In the second instalment of the personal gurus season we take a look at Matt's childhood science guru: the famed astronomer and science communicator Carl Sagan. Sagan's regarded as an intellectual hero amongst skeptics and supporters of science but is the admiration warranted or is this a halo effect enhanced by youthful innocence and the distorting mists of time? Was Matt's first science crush justified? Is Carl as 'right on' as popular sentiment suggests? Join us as we struggle to peer into the vast abyss, stare deep into the heart of the guru constellation, and uncover the truth. It's time to take a long hard look at a small sliver of our demon haunted, pale blue dot. Along the way we address the burning issues including: whether Carl Sagan is actually a woke cuck, how Chris feels about chimpanzees in lipstick, if humility might actually be a good thing, and whether the universe was actually created for rocks.So join us as we return to a simpler time, when scientists wore turtleneck sweaters, ill advised tweets were not yet possible, and gurus were REAL gurus.Also featured in this week's episode: Weinstein Watch, Viewer Feedback, the Next Guru Announcement, and an illustration of how to provide an even tempered & measured response to critical feedback.LinksCarl Sagan's 1994 'lost' lecture: The Age of ExplorationSagan's Final Interview with Charlie Rose
It's the podcast where an anthropologist and a psychologist listen to the greatest minds the world has to offer and we try best to understand what they're talking about.
I'm Professor Matt Brown and with me is my perennial bridge over troubled waters, the Simon to my Garfunkel Associate Professor Chris Kavanagh.
Hi Chris.
Well, hello.
I thought you were going to repeat yourself in your old age and do the same...
Introduction that you've done before, but no, you didn't.
You proved it out at the last minute.
It was a curveball.
So congratulations, Matt.
You're not going to see that just yet.
This is the objective for every episode, just to throw you a curveball and see how you react.
And you don't have a comeback for that one, do you?
I never get what any of those...
You know, you don't get the grovel to your muscle master.
I don't get your 70s and 60s references.
I just assume that it's all complimentary and accurate.
It's pretty complimentary in this case.
You've never heard of Simon and Garfunkel.
What's wrong with you?
Okay, I know them.
Yeah, they do that song, The Sound of Silence, right?
That's them.
Yeah, that's them.
That's them.
So, Matt, our favourite two intellectuals of the modern era, the Weinstein brothers, I believe they've been out in force.
We know that Mr. Brett has been out with Heller trying to convince everyone to kill themselves by taking ivermectin instead of vaccines.
That's his general thing at the minute.
That's what he's generally up to.
That's his kind of default mode.
We were considering doing an emergency release episode to cover some of his anti-vaccine stuff.
But I think something has happened today.
So, Brett Weinstein, of course, has been heavily promoting ivermectin as the silver bullet, the miracle cure, and a far better alternative to fix that old COVID than the vaccines.
And he's been relying heavily on some meta-analyses, at least one of which was done by what seems like...
Tess Lawrence.
Yes, Tess Lawrence, who is an activist.
I think her credentials are real, but she is a dubious figure promoting hydroxychloroquine and the various cocktail of drugs.
That's what I mean to say.
Her associations, shall we say, are a bit dubious.
I don't think she's just a pure disinterested actor, shall we say.
No.
So there's a bit of a fly in that ointment in the last couple of days because one of the largest studies that supposedly found strong benefits for the use of ivermectin has been what seems to be totally discredited and retracted from the journal in question.
So I was interested to see how Brett would respond to this.
With scientific rigor, Matt.
You know, Brett isn't emotionally invested in these kind of things.
He's just following the evidence.
So I'm sure that he will respond in a very scientifically informed and critically minded way, right?
For sure, for sure.
So I'll just read that out.
Those who argue that large-scale randomized control trials are the only reliable evidence in evidence-based medicine have misled you.
Now you can see why.
Large RCTs amplify systematic error in addition to signal, whereas meta-analyses amplify signal and corrects for error.
Now, there's so many things wrong with this, Chris, but probably the first thing I could say about this tweet is that it is impressive the way he's attempted to judo flip this finding because this particular large-scale study was the only One,
really, I think.
And it was adding a great deal of weight to these meta-analyses that he was relying on.
All the rest were very small ends and had many problems.
Now it turns out that this one has massive problems, if not complete fraud going on.
And he's judo-flipped it into illustrating how he was right all along.
It's amazing.
That's shocking.
I'm shocked.
That he would do that.
That's so out of character for Brett that it's stunning to me, Matt, that he would even say that.
Yeah, that is, like, no, it isn't.
That's completely characteristic of Brett.
And, of course, instead of, like, this attempt to flip it is so stupid as well because, like, the whole point with meta-analysis is the quality of the data that you put into meta-analysis is what comes out of a meta-analysis.
Yes, meta-analysis can correct.
To some extent, for individual bias and studies, if overall you have a smorgasbord of studies, including high-quality studies, you cannot correct for all the studies being low-quality and biased.
If you do that, you simply get a signal, which is a compilation of biased and low-quality results.
So Brett's saying that, well, it doesn't matter if individual studies are...
Terrible.
It does indeed, if that's the quality that is representative of the studies that are going in, and that's the criticism of the meta-analyses that Brett is relying on.
Pretty much all of them say the studies are low quality, even in their own conclusions that indicate that we need higher quality studies.
So yeah, of course he would do this, but it's undermining his claims.
But he can't acknowledge that.
It certainly does.
By the way, I do have something funny to tell you related to this.
So, on the Joe Rogan subreddit, there's a post up that says, Amazon reviews of horse ivermectin suggest Brett Weinstein's followers are self-dosing with apple-flavoured ivermectin horse paste.
It's a kind of collage of these reviews for horse-pierced, which is saying things like, do not trust our crooked medical system.
All viruses are parasites and this kills them within 36 hours after a single dose.
I'm not taking an experimental vaccine that is not FDA approved.
And so on.
So it seems...
Just generally, due to promotion of ivermectin, people are taking ivermectin-infused PS4 horses.
Oh, God.
I had a joke tweet, I think, a while ago, which was like, I wonder if Brett told his audience to eat dog food.
Would some of them do it?
Would they?
If he really made the case for it, could he convince people to eat dog food?
I think that's what the kids say.
Maybe.
Maybe.
Great.
It's going to be interesting to see how this plays out because if it follows the same path as hydroxychloroquine, whatever, which once it's been discredited, public sentiment flips pretty quickly.
And he's totally hung his hat on this.
And, you know, he's sticking to his guns, obviously, with that tweet that I ran out.
And I can see him sticking to his guns and writing it.
All the way to the bitter end.
It's hard to see an exit strategy for him here, assuming, of course, that ivermectin, the evidence continues to stack up.
Actually, I was anticipating that he would start to hedge, but he's not.
So, at least credit to him there that he's riding this right into the ground.
I think the reason for that, Chris, is related to what we were talking about before, which is that...
The Achilles heel of many of these characters is their overconfidence.
Like he's not pretending, he's not grifting in a conscious way.
He is absolutely convinced of his rightness and he finds it inconceivable that he might be wrong about that.
So I don't think it would occur to him to hedge and pull back because he's convinced himself.
So this is the narcissism at play, I think.
That's true.
And speaking of narcissists, the other...
Weinstein is in a good mood, although he hasn't joined his brother on the Ivermectin train.
He actually released a tweet saying, thank you for asking, but I have no comment or no opinion on the Ivermectin.
So that's hanging out poor Brett to dry.
Maybe he reads the writing on the wall there, but he is, however, feeling very vindicated today because the Rolling Stone have released an article with the headline, was Jeffrey Epstein a spy?
And this is a report about him telling various people that he had connections to intelligence agencies and so on.
It's not a great article.
But of course, famously, Eric claimed that Jeffrey Epstein was a construct of the Israeli intelligence agency, played by a series of actors.
Or at least the man himself was not Jeffrey Epstein.
That was a character created.
So, Eric is taking this as vindication.
An article has appeared that says something similar, so that's it.
And he doesn't just say, well, look at this, the worm has turned.
Here's the tweet I want to read for this.
I want academic freedom on this platform, Jack.
It takes too long for the normies and the press to get the truth.
Your Twitter safety just isn't good enough.
This account was taking huge risk to talk about Epstein and intelligence.
Don't ever think of frottling me again.
Oh, that's the one I saw, yeah.
That tweet has it all, hasn't it?
Don't dare frottle me!
Just imagine Jack Dorsey.
I don't know, does he get these notifications from Eric?
But like, what?
Who are you again?
That's self-importance.
It's just amazing, isn't it?
Eric thinks if his tweets don't get enough attention.
The only explanation.
Is that the head of Twitter is telling his safety team, like, we need to shut down Weinstein.
He's got his finger on the pulse, man.
Like, hit the Weinstein button.
Shadowban, shadowban.
Do whatever you can.
He's getting too close to the truth, man.
Stop him.
Stop him.
Again, you joke, but I do actually believe that's exactly what Eric's thinking.
That's what he's imagining is going on.
We've got to stop him before he unleashes wormhole technology and takes the whole damn system down.
Oh, dear.
They never fail to deliver, do they, Chris?
No, the gift that keeps on giving.
Yes, thank you, Eric.
Thank you, Brett, for another entertaining moment in Weinsteinian history.
But, so, you know, Matt, we've done a bunch of interviews recently.
We have one more that's coming up soon with Evan Thompson that we've already recorded, the scholar of Buddhism, which is an interesting chat.
But today, though, we're on to a normal episode.
A guru!
Or is he?
Where is he, Matt?
This is the second in the personal gurus sequence.
The second at last.
We had Anthony DeMello.
And this week, who do we have?
We have Carl Sagan.
My God.
My God.
It's full of stars, Chris.
It's full of stars.
Look, I think he definitely is a guru because, you know, we've talked about this before.
Our concept of gurus is encompassing.
It doesn't...
I don't necessarily imply that they're terrible people and a stain on our civilization.
He could be a good guru, he could be a bad guru, but I think it's clear that he is a guru.
He was one of these characters that really invented the role of the public intellectual scientist, probably him and people like Einstein even.
Obviously, Einstein is a fair bit more important scientifically, but they both occupied a similar sort of space in the public consciousness of that kind of scientist with a big, all-encompassing worldview with important messages to teach us.
So basically...
Are you saying, Matt, that like, not to put words in your mouth, but basically, they're like the previous generation version of you and me.
Like, we are the Einstein and Carl Sagan of the modern era.
That's what you're getting at, right?
Yeah?
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, I know you've looked up to me as something of a Sagan-esque.
Character, and I've been happy to provide that role modelling for you, Chris.
I think it's helped you.
I've often thought to myself that these conversations are very much like if Carl Sagan and Einstein had met and recorded their thoughts.
This is the kind of thing that they would have produced, no?
They would have, yeah.
Probably more successfully.
I don't know if we've quite got the knack of the natural self-promotional ooze that...
Modern Fest from the IDW folk, but it was a good go.
In any case, Chris, I will say that Carl Sagan is definitely a guru, but it remains to be seen whether or not he's a good guru or a bad guru.
Yeah, there's a big question there.
Is he terrible or is he not?
It's very hard.
And people will have to wait and find out what our take is.
But the suspense must be killing them.
Chris, Chris.
Okay, I see.
I got the...
I was genuine, Matt.
The sledgehammer sarcasm, I perceived it.
You caught that.
I caught that, yeah.
But I also know...
What a critical son of a bitch you are.
And how even someone who is, you know, generally quite good, you have the knack of finding inconsistencies, problems with them.
Often they don't turn out to be quite as good as they might appear.
I'm looking at you, Rutger Bregman.
Yeah, Rutger Bregman.
Well, yeah, to spoil that surprise, I will say I really like this and I can't help but feel that In looking at Anthony DeMello and Carl Sagan, that it's given me an appreciation,
even with Anthony DeMello's issues, which were there, that we discussed, and maybe some of the things that we'll get to with Carl Sagan, it just feels like we're somewhat lacking figures like this in the current discourse.
And of course, there's a bit of looking back with rose-tinted glasses, but...
This talk that we'll get into, there's so much in it that's valuable.
There's so much humility in his presentation that it's just so rare in the gurus that we look at that it's hard not to think that there was a better class of gurus maybe just one generation ago.
That's all.
Yeah, and I think it's even more...
Remarkable when, you know, you keep in mind how long ago this was.
So we're looking at a talk that he gave in 1992, I think.
But, of course, he came on the scene in the early 70s, I think.
And that was a fair time ago.
So he could have been pretty great for the time, but I wouldn't have been at all surprised to sort of look back and find that some of his takes didn't age too well and it might not look quite so great to contemporary eyes.
We will see whether that's the case, won't we?
We will.
And so, just in case people want to find it, it's Carl Sagan 1994 Lost Lecture, The Age of Exploration, which you can watch on YouTube.
It's like an hour and a half long.
And it's worth checking out.
So, Matt, since this is your guru, I'll let you lead us.
Where shall we go forth, Macduff?
Let's start with...
A little bit of a statement by Carl about inspiration, I think.
We today living in polluted, underpolluted skies and in cities with light pollution have mainly forgotten how gorgeous the night sky can be.
It is not only an aesthetic experience, but it elicits unbidden feelings of reverence and awe.
Secondly, People made up stories about the stars.
They invented the Rorschach tests up there, follow the dots, constellations, look like a bear to you, Og.
Yes, I guess it does.
And then forced their children to memorize these absolutely arbitrary patterns.
I don't see the bear's tail, Dad, shut up.
So just in case anybody doesn't know, like Carl Sagan was an astronomer.
Amongst many other things: cosmologist, astrophysicist, and popular science communicator.
So this talk has themes related to astronomy and science and so on.
And he was not just a science communicator, though, but legitimately a well-published, well-referenced scientist, heavily involved in promoting the search for extraterrestrial.
The SETI initiative.
So all of that we probably should have said at the start, but that clip probably highlighted his interests in that kind of thing.
Absolutely.
I mean, Carl Sagan's best known for being a science popularizer, the Cosmos TV series and book.
He wrote a number of popular science books, but he was also a well-published astronomer and had a very respectable academic career.
Before that, he wasn't.
Albert Einstein, of course.
But it was more like a Richard Dawkins, who was a proper evolutionary biologist and so on, and then went into focusing on popular writings.
He was, as he said, heavily involved in promoting SETI and also was part of scientific advisory panels advising on, for instance, the dangers of nuclear war and nuclear winter in particular.
And basically did a whole bunch of things and was awarded...
A whole bunch of awards and medals and got a great deal of cultural recognition during his lifetime and sadly died a little bit prematurely in 1996.
So his career, starting from the 70s until almost 2000, spanned kind of my entire young life and I became aware of him when I was a kid and saw things like Cosmos and eventually ended up reading books like The Dragons of Eden and so on.
To be honest, I kind of forgot about him for many years, but I've just always had that sentimental attachment, but couldn't remember the details, so I sort of remembered him from a much younger self, and so I wasn't at all sure coming back to him now whether or not I'd still like him just as much.
Yeah, and so that clip talking about looking at the stars and people identifying constellations and projecting stories onto them, it fits in with a general discussion he has about How looking at the past,
the mistakes that we as a species made in reasoning about our world were entirely reasonable and in many respects are intuitive to the way that we still think and that we shouldn't look back at the people in history as that they are unsophisticated,
uncivilized brutes and we are their kind of genius.
Offspring, but rather that we are them, but for science and technology, right?
Yeah.
I think he is a guru because even though probably 90% of his material is pure science education, he certainly does weave that into his worldview, how to understand ourselves,
how to understand...
Humanity and what we should be doing and diverse topics like how we should be treating animals and nationalism and so on.
I just want to say for the audience that we'll, of course, be focusing on his takes which are kind of more connected to that big picture stuff because we're not going to cover his stuff about stars and nebulas and the Big Bang because even though that stuff is awesome, there's nothing much for us to say about that.
We're sort of looking at that 10%.
Yeah, yeah.
I will say, Matt, that we'll do the Garometer.
episode after where we look at like how he fits into our schema but there are obvious elements where he does fit like you say he has takes on a variety of topics like not just spanning within his area of expertise but I think that in many other ways he doesn't fit In terms of a lot of the characteristics that we see,
we would normally identify in the gurus that we look at.
But we'll see that as we go on.
So I don't think we need to be defensive about covering him because he's an influential guy.
And if he scores low on our grometer, that's all right.
We need variation, Matt.
We're scientists.
We need deviation to calibrate the instrument precisely.
We need somebody to throw Eric Weinstein into sharp relief.
Exactly.
So let's continue and hear him outline one of these kind of big picture talking points that you mentioned.
We humans have had civilization only for about 10,000 years.
Our species is a few hundred thousand years old.
Our genus, the genus Homo, It's a few million years old, and therefore, for the vast bulk of our tenure on Earth, we were something other than sedentary,
and the word has such an aura of self-congratulation, civilized.
What were we?
We were hunters and foragers.
By the way, I just want to say I enjoyed that disdainful, what are we, so self-congratulatory civilized.
That was good.
I'd like that too.
That stood out to me.
And that fits with his theme too because I think it's not insignificant that his first example when talking about humanity was not some...
European Enlightenment figure or something like that.
He was talking about the amazing technological achievements in the broadest sense of hunter-gatherer tribes.
It definitely speaks to his...
When he talks about technology and science and even civilisation, even though he's being a bit dismissive there, he's talking about it in a really all-encompassing way that encompasses everybody.
And you can hear how impressed he is with the achievements of human beings to be able to survive and prosper in these natural environments without all of the whiz-bang technology.
Yeah, there's another clip, I think, which speaks to that and which I appreciated not just because he praises anthropology in it, which is always good, but more because in doing so, he illustrates that he is not a rigid Reductionist,
you know, scientific chauvinist in a sense.
Like, it doesn't come across in the same way as Neil deGrasse Tyson and Richard Dawkins do sometimes, that they think the humanities are all just dancing around writing nonsense and fairy tales for idiots.
He respects, at least, anthropologists, and it comes across quite nicely in this clip.
Our knowledge of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle is due to a few...
Courageous and far-seeing anthropologists who went and lived with the few remaining hunter-gatherer groups before they were finally and utterly destroyed by civilization.
The anthropologist from whom I learned the most about hunter-gatherers is actually here with us, Richard Lee of the University of Toronto.
I don't think he's exactly correct that all hunter galleries were completely decimated, but it is true to say that in the majority of cases their lifestyles have been hugely affected by the encroachment of surrounding society.
So yeah, after introducing that there are valuable insights to begin from anthropologists looking at hunter gallery ways of life, he then talks about tools.
The first thing that I think is very important is that they are highly technological.
The technology is wood and stone and domestication of fire technology, but it's absolutely technology.
And there are experts and other people who are not quite as good at the technology.
But not only are they technological for fun, They are technological because their lives depend upon it.
And the archaeological and anthropological record is clear that we were technologists all the way back to the beginning.
So the idea that science and technology is something new, something unusual, something we can even find books that say not.
really very human is completely backwards.
Technology is, if anything, the most characteristically human
Yeah, so I thought it was really telling that he chose to lead his lecture not with stuff about stars and Galileo or what have you,
but rather with this discussion of hunter-gatherer groups.
And one time that I was feeling exactly the same thing is when I did a seven-day hike in a place called Carnarvon Gorge in the outback of Australia, about 600 kilometres west of Rockhampton in Queensland.
It's an amazing country.
It's this gorge.
It's a very rugged, harsh country.
It's just hundreds of kilometres from everywhere.
In some places, it looks like the surface of the moon when you're actually driving to this place, even though it does get quite lush inside the gorge.
And there are lots of artefacts of Aboriginal activity there.
And we know that it was a place that Indigenous groups often visited and travelled to and met there and so on.
Now, we just spent seven days hiking and we had these high-tech tents and we had...
Plastic bottles to keep our water and dehydrated food and all sorts of types of assistance to us.
But even so, it was hard, you know, going 100 kilometers for us soft, civilized folks.
And it really brings home to you what a challenge it is for a human being to survive out there.
And without any of those assistances and luxuries and safeguards and so on that we had, we would just play acting.
The Indigenous people who actually lived there and travelled there did it, and they did it with what Sagan would rightly call technology and science.
You had to know an awful lot.
You had to have an incredible degree of skill to be able to...
Locate water, locate food, locate shelter, be able to create tools and things that you needed to survive.
You can't just buy it at the hiking shop.
So I'm probably not explaining that well, but I just think Carl Sagan's view there, where he does see a continuity between the kinds of technologies and the kinds of understanding of the physical world that, inverted commas, primitive hunter-gatherer groups had to have.
It's quite right to draw that continuity to civilised, again using air quotes, civilisations later on, and also, as he mentions, with non-human species as well.
Yeah, he talks a bit later about somebody trying to learn a tool technique for fishing for termites using a method that chimpanzees learn and how even after, I think it's nine months to a year, they're very bad at it compared to chimpanzees.
But also they need to apprentice at it.
It's similar to when you see stone tools and they're Presented in media and whatnot was, oh, you just stick a sharp thing onto the edge of a stick and there you have a spear.
But the reality is, like, to make lithic weapons or lithic hunting tools took hours and hours of chipping effort.
And there's anthropologists and various archaeologists, I think, have tried to reconstruct the processes involved.
And they're massively complicated and time-consuming.
So it's a really good start for this kind of lecture to highlight the continuity of technological achievement in humanity as a whole, and not just focus on the purely modern era,
or like you say, Enlightenment Europeans, as that's the beginning of when technological development began.
So that's quite a nice...
Corrective, I feel, from a lot of the narratives that we tend to hear now, where there is presented as essentially a bleak and horrific past until the modern era begins.
And at the same time, he doesn't seem to fall so much into the trap of Richter Bregman of romanticizing the people.
In the past, because later he talks about superstitions and so on.
But it's more that he simply is giving credit where it's due.
Even what looks to us unsophisticated technology is the product of a lot of effort and a lot of human intelligence.
So that's a good message.
Yeah, it's a great message.
I guess it feels particularly refreshing today where we seem to be falling into these two camps, one of which is sceptical of reductionism and positivism, the humanities and the left side of progressive politics.
And then you have the science boosters who, as you said, Richard Dawkins, who question the value of literature.
An anthropologist in particular.
Yeah, so it's like Carl Sagan, I don't know whether it's just a sign of the times or if it's him in particular, but it just seems refreshing to not be a part of that dichotomy.
Yeah, and I will also say this isn't like a defence of anthropologists.
There's plenty of terrible anthropologists out there and there's plenty of waffle in the anthropology discipline.
But it is just this willingness to acknowledge insight from...
Other quarters, which is refreshing.
So one of the themes, I think, throughout the lecture, explicitly, is the need for humility.
And this is a, I mean, it's something that is catnip, I think, to me and you, which is possibly why we enjoyed this discussion so much, because...
The core message is don't be so proud of yourself and of what we've achieved.
As individuals or kind of groups.
As humanity, that's maybe a different story.
Yeah, actually, I think it gets to that because, you know, there's a certain element of it about erasing the distinctions between races and ethnicities and nationalities, which might not be so in vogue.
Today amongst some certain progressive spheres.
But before we get to that, let's begin with him talking about humans and the perception of themselves as uniquely important.
Now having said that, I want to turn to the important and rueful fact.
That every human culture has considered itself at the center of the universe.
What's this about?
Well, I think it's very straightforward.
Back then in hunter and forager times, many modes of modern nocturnal entertainment were unavailable.
Some were available, but many were not.
Television was not available.
Nocturnal entertainment, Matt.
Something you would know all about.
But I think that's a good illustration of the point that we just raised, that he isn't romanticizing, right?
He's highlighting an issue for all societies that we know about in pre-modern history as well, like expanding into modernity, that they consider themselves the center of the...
and potentially the universe.
And he wants to argue against that, right?
So like I say, not a naive view about the divine state of pre-modern humans.
We're all kind of wallowing in undeserved sense of superstition.
Is it the Inuit had a word for themselves?
They described themselves as the real people?
Not that there was anything especially parochial about them, as you said.
Everybody at all times has been like this, but it's just indicative that pretty much any culture has had a concept of themselves as the centre, and as strangers and far-off places are considered at the outside.
I mean, we have, like, the name for China is the Middle Kingdom, and the kanji is middle and country, so they're suggesting quite clearly where the location of China is.
But like you said, that's what every...
And he does a segment talking about how every culture tends to put themselves at the center of the map.
And to people not from that culture, it seems weird.
Like why are those people at the center when we are clearly the ones at the center?
And it's a nice point to make.
And it leads on to this point about the way that we view nature.
Not only did every culture draw this conclusion, but I think it's clear.
That our ancestors took enormous personal satisfaction in it.
Because think about it.
We are at the center of the universe.
The center of the universe is surely an important place.
Not only that, what other animals, what plants, make use of the apparent motion of the stars?
Only us.
Therefore, the stars have been put there for our life.
Yeah, so I think here he's referring a little bit to what's a common theme in a lot of religious teachings, which is that people were created by God and everything else was created by God too, but we're special and everything else from the stars to the moon,
the sun and all the animals and plants have been put there for our benefit.
Sagan's obviously someone who loves looking at the stars and thinks that's a wonderful activity, but he, as we'll get into, feels we should absolutely not think that we have any privileged perspective on that.
Yeah, and so the next clip is talking about how applying naive reasoning can lead us astray, which I feel is...
Especially relevant given the current pandemic and the various responses to that.
But this in particular bleeds into flat-earthism, which I'm sure Satan would be disappointed, but not surprised, to find is still around today.
Now the most superficial examination of the sky shows the stars are rising in the east.
Some of them pass directly overhead, and some of them pass on small circles close to the horizon.
But they all rise in the east, they all set in the west.
And then, in the daytime, they do something else.
They somehow go around the bottom of the earth that none of us has ever seen.
It's flat as a board, of course.
And then the next morning, they come up again in the east.
Now, there's absolutely no doubt From this fact that the stars, the planets, the sun and the moon all go around us and we're obviously not moving, that we are at the centre of the universe.
It's an observed fact.
Anybody who denies that, there's something wrong with them.
One of the things that's always nice about Carl Sagan is, I guess, the tone.
So he's very interested, of course, in the history of science and definitely thinks of...
The discovery of the heliocentric kind of model and so on as a really perfect example of scientific progress.
But he never ridicules or is dismissive of people back at the time when they were wrong about that.
And here he's emphasising, of course, that it's a perfectly intuitive and easy or logical mistake to make to think that the world is flat and that everything you see in the sky does go around us because that's what it looks like.
It actually takes a fair bit of effort, a fair bit of careful observation and a fair bit of careful thinking to dismiss that explanation.
So he doesn't go for what could be an easy kind of narrative there, which was...
Blaming, oh, it was the repressive religious authorities that are to blame, or it was these stupid people that hadn't learned about science yet.
I think his message here is very charitable, and it's appreciating that it's a long, hard journey to develop a scientific understanding of the world.
Yeah, and I appreciate that, like you say, that charity.
That he extends back and kind of makes clear that us, including him, in a different setting, would be the kind of people that were thinking like that.
So that's the message, is that don't look back on the previous eras as these kind of primitive-minded people, but recognize that when people are misled by what's around them in the world,
it's not always...
And I think in some way this speaks to the counterintuitive nature of a lot of scientific findings and why it's understandable that people are reticent to get vaccinated, right?
Because they feel there's something about an essence being violated, right?
Or that it's not natural and why people are hesitant about GMO food.
There's a lot of things where there's reasoning.
Which fits well with our evolved psychology, but which is ill-equipped to deal with the scientific realities.
And we shouldn't ignore that, basically, when we're looking at, you know, why people do what they do.
It's not that people have to be misled.
It's in many ways intuitive to mislead ourselves.
Yeah, that's right.
And, you know, it fits with his theme of humility here, which is not to be contemptuous.
And this is probably a lesson.
I should probably try to absorb, which is not to be contemptuous of being wrong about things and to remember that it's really just luck that we find ourselves at a particular time and place where we have even the chance to inform ourselves a little bit better than our ancestors did because they were doing the best they could with what they had available and that's as true of a hunter-gatherer.
with their own conception of the world.
It's as true of them as it is of a religious scholar in Europe who was absolutely certain about Earth being the
Yeah, and I will add to that, Matt, just to rescue my own vindictive nature, that while I agree we should reserve our vitriol for the previous generations to some extent, given the different circumstances, I think it's perfectly legitimate to take To task the people in the modern era who have had scientific education,
who do have access to information and the ability to spend some days, do proper research on topics, but yet constantly default to intuition or conspiratorial thinking,
like certain brothers that we may...
No, right?
I think in some sense that when people are claiming the mantle of scientific thinking and approach and essentially doing the opposite, as Carl Sagan went on to do in a lot of his work,
calling out pseudoscience and superstition, that it's reasonable to do that, but you can still do it with charity.
You can understand the pitfalls that people have, but it doesn't mean you shouldn't be critical of what people are doing.
You can just do it with empathy that, you know, it's understandable that people would find those kind of things intuitive.
Yeah, for sure.
So let's get back, Matt, to how humans like us are chauvinist monsters.
And we really...
Need to be put in our place about our relative unimportance to the galaxy.
And they're saying, we're at the center.
We're important.
We're special.
Everything goes around us.
There's a resonance here.
A resonance between that and our emotional hopes and needs.
The idea that the universe is made for us.
not because of any particular merit of ours, but just because we're here, or just because we're human.
you
To me, this seems to resonate with the same psychic wellsprings responsible for the view that our nation is special and the center of the universe, which, by the way, is the literal meaning of the Middle Kingdom for centuries applied by the Chinese to China.
And even those who haven't made it that explicit, nationalists of all stripes.
You can see it, by the way, in the maps, how often each nation has itself at the center of the map.
Now, it's probably important to remember that this hook is given in 1992, which was a fair while before the current climate where...
It's extremely in vogue to be talking about Eurocentrism and colonialism and so on.
And he's speaking to an audience of Americans, of course, at that time in the full swing of relishing their role as a global superpower and at the very centre of the world.
And he's, I guess, reminding his audience in quite a gentle way that that kind of thinking is inherently broken.
Yeah.
I think he becomes even more explicit about how far he extends that notion in this other clip, which follows on from that point that he was just making.
And the same psychic wellsprings that say that our
or our particular melanin content in the skin or a particular language or headdress or...
Clothing styles or convention of pulling out the handkerchief when we sneeze or anything is important and central and all those alternative ways of being human are somehow less central,
less important, less worthy than we are.
We have a weakness and scientists are creatures of the culture in which they Swim, in which they have grown up, and so we also are vulnerable to this siren song,
which we can call chauvinism, or geocentrism, or anthropocentrism.
Yeah, right on, Carl.
I really like that because there's a bunch of stuff that he combines, which are, I think, quite intuitively combined, but maybe not so commonly that you hear together in the current climate.
So, first of all, towards the end of the clip, he highlights the...
Social nature of science and that scientists are also subject to biases and prejudices and that we should be aware that they swim in the culture that they are working in.
And that's a very, I think, by folks in the culture war be seen as a very post-modern neo-Marxist point of view.
But he's not saying that to undermine science.
He's saying it, in fact, to...
Argue that we need to be more objective or strive to be more objective by recognizing that fact.
And in the same way, you could read the first part as a fairly strong criticism of identity politics, arguing that ethnicity, gender, nationality are not these super important indicators that we should attach such meaning to.
We shouldn't seek to elevate or denigrate people above any others.
And gives the example of sneezing as just a convention.
So why would we be proud of that?
And I see a lot of appeal to that message.
I get that there's a criticism of that, that there's a naivety.
That we can abandon those things given the societies that are set up the way they are.
But I don't get from his talk that he's unaware of structures of discrimination or history.
He's just making an appeal that we should develop a pan-human sense of connection and respect.
And that this is really the only future that we can strive for in the long term that makes...
And, like, I don't see a naivety in that.
I just see something that's worth aiming for, even if it's not immediately achievable.
Yeah, the thing that makes Carl Sagan a little bit remarkable in this day and age is that he is, as you say, putting forward a super progressive and even somewhat what would be called today woke point of view.
But he bases it on this Very scientific, materialistic, positivist, reductionist even worldview.
And that's what's so weird because today those things have been put in opposition.
And I guess that's where he really rings my bell, I suppose, because this is just my personal opinion, which I want to distinguish from analysis.
But I feel like he's right.
I feel that if you do have a good, accurate view of the world and you take to heart, The sort of stuff that he's talking about, which is that humans are not special.
We weren't put here by God.
We don't live in the Middle Kingdom or in a country like the United States with a manifest destiny.
And no one group of people has any special privileges over another.
A lot of good social and political views flow from this very humble...
Scientific worldview that he's laying out.
So, yeah, what can I say?
I like it.
I like it.
Yeah, he's a guru promoting humility and including in himself and the scientific community.
And so, let's just hear him one more time.
Chastise us for our chauvinism.
So, my masochistic streak in action.
Tell me, Carl, what we're doing wrong.
No, we're not at the center.
No, we're not important.
And to my mind, many of the key findings of science, much of the modern scientific perspective, evolves from the base with that character.
That point, echoing the message that you just highlighted, he also criticizes the religious message that we see ourselves as stewards of the environment.
No.
Even though he is a guy that was very pro-environment, he says this: We've been put here by the Creator to take care of things.
Stewardship is the very engaging word that is often used.
Who knows what would happen to the environment without us?
So, we have an obligation.
To make sure everything goes as God would have wished it.
I mean, we're probably overstating this point, but what really works for me is that message of not taking ourselves too seriously.
And it puts him in contrast to all of the other gurus, basically, who just take themselves extraordinarily seriously.
And when they want to flatter their audience, they tell their audience that you are part of this special community that is going to save the world.
I remember when I tweeted something that annoyed James Lindsay.
I think I'd criticised him because he was attacking some male model for wearing a dress or something in a photo shoot, and I dug on him a bit.
And his response to me, which was, in his mind, the worst put-down he could imagine, which was this, that you're irrelevant.
That was his put-down to me.
And it didn't work because I completely agree with that.
And I find that somewhat comforting even, you know.
I think a normal, healthy person has the worldview of Carl Sagan and doesn't have the worldview of one of our gurus in which they are at the centre, in which the entire world depends on their amazing insights and that we're on the brink of some revelations if only people listen to them more.
I see in general, in just so many ways, that humility and recognizing limitations are an important thing and something which is undervalued in the current ecosystem that we live in,
especially on social media, where everybody is a content creator.
Everybody is putting forward themselves as somebody with something special.
And I think the message that, you know, even if you have...
Specific skills, even if you're proud of what you've achieved and all, that's fine.
But you have to have like a degree of perspective about it.
And like, to give an example, Matt, I think, you know, people that need to tell you how many books they've read or how many lectures they've listened to or that kind of thing, these are not usually the people that it's...
Evident that that's true, right?
Like Carl Sagan doesn't say during this talk, I've read 200 books on astronomy and I have 600 papers published, right?
But Jordan Peterson, when he's talking about global warming, will say, no, I read 200 books on global warming and yet he will get basic science wrong and he'll make claims about how many hundreds of hours he's devoted on topics and then display that he hasn't read.
The Communist Manifesto or something like that, despite focusing for hours about the problems with Marx.
So, I mean, I'm basically evangelizing for humility and self-deprecation.
I'm putting my culture as the one that the world should emulate.
I don't think that's true.
Like, Northern Ireland is fucked, but, you know, I'm just making a joke.
But I just fundamentally endorse his message.
That's what I'm saying, Matt.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, look, I think these are good puristics for spotting good gurus and bad gurus because you'll never see Carl Sagan claiming to have personally revolutionized our understanding of astrology or anything else.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, he is charismatic.
Yeah.
He's mellifluous.
He's got the gift of the gab.
He had a kind of celebrity which your modern-day gurus would dream of, right?
Yeah.
And yet, he didn't do that.
Albert Einstein's another person who could have easily...
He slipped into self-grandiosity, I think, and said, oh, you should listen to me with my opinions about everything because, look, general relativity, hello.
Are you sure he didn't?
I don't know enough about Einstein.
I'm not 100%.
Look, let's cover Albert Einstein one of these days.
My gut feeling is he doesn't.
But, okay, let's put aside Albert Einstein.
I'll stick to Carl Sagan.
And, you know, he doesn't do that.
Whereas these pretend gurus really do.
They spend so much time attempting to convince you in a hundred different ways of their amazing insights.
Whereas when I have consumed Carl Sagan's content, when you watch Cosmos, for instance, or you listen to any of his lectures, he's not doing like little references to his own insight for this or his own study on that or how he's got this fresh new take about black
holes, whatever.
What he's doing is he's doing public education of science.
He's not taking the credit for himself.
He's acting as the handmaiden or the
The servant to a community which is much, much bigger than he is.
At least that's the feeling I get from listening to him.
Yeah, I agree.
And so, Matt, we'll get off the humility point, but there's one final clip which you prepared, which I thought was very nice.
And it's kind of talking about the golden barriers that we've erected between humans and other species and how we shouldn't be doing that.
There are people who find it very upsetting.
Who still long to be at the center.
And one area where you can see the emotions not hidden but written out in clear is in special creation.
The notion that we are the particular Objects of the devotion of the creator of the universe, that we're different from the other animals, never mind plants, not just in degree but in kind.
And you know the list.
No one else has altruism, compassion.
No other animal loves their young.
Nobody else can foresee the future consequences of present actions.
Nobody else has art or music.
Nobody else can use tools.
Nobody else can make tools.
And this list, it goes on and on.
He is making this point, you know, 20 plus years ago, that many of these have been shown either to be Not true, for example, make tool use and manufacturing, but or to be a different in degree rather than kind,
like Franz De Waal's work arguing about morality and the development of fairness, perception and primates and so on.
So this is not to say there aren't elements within human society which are exceptional.
And how they've developed.
But I think the message that, as exceptional as we are amongst animals, we are fundamentally of the same kind of thing.
And it's a quirk of evolutionary history that we ended up the dominant species on the planet.
And a quirk of cultural history, too, that we ended up being so dominant, I suppose.
Yeah, in both directions, right?
The genetic and the cultural dual inheritance model, if you will.
I know that you can actually, there are people who will push back and kind of highlight the level of cumulative culture, for example, that humans have is something which marks us out and so on.
And you can, like the thing is, you can focus in that perspective, but I don't think that Sagan's message is that you should never do that.
It's just that you should do it with a sense of humility about not viewing humans as this completely separate entity from the natural world that reigns over supreme.
But no, we are just a product of it.
I see it as him challenging the idea that there's a special essence.
So, in the same way that he emphasises how, in terms of our astronomical location, we're not at the centre of any universe, in the same way as before he was emphasising that you shouldn't think that your group, whether you're Inuit or Chinese or American or European,
has some special essence that marks you out as separate and distinctive.
The same is true for the human species.
And other animals.
We don't have a special essence.
And I think that's what you are saying and him.
All right.
So we were humbled ourselves enough.
Now we've evangelized the gospel of self-deprecation with St. Paul.
So what's next to look at with Mr. Sagan?
What next?
What next?
That is a good question.
Let's hear about Sagan's idea of self-worth.
And the role that luck plays in our lives, hey?
That sounds riveting.
Okay, here we go.
Dr. Wing asked, what further demotions, humiliations do I foresee for us?
You see, the idea that our sense of self-worth comes not from anything That we've done, not from anything worthy, but by an accident of birth,
is where the crux of the humiliation is, in my opinion.
I would say those of us worried about being demoted, those of us who wish for us to be important, Should do something important.
We should make an easily understandable, achievable, and inspiring goal for the human species and then set out and do it.
That would give us the confidence that we sorely lack by being dependent on our self-esteem being based on nothing we do.
We want to have self-esteem?
Let's make a planet in which nobody is starving.
Let's make a planet in which men and women have equal access to power.
Let us make a planet in which no ethnic group has it over another ethnic group.
Let's have a planet in which science and engineering is used for the benefit of everybody on the planet.
and my personal idiosyncrasy, let's have a world in which we go to other worlds.
I think I'll stop there.
Thank you.
Thank you.
I don't know that the applause was necessary from you, Matt.
The thing is that, you know, I have to say, Matt, he's just such a woke idiot.
He's obviously being indoctrinated by critical risk theory.
I'm trying to show some of our trademark cynicism and meanness.
No, I liked it.
You know, if you want to throw a bone to the Petersonites in our audience, he did kind of hint towards, you know, you do stuff, stop complaining and moaning.
And if you want to be proud of something, you've got to actually make efforts out in the world to change things.
But I think it doesn't exactly work because he's talking about...
Like, humanity as a whole and what we should be striving for.
So individual responsibility is not entirely the thing that he wants to emphasize there, right?
It's the kind of societies and the values that we should instill.
And, like, yes, just to be clear, sometimes useful for me to be clear, that was sarcasm.
I don't think he's a woke idiot.
I think that is an illustration that those kind of sentiments are not...
Exclusive to the woke social justice set, right?
Like the viewpoints here.
It sounds quite modern in a lot of respects what he's saying.
And I don't have any objection there because, you know, he's talking about a world with greater gender equality, less racism.
So, I mean, who can complain with that?
I was thinking of Star Trek, particularly The Next Generation, when he was doing that, because that's the kind of Star Trek hyper-rational but very principled, very modern sort of philosophy, which I'm all for.
I think it's great.
And the other thing I like about it, it's very optimistic.
It's forward-looking.
I like the way it's both hectoring and optimistic.
He gets to say, like, don't be so proud of yourself for just being born a human, you losers.
You've got to contribute something to the species before you get to be proud.
I think that's a sentiment that is a good reminder and probably fits in with the notion that it's all right to be proud of your Culture and so on, but you shouldn't rest on your laurels because of just the circumstances of your birth.
You didn't choose those.
I like the way this kind of thinking is big picture.
It's almost like a question a child would ask, which is, okay, this species, humanity, should we be proud of ourselves or not?
We did some cool stuff, you could argue, but from the point of view of pretty much any other species on the planet.
Like Agent Smith says in The Matrix, we're a disease, you know.
We screw everything up.
The Matrix, Mark.
It's The Matrix, yeah.
The Matrix, it's not The Matrix.
The Matrix, that's a very egotistical mispronunciation of you.
Sorry, sorry.
Yeah, as a species, we've done a lot of clever things, but most of those clever things have been done for total self-interest.
So I like the...
Star Trek Next Generation vibes, which is you have a civilizational purpose which goes beyond just feathering your own nest and making your own personal life more luxurious and comfortable.
You could potentially have other goals.
You can imagine a species having other goals.
And, you know, you could disagree or argue about what those goals should be.
Someone like Sagan would say that exploration, exploring the universe.
Plumbing the limits of science is a great and worthy goal.
But yeah, like you said, he adds to that other pretty important goals.
Like technologically, it's completely within the power of this human species to eliminate hunger and most of the diseases that are wracking the world.
But we don't.
But we could.
So, you know, I like that kind of thinking.
Maybe we should.
Maybe we should.
So, to summarise it in a pithy way, are you saying...
We live in a society.
I feel that's evergreen insight.
And speaking of evergreen insight, I have a little surprise for you, Matt, because we agreed that we'll look at this specific interview.
But in my way, I couldn't resist looking at some other seeking content.
And I came across what was billed as his last interview.
I don't know if it was or not, but it was certainly towards the end.
End of his life with Charlie Rose.
And it had some nice parts in it that I thought highlighted some important things.
So there's some amount of discussion in it about God and agnosticism and what is the appropriate boundaries of skepticism.
And I thought it's quite interesting because in some respects, Sagan had a fairly accommodating...
He was famous for publishing books, debunking pseudoscience and rank religion.
That's a terrible phrase.
Superstition?
Superstition!
Yes, that will work better.
There were these two clips where he's talking about standards of evidence and how to deal with evidence.
I thought they were good illustrations of his model of skepticism.
Here's the first one.
What is faith?
It is belief in the absence of evidence.
Now I don't propose to tell anybody what to believe, but for me, believing when there's no compelling evidence is a mistake.
The idea is to withhold belief until there is compelling evidence.
And if the universe does not comply with our predispositions, okay, then we have the wrenching obligation to accommodate to the way the universe really is.
like that, Matt, because it's just an antidote to the worldview promoted by like Russell Brand and the conspiracy-minded gurus that the universe revolves around us and our mentality and desires.
And the message there is no.
We have a duty to accommodate ourselves to what we discover about the nature of the universe, regardless of how insignificant it might make us seem.
And the contradiction with the other guru types and how they frame the kind of level of importance to attach to your own internal narratives was pretty striking to me.
Like a lot of the topics we talk about, you could describe what's wrong with a lot of them in terms of unwarranted certainty.
This unwarranted certainty that ivermectin is a miracle cure.
This unwarranted certainty that the election was stolen.
His advice there, which is that we should try to be a little bit better at withholding judgment when things really are uncertain, is good.
The grouping together of religion and other forms of non-evidence-based beliefs, I mean, I feel like they've got a lot in common.
Like, they all involve a totalizing worldview.
They all involve post-hoc rationalization for what is essentially a faith-based belief.
And they are all just very bad at doing critical thinking and evidence-based analysis.
You know, he's saying, don't do that.
And I say, hell yeah.
Yeah.
And so there's a point in this interview with Charlie Rose where he raises a counterpoint to Sagan about like his advocacy for agnosticism when it comes to the existence of aliens and his stance about religion and whether there's a contradiction there.
And I think, again, it highlights some really nice principles that he wants to advocate for.
You convinced me a long time ago that it was arrogant for me or for anyone else to believe that there wasn't some life outside of our...
To exclude the possibility.
To exclude the possibility was an arrogance of intellect that we should not...
I still believe it.
You couldn't prove it.
You didn't know it was there.
But the arrogance for you...
Right.
We don't know if it's there.
We don't know if it's not there.
Let's look.
And if you take that, why can't you say, there's a lot we don't know.
There's a lot of power there that we don't know.
There's a lot we don't know.
That's what I believe.
But that doesn't mean that every fraudulent claim has to be accepted.
We demand the most rigorous standards of evidence, especially on what's important to us.
The admission and no hesitation to admit there's a lot we don't know.
And yes, lots of things could turn out to be true.
But whenever the interviewer, Charlie Rose, is kind of saying, well, you know, isn't it just arrogance then to assume any stance to argue that types of gods don't exist or that kind of thing?
And his counter response that, no, because we need the identity.
Be willing to call out fraudulent claims or claims that lack evidence.
And for things that matter, we should care about the standards of evidence that exist.
It felt like there's not necessarily a contradiction there, but it is something that could easily be weaponized by people to simply insert doubt for things that don't deserve doubt to be inserted.
The conspiratorial talk you will see really weaponises the scepticism, doesn't it?
So they will use that argument, which is, well, you cannot prove that this isn't possibly true, so we should consider it seriously.
And that's different from...
What Sagan is advising.
But as you say, it can very easily be used as a rhetorical trick.
You need to have an appropriate degree of open-mindedness and an appropriate degree of skepticism.
But it's so easy to go too far and be so open-minded that your brain falls out and be so skeptical that you basically invent conspiratorial reasons to doubt everything and end up knowing nothing.
And I heard on a very centrist-y podcast, The Fifth Column, their most recent episode, where they had a great guest who was talking about a kind of epistemic crisis that we're in at the moment and talking about the kinds of propaganda that Donald Trump has ushered in and techniques that are also being used by Russian bot farms,
which is just so, so much doubt.
And so much confusion and so many possible alternatives and narratives that might possibly be true or so on.
And their goal is not to convince people of any particular thing.
Their goal is to make people give up on the idea that you can know the truth about anything at all.
Yeah, so I think Carl Sagan's advice there is particularly important today.
Yeah, it's kind of the distinction between Scott Adams' scepticism and like actual real.
Genuine skepticism or Brett Weinstein skepticism.
I'll get that pronunciation one day.
And the fifth column, I listened to that episode as well.
I enjoyed the fifth column, though.
You know, I think they lean more towards the libertarian spectrum of things.
But they had Jonathan Roach on.
I don't know how to pronounce it.
That's the guy.
It was so cathartic because he basically, like when they were saying, "Ah, yeah, but you know, isn't it just, you know, can we really say that things on the liberal media are better than on right?" He was like, "Yeah, we can
because..."
I'd see him with Russian disinformation and stuff.
It was enjoyable because he knew his stuff and very strongly argued that even though there's plenty to criticize in left-wing media, it does not mean that you can ignore what Trump has been doing or the partisanship on the right.
A good episode, if you want to hear.
Push back against that kind of views.
So, Matt, we normally try to find a part where we have something positive to say.
It's like, I don't think that's fair in this case, because it's almost like we have said nothing but glowing remarks about Carl.
I do want to highlight...
One contradiction, one possible contradiction that I found in the Q&A segment where he was asked a question about animal testing and the ethics involved therein.
And it's not so much his response about that, which is understandable.
You'll hear he basically endorsed that we should use it sparingly, but it...
It can't be necessary, that it shouldn't be used frivolously, which seems a reasonable position to take.
But just follow through, Matt, till the end and see if you can spot the potential contradiction here.
But I would also not argue that no animal experiments should be done.
And I think if I had to explain, somehow it was my job to do so, Some people whose child was dying because a medical procedure was unavailable, which might very well have been available if animal experimentation had been performed.
I don't know how I would do that justification.
Now, you might say to me that I'm putting humans higher than other animals.
And where do I come off doing that, especially at the end of an evening where I've been decrying chauvinisms?
This, to me, is like the argument that is sometimes...
Dave Morrison mentioned it in his talk today.
Why should we take any steps to save ourselves if an asteroid is going to hit the Earth, since asteroids have hit the Earth in the past?
And, you know, others have gone, so we might be here, so we'll go, so, you know, whatever it is, the raccoons will have their chance, or the ants, or the sulfur oxidation state-altering submarine worms will inherit the Earth.
At this point, I have no difficulty in, since I happen to be, it's an accident of birth, a human being, to justify human beings trying to survive under sometimes trying circumstances.
That's my judgment.
I'm sure if, you know, I were a lizard up here, I would be...
Talking about, yes, let's sacrifice the humans so we can get better medicine for the lizards.
After all, I'm a lizard.
I'm sorry, I can't help it.
So, Chris, where do you stand on this?
Do you support putting lipstick on monkeys?
You look like the kind of guy that would want to do that.
Yeah, well, I support that, but not for medical testing purposes.
Just cure self-enjoyment and the thrill of the cheers.
Well, how I choose to spend my free time is not the subject.
Nobody else's business.
You know, I keep the Japan for very specific reasons, Matt.
Very specific reasons.
So, yeah, I just think there is a certain contradiction, right, when you just give a talk which is extolling the importance of Humility and to avoid anthropocentric views of the world to then say,
well, but, you know, fundamentally, I'm a human.
So, you know, sacrificing other animals for our good is, you know, what can you expect from me?
And it's true.
Like, there's no condemnation there because I'm a human too, despite rumors to the contrary.
And I also would willingly sacrifice.
Animals to sustain myself on that.
So I'm not claiming to be better than Carl, but I'm just saying I didn't spend an hour extolling the limitations of anthropocentric worldviews.
So, yeah.
Don't worry, Chris.
No one listening to this thinks you're better than Carl.
Look, you didn't keep this bit in the clip, but he started off with saying that he felt extraordinarily conflicted on that issue.
And as you say, he acknowledges the contradiction there.
Don't call it my rhetorical techniques, but I didn't edit the clip.
You know, it was just for time, just for time.
Yeah, just for time.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, look, I mean, look, you're right.
It is a contradiction.
But, you know, he's right too in that I can't think of anyone who could reconcile that perfectly.
Can you think of a non-contradictory, like, assuming you don't like torturing monkeys for sport, can you think of, Principal way to approach that stuff that is totally self-consistent, except for the kind of compromise-y, milk-toasty, you know, avoid gratuitous kind of things,
avoid it whenever possible, but accepting that in some cases it's going to be basically prioritising people.
You could make arguments, I suppose, based around consciousness, right?
Degrees of consciousness or self-awareness and so on, you know?
People do.
People do.
I will say that the history of animal experimentation, I mean, I think he...
We'll completely sign on to this, but it's full of some horrors for what various intelligent creatures endured for little scientific purpose or benefit.
I'm thinking of the experiments of Harry Harlow, which, although used to, you know, sort of undo some notions in psychology that were harmful about the way to deal with infants, also involved putting young social primates into Pits of despair,
so-called black boxes, and removing all interaction and sunlight for them for months to see what they did.
I find those as disturbing when I read about them as I do human experimentation.
But I get that they're not on the same moral level because we're humans, but it's just...
It's in the same ballpark, is what you're saying, and I agree.
But, you know, Carl Sagan would definitely classify all that stuff in terms of gratuitous...
Yeah.
Suffering for marginal benefit.
In fact, I'd put anything under the social sciences and psychology as marginal benefit.
Yeah, so I think that you're never on really tricky grounds if your argument is, at the very least, we need a lot better standards and a lot more concern about the humaneness with which animals are treated and to avoid undue suffering.
But like I say, I think it's a way of dodging the issue because...
Yeah, he'd agree with you 100%.
So looking at it more broadly, human beings now consume like 60% of the ecological energy budget of the Earth.
You know, we've displaced a huge number of species and squeezing every other species on Earth into a smaller and smaller box, right?
Because we're just taking more of everything for ourselves.
And I personally think we've got to reverse that and take it in the other direction.
With smart use of technology, we can probably do that without suffering huge decreases in standard of living ourselves if we're smart about it.
I also personally think we should be very conscious of just the sheer number of people on the planet as well.
You know, how many people you can sustain at any one time.
So I'm fully in favour of decreasing the box that...
Our species consumes.
Uh-oh, Matt.
Is this your Great Reset?
You're coming out as a, like, you want to increase the population by a couple of billion?
Yeah.
This is all your globalist plot.
That's why you don't like talking about the Great Reset.
You're on board with it.
Yeah.
Flour it in the water to sterilize people.
That's what I'm after.
But the reason I mention that, right, is just to say that Even though I'm in favour of shrinking it a great deal, which is probably a reasonably radical position, I wouldn't be in favour of shrinking it to, say, prehistoric levels, right, where humans were just another primate wandering around hunting and gathering,
where now we really did consume just a sliver.
I'd probably go for like a compromise kind of position, right, where we maybe take 30% or 40% of it maybe and leave the rest for all of the other species, which isn't really fair.
If you take the super strict philosophical stance that we do not prioritise humanity, then my position is inconsistent too, even though it is fairly radical in favour of the animals.
I feel like we're just fighting a position that almost no one except from extreme mad people will take, though.
Our position that the environment is important and animals should be preserved.
These are the mainstream.
But yeah, it should not be tortured.
Like, there's a couple of people on the fringe saying, you know, no, you know, like, yeah, for nail varnish and the insoles of shoes, we should sacrifice gorillas and cetaceans.
But they're in a minority for a good reason.
So we're safe, Matt.
We're not stepping on any third rails here.
But to be super clear, I guess all I'm doing is just defending his wishy-washiness on it.
Because I don't see how you can't be.
You just have to be wishy-washy sometimes.
Just defend them all the time.
Defend, defend, defend.
You're a hero.
I get it.
No, look, I sympathize with you because I really, really wanted to find something that I could, you know, show what a great, dispassionate, critical thinker I am and even be willing to criticize my hero who's saying all the things that press my buttons.
I really wanted to virtue signal my dispassionateness.
But I couldn't.
I couldn't find it.
So let's turn to a response he gave about a question about consciousness.
Now, consciousness has various meanings.
If it means an awareness of the external world and modifying your behavior to take account of the external world, then I think...
Microbes are conscious.
If you mean deep thoughts like Bishop Barclay's contention that nothing exists except what's in his mind, I'm with the microbes myself.
You see, how do you know that I think any thoughts?
Only because I happen To be communicating to you.
You can't easily tell that I have philosophical thoughts by looking at me drinking this cup of water, right?
So imagine that I was mute.
That I could not communicate by speech or writing or anything else.
Then how would you know if I had such thoughts?
The evidence for Not just the so-called higher apes, but running through the apes and the monkeys, to me is very persuasive that they have thoughts.
Not only deep philosophical thoughts, but useful practical thoughts, like lying, like deceit, like planning.
To fool others, thinking about it far in advance.
I've got to say, I really liked his ping on Bishop Barclay.
His supposedly super deep human thinking about consciousness and God or whatever is just nonsensical to say.
So you could be super smart and use that intelligence to invent complete nonsense, can't you?
Yes, we're familiar with this, from the gurus that we cover.
But I don't know who Bishop Barclay is, but I'll grant that his title alone does not inspire confidence in me.
Okay, but as an anthropologist, did you like what he was saying there about consciousness?
Yeah!
The hesitation in that, yeah, was simply that, yeah, I'm basically fully on board with that and I share the intuitions.
That he has about the relative dispersal of consciousness across non-human species and that it's better to think of consciousness on the spectrum than as a golden barrier, right?
But I am aware though because of spending some time with the comparative psychology research literature that there are surprising limitations in our next...
Of kin, species speaking, you know, with chimpanzees and gorillas and so on.
There's so much which looks extremely similar.
And in that sense, it's often hard for us not to anthropomorphize.
And we might be justified in doing so, but there's various clever experiments which indicate that certain abilities which seem like they should be straightforward are really not.
They come naturally to us.
And a really nice counterintuitive illustration, which this doesn't exactly speak to that, but I just think it's such a nice finding, is that when you give chimpanzees a puzzle box and you demonstrate for them to go through these steps to get a reward from the box,
and they'll watch you and they'll copy the steps.
And the same thing goes for children, all right?
You show them the steps and you're tapping and you're doing various things.
Then in the next stage, You show the box and now it's a see-through box where you can see the insides.
And you realize that some of the steps are pointless, right?
They're just like tapping into an empty space.
They don't do anything to extract the treat.
Chimpanzees will drop the useless steps and they'll just go for the instrumental goal, right?
They want the sweet, so they realize, oh, we don't need to do that.
Whereas the human kids, even though when they can see that there is no mechanical purpose for the steps.
They'll what's called over imitate.
I always find that interesting because it's the common phrase, monkey see, monkey do.
But actually, humans are the ones who are much better at imitating in a non-instrumental fashion.
So humans copy the behavior better, but the chimpanzees take a more goal-orientated approach to it.
It would almost be the opposite of what people predicted because humans are more intelligent.
But what about a chimpanzee baby?
If you gave me that box, I'd get straight for the treat.
I'm sure I wouldn't.
No, oh, you're wrong.
So this is the other beautiful thing about those experiments.
They fought that.
They thought, oh, but this is just kids.
You know, they're following, like...
The cues of adults.
Maybe there's a mechanism they don't understand or so on.
No.
When you get kids to demonstrate it, the kids, they over imitate it.
When you get adults to demonstrate it, the adults, they over imitate it.
Us humans are over imitators par excellence.
And that's part of what makes us cultural.
In that sense, it comes like a limitation, but it's not.
And that's just like, you know, it's a kind of funny counterintuitive example.
But I think if you take it in another way, it is an element of exceptionalism amongst humans.
And Carl Sagan's worldview downplays them.
I think that's a good thing to do.
But I do think there are certain aspects that essentially...
Do we make us an exceptional species?
Yeah.
Well, just before we move on, an interesting correspondence there with the over-imitation is that well-known study that would put pigeons in those Skinner boxes.
Yeah.
Yeah.
They didn't do anything horrible to them, thank goodness.
When they pecked on a lever, sometimes they would get a treat when they pecked the lever and they'd very quickly learn to peck the lever.
But they had other interesting conditions where there was...
Like a lever or something, sure, but the treats would be delivered on a totally random schedule.
And what would happen is that the pigeons would develop these little rituals and behavioral quirks, perhaps bending their neck or sort of taking a step or something like that when the treat happened to come out.
So they were over-learning the association between their behavior and the reward.
And people do exactly the same thing.
Yeah, correlation is not causation.
Exactly, and it's one of the reasons that people develop delusional thinking about gambling.
Gambling fallacies, because gambling is a real-life thing.
If you're playing a poker machine or something like that, it's delivering rewards on a totally random schedule.
But people who have gambling problems often also have these little delusions about what will make the machine pay off, very similar to how the pigeons do.
So anyway, it just struck me that's an interesting similar case of over-learning.
I apologize, Matt.
I'm going to digress us further into your area of expertise because just one question.
Though you said gambling delivers random rewards, but aren't the payoffs pretty much structured in such a fashion that they're timed interval rewards of a certain amount in order to maximize?
You know, the unarmed bandits are carefully manipulated to provide just the amount of wins at the kind of times to keep people hooked, right?
So it's not random.
It is random.
So don't contradict me, Chris.
Let me clarify for you.
So, yes, it's what you're thinking of in your naive yet charming way.
What you're thinking of is, yes, those one-armed bandits are tuned in a whole bunch of different ways to increase their addictive potential.
But those things are primarily related to the visual displays, right?
So the sounds and the symbols that are shown.
For instance, they will do things like show near misses, so where the symbols almost line up, and they will show those at a rate.
Higher than is real, leading people to overestimate their chance of winning in the future.
Another thing they do is losses disguised as wins.
So they will pay off.
So, you know, you spin, it costs you a dollar.
It'll pay off and you'll win 40 cents.
And what will happen is all of the lights and the sounds will play, the same sounds and stuff that are associated with a real win of, say, 10 bucks, where you've actually made a net win.
Those same plays also play when you really lose.
So they do do those tricks, right?
But what they don't do, almost universally, is that they don't do any kind of timing.
It's a memoryless process, right?
So every time you press that button, it is a perfect random event.
So there is no sort of structuring of the intervals or anything.
It's actually illegal in most places.
It's almost like you're an expert in this area.
I'm just a little man dancing through the forest with my intuitive Jordan Peterson insights.
It's just good, though, that you can sit at the feet of true expertise.
Let's get back to consciousness.
You know, we can't measure consciousness per se, but we can measure a lot of the neurological and physiological things that are associated with perceiving pain, for instance.
We can determine that way that there's There is at least very similar things going on in the brains of animals and humans when similar sort of phenomena are occurring to us mentally.
So it's becoming a smaller and smaller leap just on a biological level to say that those same things are going on with animals.
What do you think about this?
I mean, I'm no expert on this one, but to the degree that people are special, a lot of it is associated with language, right?
When we think...
We are thinking using the same areas of the brain and we're using linguistic constructs not just to communicate with one another but also just to think.
So we know that there are parts of the brain in humans that are specialised for language.
I'm pretty sympathetic to suggestions that very recent human evolution, the stuff that catapulted us towards...
This global technological civilization is actually associated with evolution stumbling upon an abstract general purpose language rather than tool use and purely technical prowess.
What do you think?
You've just tuned out.
You think you've had something completely different, you son of a bitch.
I have not.
I was paying very clear attention there.
I was just thinking deeply about The model that you were describing.
And there's a lot of people that have mapped linguistic competence to elements of consciousness, but I think there's kind of like a never-ending debate about the chicken and egg scenario there, right?
Like the ability to express complicated ideas develops before or after the ability to do complex vocalizations and grammar, right?
When it comes to the ability to communicate and to have an array of vocalizations, there's a lot of species that have that.
There are even species that seem to have dialects, but the complex grammar or that kind of thing just doesn't exist, right?
There's been some claims it does and some discussion about birdsong and how that can incorporate a kind of grammar, but grammar...
In the way that it appears amongst humans seems like a unique aspect.
And to be honest, the whole area is just so complex.
There's, like, tons of theoretical models.
And I dug India a bit when I was doing my master's, and I came away from it thinking, like, it's a super interesting topic, but I just, I've got no idea which perspective is right on it.
Like, I'm kind of convinced by each paper I read.
And Steven Pinker actually was on a really good People, I thought about this a long time ago.
So it just reminds me that, you know, when people are shitting on them about culture war stuff, like, it's research stuff sometimes is pretty good.
Look, Chris, I'm totally the same.
I don't know.
I'm just spitballing here.
I'm not kidding.
You do.
So, like, my gazing into the sun look is just, like, trying to work out what I actually think.
The answer is, like, I want to have a...
I don't either, but just on a purely gut level, I guess I'm sympathetic to just very broad brushstrokes here, right?
That our cousins among the primates probably have a great deal of overlap with us in terms of like phenomenological consciousness, right?
Yeah.
But to the extent that we are different, it's largely due to culture, which is really...
Based on complex language anyway, and language.
So that's just my gut feeling.
If I had to, gun to my head, force me to have an opinion.
There it is.
You didn't, but I gave it to you anyway.
Yeah, well, you know, it's Cosmic Mountain.
People are getting insights from anthropology, psychology.
That's what they come from, Matt.
Now, to round things off, I think we can...
Offer some closing thoughts after this, because there's a clip which is quite famous, a little bit long, but I think worth hearing at least in part, which is a variation of his pale blue dot speech, where he basically is talking about an image where the satellite took a photo of Earth,
turned back on its way out of the solar system and took a photo of Earth, and Earth appears as a mote of dust on a pale blue beam of Earth.
And he has some poetic reflections about it.
And I've heard this segment in other formats and it never feels to strike me as like something profound and worth listening to.
So it's worth people searching out the whole Pale Blue Dot clip if you haven't heard it.
But here's a little blast of that.
So there it is.
I mean, take a look.
It's a pale Blue dot.
That's us.
That's home.
That's where we are.
On it, everybody you love, everybody you know, everybody you've ever heard of, lived out their days there.
The aggregate of all our joy and suffering, thousands of confident ideologies, religions, economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward,
every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, Every inventor and explorer, every revered teacher of morals,
every corrupt politician, every uncorrupt politician too, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there.
The earth?
It's a very small stage in a great cosmic arena.
Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors, presidents and prime ministers, party leaders, so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of the corner of a dot.
Yes.
Famous speech and justifiably so.
Very inspiring and profound.
A couple of things, Chris.
One is the thing that really hits home for me with that pale blue dot image.
It obviously gives us a sense of the precariousness of the biosphere and the great dark, right?
That's even more striking when you remember that the entire biosphere is basically an eggshell around what is basically a ball of molten lava.
And if you go from as deep as microbes can exist in the Earth to the very top of the stratosphere, it's like an eggshell.
So it's not only a dot.
Everything that he's talking about is this eggshell around that dot.
We have molten lava on one side.
Radiation-infused space on the other.
So, yeah, it should give you a pause.
The content of that speech is rightly famed for the profundity of it.
And also, as you say, highlighting how delicate the existence that we find ourselves, the situation of the earth.
And there's a nice part earlier in the talk where he kind of, he's criticizing the anthrop, what is it called?
Anthropic?
Principle?
Yeah, right.
The Goldilocks zone kind of thing, saying the universe was created in such a way that humans were able to exist.
And as he argued, you could equally argue that the universe was created in such a way that rocks were able to exist, right?
The lithic principle.
And I think that there's room to incorporate both views, that the place that we live on and the time that we find ourselves here is something special.
And we live in a delicate ecosystem.
And we are just one dot in a massive universe of stars that we will be dead long before anybody knows anything about.
So it's humbling and also profoundly depressing.
I'm quite content to offer my overall thoughts on Sagan here, which is just to highlight that He doesn't engage, I think, in most of the things, negative guru techniques that we highlight here.
But he is, in many respects, something of a guru to people or a figure of admiration.
He has opinions on a variety of different topics.
He speaks in a poetic, metaphorical way.
And his tone of voice is like melodious.
So he has charisma, is what I'm trying to say.
What I think this episode does is highlight that, one, we agree with Carl Sagan.
And to the extent that we can therefore be trusted to have an objective view, it's possible for people to occupy the role of gurus and to also be promoting messages which are good and offering worldviews which are not...
Fundamentally narcissistic and self-promotional or whatever the case may be.
Like, I just think to the extent that Carl Sagan is a guru, he's a good guru in my book.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Our friend Aaron described him as the Bob Ross of gurus.
And I think that's pretty accurate.
Yeah, so like you said, he's definitely a guru in the sense that he's like a meaning maker.
He's weaving narratives in a poetic way.
As you say, he's beliefulous, he's charismatic.
A lot of his talk is almost like poetry, even though he does take a lot of diversions into the sort of substrate of scientific fact, including useful and appropriate anthropological studies and so on.
Part of what he does is, in the same way that Jordan Peterson does, builds a map of meaning and what's important and what matters and how we should think about ourselves, he sort of sketches that out in a poetic way, resting on the substrate of a very scientific worldview.
But here's the thing, I mean, so you can be against that in principle, but...
I think it's impossible to avoid.
A lot of people talk about it these days, about how religion's on the wane, so there are these new religions, including being woke or whatever, because people have an innate need for meaning and narratives.
Now, whether or not the specific examples given are true, I think that's fundamentally true on some level.
You know, the scientific stuff goes a long way, but it doesn't tell you what you should do.
It doesn't tell you what you should care about and what's important.
So he's a guru in the sense that he's sketching out one possible narrative on top of that scientific substrate, and he does it well.
That's why we like him.
Unlike Jordan Peterson, when he gets into the scientific examples, they're appropriate, and the inferences he draws from them are correct inferences, and they support his argument in a very logical way.
But, you know, in the end, he's sketching poetry that I like.
And to the extent that I understand any of this stuff, it feels like the substrate he's building on, he's building on it in a sound way to get to those conclusions.
So, yeah, thumbs up from me.
He's a great guy.
Shame he's dead.
Yeah.
I wonder if he would be in the QAnon if he was live night.
I don't wonder that.
I don't wonder that.
I recommend.
His book, Demon Haunted World, is still worth checking out.
These past two weeks have just reminded me of a time when we had a better class of gurus.
I'm going to be a guru, a classic guru-ologist.
I want to go back to the real gurus before these online gurus came sauntered in.
The gurus were better when I was a kid.
Definitely.
Yeah, we had real gurus, Matt.
They're real gurus.
They went into the jungle and killed people.
I think this is a good time to announce that after our jaunt into the personal guru sphere and fiddling around with that, that we have decided to leap back into the culture war trenches and the mucky world of online.
Psychologically damaged individuals.
We know you love it.
We know that's what you want.
That's the content you come here for.
We're going to go slamming next week with one Gad Saad.
Gad Saad.
He's been requested.
We were thinking about Zizek or Jimmy Dore and we'll get there, but we're going to do Gad Saad and we're probably going to do a twofer.
Gad Saad and somebody terrible that he's interviewed.
Maybe Gad Saad and Jeffrey Miller.
God, Sad, and dear Ruben, we'll work it out.
But Mr. Sad, your time has come.
He's going to be delighted, I'm sure.
He'll probably flame us on Twitter.
He'll love the attention.
Yeah, possibly.
So there just simply wouldn't be enough to do.
With him on his own, he's just not substantial enough.
So we really need to do an episode with someone else there.
And I think we should make that clear.
The episode that he didn't deserve an episode dedicated solely to him.
But yes, Gadsad, you're coming up.
I've got a feeling he's going to be like Scott Adams.
But let's see.
Maybe I'll be wrong.
Well, let's see.
I mean, because I don't know much about him.
All I've seen is a few...
You know, clips of, you know, a few minutes long.
They haven't been good.
What I have seen has not been good.
I will say that.
I've heard him interviewed by Sam Harris.
Yeah.
Let's see.
Maybe we're wrong.
Maybe we're wrong.
Speaking of people that are wrong, let's talk about a couple of reviews that we've received.
You know, I like to get the negative.
To the positive side of the sphere.
And I requested that people left us reviews and we got a bunch of them.
Most of them are positive because we're just, you know, fundamentally good.
But we did pick up a couple of negative ones that I also enjoyed.
So let me just read one of them, which is titled Nitpicking as Podcasting.
And this is by PG783.
The format of this podcast is so annoying.
It is set up like a debate.
But where one side always gets the last word.
These two dudes play a short, out-of-context clip of whatever guru is on their docket, then proceed to nitpick and belittle whatever point was made, then move on to the next point.
Rinse and repeat.
It is incredible how many ideas come up lacking when set before the penetrating intellect of these guys.
In a normal debate, a contested point could be expanded or defended, but in the world of this podcast, any and all assertions are quickly ridiculed and dispatched.
It's like playing tennis with no one on the other side of the net.
And guess what?
These guys always win.
They act even-handed, but just beneath the surface is an attitude of profound snottyness.
The whole endeavor is a bit sinister, actually.
That's harsh.
That's comprehensively harsh.
What I think would be fair is to rebut this in a manner...
That this guy would love where he's completely unable to respond and just endorses his point.
I can read out his review in a snotty accent and it already reduces the legitimacy of his points by 50%.
But look, he's got a reasonable point about that it's a bit unfair that the people don't get the chance to...
But what the fuck do you want?
Do you want us to call them up, play the clip, and request that they give us their feedback?
Like, how do you answer this, Mr. Taleb?
He's not going to respond.
And also, the whole point is that we are looking critically at their content.
Yes, you can do it too if you want.
Just pause this podcast and make your own comments and release it.
Just...
Just do what you want.
But the whole format of the podcast is set up as critical commentary, analyzing, like, people's things.
So, like, that's the format.
That's the format.
Tennis without a net.
These people talk for, like, four hours unmolested, just waffling on about their ideas.
Rarely get any pushback for it.
So pardon me for expressing a critical opinion into your microphone.
Oh, I'll send them personal emails and beg them to respond before I dare utter criticism.
Is that okay, PG7E3?
Are you happy now?
What's that?
I can't hear your response.
I'm sorry.
PG7183, I just want to invite you on to the podcast to criticize us because we love that kind of thing.
We embrace it.
Chris is going to love talking to you and rebutting all of your points.
It'll be fun.
Yeah.
Reach out.
Reach out.
Tell your people to talk to our people.
We'll set this up.
Send us an audio clip and we'll take it apart.
So, yes, thank you for that.
I did ask for reviews and the word provided, so that was nice.
But here's a positive review to wash away the PG-783 bile.
This one has a bit of negging.
It's a positive review, but it has a bit of negging.
I enjoyed it.
It doesn't have the degree of criticism that's going to elicit your very defensive and sensitive response.
Defensive, Matt.
That's just joking.
It's just joshing around with people.
I could do that for all the clips.
Is that the level that people want?
They're like, no.
So, calm down, PG70.
Just relax.
No, it's just a podcast.
This one is from Colonel Kurtz.
Don't know if he's a real colonel or not, but the title is Excellent Listen, so it's already off to a better start.
And then it continues.
Despite their oversimplification of stoic philosophy, misrepresentation of Sam Harris, and the constant digs at their English superiors, Chris and Matt are thoughtful, funny, and intelligent guys, playfully picking apart today's public intellectuals.
You won't agree with all of it, and maybe they tend too much towards cynical and negative views, but it's kept light by their effortless chemistry and sharp wit.
It's not quite yet as good as very bad wizards, but I've got fear that they might one day get there.
Keep up the good work.
Oh, that's good.
That's well-tempered.
That's just the right amount.
Yeah, that's very good.
And, you know, of course it's written by an Englishman.
You can get the...
You can tell by the passive-aggressive and the gemming-by-fate praise.
Very English.
Yeah, backhanded compliments.
That's fine.
But, you know, that just had to balance out old PG's comment there.
So that was fun.
And I agree.
One day we will be better than Very Bad Wizards.
Not yet.
Not yet, but we're getting our voice, so you just watch out.
So yeah, that's our reviews.
Thank you both for sending them in and all the other people who did, because there's other funny ones which I'll get to next week.
I know we've ran long, but there is one other piece of feedback which isn't a review that I wanted to mention.
We received via the Patreon messaging, I actually think it was.
So I won't go into quoting it in depth, but in essence, We got a message from somebody who was a Brett Weinstein and I think Eric Weinstein, ex-fan, so to speak.
And they basically made the point, they appreciated the podcast, the critiques helped them, you know, kind of see the problems in the narratives that the brothers were spinning and that they enjoyed the format of the show and everything.
It was all very positive.
But they just mentioned that it was kind of hard for them to deal with initially when...
They were listening to our criticisms and there's points where we're laughing or reacting in a credulous fashion to something that Weinstein had said.
And the guy was pointing out that, you know, after you've invested a lot of time with these guys that you can feel a little stupid that you couldn't see what people are pointing out and laughing about as like transparently obvious.
And I've got things to say about that, but what do you think about that feedback?
Yeah, I think that's...
That's good feedback because, yeah, you know, we do have a bit of fun with it and when you do all that analysing stuff that we do and then gather together the evidence, if you like, and put it all together, it all seems incredibly obvious.
So, it's worth emphasising, I don't think it's incredibly obvious.
A lot of that stuff, many of those characters I listen to extremely casually and my gut feeling at the time was it's...
Fine.
It didn't really strike me as obviously bad.
And it wasn't until we did those deep dives and really stopped and thought about it that it became clear.
So I could see how someone would get that impression.
And sorry, but it's more fun to laugh and mock at that.
We're going to keep doing it.
We're going to keep doing it.
But yeah.
No, because the guy made the point as well that we often do this claim that we're not targeting.
The mockery at the followers, because the people do tend to be good at what they do.
And that's true.
It's not just a disclaimer.
I think I have a lot of sympathy for people.
You know, the people don't have time to go through the literature and ivermectin, or maybe don't have the relevant expertise to do that.
And why should they?
That's not something that you can expect everybody to be capable of doing.
They might have just genuine interest in science, and these are the guys that they picked up.
So I would emphasize the same point you did, that we make it look effortless.
But it's actually, you know, the thing is, this podcast takes time, right?
We have to go through the content, we have to highlight the clips, and we have to dig the things out.
And like you say, when you put it all together, it can be straightforward to see.
But when you listen to...
Jordan Peterson or Eric Weinstein or any of the people and it just washes over you.
It can often be very compelling and you can feel like, yeah, you know, the points that they're making are valid and sometimes they are, but the way that people listen to content isn't, you know, they don't listen like this.
They don't stop things and say, okay, so what was step one, two, three of the argument there?
We do that because we're doing something weird.
Yeah, we're doing something very weird and not at all natural.
I must have seen so many TEDx lectures that at the time I thought, wow, yeah, that's really...
And then I looked into it a bit later on and realised that it really wasn't very good at all.
But it sounded good because they're a good lecturer.
They gave a good talk.
They sounded very convincing.
It's absolutely no reflection on yourself.
To find bullshit convincing because they work hard at bullshitting.
I'm not talking about TEDx people.
Some TEDx lectures are fine, obviously.
But, you know, when they are bullshitting, like you said, Chris, you can't tell unless you just happen to have a real depth of expertise in the specific things they're talking about and the specific examples they're giving or you're willing to, as you say,
pause it and then go and do all of this background research.
But why would you do that?
That's no way to live your life, you know?
Yeah, I agree.
I know, I know.
So, yeah, so, like, I just wanted to flag it up because I think it's important to say that it's impossible for me not to be sarcastic and cynical and stuff.
There are no negotiable parts of my personality, but I still will keep in mind and try to highlight that the mockery is not intended to people that are duped.
Like, that's...
There are people who I think deserve blame for that because they should know better.
But there's lots of people who don't and you don't know people's circumstances or what else they're dealing with.
So yeah, that's all.
I just wanted to spend some time on that because it was a nice message and I think it had an important point.
Yeah, I agree.
So we don't go for a gazillion hours.
Let's get to our Patreon shout outs and sign off for the day.
Yes.
So, Matt, first of all, Joseph Whelan, who is a conspiracy hypothesizer.
Every great idea starts with a minority of one.
We are not going to advance conspiracy theories.
We will advance conspiracy hypotheses.
Thank you, Joseph.
And next we have Nick Brower and Nick Angiono.
Two Nicks, dual Nicks.
Both.
Coincidence, Matt?
That they are both...
No, they aren't.
One's a conspiracy hypothesizer and one's a revolutionary genius.
But I'm going to upgrade them and play them both the revolutionary thinker one.
And you just have to guess which one is the conspiracy hypothesizer and which is the revolutionary thinker.
Which one, Matt?
Which one will it be?
Which one?
Maybe you can spit out that hydrogenated thinking and let yourself feed off of your own thinking.
What you really are is an unbelievable thinker and researcher, a thinker that the world doesn't know.
Okay, and I've got another revolutionary genius.
I probably already messed up those two names, but I'm definitely going to mess the pronunciation on this one, so I apologize.
It's...
Who is a revolutionary genius and someone I'm deeply sorry for my mispronunciation.
Thank you very much.
You're good at saying Nick, but not so good at other names.
That's right.
Nick, I got that one right.
Yeah.
Western chauvinist that I am.
Maybe you can spit out that hydrogenated thinking and let yourself feed off of your own thinking.
What you really are is an unbelievable thinker and researcher, a thinker that the world doesn't know.
The last one for this, Matt, our last one for this week is a galaxy brain guru called Ralph Kink.
Ralph Kink.
Thanks, Ralph.
Ralph Kink.
Yeah.
Nice name.
Nice name.
Quite tangy.
Tangy.
I'm just saying tangy.
What's wrong with that?
Nothing wrong with that.
It's a perfectly good name.
Agreed.
Agreed.
Galaxy brand that he is.
Thank you, Ralph.
Thank you.
You're sitting on one of the great scientific stories that I've ever heard.
And you're so polite.
And, hey, wait a minute.
Am I an expert?
I kind of am.
Yeah.
I don't trust people at all.
Maybe we'll get some updates to these with Gad Saad next week.
Yeah, I feel like Gadsad could be fertile ground for those.
But thank you, Mr. Kink.
That was good.
Yes.
So, Matt, where can people find us in this worldwide interconnected web?
In this crazy mixed-up world?
Well, I'm at 31 Everglade Street.
No, no, that's not true.
Cut!
So, we are at Guru's Pod on Twitter.
We have a Reddit, which is Decoding...
Decoding the Guru's subreddit.
Yeah, yeah.
I don't remember our email address or anything else.
Guru's Pod...
Oh, no, wait.
Guru's Pod is our Twitter and DecodingTheGurus at gmail.com is our email account thing.
And then you are Arthur C. Dent.
I am Arthur C. Dent online.
Yeah, my semi-anonymous account.
And I'm C underscore Kavanaugh with a K and no U's.
That's where we are.
And the Reddit is very active, isn't it, Chris?
I'm just amazed.
And even though when I participate on the subreddit, it feels like nobody's up.
Voting me or replying to my comments.
Please, everyone.
Please pay attention to me on the Reddit because my ego just can't handle it.
But I do browse through the Reddit, even though I don't comment much because I know that it will just be ignored.
But, yeah, like a lot of the discussions, like people ask questions about some pretty technical stuff and then they get really good answers from like...
People who actually know stuff.
So, yeah, it just seems like a cut above your stuff.
I mean, I know this is kind of the kind of follower praising thing, but when I look at Reddit, usually it's like full of shit.
But ours is actually a better subreddit than most subreddits.
And that's just a credit to both of us, I think.
Well, definitely.
And now it's cursed, Matt.
Now that you've said that, it will become a seething cesspool of hate and white supremacy.
And people will pay this back to show that we endorse that.
So good job, Matt.
You've landed us in it with your parasocial manipulations.
They've just created troubles for us.
But yeah, the subreddit is good.
For the time being.
For the time being.
At this present moment, it's okay.
That's all we're saying.
In July 2021, we said it's okay.
But we didn't look today, so we don't know what friends they posted.
Yeah, that's right.
We're not admitting any kind of legal liability if you get involved with somebody and you get abused on gender, race, or identity characteristics.
That's not on us.
That's Matt.
That's Matt.
And upvote his post, please.
Please vote my post.
The other thing for the final moment of self-indulgence, I appeared on Stephan Kestine's podcast, The Strenuous Life.
I lead a strenuous life.
I talked about strenuous life activity.
No, I didn't.
I talked about gurus and our gurometer for two hours.
So if you haven't got enough of me, you can go and listen to that.
And there's a video of it as well if you want to see my face.
So this is how it is now, Chris.
You're doing public appearances without your co-host.
You're sidelining me.
You're seeing a career for yourself that doesn't include me.
Why wasn't I invited?
You get plenty of shout-outs.
I give you credit endlessly.
Plus, you were busy on Walkabout that week, so I did a promotional duty of recording.
But it was really enjoyable.
It's more of a discussion than...
An interview.
Like, you know, the same way we do.
And Stefan's like a really sharp guy.
So interesting thing.
And another crossover with the Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu world.
So check it out.
I haven't listened to it yet, but I will check it out.
You know, I just can't get enough of your opinions.
Two hours, Matt.
Two hours of gold.
Maybe I should forward it to PG783.
Sorry, PG.
Sorry, sorry, sorry.
Sorry, sorry.
We value the critical feedback.
We value your feedback.
We value your feedback.
It was very valuable.
So, Matt, all that remains to be said is that you now should go and gravel at the feet of your muscle mass.
I will.
Maybe between three and four.
I think I've got a window.
So, I'll pop it in then.
That's alright.
I know I should do it.
Okay, Matthew Smith.
I will see you next time with Gadsad.
Gadsad.
Can't wait.
See you then.
Bye.
Bye. Bye.
Thank you.
One thing that it has done is to enhance my sense of appreciation for the beauty of life and of the universe and the sheer joy of being alive.
You had a healthy portion of that before this, but even you, it happens to.
Oh, there's no question.
Appreciation of beauty and every moment.
Every inanimate object and to say nothing of the exquisite complexity of living beings.
