Special Episode: Interview with Phrost on Bullshido
Matt and Chris are helped again by a guest in their endless quest to get the bottom of what the Hell is Going On and What It's All About.Phrost describes himself as "the world's most dangeous nerd" and is not only an expert in the fighting arts (like, actual real fighting) but is also no slouch when it comes to combatting bullshit.He identifies as a soldier, a scientist, and as a shill for "Big Reality".And his site bullshido.net as well as his podcast The Art of Fighting BS comes up with the reality-based goods. Not only in debunking bullshit in martial arts but also with regard to miracle health cures, supplements, pop psychology, COVID and many other honey traps for the curious and the unwary.Tune in as Matt and Chris compares notes with Phrost on how and why people delude themselves. Marvel at Phrost's offers to fight Alex Jones, Steven Seagal, and (gasp) Gwenyth Paltrow (for Science!). Matt himself accepts the the offer to fight Phrost, conditional on him being ensconced comfortably within a properly equipped Armoured Fighting Vehincle.
Hello and welcome to Decoding the Gurus, the podcast where an anthropologist and a psychologist listen to the greatest minds the world have to offer and we try to understand what they're talking about.
I'm Matt Brown, with me is Chris Kavanagh and we have with us a guest today following in our great tradition of inviting people on who know more about these topics than we do.
And yeah, we're happy.
Would you like to introduce our guest, Chris?
Yes, so great tradition of two previous interviews, but that's how traditions start.
This is a new invented tradition on our part.
But yes, so the guest today is Frost, who you may know if you're on Twitter, and you may also know if you've been involved with martial arts, or at least talking about martial arts online through his website,
Bullshido.
The art of fighting bullshit, I guess, in martial arts and more generally.
And there's also a new podcast with the same title.
Yes.
So welcome, Frost.
Nice to be here.
Yes.
And I should also mention that is a username or pseudonym.
Like we have not got Jack Frost or somebody from the...
I haven't changed it.
Yeah, and it's for us with a PH, in case anybody is looking to stalk you online.
These are important ways that people can find things.
There's a long and nerdy history behind that, which nobody's interested in.
We talked about the use of having pseudonyms online, or just used to be user names.
And as we're both well aware, Matt has a Pseudonymous account on Twitter where he offers ident and maintains complete anonymity and separation from his actual identity.
Yeah.
Yes, everyone has been fooled.
Yes.
You're very familiar with this concept, but yeah.
So actually, Frost, I knew you back in the early internet times when message boards...
We're the clubhouse of the time.
And yeah, I was actually a moderator on a rival martial arts board called Martial Arts Planet, which in true form was the milquetoast version of Bolchito, right?
There was no cursing allowed and direct personal attacks were frowned upon, which wasn't the case of Bolchito.
But maybe that would be a good place to introduce for anyone who doesn't know what is...
Bullshido and the potted history of Bullshido.
Yeah, yeah, no problem.
Basically, we started way back in 2002.
And like you said, there was no Facebook or there wasn't even like MySpace back then.
So forums were where you went to talk to other people about things.
And everybody had their own little community.
And sometimes communities had rivalries.
And so it was interesting, the wild west of the internet.
And I miss it terribly because everything's centralized and homogenized and just very...
I don't know, bland.
And we have a long history.
We've gained some infamy.
In fact, I think there was a Stanford journalism student that was doing his thesis on us and described us as internet vigilantes at one point.
That was fun.
I have it saved somewhere.
It was flattering to me.
Yeah, Bullshido started out just as a platform for people to discuss things in an unfiltered, unrestricted, Cancelable sort of way to bring that up to modern times.
And yeah, and quickly spiraled into kind of an online fight club, which operated on at least four continents, which that was hilarious.
There's still videos all over YouTube of random people from the Internet getting together and beating the hell out of each other.
And I love this.
It's good stuff.
And then the other side of what we did was call bullshit on things.
And that's how how we really started.
We call bullshit on something on another forum.
And got shut down.
So we're like, let's start our own thing.
And we did.
And 20 years later, we're still kind of doing it.
The last 10 years, seven or eight, you know, for real, we got away from the martial arts because we realized that only the most delusional people are still believing in the wackier stuff that we use to debunk.
No touch knockouts or...
Chi ki abilities or Aikido being effective as a fighting style, those sorts of things.
We weren't even picking low-hanging fruit.
We were stepping on it, so we got tired of it.
I personally realized that we needed to start expanding our scope because a lot of people are getting screwed and taken advantage of just because they don't know how to process all of the information that's flooding in at them.
So there were so many bigger Issues that were just pure bullshit that we had to go after within our frame of reference.
So we started getting into health and fitness.
And you guys know that the supplement industry is just rife with absolute garbage.
And that kind of overlaps into some of what you guys have seen since you started this.
It's an easy heuristic.
If somebody's selling supplements, they're probably full of shit.
And a lot of those guys.
I couldn't agree more.
Please go on.
Yeah.
Yeah, we started getting into that and then just...
And then 2015 rolled around and we started seeing a lot more weaponized bullshit.
People started using that more to affect their political agenda.
I mean, yeah, there's always been disinformation, misinformation, propaganda.
But it just...
Social media dialed that up and it just spread.
And so we became aware of it.
We were starting to try and every now and then a meme would pop up that was just garbage and we would debunk that and we would post it on our Facebook, Twitter, whatever, and that sort of thing.
So we just got a little bit more invested in it.
And then 2016 happened and we try to stay politically neutral.
I think the Media Bias Fact Check Group rated us as one of the least biased sites on the internet.
It's tricky.
We're trying to walk a thin line when one side, yeah, they're typical political BS, but the other side, that's their MO.
That's what they do.
That's our go-to.
They rely on it.
Yeah.
So we still, we're threading that needle and it's, I'm interested to see where the next couple of years are going to go.
If we can just say, hey, this is wrong and stand in the middle.
Not that we want to be in the middle because of any particular agenda, but we're there because.
The extremes are dominating the conversation, and yeah, there's not much honesty on either side of the far left or right.
Yeah, that sounds like a really valuable goal to have, which is to not necessarily be politically neutral yourself, you have your own personal opinions, but to try as much as you can to put that aside and take an objective and critical view of stuff rather than...
Being partisan about it, there seems to be a decreasing number of places where one can get that kind of commentary or just advice.
And we don't run ads, so that helps.
So we have nobody trying to push an agenda through us.
We get a couple donations here and there, but mostly I fund it out of my own pocket, which, you know, so yeah, we're not beholden to anybody.
Like you said, when you...
When you try to take a more objective perspective on that, I think that the mistake that some people make is to imagine that means that you have to spend 50% of your time criticizing the Democrats and 50% of Republicans.
But like you said, and you've commented many times as well, it isn't an equally distributed amount of bullshit at the minute, like with Trump and the Republican Party by the looks of CPAC.
One side is really...
Heavily invested as its identity, rather than it being something which deserves criticism and as incidental.
So yeah, I think I've talked about a distinction between centrism or just moderate left or moderate, and then the enlightened version of that, which is just saying that everything has to be seen as equal, otherwise you're displaying your bias.
So it sounds that you're not enlightened centrists.
You're not classical liberals.
No.
It's wherever the bullshit lies.
The only caveat to that is that we have to, like I said, thread the needle because if all we do, if all we did for the last four years was post about Trump, and I try to avoid the guy's name as much as possible, if all we did was call out the BS, even if there were only, there were 99 Trump BS things,
news stories, and they won, I don't know.
Non-Trump thing on the left, it would look like we're doing it.
So we have to do that balance editorially, but yet this balance still was towards the right because come on.
Yeah.
So there's a whole bunch of stuff I want to ask you about, but going back to the earlier era when you were more focused on the kind of Frauds, it might be like a harsh word for it, but at least the people that were prone to hyperbole and there was a significant amount of martial arts gurus around martial arts communities.
I think they're overrepresented in traditional martial arts, but they also existed in mixed martial arts and even sports where there is a sporting aspect of it.
So I wanted to ask you, from those experiences, Do you see the kind of modern gurus that we see in the political sphere or the health and wellness sphere?
Is there a big distinction between the kinds of characters that were active in the martial arts sphere or is it there's very much a continuum and they're all doing similar sorts of things?
I think it operates on a certain level because all those gurus, especially in the martial arts, appeal to Yeah,
I think all the...
If you'll allow me to use the term, evolutionary hooks are there, and they're exploited in the exact same way that a lot of the stuff that you're seeing today, a lot of the gurus are exploiting.
It's just, yeah, they're the glitches in the system that you can't, the things that you have inherent that people are taking advantage of to sell their bullshit.
Yeah, so that's an interesting comparison, isn't it, between...
The martial arts field and more the health and wellness.
And there's a bit of overlap, of course, with the health and supplements and improving one's body.
And the thing that our last guest emphasized to us was this sort of streak of individualism and almost narcissism that is sometimes present.
in the health and wellness communities because they're very much against things like vaccinations or community-wide stuff and they're really into personal things that you can buy to maximize your own personal things.
Is that the same kind of appeal that underlies the bullshit in the martial arts space?
Yeah, I would think that on one level it's appealing to a sort of an image that you want to promote like rugged individualist Masculine in a lot of cases because, you know, overwhelming people that participate in martial arts are men and are looking for that badass angle.
And so if you defer to someone else's expertise, then some people take that as a ding against themselves.
And I don't want to show any weakness whatsoever, so I'm not going to trust that.
Squirrely little guy at the National Institutes of Health or wherever Fauci's working these days.
Yeah, I'm not going to trust that guy.
When I can take charge of my own health, I'm not going to believe you about wearing a mask.
That makes me, let's just say, put it out there in R-rated form.
That makes me this guy's bitch by wearing a mask, whereas I'm a tough guy.
I don't.
I'll breathe my own air.
So, yeah, I don't like the term toxic masculinity because that's kind of gotten twisted a little bit.
But I think, yeah, it is masculinity taken to a toxic level.
Yeah.
That seems to fit Joe Rogan's approach to health and wellness, or in general, like, brain performance.
Like, he's somebody who I think would be relatively open to recognizing the frauds and bullshit that exist in martial arts.
He still has a bit of exoticism in him, but he knows an old Tai Chi master is not going to defeat an MMA fighter.
But yet...
He definitely does have the view that your health and the response to this pandemic should be focused around vitamin D supplements and working out.
And there's a kernel of truth.
Of course, being fit and healthy and not having vitamin deficiencies is important to health, but it definitely seems that there's an element broken in the sphere of martial arts that it's about Taking supplements and he's also into cryotherapy and a whole bunch of out there things.
But I guess I wonder, do you think that's something specific to him?
Or is that a more broader thing within, say, the MMA side of martial arts?
When COVID hit and was starting to pick up...
We had so many arguments like on everything, Instagram of all places with people that were like, no, we're going to keep training.
We don't need to do this.
I don't care what they say.
And a lot of it was, you know, it had to be more cynical.
I want to keep my gym open.
I want to keep making money because they're small businesses.
And then you have the knuckle guys that flagrantly were like bragging about it.
Like we're, we're holding gym.
Look at us.
We're here.
Come train, take, leave your mask off.
We don't believe in any of that crap.
I don't know what the principle is.
I forget what it is, but I know it translates over.
If you think you're an expert in one area, then you automatically assume to some extent you're an expert in another area.
It's like you've earned a sort of expertise in martial arts or MMA or jujitsu.
And so somehow that transfers over into immunology.
And for a lot of these guys, they know one thing very well.
And again, we go back to the masculinity thing.
It's a dinging against them to not know, to be reliant on somebody else who knows those things.
And Joe Rogan's a good example of that.
He doesn't see, he'll call out the bullshit in MA or martial arts, MMA, whatever, because he's an expert in that.
But he just can't translate that expertise over into how you produce antibodies.
Yeah, that's interesting.
I've thought about the psychological basis for COVID scepticism a lot, but I've never actually thought about the masculinity angle.
And you've made it quite clear that the public health advice regarding dealing with the vaccine is to a certain kind of...
Guy feels like something a pussy would do, right?
So, you know, hide at home, close everything down.
Oh, no, I'm scared.
No, their idea is they don't care.
They're tough.
They'll brave.
They'll eat some spinach and go train, yeah?
Yeah, and if you notice in the early days of the lockdown protests, all these guys in their tactical knockoff gear were protesting the lockdowns, and they were wearing masks.
They were wearing masks because it hadn't been politicized yet and because masks look cool.
The military wears masks.
I have technical smogs and all that crap.
And they were like, oh, look.
And then the minute, the minute it becomes, like, fast forward a few months, and those assholes were in the Capitol building, not wearing masks, committing insurrection, and so desperate to be aligned with the politics that they wouldn't cover their faces.
Yeah, figure that one.
It probably relates to the points that you've already made for us, but somebody on our Patreon, when they heard that you were on, wanted to ask about the Gracies' response to...
And I know there's a lot of Gracies, right?
They have a lot of kids.
So there's a widespread thing, but I haven't been tracking them, but I get the impression from this that what you're describing about people saying we're going to keep things open and that it isn't a serious thing, that at least some elements of the...
Gracie, Brazilian, and for people who don't know, this is the family that are associated most strongly with Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, which involves a lot of close physical contact in training.
So do you know anything about their...
One of them is, and I've forgotten his name, he's the guy that got completely smashed by Sakuraba in Pride, but I'm drawing a blank on his name.
Like Hoist Gracie's cousin.
Major fighter, but I'm drawing a blank on it.
But yeah, he's a huge fan of Bolsonaro, the Brazilian president, major anti-masker himself.
And so a lot of people have taken their cues from him.
And like I said, I've had arguments with these people.
No, at least wear a mask.
You're literally sweating into people's eyeballs.
You're rubbing body fluids on each other.
You're doing the opposite of social distancing.
There's no real effective way to train jiu-jitsu unless you're in physical contact with somebody.
And in fact, who is the guy?
There's some major dude in New Jersey, a super Chad-looking dude, who I think he called me, is some autistic lab coat from Bullshido.
You know, me.
For the people who are listening on audio, Frost doesn't look...
Like an autistic lab coat wearer.
I look good in a lab coat, though.
So I trained in Brazilian jiu-jitsu for a couple of years at university and when I came over to Japan.
And like you say, the notion that there is any possibility to train with physical distance, it doesn't seem feasible.
But there is an issue there that people's livelihood, if that's what you do and that's what your whole business model and your whole self-identity is about, then...
I get it that this virus is a massive issue, not just for your health and that kind of thing, but your livelihood.
I got injured prior to the pandemic and I've now recovered.
I had an operation and my knees got better.
But I'm wondering long-term what the impact of the virus is going to be on gyms.
Yeah, it's not a question related to skepticism and gurus.
I'm just wondering what the future is going to be for the martial arts that involve close contact.
I know a couple of gym owners through the website.
Steven Kepfer, who is the president of the American Sambo Association.
I don't know if you guys know Sambo.
It's a Russian martial art.
You get to punch people and throw them around.
It's awesome.
He has been conducting small classes in like a pod format.
So he's basically gone Private classes only with people that he knows are reliable to have been doing social distancing.
So the pods model, there's no perfect solution to anything.
It's just, there are better ones.
It's risk mitigation, not a risk elimination with this.
Yeah.
So I know people that are training.
There's a couple of Sombo competitors in town.
Austin has, you throw a rock, you hit a jujitsu school.
A lot of them are doing the responsible thing by having groups of six.
These are the people.
We're committed to social distancing.
We're going to do all the best we can.
And so and if one of us catches it, then, you know, we stop.
We shut down.
So we test regularly as best we can and that kind of thing.
It's good faith effort.
And I think that's for now, that's the model.
But I hope what I hope is just everybody gets vaccinated.
And then this is just flu to electric boogaloo and we deal with it.
We get a booster.
Yeah, for sure.
It's a very real thing.
It's one thing if you work in an office, like at a desk job, where they can transition to working from home and one's livelihood isn't so badly affected.
But if you're running a restaurant or running a training gym of some kind, it's a very different level of impact.
And so even though we often criticize COVID skeptics or whatever, that's not to say...
That there aren't huge and valid concerns about the economic impacts it has on people.
And those impacts are not equally distributed, are they?
Yeah, I completely get it.
There are guys that make their living traveling and competing.
And those guys need to train because they're still holding competitions, which, you know, that's probably not the best thing.
But, I mean, they've committed to this life and that's it.
And the thing that we're trying to get across to them is, okay, yeah.
Get your group of core people, lock yourselves inside the gym, and train until this thing's over.
And then, okay, if one of you starts coughing and stuff, maybe chill out.
There's ways to do this without compromising everything that you're doing.
Everybody just has to cut back a little bit, at least.
Okay, so it feels like there's a bit of a false dichotomy in general around coronavirus and coronavirus skepticism, where the skeptics' presentation of the people who are supportive of public health measures is that...
They want lockdowns to continue.
They don't want anything to open.
They just want the government to control them, and they're willing to accept any deprivation to just see if one out of hundreds of thousands of people.
And the reality, as far as I see it, is just that everybody thinks that these restrictions are shit.
Everybody wants them removed as soon as it's possible, but those people are just...
Willing to acknowledge that there's measures that are extremely inconvenient, cause problems for society, but until we get a handle on the vaccination that they're necessary.
But now we might be getting there.
Something optimistic might be around the corner.
Maybe.
And you guys have done so much better than we have up here.
I don't know what...
I think I have some ideas what the problem is.
But countries on that side of the world...
They've got this okay.
They're pretty good.
New Zealand's running around without masks.
They're having barbecues.
They're going to baseball games.
Taiwan, but they had like fewer than 10 deaths in the whole country.
Vietnam, the same thing.
And that's what I'm trying to get across to some of these people.
Yeah, okay, nobody wants to lock down.
Everybody's got to go to work.
But if the entire country just somehow came together and just stayed the fuck home for a couple weeks and just didn't, just ordered some shit off Amazon, just chilled out.
We could have kicked the crap out of this.
But no, the minute the government came in and said, hey, maybe you should stay home, we had our uh-uh guys that ran around licking windows and rubbing on doorknobs and just doing whatever the hell they want.
Kissing rats.
We know how you Americans feel about your government.
The whole world knows how Americans feel.
And this is coming from somebody that I...
In my younger years, was a raging libertarian.
I had a copy of Atlas Shrugged.
I was like, yeah, I'm going to live my life for myself.
And I voted for Bush.
So I'm not like Mr. Lefty with a Sheikh Rivera shirt or anything.
No.
Look, I personally have a lot of sympathy for libertarian thinking too.
I feel if I want to take magic mushrooms and go for a hike naked in bear country, then...
I don't think that's up to me.
You know, that's my choice.
I like that.
I've browsed Bullshito.net before, but I was just browsing again this morning and it's a great website.
People should have a look.
And it's impressive the variety of topics you cover.
Like it's health and fitness and anti-vaxxers as well as the kind of bullshit that occurs in arguments and so on.
It's just uniformly a rational sort of science-based approach that you're communicating.
So you obviously have been up close and personal with this stuff, not just in martial arts but in other fields too.
And what I wanted to ask is whether or not you had a rough mental model or theory of what's going on.
And I'll explain what I mean by giving you mine.
Like my baseline...
Rougher description of what's going on is people tend to be easily deluded or delude themselves on specific topics, whether it's wearing a mask or not wanting to take a vaccine or that some supplement is going to just do amazing things for them because they are congruent with their worldview,
their basic worldview, how they look at the world.
That specific belief presses the right buttons.
And makes them feel more comfortable or somehow supports their general worldview.
Do you have a mental model of what's generally going on?
One of the things when we started transitioning into general bullshit, outside of the martial arts, we still kept the martial arts analogy.
And it pairs nicely with just science in general, if you think about it, because if you have the way you fight...
Your skills can be falsified.
So you can subject them or you can subject them to peer review usually involves getting a fist in the face.
And that's how we stumbled our way into there with a little bit of head trauma.
And so the analogy, and we have a column that I write most of the articles for it because I'm a little bit more passionate about it than some of these other guys, but it's self-defense against bullshit.
So if you look at it as an analogy of martial arts, everybody Can get better at self-defense against the kind of people that want to exploit them, take advantage of them, just all the gaps in the way we think, just the psychology behind it.
And yeah, there's sort of things that people can use to just bypass the higher order thinking and just appeal to the baser instincts.
And so there's a lot of people that whether or not they're doing consciously or they literally know those hooks to the buttons to push, that's how a lot of the gurus and the hucksters and the grifters Take advantage of people.
So you got to learn to see it.
And for example, we have one of the articles about razors, like, think of Occam's razor and Hitchens razor, Hamlin's razor, all of them.
So we wrote an article about that just as a way to cut the bullshit.
So we're trying to expand on that analogy.
And our audience is still a lot of people that are in martial arts, a lot of knuckleheads, a lot of guys that have lost a full standard deviation of IQ by getting punched in the head.
So we're trying to explain all this to people that are reasonably dangerous.
So that's our hook.
Like I said, we started out in the early days meeting up and beating the hell out of each other.
We've had people get into fights in person over discussions on the forums.
There's a video of it on YouTube.
A carload of people from Atlanta drove up to Maryland to get into a fight with a dude in a parking lot over an argument about kung fu.
And it went completely sideways.
Somebody threw a flying kick, ended up on the ground, and it was just...
That's the kind of stuff we used to do.
It was like, I think we were the only online community where you could legitimately get the crap beaten out of you for something you said online.
So we have people like that.
And so the idea was to take these people who are, you know, a little rough around the edges, dangerous, and make them dangerously prepared to deal with that.
Because you don't want those people being influenced against their best interests.
So somebody that's completely willing to throw a punch against somebody.
At least you can get them to throw a punch against somebody that deserves it.
Yeah.
In that analogy, that makes us like a training gym.
You can send people to listen to Decoding the Gurus.
I brought you guys up before, too.
Yes, as long as we take all the dangerousness and all the badassery out of the analogy, then I think you can think of me as a trainer in a training gym.
But for us, when you were talking about that, one thing that paralleled for me, my personal history, I started out, like most kids, interested in Kung Fu films and Bruce Lee and that kind of thing.
So I started training in Wing Chun.
And then I, through exposure to martial arts forums, like Bullshido and Martial Arts Planet, I became aware of the endless debates about the street.
Versus the ring, right?
These are like akin to the great debates of creationist versus evolution, where on martial arts planets, there was endless debates about referees and time limits.
The dangers of the street, multiple opponents.
But I ended up partly, I think, through exposure to that and an interest in what you were talking about, like pressure testing things, that I eventually migrated to doing Thai boxing when I moved to London for university.
And through that, realized quite the world of difference that was involved in those kind of things.
And then over time, actually, I think partly through meetup.
That was half bullshit, half martial arts planner.
It was a guy who was active on both forums and this big guy who was doing grappling stuff.
So I went to meet up with him and he was very kind because he was also about five stone heavier than me because he could have just destroyed me for sheer weight.
But he introduced me to grappling and how little.
I knew about that whole world.
And then I ended up starting doing Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and Judo, and that's where I kind of ended up staying.
But that trajectory, it kind of mirrors, I think, in the way of where you might start off interested in, I don't know, conspiracy theories about 9 /11 online and supplement ancient aliens,
whatever it is.
And then you start to see the cracks.
And you come across more skeptical voices, and then you might, over time, become more interested in science and stuff.
And it seems that there's definite parallels where you're bumping up against reality and you're doing things like resources like Bush Shield or now with the rise of YouTube videos and that, that you can actually see the ancient master with the no-touch knockout get beaten up quite badly.
I don't know.
It's just echoing what you said, but it feels like you and the website, in large part, has won that battle in martial arts.
I'm not saying there's no McDojos, there's no thing, but it certainly feels like it would be hard to maintain a lot of the myths that used to be dominant.
Yeah, no, we probably could have...
Done a giant mission accomplished banner a la George Bush in Gulf War.
But in fact, I think I photoshopped myself onto that one a long time ago.
But we really did.
There's nothing to talk about except for the complete wing nuts that are out there.
The Ashita Kims.
I don't know if you remember that name.
He's a ninja master, wrote a bunch of ninja books in the 80s.
Yeah, we tracked him down.
He was a dude named Radford Davis living in a trailer in Florida.
Neither Korean or Japanese like his name.
And Steven Seagal as well.
He has featured on your website.
Yeah, we went hard against Steven Seagal because a lot of the people are friends of friends or associates with Gene LaBelle.
And I don't know if you know that story.
And I love bringing up the story because it's like third hand for me.
But yeah, Steven Seagal was on the set.
Gene LaBelle, judo master, stuntman legend.
Just, the guy is amazing.
He's been in, like, so many films, background characters, the guy that's getting thrown through the window.
Anyway, he was on the set of one of the Steven Seagal films, and as the story goes, Seagal was, like, bragging that nobody could choke him out, and so Gene LaBelle was like, "Okay."
He put him in a choke.
Obviously, Steven Seagal couldn't get out.
And there was a sort of a brown pants result that involved lawyers and threats of lawsuits.
And yeah, but the story got out.
And so you're retelling it because fuck Steven Seagal.
And he's a good example because he also went from the kind of...
All the horrors if you go into his history of what he did in Japan and various things.
I'm sure most people don't pay that much attention to him.
But he ended up like a Putin apologist.
Basically any reactionary political movement, he's happy to be in the mix there.
I think he gave up his US citizenship and he's Russian now.
Whatever.
Good.
Stay.
And then another big one from the day was Frank Dukes, who was the subject of the movie Bloodsport?
Jean-Claude Van Damme movie?
Just complete and utter bullshit.
Turns out Frank Dukes never competed in a kumite.
There never was a kumite.
And he bought the trophy that he displayed to people from the trophy store, like down the street from where he lived.
And he's had a vendetta against us for years, the guy, because he's still around, still trying to teach people how to be ninjas, grown men trying to be ninjas.
And then...
You know, which is hilarious because he's over in Europe a lot and we have an admin over there in Europe.
It's this giant dude.
He goes by Jazir on the forums, former United States Army major.
Just, he's a beast.
And it was like standing next to him on a train, like over in, like doing, he was actually doing ninja stuff right behind Frank Dukes.
He loves to tell that story because this guy is supposed to be like hyper aware and he's the secret master.
And yeah, Jazir was just like thinking, I could kill you.
I could totally ninja kill you.
The personality to kind of just bullshit without...
Because obviously those people know that they are not people who trained under some secret master in Japan or that they are not...
They haven't killed all these people and been sent on secret missions.
But they don't...
They're able to lie and seemingly in a way that they feel very convinced of what they're lying about.
And the only thing that...
I can think of, apart from health and wellness, where secret tantric masters, there's a lot of the same kind of things in play.
But like you said at the beginning, it's not that in mainstream politics, people just lie and exaggerate.
And Trump is the best example of it, but he's just leading the vanguard of what it feels like a kind of new wing.
Of politicians who are completely okay with just bullshitting about their abilities and experiences.
Extending art of martial arts definitely seems your expertise is necessary.
Yeah, no, and it's the same.
It's seamless.
It's the same tactic.
They prey on people who have a need to feel some sort of identity, to connect with a tribe, to see themselves as having some sort of status in the world where they probably don't.
They probably work a menial job.
Their home situation's crappy.
Maybe they got stuffed into a locker in high school.
They need to feel something.
And it's the same thing that maybe Trump tapped into is a lot of the The people that are seeing their options in life dwindle.
They're seeing some of their privileged statuses become more equal to other people.
They're seeing a lot of stuff happen, and they're losing things that they had.
And now they're seeking some sort of thing to make them feel strong about themselves.
And that's a playbook that's been in use for at least since the 30s.
Yeah, that sense of grievance and resentment is a strong one.
Two ways you can go with any topic, whether it's health or martial arts.
And you were talking about how martial arts is naturally suited to an empirical scientific approach if you really care about winning.
So let's say if you really care about being strong, physically strong, then you'll care about nutrition and you actually care about the genuine stuff and you'll be strongly motivated to discriminate the stuff that works from the stuff that just sounds good.
And funny story, somebody who is arguing against the empirical peer review of sparring is somebody that's very well known to you.
And Chris brought it up to me, and I had not seen this before.
But yeah, our good friend James Lindsay had like a decade ago or so.
Posted an essay which referenced us, like my website, as a bunch of people that were just trying to push their sparring mentality on.
And I don't remember the exact quote, so I don't want to misrepresent him here.
But he was making an argument against the need to have the contact sparring, to have that peer review, to subject yourself.
And as far as I know, all he trains in is like forms or some sort of push hands, like light grappling kind of stuff and some wheeling around a big sword and that kind of thing in his driveway.
I may have seen that.
That was the other side of the argument.
And so we upset a lot of people by saying, yeah, you need to actually test whether or not...
You can do what you think you can do, or you should do something else.
And it's hilarious that he, as the defender of whatever he's going off on these days, was on really the wrong side of that issue.
Personally, I'd love to fight the guy.
I think that'd be hilarious.
I'm just throwing it out there, James.
If for some reason you're listening to this, let's do it, man.
UFC Unified MMA Rules.
There you go, everyone.
Nobody expected the decoding the gurus to be the place where the throw down happened, but there you go.
Somehow, I don't think this is going to go down.
I did the same thing to Alex Jones, and he's local, so I'm sure word never got back in the end of it, man.
You should have a better chance, though, because of the amount that he never endlessly praises his...
His physical prowess and fighting ability.
Which, if you've seen the guy, I don't know where he's getting that assessment from.
He looks like a bag of old ham.
I mean, that would be hilarious and would be fun, but it wouldn't be fair.
So, yeah, I'd still find out.
Jim's a young guy.
I have a story about that.
About Alex Jones, though.
Apparently, he did show up at a jiu-jitsu school where a buddy of mine was a senior student there, and he lasted exactly one lesson.
So, according to the story that I've been told, so we're going to take it with a grain of salt.
But, yeah, so he got paired with a 130-pound female blue belt on his first day, and she wrecked him, and he never came back.
Yeah.
That's a very familiar, like, thing for anybody that trained in jiu-jitsu for a time, that there were people that come with a very aggressive Do you want to know whether or not you're good and then refine that?
Or do you want to just feel like you're tough?
It's a really good way of sussing out somebody's character.
I love it.
There was a question I had as well, Frost, about it.
Again, this might be like availability heuristic in effect, but I noticed It hasn't applied so much recently, but in the past, like, Sam Harris had started training in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and he would talk about it fairly often.
And in some sense, he was making a point similar to what you were about, that this is testing your actual ability.
To fight, right?
Or you learn quickly that you're high uncoordinated and how easy it is to be choked by someone or this kind of thing.
But then, Matt, I don't know if you know, but Russell Brand is also into Brazilian Jiu Jitsu.
And he was talking about that.
And I noticed, I know that just Brazilian Jiu Jitsu became popular.
So it was a lot of celebrities were doing it and talking about it, like Anthony Bourdain as well and so on.
But I wondered, If you noticed something of an overlap between the kind of rationalist IDW type, like the people who might take the attitude that you're talking about, like testing things,
and as a result, say, MMA and arts that have sparring are important, or was that purely just an overlap that came about because it was more in the cultural zeitgeist?
There's two tiers of people that participate in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, for example.
There's some really smart dudes that have gotten into it.
I've known they've come through the forums or they've gone off.
We have one on our board of advisors who's an immunologist.
But yeah, they've gotten into it because they do realize, hey, this is effective and it's good for me and it's a good thing.
So if I'm going to train in something, I have a limited amount of time, I'm going to do something that's probably got...
The least reasonable risk of getting injured while I'm doing it.
So probably not going to get punched in the face every class I go to.
And then something that's going to be actual, useful, and effective.
Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu fits that niche.
So it attracts a lot of smart people.
And yes, there's a little bit of something that's biased about.
Let's just come through.
Joe Rogan has a wide audience.
Sam Harris has a wide audience among people that are a little bit, consider themselves smarter at least.
Yeah, there's a lot of overlap.
And then you have the whole...
Middle-aged white dude thing, too, which, you know, is also a factor because there's a ton of them that do present jiu-jitsu, and it's kind of, yeah, so it overlaps.
It's sort of like a martial arts intersectionality kind of thing.
Yeah, yeah.
I don't know if you, I just noticed that, like, because I felt that in some ways I should be Sam Harris's ultimate target audience because, you know, he's an atheist.
With an interest in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and talks about religion all the time.
So he should be my guru, but not exactly.
Cynical bastard.
You just weren't having him ready.
I actually used to have a sort of contrarian streak where I defended them against the people in my discipline because he was seen as like...
Amongst the cognitive science of religion people, they treated him as something of a punching bag, that his view was really unsophisticated.
But I always felt within my field, within the academic field, that the basic point that there are plenty of religious people in the world who are genuinely motivated by their beliefs and that doctrines that are extremists.
Can believe in things which are harmful and not motivate them to action.
That's not the whole story, but I felt that my field was a bit too much focused on saying anybody that has that view has a very superficial grasp of things.
But unfortunately, the more you pay attention to Sam Harris, the more you see severe cracks in the level to which he applies skepticism and does research.
Yeah, so anyway.
Joe Rogan, in a sense.
He's like Joe Rogan with two extra standard deviations of IQ.
I listen to Harris every now and then.
He's had some good episodes of podcasts.
He tries.
That's what makes me a little bit more sympathetic to him.
He tries.
He operates a good faith.
He wants to understand.
He has disagreements and blind spots.
I'm certainly no academic at that level.
See the merit in what he's trying to do, and it's good.
I was super proud of him.
He disowned the IDW because it just went off the rails.
So that had to be brutal.
It had to hurt a lot of feelings.
He deserves credit for that.
Yeah, we both enjoyed that, right?
It felt therapeutic in a sense to hear someone from within that group say the thing to the other people because, you know, critics, they don't care about, but they couldn't ignore.
That he called out.
It shouldn't be hard.
It really shouldn't be hard for somebody in that sphere to not endorse voter ballot conspiracies.
But it was a low hurdle that so many people just slammed directly into and then rolled around on the ground, like, screamed out about the conspiracies and so on.
So, yeah, that was remarkable.
The post-election period has been really interesting in that sphere.
And I actually used to follow James Lindsay.
His shtick, his trolly kind of haha, you know, shitposting thing.
That didn't faze me at all.
In fact, I get it.
I get it because that's the old internet.
That's the way you used to interact with people.
And it didn't bother me in the least.
But it was that line when he started going off the deep end.
I was like, no, okay.
That ironic shitposting seems like it wasn't so ironic.
Actually, this was a point I was thinking about recently with the rise of Clubhouse.
And this recent incident, Matt, I think you're aware of this as well.
There was a room on Clubhouse taking over where Brett Weinstein and Michael Tracy and various heterodox or IDW type people were present.
And they invited up somebody who was more social justice inclined who complained there was only white people.
And in control.
And then they complained that there was only white people with moderating abilities.
And when they were granted moderating abilities, they kicked everyone off the stage, invited all their friends up and proceeded to kind of lecture and berate the various people about the, yeah, being racist and equating evolutionary biology to eugenics and so on.
And like that incident is, it's so stupid.
It's internet minutiae.
The thing was that it came out of that because I heard several people discuss it on podcasts and I'm sure there will be sub stacks dedicated to dissecting the event and YouTube videos about the great takeover of Clubhouse.
But the thing it reminded me of is this the internet that you are familiar with and are from which is people in group chats on chat forums or message boards and these little interpersonal dramas about People doing things and taking over accounts.
And I got the feeling with this event that I was like in deja vu.
And similarly, the last thing I'll mention and shut up just to hear your takes on this is I heard Sam Harris on Clubhouse recently.
And he was debating a guy about whether atheists can have morality because they don't believe in an objective God.
And it was the same arguments that was like, and it was a pretty shitty conversation he had.
But I was just like, I've done this 20 years ago on the internet, like all these debates about canavious have morality.
And it just struck me as, my God, we're back again with Sam Harris debating like someone.
So yeah, I wonder what your take is on the differences of the web 2.0 versus the old internet and whether it's just the same shit.
I mean, I am biased.
I think everybody should just go back to forums because...
I have one, so that would be great for me, but I do.
I think we need to decentralize, like just have everything back to sort of little niche communities where you can have, if you want it highly moderated and you just want people to post everything and cite their sources in APA format, okay,
you can do you over here.
And if you just want people, I don't know.
Posting videos of themselves yelling at the screen, then you do that.
And you can run the forum for the types of discussions that you want, and it's really hard to cancel any discussion that's like that.
If Brett Weinstein wants to go talk about how...
Whatever he's talking about this week, I'm not going to get, that's your thing.
But yeah, so they can have their own little thing and you can sign up and if whatever, and then you can go start another one.
It's like brettweinsteinsucks.org and have your own forum that's just dedicated to that.
It was more alive back then.
It was, I don't know.
I'm a big decentralization kind of guy because what was it?
You guys were talking about Talib recently and a system like that's more resilient.
The discussion is more resilient.
The culture is more resilient when it's not Under one set of rules.
Yeah, and I think that's an interesting point of view.
You have different niches and diversity of places rather than everything all mixed in together.
Yeah, I mean, Twitter definitely has that effect on people where people are continually slamming into someone else who's just living in a completely different planet.
You know, one person's an academic in...
Oxford, the other ones, whatever, I don't know, a Texan who runs a business or something.
And not always, but often they're just coming from just completely different perspectives, different sets of assumptions, and bringing them together is not all, unless they choose to come together on a particular topic, is not always good.
And Twitter does that.
It's got benefits and costs, right?
Because I also think that in a lot of sense, the dynamics that you're talking about recapitulate on Twitter, that there's a group of people that you interact with regularly who you know and have relationships with.
And then there's just randoms who fly by to just slam you over something or people who have an insane amount of time available to nitpick a very specific issue.
So maybe the main difference with Twitter is I feel...
If you write a thread and you say, I really hit this book by Tim Scott or something like that.
That Tim Scott's a made up name, but you know, that Tim Scott may come into your thread and say thank you for your feedback.
I think what I was getting at is I made a separate account, this pseudo-anonymous account, because I wanted to keep my random interests separate from my straight-laced academic work.
As it happened, thanks to Chris and Dakota and the gurus, the worlds collided and it all fell apart, but it was a good idea.
Even now, I'm followed by I'm followed by people who are into coding statistics in R. There's a good number of them.
Culture warriors.
And I could be, you know, when I say something now, I've got to think, how are all the different segments reading this?
Because, yeah, so I like the smaller communities is what I'm saying.
I can see the benefits.
Yeah.
So I don't want to take up all your...
Dave Frost, especially since you kindly stayed up late for us.
But I like the metaphor of the kind of training yourself to deal with like the bullshit that is out there in all the different spheres.
And that I really think there is a nice analogy, even just from a rhetorical standpoint of people training their mental abilities to point out or to recognize gurus and recognize bullshit.
And I realize throughout this conversation, we've probably Touched on a whole bunch of things.
But if I put you on the spot, what do you think are a couple of points that people could do that you mentioned the different types of razors, right?
The article that you wrote about.
But what abilities do you think are good self-defense online against bullshit and also about falling prey to Online gurus that aren't necessarily peddling martial ability but they're certainly peddling a whole bunch of intellectual abilities that we cover every week.
I know it's a bit unfair to just randomly ask someone, but are there any things that you would highlight that are important?
I think the more you want something to be true, the more you need to Be aware of that.
You need to be in tune with yourself and know, okay, yeah, this appeals to me.
I want this to be real.
And then you need to flip a switch and say, how is this not real?
What is wrong with it?
What are the flaws?
This idea.
If this appeals to me on what level, why is it appealing to me on that level?
Does it make me feel something?
Do I want to identify with this?
Or is it appealing to me because I...
I genuinely feel that there's a grain of truth in it that I'm going to go explore and see if it holds up.
So it's just basic, the skeptical principles about stuff.
You've got to be more skeptical with yourself before anything else.
Like I said, a lot of the gurus, they might not literally be selling something, but they're selling themselves.
They're selling their personality.
When it comes to reading the news or getting information about what's going on in the world, my thing is to point out now is if somebody is putting their face in front of it more than the information, if you're watching a video and it's just a guy talking at the camera, You're not being informed as much as you are being charmed.
So, and I don't agree with this guy's politics, but there's a video YouTuber called Renegade Cut that does a lot of breakdowns of movies, but he also gets into philosophy and stuff like that.
And he never shows his face in there.
It's just presenting information.
He presents sources and ideas and arguments, and he's not trying to charm you with anything other than the content.
So that is a good model for a heuristic to say, hey, okay, am I being charmed or am I being informed?
And that's something that's critical now because half the people out there get their information from some guy sitting there talking at a camera.
And they're like, they're getting their opinions.
And then they just go off out into the world, out into social media, and they regurgitate what they've heard of some lesser variation of it.
And then we just have a bunch of noise rather than signal.
We have a lot less discourse.
We just have just battling, like...
Meme content and we got to get past that.
We got to try and suss out the arguments, the differences in what we think is true, figure out what is true, and then just base policy on facts.
So if everybody can decouple what they want to be true from what their best effort towards understanding is true, then I think we...
I already have colonies on Mars by now.
Yeah, I think that's really well said.
I've often thought that myself, which is that the biggest obstacle to getting a clear view of something is yourself and the things that you want to believe, the things that make you feel good to believe, make you feel self-righteous and confident and all the other good things that come with having these opinions.
And there's a classic psychology paper, which is called, Opinions are like possessions.
So in the sense that possessions can give you a feeling of security, can give you a feeling of status, and all of these other things that we use possessions to signal, both to give a feeling for ourselves, but also
So we have to be careful of that.
Are we believing this thing because it makes us feel good?
Or because it's in tune with reality.
So that was the first thing you said, which I really liked.
And I think the second thing you were hinting at, which is paying attention to the form in which, you know, gurus or any source of information, the form that it has.
And I think you don't need to be an expert in a particular, you know, in discipline areas, whether it's climate science or epidemiology or whatever.
But if you pay attention, you can see the form and the style that they're using to be convincing.
And I think with a little bit of practice, one can spot those red flags.
So, yeah, great.
Very DTG.
You're an honorary.
We're going to nominate you as an honorary neurometrician.
I will fight you.
I will fight you.
Be afraid.
It's very, like, classic Star Trek.
We have a pit and there's weapons thrown around.
You could take on two small monkeys, I think, before Matt.
Like, two monkeys.
Yeah, but as usual with the combat, the two men enter, one man leave.
We get to choose our weapons, and I'll choose an armored vehicle of some kind.
Good luck, Matt.
I reap your chances.
You'll be fine.
I had an idea.
We can always completely cut this out if it doesn't work.
But I enjoyed this when I asked Matt about it on the Patreon.
So from the gurus that we've covered, or gurus that we don't know, so if you haven't seen the episodes, feel free to just pick anyone that you like.
I wonder, is there anybody...
If you were forced to get dinner with one of the...
Online gurus of the modern age.
Who would you select as, like, for whatever reason, whatever your personal reason is, just which guru would you sit down to have a nice dinner with?
Oh, it would be Taleb.
That would be great.
I would fight that guy, too, because he's a beast.
I mean, that would be a scrap.
That dude, he deadlifts.
He's solid.
So yeah, that'd be great.
And I mean, I'm part-time military.
So, I'm an instructor for the military part-time, too.
So, I mean, his little charade of being a chest-thump and trying to bully people, that's not going to work on me.
That'd be hilarious.
So, I can out-bully him.
So, I'd love that.
Yeah, I think that's a good fact, because, like, James Lindsay would just be a nightmare dinner guest.
He would just want to get to the fight component, where with Khaled, it would probably be...
A conversation that at some point leads to a fight because of his character.
And I think, like you say, he would probably do reasonably well.
Like, I can imagine him...
Oh, there's a good chance he'd kick my ass, so I have no doubt.
So, I'm okay with that.
So, like, this has been very entertaining and informative as well.
Like, I always...
Forget to do this bit whenever we do the interview.
So I will say that we have the Decoding the Guru's Podcast.
Yeah, we have the accounts, which are on Twitter, R4CDent, Matt's pseudonym, IMC Undersore Kavanaugh, and the account for the actual show is Guru's Pod on Twitter.
And we have an email.
Decodingthegurus@gmail.com.
And this episode will probably come out after the candy one.
We haven't...
Oh, no, we haven't.
The next guru is Gwyneth Paltrow.
Don't fight her, Frost, please.
There's no need.
But you can find Frost at Frost, P-H-R-O-S-T, on Twitter.
And also check out his website, ghoulshido.net.
And if there's any other links...
And the podcast.
Yeah, any other links you want to share there, Frost, we will put them in the show notes.
And thanks very much for coming on.
The other thing I forgot to mention was that the podcast that you have, Frost, I've been listening to it, and I can't remember the name of your co-host, but you have, like, he's a researcher, right, with knowledge about viruses and vaccines,
like genuine knowledge.
Oh, yeah, that we have Dr. Jason Goldsmith on.
He's an MD, PhD immunologist.
Yeah, we have him on regularly.
So there's a lot of the staff that host it.
So we kind of interchange.
We've got an attorney on the staff that does it, Derek Devis.
And so we have a rotating cast of hosts.
But yeah, Jason's fantastic.
And he has been all over this.
He called 300,000 deaths by the end of the year.
He said eventually it's going to be over half a million.
So the guy, he shouldn't be proud of the fact that he got it right.
Yay.
The contrast for me is I think I listened to Brett and Heller who, like you said, what did they discuss?
They mainly discussed the coronavirus and culture war topics.
And then I listened to them talk about the vaccines and then your podcast in one occasion that was like on my...
And the level of the gap in expertise and relevant knowledge, it's hard to over-exaggerate just the night and day distinction that was there and the amount of caveats and stuff that were genuinely inserted.
So I just want to say that you've covered it already, but for people who might have an interest not just in the martial arts.
Side of things, but combating bullshit and useful information about the coronavirus, your podcast has been great.
So I heartily recommend it to the listeners.
Thanks a lot for coming on.
And yeah, the usual difficulties with signing off are there.
So you can say bye bye.
Okay, so first we always say really strange bye-bye.
I actually changed it to you should grovel at the feet of your muscle master, which seems, yeah, that's it.
There is a reason for it.
But anyway, I'll leave it at that.
Feeling comfortable now, Frost?
Yeah, my hand's moving through the log out button.
