Decoding the Gurus - Very Bad Gurus with David Pizarro & Tamler Sommers

Episode Date: April 29, 2022

In the most ambitious crossover since the Fraggles met the Muppets, this week we have a special joint episode with moral psychologist David Pizzaro and famed philosopher and ghost detective, Tamler Sommers. Also known as the hosts of a small academic podcast Very Bad Wizards.Stealing the format of their show we have a culture war heavy intro section featuring discussion of Joe Rogan censorship, covid debates, Japanese maid cafes, and the great ghost debate of 2022. Following that we move on to an in-depth round-table discussion of the 2012 Paul Thomas Anderson movie 'The Master'. The movie explores the relationship between a wastrel and a cult leader and features performances by Joacquin Phoenix, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Amy Adams. There is no denying it's an acting masterclass (and thematically relevant for the show!) but is it any good?Join us and help us as we attempt to decode with the wizards.LinksVery Bad Wizards podcastEmbrace the Void 237: Defining "religion" with Chris Kavanagh'Here We Are Podcast' Ep. 381 Internet Gurus w/ Dr. Chris KavanaghThe Stoa: Truth, Trust, and Culture War w/ Zubin Damania, Christopher Kavanagh, Ben Burgis, and David Fuller

Hello and welcome to the Cody and the Guru's podcast where anthropologists and psychologists listen to the greatest minds the world has to offer and we try to understand what they're talking about. And I've got Chris Kavanagh with me right now. And Chris is fresh as a newborn bunny this morning. He was up very early in the morning making sense with sensemakers and while talking about vaccines and public information and the heterodox sphere around all the controversies there. And so yeah, good job, Chris. I'm halfway through watching it. I thought you were pretty, pretty good. That's right. I had a hardcore sense-making session at around 5 a.m. for me.

I don't like to brag about these things, but, you know, on the store, I already went on there and talked about the Garometer. It's an interesting channel because it hosts a lot of wackadoodles. And it also very recently had Curtis Yarvin, who's not somebody I am particularly favorably disposed towards, like the philosopher fascist king of the tech Silicon Valley set. But I was not there to sense make with him. I talked to ZDoggMD and David Fuller and Ben Burgess, the philosopher,

and we were discussing about truth and trustworthiness in the COVID era. I actually think it was a surprisingly productive discussion with an odd combination of people because we talked a lot about issues in the heterodox sphere and um at one point david fuller said and i believe i'm quoting here the it's time the heterodox sphere grew the fuck up something along those lines so that was refreshing to hear yeah you were saying before, while preparing for it, the topic of the debate was kind of more about what's wrong with the institutions and the orthodoxy. But the conversation seems to be bending more towards what's wrong

with the independent commentators and the heterodox sphere. And I think you might have had something to do with that, Chris. Who can say, Matt? Who can say? I am but a servant to the discourse. I would never exert my influence to discuss pet topics. That's not my nature. But speaking of which, Matt, were you so looking for Chris-themed content to recently be a deluge, a veritable bounty?

Because I appeared on Embrace the Void with Aaron to discuss definitions of religion, a very niche topic, but of academic interest to me. And that was fun. And then Shane Mouse from Here We Are, the podcast or YouTube channel who also interviewed you, interviewed me months ago and then released it very recently. And Aaron interviewed me a while back as well. So they just all decided to release it at the same time. And the sound speakers released it. So Chris content for days. Just hear me waffle about every topic. That's how it is with Chrisris content it never rains but it

pours but before you went on i was saying to you that you were going to be the sand at the sex party at the beach you would be you and then and then in the youtube comments because they could make live comments you you shared a thing with somebody saying that you were the grit in the machinery, the gravel in the machinery. Not quite as evocative as my metaphor, but still. It's an odd metaphor, but yeah, that's an apt description, I think, of my role in the sense-making ecosystem. I think of my role in the sense making ecosystem I'm now the

annoying piece of gravel making the machine break down that's fair The sand at the sex party Chris The sand at the sex party is better I don't know if that's better The two of us person at the orgy

are you married? Should we be doing this? Have you been tested? Would you like some more nuts? Should we turn the lights on? I've been to many sex parties, so you can tell I know what goes on there. But what are we doing today? What's going on?

Well, today we have an unusual crossover episode. And I want to mention that we did advertise at some point in the past couple of episodes that we were going to do Jerome Larnier as the next guru episode. And we are. We are going to do him as the next guru. We're moving into a season of tech with tech gurus out the wazoo. tech with tech gurus out the wazoo. Lex Friedman, Elon Musk,

various superstars in the tech commentariat and so on. And it will start with Drone Larnier. But before that, we recorded a while back now a crossover episode with a little-known podcast, The Very Bad Wizards, with David Pizarro and Tamla Summers. And we're going to have a little chat with them about things of interest. Ghosts may come up. And then we're stealing their format

and dissecting a movie, which is ostensibly about L. Ron Hubbard guru-esque figure. So it's kind of themed, you know. There's a reason. It just occurred to me they've got a very misleading title for their podcast

because they're neither wizards nor very bad. So what is it? Well, yeah. If you listen to the intro, they have some clip from the Wizard of Oz with him declaring

that he's a bad man, just a very bad wizard. But what's wrong with just truth in advertising? Decoding the gurus. It is what it says on the tin. You know, what are they doing? Well, yeah, they're, you know, they're symbologists. They're sheep makers. They're sheep rotators.

That's their problem. They like to symbolically dissect things and you know look at the artistic merit of media you know the kind of stuff that just wouldn't interest us so that's that's it they have a poetic title it served them well matt it served them well yeah well anyway this will be good this will be good there'll be worlds colliding you know hard-headed scientists like us and fluffy dreamers like them. Dogs and cats living together. Sparks will fly.

Should be good. Yeah. And this can be your consolation if you're listening this week. I think Elon Musk looks like he might have bought Twitter. So we'll find out. Is that good, bad? Who knows? I mean, I don't think it's a great thing,

but we'll see what the result of that ends up being. who knows I mean it's I don't think it's I think it's good I don't think it's a great thing but we'll see what the result of that ends up being um yeah so it could it could be like Ghostbusters you know when they release the ghosts and they're just flying around the city like shitting on everything and knocking stuff over that could be you know Stephen Molyneux, Alex Jones, Milo, all back on Twitter rampaging around. I hope not, but, you know, we'll have to wait and see. But, you know, the left have definitely got their knickers in a twist over this. There's a lot of rending of clothes, heart-wrenching scenes happening everywhere. I mean, for me, my take on that is that it's just, it's kind of late-stage capitalism in a way.

I mean, Twitter isn't making any money. Why on earth would you spend such an inordinate amount of money on a company that isn't making money unless it was some sort of weird kind of, I don't know, crony capitalism, clout chasing, influence peddling. You know, it doesn't make any sense to me. clout chasing, influence peddling. You know, it doesn't make any sense to me. Well, Elon Musk is, you know, an idiosyncratic shit poster. So it's par for the course for him.

But yeah, I've seen people talk about basically he'll be able to peddle influence. And quite obviously so, because he could let Trump back on the platform. He could do a bunch of things. So yeah, I mean, it's one to to watch but i don't have any big analysis and i think it's not i don't know if it's actually formally done at the time that we're recording this so it might turn out that the last minute something changes or whatever but if not i've always liked elon musk he doesn't need to ban me in the year. Castlers agree. Yeah. I, for one, welcome our new Bitcoin tech bro overlords.

NFTs agree. Oh, that's the other news. So that famous NFT. The monkey yacht club thing. What's it called? Yeah. Board Ips. I think Board Ip Yacht Club Monkey guys. Yeah. the monkey yacht club thing what's it called yeah board apes i think board apes yacht club monkey guys yeah yeah yeah so once again they were hacked the nfts were stolen and everyone is some of them

crying crying a river some of them all right yeah yeah there's the memes for this are pretty good if you go look at those threads they're just just, there's like, there's an old computer game called Ape Escape and stuff that like, yeah, it's always kind of enjoyable to laugh at people getting in trouble with NFTs because if you have that much disposable income, then

don't have a huge amount of sympathy for you. But, okay. So, forget about NFTs. Forget about Elon Musk's focus on the very bad wizards. Let's go over and say hello to David and Pamela. All right. Hello and welcome to Decoding the Gurus. I'm Professor Matt Brown with me is associate professor Chris Kavanagh.

to Decoding the Gurus. I'm Professor Matt Brown. With me is Associate Professor Chris Kavanagh. And in a world first for Decoding the Gurus, we have not one, but two special guests with us today, don't we, Chris? We do. We have not just two guests, Matt. We have a returning guest. We managed not to scare him off the first time. We talked to him about the Weinsteins for hours and he, yeah, and he demanded to come back. He wanted to do just another couple of hours on the Weinsteins, but we said, no, this time slightly different topic. So the world famous social and moral psychologist Joe Rogan's biggest defender on the interwebs, David Pizarro.

Welcome Dave. Feel free to say the N-word. Thank you. I'm not falling for that one again. Thank you for having me on. Yeah. I, I'm totally down to talk about Joe Rogan for the next two hours. So let's do this.

That's good. But this time you are not alone. You brought with you your co-host, but... I hear something strange in the background. Sounds like some ghostly apparitions. It's the philosopher Tam philosopher tamler summers noted ghost hunter and philosopher welcome tamler fuck all of you i had to go a long way for that joke that was funny definitely funny i'll never live that down. I'll stand by it. I'll talk about it all day. I'll talk about that before I talk about Joe Rogan.

for ghost perception. But so you guys have a small podcast. It's kind of like ours, maybe lesser known, a bit more niche. But I think you started a bit before us, maybe. So The Very Bad Wizards is the podcast, right? Matt, have you heard of it? I have heard of it.

Yeah, you told me about it. I'll have to listen to it one of these days. You know, you tried to make that joke about Sam Harris on Twitter and his followers were so literal minded. They were like, how could they call Sam Harrison small, independent podcaster? So I hope we get the same level of outrage from our fans. I've had a lot of mileage with that joke. I'm using it almost every time we have people that have a bigger profile than us. But like you say, the only people to react with outrage was our Sam fans. You know, actually Sam's Reddit is just today still posting clips from our interview.

They're usually complaining about us. It's where we're still on their mind. So thank you for organizing that, Dave. It was an experience. You've spurred your way into that community. Yeah. You know that feeling. First you get attacked, but then they come around.

That's right. You guys have a huge contingent of fans from Sam, right? There's like massive crossover. Totally. Have you guys managed to accrue hate following, a sizable hate following, like a community that. I don't think. Not really. Yeah.

No, I mean, look, if they might be the silent majority, but they're pretty silent. You're probably too blind, milquetoast, middle of the road. We are. That's what I think it is. We try to be all things for all people. We try to please everybody. That's right. You guys haven't spent much to do all things for all people. We try to please everybody. That's right. You guys haven't spent much time on your subreddit, have you?

Not lately. No, they're fine people. In fact, as we've mentioned previously, our subreddit and perhaps our entire audience was an offshoot from somebody in your subreddit. So we owe a lot to following your, yeah, following the very incestuous community. Very. Yeah.

We don't seem to be getting proceeds or royalties from your Patreon or anything like that. I don't know that the check got lost or something. Yeah. They're coming. They're coming to my as well. Let me know. Don't worry about those kinds of things, but in a, another instantiation of that kind of parasitic relationship, what I thought we'd do today was kind of steal

your format. So you guys often do this thing where you have like a culture war heavy intro segment and you get it all over and done with. And then you move into the papers or the movies that you're dissecting high grade art. So we're going to talk in the second part about Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master film, which we watched and we have some thoughts about, not very deep ones, but we have them. But to start with, we thought, you know, the culture war, the culture war, what's that all about? Well, before we do that, I mean, I've got to say, I feel like the culture war is on hiatus. Oh, because the actual war. Because of the war war.

Yeah. Yeah. the war war. It's like a silver lining to war in Eastern Europe. It's not like they're not trying. I mean, if we're being honest, it might be worth it, right? Just based on my twin feed? Terrible.

Then yes. But you must have seen that all of the culture war poisoned accounts are really, really trying to be like, actually, actually, this war is because Putin saw our weakness, our obsession with pronouns. And he thought, like, now is the time. This is it. And, yeah.

Well, there was a little moment, right, when people were just kind of admiring the bravery of the Ukrainian people. And then they were using it as a way of criticizing whoever they wanted to criticize the United States for having no courage. And so they'd be like, you see these Ukrainians who are coming back to join the militia and defend their country. And then you, and then these fucking critical race theorists, like complaining about the new, whatever. Yeah. Trans bills. Yeah. But there's a nice narrative there about the decadent West who have their first world problems

and now getting to understand what a real problem looks like. I have to admit there is something real to the conflict. Yeah, but those account, there is a sort of a desperate bid for relevance when you have to bring the problems of like these other foreign powers struggling with each other. You have to bring it back to some little American shit that we're fighting out. It's just, I actually am, to be honest, a little sick of anybody saying anything about this on social media. Like, I just feel like, just shut up.

Just let people fight wars. I don't know. I don't know what that people say. We're offering a lot of wisdom here. We're bringing philosophical and psychological insight. Well, I mean, it is, like it has a similarity to the COVID thing, right?

Because like COVID, it's a real material thing. Yeah, it's an absolute disaster, which doesn't actually intrinsically map on very well to the kinds of ideological wars that we're fighting in our heads. But like we saw with COVID,

people had very little trouble the kinds of ideological wars that we're fighting in our heads. But like we saw with COVID, people had very little trouble to develop this entire ideological edifice on the back of vaccines and alternative treatments, mandates, lockdowns, and so on. Yeah, I really hope that doesn't happen with Ukraine because everybody seems kind of on board with it's awful yeah we you know this was unexpected and nobody really predicted it like the hawks the left the centrists everyone was a little bit taken aback by it they all thought putin would never do it and so it's hard to score points with this one and the people who tried seemed to like peter out and lose heart after a bit that's true i think you guys look at you know you don't look at the bad parts of twitter because james lindsey

has not petered out about this that doesn't count though he's saying it's a psyop. He said Zelensky is a psyop from the World Economics Forum to instigate critical race theory in order to create communism within a fascism inside America. What is it about James Lindsay that can just obsess people to the point of mania? By people you mean Chris Kavanaugh? No, I don't look. i generally don't look at him but the occasions when i do is when he's just completely hitting alex jones stuff alex jones

is saying similar kind of things and even he had to take like alex jones is a big putin fan and even he had to take a step back to be oh oh, right. And he was trying to work it. But James was full bore into the dialectic as when that came. So it's impressive in a sense. And in the same way, like Brett Weinstein suggested that Fauci was somehow going to have to reward Putin for getting the world to stop looking at his nefarious schemes. They're all, it's kind of breathtaking, the balls on people. Because Matt was pointing out that when you look at the threads, they get thousands of

responses saying, you are a fucking idiot. Shut up. Like just tons and tons of responses saying what morons they are. But it's like, it's water off a duck's back. They're just like, away they go. You know, I feel like they really are, these people really are in a desperate bid to stay relevant and to co-opt whatever tragedy. And I do think some of Tamler's optimism here that COVID was in some ways a much more fertile ground for a culture war because of the high degree of uncertainty and the link with science. Like right now we're getting images of missile strikes

hitting buildings in Ukraine does not provide one with that, that level of uncertainty that wearing or of annoyance of wearing a mask or whatever it feels like they're throwing theories against the wall and nothing's really sticking and i hope they can just lose relevance altogether by showing you know their true colors i do think the fauci one makes a little bit of sense i mean uh he's got his thumb in a lot of pies. I didn't think of it myself, but now that you brought that up. Yeah, I was thinking when you were saying that there's one situation which is famous for clarity and not generating conspiracy theories, it's international conflict. So that's a good point.

Right. That's a good point. Right. That's a hopeful thought. I feel like people out there who are actually having to fight this thing are probably like, nobody there is endorsing these narratives, I don't think. So there's not going to be uptake from the real relevant characters. We don't have. It's like when you have White House press conferences and shit and people can hop on Twitter and talk about politicians and talk about American legislation based on flawed science. But there it's like we really don't have that. Yeah, yeah. We need to focus on more important things like what Sam Elliott said about power of the dog.

I'm very curious, Tamler, to talk to something which comes up a lot in the culture war and it's close to my heart. So ghosts, like when you say that you're open to their existence, so that we don't really know, that's a bit, right? I don't mean open like sexually or like, it's not like the exorcist or something like that. I remember the key piece of evidence that you offered in that discussion with Dave was that there are recurrent motives across like diverse cultures and times in the way that ghosts are presented. Millions of reports like, yeah. to help but think, is there not perhaps another explanation for that? That is not that there are immaterial disembodied spirits haunting the world, but human brains might reliably create the same errors in detection of agency and social organizations might be concerned about what

happens to people when they die. These are just ideas. I don't crazy. I mean, like, that's like a very medical speculation. Like, do you have the research to back that up? That that's what's responsible for those millions of reports? Like, I mean, it's definitely possible. I'm not denying that it's possible. It's probably even more likely than there are ghosts that there's something like the story that you're telling. But it's the idea that that's like we've already totally figured

this out, I think is just it's naive on the part of and like I always accuse Dave of it's scientism. You've already assumed that the world is like as materialists think it is. And so you then just, you just assume that anything that your framework can't explain is, well, there's some kind of naturalistic explanation here. I'll just say it's people who are afraid of death and that's why they see, and it's only a few people and it's often in localized places, but there's got to be an explanation for it i mean that's fine like i get it i used to be like you like i've it's a phase that's the thing that you guys don't get you're going through the phase and you'll get out of it

and it's fine i think it's actually important it's you want to know the answer to whether tamler is trolling and the truth is that it is he is in a state of quantum superposition he doesn't know whether he's trolling anymore he's the ghost he can be the best example the best evidence for ghosts is that tamler must be possessed by a demon of some sort who may or may not be the spirit of a dead ancestor. There's a field, Tamler, that I'm infinitely know, intimately familiar with called the,

it's got a very scientific name, so you'll love it. The cognitive science of religion. On its plus side, Dawkins and Sam Harrison never ever read any of the research in it. They don't care about it. And who's the big guy in that?

There's a pantheon. There's a pantheon. Farber, they like signal people out. But like Harvey Whitehouse is the group I'm most involved with. You would know like Ted Slingerland, Justin Barrett, the psychologist, Pascal Boyer. Yeah, yeah. These kind of people. So I'm involved in that field.

And we are doing what you are accusing of us, like taking a naturalistic approach to religious and ritual topics. So there might be... Which I don't oppose. I think that's fine to do it. Yeah. I think in terms of people seeing apparitions of the Virgin Mary and stuff, maybe it's because in my case, like I come from a Catholic background.

So it's very common for me to have, I'm not saying like all Catholics are falling down saying, ah, the Virgin Mary appeared this morning. But it references to people having mass apparitions or people seeing things. I think all of that happens. And I don't think it's rare. In fact, I think like most people, including myself, are prone to irrationalism and like seeing ghosts and demons all over the place and being superstitious. And that's fine. I like the world with that in it.

I think, unfortunately, we live in a much more bleak and empty world with no spiritual meaning to it so that's the that's the unfortunate part well i have a question for tamla so let's take another issue that's i think structurally similar which is ufos so so similar to apparitions a lot of sightings a lot of slightly mysterious phenomena that could have, can be explained away in a materialistic way or could be something real. So would you apply the same sort of logic there? I think clearly this is a trap that I'm walking into, but I'll do it. I don't care. If you ask me to give a probability, I would probably say UFOs, not alien life somewhere, but UFOs that have actually come here. And there's some that have been spotted that are real.

I would put that less likely just because of the scope of the evidence. And I know it's not evidence like people going into a lab or filling out like surveys on mechanical Turk or something, but just the anecdotal, the massive number of anecdotal reports. It's just way more with ghosts. I think UFOs are not something that people and this is a bad reason and everyone makes fun of me. People, and this is a bad reason, and everyone makes fun of me. I think there's even a Reddit tag on our website that like goes surreal because Mark Twain said so. So I'm going to do this again. And I'm going to say that like I was just listening to a podcast with Mark Frost, where Mark Frost was saying that he had an encounter with a ghost and it was really vivid. And so like I thought that should just settle this debate right now. He had an encounter with a ghost and it was really vivid.

And so like, I thought that should just settle this debate right now. But you don't have that with UFOs. I don't know of people that had a kind of sighting of that are at the level of somebody that I was like, oh, I got to take this really seriously. It may be that that's happened, but I don't know of them. But I do know of so many people, including like personally, but then also people that I respect from afar that have had ghost experiences. So I think you just have to be open to it because I haven't. I am very agnostic, but I think it's weird to be this certain that it's not the case. But it's not weird. So I just wanted to jump in and say, one, Matt, you say you're from Australia and we

know that there are there's clear evidence that Australia doesn't exist. I've seen the Reddit threads. So one bullshit, you probably don't exist. I've seen the Reddit threads. So one, bullshit, you probably don't exist. But two, what I would say, what bothers me, Tambler, every time you say scientism, is that the whole force of that critique comes from the fact that spiritualism was once critiqued as relying on completely shoddy foundations. And so what you're saying, in essence, really by using that is at best science can be on as shaky a foundation as the claim that spirits exist.

And I don't get that. What do you mean? Right. So like the reason that we put ism after science is to make a real clear analogy to a complete bullfield. Right. That's why the term scientism exists, not science, because what you're saying is this is- No, I don't think that's the meaning of scientism. It's more just somebody who's so committed to it that they can't think outside of it. Right, but no scientist is committed to any specific claim. Like it really is, it's like every scientist is actually has like a threshold that has to be met to believe anything. And the whole point about like you flipping it around and

saying, okay, but if you're saying that ghosts don't exist, then you are being as dogmatic. It just always feels like such a weird move because it's the dogma of religion and spiritualism that science is very contrary. So when you say scientism, how I understand that is if something can't be verified by this method that we have determined and that has been very successful for our purposes, if that method can't verify the existence of something, then we should say it doesn't exist. And we should ridicule people who are open to the possibility that those entities exist. I just think that that's how I understand scientism. The scientific method is very effective. That doesn't mean it captures all truths or that all ways of understanding reality are amenable to that

methodology. That's all I mean by it. I have a slightly conciliatory comment here. That's shocking. Everyone is ganging up on Tamla and it's just wrong. I'm used to it. I think maybe the difference in outlooks has got to do with the sort of null hypothesis and how we approach it. I think if you put aside what we currently understand about physical mechanisms, like plausible causes and methods of action, then I understand your point of view, Tamla, which is that you've got an ambiguous situation. You've got a bunch of reports of people saying that they see something.

On the other hand, there might've been some other tests, say science-y type ones that fail to validate this. So we're left in a bit of a quandary. We might well wait the other explanation that it doesn't exist more highly, but you would not be prepared to discount it. Whereas I think people like Chris and David are coming from is that because there's no plausible mechanism based on everything we currently understand about how the universe works, then the default position is that it's

not true until proven otherwise. I think that's probably the difference, isn't it? Yeah, that's fair. That's a compelling way of stating the position that is opposed to me. I would say that the way we understand the universe at the deepest level is in total flux, and it's also deeply weird and strange. And so while we don't totally understand the plausible mechanism for it, we don't understand so much of how the universe works at the quantum level, at the macro level, that it could fit in. I think it's just a it's an epistemological question ultimately. And if science and the scientific method doesn't encompass your entire epistemology, then I think you can leave room for it just on the basis of

room for it just on the basis of the ubiquity of these reports from ancient times to now. And I know so many people who have reported this to me. I don't think they're crazy. I don't think they're hallucinating things. I think that something very something for sure is going on and we should honor that we should take them seriously can i just give a an anecdote by way of maybe moving us on because this i think is one of the funniest things anybody's ever told me so i think we're having an argument that's been had so many times and you may be familiar with the example of Russell's teapot, you know, this example, right? So I was having dinner with somebody and he was very familiar with the argument that Tamler and I have had. And so he brought up this example of Russell's teapot, you know, imagine I said there was a teapot that was, I don't remember what he said, in orbit somewhere between, you know, earth and the sun. And you shift the burden of proof. And I say,

well, who are you to say that there's not, right? So it's a shifting of the burden of proof. So this guy who had a lot of tattoos tells us that he's been getting a lot more into getting tattoos lately. And he says that he actually got a tattoo of Russell's teapot on his ass. And he set this really deadpan and all of us at the table were like, are you serious? He's like, yeah. But then he says, but I'll never show it to anybody. And he left us in the perfect limbo. We could not tell whether or not he was fucking with us, whether this guy really had Russell's

teapot on his ass. It was just perfect. Tamla, I also have to say we can leave the ghosts to haunt their graves, but there's a discipline, a little known discipline that often gets overlooked called anthropology. I have a feeling that you might be inclined towards the, you might like a lot of the things there because often I'm very frustrated with anthropologists. So we should do some good anthropology, Tamler. I would love that.

We should get some suggestions from her. You should be, you're better than this if you're an anthropologist. Look, I've been standing in a... You need to be like michael fucking schirmer and oh god fuck you tablo fuck you i'm not michael schirmer i didn't know what milo being good i've been standing in minus 15 degrees in a like little village in in northern japan while i relatively obese Japanese man poured ice-cold water over me. So I've done my time in the spiritual realm. Yeah, I've seen ghosts, man, but they're mainly

my white body glimmering in the Japanese night when nobody's around to see them. So there are photos of that event, which I sent to my, my supervisor at the time. And he now uses on this slide constantly. So yeah. Patron. Is it a patron subscriber perk? I'll put it there. I'll put it there. They can see it's actually, they're not my white pants.

I had to borrow someone's white pants. So just bear that in mind. But yeah, I'm not opposed to this strange turn. This is so much worse. But I don't mean like they were podcast is this, I mean, like they kindly lent me the, I was wearing inappropriate boxers for the ceremony. It was at a Japanese Shinto shrine. And they do this thing where they get three boys who volunteer. And they have to do this ritual where once a year for three days in a row,

they come out to this straw laden stage and they get ice cold water poured over them. And they're in northern Japan in the winter. So temperatures like minus 10 to minus 15. And they need to do it every couple of hours for three days. And then come back and do it each year for five years. And they let me do it. But I only had to do it once. So I felt like, you know, it was like, oh, it's so cold.

It's so bad that, you know, you can see in their eyes like, fuck, you're just doing this once for like 20 minutes. We're here for years. But yeah, so look, so Tamla, the mysterious things, they're interesting. I just approached them slightly different, but I still think there's a lot of interesting stuff there in ritual and religion. So that doesn't lend itself well to discussion. It might even just disappear into the ether.

But I think something that we can cover really, really briefly, because Matt and I are sick talking about it. I'm sure you are as well. It's like people kept asking us to mention it with you guys about Rogan. And my only take on that is if you guys listen to the Rogan episodes, you won't be so sanguine about what he's saying and how he's just, you know, he's all right. If you had to listen to six hours of him talking shit about the pandemic and the doctors trying to kill the children and all this, I think your sympathy would evaporate like the cold ice hitting my white body on a dark night. Nice way of bringing it back.

Yeah. I think that's, I mean, I think that's fair. And I think one of the tricks that Rogan pulls for me is that I listen to the things that I want to listen to. Right. So he has such a wide range of people that he brings on that like, I actually find myself watching him talk to well recently Ben Burgess for instance but shit like MMA fighters or or directors right like his interview with Tarantino I'll listen to

it and I just won't listen I've seen him say crazy shit I've seen his Alex having Alex Jones on and I think we just did a bad job of saying it's not that we think he isn't potentially damaging, or at least I was trying to say that is just that I felt like Fox News easily orders of magnitude is worse. And there's just it's not like the topic of conversation that week in the news cycle. I would say even further that you have to trust people and their critical faculties and he's having people on and you don't have to listen to it for six hours. You're right. Maybe I would have a different opinion if I listened to it, but I don't listen to it for six hours and I don't watch Fox news. So I don't get why all of a sudden people,

and it really, it lasted like a couple of weeks. All of a sudden people felt like they had to announce how they felt about Joe Rogan and a couple of recent guests and the fact that he's open to ivermectin or something. Like who gives a fuck? Like, why is that something that people need to preoccupy themselves? It must be. And tell me if you guys think this because you guys seem to be more aware and kind of preoccupied with it. over like 22 to 35 year old men and making them like shoot ivermectin into their ass and not get vaccinated and refuse to wear a mask or like what do you think is the effect of this but i wouldn't

try to quantify joe rogan in isolation but how many americans are unvaccinated is it like 40 something like that i think it's a little less at this point. Yeah. But there's a lot of people who are unvaccinated and I think the vast majority of them are people who believe the kind of stuff that's been said by Joe Rogan's guests or Joe Rogan and people in that circle. And they really are a pretty well-organized group of anti-vaccines. They're not kind of exploring ideas of, is it possible that I could do my beautiful? No, no, they are dead certain and they push that and they're dead certain that you shouldn't get vaccinated and that it's all a plot. How much do you think of that? Like Joe Rogan contributes to

that because like all this stuff had been happening long before Joe Rogan got interested in this issue. Yeah. But I think a lot actually, I like I'll let these guys have listened, but he has had like the he fuels the fires of the Weinsteins who are just asking questions. And I mean, you can't quantify it, but I would put the number of people who you could link causally to dying because of Joe Rogan is a non-trivial number. Yeah.

Yeah. And I think, I guess my counterpoint to it would be we all accept that anti-vaxxers and, you know, various vagaries of pseudoscience are going to be there. And like you said, Pamela, in some respects, it's up to people. They have to make their choices themselves about what sources they trust. But I think that's part of the concern is like, you're not going to hear a lot of the figures that are like hardcore. You don't see Andrew Wakefield on the news. You don't even see him on Fox News anymore. But that is what you're seeing on Joe now, the next wave of Andrew Wakefield.

And I admit that quite obviously we have an interest in these weird neck of the woods. And there's a podcast I follow called QAnon Anonymous. You know, it kind of focuses on the Q community. And they were talking about the... I've listened to a couple of them. They're very funny. I mean, they're great, but they were following the American trucker convoy. It's coming your way, by the way. And at the kickoff of that event, you had Pierre Corey, Robert Malone, Peter McCullough, all these guests on Rogan. And when they were at that event, the rhetoric was really strong.

Even on Rogan, it was quite strong. But in that element, they were saying, no, you're injecting your children. You're killing your children. We've shown that we could save 90% of people. And I think that goes into the MAGA world, the QAnon world, the far right. So Rogan's just a piece of that. But he's probably the piece which is the most likely for normal people to listen to because he does do interesting stuff.

Like I liked this interview with Carrot Top. That was fun, but that's the problem that he's a guy that isn't treated as if platforming Andrew Wakefield is an issue. I mean, people are now saying it's an issue, but I think that's it. Like if you had Andrew Wakefield on, it would be concerning. And Joe has HIV AIDS denialist guys on. So here's the other difference maybe between me and you, and now this is going to get a lot of blowback, probably fund my end, but I actually think that

the consensus liberal take on COVID has not had the best track record. consensus liberal take on COVID has not had the best track record. And there's a lot of people that have been oversold on the, say, effectiveness of masks and especially masks in schools. And also, I've looked at some of this research, but I think we're a little oversold on the effectiveness of vaccines, certainly to prevent reinfection. And in otherwise healthy young people, they're just effectiveness or importance for keeping people out of the hospital. I think it's been a little bit oversold on that side, too. And so I'm a little more open to having wacky people who are not doing it. And I don't think Joe Rogan is doing it purely for reasons of polarization. Right. Like this is the thing that I kind of respect about it is

it's not just like Fox News where it's like, OK, we have to be anti-vax now or we have to be what do we have to do? We have to be anti-mask. We have to be like anti-requiring vaccinations in school or whatever. Like they'll just do whatever their political base is telling them to do or whatever the leaders of the most right wing part of the party will tell them to do. But I don't think Joe Rogan's like that. I don't think he has any kind of political agenda like that. So I'm happy to see even if some of these people are crackpots, as I totally believe they are, like just get some things out there because i don't think vox and the atlantic they've had their share of just hysterical bullshit too my heart pressure my blood pressure

is going up at this right now because i know these guys are gonna be nice to you but rogan very much is exactly what you're saying he's not and it betrays that you haven't watched these episodes he is totally true yeah he's like angry not a single second yeah i'll say this about vax like i i'm a little chagrined because oversold i don't think is the right word i think that getting young people vaxed has saved the lives of older people and i feel like i've had two people in my life die from this shit, right? Like one young and one older and the older one, because a young person probably gave it to them. So like oversold on what? Oversold on that it would have prevented the kid from getting an infection that they could then pass on because every, I know so many kids who got COVID and who

passed it on to other people, they're all like boosted and vaccinated. Like all I'm saying is it's true. The viral load is just smaller. Like vaccines work. Does nobody ever on the left said you won't get infected if you get a vaccine? No, that's not true. They were much more confident about how it would prevent infection at the beginning. Some CNN figures. Tamla, I will say, I live in Japan, right? And so, thankfully, there's a nice bit of distance from the US and even the UK culture. And like over here, people wore masks.

They already wore masks before the pandemic when they got sick. It was a normal thing. So there was no outcry over the wearing of masks. Japan is a different social environment where the government issues recommendations and people follow them. But the thing that struck me is I'm driving home from the office late at night sometimes, and there's people walking out on the road at about 1am or whatever, not just wandering around.

It's not like zombies, but they're going to the shop or whatever. And they're wearing masks. Now, they don't need to, right? There's not a logic there. But the thing that they're doing it for is that they just, they don't see it as that much of an inconvenience. They go into the shop and they, the emphasis is very much on just, it's a small sacrifice to make for other people and the the kids and stuff in japan

as well like my kid he doesn't like wearing mask but he eats it most of the time and my youngest is like two so he doesn't wear it perfectly or those kind of things on the occasions when he has to but it just struck me that it doesn't have to be this huge thing with all these political violences to it because the same thing is happening in Japan. And it's just like people aren't freaking out about it. So it's just not a big deal. And people will stop wearing masks when the cases go down. The whole mask thing always strikes me as this very American and the UK is the same

thing. Like this kind of hyper focus on individual freedom is the most important thing. And like, fuck it if we're going to kill older people or if there's some must be sacrificed for my liberty, the kind of libertarian vibe. Is that unfair? I'm not accusing you of being, you know, don't tread on me. I think the question is what the actual scientific effectiveness of the wearing masks is, right? We don't stop people from driving cars, even though driving cars can kill people. And obviously it would be much more inconvenient

to tell people to drive cars than it would to tell them to wear masks anytime they're indoors. But you do have to take into account what the percentage of risk is. And at a certain point, you have to really weigh. It's an ethical question. It's a normative question. And yeah, You have to like really weigh. It's an ethical question. It's a normative question. And yeah, Japan has a different sensibility about this. Japan, I remember the time I was in Japan in 2014, two times.

And I would see people wearing masks then just on the street. Yeah. Because allergy season or something like that. It's already a little bit built into the culture. It's not for us. And there are costs to it. There are costs to having kids not be in school for a year and a half. You have to take these costs into account and really look at the scientific evidence for any kind of intervention that's going to do something as drastic, say, as keep kids out of school. And then, like, I think that people got that wrong, which is fine.

Like, we've never dealt with this before. But I think that the certainty could just be like the ghost thing. The certainty on any side in this is, I think, just unjustifiable because we don't fully know. And nobody has the best track record when it comes to this i'm in favor of you choosing to tie it to the ghost belief so that's i'm gonna get so fucking slain after this save your emails i don't want to hear it like i'm just block anyone on twitter who gives me shit about this. I'm a little drunk.

It's late. It's been a hard week. Fuck all of you. I feel my concern is that, Tamler, your contrarianism is what guides this more than anything else, because surely even you can say, like in all seriousness, yeah, that the side that has been doing the science to even collect the data to know whether we're wrong is disproportionately on the left. Yeah, although it's all over the place. Right. So the only reason that we know, for instance, that maybe our masks, cloth masks didn't work the way that the CDC might have said they did is because we kept doing studies.

Like, it's a no brainer. We're the ones trying to do the risk assessment. And sure, we get it wrong, but there is a mere sort of like impulsive side of the American right that just, they use maybe post hoc, the, the like science stuff, but I don't think that that's what's guiding. Totally. You're right. A hundred percent. I agree that the people doing the science are

better than the people who are just rejecting the science out of hand for political reasons because they feel like they have to because they don't trust science in general or whatever the fuck. But I think that once you have the science and when the science is as within a large degree of uncertainty, then it's just not as clear as some people on the left or liberals, I would say. It's not as clear that we have to take the steps that they think is just so obvious that we have to take. And I think the keeping kids out of school for a year is a great example of that. And the continued insistence on masks and they were doing masks outside. People

still scrub down hotel rooms. And you could be like Chris and you could say, you know what? Like that could just save one people. It's not that big a deal here in Japan. We scrub down hotels anyway to stop spreading colds. Or to get rid of the evidence. Fine, but don't pretend that that's obviously the morally right thing to do. There's plenty about Japan that is not morally right.

So just... Now, I think COVID was such an interesting one because nothing was super clear. Even things which became clear, like the efficacy of vaccines, was not 100% clear. Many things, like how long they would last and things like that. And so it's been one of those situations, like I've likened it to fighting a war. You know what I mean? They're famously full of mistakes and disasters and working with incomplete information.

But you make the best judgment you can at the time. But I think with a little bit of hindsight now, North America has been adversely affected by the social ideology of hyper-individualism and stuff like that, which is how it looks from over here. Australia, we've had 5,000 deaths in total. Sure, we're only about the size of California, but even proportionally, it's 50 to 1. You all live in, live in little huts.

They're in a concentration camp. Matt's recording from a concentration camp. That's right. We have the concentration camps. He's the capital. The neighbors are like four kilometers that way. No, no. I mean, it's pretty similar. Everyone lives in cities, all that stuff. Now, it's not because there was some brilliant strategy here or anything like that. There was huge truck ops, one after the other. And there was a little bit of luck involved, sure. But that was perceived and probably still is perceived in the American right. Australia's response was completely over the top, like lockdowns, Australians can't return from overseas. Yeah, like these quarantine camps. But Australian culture is just a bit more

like Japanese, I suppose, a bit more like Japanese, I suppose. A bit more communitarian than American culture. Many people have said that. It is. Australians are like Japanese. I'm all for collectivism and having a more of a communitarian spirit. I'm all for it. I think the individualism of American, the kind of hyper-capitalist we're out for ourselves is like leading to the destruction of society. So I'm totally with you on all of that. I'm just talking

about this particular issue and whether we should be open to all sorts of points of view. But yeah. The other conciliatory thing I wanted to say is i kind of sympathize where you're coming from with respect to say joe rogan and stuff like that you can't just run around cancelling and prevent you know anytime somebody says something stupid or something you don't like you can't just run around shutting it down and you know we've just had josh zeps on australian journalists too i think coming from a pretty similar progressive liberal place as us, but maybe has more sympathies along that free speech type direction. He has IDW sympathies.

He does. Yeah. Yeah. But he went on Rogan and did a great job. He did. Yeah. And to be honest, to be absolutely honest, before I listened to Joe Rogan, my attitude was exactly yours.

It was like people get so upset about some little thing. And I know he's not an academic. He doesn't say the right things. But you should pay attention when someone's that popular and can communicate in such a, I guess, is perceived to be so authentic by such a large audience. That maybe you could learn a thing or two from that. And then I listened to Joe Rog to it and I changed my mind. Yeah. So you might too.

You never know. That's what's so unfair about the terms of this debate is that you guys have more information that I do concerning the very topic of it. Yeah. Matt promised that in our little secret DMs back and forth, he was going to do the pivot to the movie, but he got dragged in there, just in the COVID chat. So I racked my brain for a segue, Chris. Where was it?

My, I even liked getting like cold water. Well, can we talk about the ancient Japanese ritual of getting a handjob from Amy Adams over a sink? Oh, yeah. That's a hell of a pivot. There are things called soap bars in Japan. Soap lands, soap lands. Yeah. Actually, this was my morning insight.

I don't know why I was thinking about this. I think I heard someone talking about hooders on some podcast. And then I was thinking that the maid cafes in Japan are like the hooders in America. If you want Americans to understand what a maid cafe, it is them. When I had that part, I was like, no, but weird. Hooders is about people seeing scantily clad women with large breasts. And maid cafes is about very young looking maids. I'm not sure that's a fantastic comparison for the Japanese. So what's a maid cafe?

Don't act coy, Dave. No, I genuinely don't know. We're all adults here, Dave. We can all move here, Dave. We can all move into maid cafes. When a middle-aged businessman loves a young woman. I don't know what a maid cafe is. Oh, God.

I've unveiled something I haven't thought about. When every academic comes to Japan, they would always come to the lab where I was based in Hokkaido or come over. And when the Japanese people were away, they were always like, so Chris, are there mead cafes? And like, and the other question was panty vending machines, right? These were the two questions everybody asked, like, are there really, I don't think they want to go there, but the mead cafe is a, it's like a cafe, you know, you go and you get drinks and stuff, but the clientele are almost all middle-aged or older than that Japanese men. just out of high school, maybe early university age girls in like frilly maid costumes who talk to you in Japanese as a, using language along like welcome home master, please sit. And like when they pour your drink, you need to say like, muy muy in order to make

them stop pouring the milk and stuff. So that's a meat cafe. Okay. Wow. I mean, they'll wear masks if you ask them to. They do wear masks. There's a lot of fucked up things about Japan too. If you want a discomforting experience in Japan,

go to a meat cafe. Because it's like, you might think, oh, that would be an all-around neurological experience. It's just uncomfortable. You're just in a pure state of discomfort the entire time you're there. So there's something to look forward to next time you visit Japan. Here's one final question. Do you need to wear special boxers in Japan

to get jerked off by Amy Adams over the sink? That's ancient tradition. I've not partaken, so I can't comment. But there's a lot of ritualized things in Japan, so it wouldn't surprise me. For the people who haven't seen The Master, the context for what we are talking about with Amy Adams. They must just think we really have a lot of shared fantasies

about Amy Adams jerking us off. Well, we do now. It's all right. Let's turn to the master. Speaking of the master, speaking of the master. Maybe that can all cut. Good job. Let's do that.

Somebody needs it. Do it. How should we begin? Do we need to summarize the plot? What's the format here? One of the good things about being on someone else's podcast is we have to do that. Okay. So Matt, the master 2012 film by Paul Thomas Anderson about we a stroll played by Joaquin Phoenix, a kind of

alcoholic returning from the Vietnam War, I guess it was. No, World War II. Sorry, World War II. Okay. Oh, yeah, it would have been in your research there. Really? Shut up. You don't get the I love how you pronounce

Joaquin. You called him Joaquin Phoenix. It's just because he does. He's Joaquin. You called him Wacking Phoenix. It's just because he does. He's whacking in the early scenes. That's bigotry, Dave. Just because I'm Irish. It's bigotry not to pronounce a Spanish word properly, you anthropologist piece of shit.

Joaquin. Joaquin. Joaquin Phoenix. Joaquin. Joaquin Phoenix is playing a wastrel coming back from an undetermined war, possibly World War II. And he falls in with the cult movement, which is extremely reminiscent of Scientology and L. Ron Hubbard.

The movie documents their relationship over, I think, a couple of years. And yeah, and it, a couple of years. And yeah, and it was widely celebrated by critics. It didn't win. I think a lot of people won Oscars for their acting in it. And the cult leader is Philip Seymour Hoffman, who is jacked off by his wife, Amy Adams, as we've already established. I keep that point that happens in the movie. Yeah. So there were Oscars awarded for the acting in it, but it didn't win Best Picture. And it's well-regarded, but not that well-known. I think that's fair to say, right?

Oddly, because it was so critically acclaimed that year, but it just dropped off. Like, There Will Be Blood is just a much more well-known movie. Yeah, and idolized. Well, I have a theory about as to what's the case. It's because there will be blood is just much more entertaining.

It's just much more entertaining. Can we start this by just no clever analysis? Just did you enjoy this movie? Should I go first before they give the proper answers? Because I'll summarize that. I can't say I enjoyed the movie. Like I thought it was well made. The acting was good.

The cinematography was very impressive, but I left it with a feeling of kind of what was the point, which I guess some people like, but I felt like unsatisfied by the, at the end, although I recognize the craft. That that's my take and, and Matt, you before the professional stick over. Okay. Yeah.

So yeah, for me, this was a good movie in all the respects that you'd normally measure a movie. Like the acting was tremendously good. The lighting and the cinematography was so good. There were interesting ideas in it, but I did not enjoy it, you know, and I left, the movie ended with me feeling unsatisfied and slightly bored. So. Tell us why we're wrong. I loved it. And I think maybe it's one of those kinds of movies where you do have to be in a certain frame of mind to watch it. I was actually surprised at how not bored I was because I know what you mean.

There are these long shots. There's not much by way of plot, really. I mean, there are events that drive the characters, but it's a different kind of narrative. It's really just this meanderings of the Joaquin Phoenix character. But I was mesmerized by it. And I'm not even really that, like Joaquin Phoenix bothers me a little bit when he gets too Joaquin-y, like I get a little bit graded by his acting style. But Philip Seymour Hoffman and him sort of trading blows as actors, I found mesmerizing. And I thought that there was, yeah, it was this, maybe because I've been doing movie episodes for a long time with

Tamler now, I found that it was, it's fertile ground for interpretation in not a bullshit way, but like a real what's going on with these two men kind of way. Yeah. I also really love this movie. I think the first time I saw it back in 2012, I really also loved it, but then never really went back to it. Like a lot of movies that I, if I really like a movie, I'll just keep watching it.

And I never went back to it. I've always been trying to get my daughter to watch it, but then there's always something else that I'm like, all right, let's watch that instead. And so I was a little bit wary going into this rewatch. There's got to be a reason why I keep kind of putting off rewatching it. And then I watched it today in preparation for this. And I was like, this is awesome. I just was fully on board with it because it's so beautifully made and it's got such an energy and the sound and the score

and the filmmaking is so beautiful. And there's so many just set pieces, long takes and yeah, the really good performances. I also have a little problem with Joaquin Phoenix like Dave does. Me too. But I thought the way he is it's good for this character for us to be a little bit like there's something about him that's just bugging us

because he's so uncomfortable in his own skin as a character that my reaction natural reaction to him as an actor actually I thought helped the movie so yeah i really enjoyed it i don't totally get it so i'm with you matt on that i'm not sure i fully get what it's trying to say but i think in some ways that's good that's something like maybe we can try to talk about and we'll get some clarity on that yeah so why don't we start with these two main characters? Cause that's pretty interesting part of the movie. So you have this Lancaster Dodd character who's the master, the head of this Scientology inspired movement.

And he plays against Freddie Quell, who's this animal like drifter, Jack of all all trades and so they're obviously contrasts right like total opposites the lake as the dog character is sort of a vuncular he's a smooth talker he he projects superficially anyway this degree of sort of comfort i suppose he's got a sort of folksy charm like he says those sort of folksy things like leave your worries for a while. They'll still be here when you get back. Soothing the wild beast that Joaquin is.

But it comes across as a bit thin, doesn't it? Like there's, it's got a faux folksiness and also this faux intellectualism. Like one of the best lines of course is where he introduces himself and he says, I do many, many things. I'm a writer, a doctor, a nuclear physicist, a theoretical philosopher, but above all, I am a man. It was very Eric Weinstein. Very Eric Weinstein.

Yeah. Yeah. But you don't know. So, so Freddie Quill is like the complete opposite, right? He's just all over the place. You just feel uncomfortable looking at him. You know, he's, he's backing off on the beach at the beginning of the movie. He adopted this hunch too. Like he's just like, his posture's terrible. Like he lost weight,

like he did for the Joker. So his body is weird looking. He contorts it. He often does this thing where he puts his hands on his hips and he is like hunched over like an old man, you know, in his old timey pants. And it's just like, yeah, he looks uncomfortable. I was wondering if this movie served as the inspiration for him being chosen as the Joker character. Cause like I haven't watched the Joker, but from all the clips and whatnot, I've seen of it, the movement style and the not comfortable in his own skin. It's something which Joaquin Phoenix does in pretty much all of his roles,

even in Gladiator when he was, you know, the kind of handsome young emperor. It has a vibe about him that emanates discomfort and it suits this role very well because it seems like the character's point is that he's he's not comfortable in his own skin and he you know you're not supposed to feel comfort when he's in a scene like a kind of uneasiness he's broken too as a character i think like he's just something about the war, we never find out what has just shattered his sense of meaning and purpose. And he doesn't know why he's alive. And one of the, I'm not sure if I totally agree with Matt that there's some kind of superficiality to Philip Seymour to Lancaster Dodd I think he might buy what he's selling himself to some degree and I think that he's good at it at times like the stuff that the first

scene the first little um what do they call them? The processing. Processing. Yeah. The first processing session with Freddie is he's good at it. He's getting him to remember something that's really deeply important to him and taking him back in time almost to relive those moments. And even with the woman, when the skeptic, probably your guy's favorite character in the whole movie, even in that scene with the woman, like we don't see the processing. But clearly he had some sort of really good effect on that woman. She seems relaxed and sure. Back doesn't hurt anymore. So I think he's doing something.

And I think actually this is somewhat unbred for you tamla i mean this time yeah this is this is a surprising dick the way i read him is someone who has claimed to see jesus and probably didn't but at least believes that they did they really feel like in benedetta did you guys see bened, the new Paul Verhoeven film? It's about a woman in like the 16th century who kept having these visions. I read that. It's ambiguous. Like with this, she believed she had those visions, even though she didn't.

So before getting the full retort of the gurus, I off-brand had the same feeling about Lancaster Dog character. So I went into this movie thinking, well, if this is based on L. Ron Hubbard, there's going to be a deep criticism of whether or not any of this stuff worked and that there would be some sort of animosity. And I was surprised at how the Lancaster Dodd character really did seem to have a calming effect on the people around him. And I thought afterwards, well, I think Paul Thomas Anderson doesn't have the animosity that I think he might've had to Scientology. Now that processing thing is, you guys probably know,

is based on the very real Scientology practice of auditing. I don't know if you guys have ever visited a Scientology thing. I don't know whether it works or not, but it is super duper. It is, I think there's just enough psychology in some of that stuff as to produce a positive effect or else it wouldn't have the staying power that it does. That whatever it is, you're given permission from an authority figure to talk about your past. from an authority figure to talk about your past. And by the way, the scene where he's given the Rorschach inkblot test, this is also just straight out of the Scientology page of L Ron Hubbard's origin story, thinking psychiatry was such bullshit that he could actually provide a better system. Like, I don't know about the trillions of years shit, but I think he believes

that he's doing it for the sake of helping those people. But you guys seem to have a different. Yeah, no, that's a very interesting reading. I have quite a bit to say in regards to the way that the Scientology is presented. But Matt, in case I do you a disjustice, do you want to respond first about like the presentation of Lancaster Dodd? Yeah, look, I think it's important to distinguish the movie character in Scientology, right? There's big influences there.

And I agree with you that I think the Dodd character was presented really quite sympathetically. Like in the movie, he was not a toxic character. Like he didn't see too much manipulation or nasty stuff. I just, my feeling of the character was that, and this is not influenced by my prejudice against Scientology, which I hate, but it is that he was kind of like weirdly like a lost soul, even though the contrast was meant to be that the, the Joaquin character was all over the shop and, and this wild animal just following

this self-destructive kind of path. The Lancaster dog character was so smooth and superficially so self-possessed and it seems like he knows exactly the right way, but there was just a hollowness to it all. Like when you saw him with his wife and they were alone, he was not happy. And when he was speaking publicly and so on there was this and you know obviously the mask slips at several points as well and he loses his when he gets challenged or he gets caught in an inconsistency i i love what yells at the guy from silicon valley like this amazing actor um yeah are you gonna play that clip of him chewing out the yeah i have it here and i think i can let you hear it the pig fuck one john moore mr moore

if i may is there something frightening to you about the causes travels into the past frightening yes oh what's what's what scares you so much about traveling into the past sir i'm not are you afraid that we might discover that our past has been reshapen? Perverted. And perhaps what we think we know of this world is false information. Time travel does not frighten me, sir, because it's not possible. What does frighten me is the possibility of some poor soul with leukemia coming to you. There are dangers in traveling in and out of time, as we understand it.

But it's not unlike traveling down a river, you see. You travel down the river, around the bend, look back, and you cannot see around the bend, can you? But that does not mean it is not there, does it? But certain clubs would like us to think that a truth, I say truth, uncovered should stay hidden. I belong to no club. And if you're unwilling to allow any discussion,

no, this isn't a discussion. It's a grilling. There's nothing I can do for you. If your mind has been made up, you seem to know the answers to your questions. Why do you ask? I'm sorry, you're unwilling to defend your beliefs in any kind of rational way. If you already know the answers to your questions, then why ask? Pig fuck! Yeah, that is the least flattering of his moments. And if that's all you heard, he is a charlatan. I disagree. I think, like, that he is just a fucking reply guy on Twitter. John Moore. I should have just played that clip when you guys were grilling me about ghosts in the fucking first segment.

I wish you had because curing leukemia is exactly the kind of thing you'd endorse with time travel. I wasn't going to be unfair and suggest that he is Yuri Tamler in a stronger fashion, but you did it yourself so it's okay but I have a slightly different read I think than the three of you because I wonder if it's partly because I have maybe more I'm assuming more of an interest in the Scientology and the familiarity with it so I read quite a lot of the material as critiques even the processing scene Tamlerla, that you mentioned, where he does get the person to go back and visit the painful experiences and identify having sex with his aunt as this kind of important moment in his life. But I read that as illustrating that the guy has skills, but these are skills which enable people to become vulnerable and manipulated. And if you remember, he was recording the conversation, which is a thing that Scientologists

do when people are divulging these traumatic life experiences, which can then be used in the future as a means to prevent them from voicing criticism. So I took that scene as like showing, yes, he has the ability to elicit real emotion and real experiences from people, but it's very much in a manipulative context. And the later scenes that we just heard, I got the impression that what he wanted to say is not that he doesn't have skills and that he isn't charismatic,

but that these are fundamentally manipulative and empty. And the kind of clearest illustration of that is when his son is talking to Joaquin Phoenix's character, Freddie, and says, you know, it's bullshit, right? Like he's making it all up as it goes along. I took that to be Paul Thomas Anderson, just inserting the point of view to remind the audience that like, there's no there there. Can I ask you a question? Because the way I read the movie is just the movie. I put out of my mind anything about Scientology and anything about L. Ron Hubbard. So do you do that? Because when you say that he's recording it and he can use that against them,

there's no evidence that he does that or would do that in the movie, right? No, I thought the inclination was just going to be that Scientology is the inspiration, but it's just a setup for this character study between these two people. But the parallels were too strong. There was the Sea Org organization right out on the boat. Then there's processing, which is very clearly the other thing. And then there was also the... All the sci-fi shit, you know, like the trillions of years old stuff. It's definitely based on that character. It's more of like an interpretive question of, is it just inspired by that character? But you're supposed to take the Lancaster dot as Lancaster dot and not import any of your beliefs about L. Ron Hubbard aside from that. Yeah, that's the part where I think it's impossible to do that, because if you wanted to make Lancaster Dodd completely divorced from L. Ron Hubbard, or not even completely divorced,

just highlight a couple of similarities. You don't have to draw such tight parallels in the life and the doctrines and the organization and what they're doing. And the way the processing is talked about, it's very much the same as auditing and Dianetics, right? The way it's presented as a scientific. So I felt that like a little bit, Paul Thomas Anderson, I read some stuff about the movie afterwards and he was having this cake and eating it by saying that it was just inspired and he wasn't really wanting to talk about Scientology. But if that was the choice, it felt like you could have made more distinctions

between this group and early Scientology because the parallels were so strong. It made it hard for me not to think they were intentional. Yeah. What I was going to say two things, one, a question, but I'll say what I'll say first is it read to me like the inspiration to create this character was clearly L. Ron Hubbard and it might've even started off as a stronger critique of Scientology, but it seemed not to end that way. And I almost think Paul Thomas Anderson is the writer and the director. I almost feel as the story unfolded, he had a different story to tell. And one thing for your listeners, if you go into this thinking that this is going to be

like a biopic of L Ron Hubbard or something, it's way off. And so what that leads me to is this question, which I had a very strong dissonance about this because of the scientology stuff is do you think that hoffman truly cared because to what end is he manipulating joaquin phoenix i left the movie thinking he truly cared about that character oh yeah yeah i don't think he was manipulating that that character at all He might have wanted her to fuck him. Matt, before you do, I have to say that I disagree. Because I agree there's a real relationship. And the things that we'll, I think, move on to talk about very shortly

about the relationship between the two men and the nature of it is important. But the real affection that I think emerges towards the latter half of the movie and it's very clear at the end. Did you not read those scenes, for example, where Freddie is offering kind of directly suggesting that he's going to attack the critics violently of him and the half hearted way that he, you know, kind of says, oh, no, you beast, you bold boy, don't do that. Because it struck to me that like he saw the value in having Freddie as a kind of enforcer type figure within the organization. So this might mean me layering my interpretation on top, but I saw him as being presented as he's calculating and he is

manipulating people into his orbit and using them. But it doesn't mean that he doesn't have these mixed motivations, like potentially attraction and so on. But I felt very much that there was a manipulative aspect to why he wants him in the orbit. I had a similar question about that scene in particular, where he's kind of chastising, but it may be at the same time it is a little half hearted. I think you could read it that way, or I think you could read it as no, we don't do this because at every point he doesn't seem like he's advocating violence. And even when your boy, seem like he's advocating violence and even when your boy john moore or whatever that guy got under his skin i think he regretted that he got out of control like that and he let that guy get a rise

out of him so i don't know my feeling was that you could read it the way you do chris but like you don't have to and i think that's the the thing that this movie is really good at, is leaving a lot of that stuff open to question. I have just one question on that and then move on. Wait, Matt's been trying to talk for the last three turns. Sorry, Matt. Aren't you lovely, David? Aren't you nice? I need you to come along to every recording session.

I listen to you guys. Sometimes I'm like, let Matt fucking talk. I promise I'll shut up. But I have to ask Tamler, when he attacked the guy, the John Brown, the guy that you hear, the one you wanted to physically attack, did you think that he was- The guy that you guys want to jerk off over, I think. Yeah, that guy. My hero, the anti-hero of the movie. Like, did you think that he was actually upset that they went and beat him up for criticizing him? I do, because it's not a good look either way. Like, even if he's pretty, like, just manipulative and instrumental in his thinking, I don't think that's what he wants. There's not enough in the movie to make me think

that this is actually, it's more that Amy Adams character who has a little Lady Macbeth in her and seemed like she wanted that to happen, which the way I read the movie is that's why he did it. It's because I think Amy Adams wanted it to happen. Well, yeah, I agree with Tamler on that one. I think he's ambivalent at best, and it also permits multiple interpretations actually thank you david for helping me talk because i wanted to talk to criticize the thing

you said so you're going to regret that but i kind of disagree a bit about it being effective you know what i mean you're putting aside the thousands of years of aliens and so on the actual methods and so on being effective because that's true but it's true in a very kind of superficial way. Like those methods, those interpersonal things are always effective. And little experience that I had. In the hands of the right person, I guess. Yeah, that's right. Like I've told this story to Chris, but really briefly.

I was in Japan, actually, when I went to visit a friend of a friend and and she was into color therapy and there's all these bottles of different colored oils and and you choose a couple of colors that appeal to you and they represent your future and your president you'd like that and so on you'd love this yeah and the practitioner sits there across from you and like stares into your eyes and holds your hands and touches your arm and shoulder. And they, they talk about you for like 30 minutes or so. And so I went along to that being the skeptic guy and I loved it. That you could feel the power of the interpersonal experience. And you can see how, you know, all of these colds, all of these quack kind of things, they always generate a genuine, in inverted commas, response because we're monkeys

and that sort of shit works on us. So, well, allow me to retort. I don't think I disagree with you. I think, though, what you're saying, what I'm saying is simply that what the active ingredient is in color therapy is clearly not the colors. It's the connection and i think that the method the process that they're using in this movie is more on the face of it what it says it is forcing an interpersonal connection right so it is simply saying now you tell me some vulnerable

shit no i'm gonna ask you again i'm gonna ask you again there's no pretense that there is like um because i think psychics do the same thing, right? They forge this connection, which is pseudo. It's all done. False, falsely. Yeah. I mean, if one chooses to ignore the thousands of years of evidence, but this one it's, it's more laid bare. I don't think this is good therapeutic practice by any means, but I do think that it, I guess

I would call it like a ice breaking exercise on steroids right you know forcing and and let me add to that that it's all well and good to say there you know i'm sure there is it's true there are better ways to make this kind of connection that don't involve a lot of this spooky shit but that isn't happening to freddie quell right like so this is what he has this is what's on offer for a lot of these people it's that or nothing and so they get that and that is really important it's not like the other option that the movie seems to lay out is tell me what this thing is that looks obviously like a vagina like exactly that's the other option that they have is it's that and the back to the discussion

of whether or not philip seymour hoffman was trying to sick his dog whether he was trying to do this or not i actually read these interactions as reflecting something different. I don't think that he really wanted Joaquin Phoenix, Freddie to go kick ass. I think that what is seeming like indecision is that throughout this whole movie, I think he's trying to figure out why he likes Freddie. And I think one of the things is that this guy has, his impulsiveness is something that Dodd doesn't have and that he kind of likes. I think his lust for life is too positive, but the whole thing that he's calling humans animalistic, right?

He hates the fart, but he laughs at it. And he ends up concluding that laughter is really important about, right. And he ends up concluding that laughter is really important about break, but I think he is stuck in believing that we should rise above our animal nature. But there is something that is so appealing about Freddie's animalistic nature that he's attracted to. Yeah. Yeah. That's totally true.

At several points in the movie, they really emphasize the animal nature of, of, and I think he can't even tell whether or not he wants Freddie sexually. I think it's unclear. Yeah. But I think you're right. It's interesting that the self-concept of Dodd is that, and this is aligned perfectly with Scientology, is that idea of ascending to this sort of spiritual realm and completely divorced from your animal nature. But like I was saying, I just picked up lots of hints that he wasn't happy. Absolutely. He was, he's miserable. But I think Freddie is showing him

that he's miserable about something. He's given up this part of life. Yeah. And kind of the only times you see him laugh. Yeah. That line that he says at the end where Freddie is leaving him and he says, if you figure out a way to live

without serving a master, any master, then let the rest of us know for you'd be the first, you know, something like that. I think he sees in Freddie something that even though he's a completely broken, aimless soul, like he sees in him, you can actually live in this way where you're not beholden to some source of meaning and that is appealing to him because he doesn't he also feels lost too yeah i was just going to say just to extend on that so dodd is kind of the leader of the cult right he's the master but he's kind of where i'm going like it's full of schemes and organizations and boats and then they move to to london and they're going to set up things and you can just sort of you get a sense of all of the sort of fruity and ego type strategizing

that sort of dominates every little thing that they do and his wife is the full-on believer and a powerful character and in a way he's like the full-on believer and a powerful character. And in a way, he's like the tails wagon that is a little bit of a prisoner of this construct that he's created. There was an element in the character of Freddy I found interesting was that while he was presented, you know, this kind of animalistic force, right? Like when you saw from his perspective, it took me quite a while to work out that's what's happening when you saw suddenly all the women being naked in one scene,

I actually fought for a while. We, so is this showing like dogs commanded all women to become naked? But it was confusing. I watched that scene three times or more, not for the boobs, but yeah. Is there like an accepted interpretation? My interpretation is it's clearly from his perspective and he's an actor. Yeah. I think the camera work is what gives us that.

I think that the director is trying to tell us that. But there is something I want to talk about that scene when Chris is done. So I think that scene, various other ones like are presenting the parallel and the imagery of like he's an animal, he's a dog. That's very clear. But there's also this like weird part. And I liked it because it reminded me of this short story I heard when I was at school in Northern Ireland called the Potching Maker, right? The people who brewed their home alcohol.

And in that story, it was a school teacher, I think. I looked it up and it was like a short story from the 70s. But that skill he has, right, where he's, yes, he's making like these kind of potions out of deadly things like paint thinners and so on. But the camera work presents it as, in a sense, he has some sort of science or mechanical skill, like an artisan, to make these drinks. And I can't remember how Dodd refers to them, but it had this nature that he has some part to him, which is like proficient in a skill, albeit it's brewing alcohol.

I totally agree. And remember, this is the thing that first attracts Dodd to him. On the one hand, he's obviously a bootlegger. We can read it straight that way. You know, he was his father's alcoholic and he learned this skill. But it's almost like he had this elixir of life that Dodd wants in on. And when he asks him how he does it, he won't tell him. So it's almost like a wizard or a shaman.

He's able to craft this elixir and that's what draws him in. Like he sees, along with everything else, he sees that Freddie has something that he wants that he's denied himself for so long. And vice versa. Yeah. Well, and I think that this is Amy Adams. Peggy Dodd is one of the things that she first asked him is to stop boozing. You know, you can read this as stop your magic, the magic that you have on my husband. And which gets me to that

scene, that scene. If you look at Amy Adams in that scene, I think it's the most brilliant piece of acting in the whole film is you're distracted by these naked women. I think you're seeing it from the perspective of Freddie. You see Amy Adams catch the camera so we can see it's Freddie. And she does this thing where she notices the way that Freddie is looking, but then she looks up at Dodd and then looks right back at Freddie as if to notice that there's something going on in that dynamic. And then that's where right after she goes and to notice that there's something going on in that dynamic. And then that's where right after she goes and jerks them off and she says, you could do whatever you want, but not this, think that there's an

illusion there to that chemistry. Nobody that other people I know. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So that, that's in Matt and I were actually talking about it. And I think there is in lots of the things there's ambiguity right because it's it's not explicit that it's referencing like homosexual urges it could be just right not at all it could

be three different things at the same time right yeah but did you guys read it that there was like a homoerotic going both ways or one way or how did you read that relationship actually i read it less like that even though like it's almost begging you to interpret that way i i read it more as a father son kind of relationship and well that's not inconsistent no i guess well i don't know what kind of like family you grew up in he was only fucking his aunt but i guess my point is like i think that's the thing that it seems like joaquin phoenix or or freddy is hungering for but at the same time can't commit to. So I didn't come down on the clearly this is two men that are trying to get with each other, but can't bring themselves to admit that. But I could see that reading too.

Now, I'm with you, Tamla, and I don't think it's very important whether or not there's some sort of physical thing going on there. Because what's clear is that his wife doesn't approve of him and other people in the movement don't approve of the presence of this guy. And it's Lancaster Dodd who wants him there and appreciates him. And his wife in particular is kind of jealous, nothing to do with physicality at all. I mean, this is the contradiction, right? He's meant to be the cult leader and Freddie's meant to be the one that's sort of fallen into it and is the loyal dog. But like he's too sociopathic or something to actually really care that much. He's a little touched, as they say in the South.

He's like not all there, right? Not all there. Yeah. So it's actually the master that has this strong thing for Freddy and Freddy's more casual about it. And so Freddy leaves, right? On the motorcycle, he just burns off. this strong thing for freddie and freddie's more casual about it and so freddie leaves right on the motorcycle he just just burns off and it's like it's hard to understand for a little while and then it's lancaster dot at the very end who sort of begs freddie to come back and really

at the very final scene he's telling freddie basically just don't leave you have to stay if you leave again that i can't him don't come back so yeah he's conflicted and i also read that as sort of him you see when he's driving off in the distance he's sort of cheering for him to leave yeah not but he also wants him he said he's driving fast like good for him yeah. Yeah. Good boy. Yeah. Yeah. Um, and you'll see, I agree absolutely, um, Matt, that it's not even important really for the movie. What's important is that there is some sort of dynamic there. That's intriguing. If you see right before the scene where Philip Seymour Hoffman is dancing and

singing, he is the scene right before that is he's telling the audience that he's in love. And you'll see Joaquin Phoenix looks embarrassed. Like he has this sort of look as if he thinks he might be talking about him. And maybe this is me imputing something on it, but I think there's a reason for him giving that look. On the face of it, he's talking about his wife, him giving that look on the face of it he's talking about his wife but i think this is ties into the whole she's jealous she might not know what and in this era maybe any homosexual feelings were so repressed that not even they themselves know what's going on between the two men they might not even realize what's going on but and he and he didn't see him in love with amy ever no no yeah so when he's saying that that

is a fair yeah in a way but when he says that he says i'm in love i'm in love we've all been in love but he says it in again this kind of hollow yeah yeah yeah it was very much like a pat he's a pastor at that point the only thing i would to say related to Dave's point was that the, something that supports that reading, Dave, is that the indulgence that he later shows Freddie when everybody else is like, this guy's no good, he's dangerous. I think he's a CIA informant and you get to see the frustration of them trying to make him better. But it is very much like Dodd says, okay, I take to make him better, but it is very much like.

Dodd says, okay, I take all of those things, but they still see something in Freddie, right? So I think that kind of fits with that reading that he has some devotion to him that the others don't, whether it's love or not, so that's all then they wrestle on the front lawn. Yeah. Yeah. Which is kind of one of the only times you see Dodd being like happy.

Exactly. Yeah. That's right. Yeah. Who do you think this is more about between the two of them? Because in some ways I think you're tempted to see this about to focus on Dodd, but it's on a lot of ways,

a movie about Freddie Quayle and more broadly speaking, the kind of person that might be drawn to this kind of community. Because it's also an interesting mission. He can't hold a job. He can't stick to anything. But he does stick with them for much longer than you see him capable of sticking to anything else. So what is it about him and his experience that draws him to this? Yeah, these people. Well, actually, I got to dispute your premise there because I don't think he is that drawn to them. He fell into them.

He boarded the boat on a whim. He sort of gets kicked out and is unsuitable for all these other contexts. And they feed him, they give him clothes. He gets to go to a party and drink. He says, everybody's very nice to me here. Like that's all. Yeah. Yeah.

So it's like, of course he's going to stay. He'll stay until they kick him out. It's just like he stayed in another situation. He doesn't just get kicked out. Like in one case, he attacks a guy and in another case in another case he well there are reasons for getting kicked out yeah but like he doesn't do things like that in the community i i had a question related to that like i just i couldn't read it myself about the intention that like two parts were one why he attacked the guy in the job when he was the photographer, why he started

being aggressive to him. I thought like maybe something to do with commanders and more or something like that, maybe. But the second one was, oh God, it slipped my mind now. It'll come back. But there was a scene I couldn't interpret like, oh yeah, that's it. Where he gave the alcohol to the man, right? And you've seen before that he was talking with the man and he said, you look like my

father. And then they started accusing him of poisoning him. And I thought that he had intentionally poisoned him, but Matt didn't read it like that. And I was kind of curious what you guys felt about that. And also the scene where you attacked the guy, because I didn't really understand why, except, you know, he's a weird guy. Yeah.

I was just going to say, I didn't see that as intentional, but maybe reckless what he did. And yeah, I think this is somebody who really just has trouble maintaining any kind of connection, even temporary of, I'm going to take your picture for 10 minutes. Like, he really can't do it. He also has clearly, like, sexual problems, impotence. That is something that is just a general part of his social dysfunction.

And that's why I would say that I think even though he ends up leaving them multiple times, there is something about this community that I would say is distinct from when he tries to blend in with other areas of life. I have formulated a mini theory for your evaluation here in listening to what you guys are saying. One of the things that I think I read in a review was the connection with the theme of family in this movie. The old man that he kills or causes to die, he says, you're like my father. You remind me of my father. Right.

And then that guy dies. The man in the mall is, you know, he's asking him if he's a family man and if he's there for his wife and he attacks him. I think he's looking for and unable to find a father figure because he's so destructive. And note, the father that he was trying out, he killed. It seems as if Dodd is taking the elixir and surviving, not dying. He has shown that he's going to take on that role. And I think that one of the reasons he leaves is he has adopted this surrogate family in a way that it doesn't seem he ever had one. And he plays out an adolescence. And, you know, at the end of adolescence as anthropologists will

tell us we leave right like that's he's actually leaving of his own accord for the first fucking time in his life right he's not getting shipped off to war he's not getting run out of the cabbage farm for killing he's not getting kicked out of the department store. I think he's finally found a surrogate father. I like the movie now. Yeah, Dave pretends to be a Philistine, but he actually has some insightful film analysis. I was sitting there going, oh. So the time that he actually goes back to the girl's house, the girl that he left and unsuccess to the girl's house, the girl that he left and,

you know, unsuccessfully reconnects with her, that's kind of what a young adult does after they leave home, right? Yeah. It's actually ready to say, yeah, okay. And when he starts to do the processing at the end and the like sexing, right. Where he's trying to get the woman to do the processing. But that fits, that's kind of what you're saying. Very bizarre. Yeah. Become the, to do the processing. But that fits. That's kind of what you're saying. He's now the father.

But you don't feel hopeful. He's the master of that pussy. It's not good. I agree, Tamler. It wasn't like, oh, he's mastered this. Do you get the sense that he's finally able to have sex in that scene? I think so, right? Well, I hadn't tweaked about the impotence.

What's the impotence? Where are you getting the impotence? Well, just like he always is like with the girl at the department store and he kind of falls asleep when they're going out to eat. And then he has these like kind of pre-sex things where he's like let's fuck to the transcribers who are right but we never actually see him able to take any of those to completion to support that template it does slip out during yeah but he says put it back in which means that it can we don't know if it was successfully. We need a close

up to get to the bottom of this. But you're right, Tamler, that he has pre-sex and whether or not he's a stud at the end there, it is the first time we see him really do it. And he's lumbering at it.

His processing sucks. Right. His idea of processing is like a real stripped out. He's not really doing it right, but he is finally like his own. Yeah. I, I, I also, it's really irrelevant. It's so irrelevant, but I've got to mention it anyway, that, you know, the stuff you were talking about, the techniques that they kind of work, right, that they break down.

Even if it isn't, it's better than the fucking inkblot Rorschach test. I also took that as an indictment of those techniques because it seemed to me to be saying that, yes, these do work. that yes, these do work, but like getting people to sit opposite each other and stare at each other and that scene where they're, they're supposed to tell truths to each other. These are all things. I don't know if Scientologists specifically do this. I think they do, but like they're, they're associated with cult movements, right? They have these techniques that force intimacy and that it works. It really works.

Cause like they've, Tamler, they've done psychology studies where people have ticked Likert boxes where if you force people to reveal secrets, intimate secrets afterwards, they feel more, you know, like close, like it, because that's what humans do when they become close to someone, they reveal information. So if you artificially create that, and I felt the movie was saying that these guys are good at doing that. They intuitively or not, they understand how these manipulative things work and they're using them to draw people in. This could be me layering my own interpretation on top.

Well, no, I agree. Yeah. It's interesting because whether or not you call it manipulative has just simply to do with whether or not you find the ends appropriate, right? Because you're right. There is actually like in social psychologists, in a relationship, they use this method to get two people in the lab to get to know each other really fast. Right.

It's like a whole technique where you divulge information to each other. It's science. It's, well, and it works. And so the thing is, no, I don't think any of us here would disagree with the claim that cults are effective at giving people these tools to bond with other humans. I think what our judgment is about whether it's fake or not, it has more to do with whether or not we think that the goals of that bonding are manipulated rather than whether or not people have bonded. It's effective. And also, I think that there is a way to look at this and say, well, all this is doing is just normal intimacy and it would be much healthier for him to have this intimacy without all the bullshit. But clearly,

that's not in the cards for him. He has no opportunity to do that in a way that wouldn't involve these kind of cult-like aspects. So I think it's really asking the question of for people who are truly lost and aimless and who feel like their existence is kind of a joke, is this something that is actually helpful or beneficial for them in spite of the fact that there's all this metaphysics behind it that is crazy? Like, is it still better than living this atomized life of bouncing from job to job and never being able to actually have sex, even when, you know, it's this hot department store worker? How about, Tamlo, that scene where he, uh, Dodd tells him, no one else likes you, just

me, right? Like, it tells him, did you read that as like he wanted to hurt him so that he was kind of saying i'm the only one that recognizes you has merit because with my reading of that saying i keep feeling like i'm a philip stein is that freddie actually felt that he had connections with the other people in the group and then dodd that he had connections with the other people in the group and then dodd cruelly told him none of that's real i'm the only person that likes you i'm the only reason you're there and that felt to me like manipulative and cruel even if it was true because it felt like freddy did feel that he was accepted by the other people so i just check it out am i appe I a peace zombie? I think it's true, but I think what he was saying

isn't wrong. Those people were ready to throw him under the bus at the first opportunity and nevermind like the rest of the world that he's always running away from. So I think it's true, but I also think it was maybe a manipulative thing to say at that moment. No, I think it was just upset. You know what I mean? Chris, you're so cynical. You always attribute the worst motives. I think Lancaster Dove was just upset and was telling him how it was.

And Freddie had just told him that his son had said he was full of shit. Yeah. I think one of the uncomfortable truths being spoken here is that our relationships, even at their most sincere are often manipulative, right? So we often, even with people whom we love do things in order to get our way and in order to at least satisfy our needs. I read it always as, and I think this is where, you know, Chris and I coming into it with a little bit of a different take. I always read it as, of course, that's manipulative, but he's manipulating him because he really wants his affection. Like he's just actually cares about the guy.

That's how parents are sometimes. I certainly have seen people in more toxic relationships who love each other. Dave does that to me. people in more toxic relationships who love each other. Yeah. Dave does that to me. Him manipulates me, but not. I try. It's hard to manipulate a psychopath.

I get my off early in the morning. I say, you know, we've got to record it for him. Tell me your law. What did you do today? Yeah. Sleep deprivation,

cutting me off from all other social connections. It's all happening. And we're letting you talk. The thing is, Tamler, that's a good way to do it. Usually I just hold up a little piece of paper on Zoom that says, do you want to fuck? This is going

deep. This is going deep this is going deep all right well i think to draw a line under this has all been very interesting this has all been fascinating all of these interpretations and see you got so much more than you thought you were i did i got a lot from this i recognize all of it i still didn't enjoy watching the movie i still if i had the opportunity to see another movie like this, I would turn it down because fundamentally it wasn't entertaining for me. I could interpret the hell out of it. Yeah.

Just in the genre of cult. No, no, no. A movie which didn't go anywhere. It has all these interpretations and there's different sort of ways you can look at it. But ultimately I didn't know what the hell was going on really. I didn't realize you were such a black and white kind of thinker, Matt. I thought maybe what's being communicated through ambiguity is think for yourself about what human beings are

like when they relate to each other. I thought. You know what a good movie looks like? Dune. That's a really good movie. There's bad guys, there's good guys, there's spaceships, and giant fucking worms. Byron Horcoven. That movie also just kind of tails off.

I loved Dune. I loved seeing it in the theater, and I loved Denis Villeneuve, but that movie just kind of, in the same way that this movie does. That's because it's part one of one of six. There's going to be like five more. I get it that there's another one,

but still, like if you enjoyed that, you can, maybe there'll be a master too. But perhaps you'd be more comfortable with the MCU or something like that. At the end of Lord of the Rings, were you very... Wait, there's an end? What the hell?

They didn't even get rid of the ring. What? Wait, there's an end? What the hell? They didn't even get rid of the ring. I never saw Return of the King because everybody was saying that it just doesn't stop. You know, I will, though, I'll say this, Matt. The other day we watched a movie and talked about it on the podcast where hedonically my experience wasn't one of pleasure, but in the last, I think going into it with the sake of trying to, yeah. Right. Where I could say, I don't want to watch it again.

And I certainly wasn't like entertained isn't the right word, but if you're going into it, the filmmaker, I think in this case, wasn't randomly throwing stuff at us. There was something there that was being communicated. But I get it. Like, sometimes you just don't want to do the work of interpreting fairly ambiguous. Then just sit back and watch how the filmmaking is enough. If there's nothing, if like thematically it's not like hitting for you just filmmaking wise i feel this way with melancholia and i actually responded to the themes of both but like in both cases it's

well worse comes to worse i'm just watching one beautiful scene after another and yeah no look i i enjoyed you you guys talking about melancholia and And that was the episode with the Oprah Winfrey takes too, wasn't it? Don't try to pick up on me, Goldberg. We had to get some people to listen to us in that episode. That's right. I was trying to think of an ambiguous artsy-fartsy movie that I like. And I thought of Blue Velvet. Oh, there you go.

Well, now you're just sucking Tamler's dick. No, no, but I get it. It's a different kind of movie. That has a plot. That has something that just keeps you moving through you. And then it has a very clear way of ending. Yeah. Are you guys big fans of Eraserhead?

You like Eraserhead? I'm a fan. It's not my favorite of his movies but yeah it's i'm just calibrated anything lynch tamler will never speak ill of right lynch could shit onto uh do roar shocks out of his poop and tamler would find the beauty in it he could put a worm inside a radiator. A lady's pussy. Not just a pussy, a lady's pussy. I felt after watching, as I said, similar to Matt, like a lack of satisfaction. And I think because of my relatively unsophisticated palate when it comes to films, a reaction that, and I think it's the reason that this movie didn't get the audience that entirely was expecting or was anticipated because the framing of the kind of master, the Scientology stuff, despite all the things that I've been saying, it's very much incidental, right? The guy could be a business and executive, and it's really about the relationship and these two characters. And that's what's important.

I agree. You're right. i think that actually hurt it i avoided it because i was like i don't want to see something vaguely about l ron hubbard yeah yeah and i think that maybe for me a little bit all of that stuff because i've got so much layered on there with interests and cults and Scientology and whatever it kind of interfered with just the character study of the people. And then because that character story is like fundamentally made up of people I didn't like, like I don't like Freddie Quill, I don't like Lancaster Dodd, they're not good people. And I think apparently this is Paul Thomas Anderson's speciality, right?

Is to make people that are a little bit broken or they're real, but they're very flawed humans. And as a result, I just didn't like anyone in the film, even the skeptic Tavler, even that guy that, right on, get him man. Yeah. Like he was a dick too. It was clear that he was a dick. It was clear that he was a dick. So there's nobody in the movie that comes across as like a very appealing, dying character, apart from just incidental people that they bump into.

What about Lennon Castor Dodd? There is a kind of warmth to him that other people in the movie don't have that I thought actually in some ways he's the most sympathetic character in the movie. There is a kind of just he really loves people and is genuinely trying to take care of them. He's got a lot of charisma. He seems even though he's clearly struggling, he it seems like doesn't let that affect how he treats others in the way that other people do. And he's on B.T. is that he's a manipulative cult leader. I'm sorry. Aside from that, that's on the comments.

Yeah, I actually, yeah, I don't know. I think that Freddy's the only person he really cares about. One of the things that you see at the end there when he's created this whole center, you know, he has this big desk in this huge room. I think what we don't see throughout the movie is that he has been all along building a pretty shitty institution, milking people out of their money. But I think he really does care weirdly about Freddie. And I found it touching.

I did find it. Don't go there, Tamla. Don't go there. You guys are really interesting well i'm with chris when the most sympathetic character is a manipulative cult leader who's fleecing everyone else for their money and a narcissistic wanker as well then your movie has an appeal problem yeah what about fat matt damon what's oh he queer. Jesse. I'm very plausibly the song. Don't call him Fat Matt Damon.

I call him that in every single episode where we've ever discussed him. Yeah, but that's not cool. But yeah. He deserves Kirsten Dunst. And that's hard for me to say. But I think he deserves Kirsten Dunst. I love Jesse Plymouth.

Yeah, he's great. Chris and Matt, I appreciate you guys going out of your comfort zone and watching such a disdainful cast of characters well it was Chris's fault for nominating it thank you Chris probably nominate a more fun movie next time

no it was good like Shrek Shrek he was so bad right he's such a bad guy did you see the black he had? To be good, guys, I actually, I learned something. I learned more about the movie.

I actually like it just infinitesimally more after talking to you guys about it. Yeah. It was good. Did you guys see Licorice Pizza? This doesn't have to go on. I haven't seen it.

Great. And much more fun. And a lot more likeable character. Licorice Pizza, his new movie. It's his new movie much more fun. And a lot more like a book. Licorice Pizza, his new movie. It's his new movie. You know, maybe you guys should stop watching like 18 hours of Joe Rogan a day and watch like a good movie. Pamela, have you seen the discussion between James Lindsay, Michael O'Fallon and Jordan Peterson? It's like, if you want to see gurus, oh my.

The scenery alone. I mean, you are metaphorically getting jerked off over the sink by all of those people. So I guess. This is true.

I can't interact with ordinary people anymore. They're just so bumpy and like, where's your Nobel Prize winning idea? All right.

Thank you guys. Thank you very much. Let's do it prize winning idea? All right. Thank you guys. Thank you very much. Let's do it again sometime. Yes. Definitely. Thanks both for coming and helping us class up our joint, at least for one episode. We'll continue. This is classing up your joint?

Yeah, this is it. This is the peak. Hey, we had Liam Bright. We got Liam Bright. This is the peak. Hey, we had Liam Bright. We got Liam Bright. We'll continue to parasitically absorb your audience and you're at least older than one of us.

The only thing we ask is that you pay it forward to whatever parasitic podcast grows out of your listeners. Oh, yeah. Sure. Sure. Sometime in the future. We'll definitely do that. We'll help them out.

We'll do that right away. So, thanks guys and we'll do it again with a Disney movie or something next time. Sounds good. Yeah. Mischief managed.

Sense made. Sense made. Gurus Decoded. Films Reviewed. Just another day. Just another day at Decoded. Another day at the office. But that was fun.

It was a nice escape from our usual format. And aside from Tamler's insane ghost takes, he's very insightful when he's talking about movies. Yeah, yeah. He's like most philosophers, just like a tremendous intellect, but just misapplied. But a great guy, nonetheless.

Yeah, yeah. Setting aside the ghost advocacy, he's a great intellect. But yeah, it was very much fun. And well, we're not going to keep people long, Matt. We're not that kind of people. We don't hang around. We don't make episodes too long.

So what we normally do at this stage is switch to our review of reviews. It was very close. It was very close. It was very close. I almost got it. And I've got some little gems this week. I've got a very short one to start us off.

There's a five star from Gavsky with many eyes. And the title is, I listened to these guys religiously and he says, nearest thing I get to having a life. That's somebody from Australia. So I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry to hear that,

but I appreciate the positive review. It's the same. It's the same. It's the same as for Chris. This is the closest thing he's got to a life as well. So, you know, you're one of us to home careful um this is so the less good review this week it's a three star one which you know i always feel conflicted about these you know take a stance be a bit stronger um in any case it's three out of five and it is by David Ryan Shaw

giving away his full identity there. And title is Questionable Content Yet Well Produced. It's just... Yeah, well, as I said to you before, Chris, that just seemed backwards.

I would say it's good content, questionably produced. Surely. Yes, yeah. Look at the markers on the previous episode. There were like 13 of them, half were blank. And one of them, the title was, release this episode.

Whatever. So, yeah, but good production. Nonetheless, nonetheless. Chris, I'll explain this. You know, I blame the tools. The script is very weird and funky. It is. Not me.

That's our editing software for those in the know okay so this person says i tune in to try and make sense of how other educated people view society and culture that's your first mistake i do find it unsettling the manner in which the hosts particularly chris criticism allers. That's what he wrote, criticism allers. They seem to get a cynical high from it, which I find distasteful. No matter, I find their takes important to keep in consideration when it comes to the various gurus

with hyphens around it. They critically deconstruct. I'd say it's 40% solid content and 60% doing exactly what they chastise others for doing. Take a listen and think for yourself. Smiley face. Too critical. Well, the one thing I would never do is criticism that person's editing skills.

I would never do that, Chris. I don't do a criticism. I don't. Yeah. It's editing skills. I would never do that, Chris. I don't do a criticism. I don't. Yeah. So petty. The harp on a minor grammatical error. Did this count otherwise valid criticism? That's not in my nature.

But look, he had me at especially Chris. From then on, he could have said anything. And I was on board. I was sold. Good man. A cynical high? A cynical high? What kind?

You think this gives me pleasure? You think I enjoy this? You're smiling right now. I can tell. You do. You derive energy from this. Everybody knows it, Chris. You can't hide it.

You love it, you sick puppy. I do like his message, though. Think for yourself. Listen to the content. And again, he's 60% wrong. How many times are we going to have to tell you, if you think we're doing the same thing as the gurus, you need to spend more time with the gurus' content.

It is not the same. It's not the same. But anyway, other opinions are available. It's the only 60% wrong in this case and three out of five stars. So thank you for the feedback.

Yeah. It's criticized, by the way. Criticized. Now, to move on, Matt, to people who would never dare

criticize us lest they would incur our wrath. Um, the Patreons, our, our veritable smorgasbord of, of beautiful and intellectually impressive people that support our efforts. If any one of them criticize us, we'd just, we'd just tweet about them and say, Twitter, do your thing, we'd set our hordes of rampaging followers on them. They know what the deal is.

12K account just you watch the power of the hate followers who will leap upon any mistake I make. So, you know, the last two times we've experimented, we had Matt saying how much he loved you, then how much he was favorably inclined to you, how much I resent you. This week, Matt surprised me saying he was going to compose poetry for each individual person. An iambic pentameter on the fly. That was unexpected. But, you know, we got to give these things a shot. I still remember you promising a dirty limerick for every single one of them.

No, I'm sorry. You're not getting out. We realized that our attempt to help things be more efficient, they just make things longer. So we're going to use our tried and tested clips and shout out a bunch of you collectively. So I'll read out a bunch of the names for our galaxy brain here. Then we can both just sincerely thank them and we'll play the clip. This will be efficient. Watch this.

So Fernando Ferreira. Jim Murray. Tom Allison. Heidi Packard. Cameron O'Mara. Alex Anderson. Petito Wire. Tom Yasko Davwek

Daniel Estes Danlev151 and Seb Katimas That is our Galaxy Brain Gurus for this week and I thank them dearly. Thank you all from the bottom of my heart too and no parasociality at all. No, we don't permit that. Just thank you. You're sitting on one of the great scientific stories

that I've ever heard, and you're so polite. And hey, wait a minute. Am I an expert? I kind of am. I kind of am. Yeah. I don't trust people at all. That just reminded me, Matt, that Scott Adams had an amazing thread, but we can cover it on the next episode, like a tweet storm he did. It's amazing. That's something to look forward to, a little teaser for people there.

So that's our Galaxy Brain Gurus, the kind of morally superior people who support us, but there are lower tiers of people who are okay. Revolutionary Geniuses, Matt. That's who they are. And there we have Joan Mazza, Lachlan Gilchrist, A Mugs Game, Chris Clark, William Quarson, Zara Halliday, Joshua G. Ziegler, Linda Blackwelder, Brian Schmeier, Janet Uter, Patrick Bellancourt, and David R. Woody. All of them are all pretty good people. Pretty good. Pretty good. I moderately thank them as people. Pretty good, pretty good.

I moderately thank them as well. I like the moderatero. I have special sympathy for them being a mediocre academic myself. You know, it's the kind of people that would discover something about mouse telomeres but wouldn't quite be capable of figuring out a grand unified geometric theory. You know what I mean? You know, the middle of the road. You know. Well, counter to that the road, you know.

Well, counter to that, Matt, they're revolutionary thinkers. So here's their little clip for that. Maybe you can spit out that hydrogenated thinking and let yourself feed off of your own thinking. What you really are is an unbelievable thinker and researcher, a thinker that the world doesn't know. They do not know you. And that's a shame. But we know you. We know you in a non-parasocial way. Bye.

Conspiracy hypothesizers. No lesser than either of the two tiers. They just don't need less money. That's fine. It's a reasonable thing to do. And we appreciate it all the same. So these people, you're no lesser. You're conspiracy hypothesizers.

And that's okay. Say it with me. That's okay. Yeah. It's just like an animal farm. You know, all the animals are equal. Just some are more equal than others. Yeah. Yeah.

That's it. And most equal amongst those animals are Kitty Gilbert, Seth, Indy M, Connie Prantera, 9 underscore 9, John Toot, Recalentrant Goat. Recalcitrant, I think. Recalcitrant, I think. Maybe. Maybe. Um, Aidan Whitehall, Viktor Ivanov, Andrew, Ian Cherow, and Shane. Hey, thank you, non-parasocially. Thank you, non-parasocially, you conspiracy hypothesizers.

Every great idea starts with a minority of one. We are not going to advance conspiracy theories. We will advance conspiracy hypotheses. Yes, we will. One day they're going to get it beyond the hypothesis. They're actually going to build a fully fleshed out model and a theory, and then it'll one day, one day become a law. That's what you can aspire to you guys.

So keep it up. You'll get there. Just stick with the hypothesizing. It for some yeah so the next episode as we mentioned in the introduction a million hours ago is going to be jerome launier a pioneer in technology who also has some skeptical questions about whether you should delete your social media accounts and whatnot. An interesting dreadlocked man who plays various instruments and walks barefoot on stage. So look forward to that. You can find us on the interwebs, on the Reddit. We're there.

We have a Discord. We have Twitter accounts. GurusPod is the podcast one. And you can email us at decodingthegurus at gmail.com and yeah I always forget to say it

so do all that and oh and we're on Instagram and stuff like that and Facebook and Facebook oh we're on Facebook too

we're everywhere and the only remaining thing to say Matt is note the disc consider the gin. I will, Chris. I will.

Thank you. Distributed idea suppression complex and gated institutional narrative. Yeah. Thank you, Chris. Bye, guys. Bye-bye. Thank you.