Special Episode: Interview with Robert Wright on crackpots, gurus, and modern media ecosystems
This week we welcome the author, journalist, and podcaster Robert Wright. Robert wrote the popular (and provocative!) book 'Why Buddhism is True' and has hosted many interesting discussions and debates at bloggingheads.tv, which he co-founded.We had a wide ranging discussion that touched on a vast array of topics including: the Weinsteins & their relative crackpot ratings, alternative & Mainstream media ecosystems and how they feed into guruism, what are gurus anyway (and are they all bad), Sam Harris and cognitive biases, whether Bob is a Buddhist Modernist, the extent to which meditation is a form of cultural conditioning, if wokism is really taking over America, and whether Matt & Chris' actually hate evolutionary psychology or not.Robert offers a unique perspective, displays a lot of good humour and patience, and indulges our ongoing fetishism of self deprecation culture. So join us for a suitably meandering Irish-Aussie-Americo conversation that involves only the prescribed amount of mutual backpatting!P.S. We promise the Gad Saad episode is coming soon!LinksBob's Book 'Why Buddhism is True''Is Eric Weinstein a Crackpot' on Bob's Non-zero SubstackBob's Interview with Tim Nguyen for The Wright ShowBob's article for Wired on Sam Harris & Tribalism (the one that got him cut off!)The Crackpot Index by John Baez
Hello and welcome to Decoding the Gurus, the podcast where an anthropologist and a psychologist listen to the greatest minds the world has to offer and we try our best to understand what they're talking about.
And sometimes, just sometimes, we have special guests on who are going to help us figure out what is true, beautiful and real in this crazy mixed up world.
And today is one of those days, isn't it Chris?
That's right.
Morning Matt.
We have Robert Wright.
We mentioned just recently when we had Evan Thompson on because of his recent book, Why Buddhism is True.
But that's just one of the many things that he's done.
He's a journalist and author and probably got into the online podcasting or video tubing, I'm not sure of the terminology, with Blogging Heads TV quite a while back and has wrote a number of books,
The Moral Animal.
The logic of human destiny, the evolution of God.
So, hello, Bob.
Hello.
If it's okay to call you Bob.
It's very common to call me Bob, yes.
And I should also mention that I have recently become a patron of the...
Power room.
God bless you.
Yeah, this is opposition research.
You and Mickey Krause, I feel like I'm starting to know personally in the power social way that the online space creates.
Well, Mickey and I are opposed to each other, so you can't be opposed to both of us.
I don't know.
I don't know.
What the form the opposition research takes, but I guess we'll explore that as the conversation proceeds.
I know I'm an advocate of some things that you guys are skeptical of.
Yeah.
To varying degrees, but maybe us too.
No, you're actually generally skeptical of people I'm skeptical of.
As far as I know, I'm largely on the same page as you.
I was thinking that a place to start might be...
In line, Matt, with our recent recorded episodes, not with Evan, but with Daniel, we invited somebody who was from the more anti-fascist leftist side to discuss some issues that they had with the way that we covered the IDW and related spheres.
Given how happy that made all of the people who listened, Matt, I thought it might be a good space to...
Start an airing of grievances.
Well, this is the part, Bob, where we show what open-minded people, how welcoming we are to criticism.
We probably agree on heaps of stuff, but is there any stuff you disagree with us about?
You want to get off your chest?
I mean...
I know I have heard casual references to your skepticism about evolutionary psychology.
My book, The Moral Animal, was kind of one of the first book-length advocacies of evolutionary psychology, but I haven't heard you flesh that out.
There's the Buddhism issue.
I don't know where exactly the disagreement would be there.
My last book was called Why Buddhism is True, and I forget how you characterized that title, Chris, on your Evan Thompson podcast, but it was a reference to it not being...
Just loaded with epistemic humility, I guess, was provocative.
Maybe you called it provocative with dry understatement.
I mean, that's relevant to the whole Sam Harris thing.
I have my own history of writing critically about some of the people you podcast skeptically about.
I've written a piece about Sam Harris in Wired magazine that led him to cut off all communication with me.
He had had me on his podcast to promote my book, so maybe the timing wasn't optimal.
And I've written critically of the intellectual dark web generically and a few particular people in it, like Barry Weiss and lately Eric Weinstein.
Now, that had a kind of synergy with what you guys had been doing.
I became aware of Tim Nguyen, who critiqued Eric's theory of everything, this mathematician, and had him on my podcast, The Right Show.
I titled the YouTube version of that, Is Eric Weinstein a Crackpot?
That just passed the 50,000 view mark.
So next time you criticize one of my titling decisions, Chris, just remember that.
I'm going to say that I feel that in so doing, we should thank you because As you noted before we started recording, Eric has made various hints, playful hints, at forthcoming litigation aimed at critics who are preventing him from podcasting.
So I think the fact that you publicly posed the question of whether he's a crackpot, we should thank you because that's probably...
You think I'm now the one that the lawsuit will be aimed at?
Yeah, the eye of Sauron has shifted to...
However, just to show you how far I think these things through in advance, I did also a piece called Is Eric Weinstein a Crackpot in my newsletter, the Non-Zero Newsletter, and that addressed a different part, not the theory of everything, but his conspiracy theories.
And at the end of that, I said, I'm not ready to call him a crackpot.
Partly because...
In a way, on IDW grounds, in the sense that I think we should be reluctant to give people labels that are designed to marginalize them.
I actually do believe that.
And I try to believe it consistently, which I think may be more than I can say for some people in the intellectual dark web.
I suspect that nuance may be lost on somebody of Eric's particular sensitivities.
But for me, I felt that like crackpot, when I hear the term, I imagine, you know, like Tim said, somebody sending you in their handwritten letter of, like, refuting Einstein and relativity, right?
Well...
And there's a...
He does say his theory may enable us to break the Einsteinian speed limit of the speed of light.
Yes, and there is a crackpot checklist that you might have came across in your wondering some physicists prepared because they...
Received a lot of those kind of correspondence, and you get points for various things.
And I scored Eric on it for my own amusement before, and he did meet the technical qualification by a large margin on that scoring.
So you're safe then.
You can get an expert witness to testify that he actually is a crackpot.
So according to that schema, yes.
But as I understood it, though you were hesitant to label Eric a crackpot, you were more...
The bigger hesitation was you had a broader schema, right?
Like, are the Weinsteins collectively crackpots?
And with Brett, you were more hesitant to apply that label than with Eric.
Is that fair?
I had been.
I think I still probably would be.
But you're right.
At that point, I was using the word crank.
Before I came across your podcast, I said on my...
The weekly version of, I do two shows a week.
One is always with my friend of me, Mickey Kaus.
And I had said, I have not a grand unified theory about the Weinstein brothers, but at this point, a grand unified hypothesis.
It's that they're both cranks.
After I said that, and I am still exploring that, by the way.
It remains a hypothesis.
But one of our viewers sent me to your podcast.
And the first one I listened to was the one on the conversation between Brett.
And Eric, which I had already listened to, but your analysis of it was useful to me because you highlighted some things I hadn't remembered.
You mentioned that you were just hypothesizing.
Again, I feel that this is a nice judo flip maneuver because I've listened to much Weinstein content and they're always very clear, as long as it's a hypothesis.
There can be no judgment passed because you have not claimed it's a theory.
You're just working your way towards it.
So, yeah, I think that's another smart move on your behalf.
When the case eventually comes to court, this will be a key component.
We can cite Brett.
Totally.
That hypotheses cannot be held to any standard.
He doesn't engage in conspiracy theorizing, just conspiracy hypothesizing.
No, Brett says he does conspiracy hypotheses.
He's actually said that.
Look, I think he should score a few more crank points because he's appearing at the Making Contact UFO conference as a speaker.
Oh, this is Eric.
This is Eric.
You're not necessarily a crackpot to be a speaker at a UFO conference.
Well, Matt, your own personal guru is Carl Sagan, who had quite an open mind on the extraterrestrial life front.
I strongly believe that there are aliens out there somewhere.
I just don't think that they're probing people in middle America.
It'll just be a short while until you're at one of those conferences, Matt.
Be careful.
Bob, how have you taken the turn that Brett has taken rather publicly towards vaccine hesitancy, scepticism, you might say anti-vax advocacy, and then strong promotion of ivermectin as a miracle drug that can...
See the world in three easy steps.
Well, I mean, I genuinely do try to keep an open mind on these things because in the U.S., I'm maybe more conscious than you are of the way Trump polarized media coverage of things.
Once Trump started advocating hydroxychloroquine, it was going to have a real uphill struggle.
The drug was to get like the New York Times to say it works.
Now, as I understand it, it doesn't work, so it doesn't matter.
But my point is, things are really so polarized here that it affects the coverage of even things like that.
I try to keep an open mind when somebody says they have a marginalized view that's not getting airtime.
I listened to Brett's podcast on ivermectin and the guy, what's his name?
Pierre Corey.
He described this...
He had failed to mention that ivermectin was not the only drug being administered to the group, leaving aside that it wasn't a control group and it was exactly the kind of situation where you can imagine it not being controlled leading to dramatically misleading results and all that.
He just had not spoken carefully about it the way a scientist would.
Similarly, I mean, you know, Brett's Vax podcast with Robert Malone, who does seem to have some relevant credentials and seems relatively sober.
And this other guy whose name escapes me.
Steve Cush.
Yeah, he seemed like, I mean, did you listen to it?
Yes.
He seems emotionally unstable or something.
I mean, he's like a rich guy who funds research.
And so people like...
Malone are nice to him, I guess, but I later heard Malone on Tucker Carlson's show speaking critically of Tony Fauci, and I have criticisms of Tony Fauci, but this was in a way that led me to wonder whether he didn't have kind of a thing about Tony Fauci,
like a history of antagonism that had colored his whole reaction to Fauci-supported vaccines.
I think it's legitimate to...
Look at this stuff on multiple levels.
You can look at the level of evidence and arguments and so on, talk about meta-analyses, talk about whether or not it's a proper RCT or not.
But I'm pretty hesitant to do that, to be honest, because I'm not a virologist and I'm not an epidemiologist.
I know a lot of people do love to dive into that, and that's good, but I do think there's a pretty good argument.
Unless you're a completely paranoid conspiracy theorist, I think there is good reason to defer I do agree that,
you know, some fields do have, especially in the social sciences, my own psychology can have a bias one way or another.
With fields like virology and the heart of sciences generally, I feel much more confident in simply going to the peer-reviewed literature.
And I don't mean pouring through the methods section or some random papers.
I mean just reading the review articles and the commentary articles, the high level opinions essentially from experts.
And I tend to take that as a guide personally.
Yeah, it's true.
I mean, at the same time, the vax thing has, as hydroxychloroquine did, has gotten caught up in this kind of tribal lens, this kind of tribal conflict in America.
And so...
And not only that, but of course, anti-vaxxers have a reputational problem to begin with.
So I'm open to the possibility that there could be data that reflects unfavorably on the vaccine that's not getting as much attention as it deserves.
But so far as I can tell, the concerns are pretty conjectural.
It's not like there's any clear data that he can show us.
I may have a more favorable view of Brett generally than You do.
I've generally thought he's a less problematic character than Eric.
As I said, I listened to your podcast on his claim that he came up with this theory that didn't get its day in court.
And as it happens, I knew, most of them are not alive, but I knew some of the characters in this story.
I mean, I know Brett slightly because he was on my podcast before he cut off communication with me because of my piece about Sam Harris.
I knew his dissertation advisor, Richard Alexander.
I knew George Williams, who was this huge figure in the senescence field.
I thought you asked earlier, you know, do I have any criticisms?
I thought you were a little too hard on him.
I think the bare bones of that story could be true.
It happens that you share a good idea with some more prestigious scientist.
You fail to get it on the record.
You make the mistake maybe of just saying it in conversation so there's no paper trail.
And they take more credit than they should and they don't cite you.
That has definitely happened.
That could be the case.
Now, that wasn't the end of his story.
And I think, I mean, there's no doubt that Eric was hyping the whole thing.
But that's another case where, you know, I'm kind of agnostic.
I haven't dismissed the possibility that that thing happened.
I'm still not clear on how important Brett's idea was.
But I did go look at his paper and read the abstract.
It was not nothing.
I don't know.
Yeah.
Look, I mean, this is one of those issues.
I mean, partly it's a he said, she said thing, of course, you know, so it's speculative.
But it's one of those questions where one's prize come into play.
And as you say, yeah, it's true that people, academics, steal each other's ideas, right?
That happens.
And yeah, more prestigious, more established people might take credit for stuff that, say, a graduate student did.
At the same time, I just know from personal experience that good ideas are a dime a dozen in academia.
It's just super rare that somebody comes up with an idea and no one else has thought of that.
And the idea is really the precious thing.
People talk all the time.
There's just so much communication going on that, again, it's just personal experience in academia, that really what matters is It's turning that nice idea.
It's a bit like being an entrepreneur.
Turning the nice idea into reality, that's actually the key thing.
So I guess my prior there was having...
I mean, but what is actually very common is academics feeling like someone else has taken a good idea.
It's really, really common.
This problem is not confined to academics, believe me.
I mean, there's a literature on this particular...
Cognitive bias.
By the way, George Williams is an interesting case because he was not the kind to lodge those kinds of complaints, but he probably had grounds to.
If you look at the theories that are considered foundational in evolutionary psychology, a number of them can be found in his book, Adaptation and Natural Selection.
Bob Trivers developed them, and maybe you're right.
It's the person who takes the idea and runs with it.
But I know for a fact Bob Trivers was reading his book, and the basics of reciprocal altruism can be found in Williams, the basics of what was called the theory of parental investment, I think, along with, I believe it was Williams who came up with a very smart way to kind of...
Test the theory, the hypothesis, in a sense.
George Williams is a great thinker.
I mean, I'm getting off track now, but he really was a really wonderful human being and an unsung hero in evolutionary biology.
I've heard you talk about that before, Bob, in an episode discussing Evo Psychic.
I can't remember who you were interviewing, but I think you made the case well for that.
And I think that's largely...
Beyond dispute, beyond most theorists in evolutionary psychology kind of land.
In regards to Brett, just to put a coda on that point, I would say, like Matt, that academics not giving credit, a grad student having ideas stolen or whatever, yes, happens.
And I wouldn't have that much skepticism about something like that happens.
The way Brett tells it with like...
A telephone call and all that.
Okay, like the specifics, whatever, you know, the mists of time.
But the issue that looms large for me is that Brett doesn't just say, I had an idea, I talked about it with someone, and they ran with it and got some studies, right?
What he claims is that they realized the importance of this insight.
They held it.
In-house, they use this to secret knowledge to create like a whole line of experiments.
Then in her Nobel talk, that this is kind of a centerpiece, that she's now adopted like a Weinsteinian framework without credit.
And that if Brett had been credited, not only would he have had like a successful paper and more influence, but actually the entire drug industry in the US.
May have come crashing down because of this problem with the telomeres of specific mice that were prevalent.
And, like, all of that seems to me hugely dubious.
I watched Carol Greider's Nobel speech, and the part that Brett is talking about is a slide.
And it's, like, covered in about 20 seconds.
And it's a very, like, she basically says, you know, we did this interesting study.
And we find out actually lab mice had surprisingly long telemeters, or like one species of lab mice.
But when I looked into details after that study, they were looking at like 15 different strains, and that's just one of them.
But in any case, we don't need to litigate the details, but I just want to say that those extrapolations, that he poses a threat to the entire pharmaceutical industry, and that he uses this to justify his skepticism of the current set of vaccines.
That all seems like highly dubious to me and why it's right to be skeptical as opposed to like say well there might be some truth to what he's saying because the truth might be there but the broader points it feels are very far-fetched.
I wondered about that.
Has he explicitly made that connection?
Because I wondered whether his current jihad against kind of pharmaceutical conventional wisdom both on the COVID therapy and the COVID vaccination front Whether that was somehow grounded in antagonism toward the pharmaceutical industrial complex,
which would be kind of weird because I don't think his theory is that Biogen stepped in and suppressed and was in cahoots with this professor.
He thinks stole his credit, but I wonder about that.
Has he made the connection himself?
He has.
Yeah.
Yeah, he's specifically linked that.
And Matt, you know that he's anti-Frodean.
Oh God, is he really?
Yes.
Does he think it's a communist plot, like in Dr. Strangelove, or he just thinks it's bad?
I think he just thinks it's bad.
The other stuff that comes into play is that Brett has a history of grandiose claims.
He's outlined an alternative theory of evolution, like lineage evolution.
You mean the, what's it called, explorer mode?
Yeah, that kind of thing.
Explorer mode is part of lineage.
I'm not convinced that's entirely crazy.
Now, he did trot out on my podcast a theory specifically about human evolution that I think seems pretty far-fetched.
I have to look into explorer mode a little more.
I think most biologists are taking it to be a form of group selection.
I'm not sure it's not.
But that aside, he did have this theory of human evolution.
That had this side effect of glorifying the people in the intellectual dark web.
Like there's some special adaptation that gives humans the power.
There's like some switch that can get flipped when things are really dire and we need really creative solutions.
And he thinks that's like built into our genes.
And in the IDW people, the switch has been flipped.
And the rest of us are waiting for our switch to be flipped.
I mean, look, people can see if I'm being unfair, but it's on YouTube.
Google me and Brett Weinstein.
I have to add to that, Bob.
Like, we'll move off Weinstein world, we promise, shortly.
I'm not sure, but we all seem to like talking about it.
They're fascinating characters, but Eric has also, like, at post-election...
We covered this episode where he does these little 15-minute introductions to his podcast.
And he essentially weaved the narrative whereby the term fake news was invented by a secretive cabal in order to elect Biden.
But most importantly, was also designed to discredit the intellectual dark web and long-form podcasters.
Wait, the term fake news?
Yeah.
So it was like he had a narrative.
Whereby it wasn't just that fake news was a term that came to prevalence after Trump.
He was kind of making a Mandela effect kind of argument saying, you thought that fake news was something that was discussed in the run-up to the 2016 election.
It was actually a post-election narrative.
And I think that rests on the specific term where Trump started popularizing fake news as a term.
But Eric's narrative, like the thing with Brett that you described, the amazing thing was...
It all linked into the targeted suppression of the intellectual dark web thinkers, Sam Harris, Joe Rogan, him, his brother.
And this was that the blob or the neoliberal institutions, they sensed the danger and they were just, they were running mad to shut it down.
So it's always impressive that the intellectual dark web is the beating heart of the resistance to Whatever they are.
I would say the only hope for our species lies within the intellectual dark web.
I actually think this goes into a topic that I wanted to ask you about and relates to your figure who you are a great admirer of.
So Barry Weiss has started her podcast called Honestly.
That's the title.
I can't remember the person she interviewed for the first episode.
It was a journalist.
At the end of it, The interview, she basically asked him, you know, what can we do to defend the republic in the face of everything that's happening, partisanship, the problems with liberal media and right-wing extremism and so on.
And the answer of her guest was that subscribe to people on Substack, support independent journalists, and that basically people like Barry and so on are holding the line.
For Western civilization against encroaching forces of wokeness.
And you've been active in this space in a long time.
You have kind of like one foot in alternative media, one foot in mainstream media, maybe, or at least previously.
And I wonder, you don't seem the kind of person to take that grandiose stand, but what do you think about the broad dynamics, alternative media, the mainstream media?
Is it the substack is the savior of civilization?
Or where do you land?
Well, I mean, you know, we all have our hobby horses.
We all have our areas where we think our views don't get enough attention.
My own probably is in foreign policy.
I do think the American foreign policy narrative that you see in mainstream media is a very destructive and dangerous thing.
I mean, if you just look at the way the New York Times covers Iran, for example.
Now, it goes back to the Iraq War.
I was against the Iraq War.
I observed the way it was being processed.
I hold out hope that alternative media could expand the Overton window or whatever in that space.
That said, in the run-up to the Iraq War, bloggers...
We're as complicit as mainstream reporters in confirming the kind of mindset that got us into the Iraq War.
So the other thing I just think is like, at some point they're going to have to quit calling it alternative.
I mean, Joe Rogan, who wouldn't kill to be on Joe Rogan's show?
If you're like Eric Weinstein and you can email Joe Rogan and say, I'd like to be on your show like April 2nd after I roll out my paper, and then it happens, well, just quit whining.
About being ignored by media.
There's like, where would you rather be on that day?
Anywhere?
There's no place where stuff like that gets discussed that would be better than Joe Rogan's show.
A hobby horse that Matt and I sometimes get on is that when people are talking about mainstream media and the lack of attention, they tend to, one, completely ignore the entire right-wing ecosystem.
Brett can talk about he's not appearing.
On the New York Times or CNN.
But he is appearing on Tucker Carlson.
He's getting coverage now on Infowars as it happens.
You know, Megyn Kelly interviewed him.
And Joe Rogan did an emergency podcast in a similar way with Eric.
So I think you made a similar, not exactly a similar point when you were criticizing Sam Harris.
But this inability to see that there's a kind of tribalistic element to it and an openness to those narratives.
It seems to be really lacking and the willingness to acknowledge that, as you've described with Eric, that he is now a part of an establishment or, you know, he's a celebrity figure with a lot of push, a lot more than Tim Nguyen.
No, absolutely.
One reason I find the Weinstein so fascinating is the role they played in catalyzing at least some of this.
I mean, Joe Rogan had his own momentum before Barry Weiss popularized the label Intellectual Dark Web and put it in the New York Times and got all this attention.
Of course, Eric had thought up the phrase, but it's just interesting, the synergy between the brothers.
Brett had started to become a figure because of the Evergreen controversy.
And then Eric, you know, he's the impresario of the two.
Yeah.
And you kind of saw this in the dialogue between them, right?
It's like, Brett is, he's this humble scholar who, gosh, doesn't want to make a big deal of this or anything.
And Eric is, wait, this theory, this theory was huge.
And you were, you know, you suffered an egregious crime.
And it's interesting to see how they have worked together to...
To kind of launch the intellectual dark web almost.
Again, this was happening anyway.
I mean, the reaction against wokeism was going to happen, and that's a lot of this.
It was happening with Jordan Peterson.
And so with or without the IDW label, maybe we'd be roughly where we are.
But the Weinsteins are a fascinating case study in new media synergy or something.
I think you can't overstate the influence of the reaction against...
Wokeness, if we want to call it that.
I mean, somebody, actually Liam Bright tweeted today, if the Evergreen students could have just chilled out for a couple of days, then none of us would have ever heard of Brett Weinstein.
And to some degree, that's true of Jordan Peterson as well.
That's true.
That was his total ticket.
Absolutely.
And what's interesting with him and Jordan Peterson is how you become famous for one thing.
And maybe this is one of the perils posed by restrictive speech codes or something.
I mean, at least in Peterson's case, it was a speech code.
It's like, you become famous just for violating a speech code, and then all of a sudden you've got a huge audience listening to you go on and on about the logos.
You translate your fame from kind of the boundary-pushing realm into guru territory.
Well, exactly.
I mean, the key thing is that the narrative of...
The suppression of dangerous ideas.
And I agree with you about, say, the New York Times not being particularly willing to write about certain things and be much more willing to be talking about other things.
I agree that's true.
But the gurus that we look at, they gain so much leverage from the narrative that you cannot get this information anywhere else.
Mainstream media isn't willing to talk about it.
These theories about...
They rely on the conspiracy, essentially.
Because without the conspiracy, why on earth would you listen to them?
They have no qualifications or experience in the areas that they're talking about.
So the rationale for listening to them is that you can't trust what's being published in, say, The Lancet or BJM, because those researchers are all tainted.
They're either...
Succumbing to a kind of groupthink, or they're subjected to institutional incentives, or they're directly part of a conspiracy.
So there's a spectrum there.
But the rationale is the same.
They rely on that.
No, persecution is a great asset these days, or the perception of persecution.
So Bob, actually, I was curious about this.
You may have spelt it out before, but like...
You have quite an interesting position because, like, Blogginghead seems to, the platform as a general thing that exists, seems to be relatively welcoming to, you know, people having debates across the aisle, so to speak.
And you host a podcast that is explicitly that, right, with your frenemy, Mickey Kaus.
I get the impression from that that you're not on board with notions about...
You could...
You shouldn't give platforms to people who are any further right than center-left, basically.
And even center-left are kind of questionable to look at.
But I'm wondering, has that dynamic impacted you?
You live in America.
You talk to a lot of people that are deemed beyond appeal or controversial.
And you also do it on the left side of the spectrum, because I would probably have more criticism for like platforming, so to speak, of people like Aaron Maté and so on.
But I'm just wondering, you know, how do you view those dynamics as somebody that's like been in the game for a long time?
I feel almost sure I'm the only podcaster who's had a conversation with both Aaron Maté and Brett Stevens, for example.
Aaron gets dismissed as an Assad apologist.
I mean, one thing I feel very strongly about is the value of Cognitive empathy.
That's not like feeling people's pain.
It's just understanding their perspective.
And I want to apply that to everybody.
I want to understand how Assad views the world.
I don't consider Aaron an Assad apologist, but whether he is or not is actually immaterial to me.
If he is a good stand-in for how Assad views the world, fine.
I want to know how Assad views the world, how Putin views the world.
And I just know how...
The view we got of the Syrian civil war in America was not a balanced view.
We intervened by proxy, and that just colored the way the whole thing was covered.
And my own view is, in retrospect, if we and our allies hadn't funneled a bunch of weapons into Syria, we'd be in a better place.
Assad would still be in charge.
He would have done some horrible stuff, but way less than he did.
And a lot of, you know, there are various dead people and refugees who wouldn't be dead people and refugees.
So I don't want to get into the politics too heavily, but I think if we had at that point understood that the story was just a little more complicated than one dictator and an entire nation that felt oppressed by him and had understood that There were people who didn't like the proxies that were being armed because they considered them scary jihadists.
We'd be better off.
I mean, it's just an example of where, would I have Alex Jones on?
No.
He's obviously not acting in good faith.
He has manipulated people's brains in an obviously horrible way.
And I'm kind of surprised that Joe Rogan has had him on his show recently, at least within the last year, right?
Yeah.
There are limits I draw, but they're not ideological.
I would say, That I'm completely on board, Bob, with your general stance, which is that there are narratives and things are more complicated than are presented in mainstream American media.
I don't have that much experience of American media like CNN or Fox, just the clips that rotate around the internet.
But at Gala, there are narratives that are rather simplistic in the way that things are presented.
But perhaps the...
The part where I would differ from you is that when you interviewed Brett Stevens and you tried to get him to have cognitive empathy for how people in Palestine may regard the situation in Israel, regardless of the truth of how it came to be or that, but just the situation they find themselves in and why it might make them amenable to people who would justify violence.
And he didn't seem to want to do that, right?
But from my point of view, I completely agree with you that there's no harm.
In fact, it's helpful to take the viewpoint of why would these people act like that?
And I come from Northern Ireland, so in the same respect, it was helpful to meet Protestants and see the way that they view the situation in Northern Ireland, which is very different from me and my family and my experience, but it's helpful to understand their perspective.
I think that you can have that without bringing into it The narratives were you're claiming that things are false flags and that you're denying the chemical attacks took place and going on tours organized by the Assad regime.
Like, there is complicated narratives and there are views which are heterodox or alternative viewpoints.
But there's also, there is apologism, apologetics and conspiracy theories and denialism.
If you disqualified every journalist who has been on a trip organized by a government, you know, Assad, it is the government of Syria.
And is your argument that it's a...
No, it's not.
My argument isn't that you can never do that.
You can never go on that.
I think he denies that he was subsidized in any way by the government.
I'm not sure.
And I don't know the details.
Basically, I see it as there are always things when people have to get access.
And like, if you want to go to North Korea, you're going to have to deal with the North Korean state.
You're not going to have freedom of movement in that country.
That's just the reality, right?
But there's a difference if you then come back and say, well, I see North Korea, the people there, they're happy.
And I got to talk to them and I got to see, you know, how the situation was on the ground.
If you end up that you are essentially endorsing then a regime's position, at least I look skeptical of that.
And I think like Max Blumenthal and the Grey Zone, there's been pretty good documents about a shift in their perspective, which aligned with a visit to a Russian conference, right?
And even if you don't accept that, I think...
Their questioning of the evidence for the war crimes, like the gas attacks and that, that seems really approaching the same kind of thing of global warming denialism in terms of credibility.
There are certainly people who you can find that will argue that.
There are experts who will say it's exaggerated.
But the weight of evidence is quite firmly against them.
Actually, there's one chemical weapons attack where a lot of documents came out in Wikipedia.
It's the Duma attack, the one that Trump retaliated for without waiting for the inspection team from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons to get there.
And in that case...
The original director of the OPCW, of the Organization for Prevention of Chemical Weapons, okay, has himself said that there needs to be an investigation because there is evidence that the OPCW, under American pressure, covered up the original report filed by the inspection team.
And what I've said about that is I have no idea what the story is.
What I'm sure of, I've looked at the documents enough to know for sure that if the American media were doing its job, There would at least be a story about the controversy, about the fact that the original director of the OPCW has said this.
It strikes me as, as I say, kind of similar parallels where you might have people that are involved in IPCC, for example, who will release their version where they say, look, this was a political document and I disagreed with the projections of global warming.
And my analysis did not support the claims of this.
And that's the impression I get with the analyst who, you know, made a report and was annoyed that it wasn't reflected in the final report that was issued, that there are, like you say, there's difference of opinions exist, but it's in the same way that there are differences that opinions exist on global warming.
There's still a very strong consensus in a particular direction.
So if you cover the controversy, I think you have to frame it that there's minority Sure, of course.
Let me put this in the context that matters to me.
And it gets back to the title of both my newsletter and my book, Non-Zero, which is about my conviction that the world's nations face a lot of non-zerosome problems, including climate change, that can only be solved through institutional cooperation.
It is very important to me that the institutions of global governance be functioning well.
So I think there should be an investigation into how the WHO has handled the pandemic and whether they did or did not submit to Chinese pressure.
And I do think there should be an investigation of whether the OPCW submitted to pressure from the Trump administration.
See, for me, it's not so much about the chemical weapons attack.
It's about the functioning of an international institution and the fact that these institutions in some cases aren't being taken seriously enough.
By our media to even be closely monitored.
Now, as it happens, the WHO thing is feeding into this neo-Cold War narrative with China, so that's going to get attention, and that should get attention.
But I'm saying all legitimate questions about the functioning of international institutions should get attention, and they're not getting it.
Can I push back one last thing on that, Bob?
When you say, like, don't get attention, like the WHO, to me, when I look at the past two years, there's been nothing but attention on the feelings and potential political implications of the WHO.
Like whenever there's a Zoom call and there's a random member of a WHO team trying to organize access with China, right?
And they have a Taiwan reporter who asks them about Taiwan's response, right?
And they do this terrible attempt to avoid the question of like addressing a GLO political point.
And they, oh, you know, they hang up the call, right?
That got taken as like complete irrefutable evidence of the capture of the WHO to China's agenda.
Whereas to me...
Like I heard about, I'm still hearing about that endlessly.
But to me, that is an example of like, that's a mid-level WHO person trying to avoid creating something that's going to be quoted all over the media and that the Chinese government will then react strongly to.
That would, to me, kind of counteract that nobody is issuing these criticisms.
They're not being heard.
That they should be hated because a nuanced view of that to me is that, yes, we should be concerned, like you say, with the influence of China on the WHO, but we shouldn't be focusing on things like that Zoom call as being this thing that we need to endlessly litigate because it could happen in so many contexts that don't involve Chinese domination.
Or alternatively, I mean, I agree that was overemphasized, but it was interesting.
But what I feel is that This narrative that China runs the WHO should be counterbalanced by an understanding of how often the United States has strong-armed international institutions.
And the OPCW, this may be a case of it.
There is evidence that there was a team of US officials who visited the OPCW and tried to lay down the law about what the findings of the inspection team should be.
That should at least be examined.
And that's what I want is an understanding that the U.S. has often abused its power with international institutions.
We shouldn't do it.
China shouldn't do it.
That's my view.
Well, we can all agree on that.
All right.
Okay, I'm going to perform my role as let's all agree that international institutions are important and that big, powerful nations like China and the United States do have a fair bit of influence on them.
It's uncontroversial to say that whether it's the EU or the United Nations, they're not necessarily functioning in the way that they were envisaged to function.
And let's also agree that politics in the Middle East is very complicated.
Very complicated indeed.
And simple narratives don't work very well there.
I'm going to change direction here because I just want to correct one small thing because, Bob, I think you got the impression that we were kind of down on...
Well, actually not.
I mean, speaking for myself, I'm a huge fan of evolutionary psychology in terms of the respectable parts of it, and there's a lot of it.
The stuff that you see on Twitter or on social media that everyone tends to talk about, whether or not it's the sort of evo-psych bros who want to make some point about women and lipstick or something, or the haters.
It tends to be a relatively small proportion of it that you do not see in EvoPsych textbooks in psychology departments.
You only see it on social media.
So, yeah, I just wanted to correct that potential misperception.
Okay.
I thought I had heard Chris allude to issues you had with EvPsych, but without elaboration.
Yeah, I would say, like, my IT issue with, like, Jeffrey Miller.
I tend to be very skeptical of a lot of the claims about the revolve around, like Matt says, the wearing red at certain times of fertility.
But I'm much less skeptical of that.
Like in the conversation you had with Evan Thompson, where he was kind of emphasizing that massive modularity is a necessary feature of the EvoPsych approach.
And I was more on your side, though, that.
You know, that might have been true early in the Evo psych field, but now there's a much greater understanding of the role of culture and the dominant views would be dual inheritance theory.
So, like, I like Joe Hendricks and Michael Murta Krishnas and that kind of group's work on Evo psych.
So maybe it's an issue that you would share that like some of the way that evolutionary psychology is presented in the mainstream is doing it at service or do you think that's not
Oh, I'm sure that's true.
And I don't like the way casual applications of it have gotten caught up in politics, or at least some of them.
I mean, like James Damore, is that his name?
the guy at Google who wrote the memo, and I think there was a conflation between kind of evolutionary psychology and his observations on some data about sex differences.
I mean, for example, if women seem to do, if there's some evidence that they seem to do better on some tasks than others relative to men, I mean, it's not the case that evolutionary psychology always has some story about why that would be in the genes.
There are sex differences in the aggregate.
I mean, you know, statistical differences that evolutionary psychology does think have a genetic basis, but I think you need to be careful about that.
Your regular listeners may know you had a conversation with Evan Thompson.
He's critical of something that he calls Buddhist modernism, I guess, which is kind of Western secular Buddhism.
And I want to be clear, first of all, that I don't hold one view that he attributes to Buddhist modernism, which is that this Western secular Buddhism actually captures the essence of the true ancient Buddhism.
And he kind of mischaracterized my book and his book, not intentionally.
As you know, he and I had a conversation about this, and I think I succeeded in convincing him that my book actually says the opposite, that Western secular Buddhism is one evolutionary strand of Buddhism.
I do think it captures a lot of what you could call the naturalistic part of Buddhism going back pretty far.
And by that I mean not rebirth, not gods, not the stuff that some people might call supernatural or metaphysically exotic or whatever.
I was focusing on the parts of Buddhism.
Which are emphasized in this Western Buddhism, which are, I think, amenable at least to scientific and, you might say, philosophical analysis, without appeal to special revelation or authority or anything.
But I'm not under the illusion that that's what Buddhism is in Asia.
I say in my book that a lot of Americans, at least, think that Buddhism is this religion where they don't believe in God and they do meditate.
It's closer to being the opposite.
In Asia...
By and large, the lay people don't meditate, and they do believe in deities, not a creator god, but deities.
So on that, I'm more on Evan's page than I think he thought I was.
It reminds me, Bob, just to mention that we covered Sam Harris talking about this, and he mentioned that if you engage in the introspective practices, you will...
You will confirm the key insights of Jesus and the Buddha.
So, in that sense, there's quite a strong contrast between the stance that you're taking, I think, on that topic.
I remember when you played that segment from Sam.
I listened to that podcast, too, of yours.
And when he says, basically, that Sam has had the same experience that Jesus had or something.
I mean, first of all, look, I was raised a Protestant.
I don't recall Jesus mentioning, you know, having the not self-experience in anything like explicit terms.
I mean, maybe, I don't know.
I mean, I suppose there are things you could take as metaphorical or something, but...
Me and Chris grew up in a Catholic background, so it's mainly just about the not masturbating.
That's the key message, I think.
Yeah.
So, yeah, Sam is, I mean, this brings us back to kind of the character of the...
The IDW, I guess.
One interesting question is how much of the character of the new atheists did the IDW inherit?
And look, the IDW is a pretty diverse set of characters, I guess.
And it seems to have fallen apart anyway, which is a very entertaining spectacle to see.
Claire Lemon doing battle with the Weinsteins, you know.
There is, with Sam especially, and with some of the IDW people, there's this It's almost like a claim to not special revelation, but it's an assertion of almost unique authority, right?
It's like Sam has seen the one true vision.
I remember he had on his podcast Joseph Goldstein, who's a very renowned, very important figure in American Buddhism, very important.
Sam was championing this one kind of meditation, and Joseph had done that, and he had done another kind, and he thought they both had value.
And Sam was like, no, no, no.
The kind I'm doing, the kind I'm doing is, you know, trying to get Joseph to say one was better than the other.
That does seem a myopic expression there.
And I think Evan makes a very valid critique when he's kind of saying the view from nowhere.
I think you've, I mean, you've made this point as well, Bob, with your article about Sam and tribalism, that it's a very...
Appealing narrative that you are seeing things objectively and non-tribalistic and all of your opponents are simply engaged in tribalism and bad faith.
That's a very useful way to frame the reason that you may disagree with people.
It's maybe, unfortunately, that this might be a bit harsh on modern Buddhism, but I think there isn't.
A tendency towards that amongst modern Buddhists that it's a prevalent sentiment that maybe it's common in general from people who convert to things later in life that they think they have seen something that other people haven't.
Yeah, maybe I should plead a little guilty to that.
I mean, the feeling I had after my first meditation retreat, which was like a week-long silent meditation retreat, and, you know, I had never had any success meditating before then.
But my consciousness had been so transformed by the end of that that I came out of it as something of an evangelist.
I was just way less inclined to, like, judge people.
I mean, calmer, but I'm willing to defend the claim that it was closer to being an objective view of reality that I had at the end of that.
I'm willing to defend that claim.
I've never gotten to the view from nowhere.
That's what true enlightenment would be, I guess.
I don't know.
I've never met anybody I was sure had attained enlightenment.
I mean, I don't know if Sam actually says he has or not, but I believe at that moment, and this is hard to hang on to, this point you can get to in the course of a retreat, but I think at that moment I had a clearer view of the world.
And the connection to evolutionary psychology is just that, and this was a theme in my book, The Moral Animal About Evolutionary Psychology, is just that natural selection.
Did not design us to see the world clearly.
And in some ways, it designed us to have a specifically distorted view of the world.
That's what all these cognitive biases are about.
On that point, I agree with you very, very strongly.
I teach a class in neurophysiology, and we actually go in detail into the biological basis for cognition and behavior in people.
And it's strong.
It's very strong.
And the one lesson from evolution is that evolution is stupid.
It doesn't have our best interests at heart.
We actually don't.
We actually have entirely different interests.
And I don't think you're a fan of Richard Dawkins, but I think it was him who described...
No, I'm a fan of early Dawkins.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, me too.
Pretty Islamophobic.
Yeah, yeah.
We'll leave that to another time, maybe.
Yeah, like he...
One metaphor I liked of his, I think it was him, who described like...
Us, as in our conscious selves, as being like a parasitic software virus, right?
It invaded our brains, a bit like the invasion of the body snatchers.
And we're now essentially inhabiting these hosts and bending our biological substrate to our own fiendish desires, which is to do things like create art and have...
Nice, non-dominating relationships with one another and do podcasts and a whole bunch of things which have absolutely nothing to do with evolution.
And that's like a marvelous thing.
But I agree with you that our biases, our heuristics, including things like overconfidence.
There's a famous result where, I hope it hasn't been invalidated because of like a lot of social psychology.
Don't tell me if it has.
But there's a very nice result, which is that people with a more inaccurate view of the world tend to actually are happier and do better in various ways.
I mean, that's just an illustration that it's not, I mean, we do want to be happy, but, you know, it is an illustration that one, being happy.
I don't think being happy is necessarily consistent with following your biological impulses.
And two, having an accurate view of the world is not consistent with the biological substrate either.
I mean, I would say evolution, natural selection, is smart in the sense of doing a reasonable approximation of maximizing genetic proliferation.
But the point is, A, That doesn't mean creating happy organisms.
In fact, quite the opposite.
It means creating eternally unsatisfied organisms.
And that is a deep connection with Buddhism and early Buddhism.
To get back to things that were in the ancient texts, you know, the Buddha's first, well, what is said to be his first sermon.
We don't know what was what, but the point is the earliest texts say it's his first sermon is about how...
The craving for things leads to unhappiness.
That's a product of natural selection.
We keep thinking that satisfying the craving is going to make us enduringly happy, and it doesn't.
And that's just one of many ways in which, you know, natural selection does not design organisms to be happy.
It designs them to attain happiness, but the point is...
It also designs the happiness to evaporate so that they will be motivated again to do the next thing.
And then there's the second problem that we're living in an environment different from the one it designed us for anyway.
I mean, this is not, you know, this is a technologically weird place that is definitely not a hunter-gatherer society.
You're familiar with the work on, like, supernormal stimuli?
No, I'm not sure what you mean by that, no.
It's basically just supporting your point there.
There's a whole lot of research on what they call supernormal stimuli, which are essentially artificial artifacts, which instigate responses to our sort of evolved preferences, but are like a hypernormal versions of it, which can lead us in a not necessarily healthy direction.
So typical examples are things like gambling products, which basically hijack our reward.
Well, and you know, just one place I'd advocate mindfulness is like on social media.
Just try to be aware of the feelings that are leading you to retweet something or to reply to somebody.
And if you can pause and observe the feeling, and I think meditation does make you better at this, you can probably keep yourself out of some trouble and maintain a little more in the way of equanimity.
People are taking part in long, silent retreats or so on.
Rather than getting an objective insight into the mind, they are being an interpretive framework.
One which is associated with a certain tradition.
I don't think you'd take an issue with that because you could do a Hindu meditation retreat which gives you a different kind of framework for the experiences.
But the question I have is say that The approach that you outlined, regardless of whether it's a culturally transmitted framework and how authentic it is to an original tradition, that it does give you the ability to recognize emotional reactions,
have a bit more distance, and so on.
And in a sense then, be aware of how you're experiencing things.
If that were the case, it doesn't matter in any respect if it is...
Ultimately tied into the Buddhist tradition or a long, ancient teaching.
Because if it's a modern thing and works, I'm just wondering, is there a necessity or any benefit to be gained by crediting it to a Buddhist tradition?
Except to say, this is where I'm drawing ideas from, but I have no idea about where they fall.
I don't think it's essential.
I think it actually helps some people.
You know, some people like getting into the ritual and bowing to the Buddha statue when they walk into the meditation hall.
I don't do that stuff.
It helps some people.
And that's why, you know, I don't get into big arguments about whether we really know that the Buddha said this, even though my own view is one of agnosticism about what we know about what the Buddha actually said.
Because, you know, nothing...
So far as we know, it's recorded in text that has survived at the time he lived.
It does help some people, but you know, there are people who are treating it as divorced from Buddhism and want to do it that way.
Like there were people who wouldn't, like there's a mindfulness magazine or something that wouldn't touch my book because it had the word Buddhism in it.
And there are a lot of institutional settings.
Well, I mean, American schools.
Believe me, if you want to get mindfulness into the schools, you should not mention the name of a non-Christian religion.
And so it is being divorced from Buddhism in that context, which I think is also fine.
You know, whatever works.
And I would say, by the way, you're right that the retreat can shape your interpretation of what's going on.
And there are a lot of different meditation traditions, even within Buddhism.
I mean, Tibetan meditation is very different.
And there are different strands of that from what I've done, which is mainly, you know, Vipassana, which is closely related to mindfulness, which for my money is a particularly good vehicle for thinking about,
well, I guess the issues I want to talk about, which is, you know, how our evolved brains distort our vision.
And you're probably damned if you do and you don't in a way.
Because if you didn't acknowledge the Buddhist history of certain ideas, other people would take issues with you not giving credit.
So you're rocking a hard place spring to mind.
I wonder, Bob, the ostensible theme of our podcast is talking about gurus, right?
And we've talked about a wide variety of potential gurus.
I'm curious, in some respects, it wouldn't be beyond appeal.
People suggested, have you considered doing Robert Wright?
He's a, like, he fits the guru model, right?
And there's a perennial joke amongst people where they say, when are you going to decode yourself, right?
That comes up.
So we've noted that, like, in thinking about the topic, that a lot of the stuff that we are...
Focusing on the guru sphere is slightly the negative skewed side of it, right?
Slightly.
A little more than slightly, Chris.
There is an air of skepticism, I've noticed, yes.
Just a tad.
And the gurometer, in a sense, is actually the way that we try to rate people, because it makes us feel a bit better as well if we can put people on skills and not say that everyone we're treating is just in a flat category.
But the gurometer that we came up with, these 10 characteristics, If you score highly on that, you're generally not a good person.
At least people should be wary.
I guess I'm wondering how you personally or in general feel about the topic of the parasocial dynamics that exist now in the online world and the potential danger of being perceived as a guru.
I mean, you wrote a book about like...
Buddhism, you've written books about philosophy and how the evolutionary side.
It seems that you would be in danger of falling into that thing.
But I guess healthy self-deprecation counts against that.
What, you're asking, am I a guru?
No, I guess I'm asking, how do you avoid the unhealthy aspects of guruism?
Doing what you do.
Probably if I had a following as Sam Harris, it would be harder.
I don't know.
I mean, you know, it's like audience capture is a powerful thing.
I mean, I don't think I have, you know, they're just aspects of Sam's personality that are conducive to becoming a guru.
The sense of self-certainty.
Gurus?
I don't think gurus are necessarily always bad things.
They're obvious pitfalls, I guess.
It's having an uncritical audience that constitutes a lot of the pitfalls, I would say.
I mean, that's having just an enraptured, uncritical audience.
And I'm not saying that Sam has that in particular, but I would think that that's one of the things that leads people astray and leads them to start exploiting their followers and so on.
I mean, I'm a little unclear on your definition of what a guru is.
I was surprised that Carl Sagan qualified, for example.
Was he a borderline case?
Well, yeah, it's confusing for people because we made it confusing.
It's our fault.
Yeah, like when we talk about those characteristics of gurus that we don't like, like the conspiracy mongering and the galaxy brainness and so on, they're obviously all bad things, right?
So there's one aspect to which we talk about gurus and it's being a bad thing.
We don't want to discover terrible people.
Right.
And like you said, you can be a well-known sort of public figure.
You can be perceived as having some kind of intellectual stature.
You can be willing to give opinions or study or talk about a wide variety of topics.
And you could do it in a healthy way.
And so we...
I enjoyed covering Carl Sagan because he, to us, was the epitome of a good guru because he does, in some of these talks, go beyond simply doing public education of science and talking about black holes and stars and so on.
He does link that to broader thoughts about animal welfare, about international relations, about how we should be living our lives, what's important and so on.
That's just answering your question.
There's two ways to use that word.
Yeah, I mean, I would have thought that a guru needed to have some kind of self-help dimension.
I guess I would qualify on those grounds.
Basically, the question is forcing you to pitch yourself as a guru.
I apologize for that.
Yeah, it's funny.
After the book came out, I did a video series with Tricycle Magazine.
You know, that's kind of the big American Buddhist magazine on mindfulness and the psychology of tribalism.
Maybe that's what it was called.
Originally, the idea was that Sharon Salzberg, who is this very big figure in American Buddhism, and in particular, she is the person to see on meta-meditation or loving kindness meditation.
She was going to do these guided meditations to go on the end of each lecture that I gave.
Then she got sick.
She's now all better and it's fine, but she couldn't do them.
I had the option of doing them myself, the guided meditations.
And I don't know, maybe I should have.
It didn't feel...
I didn't feel qualified quite.
It didn't feel quite right.
And I was just kind of busy.
But maybe that was the guru path not taken.
Who knows?
Maybe if I had done that, I'd be hanging out with Sam Harris instead of you guys right now.
You made the wrong choice.
Definitely monetarily wise.
I think from my perspective, when we initially started the project, we were kind of interested in the emergence of...
Unconventional gurus might be the way to put it, because like you suggested, the kind of traditional version of a guru is a self-help, spiritual healer, potentially alternative medicine advocate.
And what we find interesting was there were these people like Jordan Peterson, like the Weinsteins, who seem to be emerging and to display lots of the characteristics that are associated with those kind of...
I'm not just, I don't even mean like, you know, Jim Jones types.
I mean, like more mainstream people, but that they didn't carry with them necessarily.
Like I know Jordan Peterson has a self-help component, but like Eric Weinstein doesn't necessarily, right?
It's more about the anti-institution position.
So we were interested in this kind of emergence, what we called secular gurus.
And then since then on the podcast, we've kind of expanded.
To look at people like Gwyneth Paltrow who fall more into the traditional space.
But I think the thing that surprised us was that there's so many characteristics which overlap in all these categories.
In the alternative health space, in the secular guru space.
And Jordan Peterson can, in many respects, just be best understood.
As a traditional guru figure, it's just that he also implements it through the space of science and psychology.
But that's not even that unusual when you go back and look at what gurus have been talking about throughout history.
Actually, this is a criticism I think you brought up.
To a certain extent, we lack enthusiasm when it comes to addressing like candy or contrapoints or the...
I wasn't sure your heart was totally...
I mean, I listened to the beginning of the Candy Podcast and it didn't seem like you were heading into it with quite the sharp edge that you would approach, say, a Weinstein.
Yeah.
I think it's fair to say that nobody with any sanity is super enthusiastic about reading into...
Race dynamics in the US and race and IQ debates and that kind of thing.
I just always think about Sam saying, I really don't want to talk all the time about race and IQ, and yet it comes up so much.
From our side of it, I think we'll find people that don't fit this, but people like Kendi They kind of form more into possibly a point that you are talking about,
that they're kind of like public intellectuals with advancing a particular political program, and they didn't display the same level of the kind of manipulative guru characteristics that we,
like, we didn't agree with Candy's framework, like the anti-racist framework, but people were a little bit disappointed that we didn't.
Tear him apart.
But in our guru set, he actually did come across more reasonable.
So it was kind of...
It's an interesting issue because it might be that the lefty type people are just a bit better at disguising their rhetoric or whatever in a way that is more palatable to audiences without going into a Weinsteinian rant about the disc and whatnot.
Yeah, so it's a wrinkle that we've discussed.
I'm curious, by the way, if you've thought about doing Steve Bannon.
For a while, I was listening to his podcast during the Trump era.
And, you know, he's got, I don't know if you'd call it self-help, but he's got his sermons about agency and volition.
One thing maybe all of these people have in common, I mean, if you wanted to draw in some people like the Weinsteins, even though they're not doing so much, obviously, in the way of self-help, but if you wanted to still draw them into the guru paradigm, there is this idea that if you accept their worldview,
it will be transformative.
Right?
And look, who am I?
I mean, I wrote a book called Why Buddhism is True.
I mean, I'm making the same claim.
So maybe I'm the G word.
And that's something that's true of these, of all, you could say probably about pretty much all the people you're trying to draw into your model.
Whether or not there's self-help, there's this hint of transformation.
Yeah, that's right.
I was going to push back a little bit on before when you mentioned that self-help was like a necessary ingredient.
But you kind of said it yourself.
We don't think it is.
It often...
What's involved is a transformative worldview that you need to know these things.
It's very important to know these things.
So if you take someone like Scott Adams, say, who's just purely a political figure, monster, when your worldview does involve these oppressive forces that are lying to you and so on, that are pulling the wool over your eyes,
then obviously by opening your eyes and getting woke to that is going to be super transformative.
So the political and the personal Overlap a great deal.
And the other thing I'll just say is that we've been thinking a lot about...
The fact is, going into the Kendi episode, I knew virtually nothing about him, except what I'd read from people tweeting or something.
And my expectations was that it would be terrible, just nonsensical rhetoric.
Not nonsensical, but certainly really hardcore rhetoric, which would have a lot of flaws in it.
And it was quite carefully argued.
This thing that we noticed.
And his style of doing it was a very academic style.
That doesn't mean, as Chris said, that we necessarily agreed with it and we could pick holes in it, but it just didn't have the same character as the centristy or right-wing gurus.
And we actually find it quite hard to find, except in the health and wellness space, we find it quite hard to find gurus that fit our gurometer.
On the left wing, that's not to say that there isn't bad ideas on the left, that there isn't rhetoric on the left or manipulative stuff going on.
Have you done Marianne Williamson?
Not yet, but she's been suggested.
I'm kind of convinced that if we look at Jimmy Dore and stuff, we will find very similar dynamics.
You might be more sympathetic to his worldview, but I think Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taiby as well would.
I think a key thing that the guru set lack is a genuine...
Willingness to self-deprecate and to evoke an awareness of how partial their understanding is about topics.
And the one thing that you definitely do have is a willingness to self-deprecate and acknowledgement of partial understanding of things.
So in that respect, you don't fit well into the guru set because you're...
Self-deprecation.
You can self-deprecate as a guru as long as you do it in a way where you're actually praising yourself.
Then it's okay, but genuine self-deprecation is rare.
That's the way I've always tried to do it.
It sounds like I've failed.
You think I have not succeeded in using tactical self-deprecation to enhance my credibility.
But seriously, it's interesting.
For a while, I used to think...
Sam Harris had no sense of humor, but then I realized he has a sense of humor, but it's almost always making at the expense of other people, right?
It's like he would say things his audience considered funny about people who had various religious beliefs or something.
And I'm trying to think if I've ever heard him be self-deprecating.
But it's an interesting question, the category of self-deprecating gurus.
That's a whole realm for you to...
That's a whole series of...
Yeah, the person that we've saw who've done that is ContraPoints.
There's a leftist kind of ironic self-deprecation, which I think works as a deflection, but it also seems to reflect, at least in her case, a genuine personality.
Whether it's genuine self-loathing or ironic self-loathing, it doesn't come across as forced.
As a Northern Irish person, I feel like I'm a connoisseur of self-deprecation.
It's like the core value of my society is based around that.
And so I think my bullshit detector for self-deprecation is finally attuned.
And Australian culture, I think, is...
Quite similar, Mark, right?
You forgot to put culture in inverted commas.
Australian culture.
Such as it is.
Yeah, such as it is.
Culture.
Yeah.
We've got lots of good culture.
Yeah, yeah, it's true.
It's true.
So, yeah, American culture, a lot of great things about it, but it does more uncritically, I think, not everyone, obviously, and Trump's probably a bad example because obviously at least 50% of the country hate him.
But the fact that even some people could find him an attractive or a funny person.
The weird thing is, I would say, I mean, there is a strong American tradition of self-deprecation.
It's part of my cultural heritage.
And I would say my cultural heritage is also kind of middle American in the cultural sense.
The funny thing is, Trump's constituency Resides largely in that demographic where self-deprecation is actually a value.
That's what's so weird.
You will find a lot more self-deprecation in Missouri than New York.
I don't know.
It's one of the great puzzles of Trump.
There is an element.
I live in Japan.
Of course, there's big cultural differences between Northern Ireland and Japan.
Shocking.
The cultural insight you gain here.
But there is this one element which is very similar.
In Japan, there's a real value around just leave other people alone.
Don't cause them disruption.
Don't talk to people when they're eating.
They sit down and they eat and so on.
In my case...
You know, I grew up in the UK and spent time in London and stuff.
And there's a little bit, like, the value is similar, maybe with, like, grumpiness around service staff, also a cultural value.
But when I go to America, even in the liberal cities, the level of what looks to me to be extremely faux enthusiasm and friendliness and, like, you know, a talkativeness.
People talk about America, about how people are coming insulated and isolated and so on.
I feel like they just should spend some time in other countries to understand how that is from my perspective.
Because I feel oppressed in America from the people asking me, how was the salad and how are you doing?
I know, it's smiling at you.
It's just horrible.
What's Ireland like?
That strikes me as the baseline in America for accepting enthusiasm.
There's cross-cultural studies about willingness to self-promote, and it's always presented as the West versus the East, but it actually means Japan versus America.
They're at very strong loggerheads.
That seems to me the element that Trump tapped into, that there's a cultural value towards...
Self-promotion and willingness to speak out and that kind of thing.
Yeah.
Well, just being comfortable with it.
I mean, and I just want to correct because I didn't mean to imply before that Americans don't have a good sense of humor or are all annoying like Trump, right?
But, like, what I was thinking of was...
He just says that in private.
I said that off camera because, you know, we've got a lot of Patreons in America.
Like, for example, my American colleague who's been in Australia for many years, he finds Australians quite annoying because, You know, he'll go to a place and he'll say, look, is the cake any good or whatever?
And they'll go, it's all right, I guess.
Whereas in the United States, you go, this is the best pie in the state.
We make the best pie in the state.
You mean if you ask the waiter or something?
If you ask somebody who's serving it?
Well, yeah, I mean, but I think he'd say it was just a bit more, like a more general willingness to be positive, not necessarily to be, you know, narcissistic or self-aggrandizing, just to be generally positive.
I do think that's more urban America.
I mean, my heritage is from West Texas farm families, and I'm telling you.
How you doing?
How you doing?
I guess not...
Too bad.
I guess it could be worse, I suppose.
I can't imagine how, but it could be.
No, I hear you.
I hear you.
And look, so I'll say something that our entire American audience knows, which is that America is a hugely diverse place geographically, right?
And places like Australia, it's just a monoculture.
We've got less history, basically.
Is it?
It is, basically.
Yeah, you go to Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria.
Tasmania, you know, even New Zealand.
I mean, it's not that different, really.
Like, Australians are a hell of a lot more similar to New Zealanders than Texans would be to New Yorkers.
There's a couple of notable divides in Ireland.
But culturally, actually, pretty similar, relatively speaking.
Maybe exaggerated, but yeah.
But I think Matt's caveat is probably, well, Listening to you and Mickey, I feel perfectly at home because you're both constantly either taking shots at each other or self-deprecating.
It feels like a perfectly normal part.
Larry David is just as American as is Trump.
There definitely is a cultural value attached to that.
I guess it's just in the aggregate it comes out differently.
And we have Boris Johnson in the UK.
Like, it's not that narcissistic self-aggrandizers can't do well.
Yeah, although, you know, Trump makes him look like, I don't know, Churchill or somebody.
You know, it's funny.
I mean, Trump, if you ask how did somebody so obnoxious capture the hearts of people who ostensibly would not seem to share many of his kind of...
His superficial values, his mode of self-presentation and everything, the ostentatiousness and so on.
The answer is related to the answer to the question of how did somebody as strange as Eric Weinstein burst on the scene and capture a bunch of attention?
They both captured the same set of frustrations.
People feeling like, oh, now you're telling us what to A, B, and C, and so on.
I think the grand unified guru theory can accommodate both Trump and Eric Weinstein in principle.
That's true.
I think there definitely is a component that people from the left side of the sphere, like us at least, don't focus that much on the issue about wokeism because there is an already existing narrative amongst the right which is very fixated.
And you don't want to feed into that.
But I think that context is really relevant to why certain figures can emerge and get traction.
We've already mentioned, but the evergreen situation, if the students don't do that, don't react in the way that they did, I doubt that Brett is getting time on Fox News.
He was always a guru in waiting.
I think he's described that he always felt...
He had a place in the public conversation that was just waiting for him to burst forth.
You can see that, yeah.
Yeah, but still, he wouldn't have that if it weren't for how events transpired there.
So, yeah, that's something that I think we get charged by our followers who lean more to the right as being out of touch with because Matt's in Australia and I'm in Japan.
So, Bob, are you besieged by...
Woke-ism, do you feel in America now where you are in your enclave, are you kind of being pressed on to say men and women, there's no differences?
Well, I am the least woke member of my family.
My wife and my two daughters are both more woke than me.
So there's a certain amount of...
Oppression on the domestic front.
My two daughters are out of the house now.
You know, it's funny.
I mean, I suppose there are things I'm reluctant to say on social media.
You know, social media is kind of an intimidating place.
But at the same time, I guess I'm trying to make a point to say them somewhere.
I mean, for example, I have a conversation set up with an anthropologist.
You may know of him.
I don't know.
Augustine Fuentes.
He's now at Princeton.
Was it Notre Dame?
About the gender thing.
Are there the sex differences thing?
I'm going to argue the evolutionary psychology side.
I feel careful about, too careful.
I'm trying to start feeling less careful about what I say on social media, in a sense.
It's lucrative.
Well, that's the funny thing.
One of the, I think, largely unhealthy things about the modern environment is just how being outrageous gets positive reinforcement.
You get more and more followers, and there's an incentive to be transgressive, and I think certain kinds of transgressiveness are healthy, but I'm not a fan of transgressiveness for the sake of transgressiveness.
Yeah, it's true, isn't it?
If you are transgressive, you'll...
You might accumulate three times as many haters as fans, but you'll certainly accrue attention, and many of those fans will pay you.
So it can work out.
For every person who's cancelled, I suppose, there's maybe somebody who's benefiting.
We've been watching a couple of figures like James Lindsay and more recently Michael O 'Fallon, and they didn't start off like wilting violets in general.
But there's definitely a spiralling and increasing level of rhetoric that emerges from them.
And it gets like, at least in the case of O 'Fallon and Lindsay, they get really just into, you know, Alex Jones level conspiracies, the Great Reset, billions are going to be killed.
And it's quite impressive to watch how quickly, you know, that pool can go.
But their audience is just, you know, ever expanding.
So there's definitely an unhealthy dynamic there.
Well, I think speaking of audience capture, Bob mentioned audience capture before is a really important thing.
And I agree with you, Chris.
I think that's really happening.
They notice that the more outrageous they are, there's a flurry of likes and their follower count goes up and so on.
But maybe what they don't notice is that their fan base is shifting.
It may be growing, but it's actually changing.
So I would say at the beginning, There were many people who were fans of James Lindsay because they agreed that there were some stupid articles written in the critical theory of society.
Feminist glaciology.
Feminist glaciology, right?
And then he may not notice or care that his fan base has shifted to include basically just lunatics now.
But I guess there are a lot more of them somehow.
Yeah, when the follower count is growing and more money is coming in, it's probably hard to change course.
I don't know.
I wouldn't know.
Yeah.
I want that problem.
Bob, you made that point.
I suspect it wasn't that much of a surprise for you as it was for Sam Harris when he discovered that a large amount of his audience were fans of Trump.
From your criticisms that you leveled at him and the New Atheist more generally, you probably saw that coming, right?
That there would be sympathies for people in that side.
Because I think, if I'm rightly characterizing, you've essentially said that the New Atheist, the criticism of religion focuses on ideology and kind of ignores the...
Foreign policy aspect and neoliberal potential influence on things.
I think I was the first person to say in print that although they were casting themselves as liberals, when it came to foreign policy, they were on the right.
Both if you look at some of Sam's specific views, but also almost intrinsically in the sense that if you attribute conflict to religious motivation...
That tends to obscure sources of conflict on the ground, so to speak, that include things like invasion and occupation and so on.
So when Richard Dawkins said, if it weren't for religion, there would be no Israel-Palestine conflict.
That's just incredibly naive.
And it's a way of kind of dismissing the Palestinian perspective as being a result of religious fervor.
I mean, the truth is...
Zionism was not very religious to begin with.
It was essentially secular.
The initial Palestinian resistance was not particularly religious.
And by the way, there are a lot of Palestinian Christians.
I think it's a false view to see religion as this kind of autonomous force that governs events in the world, as opposed to the more, I suppose, in a way, it's a Marxist field.
I'm not some kind of thoroughgoing Marxist, but the view that...
Religion and ideology is itself responsive to facts on the ground.
When you see fervent and intolerant forms of religion, that probably reflects some kind of conflict that has its origin on the ground.
Yeah, I think you're completely right about that.
It seems like a very easy thing to agree with.
I guess the only little...
The elaboration I'd put there is, like, I know an Israeli guy.
He's a secular guy.
And he talks a lot about the hardcore religious faction in Israel.
And, you know, these tend to be settlers and so on.
And they are, to at least some degree, motivated by their beliefs.
Well, as conflict goes on, it often gets more religiously engaged.
Intense.
I debated Sam Harris in Los Angeles like, I don't know, 12, 15 years ago or something.
Richard Dawkins was in the audience.
And I criticized his view, which was not a reflection of my courage.
I didn't know he was in the audience.
So I criticized his view on that specific thing about, you know, there would be no Israel-Palestine conflict.
And he said, but religion serves as an ethnic marker.
And now that is...
True, it can serve as an ethnic marker, as I would think it does in Ireland.
But you didn't need a religious ethnic marker in Israel because you had a linguistic and cultural marker.
The Arabs speak Arabic.
The Israelis don't.
So once you had what originated as a territorial dispute, it didn't take religion to turn it into a kind of tribal conflict.
Trying to understand the Northern Ireland conflict, for example, just through the lens of the different doctrines of Protestantism and Catholicism would be completely meaningless in comparison to understanding Republicanism versus Unionism as political doctrines.
So I think I fall closer in line with anybody who's arguing that social dynamics and geopolitical realities impact, and like you say, oppression and kind of Invasion play a big role.
But I would add the caveat that there are circumstances, like for example, when you have Western recruits to extremist Islamist groups who haven't lived in oppressive...
Some of them maybe have treated badly, but there are cases where there's foreigners from wealthy backgrounds and also people in the Middle East who are relatively wealthy.
Backgrounds who become enamored with maybe an unsophisticated interpretation of a religion.
But I think you do get ideological fanatics, but focusing on that as if that's the core that explains all conflicts, that's the problem.
And I think you would imagine, Bob, agree.
No, sure.
I mean, once you've got a conflict, you can get people who will just feel more fulfilled if they...
Latch on to one cause or the other, but the cause can be religious.
It can be ideological.
It almost doesn't matter.
What they need is a worldview that can give meaning to their lives, and that's why I think we should be careful about starting conflicts.
If we had not intervened by proxy in Afghanistan 40 years ago, or however long ago it was, and if we had not invaded Iraq, both of those things had ongoing consequences created.
I don't think ISIS would exist if we hadn't invaded Iraq.
But yeah, absolutely.
And I don't mean to say that you don't wind up with situations where people are appealing to their religions to justify the conflict.
I'm just saying I don't think that means that religious doctrine is very often the actual source of the conflict.
Yeah, there's a funny parallel there because your message there is essentially bad.
Religion may well be a contributing factor, but it's not special.
It's not a special thing.
And that parallels really our view of these gurus, right?
Some of them may be religious or spiritual or whatever.
Some of them may focus on political things.
But in a sense, the details don't really matter that much.
No, I think that's right.
It's partly a question of what psychological buttons are being pushed.
Ideology and national affiliation and religious affiliation can all push the same buttons and any of these things can become worldviews that give your life meaning.
Bob, I feel like we've stolen a lot of your time.
It's been fun though.
Is there anything that we forgot to mention or that we lose threads that we should have covered or burning questions that you...
Felt have gone unanswered?
Just that salvation can only be found through me.
That is the endgame of our podcast.
We're getting to that in the second half of our tram.
I will say, and I'm going to engage in IDW backpadding here, so take this for what it's worth.
I've disclaimered now, so I'm fine.
I enjoy the way that...
Especially your interviews where there's an element of disagreement and kind of cantankerous back and forth with guests.
It's still relatively rare to find people that can have extended conversations with, like you said, with someone that you disagree so strongly with, like Brett Stevens.
And I know people argue that, well, civility porn and all this kind of thing, but I think there is civility porn, but there is also just...
Civility and the ability to have an engaging dialogue.
And I think you and your conversation with Bret Stephens did a good job of highlighting, from my point of view, areas that were lacking in his position.
But he also represented his position quite well.
And I think that amongst the guru set, the tendency to take any strong criticism as a potential source of litigation or as a...
Like that Ezra Klein has a fundamental feeling and anybody that would agree with him is just a myopic fool that I appreciate what you add to the information ecosystem.
Whether you're a guru or not, you're a good guru in my books.
So if we cover you, we'll be gentle.
I can't think of a better blurb for an aspiring guru that the decoding of the guru's podcasters themselves consider me a relatively good one.
I guess if it's going to be Truly IDWS backpadding, I should compliment you.
I've really gotten engrossed in your podcast.
And it's a fascinating enterprise.
There's a lot of gurus out there.
We got a review recently where somebody was saying, oh, they're running out of gurus because they're having to go back to the 80s.
I was thinking...
It's really not the problem.
That's not the issue.
Well, also, there's nothing wrong with getting historical and there's a lot of history on the record.
I mean, you know, there's Norman Vincent Peale.
There's this fascinating...
L. Ron Hubbard, I think, is someone that we've talked about.
Now, that's a guru.
By the way, Trump went to a church where Norman Vincent Peale preached.
He was still preaching at Marble Collegiate, I think, church in Manhattan when I believe Trump went there as a kid.
So there.
It's been...
Very enjoyable, Bob, and wide-ranging as anticipated, so really appreciate you humoring us and also sticking with us for the past two hours.
