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Round two on Iman Gadzhi, the 23-year-old self-proclaimed marketing millionaire who makes conspiracy theory videos to sell business coaching packages. (Listen to EP 180 for background.)
This week, Julian and Matthew discuss Gadzhi's seemingly plagiarized rhetoric that invites preteen boys from Boston to Belarus to drop out of school. Manosphere types are drawn to fascist values like moths to the flame, yet when they get too close, they have to reckon with authoritarianism, and try to rebel against it.
Julian discusses Gadzhi's deceptive social-media-based marketing in the context of election-disrupting technologies. Matthew then exposes the cruelty at the heart of Gadzhi's coaching scheme, as the YouTuber imagines disciplining his future sons with violence.
Show Notes
Join THE RESCUE today (Gadzhi content)
The Great Reset - Iman Gadzhi
Iman Gadzhi LIED to You - He is The Puppet Master
Iman gadzhi is pulling his second fear mongering scam and coffee should talk about it
THE IMPACT OF SCIENCE ON SOCIETY
The country school of to-morrow
Context: "People yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hand"
Education or Indoctrination? The Violent Origins of Public School Systems in an Era of State-Building
Webarchive: Foster Gamble quoting Gates
Thrive - Viral Video
The Revisionists Revived: The Libertarian Historiography of Education
The Origins of the American Public Education System: Horace Mann & the Prussian Model of Obedience
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Please tell me more about how a 23-year-old con artist is trying to get preteen boys to think his life coaching package is better than high school.
Do we really have to do this episode?
I don't know, brother.
It all depends on whether you value your own personal growth or not.
All right.
Whether you want to protect your family and save the children.
All right.
All right.
Let me go and take an ice bath.
I'll mix up some brain powder.
I'll be okay.
Hello everyone, welcome to Conspiratuality Podcast, where we investigate the intersection
of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian
extremism.
And today this includes man-child YouTube clones who use conspiracy theories and clean-cut misogyny and ableism to sell online marketing courses to frustrated boys.
I'm Matthew Remsky.
I'm Julian Walker.
We are on Instagram at Conspiratuality Pod, and you can access our Monday bonus episodes through Patreon or Apple subscriptions, and you can access our episodes ad-free on Patreon.
We've got a book out.
It's called Conspiratuality, How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat.
It's in print, ebook, and audiobook format, narrated by me.
Welcome to Conspiratuality 181, YouTuber Redpills Preteen Boys.
All right listeners, so you've been doing the work.
You've been breaking down those habits that no longer serve you.
You've been in the cold shower doing the breath work, restricting the calories, adding intensity progressively to your workouts.
You've been dopamine detoxing.
You've been questioning your educational programming, meditating on your soul goals, and preparing yourselves to go to the next level, right?
Yeah, I certainly have.
I mean, because listen, You should get the hell out right now unless you're ready to give everything.
I'm talking 200% blood, sweat and tears to what is to come next.
You need to be willing to sacrifice anything if you want to win everything.
Because believe me when I say this, warrior spirit is only forged in the fire and it always comes at a cost.
But without it, you, me, you too Matthew, really any of us is nothing.
Well, thank you, Julian.
And joking aside, welcome to our second episode reviewing the life and exploits of Iman Gadzi, specifically the last sales funnel program that he released on YouTube called The Rescue.
And last time we learned that Iman Gadzi is 23 years old.
He's a self-reported multi-millionaire originally from Dagestan.
He grew up with a single mother who remarried a very wealthy but cruel guy, at least by his account.
He went to private school in London and he basically grew up on YouTube, opening his first account when he was 15 years old.
And from there, kind of sliding through every online biz fad that the times and the algorithm brought, And then during COVID, like so many others, he got red-pilled and people started to draw comparisons between him and Andrew Tate.
Yeah, and to me, he represents the evolution of how the most troubling viral aspects of social media can be recombined, normalized, magpie style.
They're used to then exert influence on this younger audience in a way that's very natural to the platform.
Yeah, and also compelling, given how skillful he is as a visual arts producer.
What would you say about his production values?
Well, in terms of YouTube content, I think there's like different tiers, right?
This is fairly big budget.
There's a lot of creative and editing hours that goes into every video, especially the ones we're talking about.
So my sense is there's a team behind this, there's a lot of planning, there are deliberate choices.
I would see it as being in the lineage, as I said last time, of online propaganda films that purport to reveal the hidden truths.
There's the ominous soundtrack, the montage and clip art, the short live action narrative scenes, sort of recreations,
and it's all with a voiceover that establishes its theme via quick and dirty remixed
historical narratives, paranoid assertions, and emotional urgency. And those more visually propagandistic
segments are usually then interspersed with talking head monologues or one-sided
interviews.
And in days gone by, or in other genres, you're going to see talking heads that are experts on anything from UFO abductions to mind over matter, magic and quantum mechanics, or to the dangers of vaccines, maybe the melting point of steel.
Right.
It's just that young man himself who is the product and the entrepreneur.
It's just him talking to the camera in these slickly shifting different settings, right?
I think that's a good summary.
And getting to the title of our previous episode, which listeners can certainly check out, why are we tagging him as the next Andrew Tate?
I think really there's two reasons.
First is that he's leaning into marketing himself to young boys as a role model for masculine success.
So that's a really clear straight line.
Right.
Second, even though he's thankfully not training up a generation of wannabe pimps and sex traffickers like Andrew Tate, Our young Godsey does openly espouse old world gender roles and also expectations that he has and that he thinks it's okay for his customers to have of male dominance, female submission, and the supposed wholesome and natural dynamics both of having control
Over his future wife's behavior, she should have no social media or a private social media that he sort of manages.
And also this red-pilled trope that high-earning men are entitled to one-sided open sexual relationships.
About the control stuff, we ran a clip last week in which he says, I want my future wife to have only private social media to be entirely devoted to taking care of me and the kids.
And then he finishes the thought, but it's a YouTube short, so it might be clipped together from another part in the session.
But that short finishes with him saying, you really can't let anyone take your dreams away, which is hilarious.
Anyway, I want to say something about the cleanliness of the misogyny.
I mean, it is true that there is no whiff of allegations against him.
However, if there were, part of me would be surprised and part of me wouldn't be surprised.
And the part that would be surprised wants to believe that his self-I.D.
as, you know, a simple Eastern European chauvinist is accurate.
And while it's not feminist, it's also not criminal.
And this is the part of me that believes the centrality of his mom in his content is actually in earnest, and it communicates a real desire to honor and protect women, albeit in a patronizing way.
But then there's a part of me that wouldn't be surprised, and that's the part that I think we all have to reckon with these days, which is that our media landscape is just wall-to-wall with personalities who lie, who cover up, who manufacture respectability in really sophisticated ways.
And so when I think about Those two parts of myself, like there's a trusting part and there's a very distrustful part constantly at war within me, I feel really sad.
As I mentioned last week, Godsey came into my home through YouTube ads, served up through my 11-year-old's Google login, and the ads were selling a course called The Rescue.
So this week, we'll be looking at that content in detail.
It's a three-part doxploitation film.
He said Netflix-style episodes, and I think he's right about that.
And the first episode aired on October 30th, and that first episode netted close to 2.5 million views.
Parts two and three were spaced out over the following week.
There was a WhatsApp group, there were homework sheets, there were promises of huge revelations throughout about Godsey's stunning research into the widespread, meticulously planned conspiracy of public educators who, over 300 years, he says, have aimed to enslave generations of young men.
And, you know, as Naomi Klein will say about the stereotypical conspiracy theorist, he gets the feelings right but then the facts wrong, and in some cases blatantly and lazily wrong, based, I'm afraid to say, on borderline plagiarism of recycled YouTube trash.
As with many things, Reddit is ahead of the curve on this stuff, so I have a couple of notes from the Reddit files.
Someone, first of all, created a flowchart called the Andrew Tate Red Pill Hustler Scheme and then posted it to, you know, a thread that was talking about Godsey.
And I think this captures the Godsey arc very well.
Julian, can you just walk us through this?
Yeah, it's a really nicely created slide that uses graphics and a flowchart.
So it starts with, uh, create an over the top persona.
And it's like, it's like a, uh, a figure that has a, uh, almost like a cape or a trench coat on or something with a, uh, an icon on his chest.
Like he's a dark superhero.
Say outrageous things.
Do the red pill podcast circuit.
Yeah.
Amazing.
Increase clout.
Monetize clout.
Create your pyramid scheme.
And here they have Andrew Tate's Hustler University.
So already I think we have a very clean sort of set of things.
Okay, create this outrageous persona that gets you invited onto these podcasts or you reach out to them and then you get on.
Right.
That increases your clout.
People are talking about you.
Who is this guy?
He's saying these wild things.
But you know, I agree with a lot of what he says.
I mean, sometimes he goes too far.
Then how are you going to monetize that clout?
Well, obviously you have A course.
You have Hustle University and Andrew Tate's case and this course that we're covering from Iman Gadzi at least as one aspect of his quite elaborate and well-developed business model for a 23-year-old.
And then it says students pay $50 a month for gigs that you can start on Fiverr.
Students receive kickbacks for creating Tate-inspired content.
No, I haven't seen Godsey go that far.
I have seen supporters boosting through their own videos, his various programs.
That's actually how I came upon This next piece of information, or it's related to it.
So I came across a Reddit post on CoffeeZilla and it's from April of this year.
Iman Ghazi just released his trailer for The Reset, a webinar discussing conspiracy theories and the elites.
He did this a few months ago with a YouTube series about what he calls the Puppet Masters.
This series was all a front to create fear and then sell his course as the solution.
Iman commonly uses lies and deceit to steal from his audience.
During his last YouTube series, all of his videos disappeared, and he publicized that the elites took them down because he's sharing secret knowledge, but it was later revealed that Iman himself took down his own videos as a marketing stunt.
Okay, and sure enough, The Puppet Masters and The Great Reset are gone.
But I did find, and this is what I was mentioning before, an acolyte or some affiliate marketing dude helping Godsey promote The Great Reset in his own video, and that program ran in the spring of 2023.
And then I found a debunk video of The Puppet Masters series, which aired in December of So he's doing this about every six months or so.
But that debunk video was put out by someone who appears to be like a coaching sales rival.
But what you won't find is any reference on Godsey's own YouTube channels to any of those programs anymore, including the one we're covering today.
So, we started this entire project on this thing that has now disappeared.
We're actually following in Godsey's footsteps now, chasing a ghost, I think.
Yeah, so Maximum Impact, you know, let's really make this a big event, market it, get people ready for it, put it out there, get millions of views and then it just disappears and we're left with workout videos and videos on how you can make an extra $1500 a week with this one cool hack from this young millionaire.
Well, with The Rescue, the target income he kept talking about was $10,000 a month.
Yeah.
I'm actually really impressed at the willingness to torch all of that really highly produced content so quickly.
And I don't know how these things budget out, but The Rescue marketing effort between production values and the constant drip feeding of promo materials, it looks to me like tens of thousands of dollars.
Absolutely, but in the same way that we don't really see how the sausage is made in terms of the affiliate marketing deals, right?
That's not something that's publicized.
We also don't know really what's going on on the inside of the premium subscription service he may be offering or, you know, any of the ways in which he is repurposing that content.
And that's part of what people in this kind of business are genius at.
He may have just changed the settings on those videos to private and he can
share the links now only with people who want to review the course because
they've signed up.
Oh, so it becomes part of the remonetization sort of archive. Okay. All right.
Well, we captured it anyway.
We're not going to play the whole, you know, shebang here, but we do have the data and we're going to do a walkthrough of this stuff that doesn't even exist anymore because we obviously care about this more than he does.
Before we get into that content and the ironies of a 23 year old, you know, high school dropout selling an online marketing course by pretending to be a historian of education, I want to point out something obvious.
about any cabal-type theory about public schooling in general that anybody would consider, because I am the son of lifelong high school teachers, and the notion that there is a conspiracy theory driving any level of ideological or behavioral control over, quote, the education system, wherever it is we're talking about, and Godsey doesn't specify, you know, is it US, UK, Kenya, whatever, it's just a really stupid idea.
And it hinges on the problem of conspiracies is that conspirators have to be few in number
and absolutely disciplined in secrecy and messaging and that they have to cover their tracks.
So this might be possible in a very insular government agency, but
like have you met public school teachers?
Do you have any idea how much shit they talk about their principals, their vice principals, about departments, ministries of education?
Like, in my considerable experience, public school teachers are some of the most vociferous critics of public schooling around.
And then there's teachers' unions and decades-long wars with school boards and conservative governments that are always about much more than salaries because, you know, they're usually talking about class sizes.
And that's about whether or not children are receiving enough attention so that they're not actually being shuttled through factory-like conditions.
Yeah, it's one of the central flaws of most conspiracy theories.
They present as ruggedly skeptical, but then require these pockets of extreme credulity and epic leaps of faith that strain basic common sense.
This profound cognitive dissonance, I think, is then overcome to the extent that having a simple explanation There are curriculum battles taking place out in the open.
some deep need for vindication or meaning making or a sense of agency in a world
that's actually quite complicated.
There are curriculum battles taking place out in the open.
I mean, there are no conspirators who openly publish all of their debates and research materials
or who allow school board trustees to be elected from the general public.
It's actually the democratic porousness of public schooling, especially in the US, that is now exposing educators
to assaults from the right wing groups like Mothers for Liberty.
Oh, wait, I see what you did there.
But essentially you're saying because the system has this open-ended accessibility, it's actually too open to the extent that it can be infiltrators like Mothers for Liberty with just a little bit of good organizing and a lot of bad intentions can come in and actually wreck havoc.
It's more, though, than the porousness of disorganization and also the paralysis of progressives in the face of very obvious reactionary incursions.
It's the general decline in public school support over the last 40 years of neoliberal policy.
Cultural attacks on teachers as being part of the cultural elites, union-busting tactics, constant growing class sizes amidst constant decreases in funding, and then the rise of the charter school movement.
And now libs of TikTok will just declare open season on random public school teachers who support trans rights.
So the ultimate irony of this really stupid sales pitch that he's got going on is that if Ghanzi wants public schooling to implode, He just has to wait a little bit like he's he's actually getting what he wants.
He doesn't have to do the Alex Jones routine.
It's pure straw man building as a foil for his sales pitch.
But, you know, really, there there actually is a conspiracy and it's coming from the right and it's coming from people who want to privatize education so that they can actually do real indoctrination in terms of whatever their agenda is, which is largely Christian nationalist, if I'm reading it correctly.
So.
You sign up for the rescue, I signed up for the rescue, and this cute drumbeat of text leaks and video teasers and notifications on my WhatsApp, all in the same paranoid register.
And, you know, there's this technique involved that is just really thick.
You can feel it through all of the communications.
And you talked about it a little bit in the last episode, Julian.
It seems so cheesy to me, and I just don't understand how it can really work.
Yeah, so you're describing how you take the first step of being hooked and signing up, supposedly acting as if you are, and that actually is just the first step in a long line of back and forth that's going to go on, mostly coming in one direction towards you, trying to hook you in various ways.
I think, yeah, it's cheesy, but the thing to grasp about these aggressively persuasive techniques Is that they're deployed with the understanding that they're only going to work on a small percentage of potential customers.
Okay.
So if you think about the numbers we're dealing with here, then it starts to make sense.
It goes back to that graphic you found on Reddit.
So step one is make a big impact, create bold, attention-grabbing, polarizing content.
This achieves two things.
It builds an audience to whom you're trying to appeal.
But it also drives traffic to your landing pages, email collection widgets, social media pixel trackers, right?
That log every time someone visits one of your pages.
So, we know it's more than that, but just for argument's sake, let's say you get a million views on a controversial, slickly produced film like this.
And first of all, even though this video was not monetized, the view count bonanza increases the value of the channel to advertisers, because all of that is included on the About section of the YouTube page.
It's all being tallied up, how many views you've gotten on your channel.
And then, let's say conservatively, the video, let's say it reaches a million, maybe a hundred thousand viewers click through on one of your links.
And again, conservatively, maybe 30,000 of those respond well to your carefully calibrated conversion strategy.
Because this is not just some page you're visiting.
It's a page that's been set up in a particular way.
There's a lot of thought that goes into all of this.
And let's say you join like you did.
Now, the person running all of this has the ability to trigger a series of emails.
That will draw those who joined into the marketing further.
Marketing now as awakening or as community or as hope for empowerment, right?
Now you're talking directly to a somewhat captive audience, but then you can also serve up social media ads.
This is called remarketing to everyone who visited that web page.
That's that whole pixel thing.
Now typically the industry standard says that between one and two percent of all of these people that we've been talking about who either joined the email list or visited the site, one to two percent of them buying something from you is considered a good result.
Like that's congratulations, your marketing is working.
So let's say 1% buys a $1,000 coaching product.
That's $300,000 based on, you know, the math we've just been fooling around with.
But that's just the start.
Because he's building his name, he's building his profile, he's introducing thousands of people to his ideas, his personality, and all of that exposure and traffic then gets carefully and deliberately channeled back into the well-constructed funnel.
It's also all market research, which is one of the reasons too that he probably takes stuff down because he's experimenting to see what gets the biggest impact and he can try different things.
Right?
So it's Marcus research that based on data gathered will drive future tweaks, variations, strategies to get higher and higher conversions each time and higher sales rates within now the immediately segmented and micro targeted It's incredible stuff.
And I mean, then there's the sort of charismatic personal pull itself.
There's this super direct eye contact that he performs.
He gives this point-by-point delivery, very ominous music.
He does it pretty effectively, I think, if you're 13 years old and you haven't developed any kind of BS radar.
Yeah, it's a magnification of what in old school sales terms is called the trusted advisor technique.
He's becoming your trusted advisor.
Right.
And look, I mean, obviously, one of the flaws, right, that some people may see in our analysis of this is that a young kid probably doesn't have the money right now for an Iman Ghazi course.
But listen, advertisers figured out a long time ago, you can actually find articles on this, that if you can get someone to bond with your brand as young as possible, your opportunities to sell to them down the line are extremely lucrative.
The trick here is that he may well be inspiring that 13 year old to figure out next how to get the money to buy the course.
There's a kind of challenge to his ability to grow up, to empower himself, to wake up out of society's imposed limitations, or out of his family's rules and protections.
And maybe some of those rules really are kind of shitty.
And so, you know, he's finding himself pushing back.
This is feeling plausible.
What is Godsey really saying?
You can be like me.
I'm a high school dropout.
No college.
You can start your own business.
Be a millionaire at 21.
Have a hot, submissive wife at home with no social media.
Limitless casual sex opportunities as a high-value man.
A collection of sick cars and impressive watches, right?
He talks about this in all his interviews.
Travel the world.
And talk confidently on baller podcasts.
It's all pretty appealing in terms of being a role model and it's really pretty dangerous for the actual future of these boys.
Yes, who could be nurturing other aspirations.
I mean, my kid already has what he loves, like he knows what and who he loves and what he loves to do, so there's some protection there.
Worry about the kids who, for whatever reason, are more in more of a blank slate stage.
So, in terms of this course, tell us what that was like.
Okay, so the first sneak peek pushed out through the WhatsApp group consisted of a PDF that reads like a TikTok script.
It's like single sentence paragraphs, huge claims about the modern education system being designed by three notorious people over three centuries.
And so I was thinking about whether or not there was any substance to it.
It really didn't appear like there was.
But the answer is yes.
But it's not new.
And I think I figured out where a bunch of it came from.
And I'm going to track it in this episode for two reasons.
Because I think seeing where he got his content from sheds light on how the sausage making of Internet propaganda works.
And how, when you look carefully at that machine, you begin to see these networks.
But more important, I think, is the mirror world irony of his reference selection.
Last week, we talked about this paradox that the Tech Bro Manosphere Bitcoin grindset wants two different things.
They want absolute freedom, but also absolute discipline at the same time.
And I think this double desire, this contradiction, is a doorway into whatever the internet has preserved in amber out of the various phases of fascism.
It's like a siren call.
Ideas of natural health, gender essentialism, cultural tradition, finding your spiritual purpose, But also ideas of speed and domination.
Just a few weeks ago we were reading Mark Andreessen quoting Marinetti's Futurist Manifesto in his hymn to the power of technology.
So they love all of that stuff.
So in this space, men want absolute freedom while preserving absolute dominance hierarchies.
It's a space where you want to appear as uniquely countercultural as Jordan Peterson, as you passionately argue for the restoration of a world gone by.
So that's why I want to look at the sources because that's where they're going to lead us.
Matthew, like a lot of people we cover, Gazi enjoys using quotes that seem to give
intellectual depth and validity to the story he's telling.
There are plenty of examples, but in preparation for this, you went pretty deep on this one specific Frankenstein quote that caught your attention.
Tell us about that.
Well, it's something that he misuses in a way that's really ironic.
It is contained on one of the first PDFs he sent out after I registered.
Okay, so this is what it says.
Julian, can you just read that?
Here's what one of the creators of this plan has written in this old book.
This is what he envisioned for their education system.
In his own words, and then the quote is, Education should aim at destroying free will, so that after pupils are thus schooled, they will be incapable throughout the rest of their lives of thinking or acting, otherwise than as their schoolmasters would have wished.
When this technique has been perfected, every government that has been in charge of education for more than one generation will be able to control its subjects securely, without the need of armies or policemen.
So disturbing.
Very, very disturbing.
Yeah, hey teacher, leave those kids alone.
Yeah, so I copy-pasted this quote just to search it, and it popped up all over homeschooling websites, many with Christian and many with libertarian leanings.
But in all of the cases that I saw, it is attributed to the German idealist philosopher and proto-fascist Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who lived from 1762 to 1814.
There's no citation on any of those sites which are so dedicated to learning, but someone on Wikiquote took the time to track down a secondary source for the quote, Bertrand Russell's Impact of Science on Society from 1952.
Now Russell's book is a collection of lectures he delivered at Oxford and Columbia in 1951, in which there's this recurring warning about the capacity for state-based educational indoctrination.
His tone is anti-authoritarian.
He's emphasizing anti-communist anxieties.
His central claim is that sound scientific education, based in the freedom to research, will promote democracy and liberal humanism.
And if you search his text carefully, you can see how Godsey's Frankenstein quote was stitched together from two different lectures and then falsely attributed.
So, here's a passage from Russell's General Effects of Scientific Technique.
It comes in this passage in which he's describing the possible future perversion of science-based education by communists.
Although this science will be diligently studied, it will be rigidly confined to the governing class.
The populace will not be allowed to know how its convictions were generated.
When the technique has been perfected, every government that has been in charge of education for a generation Well, no, Russell is criticizing the potential for, you know, state over-involvement in education.
So, then there's the next passage, which pings Fichte, and this is in a different lecture altogether, and it goes like this.
Russell is criticizing the potential for state over-involvement in education.
So then there's the next passage, which pings Fischte.
And this is in a different lecture altogether.
And it goes like this.
Julian.
Fischte laid it down that education should aim at destroying free will so that after
pupils have left school, they shall be incapable throughout the rest of their lives of thinking
or acting otherwise than as their schoolmasters would have wished.
But in his day, this was an unattainable ideal.
What he regarded as the best system in existence produced Karl Marx.
In future, such failures are not likely to occur where there is a dictatorship.
Diet, injections, and injunctions will combine from a very early age to produce the sort of character and the sort of beliefs that the authorities consider desirable.
And any serious criticism of the powers that be will be psychologically impossible.
So this passage is great, and it sounds like a very upscale Alex Jones, and it would be much more in Godsey's wheelhouse.
Actually, he should have stuck with Russell if he knew that that's where it was coming from.
So, Russell doesn't provide a citation for Fischte.
So, when I go and trace it back to Fischte, I find that Russell had actually messed it up.
Okay, so Fischte is a German transcendental idealist.
He's attempting to re-envision education and the German spirit after Napoleon defeats the Prussian army in 1806 because, in part, as some historians have argued, others dispute this, the Prussian soldiers weren't sufficiently trained to follow the chain of command.
They weren't good and obedient students.
So this historical event is what Gazi hangs his hat on.
And he's not entirely wrong about the Prussian model of education becoming influential in Global North schooling going forward.
But the problem is that in his heart, Gazi would really dig Fishta's main argument.
And this is the mirror world paradox.
Manosphere types are drawn to fascist values and sentiments, like moths to the flame, and then they get too close.
And then they have to reckon with the authoritarianism that they find there, and they have to rebel against it.
Because Fishta does not actually argue for the squelching of the child's will altogether.
He's arguing for A purification of a particular kind of will.
You know, the kind of thing that you would do through saunas and ice baths and natural food.
Of course.
It's a proto-fascist argument in which he tries to split the difference between personal freedom and authoritarian ideals by appealing to the essential soul of the folk.
So it's delivered in one of his addresses to the German nation, 1808.
It's called On the New Education, and he opens by describing the cultural peril faced by the fatherland, and he relates it directly to problems with schooling.
What kind of schooling is he criticizing?
He criticizes the old-timey rote learning that focuses only on order and discipline.
He wants something more, something that releases the real, vital impulses and actions of his pupils.
In fact, he wants the kind of schooling that Iman Gadzi wants and Jordan Peterson wants.
So Fishta does talk about the eradication of a kind of will, but it's a lower, disorganized, indolent, uncultivated will.
It's a will that Gazi would be familiar with, given his criticisms of social media, porn, and wasting time.
Fischte's ideal is not just deconstruction, it's the stimulation of a will that expresses the sublime virtue and mystery of the people.
He believes that children will naturally thrive when their will is guided by their authentic German
heritage.
Wow.
And the role of the educator is to enliven that heritage, which is already intrinsic to them.
And once that happens, there's a kind of limitless flow.
They will go on learning, and I think in Gazi's universe, earning forever.
So Fishta goes on to expound on the virtues of unfettered free learning
once the student has been steered in the right direction towards the state of adulation for natural law.
And so Gazi doesn't know it, but he's very much influenced
by a kind of naturalistic idealism that rhymes loudly with this German predecessor.
What he actually wants, whether he articulates it or not, is the fashioning of the child's will into that which would eschew pornography and dating low-value women That would disengage from frivolity by going into monk mode, that would do dopamine detox days and throw away corrupting and poisoning medications, where the ultimate goal is to return to and rediscover a more virtuous will, but not a free will per se.
It's a will that's aligned with conservative, gender-essentialist values.
It's a will to win at capitalism instead of challenging it.
You know, it really, it really strikes me, Matthew, this, like, first of all, I'm imagining sort of an infinite regress, right?
That goes into the past and into the future where it's authoritarians all the way down.
Right.
But at each level, they're saying that whatever came before them was authoritarian for the wrong reasons.
Right.
And now we're, we're going to be authoritarian and like teach you how to be free.
And, but it also, it's like, Every accusation is a confession in that this is the whole current zeitgeist we're in around woke authoritarianism, right?
Supposed woke authoritarianism is imposing this horrible kind of oppression upon our children, and we need to liberate them from that so that we can get them back into the way kids were supposed to be educated, which is, you know, in homeschooling with no vaccines and lessons from the Bible every day.
It's a real bait-and-switch in right-wing and libertarian politics, which is this protestation that one's natural sovereign self must be free, but will only be free when it follows the right order, which is always presented as commonsensical, as natural, and authentic.
Just to finish that last thought, because there is no basis for the accusation of some kind of authoritarian conspiracy coming from the left, they have to rely on sources that are actually right-wing authoritarians as the basis, right?
So that's why you get Frankenstein quotes.
That's why you don't get a lot of attribution.
That's why it's all very kind of hazy and weird, like where the oppression is supposedly coming from.
I would say that a prime example of the bait and switch in Godsey's imagination is the carefully constricted freedom that he believes women should be afforded.
Especially, as we've said, his future fantasy trad wife, who he suggests will achieve her full potential as a human being by committing fully to his So, I call it a bait and switch, but I think it's also deeper than that because it's a mindset that's so rooted in 19th century transcendental idealism.
It allows for adherents to proclaim that they are free because they are choosing their divinely ordained roles and flourishing within them.
And this is exactly what Johann Fichte is actually proposing.
Yeah, and I just want to clarify for any listeners who may not be aware, the use of the term idealism here is as a philosophical, technical term, right?
We're not just talking about having high ideals, we're talking about a very essentialist spiritual notion of these core moral and spiritual truths that are accessible in a way that goes beyond the material world.
And they're eternally accessible and our virtue will allow us to access them.
Okay, so the first episode goes live.
There's a countdown, there's dramatic music, there's 80,000 live viewers.
You know, on the first feed, and I'm rarely on these things where you can see the sort of chat go by like it's almost blindingly fast.
Totally.
There's 1.1 million watching the replay over the next few days.
As I said, the total rose above 2 million.
The chat stream is like a sporting event.
In the chat stream, there are tons of boys and young men checking in from all over the world, you know, let's go in all caps, tons of emojis.
And Gazi lights out in the same tone and music, very consistent with the promos, excellent
HD visuals and lighting, dramatic sitting down into his presentation chair in his darkened
study.
You know, you can smell the cologne through the screen and I'm listening to him.
He's building out his story.
You know, Prussian education model inspired reformers around the world.
That included U.S.
Representative Horace Mann, who led the charge towards compulsory education in the U.S.
in the mid-19th century.
This paved the way for Rockefeller to co-found the General Education Board in 1902.
So America eventually produces mindless workers for the new industrial economy.
And he calls this the conditioning factory.
So then my ears prick up when I hear this quote read by a voice actor.
In our dream we have limitless resources and the people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hand.
We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or men of science.
We're not to raise up among them authors, orators, poets, or men of letters.
We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians, nor will cherish even the humbler ambition to raise up from among them lawyers, doctors, preachers, statement of whom we now have ample supply.
All right.
Very patronizing, very controlling.
And it's, you know, seeming explicitness is a good fit for that kind of conspiracy theory rhetoric that obsesses over, oh, yeah, they're rubbing our faces in it, right?
Yeah, the accent is pitch perfect for a sadistic elite.
However, Godsey left a quote, an actual quote hanging out there, so I went and searched it up.
It comes from Frederick Gates.
He's the Baptist minister who advised John D. Rockefeller.
But the context of it is quite different than what Godsey is making out.
Gates was actually very concerned about educational inequality, especially in the immiserated rural south of the United States, which is the postbellum legacy or part of it.
Here's the full passage.
Now, Julian, don't read it like creep fest, because I think the tone is quite different.
Is there aught of remedy for this neglect of rural life?
Let us at least yield ourselves to the gratifications of a beautiful dream that there is.
In our dream we have limitless resources and the people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hand.
The present education conventions fade from our minds and unhampered by tradition, we work our own goodwill upon a grateful and responsive rural folk.
We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or of science.
We're not to raise up from among them authors, orators, poets, or men of letters.
We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, and musicians.
Nor will we cherish even the humbler ambition to raise up from among them lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we now have ample supply.
We are to follow the admonitions of the good apostle, who said, Mind not high things, but condescend to men of low degree.
And generally, with respect to these high things, all that we shall try to do is just to create presently about these country homes and atmosphere and conditions such that, if by chance, a child of genius should spring up from the soil, that genius will surely bud and not be blighted.
Putting, therefore, all high things quite behind us, we turn with a sense of freedom and delight to the simple, lowly, needful things that promise well for rural life.
Very, very different from what we're given.
Okay, so Gates is a white Baptist born in New York in 1853.
I'm sure he carried with him all of the typical ignorances and arrogances of his age and race and station.
But this passage is rich.
It's also ripe for misunderstanding.
There's this line, uh, mind not high things but condescend to men of low degree.
This is Saint Paul writing to the Romans, but in a translation where the word condescend, it doesn't mean patronizing or infantilizing.
It means Make things accessible and real.
Make things pragmatic.
So Gates is advocating for a practical and naturalistic education in response to the devastating poverty and disease rampant in rural, neglected counties.
In the essay, he goes on to emphasize the skills of maintaining health and sanitation, providing shelter, learning best farming practices, and then providing access to other tools as the child desires, and keeping people out of the urbanized, budding professional managerial class.
As with Fishta, Godsey would actually love this guy.
And there's something so tragic about these bits of history being dredged up and completely fucked over because he could actually learn something from them, right?
Where he might actually find his values actually really being spoken to.
As I searched for the original, I found Gates's decontextualized quote because a whole bunch of people just ripped this out of context and plastered it all over the internet.
And I can't really say where it first shows up, but the earliest I can find it is at the top of a 2011 blog post by Foster Gamble on his now-deleted Thrive Movement website.
And Julian, I think you Oh, it had to be Foster Gamble.
I just want to underline what you're saying there, Matthew, that here's a guy who is talking about not imposing the expectation, the bias, the inadequacy generating sort of set of roles onto these kids, like you should grow up to be such and such, but rather to provide an open And empowering and a respectful context for their education.
The material conditions for being able to advance and pursue dreams beyond the farm, if they want to.
And if they don't, then they have really good farming practices.
These are not bad ideas.
Yeah, it's the opposite of imposing something that we're going to turn you into something you're not.
Yeah.
Okay, so Foster Gamble.
Look, this is the great-great-grandson of the 19th century industrialist James Gamble, who is co-founder of a little multinational consumer goods company you may have heard of called Procter & Gamble.
There's some disagreement online about his age.
He seems to be somewhere between 75 and 78, the last anyone was able to try and track it down.
He's a former Aikido instructor, of course.
Good.
An aspiring inventor.
He has his own production company called Clear Compass Media.
I don't know if that's still the case.
And that was behind the popular pseudoscience New Age documentary, Thrive, which is in this whole lineage that we've been referencing, as well as its sequel, Thrive 2.
Like a lot of this genre, those films predictably recycle themes of shadowy banking conspiracies and, of course, evil reptilians in amongst the claims of breakthrough free energy technology that could change the world if only the sheep would wake up.
There's also a ringing endorsement of anarcho-capitalist economics and claims that, of course, taxation is just theft.
I'll share the link in the show notes below.
We've shared it before, but it's always worth looking at.
It's a brilliant 2012 review of Thrive and a debunking of all of its claims by a journalist named Eric Johnson.
Okay, so Foster Gamble, you know, somehow gets this Gates quote and spreads it all over the internet.
It winds up in Godsey's, uh, on his screen.
And then here's the next weird thing.
In the midst of all of the searching around, uh, I came across a YouTube video from 2013.
This is 10 years ago it's posted.
Let's take a listen.
In order to have an efficient policy-making class and a subclass beneath it, it was believed that one had to remove the power of most people to make sense out of the available information.
In other words, critical thinking had to be done away with.
Now, if you're wondering why the average person doesn't know that the North American education system is based directly on the Prussian model, it might just be because its original purpose was not designed for the good of the individual, but for the good of the government.
The philosophy of Johann Fitch directly influenced the creation of the Prussian model of schooling.
as he is quoted saying, the schools must fashion the person,
and fashion him in such a way that he simply cannot will otherwise
than what you wish him to will.
With quotes like these, you can see why his involvement is not well known.
Education should aim at destroying free will, so that after pupils are thus schooled,
they will be incapable throughout the rest of their lives of thinking or acting otherwise
than as their schoolmasters would have wished.
When this technique has been perfected, every government that has been in charge of education for more than one generation will be able to control its subjects securely without the need of armies or policemen.
All right, so sound familiar?
I think we've heard that before.
I mean, I guess it's a good thing that you can't sue people for plagiarism when they use your Frankenstein-like, weird, ironically badly interpreted quotes, right?
Okay, so this is a wild part of the story.
This is an 8-minute video posted in 2013 to a conspiracy theory channel called Police State USA.
Now, when the credits roll, the names Brendan Conway Smith and Eve Zarifa appear.
I was able to track down Brendan Conway Smith, and I wanted to see if he was some kind of, like, OG YouTube conspiracist.
But when I found him, I found that he was a PhD candidate in cognitive science at Carleton University in Ottawa.
Well, then he was right about everything he said.
And so I reached out to him for comment, and we had a Google Meet where he laughed incredulously and explained the following.
So here's the quote, Julian.
Our video was originally made as a group project for school.
We were not historians, but simply students trying to complete a class assignment.
We consulted a few historical references, one of them written by John Gatto.
I was shocked to see our student video re-uploaded to conspiracy sites.
This type of poor critical thinking is a big motivation for my graduate work on metacognition, which is an important part of reasoning.
So this video was an undergrad school project that Conway Smith collaborated on, not in 2013, but in 2004 for a psychology class.
And one of the fellow students he worked with was Eve Zarifa, who he's lost touch with.
I haven't been able to track her down, but I did find one source that Zarifa went on to work for a video platform called Quantum Shift.
And Conway Smith remembered this too, and it's possible that the school project made its way onto that network first, and then eventually to YouTube through multiple rips and downloads.
Now, I want to flag that Conway Smith cited Gatto in the script for this 2004 project, because I think that's interesting.
Patreon listener Jessica Hintermeister—thank you, Jessica—pointed me towards a 2012 article called The Revisionists Revived the Libertarian Historiography of Education.
The piece is by Milton Gaither, and he's got a great summary of Gatto's main work, writing that, you know, this was a teacher who won the New York State Teacher of the Year Award in 91, He was working in Spanish Harlem, and immediately after he won the award, he quit teaching and he wanted to become an education critic.
And he wrote a book in 92 called Dumbing Us Down, The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling.
It was a bestseller, but pretty much as poorly cited as, you know, Godsey's material ends up being.
Gaither actually calls it, quote, one of the most provocative Most insightful, most absurd mixes of erudition, reductivism, research, and wild conspiracy ever published on the topic of educational history.
And then he quotes Gatow as saying, quote, no doubt I've made some factual mistakes.
But he is all about, quote, locating truth, not assembling facts.
We live together, you and I, in a dark time when all official history is propaganda.
If you want truth, you have to struggle for it.
And this is my struggle.
Also known as Mein Kampf, but we'll leave that.
Right.
Yeah, so Gaither shows that Gato's history depends on, like, golden age fantasies in which social conditions prior to public education were rosy, purely democratic, you know, if only we'd follow that pathway.
But, you know, I have to say, Julian, that following all of the sources, it's just been a real trip because it's expanded my empathy for almost everyone in the story.
Because you can kind of see how these undergrad kids in 2003 are focusing on, you know, education as a topic for a media presentation, and they get pulled in by this provocative book by a charismatic educational reformer.
And they turn something that sounds like, you know, a late night dorm room bullshit session into a video for this project, and then the internet just takes it.
Yeah.
And there's a lot of downloads, uploads, to the point where it looks like the great modern reformer of our education system, Iman Gadzi, is tempted to plagiarize these photocopies of photocopies.
So, Godsey echoes Conway Smith's video in several key passages related to the description of Prussian influence.
Here are some of the most direct and consequential echoes.
In one passage, Conway Smith says this.
And most importantly, historians point out that one of the greatest social factors that allowed Nazism to achieve mass adoption in Germany was because of how German people were bred from birth
to be obedient, to respect authority without ever questioning.
OK, then 19 years later, here's Godsey saying this.
Historians reflect that one of the greatest social factors that allowed a man like Hitler's rise to power
was that the German people had been bred from birth to respect authority above all else
and accept it without question.
You know, a lot of people in the demographic that we cover love the Matrix film, the first Matrix film.
Right.
I love the first Matrix film.
I love all the Matrix films.
But the second one generally gets shat on a lot as being a very disappointing sequel.
But you know what?
This is the climactic scene in the second Matrix film where the architect says, there have been many of you again and again and again railing against the system, but you're actually part of the system.
And this has all been allowed for you.
The remainder of the remainder.
Exactly that.
There's so many examples.
This next one we can do in clips.
So here's Conway Smith doing the voiceover from 2004 and then Godsey echoing in 2023.
This is all about Johann Fichte.
Which begs the question, why would the father of American education make it a law that every child spend their youth in a system created by the father of neo-Nazism?
Okay, here's Godsey, 19 years later.
And it also begs the question, why would the father of modern education make it a law that
every child spend their youth in a system created by the father of neo-nazism?
I mean, come on!
Wait, what's the neo-nazism they're referring to here?
They're talking about Fischte's place in the history of proto-fascism.
They're talking about actual, actual Nazism.
Yes.
Yeah.
Oh, sorry.
Yeah.
Okay.
You're right.
Forgetting that they're throwing the neo in.
Yeah.
But my God, I mean, you don't get more on the nose than that in terms of straight plagiarism.
Many more echoes.
There are verbatim quotes.
There's keyword and phrase overlaps.
So, I mean, we can't say what happened here.
I don't even know if Godsey wrote this script or if he outsourced it on Fiverr.
There are visuals in the rescue of him sitting down at a darkened desk late at night, you know, researching.
So he wants us to believe that he came up with this stuff.
So there's the possible plagiarism, Julian.
Let's move on to the emotional manipulation.
Can you read some of the questions that Ghazi sent out after the first episode aired?
This came through WhatsApp.
These were on a PDF.
It was a kind of a homework that he wanted us to do.
Are you afraid of renouncing on the formal path, whether that be dropping out of college or quitting your current job?
Even if you know that's what you want.
And this sounds like a writing prompt.
Yes, exactly.
Yeah.
Okay, here's the next one.
And if that fear is there, where do you think it comes from?
Do you think it is something rational?
Or is it a belief that has been seeded into your brain by the people around you?
Next one.
Is there anything you should start doing or approaching differently in your life after coming to the conclusions you've gotten through this exercise?
This is where you need to put together a list of things and actions you're going to implement in your life from now on.
If you don't do it, all of this effort was just wasted time.
What is the purpose here?
I mean, I got this email.
It's in black with the printing in white.
There's white boxes for you to enter answers, but it's not an editable PDF, so I'm not quite sure how you're supposed to do that.
You couldn't type into it.
You wouldn't print it out because it would, you know, blow the ink out of your printer.
So, what is this purpose here?
It just gives me a very bad feeling.
I mean, it just seems to me that these are leading questions that are designed to get you into a reflection process where you categorize any resistance you might have to the material as fear and the conditioning you've been brainwashed into.
And any embrace of obediently taking the next steps as indicating you're being very brave and positive in your life.
Yeah.
Yeah, it was it was a very eerie feeling to get the questions because I also had the sense, I mean, I'm 52 fucking years old.
I had the sense that, you know, if I answered them, that that I would I would I would get his deeper meaning.
It's like it was it was it was 10 percent effective.
So anyway, we have parts two and three.
There's no point in going through the rest of the actual content in any detail because it's just as garbage and scrambled and as literate as part one.
I'm not even actually going to touch Part 3 because it's just an extended sales pitch for the coaching program, the primary refrain being the promise that, you know, registrants will earn up to $10,000 a month in income within a couple of months.
It's very boring, that third episode.
But in Part 2, there's still some semblance of narrative going on.
Because Godsey's solution to the conditioning factory is to propose, very secret-like, that all the top Gs of history—Socrates, Alexander the Great, Plato, Aristotle, Leonardo da Vinci, Shakespeare, and Marcus Aurelius—adhere to five ultimate rules that prevented them from going woke.
And here are the five rules.
These are our five lost principles.
1.
Establish what truth means for you.
2.
Evaluate your current beliefs and figure out where your limiting beliefs come from.
3.
Have a mentor.
4.
Figure out what curriculum will set you free.
5.
Seek intense hardship to forge discipline and self-control.
I think if we squint our eyes, there's actually a fairly sophisticated psychological pathway here.
Julian, what do you think?
Oh my God, I don't know.
I'm just, I'm just, my head is reeling at the idea that William Shakespeare, you know, was in a coaching program where he was adhering to these very like dumbed down notions of what it is to live, you know, the examined life.
Yeah, and I think too that we can see in these five a kind of pathway that mirrors the arc of the course.
Establish what truth means for you.
And he does that by saying, you know, you feel like shit right now in your educational situation, don't you?
You know that it is wrong that you're sitting You know, for six hours every day in in this in this factory of learning, then evaluate your current beliefs to figure out where, you know, why you're afraid.
And but then there's a turning point.
Number three, have a mentor.
Oh, yeah.
And this this links straight to what he's actually selling.
Number four, figure out what the curriculum will be that will set you free, because once you have your mentor, they're going to ask you, well, which version of the coaching program would you like to purchase?
You have a choice, you see.
You have a choice between the different offerings we have available for you, unlike that very dominating education system from the mainstream.
Yeah, okay, so this whole thing is kind of swimming in this endless gush of pseudo-history about how the Socratic method allowed people to establish, you know, truth and, you know, to focus on self-perception and, you know, how they were limiting themselves.
The sales pitch comes through, have a mentor.
And, you know, why do people want to have a mentor?
Well, here he says it.
And this is the third principle of the outsider.
Have a mentor.
Because history shows us that's the greatest way to ensure you'll achieve success in life.
And that's why every single one of the outsiders I mentioned throughout this video had mentors.
Listen, at the end of the day, we all want the same thing.
Freedom.
To be able to do whatever we want with whomever we want.
Now for you, that might mean to be able to wake up one day and gather all of your best friends for a surprise trip to the Swiss Alps in your cozy chalet to enjoy a week of skiing.
Or you want to call the world your home and you want to switch places every few months.
A very tranquil Japanese zen garden home in Kyoto, a nice chic apartment in New York's Upper East Side, and a quaint cottage in New Zealand's countryside.
Or maybe all you want to do is hire the world's best personal trainers and nutritionists to get you in the best shape of your life.
All while enjoying gourmet meals tailored to your palate.
Or maybe you decide to buy a vineyard in Tuscany and spend your days tasting wines and enjoying the Italian sun.
Or you fund the building of a school in a remote country, like I personally started doing in Nepal in 2019, ensuring education for generations to come.
Listen, whatever that experience may be for you, we all have different aspirations and goals in life.
At the end of the day, I call it having financial, location, and time freedom.
And today, the reality is that less than 1% of the world's population have managed to achieve these three types of freedom.
And if you want to be part of this 1% yourself, you need to ask yourself, How do you become truly free?
I mean, this is outrageous, aspirational bullshit, right?
It's incredibly elitist.
It's painting a definition of freedom, which is incredibly opulent and self-indulgent and wealthy beyond belief.
Yeah, and kind of globalist, wouldn't you say?
The world is your oyster, right?
Right.
But so that's why you want an oyster.
That's why you want a mentor.
Okay, so here come the Rescue 2 questions.
Okay, more writing prompts.
Whether you want it or not, you're always learning from someone and your success will always be limited by the level of success from who you're learning from.
So who are you currently learning from?
Do you even have a mentor?
Next one.
If not, even Plato, Aristotle, and Alexander the Great needed mentors.
What makes you think you don't need one?
Especially for your social media marketing agency needs.
Mentors are standing by at 1-800.
Is your current mentor going to lead you to the level of freedom you aspire to get?
Or do you need a new one?
Yeah, so this endless talk, it all points towards his sales team.
And that's how I got funneled into two calls with his underlings who really, they really pitched me hard.
You know, and what I wanted to try to do, I didn't record the calls because they were both in single party consent areas.
I wanted to try to ask them, you know, how do you feel about the ethics of this program really leaning into a kind of very dim, dark idea about education that's actually filled with flaws.
How do you feel about, like, are you going to be teaching me to do something like that?
You had your own writing prompts for them.
I did. Yeah, it was, they were like, you know, non-consensual coaching call, you know, reverse therapy
sessions, right?
Anyway, yeah, no clear answers.
They were a little bit stumped.
They couldn't close.
But, you know, the thing that haunts me is that, you know, Godsey has done really well for himself in this emerging sales market.
And, you know, fine.
Let's say that he isn't the type of guy who would naturally gravitate towards conspiracy theories.
And we provided some evidence for that.
You know, we laid out in episode one that, you know, he showed his first response to COVID as being cautious, helpful, not galaxy-brained.
You know, he really wanted people to wash their hands so that they wouldn't make their moms sick.
But it seems like so many others, you know, he got pilled during the pandemic.
So, he's exposed to this whole gamut of conspiracy bullshit, he runs with it, and he just injects his sails with this incandescent but also very, like, controlled and, I would say, focused paranoia.
This is that whole thing of weaving together what really works on the internet almost just intuitively, right?
It's where apocalyptic prophecy meets buy my shit now!
With conspiracy theorists, the urgency is about stimulating people to make big changes right now, even if those are initially just to their worldview.
But the urgency is not real.
It's fake urgency.
It's a lie.
Now, in spiritual terms, this could be based in an urgent channeled prophecy about the cabal, or a fundamentalist reading of an old-world scripture about how God wants you to take action so Satan doesn't win.
It's really sharp-edged, poison-dipped, intoxicating lies that derange your moral priorities and your sense of reality.
Yeah.
But it does something else.
It also heightens emotional connection.
You know, it's that whole psychological experiment of you have someone standing at the end of a rickety bridge across a sheer drop, and when they meet the person at the end of the bridge and give them a questionnaire, later on they're asked if they find that person attractive.
Oh, right.
And people who have been scared will tend to say, will tend to see that person almost like the halo effect as being very, like very nice and very interesting.
And oh, I had a wonderful interaction with them.
And actually, yes, I was quite attracted to them.
So anyway.
Yeah, it's like this kind of cultish bonding technique.
And in this case, even after this particular course disappears as if it never happened, whether you've taken it or not, there's a new and exciting titillating cycle of urgency that's ready to start all over again.
Oh, I just realized that's why he has to take them down, actually, because he can't leave them hanging there on his channel.
He can't show himself to be ginning up the urgency over and over again, right?
Yeah.
I mean, he probably also doesn't want people doing what we're doing right now.
I mean, it really makes me wonder what the vaccine is for this because, you know, in the comments under the YouTube videos, hundreds of boys talking about their loneliness, their inadequacy, not being able to talk to their parents, feeling completely ignored by their school teachers.
I mean, those are the root viruses, right?
Yeah.
That's that's really awful, actually, because those boys, they need something.
They just don't need this.
Right.
And look, this is this is my take right now.
And I'll pull back a little bit and give a broader view.
This is what I think of as the unexpected reality of the internet that really just snuck up under all of our older world immune systems.
You know, for my latest bonus episode in my Swamp Creatures series, I spent several days consuming everything I could.
On Steve Bannon.
And that's someone with whom I was already very familiar, too familiar, more familiar than I'd like to be.
But I was especially looking into things like Cambridge Analytica and all of the new companies that rose up from the ashes of Cambridge Analytica after the 2018 investigations around that huge Facebook data hack.
Which played a role in how Bannon, who was part owner of Cambridge Analytica, and several other Robert Mercer-funded operatives actually saved the 2016 Trump campaign from what looked like certain defeat after the terrible calamity of the GOP convention in the summer.
It's become fashionable to just dismiss Cambridge Analytica's impact, along with the Mueller probe, as being a left-wing conspiracy theory, a form of liberal copium.
But if you really look into what they were doing, here's where this is relevant and how they worked with the Brexit campaign as well.
Essentially, these were just opportunistic people with the right skill set to be early in terms of exploiting both Facebook's semi-porous data gathering possibilities and the marketing on steroids capacity to micro target communities, demographics, and even individuals with very specific bespoke messaging.
I'm not going to belabor the conversation today with too much detail, don't worry.
But they used all of that as part of their strategy to flip two-time Obama voters in the Rust Belt to target several million African Americans with messaging that in many cases sought to persuade them to just not even bother voting.
And there's this cliche amongst people who are critical of social media that says, if the platform is free, then make no mistake, you are the product.
You think the free platform is the product, but it's really you.
And it's not just selling you targeted ads.
It's how your data is being used.
It's all of these webs of algorithmic intersection that overlap with micro-targeting.
And this represents a weapons-grade amplification of a certain kind of technological reach and penetration.
It gets used in a lot of different ways.
But greed being what it is, and power hunger being what it is, what these tools mean is that every single human being who's participating in this mass digital social media experiment, with or without consent, has gotten involved with a technology that completely sidesteps the old immune system we developed in relation to 20th century media and advertising and political discourse.
And how it does this is by making all of it into entertainment.
And all of your consumption of that entertainment is then made into the gathering of data points that paint a digital portrait that is perhaps more behaviorally faithful to who you are than your conscious self-image.
I'm not saying we don't have any agency in this.
I'm just saying the persuasive capacity to get under your skin is very, very strong.
And it makes me worry for the younger generation.
That's a beautiful line, that it paints a digital portrait more behaviorally faithful than your own conscious self-image.
And I think it's also a really beautiful description of Iman Ghazi, or who he appears to be, a guy who markets freedom, sees himself as free, but only really through the tightly scripted discourse of late capitalism that gives him no option but to gobble up every last dollar and ounce of attention.
So homestretch, Julian, we've laughed, we've cried, we've tagged Godsey as Andrew Tate 2.0, we've picked apart his bullshit and shown how he's become a kind of YouTube automaton for creating internet garbage.
High school dropout who wants to expose the education system, who gets pilled by a fake Frankenstein quote he probably found because it's memed by right-wing homeschoolers, as if many homeschoolers don't have their very own strong ideas about what exactly their children should think and do.
Yeah.
But I want to end by remembering that we're talking about a boy who really wants to grow up, who tried to grow up on YouTube performing for the world.
This is a boy who really wants to have found the secret, who really wants to turn the chaotic luck of his Dagestan to, you know, Chelsea to... Monaco.
Fabulous, right?
Fabulous, you know, home in Cape Town or Dubai.
He wants to turn that chaotic story and the story of our times into some kind of ancient pathway to virtue and God.
And I think there's something charming and even moving about that desire, which is perhaps all he had the chance to develop in his defense against the threat of poverty and humiliation, but it's also this cruel desire.
And sometimes, because I find him to actually be a fairly transparent and unscripted guy
when he's not using conspiracy theories to sell coaching packages,
there's a pretty big difference between how he creates his own content
and how he speaks somewhat disarmingly on other people's shows.
He often confesses to a knowledge of that cruelty, and he betrays just how self-punishing it is.
He's fond of ending many of his instructional videos with, I want you to know that I'm rooting for you.
But there's a point at which that generosity and kindness evaporates when he's asked about the most important thing that a young manfluencer could consider, which is how would he raise his own children, especially his sons?
Now, we've seen how he's promised, you know, personal and financial freedom to his clients, but how does he imagine that will work in his home when the most important exchanges happen as he parents?
I want, and this is the question I want to ask you, is how are you gonna, you said you don't want to leave your sons with anything.
So, but while you are still alive, how are you going to give that balance to your kids to say, like, so they don't turn out in a way where they're, say, cocky for achievement?
Because that's the worst.
I'll smack them.
Being cocky for the achievements of their parents.
I have no issue saying I will hit my son.
Oh, man.
My daughter never... I'll beat the shit out of my kid.
Yeah.
Or I'll get someone to do it.
Yeah.
Like, bro, if my kid ever tries to Use my accomplishment.
Also, by the way, look, I grew up with a Russian mother.
My mom used to beat the living shit out of me growing up.
Yeah.
Right.
And like, but that's normal.
You know, like I remember it was my birthday.
We were in Dubai.
I was like a bunch of friends.
I made the joke about, like, my mom.
I was like, Mom, like, I forget how it came across.
I'm like, Mom, why did you used to beat the shit out of me growing up?
She's like, because you deserved it.
You know, so like, bear in mind, when I say this stuff, like, I was raised Eastern European.
It's in my blood.
I will raise my kids with traditional values, right?
It's like, my daughter, I will never lay a hand on.
My son, I will never lay a hand on, but if he tries to do something like that, like he's getting his fucking ass whooped.
The most disgusting thing on earth is seeing wealthy kids who try to, who have a sense of entitlement for something that they never accomplished themselves.
No, the most disgusting thing is seeing an adult inflict violence upon a child that is in their care.
Sorry.
Yeah.
So, he built this whole online empire, like, instead of going to therapy, it seems.
But at the same time, you know, there seems to be part of him that's too honest to really ignore the angst of what he's talking about.
The angst at the heart of his own project.
You know, I would say that if he was sincerely interested in challenging the cruel logic by which children are raised in families and schools, and the authoritarian places it can lead to, and which he understands to be normal, actually, he can pick up a book by Alice Miller called For Your Own Good, Hidden Cruelty in Childhood and the Roots of Violence.
She's a psychoanalyst who went back into that Prussian model of education and parenting style and showed that the parent-to-child punishment cycle of which he speaks so casually was essential to the culture of fascism.
Here's a broader comment from Godsey for us to finish on.
What are your plans to raise your children?
Because I know you're only 21 or 22 right now, but you're very forward thinking in your approach and your life.
So I know you've thought about the plan you're going to raise your children with.
Yeah, so with my children, you know, it's a tough one because I want to give them the best education possible.
And basically, the thing is with my children is I never want to give them something that they get a sense of pride from, that they haven't earned themselves.
Like, for example, my, you know, I'm very into watches.
I will never give my, you know, everyone wants to sort of pass down and watch their child.
I'm okay.
like maybe when they're 30 or something like that and they've made it on their own, maybe
they'll not pass something down and it'll be meaningful.
But I don't want, or if it is like, for example, let's say if I give my kids something
on their 18th, it'll be, you know, a watch is still pretty expensive. You know,
maybe like a Jaeger LeCoultre, like a very, a watch person's watch, you know, that's very
expensive, but like, you know, they're not going to walk into school and be like, I have a
JLC on my wrist. Whereas like, you know, you give them a Rolex for even one, you
know, half the price and they walk into school and, you know, everyone thinks they're
cool and this and that. So, yeah, my kids aren't going to get anything. Cause it's like, man,
it's a.
Bye.
All this stuff is very, like, money is really, like, fucks you up, honestly.
Like, money fucks you up.
Even to this day, like, I fight with it.
Like, I'm, it's a really weird thing, like, when you're, when you have money and it's, you know, like, everyone says, I hear this all the time, like, Instagram is probably the worst place to get your advice from on Earth, because it's just a cesspool of just the stupidest shit I've ever heard.
Like, you see all the time, like, money doesn't make you happy, but I'd rather cry in a Toyota than a Lambo.
It's like, that's not true at all.
Like, it's way worse to cry in a Lambo, because if you cry in a Lambo, then it's like, genuinely, it's like...
There's nothing left to hide.
You're naked.
You're crying because you're fundamentally unhappy, and that's really scary.
And I've even faced that in the past few years where it's like, I'm not happy.
And it's not an extended period of time, but it could be even a couple of months or something.
And I'm like, you're not happy because you.
There's nothing left.
There's no There's no next checkmark that you can be like, OK, once I get that, then I'll be happy.
It's like you've checked all the checkmarks that you could one could want.
Like it's your fucking fault, dude.
He's so close.
He's so close.
And, you know, at a certain point you step back and go, oh, this is the vision that he's selling to his potential customers.
Right.
You can you can cry in the Lamborghini about how none of this is actually worth shit in terms of your your true happiness.
And that will be really scary.
And I think he does come really close to, like, the real red pill, which is, yeah, realizing the bankruptcy of what he's pursued and is trying to sell people.
He comes pretty close to touching the sadness of toxic masculinity.
I guess what I want to say to him, if I could, is that, you know, Godsey, it's not your fault that your world is wealthy, but also depressing.
Because I don't think anybody's soul can really bear the consequences of winning at capitalism.
Especially not if you also remember your roots or you have a sense of traditional goodness, whatever that means.
Not if you remember how much help your mom needed.
And also why it felt so good to use some of your internet lottery winnings to build schools in Nepal.
Thanks everyone for tuning in to another episode of Conspirituality Podcast.
