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March 11, 2021 - Decoding the Gurus
45:13
Ibram X. Kendi: Gurometer Rating (Patreon Preview)

In this episode we provide a special preview of our usual Patreon content with the follow up discussion and our Gurometer™ scores for Ibram X. Kendi. You can find a summary of all our Gurometer scores thus far available here.Our new subreddit can also be found here.

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Time Text
Hello and welcome to Decoding the Gurus, the podcast where an anthropologist and a psychologist listen to the greatest minds the world has to offer and we try to understand what they're talking about.
I'm Prof. Matt Brown and with me is Dr. Chris Kavanagh.
G'day, Chris.
Hello.
Ass Prof, Matt.
I'm Ass Prof. Sorry, you're an Ass Prof and a doctor.
Yes.
Ass Pro.
Sorry, Ass Pro.
Not Prof. Not Prof. Sounds better.
Ass Pro.
Now, we are doing a special episode.
We are doing our gurometer coding for Ibrahim X Kendi, and we are going to release this episode not just to patrons, but to the broader world who needs to benefit from our analysis.
Hey, Chris.
That's right.
It's very...
Important.
We're sharing the fruits of our labor with the unwashed mashes to try and give them just a taste of the Patreon gold that is there for the taking.
Should they be able to climb the tiny hurdle of a small donation to our car?
This is the catnip?
No, I don't know.
The thing which you want to give people, like the first cocaine.
And then they'll come back.
Just to taste.
Just to taste.
That's right.
This is just one of the analogies and metaphors that you can expect.
Oh, and I've knocked over the microphone as well.
Yes, and at $2 a month, it is a low, low bar to become a gourmetrician.
Yeah, look at that.
We're giving it away.
We're giving it away.
Tell your friends, get three other people to join and you get added benefits.
No, yeah, this is not a multi-level marketing scheme yet.
We thought as well with this episode, we got some interesting feedback with Kendi.
So it would be irresponsible of us not to release it to the broader listener base.
Absolutely.
Yeah, so it was a well-received episode.
a fair bit of chatter about it online and lots of downloads.
So that was nice to see.
We should cover more famous.
I think that's what people assume that we already do.
And I also think that we may be just meandering into these well-worn cultural groups, things that people have already worked out five years ago.
Oh, look, if you talk about...
This person, which is controversial, then more people are interested.
Can you imagine that?
It's deep insight we've reached here.
Well, that wasn't our intent in decoding the gurus.
We wanted to decode the gurus because we like decoding gurus.
It just happens to be that we get that extra cachet.
Yeah, I think we have an assorted medley of...
Obscure to well-known characters.
And since Gwyneth Paltrow is the next person, she's a culture war figure.
But like, is she?
I don't think we're sticking to type.
So we have expansive interests outside of just pure culture war figures.
But the culture war is all expansive.
It touches everything, Matt.
It does touch everything.
So Chris, you were just listening to an interesting bit of material where Jordan Peterson was having a chat with Brett Weinstein, hey?
Yeah, we're going to have to definitely cover that because it's like from the perspective of guru dynamic in the guru sphere, it was just incredible there.
And both in good and bad ways, I would say.
If you want to understand the appeal of people like Brett Weinstein Jordan Peterson.
I think that episode is actually a really good illustration of why people would find value in their content, but also an illustration of the revolutionary theories that they've developed and their tendency towards grandiose proclamations.
So yeah, it's an interesting episode and we haven't covered Brett Weinstein specifically.
Without his brother in tow, who's always a looming presence in our podcast and Brett's life.
I kind of like these ideas where we cover them in combination with another one.
So it's a mix and match.
Yeah, and it's also pretty par for the course, right?
Like you get gurus acting in isolation, but they're very often doing cross-promotional stuff.
And this is...
Jordan Peterson promoting his book.
That's what the main purpose of it is for.
And Brett and him referenced that he's also appeared on Jordan's podcast, which isn't released yet.
So, you know, I can't help thinking about the dynamics that Matthew Remski talked about with the health and wellness people appearing and cross-promoting each other.
I think, aside from genuine friendships and that kind of thing...
There's definitely a significant component of the dual appearances that relate to just marketing and brand building.
Yeah, if you look at it cynically, you know, it's also a very natural thing for people to talk to other people who overlap in terms of their interests.
I mean, we do it, so we can't...
Well, we are brand building as well, that's it.
We get cut by our own knife, but I think you don't have to...
Regard it all as just like Machiavellian cynical strategies, but you can just look at it as what it is.
Like you say, these natural overlaps occur and that leads to cross-promotional activities, but ignoring the cross-promotional aspects is...
Doing a disservice to the totality of the interaction.
How's that?
That sounds very clever.
Now, I haven't listened to that interview episode, but you were describing it to me, and you were describing how Jordan gives his theories of how the hero archetype is underlying religions, and he also talks about those...
Links to dominance and competence hierarchies weaving in the Evo psych.
Group selection and kin selection.
These are almost existential topics, aren't they?
Existential concerns that weave together these key questions of who are we, where did we come from, why are we here?
You know, these big questions.
And that interview is a good example of why they're appealing.
And you can see why, can't you?
If people who are prepared to connect all the dots and weave together a satisfying narrative, that's what people want.
We want meaning.
We want the dots to be connected.
We want somebody to tell us the pattern that is this confusing mess of information and life.
Somebody in the comments on Twitter was saying that real science tends to be, at the granular level, pretty boring, gradual development, and so on.
Individual studies can be interesting and whatnot, but they don't offer these sort of emotionally satisfying grand narratives.
But what Brett and Jordan offer is that.
But it's referencing all the science, and in a way, it reflects their views about the importance of heroes and mythical archetypes.
And they themselves are...
At the center of the fields that they're discussing with these theories that if people paid enough attention to them could revolutionize things.
So there's definitely appeal to it.
For example, when Brett, in that episode, he outlines his theory about lineage selection and how that resolves.
The tension between kin selection, classical Darwinian theories, and group selection, cultural evolution theorists.
And there's a genuine debate there, but unless you're well-versed in that literature, it'd be very unclear to someone why his answer isn't compelling, because it sounds compelling in the narrative.
My master's degree was in cognitive and evolutionary anthropology, and I work in fields which are focused on the cultural evolutionary role.
So I'm very familiar with this literature.
And so I have very strong criticisms of the things that he claims.
But I don't think you could expect that everyone listening would have a background in evolutionary biology or cultural evolution.
And so it isn't that people are gullible rubes.
I think it's genuinely compelling.
And it is referencing actual debates in actual...
And not doing a terrible job of summarizing them.
It's very close to offering valuable insight and summaries of real research, but it just comes with this added spin where there's like this heavy dose of the guru's unique interpretation of things and layering of highly speculative theories.
But mixed in with theories that are well-established and have a strong evidence base, without a clear distinction between the two.
Yeah, I think we might have to cover that one.
That's a preview.
That's a preview.
That's a taster.
Another taste.
A taster within a taster.
That's what we're innovating.
So let's talk about candy.
We're going to go through the grommeter score according to these 10 attributes that we have identified as recurrent amongst the guru set.
Just at the very start, a criticism that we received or feedback that we received, concerns that basically some people were like, you love Kendi now, or thinking that we didn't go hard enough by giving an overall favorable assessment towards the end that we're applying double standards than we would with other gurus who we don't see so much eye to eye with.
My reaction to that is that, to me, we were critical about Kendi, quite significantly, about the applying of idiosyncratic definitions and the...
Making binaries, making categorical type...
Yeah, making categorical binaries and that assigning to opponents the label of racism or racist, but saying, well, it's not meant pejoratively and so on.
Now, the fact that we...
Assessed him positively in part derives from the comparison group, which is the other gurus that we've looked at and the baseline that we draw from there.
And in that respect, in many ways, which will probably come up in this coding, Kendi doesn't score so highly on typical guru attributes.
The fact that he comes across as academic.
And has idiosyncratic definitions and so on.
But he comes across as relatively reserved and not grandiose.
So the positive take, I think, is mainly related to he isn't the prototypical guru from the set that we've looked at.
Our bar is actually pretty low.
We don't give people a thumbs up because we agree with every little thing that they say and we think that they're completely right in all respects.
Rather, we're focusing on this bullshit mongering.
And if people clear that bar, then they get a positive score for us.
And so when we give a net positive review, it's as you say, it's more that they're being sensible, that you can follow what they're saying, that they're not making outlandish claims, that they're not doing obviously tricky, dodgy, rhetorical manoeuvres.
it's not so much whether or not we individually disagree with them.
For instance, I agree with Rutger Breckman's job
general worldview pretty well, but you know, he's pretty guru-ish in quite a few ways.
So if we give Ibrahim the thumbs up, it's not to say, "Okay, great.
We're 100% on board with critical race theory and aligned with the politics."
Yeah.
Yeah.
Driven by how much we agree with their worldview.
Yeah, and I would say that it definitely has an impact.
Our political sensibilities and the harm that we regard someone as doing, the extent to which we are harsh towards them, it's just an inevitability.
But like I would say, for example, some people would take issue that Kendi is making fairly extreme...
Arguments, outlandish claims when he assigns that everything is racist or anti-racist in policy terms.
But as you pointed out in the episode, according to Kendi's criteria, which he describes quite clearly, that judgment does make sense and does have a coherency to it.
So on that grounds, you can say you agree or disagree with the usefulness of applying that model to the world.
His description of it was fairly straightforward, and you can see the logic to it.
So from that respect, it's just refreshing when you're dealing with gurus who are often very bad at just clearly expressing their position.
When somebody clearly expresses it, then you're like, okay, so I can see what they're arguing for.
That just comes across to me as our position is one of relief because we can understand the argument.
It's clearly stated.
And you can agree or disagree.
So a part of the positive point is just he stated it clearly.
It's the same frame I apply if I'm grading a thesis or I'm reviewing an article for a journal.
Like, I don't need to agree with that thesis.
My criteria is not that, believe it or not.
We can actually put that aside and go, yes, look, I don't agree, but they make a strong case.
And the other interesting little thing, though, I think, is the degree to which they're guru-like and obscurantists and all that stuff.
It's not necessarily correlated, in my mind, to the degree to which they're harmful as well.
No, yeah.
It can be correlated, but they're not the same.
Not the same, no.
So, for instance, I personally, I know some people think Jordan Peterson is evil and wants to turn people into neo-Nazis and stuff, but from what I've personally seen, he doesn't seem that harmful to me.
But if you look, compare him to J.P. Sears, who...
It's probably less guru-like overall, just because it's too stupid, I suppose, to do it well.
You think, you know, with his coronavirus skepticism and advocacy against mask wearing and stuff, that he could be doing more actual direct harm, right?
Yeah, more direct harm, exactly.
And Scott Adams is somewhat guru-like, but probably less so than...
Jordan or Eric or Brett.
Harm to society with what he promotes.
So yeah, I agree.
And the other issue that a lot of people raised, which I think is important to address, is that we didn't consider things like Kendi's unwillingness to engage with critics or address his...
Propensity for hot takes on Twitter that much.
I mentioned it negatively in passing, but not really.
So one point to make there is that we've been quite explicit that we're taking a slice of a person's content and focusing on it.
So that, in one respect, is a feature.
That yes, we don't take all of their collected output to analyze because it simply wouldn't be practical.
But...
I think people have a point that where we're addressing figures that we know well, where we've read the books or we follow them closely on Twitter, that we draw information from other things that they do and use that to assess what they are saying in the episode.
And that's true.
In the case with Candy, so his unwillingness to...
I would say that is something that's worthy of criticism and this propensity to hot takes on Twitter contradicts the more measured tone that he takes in interviews.
But our claim is not the content that we look like represents the totality of the person.
I think people are right to point out where there's a contrast between the way somebody presents themselves in an interview and how they represent their work online or in other avenues.
I think we, in general, would welcome feedback where people are bringing up these points or highlighting where there's inconsistencies from what they presented in the content we look at.
And where it's relevant, we'll address it on the next episode.
There's one more that I'd like to mention from Liam, Liam Bright, a friend of ours on Twitter.
Liam, I don't know who that is.
What's this Liam character being said?
He's a man with takes.
He makes takes.
And he had some interesting reflections on this.
I think it was more influenced by how people responded to somebody daring to mention Kendi in a vaguely positive light.
His view is that...
The culture war, especially in the United States around race and so on, is almost like a kind of psychodrama going on within the minds of white people, relatively well-off, educated white people who have all these kind of conflicts and paranoias and things that they're repressing and not wanting to admit and other things that they feel ultra-guilty about and neurotic about.
It's all kind of happening within them.
And he might be suggesting that when someone like Kendi comes along and the fact that the reactions to Kendi seem completely out of step with what he's actually saying might be indicative of the problem lying somewhere else.
So I realise this contradicts somewhat what we were just talking about with that contrast with Kendi in terms of that ultra-reasonable version that happens in the long format.
Material versus the more showboaty or less restrained, shall we say, tweeting and so on.
But yeah, anyway, I thought that was good feedback.
Any thoughts, Chris?
Yeah, I think that there's some validity to the point that Liam raises that if this is what Kendi does, why are people getting so worked up?
I think both of us and Liam were probably expecting a more bombastic, culture-war, hot-tick-heavy output.
And that's not what was in the content we looked at.
But I think that the other side of that, some of the people commenting on it, might also agree to that.
But add that, yes, but that's not all he does.
And if you include his behavior online or the Some of the more inflammatory stuff that he puts out, then the vitriolic response, if not entirely warranted, might be at least understandable.
Like he is a competent in the culture wars.
So that he draws are is not surprising.
And I think there's validity to both of those arguments.
And it may be the case that in some sense, they're both true, right?
That Liam may be right, that people overreact.
The candy and part of that could be because of his identity and the policies that he's pushing.
On the other hand, the people who are following him more closely and aware of his hotter takes might think, well, he's just offering in the material that we looked at the better version of himself.
I've made the argument recently on Twitter to much consternation that online and offline behavior matter in assessing a person.
You shouldn't just take one as indicative of what the true essence of somebody is.
A person's a totality of what they do.
And I think that applies to Kendi as much as it does to anyone else like James Lindsay or other people that I might more strongly disagree with.
So let's figure out whether Kendi is a guru or not.
Crank up the gurometer, Chris.
Get those wheels turning.
We talked about beforehand, it would be nice to have a big steampunk gurometer.
Yeah, this is what I'm imagining in my head.
So the first category on the gurometer is galaxy brainness, which is to believe that your insights apply across a wide range of domains and how much your insights expand across the galaxy to all topics that you may touch.
Yes, that kind of polymath.
Everything's connected thing.
Look, I think Kendi is a one-issue kind of guy.
He specializes in the one thing.
Well, so I'm going to give him a three out of five on this.
And my reasoning is, like James Lindsay, he does have one topic that he's primarily fixated on, but he applies it across a wide array of things.
And when they were trying to sort out the veteran pay policy, he was...
Trying to venture into his framework, how could he do that?
And I know the interviewer was asking him to do that, but I think a little bit like an inverse James Lindsay, that if you're interpreting all things through a specific lens, that that does lend it to like a degree of galaxy brainness,
but he's not claiming to be an expert on multiple different disciplines and that kind of thing.
Just that his theory applies across, so that's why in the middle.
Yeah, that makes sense.
And that's something I generally don't like, which is when people cram everything that comes along into their single framework.
So James Lindsay at the moment is obviously on this anti-woke crusade.
Leftists gone mad and every little thing can be pushed into that frame.
I mean, I'm looking at our list of gurus now.
Scott Adams does it.
Even Russell Brand does it.
You know, he'll find a way.
To put any news item into how is this an example of the mechanistic global...
Culture repressing our desires to be free and enlightened and so on.
So I don't like that.
So look, I'll give him a two.
That's one little bit of Galaxy Brainness, but it's not.
Yeah, I noticed that I've given Jordan Peterson a three, so I feel bad for that.
But James Lindsay is a three.
So yeah, roughly, I'm okay with that.
You give everyone higher scores than me, so it's all right.
It's all right.
I'm generous like that.
You see gurus everywhere.
That's your problem.
That's my single lens to interpret the world.
So cultishness, this is strong in-group, out-group dynamics.
The people who don't agree with your perspective are evil and bad and not part of the moral good.
And with Kendi, I think the binariness of his worldview is very strong.
But he also does have that element where he strongly emphasizes that he's not trying to disparage people.
So I think for that reason, he's lower than some of the gurus that we've looked at.
But he's still high.
I would put him...
Cultishness feels a disparaging way to put it.
But I'd put his binary worldview as a core feature of him.
So I'm going to give him four.
Well, as usual, I'm a little bit lower than you.
I do grant that point that despite what he says, the framing that it's not possible to not be racist, you've got to be anti-racist or racist.
And even with all the caveats, the Martin Bailey thing, how it's not a property of people, it's a property of behaviours, etc.
I don't know, it still feels a bit like you're either with us or against us.
It is.
I mean, like, George Lucas was not a good writer in the prequels, but he did have that one bit about only a SIF deals in absence and, you know, you're not.
There's only two possibilities, four or against, and there is no grey.
And in general, I think that's wrong.
There always are shades of grey.
So that's why it gets a four for me.
Anti-establishmentarianism.
Okay, so this is the one.
It's not necessarily that you are anti-establishment in the sense you could be someone who's all for socialism or something and wanting to change the status quo.
It's more about the anti-establishment sources of knowledge that you set yourself up against the orthodoxies and the academics and the stupid experts.
Yeah, I think we've went back and forth a bit on this about whether it does include the extent to which you You want revolution as your goal.
You want to tear down the existing establishments and create new ones as well.
And I can see from the fact that I give counterpoints of four that I'm putting that.
Well, I get counterpoints of one, so I'm clearly working from the other.
So there's an issue in our definitions here, but I'm sticking with my I think he does want to see a lot of social institutions overturned with that hot take of a constitutional amendment to create an anti-racist agency.
But in large part, he's also talking about working within the system to change policies.
And in that sense...
Try to reform institutions rather than completely tear everything down.
Okay, but you can't, even if you accept that you can have your definition as well, you still have to retain the original one, or my one, which is that it's about whether or not he's setting himself up against, in an epistemic way, against, which I don't think he is.
He's a very standard kind of academic in that.
In that respect, yes, he's setting up an agency, he's getting funding from donors.
And he's in the New York Times bestseller list.
But he is, like many people, arguing that traditional institutions and sources of information have overlooked this important aspect and they fundamentally don't grapple with it well, the issue of anti-racism and the necessity of it.
So I'm going to put him in the middle at three.
All right.
All right, I'm going.
And you'll give him a two.
I'll give him a two.
So far, I'm just one below you on every thing.
That's in so many things in life, Matt.
That is true.
Apart from the ability to enjoy life.
That's my speciality.
So, grievance mongering.
Yeah, so I guess this relates to, you know, do we take his online antics into account or do we base it purely on the material that we looked at?
Because there's very little grievance mongering in there.
Even when talking about enemies, he was saying they're mistaken, but they shouldn't be condemned for their mistakes.
However, people have brought to attention his propensity for putting people on blast on Twitter.
For that reason, I'm going to bump him up from one to two.
But I think other people would say he is a grievance machine.
But I didn't see it in the content that we're looking at.
So that's why I'm going to put him low.
I don't think I've seen any of his tweets.
So I'll give him a one just because I haven't seen it myself.
Other people can score.
Other scores are available.
Do your own one and give him five if you know that he's a grievance machine.
But a clear distinction for me is other people...
Who are high on this score will bring up their grievances in unrelated content.
Just continually.
They just bring it up.
Yeah, and he doesn't do that.
No, and it's very personal, you know.
It's that I've been overlooked.
My unique insights were neglected and nobody was listening to me.
And now they're all saying it, but I was there first.
Anyway, I deserve more credit.
The people who do this are really obvious.
Yeah, I have heard him discuss some of the people that want to debate him.
And he sounds generally disparaging of them, but he also...
He also sounds relatively reluctant, as in he doesn't want to devote that much time to addressing their criticisms or he doesn't think it's that important.
So again, grievance mongering low.
I think we both agree.
Self-aggrandizement.
An interesting one, because I'm a little bit suspicious of Kendi, just from one academic to another, if you know what I mean.
Because what I feel like is going on a little bit with Kendi is that, look, all academics like to sell themselves and sell their research and their theories and their perspectives.
And you see this in science journalism all the time, where some relatively boring research is done, the scientist is interviewed by the journalist and gives it a...
Sexy spin or they do a press release and then the journalist turns into something even more hyperbolic.
So it's something that all academics do to one degree or another.
And I guess I'm a little bit suspicious that when I look at some of these positions and you really drill down, they're pretty anodyne.
There's not much to it.
Well, in the sense that it's not controversial, it's not super sexy.
It doesn't present actually a whole brand new way of looking at things, right?
So that thing that we talked about before, which is about how to evaluate policies as anti-racist or racist.
On the surface, it seems like it's attention getting a brand new way of looking at things, kind of controversial, but great for getting attention.
But if you actually drill down, it's actually almost trivial, ultra reasonable, but not very interesting.
So I suspect he's doing.
In a more nuanced way, like unless I deserve a noble and my family are all geniuses, more the slightly faux self-deprecation that you find amongst the academic set.
You dot all your I's, you cross all your T's, you have all the caveats, you have the very restrained version, but then if you're writing a popular article of some kind or doing an interview, you present the sexy version.
So I guess I will give him more than one on that criteria, even though he is not anywhere in the same ballpark as someone like Eric Weinstein.
So what are you going to give him?
I'm going to give him a three.
No.
Good, I give my two.
I'm lower than you.
Okay, all right, I balance out.
I was torn between two or three because it wasn't very much.
After all of that spiel, it still doesn't count for very much on that criteria.
Okay, Cassandra Complex.
So this is the tendency to believe that you have identified something which other people have overlooked and that poses a future threat, a potential world-altering, society-collapsing.
I'm going to give him a 1. I don't see it.
How about you?
Well, I want to go one higher than you.
He's kind of saying that the status quo is not to address these things and that the system will continue to produce the inequalities, but that it would continually chug along if you didn't do anything.
It would just be that people are exploited.
And even then, he's not claiming to see...
Something that no one else can see.
It's not like it's controversial to say that there's currently big problems of equity.
That's not a hot take.
So you can't really say that he's like Cassandra pointing at something.
Exactly.
I'm not going to go for one, though, because I think he still is claiming that we need to adopt this perspective in order for societies to flourish and that it has been...
He's unaddressed in the policy sphere or so on.
I think he's slightly higher than the one, so I'll give him a two, but I see you've given him a one, so one of us has given him a one.
He's in between one and two.
I think that's fine.
Leading on from that is the extent to which he purports to hold a revolutionary theory.
Now, Matt, before you answer, I want to point out that whether or not somebody has a revolutionary theory is different from whether they present themselves.
As having a revolutionary theory, right?
So if their insight is mundane, but they believe that they are presenting something extremely insightful, Talib.
I feel that has to be taken into account.
I know why you're saying that.
That's just a reminder.
But with that random piece of information, for me, Kendi is middle of the road.
He has a framework.
But again, he presents it as something that shouldn't be controversial.
It should be something which is fairly straightforward to people to see.
And it will change society if people adapt.
This kind of viewpoint.
But it's modest in comparison to the other people that we look at and how far they claim things will be revolutionized by their worldview.
So I'm going to put him in the middle of the pack with three.
Yeah, I'd rate him on a par with Rutger Bregman.
I don't think his series are as revolutionary as he presents them.
And that's why I'm giving him a three.
Okay.
Pseudo-profound bullshit.
So here, I don't really have any hesitation.
To me, he's a one.
Like he uses definitions in idiosyncratic ways, but that's an academic disease.
And he is relatively clear what his definitions are.
Whether or not he applies them consistently is different, but he's not trying to disguise his viewpoint with jargon.
No, no, I gave him a one too.
In fact, he's the first one that I've awarded.
Me too.
He's the winner.
He's less pseudo-profile than ContraPoints.
Yeah, there's no doubt in my mind that that's the case too.
Okay, so next one, conspiracy mongering.
So his worldview does entail seeing that there are forces arrayed against minorities in American society, but...
There are forces arrayed against minorities, at least certainly the case historically.
And I think that there's few people who would claim that discrimination is completely resolved in America or other contexts.
And so, you know, pointing out that the Republican Party engages in voter suppression and that this targets minorities, to me, that's not...
Conspiracy mongering, that's not what we want to get at with this, because we're not saying you can't identify systemic forces.
Like, I wouldn't say, for example, Stuart Ritchie, when he criticizes the scientific establishment and the incentives in publication structuring, is conspiracy mongering.
He's just documenting a problem.
And to me, Kendi is doing the same.
Well, that's the thing.
You can't overstate really how conventional Kendi's point of view is in large segments of academia.
So pointing out all that stuff is pretty standard social criticism, critical sociology, whatever you want to call it.
People will say that those fields are the left-wing equivalents of conspiracy theories, right?
Because they interpret the world through...
These secretive forces arrayed at keeping women and men in their place.
Yeah, it's a bit of grey area there.
On one hand, I was going to say, look, the thing about a guru is that they're individualistic, but that's not always true either.
So if the distinction is just that some of them have academic jobs and some of them are outside academia, then that's not my distinction, is it?
I mean, I'm still keeping them low.
His worldview didn't strike me as conspiratorial.
You can disagree with his conclusions, but it doesn't mean that his worldview is based on conspiracy.
So for me, two.
Two.
Yeah, okay.
Yeah, all right.
Well, I'm giving him one.
I mean, we gave Douglas Murray and Telova one.
I'm going to give him a one, two.
Profiteering.
He's been successful.
As an academic.
He's been wildly successful and he has three books or recently did have three books that were in the New York Times bestseller.
He received a £10 million endowment from Jack Dorsey for his centre.
So this is the thing with profiteering, right?
Remember the definition of it?
It's not success.
No.
And that's the thing.
When you are super successful and you've got $10 million endowments and you've got best-selling books, then you don't need to promote supplements.
Yeah, but what about Anti-Vasis Baby?
I don't know.
How many copies did that sell?
Well, that was a bestseller too, I think.
But I actually think the motivation for that will primarily have been to get the information across.
About the ideology he wants to promote, right?
So actually, in some sense, an agreement with his critics that would say he's trying to influence the youth of America.
Yes, I think he is.
And make them aware of the anti-racist worldview.
But is he doing that to make the big bucks?
I don't think so.
I think it's more about spreading his worldview.
This comes up with the limitations of my knowledge, but I don't see him as somebody who's fundamentally about profit.
Even finding his content to examine, there's not that much of it available outside of his books and stuff.
He's not someone that's constantly doing podcast appearances or talk shows.
No.
Yeah, he's more academic.
I agree with you.
I haven't read Anti-Racist Baby, but I don't.
I think it was written with a view to cash in.
So he gets a one.
And in terms of shilling supplements, no, he doesn't do that.
And broicity, the addition from Matthew Remski's suggestion about the extent to which people are engaged in hyper-masculinity displays, I don't see that either.
So he doesn't get any bonus points.
And overall, my score for him is...
2.3, which makes him our third lowest guru after Rutger Bregman and ContraPoints.
Okay, well, he got an average of 1.7 for me, which makes him my second lowest scored guru after ContraPoints.
Yeah, so look, we have a political problem here, don't we?
In that the two most progressive figures on the political spectrum have gotten our lowest scores in the gorometer.
So we urgently need a really left-wing guru to just trash to restore our credibility.
Hello, Gwyneth Paltrow.
Gwyneth Paltrow might do the trick.
I agree.
There's a discrepancy here.
But I think this reflects the people that we've looked at, rather than necessarily that there are no Properly guru people on the left-wing side.
Contrapoints and Rutger Bregman are both people who, when we suggested to do them, people were on the fence of, well, are those really guru types, right?
And the Gurometer exists in part to help us feel more comfortable about dealing with people who are within the guru sphere.
But don't necessarily reach the peaks of Eric Weinstein or Scott Adame type people.
I think it's helpful because people can understand.
Look, you may not like Kendi.
You may think he's an ideologue, a political activist who's blinkered and you just don't agree with all of his stuff, right?
But that doesn't mean he's a guru.
Exactly that.
So I do think that would be an interesting thing to look at.
Figures who are from the left side of the spectrum who are more highly guru-tastic.
But it's worth pointing out that from the people that we've looked at, eight of them out of the 14 self-identify as left-wing.
So the fact that we don't believe that that's necessarily an accurate description.
Is neither here nor there if you're a fan and you agree with their self-identification, right?
Brett Weinstein and Eric Weinstein are self-expressed lefties.
And Russell Brand, his politics are probably a little bit weird, but he's definitely...
No, he's completely left.
I think we skipped over him and he's a good example.
Actually, he scores much more highly, right?
3.7.
So I forgot about him just when we were talking there, but he is an example.
Of a high-level lefty guru type.
But the example of Talib is indicative to me because Talib is somebody that's prone to bombastic pronouncements and has no lack of self-confidence.
But when we looked at him, he's middle of the pack when it comes to guru.
And I think that's accurate because he has things which don't fit so neatly as opposed to other people.
So he definitely is a guru, but there's a reason that he doesn't score high on everything.
And Kendi being low is what I would have expected and not because I fundamentally endorse his worldview.
I definitely have more sympathy for it than other figures that we've looked at, but he just isn't that much of a guru figure.
Agreed.
Agreed.
So, I think we have done it.
We have our rating.
That's right.
So, Candy, you get 2.3.
That's your score.
My score is 1.7, a bit lower than yours.
Oh, sorry.
Yes, that's right.
So you're between 1 and 2. You're a high 1 or a low 2. Congratulations.
That's where you are.
We should send out certificates.
We also should make our grommeter scores available somewhere.
So I'll maybe pin them up on the Twitter profile so people can reference them.
Yeah.
You know, we should also put some labels.
Oh, yeah.
So people can interpret the scale.
Yes.
Yeah, and get more mad at us.
Sorry, putting people in categories.
So this was our Garometer episode following up on Ibram Kendi.
He's an interesting character.
And the next thing that will come out after this is an interview with Frost from Bushido.
Following on from that, we will have the Gwyneth Paltrow episode.
We've been getting lots of requests for different people and Michaela Peterson, for example, comes up and she doesn't meet the requirements.
We just talked about a left-wingy type, but I think she is an interesting person and somewhat distinct from her follower.
She's more in the health and wellness weird diet area, but she's obviously trading on her followers.
We have a subreddit now, which was kindly set up independent of us on Reddit.
So you can check that out.
And then, like we say, we have a Patreon.
We have the Twitter account, GurusPod.
Individually, R4CDent for Matt and C underscore Kavanaugh for me.
Or you can email us at decodingthegurus at gmail.com.
Well done.
Bye-bye.
Oh, look at that.
That's it.
Matt's done.
Bye-bye.
See you next time.
Yes.
You don't need to buck around.
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