Gad Saad is a Professor of Marketing at Concordia University, author of The Consuming Instinct and, more recently, The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense. Self described as the 'Gadfather' with a podcast called the Saad Truth, he's certainly well versed in puns on his name. But is Prof. Saad the true Godfather of evolutionary consumption as he claims? or is he more of a Fredo, perpetually getting passed over for other Gurufathers?Gad is worried about parasitic brain worms that are influencing people's politics, though this affliction seems to correlate pretty strongly with all the liberal political views that Gad dislikes. Indeed, you won't find any discussion of MAGA or QAnon in his extensive bestiary of the pernicious brain-worms that can parasitise your mind. Rather it is 'Trump Derangement Syndrome' that has Gad fretting. But it isn't all partisan politics, we also get to see Gad draws on his knowledge of evolutionary psychology and unparalleled 'surgical' satirical skills to 'castrate' his opponents. Get ready for a string of anecdotes in which Gad destroys postmodern ideologues with facts and logic, embarrasses pigeon brained academics, and teaches his soccer coach the true meaning of freedom... and then everyone stood up and called!LinksVaccine: The Human Story (Recommended Podcast!)Great thread on conspiracy theories and Gurus on TwitterTimbah on Toast's YouTube Documentary on Tim PoolGad Saad: The Death of Truth and How to Revive it: Modern Wisdom Podcast Ep. 217
It's a podcast where an anthropologist and a psychologist listen to the greatest minds the world has to offer and try our very best to understand what they're talking about.
I'm Professor Matt Brown.
With me is Associate Professor Chris Kavanagh.
And Chris, I don't have a special introduction for you today, but I do have a parable, if you will, which I think contains a special message for both of us.
Regreal me with your insight.
Imagine, if you will, A man, perhaps on Twitter or on the internet somewhere, and he's cloaked with bad opinions.
He's holding them closely to himself, protecting himself against the winds and storms of everything that's going on.
Okay, far-fetched.
Far-fetched and a person with bad opinions on Twitter, but I'll try to imagine it.
Keep going.
The wind and the sun, who are actually people in this parable, have a bet as to who could get him to...
Change his bad opinions.
So they had this friendly bet and the wind blows and buffets this man.
He goes, ah, you stupid feckin' idiot.
Change those stupid opinions.
Take them off.
And the man, he just holds them ever more tightly to himself.
And he doesn't take off his coat.
If anything, he's holding it even tighter.
And then the son says, all right, I'll have a go.
And he says, go on, mate.
Go on.
It's not that bad.
The sun's shining.
Let's have a barbecue and have a swim.
It'll be good.
Don't worry about it.
The man, he starts, does realize he is a bit hot.
And he does.
He takes off his coat and then they all go and have a barbecue and a swim.
Do you think there's a moral to that story, Chris?
I was just blindsided by the...
Deeply offensive ethnic stereotypes that that parable contained.
Jordan Peterson and a lot of the figures we cover are famed for their ability to weave these poetic metaphors.
I just don't think we're a threat to them.
It's true.
I don't know why I feel that.
I just thought I would mention that.
But on the topic of the parable, I'm a little bit surprised that The man walking around the internet cloaked in his bad opinions, that he reacted so positively to such a manipulative son.
The son figure in that parable seemed to me an obnoxious force trying to...
Force its jovial nature onto the man.
No, I think the son was just being himself.
I think the son is just naturally like that and just naturally has that effect on people.
I don't think he was being manipulative, but, you know, that's the thing with parables.
People take different things from them.
I mean, it was beautiful, Matt.
What can I say?
And it actually fits with the theme of the current episode because we're going to look at Gad Saad, who we'll talk about in a bit, but I will provide a...
Tempting morsel by saying that him and the interviewer in the content that we're looking at are prone to stretched metaphors and analogies.
They don't go so far as to issuing parables, but they do provide long anecdotes about events that may or may not have actually happened.
So this was a thematically appropriate introduction.
Good job!
Introductions, they come to me in the shower.
Inspiration strikes.
I've warned you about thinking about me in the shower, but it seems it hasn't stuck.
This also fits because we wanted to remember up front to thank our new editor, Better Angels on Twitter, who has kindly offered to help with the editing of episodes.
And we will give him plenty to do.
If the release schedule is more regular and the episodes are more coherent, that's nothing to do with us.
It is all down to Better Angels.
So just wanted to give him a shout out for his hard work and kindness.
Yes.
Thank you, Better Angels.
Much appreciated.
Another thing we wanted to mention online is to call for expressions of interest for a social media helper.
We have a Twitter account and we...
I think we technically have a Facebook group that we've never posted to.
And we have the Patreon, of course, which one of us actively supports.
And the other one occasionally shows up.
We are willing to divert some of our hard-earned Patreon funds to reimburse somebody who might be willing to look after Instagram, Facebook, whatever the kids are using these days, helping to spread.
The gospel of the DTG thing.
So if you should be interested in such a thing and it wouldn't destroy your life work balance and whatnot, just drop us an email and we can have a chat.
We're not talking about somebody building up the brand on social networks with detailed threads and all that.
No, just minimum effort is fine.
Yeah, you can take us as a role model for that.
I'm not sure what our selection criteria is.
Enthusiasm, a sunny personality.
You'll find out.
Yeah, somebody motivated.
Good if you have experience, I guess.
I think we're doing this wrong, Matt.
We should be saying, like, qualified people that are ready to make a change in the world and want to represent the DTG brand and help us expand their frontiers.
No, no.
If you literally want to help save civilization through logform podcasting, then this is the best way to do it.
That's it for you.
That's right.
We're reaching into the parasocial relationships that we've cultivated now to exploit you on the level of crappy employment offers.
Oh, no, this isn't an employment offer.
I think that's probably something we shouldn't say.
They don't want to go through the hassle of that.
It'll be a...
Casual gifts and sexual fevers.
So send us an email if you're interested in any of that.
If that sounds good to you, yes.
We're bad at this.
We're bad at this.
We're very bad at this.
Very bad at this.
Labour metaphors and badly told parables.
That's our brand.
That's what we've got.
That's why people come here.
The other reason that people come here is to hear us talk about the Weinsteins.
We're going to disappoint you only to infuse you with a new vitality that you didn't know you possessed as we say that we're not doing Weinstein World today.
Instead, we're going to do an entire episode dedicated to updating what's happening in the wacky world of the Weinsteins.
And we will have a special mystery guest joining us.
Somebody who might be, in some ways, considered Relatively normal and who doesn't know all of the ins and outs of Weinstein world.
So they will be able to react as a normal person and see whether we are being unfair or whatnot.
Yeah, so it's going to be us two terminally online people and a normal person.
I realized, Chris, that I was pathetically terminally online when I found myself on Twitter and I found myself watching the first 10 minutes of a two-hour video that someone had posted.
This person was a Marxist-Leninist who was doing a deep dive into ContraPoint's latest episode with the theme that she was a pseudo-fascist.
And I got like 10 minutes in and I thought, what the fuck am I doing?
That's even quite online for me.
Commentary on ContraPoint's videos is a lie that I...
I can't say that I've never crossed it, but I can't say that I've pulled out at the beginning or in a similar fit of what the fuck am I doing?
Matt, to make us feel better about our online lives, there is sometimes good content that we come across in the online sphere.
And since we aren't going to do Weinstein World this time, we thought we might mention some stuff that we come across and that we actually liked.
We didn't hear that.
It was good.
No.
Yeah.
And we'll post the link to this thread on Twitter in the show notes.
It was by this chap called Julian Sanchez, who I don't know who that is.
It was a great thread and he nailed a lot of great points that we talk about in the Garometer.
It was really talking about the COVID misinformation stuff and how people engage with that sort of disinformation.
And he made some great points.
So one of them was the cranks and crackpots.
Without naming any names.
They're out there, shall we say.
Do this kind of deep dives into all of this impressive looking details of hex dumps and spreadsheets, IP addresses, that kind of thing.
You see the same kind of thing with theories about election hacking and people debunking climate science.
And he makes the point that...
A lot of this stuff is purely signalling.
The audience doesn't understand this dense material they're getting presented with.
It's really performing the role of flattering the audience with this invitation to assess the raw evidence for themselves and come up, do their own research and to come up with their independent opinions.
A lot of it is repeating things that we have said, in other words, better.
So that's always nice to get.
Positive reinforcement, but somebody doing it better than you.
I like this point that superficially things look very compelling or scientific because there's diagrams and there's references to articles.
Like you say, it's superficial and performative.
The other part about it, being flattering not just to the person who's able to do that, right?
like the guru figure who is demonstrating their mastery of statistics or science or some field of research, but also saying that you as somebody
He drew an analogy that what the crank is actually doing is ultimately a lot more condescending.
This is me quoting him.
The equivalent of giving the child a fake cell phone so they can make calls just like mom and dad.
He's saying that they make appeals that...
You are not the victim of the information ecosystem, the mainstream media.
You're a truth seeker, seeing through the illusions that people are presenting you.
This is valorized in modern culture, but that in reality, you end up...
Doing exactly what you're claiming not to be doing because you're relying on this presentation by alternative experts and the gurus who are really selectively presenting information to you and doing it in a way that flatters your biases,
that you're the real critical thinker and that's why you'll agree with them.
Yeah, it's a really nice spread.
He makes the point that it's a byproduct of a culture that valorizes the idea of being.
An independent thinker, somebody who can critically evaluate evidence and come to good conclusions.
And it seems to be this tourism of the modern world, which is that every good thing gets weaponized and turned around and the ASATS version of it gets used in exactly the opposite way it should be.
But yeah, I think in the current climate where people are...
Increasingly sceptical of authorities and institutions.
The people involved are not necessarily conspiracy theorists or even prone to conspiracy thinking, but I think they are vulnerable to that kind of flattery, which just ends up being deceptive.
And the actual experts, who tend to be very busy working on their expert things, may well not be particularly interested in public...
Communication or developing online cachet or online followings are very bad at that and can be dismissive and can come across as being patronising when, in actual fact, they're just often being quite honest when they say,
look, you don't understand the details here.
You haven't done it.
For 10 or 20 years.
So just trust me, sometimes that's the right thing to be saying.
That's the honest thing to say.
Yeah, he meets the point that in actual fact, it is often the experts who are treating you like an adult by saying, I'm sorry, you don't have the expertise to assess the genetic evidence for the origins of the coronavirus or whatever.
People don't like to hear that.
And there is the flip side where...
There can be a stifling orthodoxy, right?
There's famous examples throughout scientific history where this is the case.
But they were not typically overturned by people on Twitter having threads where they've read the literature and have worked it out.
Yeah, the final thing I'll say about it is that it's connected to the article we wrote for Skeptic magazine.
We were making the same point, that I think the challenge for someone who does want to practice critical literacy...
And not get taken in by nice sounding lies or just deceptive information is not so much to get really good at analysing genetic data for viruses or to get really good at understanding the methodology underlying complicated statistical analyses.
The challenge is really deciding who to trust.
And what sources of information to trust.
We're not polymaths with infinite reserves of time and energy.
And so we shouldn't try to be an expert of everything.
It's really much, much easier to just find good sources of information and trust them.
So I think the mistake that a lot of people in the rationalist and heterodox fear make is to try to engage with every technical argument, no matter how many of them get thrown around when the people that
you're engaging with are often conspiracy theorists and delusional, if not being deliberately deceptive.
So trying to engage with that flurry of bullshit
It's a good thread, and we were right.
Yes, it's a good thread.
There were two other things I wanted to mention, and they'll just be quick things, Matt.
One is that there is a podcast, which I came across relatively recently, called Vaccine, The Human Story.
It's only three episodes out so far.
There are episodes coming out each week.
And it's about the eradication of the smallpox vaccine.
But it's done looking at the history of it and doing reenactments and so on.
So it's really, really...
I think in the current moment when there's a lot of disinformation and fear-mongering around vaccines, it's just a really welcome breath of fresh air to see something which is kind of celebrating the victory we had over a virus and to hear all these anti-vaccine and pro-vaccine arguments from a completely different era and realize how much of it is being repeated now or forgotten.
No, because we eradicated smallpox and that, but it's a really interesting podcast, so I just want to recommend it, and we're going to actually interview the person responsible for it in a couple of weeks, so there's that too.
Good stuff.
Tim Bond Toast, if you don't know him, you should know him.
He's a guy that makes YouTube videos breaking down culture war figures and also some stuff to do with music that I don't know very well, but he...
His videos are excellent deconstructions of various IDW-type culture war people.
He's done Dave Rubin, he's done James O 'Keefe, and he's just started a series on Thimpool.
And the first part is up.
It's about an hour and a half long, but it's excellent.
The production value is great as well.
I watched the first one.
It's really good.
His series on Dave Rubin is excellent as well.
So if you want recommendations for something to listen to...
There's two.
And we might interview him as well in a bit of time.
So look at that, Matt.
Interviews on the horizon.
There's a flurry of interviews.
That's right.
But in between the interviews, we have to do our bread and butter.
Some gurus.
All right, Matt.
Yes, we'll do a couple of gurus if you demand.
That's what the people want.
And who are we doing today?
Let's talk about the man himself.
The man that they slash he calls the Godfather.
I don't know if anybody legitimately calls him that, that he doesn't ask them to, but in any case, Gad Saad, the professor of marketing, but maybe more known as an, as he describes,
evolutionary behavioral scientist and author.
He's got some books focusing on the evolutionary psychology of consumption patterns, but he's more recently...
Came out with a book about the parasitic mind, how infectious ideas are killing common sense.
And this is a completely culture war drenched book.
The appearance that we are looking at, which is Gadsad, The Death of Truth and How to Revive It on Modern Wisdom Podcast 217 is also about 50% of it is a promotion of the book.
Those ideas will come up and look at them.
And I want to also mention Matt because he's a figure that will come up in the clips.
The person interviewing him is a guy called Chris Williamson, who is now a podcaster, YouTuber.
His original claim to fame was that he was a contestant on Love Island reality TV show.
And as that might imply, he's a male model.
And also into fitness and life hacking kind of stuff.
But what he's managed to carve out in that niche that he's the IDW leaning person within that life hackery fitness area.
So Andrew Doyle, James Lindsay, Gad Saad, Evolutionary Sight, Sam Harris.
These are all frequent references.
He sounds like someone who owns Bitcoin.
Yes, yes.
I think that's a fair bet.
And we'll see.
He has his own unique foibles which come up.
We're not focusing on him particularly, but I think he is an emerging figure in that scene, the online IDW scene.
So, yeah.
Yeah, the one thing I'll mention before we get started is there's a bit of a connection for me with Gert's study of consumption from an evolutionary point of view.
There's a weird connection there with...
With one of my PhD students, we published a few articles on a very similar theme, which is to basically look at individual traits towards generalized consumption.
So you have stuff like consuming food, of course, but also consuming consumer economic products and also propensity for alcohol and drugs and things like that.
So in psychology, there's a very strong focus on approach behavior.
Yeah, which is just that tendency to be attracted to things in the environment with the intent of acquiring them, owning them, ingesting them, whatever.
In other words, good things.
So you have approach behavior and avoidance behavior.
And you can, not just people, but pretty much all animals, a lot of the behavior or interactions with their environment can be broadly categorized in those two ways.
So Gadsad doesn't, like he often mentions this research, but I think it's fair to say most of his appearances Most of his tweets, most of his discourses about the culture war stuff, more in line with his book,
The Parasitic Mind, rather than his stuff on consumption.
But I just wanted to mention that I'm aware of that general area and broadly sympathetic to it.
Did you cite him?
We probably did cite him, or rather she did.
Yeah, but you haven't read his book.
But I haven't read his book.
No, I didn't.
I take your disclaimer that you're a fan and we'll take that context going into the episode that you've been a long-term fan and citer of Gadsad in your work.
You kind of based your whole academic career around his approach.
So that is good to flag up.
Well, as we'll come to, I think he says he founded the field of evolutionary consumption, which I didn't realize until he told me.
Yeah, you're playing in his garden, Matt.
We all are.
He is the Alpha and Omega, as we'll see.
So, yes, let's kick back and get into The Godfather.
So to start with, Matt, before we get into the Chris Williamson interview, I want to just provide for you and the listeners an illustration of Gadsad's rapier wit and satirical stylings.
This is him.
Well, let's just listen.
This is from a video on YouTube.
Hi, everybody.
This is Katzad.
An acquaintance sent me an article in Salon wherein a psychologist by the name of John Gartner said that the reason why the number of deaths due to COVID is so high in the United States...
It's because Donald Trump is a sexual sadist who enjoys torturing people.
And so this is a form of democide.
These are literal words in the article.
So because I don't want to be a victim of Donald Trump's sexual sadism, I know he'll come up to Canada to kill the rest of us because of COVID.
I'm back to hiding under the table.
We need to be protected from sexual sadist Donald Trump, who's trying to kill people because of his masturbatory urges.
Think of me.
Ciao.
Reapear, like, it's the level of satire, you know, step over Armando Iannucci.
This is the new masturbator.
Did you get there, Matt, that he's not actually afraid?
It's a parody.
And him hiding under the desk, this is something that he has done repeatedly.
The best thing about sad heart tends to be when you repeat the same joke and just emphasize it more.
That's often considered the kind of creme de la creme of satirical delivery.
Wait, wait, I'm just catching up here.
So he wasn't actually afraid of getting sexually...
No!
Yeah, that's the joke.
The whole hiding under the desk bit, that was just a bit.
Clever.
Yes, it is.
It was very clever.
And as we'll see and hear, this is just an illustration of the mastery of parodic satire that Gad has.
Yes, it's not the first example.
And before we get into the interview too, there's something...
I want to read out.
It's actually part of a Goodreads review from his book.
Now, this is not covering his book, but it's covering a lot of the same themes, and I think it's apropos.
The reviewer describes Gadsad's writing voice as vile.
He says it's like reading a right-wing YouTube comments section, only instead of it being a phalanx of angry 20-year-old virgins, it's a single boomer academic.
Large swathes of the book are sad quoting his own tweets and then describing in blistering Technicolor his cutting retorts whereupon everybody on the internet clapped.
We've got your deep admiration for his evolutionary ideas balanced against the negative book reviews.
So we've set the context well.
We've provided a nice sample of his satirical depth.
Now let's get into the meat of the sad pie.
The concepts he wants to introduce is the...
Parasites, right?
Brain parasites.
So we've got a couple of clips where he's outlining what this idea is that he wants to introduce into this course.
Here's how the idea came to him.
As a result of my, if you like, my openness to studying other animals, I noticed that there was a field called neuroparasitology, which is the study of how parasites can infect the brains of a whole...
Host of hosts.
So he spotted something.
Now, how does this apply in the case of humans?
Humans suffer not only from actual brain worms in the same way that the mouse does, but we suffer from another class of idea pathogens, and those are actual ideas that are parasitic.
So you got that map?
There are actual parasitic brain worms that humans might suffer?
But we also have this metaphorical brain worm that can take over.
And this would include certain ideas, like postmodernism is the muller of all brain worms, as he'll explain.
There's just one more clip of him kind of making the metaphor concrete, just to make it clear what he's saying.
Otherwise, supposedly functioning human being.
And then you can have these idiotic ideas infect your brain so that you could become a mush of bullshit.
So that you, instead of jumping into the water as the insect does, you now jump off the abyss of infinite lunacy, right?
So he talks a lot about this brain worms idea, which is obviously the subject for his book, The Parasitic.
I have to say, Chris, he doesn't really flesh it out much more than those clips indicate, does he?
There is one clip where he maybe draws the point a bit more concretely.
He talks about the parallel that he wants to describe.
It's this one where he starts talking about a parasite that affects mice.
Toxoplasma gandhi is a parasite that affects the brains of...
Mice, and when they are infected with this brain worm, they lose their innate fear of cats.
They become sexually attracted to the urine of the cat, which is not a good thing for a mouse to be attracted to.
And so I took this principle from animal context, and I argued that humans suffer not only from actual brain worms in the same way that the mouse does, but we suffer from another class of...
Idea pathogens.
And those are actual ideas that are parasitic.
Okay.
Upon listening to it, it doesn't actually really help that much.
But, you know, the parallel is clear, right?
The self-destructive thing which takes over a brain and does the host harm.
So the first thing that should make anybody think of is Richard Dawkins' idea of memes, right?
Yes.
It is parasitic.
On the meme metaphor, the idea of memes.
It is, it is.
So the tricky thing is figuring out what, if anything, Gatsad's idea of parasitic ideas adds to the idea of memes.
So just to rehash the idea of memes, which is now into popular culture, it's just the idea that ideas are a little bit like genes in that they...
Spread and become more prevalent in the population of brains or minds based not so much on whether they're good or not or necessarily helpful or not, but rather just on being good at spreading.
So everything from catchy tunes to clickbait to slogan type stuff or conspiracy theories can be thought of as memes and the fact that it is so common.
The word meme is so commonly used now as an indication that that at least is a helpful metaphor.
The thing that I can't figure out is how does the idea of parasitic ideas add anything to that?
Because if you add in the idea of parasitic, then that's the idea that the meme is somehow drawing energy from the host.
It's benefiting itself at your expense.
It implies that parasites are a living organism, which exploit another living organism, but ideas and ideologies are not living organisms.
So yeah, we are being parasitically infected by ideas that are using up humans for their own benefit.
But of course...
They're not actually alive.
Yeah, but that's all contained in the original idea of memes, right?
Which don't necessarily have the interests of the host, the believer.
Yeah, mind viruses.
So if you think of it in terms of memes, it's just more like an idea will spread and be accepted because it's appealing and good at spreading, but not because it necessarily does you any real material good.
That's true of his idea of...
Brain parasites, but I just can't see any additional use of this metaphor.
Yeah, it is a little bit like he's just come up with a synonym for mind virus, and a fairly superficially distinct one at that.
We will get into him talking about what the content of these mind parasites are, or brain parasites, but given his evil psych take on things...
It does seem a little bit strange that if we take his argument seriously, which is basically the claim that in the modern environment, especially at universities and in left-wing dominated areas, there's now a dogmatic social justice ideology which has taken over everything and requires you to say that there's no objective truth,
that there's no difference between the sexes, and so on and so forth.
Let's assume, just for argument's sake, that that exists and that we're now going to approach things as an evolutionary psychologist.
From the point of view of somebody who wants to increase their fitness in that environment, indicating that you sign on to that ideology actually would serve your interest, right?
Because you would then be better regarded by your conspecifics in the environment too.
Who will then be more likely downstream in the long term to meet with you, right?
So it would be adaptive in an evolutionary psychology kind of approach way, I think, if there is a new ideological system which has took control of everything that is dominant in a culture to it.
Here to it, for your individual fitness, maybe not beneficial to the society in general, because that would suggest that any ideology that exists in the society, you should just simply go along with, adopt to, in order to increase your fitness.
But I'm just talking on a purely self-interested genetic, spread your genes to the most people in your left-wing enclaves.
Yeah, look, it's telling that all of his examples of these terrible...
Brain parasites are basically left-wing, woke, political things that he doesn't like.
He doesn't mention any aspect of MAGA or Trumpism as examples of mind viruses.
And so I guess the second point is that it's hard to see it as this idea that he's got.
You can't call it a theory.
It's just a metaphor.
It doesn't seem to be doing anything apart from functioning as a pejorative.
It's just a synonym for...
Yeah, and I think that fits with his role.
He is an evolutionary psychologist, or at least plays in those waters.
And on the academic side, that may be where his interests lie, but a lot of his content is heavily culture-orientated, and he was one of the figures leaning into Trump apologetics pre-election.
This interview is from...
We'll see some of them later in the clips we play.
He is best understood within that ecosystem as a figure approaching Dave Rubin or Scott Adams.
He plays in those waters with just slightly more academic rigor, maybe more like Jeffrey Miller.
Yeah, I guess that's the part that I object to.
If one is a political partisan and is a culture war warrior, that's one thing.
I find the very superficial application of what's supposed to be a scientific or intellectual idea, when really it's just functioning as a bludgeon, that's this kind of scientism that we've seen a fair bit.
It's like, just admit that you're playing politics.
Don't try to intellectualize your analysis.
Well, you're accused of scientism, Matt, so let's just hear...
Gad, explaining why you would be wrong in such accusations.
Now, I always like to preface that scientists do have epistemic humility.
So we recognize that what is true today might become untrue tomorrow in light of new evidence.
But at any given point, we do operate under the premise that there is a truth out there to be discovered.
There is, for example, a universal human nature.
As an evolutionary psychologist, I want to study that.
There is certain recurring patterns of how women respond to their ovulatory cycles.
Postmodernism completely blows up this edifice of...
I think he's referring to a paper that he wrote,
which Women's behavior in terms of buying makeup or buying various things was connected to their menstrual cycles.
And this was a paper you had a quick look at, Chris, hey?
Yeah.
Calories, beauty and ovulation, the effects of the menstrual cycle on food and appearance-related consumption from 2012.
I already know from the replication crisis that a lot of the research related to menstrual cycles and...
Behaviors within the evolutionary psych kind of world is highly questionable about people wearing red dresses to signify their fertility.
And there's a lot of shenanigans going on with people defining different windows for fertile periods and the kind of standard issues that you had in social psychology with multiple measures and people engaging in pee hacking and so on.
When he made that claim, I was wondering what his paper is like.
I know there's a literature that focuses on this topic, but my general impression is that it's not good.
So I wondered what his paper is like.
I only did a scan of it.
It actually took quite a lot of time to find where he mentions the sample size.
And this is people completing questionnaires about their buying habits and their...
Relative menstrual cycles.
The sample ends up with 35 participants for survey 1 and 17 participants for survey 2. The claims made that the paper has huge implications for evolutionary understandings of consumption patterns.
On the sample size alone, it's hugely questionable.
This isn't a sample of 30 countries buying behavior tracked over two years or something like that.
This is a sample of around 50 people across two surveys in the US or Canada.
The other thing is that when you look at the kind of key measures, the outcomes, which are focused around whether they're buying beauty products or food-related goods, they want to say there's a difference depending on where people are in the cycle.
But the key comparisons are all very close to the famous P equals 0.05.
The effect size claim is, as they say, quite large.
So you can't say for certain, but it's a hugely dubious study.
And it's more that the level of certainty he attributes is just not warranted from that kind of evidence at all.
Yeah, so in that kind of comment, he's contrasting this appreciating objective reality and basing things on totally...
Unassailable facts and logic and contrasting that with postmodernism and subjectivity and so on.
He's citing, as far as I know, an unreplicated paper with a small sample size and p-values in the worrisome zone.
That's nowhere near objective reality.
You know, there's a certain laxity, I think, where you can say, well, the standards of the fields that he's operating in 2012 were different than what they...
That's sort of true, but at the same time, he's citing this kind of thing as evidence in 2021 with extreme confidence.
And I haven't seen Gad or pretty much almost anyone in the IDW sphere focusing on the very real issues that the replication crisis brings up with regards to a lot of the kind of studies that they would...
I know people have covered it, like Jesse Singel, and that there is reference made to it whenever they want to basically fire a shot about the legitimacy of whatever research, right?
They'll mention, no, the replication crisis means we can't be confident.
But it doesn't seem that it's applied universally.
It's findings that they don't like that should be considered potentially unreliable, whereas studies like this...
Still fine.
And I guess we should say for fairness, he doesn't specifically mention the name of the study.
So this is me just inferring, but I mean, the topic is the same as what he's covering.
Yeah, well, I think self-citation, we can assume that.
He has a penchant for it, but anyway.
Let's stick a little bit with his presentation of postmodernism and how bad it's got, right?
So this is him talking about what is now the accepted...
Dogma on liberal campuses about borders.
All borders are racists.
Well, there is this thing called countries and nations, and countries have borders.
And last I checked, it wasn't only the Nazis who were condoning borders.
But I can walk with you on university campuses where that is the official position.
Borders are a form of white supremacy.
Yeah, I thought it was really interesting that when he was looking for an example to give of things that are objectively true in a material sense, as opposed to merely socially constructed in a postmodern sense, that he settled on national borders.
Which, if I had to just pick up one thing that was obviously a social construct, it would have to be...
Political borders.
But political borders are real, Chris, in an objective sense, whereas somebody talking about, I don't know, gender roles or something, that's terrible relativism and postmodernism.
Yeah, plus this presentation that...
So I'm not saying you won't be able to find anybody on a college campus who argues that we shouldn't have borders and that open immigration is morally...
An ethically correct position.
But I will bet you that that is not an enforced orthodoxy, which if you diverge from, you are cancelled persona non gratis.
Like maybe if you're wanting to join some far left group that like, because I think communists still believe in borders and stuff.
I think the USSR had borders, yeah.
I wonder what that Leninist who was criticizing ContraPoints thinks.
We should ask him.
We should.
It's just that constant conflation of the most extreme position is presented as an unquestionable dogma.
It just isn't.
Like, I work at universities.
I believe in borders.
You can take various positions on that and you won't be exiled from conversation by simply saying things like, you think immigration should be controlled in some respect.
Like, that's the dominant position of political parties as well, right?
Look, Chris, look, to a large degree, what we're describing in Gadsad is something that is just common to pretty much any player in the culture wars, which is seizing upon the extreme bleeding edge of your opponents and catastrophizing it into a huge boogeyman.
Yeah, he's just doing more of that, so it's not particularly noteworthy or interesting, but Gadsad does do it, so yeah.
There is another segment where he's discussing the social justice activists and their relationship to truth in contrast to where he stands.
And I think it's an interesting encapsulation of his perspective on what they're about.
It's not that.
The objective of seeking...
In the pursuit of that objective, we never murder truth.
We never rape truth.
That's the problem, is that...
What they do is they conflate the pursuit of social justice with a consequentialist ethic, which basically says it doesn't matter if I murder and rape truth in the service of this more laudable goal called social justice.
No, as a purist, I'm a true classical liberal person.
I'm opposed to that.
This is how he finishes that segment.
This is a common position that I see attributed to the social justice side.
And I don't think it's accurate because in my experience, even when I have disagreed with people on the stronger edge of the social justice side, I don't ever get the impression that their argument is, it doesn't matter if anything's true.
I just believe this because I think it serves social justice better.
That's not the way they argue.
They argue that the evidence supports their claim better, right?
They argue that there's evidence that discrimination exists and that we shouldn't ignore it.
Now, you can argue about the quality of the evidence or the conclusions that they draw, but I haven't met that many social justice people that sort of say, I don't give a crap about what any evidence shows.
It's just what I believe to be true, and that's all that matters.
Well, I guess Gad would say that people who would be against any biological explanation for human behavior or biological differences between men and women are doing so in a knee-jerk fashion because they are motivated by the consequences of accepting those sorts of differences.
One to cultivate a world in which men and women aren't treated differently.
That's the Stilmann version of his position.
I think if you take it, what he's arguing to say that people ignore or downplay the relevance of statistics that they don't like, or that don't suit their argument, or that they say that succeeding on things like that is kind of missing the broader picture.
Certainly, those people do exist.
And can be vocal about it.
But it's this certainty in which the postmodern side is presented as directly saying that they just don't care about evidence and they think truth is a silly thing to consider.
I'm not saying nobody takes that position.
There is validity to the point that postmodernists are skeptical of truth with a capital T. But I don't know that that entails...
The rejection of all evidence or the assumption that everything is on an equal footing when it comes to truth value.
I think what you're speaking to is the trend amongst critics of social justice, people like Jordan Peterson, who tend to conflate postmodernism.
They call it postmodern Marxism or something like that.
And they seem to overestimate the degree to which people who...
Advocate for social justice, actually embrace postmodernism wholeheartedly.
It's from the people that we know, they don't.
Postmodernism is a niche, pretty abstract stream of philosophical thought, which is like a diagnosis rather than a recommendation, first of all.
We don't want to get into it, but it may well be influential, like, say, in encouraging skepticism.
Of consensus or normative ideas of what's right and true and whatever, and skepticism about our ability to directly access truth in an unbiased way that's uncontaminated by our culture or social influences.
A lot of the ideas that are influential are to a large degree true, right?
I think what you're saying is that he's essentially creating this caricature of the people he doesn't like in saying that they are 100% Postmodernists, to the extent that they're total solipsists that have no concept of there being any kind of external material reality at all.
And that's just obviously not true.
It's just a storm in.
It's almost as if there's like thousands of Derrida's roaming the corridors of modern universities.
And the thing that annoys me about it is partly because I appreciate postmodernists.
I'm falling into the trap of just labeling everything.
From continental philosophy is postmodern, but I'm not fond of that approach in general.
I think it had some useful elements, but that a lot of it is taken too far in terms of encouraging a degree of reflexiveness which can be self-indulgent in academia, like this kind of thing.
So I have issues with it.
I find myself annoyed when I'm forced to defend it because people...
Or forced to defend the general...
People who supposedly...
Yeah, are doing that because they're not doing what they're being presented as doing.
And it's weird because I end up feeling like if they were what Gadsden were claiming, if what he was saying was completely dominant and that they all felt like that, his critique would be legitimate to some extent.
It just doesn't accurately map onto what seems to be there in the real world.
Yes, that's clear.
You've made it clear.
Yeah.
And I guess, I think given the illustration, there's a section which comes up a lot, Jordan Peterson talks about it and other people as well, where despite being the defenders of the West, they spend a lot of time bashing the decadence that the West has fallen into because of this postmodern Some of
it is that if I am suffering every day, not knowing if I'm going to get my caloric, minimal caloric food for the day, I don't have time to pontificate about feminist glaciology.
So in a sense...
It is a measure of the decadence of the West, right?
It's kind of the Caligula effect, right?
When Rome becomes too, you know, imbued with all of this hedonic pursuits, it kind of self implodes.
So I think there's a similar thing here where instead of, you know, feasting at the buffet of gluttony, the actual food, we're feasting at the gluttony of bullshit ideas.
At this point, I really feel sorry for the hapless academic that wrote this.
Feminist glaciology.
They should be sending him checks.
That paper has got so much mileage on the culture war circuit that, like you say, they're due royalties and they talk as if there's a field of feminist glaciology that is...
But this is a paper, right?
It might even be a paper which is like me arguing that there might be a need.
For an approach, like a feminist approach to glaciology.
But it is not like there's this active, large-scale community of scholars engaged in feminist glaciology.
It's a single paper.
I think it's just a single person, yeah.
That paper, like brought up by James Lindsay, brought up by Andrew Doyle, brought up by Douglas Murray, brought up by Eric Weinstein, brought up by Gad Saad here.
I've seen more breakdowns of that paper than I ever want to see.
And the general thing is, yes, there's plenty of stupid stuff within it seeming to suggest that we need to take other ways of knowing about what glaciers represent and stuff.
But a lot of it hinges on the degree to which you interpret that as being a claim that we should put that on a par with the scientific understanding.
Like, appreciating how...
People in indigenous cultures have understood glaciers, that those might interact with the field of glaciology when people are studying in environments that host those people, for example.
Seems relevant, right?
But you can do generous readings of the paper or ungenerous.
And like all papers, there's good stuff and bad stuff.
And maybe overall, I don't think I'm a fan of this paper in any respect.
But there's so many papers that come out that are just...
Insane, stupid.
There was a paper that came out which suggested that cunnilingus by males performed on females was a cheating detection adaptation, right?
So there you go, Chris.
The existence of that paper totally demolishes the validity of evolutionary psychology, doesn't it?
I mean, it was an Evo psych paper.
Yeah, I know.
Like, it's just so silly.
And look, it's on a par with just fastening on a blue-haired student at a college campus in the United States.
And to be even handed about this, you know, there's a fair bit of catastrophizing on the left about fringe.
Or particular specific incidents that are actually a blip in a lot of things happen in populous countries.
So that happens too.
But look, it's just what I want to say is it's just the same old pattern in the culture wars, which is just fastening on a tiny little atom of outrageous content to whip up what fresh hell is this type reactions in people.
And Gatset does a lot of that.
We're going to be hearing about feminist glaciology in a decade's time, still being cited.
That paper, its citation metrics must be through the roof.
It would have just been an obscure paper that died to death in a random journal like most papers, except for this exalted status it's now given in the culture war.
I just wanted to mention that.
And it relates to this point that Chris Williamson...
And this is not satire.
I just have to flag up that this clip is not satire, where he laments the situation where they need to talk about this kind of thing.
Now, my concern is I've got someone like you, multidisciplinary polymath, James Lindsay, PhD in pure mathematics.
I don't want the brightest minds of our time to...
Be taken up.
I don't want this in the nicest way possible.
I wish that you hadn't had to write this book.
Yes, I agree.
Are you bored of talking about social justice?
No, he's not.
And also, you don't need to worry, Chris, about the greatest minds of our day being focused on these issues because James Lindsay and Gadsad are not.
The greatest minds of this generation.
Just think, Chris, for a moment, what these people could have accomplished if they weren't getting bogged down in this culture war stuff.
I mean, James Lindsay would be inventing new mathematics here, there, and everywhere.
Gadsad would be coming up to it, just doing amazing evolutionary science.
They wouldn't be.
These political monsters, they're forced to do it.
They made them do it.
They have to read feminist glyceology papers.
They have to.
Because if they don't, who will?
It wouldn't be that these are attention-seeking opportunists who glom on to anything that's going on in the culture war.
No, that wouldn't be it.
And does the interviewer have to jerk him off so blatantly?
That was a bit too much.
Well, there's quite a lot of that in the interview, which is characteristic of IDW content in general.
But he is just repeating a characterization that Gadsad attributed to himself earlier in the interview.
I'm someone who's a true polymath.
I'm all over the place.
I truly believe in interdisciplinarity.
But my main claim to fame, if you'd like, in academia is that I founded the field of evolutionary consumption.
Yeah, yeah.
So we're going to play some more clips on this theme, but about three quarters of this interview is self-editorializing and commenting on himself and his way of doing things and how great he is.
And I guess congratulating himself for being such a brave seeker of truth.
It's becoming a common thing, isn't it, Chris?
We see it in almost every bit of content we look at.
As we've mentioned many times, I think this is our kryptonite.
As people that have admitted and acknowledged fetish for self-deprecation, the tendency towards self-aggrandizing in the intellectual dark web sphere is sometimes hard.
And what's most hard about this particular instance of it is it's in a conversation where there's a large segment about the importance of irony and satire and rapier wits coupled with this pompous,
Trump-like self-pomposity.
And the two do not go together, right?
Like a non-reflective, constantly bigging yourself up is not...
Usually the chosen affect of the world's famous satirists.
So I guess it's trying to be Oscar Wilde or something, but it very much does not come across like this.
It's kind of on the same level of James Lindsay's tweets.
Yes, or Andrew Doyle.
They seem to truly believe that they're really very, very witty and funny, and that's the bit that's mystifying to me.
Yes, there's this part where Chris Williamson, the interviewer, talks about the powers in the IDW sphere to cripple their opponents with their mockery.
And again, Matt, this is not satire.
This is him accurately expressing this sentiment.
I would much less like Andrew Doyle Or Zuby to come after me than Nassim.
And the reason for that is there's going to be so much social embarrassment because they're going to find a thing that I did or that I said, and they're going to make me feel so dumb.
And this is the particular modus operandi of...
Yourself, Andrew Doyle specifically, and Zuby's very famous video where he did the deadlift record.
It's utilizing the weaponry, the semantic weaponry, against people who are weaponizing it against you.
Is it though?
Zuby's famous deadlift satire video.
That's the height of irony.
This feels personal to me because I enjoy satire.
I like irony.
I appreciate good humor.
Andrew Doyle and James Lindsay being represented as masters of this art.
It's painful to me.
I've argued with Andrew Doyle online.
I really can't say I was concerned by how small he shrunk me down with his cutting intellect.
No, it was all standard partisan nonsense.
I just feel that there's an undue credit being given to the level.
Of what required to run Titania McGrath account.
But it's definitely a phenomenon.
If you look at the second tier or bottom theaters online, people like DrRolligator, who tweets all in caps, that's his modus operandi, and perennially funny, apparently.
They seem to genuinely believe that their heroes are extremely funny and that they're being funny.
Yeah, it's just...
Yeah, yeah.
I can appreciate when people are making an argument that I don't agree with and they're doing it in a witty way.
There are plenty of people who are witty and can make arguments I don't agree with.
I think Douglas Murray, for example, can do that better than other people on that side.
Yeah, I don't know.
It's like the Babylon Bee or something being held up as this pinnacle of satirical content.
It's offensive to me, Matt.
That is offensive to me.
But look, the best way we can explain this point is probably just to provide more examples of it in his own words.
Oh, right.
Yeah, let's get to that.
So if you think we're being unfair and we're being snobs, Because I'm Lebanese,
I'm entitled to speak on behalf of all Lebanese, and so I gave a culinary clearance for 24 hours, and then I asked for everyone to take a photo of their Did you get the
subtle joke there, Matt?
It's a cultural appropriation, right?
So he's issuing permission slips for people to do it.
I agree with him.
There's cultural war clickbait of Asian Americans getting outraged that somebody is daring to cook some dish from Taiwan or something.
I think it's silly.
I think people can cook and eat whatever they want to cook.
This is an example where I broadly agree with him.
But it's still a stupid, unfunny joke.
I criticize you for having Sledgehammer Whit, Chris, but you're...
Yeah, compared to him, I'm like the 007, you know, assassin when it comes to Whit.
Like, I agree.
I don't like the cultural appropriation topic.
I side very much on the side that cultures mix and...
People being overly concerned about the authenticity of cooking food that is culturally specific.
I tend to fall more in line with those arguing that it's an overhyped concern.
But I can still hate this level of witty cutting down.
And the way that he describes it, it's just so far removed.
From the actual level of satire involved.
So here's him editorializing.
It's very hard to be witty, sardonically witty, to be sarcastic at the right delivery if you're a babbling fool, right?
You have to have a very sharp mind to be able to very quickly identify these things.
So now coming back to satire, I think satire, so the expression I like to use is properly activated.
Satire is like the surgeon's scalpel cutting through walls.
Yes, he's got a scalpel-like wit.
He's actually correct.
Appropriately wielded satire is an incredibly effective way to undercut arguments.
Except he's slashing with a blunt machete.
That's the issue here.
Yes.
It doesn't take great intellectual powers to exaggerate and...
Ape the position you don't like and go, oh, look how stupid I am.
Being so pleased with oneself for doing that, that's the bit that's insulting.
That is, it's like mistaking the who do who do, I'm a social justice where I got purple hair.
As that is surgically wielded, you know, cutting satire.
It is not.
And here...
The last example, you know, that's borderline.
Maybe there's an element of wit in getting people to post passports with cultural appropriation.
But let's just go to another example.
There's plenty to choose from.
So how is this?
So now, if anybody sends me any compliments, and thank you, I received a million of those on social media, I will always state...
That I need to know what your skin you is before either accepting the compliment or not.
If you don't have 50% plus people of color you, then I'm sorry but I reject your compliment because I'm trying to decolonize my Twitter feed.
So what I've done is I've taken literal things that these morons say and I've just taken them to the extreme.
Can you see what he's doing there, Chris?
I mean, can you follow?
Because...
It was hard.
It was hard to detect.
When I first heard it, I was like, what?
Has he become a culture?
Like social justice warrior?
What's going on?
This is completely against time.
Yeah, but then you explained it and you realized it was a tactic.
He was using a tactic to make a point.
Yeah.
Yeah, that was what made it really click for me.
And he also explains, Matt, how by using this kind of confusing, this mist of war, this presentation, it's impossible to pin down what his actual position is because you can't detect what...
What's satirical?
What's real?
Like, what's his real opinion?
Yeah, you know, I picked that up too, Chris.
He was very pleased with that, that it provided sort of an invincible shield that prevented him from being criticized.
And it occurred to me that, congratulations, you've just rediscovered 4chan, the kind of shitposting.
Oh, no.
Matt, I think that's giving him too much credit because, like, listen to this.
So, for example, it's very hard to pin me because when I say something sarcastically, you could technically not know whether what I'm saying is right.
So if you come at me, I say, "What are you talking about, bullshitter?
I am totally decolonizing my Twitter feed.
I don't want to receive compliments from..."
From, you know, people that suffer from being white.
They disgust me, right?
You get it?
So what happens is, I am pointing the mirror, I'm taking the exact semantic structure of your argument, and I'm mocking it into oblivion, right?
This is the James Lindsay.
I just, like, to me, that's not even on 4chan level, because they don't explain the joke.
And also...
Gad, it's not hard to detect what your position is, you bumbling fool.
Like, it's transparently obvious.
Nobody would mistake you for somebody who is actually trying to decolonize your Twitter feed, whatever that might mean.
It's like, it's the Tim Pool school of satire, right?
Like, Tim Pool did this where he started posting out tweets that he didn't believe, saying, you know, Bernie Sanders was right and so on.
And people were like, what the hell is Tim Pool doing?
And then he explained on an episode that he's like chumming the water.
Like he's just posting, AOC is great.
And she has the right view on Green Deal.
And it's like, this was his way of firing chaff to make it impossible to detect what is his actual position.
But I think I know which one is Gadsad's actual position.
I've read between the lines.
I've, you know, decoded.
Yeah, I think I can detect when he's deploying parodic content.
Yeah, I think the thing that's irritating is not so much that he's doing trolling and shitposting, but that he thinks he's discovered and innovated some new form of rhetoric, of rhetorical persuasion.
That's the thing.
It's the fact that he thinks he's good at it.
That's what's upsetting.
And he actually, again, in a thing which in itself is hard to parody, they talk about how it's kind of unfortunate that he's unable to teach these skills to people at university.
So by providing you with the packets of information in a way that is enrobed...
In sarcasm, in sardonic wit, in satire, it almost makes it...
Now, the difficulty, though, is it's hard to kind of teach a seminar on this, right?
Because it's hard to say, please come to Professor Saad's sardonic wit seminar so that you can castrate the morons, right?
Because in a sense, there are certain rules that you can use in building your satirical arguments, but it's also instinctual.
So some people just have it.
For example, I don't believe that charisma is something that you could teach in leadership class.
You're either charismatic or not.
Charisma.
Shitposting.
Trolling.
You can't teach these things, Chris.
You either got it or you ain't.
That's just how it is.
It's a shame.
He'd like to teach you.
In a sense, it's kind of like a science.
He's explaining how all the pieces fit together, but not everyone can do this.
I know.
If only there was a class where we could learn these satirical parodic skills that he possesses.
That would be a class that I would...
Never send my worst movie on.
That's how it's comedy plot.
It's almost cute.
He's just so pleased with himself, like just so happy about it.
But the thing that kills me with that is just the laughter and the admiration from the interviewer, that sort of forced laughter before, like, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.
So funny.
You hear that a lot and it's...
Yeah, Chris Williamson has a very demonstrative laugh.
There is one part in the interview where that performative laugh of Chris Williamson's, which I find particularly great as well.
You know, this isn't an aesthetic preference, but I hate that guffawing kind of laugh.
And Chris Williamson utilizes it liberally.
But there's this point where he utilizes it at a point that Gadzad didn't...
Because Gad is actually outlining a serious point.
So let me just play, because it was a funny interaction between the two of them.
The effort for me to protect myself potentially from one of these ideas, is that on me to go out and search for this much stuff?
Or is there some platform?
Are there some particular voices?
Have you got a playbook?
Yes, so one of the projects that I'm currently working on, and I just published an academic paper on exactly that, so one of the ideas that I have is to have something akin to a Wikipedia platform where, what is it?
This is not a joke, this is real.
I know it's not a joke, but it's funny.
Is it?
Did he know?
Yeah, that relates to...
This is as good a point as any to mention that the nominological networks of cumulative evidence, the cure for brain worms.
What he was outlining there is his plans to instantiate then in the Wikipedia platform, which I just have to say, Matt, oh my God, what a bad, like, you know, for talking about people that are morons and imbeciles and have stupid ideas.
This is a serious suggestion that he's going to build an alternative to Wikipedia to store the accumulated Evo psych knowledge is what he's talking about.
Do I need to explain why that wouldn't work?
There's a thousand Wikipedias already exist.
You need to incentivize people to take part in them.
Nobody's going to take part in his bullshit like new Wikipedia.
And you would just end up with a conservopedia.
If you made one that was focused on evolutionary psych, and the evolutionary psych articles on Wikipedia are fine.
They already exist, and they're not all permeated with social justice, ideology, rhetoric, right?
Like, if you want to look up sex differences in humans on Wikipedia, go ahead.
There's plenty of information available there.
So you're skeptical of this alternative Wikipedia idea in the same way that you were skeptical of the Unity 2020 initiative.
Exactly.
You're a very skeptical person, Chris.
Yeah, but I'm just with Chris Williamson and his reaction.
Oh, it's not a joke.
Yeah, I know.
Yeah, but it's crazy that you have to.
The other thing you introduced there, of course, was this nominological networks of cumulative evidence.
Yeah, and so Gadsad has a habit of inventing new complicated phrases for things that already exist.
And I'm going to go out on the limb here and say that he's basically, as far as I could tell, this very fancy title basically means destroying social justice warriors with facts and logic.
That's basically what it seemed to mean.
If you wanted Steelman version, I would just call it triangulation.
As well, as like a legitimate academic thing where you approach a topic with evidence from different lines.
You have triangulating lines of evidence showing the same result.
So there's no need for this bullshit new term for an approach which already exists.
And the way that Gad Saad is applying it is also not in line with the legitimate usage of it.
Because, okay, well, let's hear him.
Explain it a little bit himself in his own words before we take issue with it.
He assiduously over many decades collected data from an incredible number of sources, from paleontology, from animal husbandry, from embryology, from comparative anatomy, from geology.
And each of these small pieces of the puzzle, once you put the whole thing together, made it impossible for you to argue against it, despite the fact that 150 years later, people are still trying to falsify it without being able to, right?
And so I take this mindset and I formalize it in this thing called nomological networks of cumulative evidence.
So he's taken this idea of doing science and he's formalized it and he's given it a new name.
It's basically gathering a bunch of evidence and forming a logically cohesive theory and doing a good job of it.
But he's formalized it.
The example he takes is to try to argue for the reality of sex differences and toy preferences.
He lays up a couple of sets of evidence from developmental psychology and comparative psychology and stuff which seem to support the conclusion.
I actually don't know enough about that literature.
I looked into it a couple years ago, so I can't say how accurate his claims are.
But I'm not believing anything that Gadsad editorializes for me.
But I will say that there are legitimate ways where you can employ that.
For example, with evolution or any number of topics where when you have different lines, independent lines of evidence pointing to the same conclusion that it increases your confidence.
That is true.
It's perfectly reasonable to do that.
There isn't an issue with that.
There's a word for it, triangulation.
I don't take issue with that.
What I take issue with is the way that Gansad practices it.
And another example he uses in relation to Islam, whether we can regard it as a religion which is peaceful or warlike or so on, right?
And what he describes there is more like cherry picking, where you...
Take isolated facts and use those to create an argument.
And in those respects, if you do that, if you take lots of evidence about how steel can burn, about how many people reported discrepancies in videos that they've seen, about the radar network failing in some coastal...
Right?
You can take all these different mini factoids and produce a...
9-11-trooper-style argument, which points to an illegitimate conclusion, right?
Same thing with intelligent design.
The way that he is presenting that is different from how he then employs it.
And you picked out the example of Islam.
So let's just play the clip of him using that to answer the question of whether Islam is peaceful or not.
I don't need to listen to noble prophet Barack Obama tell me that it is peaceful or not.
I simply need to build a nomological network.
And if that nomological network says that Islam is peaceful, then we've proven that it's peaceful.
If it says otherwise, then we've proven otherwise.
So I don't need hysteria.
I don't need emotionality.
I don't need to trigger my affective system.
I simply go where the data tells me to go.
Does that give you a good sense of how to get vaccinated against BS?
So the thing you notice here is that it's one thing that's very uncommon with a lot of gurus, which they really hammer home points that are pretty basic.
One version of this is just that he's saying, you should do evidence-based reasoning and due diligence.
And he makes out that there's this whole array of enemies out there who are against this controversial idea.
And they also appropriate.
This pretty anodyne idea of doing evidence-based research.
They give it a name.
They say that they are the flag bearers for it.
And then they go ahead and apply it, not to random topics, but to a whole bunch of cultural topics.
That's why I described it as destroying social justice warriors with facts and logic.
And with this particular example of Islam, I mean, you could just flip that around and go, is Christianity a violent religion or not, Chris?
Well, let's see, shall we?
It's a stupid question to begin with.
On top of that, I'm well aware from previous appearances that he had with Sam Harris, for example, that part of his numerological network is based on his personal anecdotal observances of people wearing the burka in Toronto.
though. This is not specifically for him answering the violence question, but when he was talking with Sam Harris, he...
Derived a lot of his argument from his kids' reaction to seeing people in the burka in Toronto and feeling unsafe.
What he's talking about here and claiming that he does, it's not what he actually does, right?
He takes anecdotes, he takes specific facts that support a conclusion that he wants to arrive at and use that.
This claim that he's this passionate figure who doesn't...
It's completely contradicted by all of his other arguments and content, which he clearly comes across as somebody highly ideological, highly motivated to find specific answers.
Yeah, just not a dispassionate scholar in any sense of the word.
Yeah, I think that's the bit I find irritating, which is that I'm not against people having strong political convictions, one side or another.
To take a related but different issue, you could take someone who's very pro-Palestinian and really, really strongly against Israel and is making all those political rhetorical points.
Or you could take an Israeli person that thinks they're all terrible and they're trying to destroy us and so on.
That doesn't bother me that people have...
Strong ideological convictions, even if it's not necessarily healthy.
But I think like you, Chris, I get annoyed when they drape themselves in this cloak of scientific objectivity.
And they're doing, as you say, doing that cherry picking, doing that motivated reasoning, but pretending that they're doing science.
And it's just not, you know.
It doesn't matter what your political views are.
Another illustration of this point is that the extent to which a lot of Gad's content, or at least his arguments in these kind of interviews he does, rely on these anecdotes he provides about his personal encounters that you might categorize falling within the genre of overhaired in coffee shops,
where Gad...
Illustrates things that have happened to him and how, needless to say, he had the last laugh.
He gives one of them at the start of this podcast where he's talking about going out for dinner with an adherent of postmodernism who was dating one of his students.
I think it's worth playing a couple of clips from this just to see what we're dealing with.
Halfway through the dinner, whenever it was, I said to her, so I hear you're a postmodernist.
Yes, yes, I am.
So there are no universal truths?
Absolutely not.
So do you mind if I maybe offer you some universal truths, and then you can tell me how you think I might be wrong?
She said, yes, go ahead, go for it.
I said, well, is it a universal truth that within the human species, only women bear children?
Is that not a truth?
Can we hang our hat on this one?
She says, absolutely not.
Oh no?
How so?
Well, there is a tribe off some island in Japan where within the folkloric realm, within the spiritual realm, it is the men who bear children.
So by you restricting the conversation of bearing children to the physical realm, this is how you keep us pregnant and barefoot in the kitchen.
He met the most stereotypical...
Actually, he met somebody that I would like to meet who put their hand up and said, yes, I don't believe in objective truth.
It doesn't exist.
I'm not interested in that.
And focused on the Japanese tribe.
That's interesting.
Off the coast of Japan, but folklore tradition, interesting.
I'm a little suspicious as to whether or not it really happened.
And look, can we be sure that this anonymous interlocutor wasn't trolling?
Maybe she was using ironic satire to troll Gad's satire.
A master satirist like Gad would have picked up on that, Matt.
But there is some more evidence that actually, I didn't consider that, but if we take this anecdote as actually referring to any reality, then this next segment of the anecdote I think might buttress your interpretation.
Is it true since time immemorial that within the vantage of Earth, sailors have relied on the premise that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west?
Is that not a universal truth?
And then here she uses a subform of...
Postmodernism called deconstructionism.
Language creates reality.
So she says, well, what do you mean by East and West?
Those are just arbitrary labels.
And what do you mean by the sun?
That which you call the sun, I call dancing hyena, to which I retorted, well, the dancing hyena rises in the East and sets in the West.
I put on dancing hyena lotion when I go to the Caribbean so I don't get dancing hyena burn, to which she said, I don't play those label games.
Now, that was an incredibly prescient story.
And then everybody stood up and clapped.
You destroyed her.
Really?
Someone in Canada said, I call the sun dancing hyena?
And no one ironically?
To be honest, if I was having dinner with Gadsad, I might be tempted to say several words.
I'm going to do this if I ever meet him.
Just to annoy him, yeah.
No, but the problem is you'll become an eternal anecdote for him.
But, like, maybe he had a conversation with someone who was postmodern inclined.
Maybe.
But it definitely didn't happen like this unless the person was trolling him.
This is the most stereotypical human that would fit all the stereotypes.
And it feels so painfully obvious that this is not a real...
It's an illustrative parable.
It's like your thing at the beginning.
But it's actually less subtle than that.
Yeah, so there's a lot of anecdotes like that in this.
We mentioned it before, but that's just an awful lot of...
And then I said this on Twitter.
I've got another one, Matt.
I've got another one.
You sound like you're ready to hear another one.
Here you go.
Hit me with it.
Hit me with it.
This also really happened exactly as described.
I was asked to appear at a business school luncheon or whatever to give a talk on how I am a better ally to women.
Guess how that conversation went.
I said, no, I'm not an ally to women.
I'm an ally to all individuals.
I have been an ally to women.
I have been an ally to men.
I have been an ally to people who are purple, who are white, who are fat, who are short.
I judge people based on the merits of who they are.
So then I said, but I'm willing to come and talk about evolutionary-based sex differences.
Oh, let us get back to you, Professor.
They never got back to you, I know for a fact.
Well, they got back and said, sorry, we're going another direction.
Not happening.
Did that happen?
Chris Williamson, activate that big IDW brain you've got and just consider what's being described and is that a normal human interaction?
What idiot administrator selected Gad Saad to give a presentation on how to be a good ally to women?
Did they not Google him before that?
I've never had a conversation even approximating that.
In my entire life.
And I'm pretty sure you haven't either.
I just don't believe he's having conversations like that.
If he is, Canada is a bloody...
It's just a zone of...
I don't want to disparage the Canadians because I know it's not.
I know this world that he inhabits.
What is the more interesting question for me is, given that these anecdotes are...
Not as described.
They may relate to big things, like you might have been invited to a luncheon and they said they decided to go a different direction.
But that's the, like all the other stuff feels really, really editorialized.
But I'm wondering how much Gad Saad knows that he's doing that thing, making the details more exaggerated and the story more in line with the point he wants to make.
Does he know?
That didn't happen?
Or is his head such that, like, he is a master satirist.
He does inhabit this world where there's social justice, postmodern people who believe in dancing hyena rather than the sun.
That's right.
And then he's smacking them down and talking about his commitment to truth and freedom and liberalism.
Yeah.
Just in random conversations.
Yeah.
Okay.
We'll get onto something slightly more substantial about this.
But there was this part, Matt, and it's one of the purest illustrations of guru self-perception that I've heard.
So it's an anecdote which isn't really related to culture war stuff, which is astonishing in this interview.
So there's a part where he's talking about how much he's committed to true
There are really two life ideals that drive who I am.
One is truth.
And the second one is freedom.
Okay, so there we go.
There's him saying that.
His commitment to freedom extends not just to his culture war and his academic career, but to his sporting career as well.
His commitment to freedom knows no bounds, Matt.
And the anecdote he provided here was just amazing.
So let's hear that.
But when I used to be a competitive soccer player, I played the playmaker role, the number 10 role, where I just kind of float around.
Whenever I had a coach who would put restrictions on me, you're playing today more in left midfield, and you have to track back and cover somebody, suddenly my brain would explode.
Because you were removing...
What I consider to be my greatest asset, which was to kind of look for spaces, to freely roam around looking for those opportunities, right?
So freedom is something that constantly comes up in my life, whether it was when I was a soccer player, when I'm deciding which topics to pursue as a scientific project.
He's got freedom just baked into him.
It's in his DNA.
He just cannot stand the thought of being unfree in any context.
He's so free.
He'll fuck up a soccer game by refusing to heed his coach.
He's like, get back in the center, you freaking idiot.
I love freedom, coach!
I love freedom!
You know, he reminds me of like the little boys playing soccer.
My son plays soccer.
Below a certain age, they don't understand about positions.
And they're like a little flock, sort of like a little huddle following the ball around.
And then they eventually learn to play positions.
And I'm imagining a team of Gadsads just kind of doing whatever they want.
Running where they want.
I'm seeking out spaces, coach.
I'm seeking out spaces.
Gads, we're 10-0 down.
We need you to be.
It's a silly point, but it's just like he's always the hero in his own stories.
That never seems to bother him, that he's.
He's always the legend.
I'm the guy that couldn't control.
I was just so out of the box.
Yeah, like this is the editorializing that's a constant amongst all our gurus.
And I'm just constantly amazed that people just lap it up.
It's the same.
It's like Trump and Trump just his braggadocio thing.
And the fact that at least some people think that's cool, that's great.
I just cannot wrap my head around it.
He's clearly very influenced by Taleb, a guru that we've covered before.
And Taleb is famed for having a quite punchy, combative style, calling people morons and so on.
Gadsad does this too.
You know, he does this online.
He's in the mold of James Lindsay on Twitter.
Even with Taleb, where we listened to his content, it did feel performative at times, right?
That he was having to...
You know, remind himself I'm supposed to be Taleb.
And super macho and all that.
Yeah, so I need to throw in a few morons and stuff to make that clear.
At least Taleb is the originator there, right?
He's famed for being that thin-skinned, arrogant asshole.
But this is like a budget, second-hand version of someone doing an imitation of Taleb.
And you still get that feeling that he's trying to insert it to make it more controversial.
So there's a couple of examples of this, but let's listen to one of them.
So one of the things that I find most galling when imbeciles argue against evolutionary psychology.
Sorry, I don't mean to say imbeciles.
That's not diplomatic.
People with a deferring opinion, also known as lobotomized idiots.
Morons.
Right.
So they will say things like, well, you know, evolutionary psychology, it's pseudoscience.
Yeah, you're a moron.
The mind didn't come from magic.
It didn't arise through a magical cultural process.
Culture exists in its form because of biology, not instead of biology.
Socialization matters, but socialization is not something in lieu of biology.
It's because of biology.
Well, I mean, look, I know you played that to illustrate him being essentially a budget form of Nassim Taleb, which he absolutely is.
But I just want to mention that it also illustrates the point I made before, which is that he's fundamentally making a pretty uncontroversial point that the mind isn't magic.
There is a biological substrate to the mind.
Yes, culture is like a lay that sits on top of that.
He may be exaggerating a little bit or downplaying the influence of culture, but at heart, it's nothing particularly...
Not many people disagree with that, but he just sets it up as it being this brave intellectual position that...
Look, I'm going to take a stance for him at my first movie of this episode.
The second part of that clip, I kept it in because I wanted to highlight that he actually can construct...
Like you said, it's a fairly mundane point, but it's a relatively valid one.
Culture and biology are not completely independent things.
Culture is impacted by biology and vice versa, right?
Culture doesn't exist without people which came through a process of evolution and so on.
Don't need to really get it because dual inheritance models, as we've discussed, are the dominant view.
In modern evolutionary and cultural evolutionary fields.
And psychology, for that matter.
Yeah.
The first half of it, with the morons and imbeciles and all that, I don't want to agree with him on the second half, because the first half is just so annoying.
I feel dirty agreeing with a general point that he might make, because he wraps it up in this layer of self-aggrandizing culture war bullshit that makes it...
If he does have something worthwhile to say about evolution and psychology and consumption and so on, he's got it buried under so much of his persona and the culture war.
It actually degrades the points that he wants to make.
It doesn't buttress them.
Yeah.
Now, that's my instinct as well.
He says an awful lot of things that are pretty uncontroversial, even the stuff I'm not totally sure about is probably true.
Like, for instance, that young...
Boys and young girls probably do have some mean differences in toy preferences.
There are sex differences in behaviors and preferences and so on.
We can argue about how large they are or how relevant they are or whatever.
There's a bunch of pretty basic points that he makes.
But one, it irritates me because he makes out that he's this lone figure presenting this view against an army of ideological terrorists and academia when it's just the standard view in my part of the social sciences
anyway. And the second thing is also that,
sort of forced macho persona and the morons and the imbeciles.
We'll probably hear more examples of that.
And yeah, and because he links all of those points to culture war, political ends, it makes me want to disagree with him.
It makes me want to, yeah.
To speak to that, the presentation of himself and others like him as the kind of lone warriors standing up.
So here's a clip that speaks explicitly to that point.
The silent majority hates the stuff.
I know this because I receive a million emails a day from all professors who are too afraid to speak and they say, thank you, you're my only...
Take it to sanity.
So I know that 99% of people are against this stuff, except that each of the 99% is too afraid to speak up.
So it is left on three, four, five people to carry the burden for everyone else.
The day that people find their testicles, whether they're males or female, and actually activate their testicular fortitude and speak out and say, enough of this.
I wanted to mention that as well because he falls for the same sampling issue that Lindsay does and so many people.
They just don't factor in, you are famous for having a particular perspective.
So you will, of course, attract correspondence that relates to that perspective.
That does not equate to 99% of people actually agree with you, except where you're taking the stance where...
It's fairly mundane, and actually there isn't a huge amount of controversy.
So I agree with the people who say that the extremes of the left and the right are the extremes, and they don't represent the majority position.
This isn't strange because, as we've said, we're center-left people, so this is a self-serving view.
Well, you're not implying that they're right or wrong, just that there's like a bell curve of opinion.
Yeah, I'm just noting that this isn't a controversial opinion for me to stick out because it simply says that people in the middle are in the majority, which they are, obviously, because the extremes are extreme.
The notion that you can rely on your inbox as a proportional sample of sentiment, it's so wrong.
They all make this mistake.
I'm not saying you can't detect trends from what people tell you, but the way they extrapolate from there,
Yeah, it reminds me of that wonderful character who believed that owls were holograms that were actually projections created by aliens.
When you saw an owl, it was probably actually like a weird interdimensional hologram created by aliens to conceal their presence.
In order to investigate this, he put out a request on his UFO whatever platforms and got all of these responses, all of these people going, yes, you know, now you mentioned it.
When I did see that, Al, something weird did happen.
It's the same thing, Chris.
I haven't heard that, though.
It does sound a lot like the hitchhiker's guide.
The mice, isn't it?
Mice are just the...
Thing which is visually represented in our universe from these trans-dimensional...
Actually, yeah, the mice are...
But I'm not going senile.
I'm not conflating the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy with a thing that actually happened.
Look, it's a real anecdote.
Everybody came in.
I really just...
Yes, Andy knew, but I have to mention it because it struck me as well.
There was a researcher who I like who was doing research on reptiles and crocodiles and their sociality, and he wanted to get...
He basically wants to argue that they're more social than people claim.
And he did the same thing, which you suggested, which was he canvassed researchers of crocodiles for instances of cooperative hunting.
And he received many instances, and then he published a paper about it.
And when I was reading the paper, it was interesting, but it was also like, but this is the exact way to collect anecdotes.
And the examples were all...
There are things that if those abilities exist in crocodiles, it would be much more scary because it's things like a crocodile scaring a pig so it runs down and another crocodile jumps out and gets it.
And then if they can plan like that, we are back.
And secondly, that could also just be individual.
One crocodile tried to eat a pig and it ran.
It happened to run down the thing and then the other crocodiles were there.
Yeah, of course.
And you know that crocodile researchers have considered this, but obviously there's some examples where they found that it was plausible.
I don't think you can take from that that crocodiles can engage in cooperative hunting.
You should remain skeptical.
Well, given that I live in an area where we have like four-meter crocodiles, I'm fucking glad to hear that, Chris.
Oh, what's that?
Look, there's some nice barbecued shrimp there just beside the...
The crocodiles are trying to lure me out.
They've prepared some shrimp to lure me into the river.
Throwing around the edge of the pool.
Oh, that's interesting.
Just one crocodile watching across the way.
Wait for it, lads.
Wait for it.
I'd prefer to talk about crocodiles than cats, but we have a job to do, Chris.
We do have a job.
We can't stay with the morons and idiots for so on.
And let me see, Matt.
I feel like we have to play at least one more clip of him being a budget.
Taleb, before we escape this point.
I can't remember if this is one I've played or not.
Let's see.
But for example, when in the pursuit of trans-activism, you negate biological realities that the average three-day-old newborn pigeon knows, then that becomes a problem.
Yeah.
I just wanted that for the three-day-old newborn pigeon gag, which comes up repeatedly.
And he does actually explicitly mention...
And he highlights how important it is and how significant that he's friends with Taleb.
Nassim and I are very good friends for several reasons, one of which, at least if I can speak for him, in terms of, you know, I always joke that Nassim thinks 99% of humanity are useless cretins that should be,
you know, killed.
Because they're imbeciles beyond redemption.
And that I am one of the few who makes it into his...
You're in the cut.
You're in the 1%.
I'm really in like...
I think getting the approval of Nassim might be bigger than a Nobel Prize.
Kind of one of the cute things about Gadsad is he kind of wears a lot of these things on his sleeve.
He almost is quite upfront about the fact that he's imitating Nassim in this respect.
Yeah.
Or how needy he is for approval.
I don't think that he's entirely intending to be so transparent, but it is.
At the same time, Chris Williamson doesn't pick up on it.
Maybe he's just like, oh, that's great.
Nassim loves you.
So, you know, geniuses, recognized geniuses.
Chris Williamson, I don't want to sound like a snob, but he is a reality TV show participant and a male model.
Maybe he's not the best barometer.
Identity politics, Mark.
Identity politics.
Judge people by their arguments and what they do.
That was bad of me.
I apologize.
I'm sorry.
That was below the belt.
Below the belt.
This is the last reference to Nassim Taleb and then we'll escape this belabored point.
And linking back to what you just said to Nassim and I, our friendship, we're both...
Direct talkers, right?
We're both no BS.
Therefore, we can see what Trump is.
It's not as though we're simpletons who don't understand that he's got certain qualities.
Predilections, yeah, yeah.
Exactly.
Yeah, this is...
Look, I want to pick up on this.
Have we got more clips about the Donald Trump links?
Because...
Oh, yes.
This seems as good a time as any to move to the Trump apologetics.
Okay, I won't say too much now.
But, yeah, we're starting to get into it.
It's a familiar thread here, which is that these apologists, nominally liberal, nominally centrist apologists for just the shit show that was Donald Trump's presidency and who were hoping that he would be re-elected,
they would always frame it as, yes, we know what Trump is, we understand, but we can see beyond his boorish whatever and his persona and all of these liberals who are just...
Terribly triggered by this brusque personality.
Just can't see beyond that and have got Trump derangement syndrome.
That was the Galaxy Brain take I just saw ad nauseam.
Yeah, there's a lot of this.
This comes at the end of the interview and Gatsad predicts that Trump is going to win.
The election, and that's wrong.
But you can get election predictions wrong for various reasons.
But there's more issues here, and they fall in line with a lot of the things that we identified with Scott Adams.
So here's an early, even before we get into the issue of Trump's unique characteristics and how Gadsad interprets them.
But listen to this and see if it rings any bells.
So at the start of the...
So before COVID, I would have said it's 95% sure that he would win.
With COVID and all of the imbeciles that now say, well, look, the deaths, it's Trump, right?
This is like your aunt got diabetes during Trump.
Well, there's really only one conclusion.
It must be that Trump caused her diabetes because, brah, it's during his presidency, right?
An Amazonian frog just died in the Amazon.
It is during Trump's presidency, so how could you not see the link, moron, right?
So because most people have the cognitive abilities of a newborn pigeon, they are regrettably all placing the blame on Trump.
So Matt, the pigeon made its appearance again here, but the other point I wanted to emphasize is, this is from the Scott Adams School of Thought, where holding...
Trump responsible for anything that happens during his administration is unfair and non sequitur.
But the flip never applies in regards to Obama or Biden or the Democrats.
You can criticize Trump's handling of the pandemic because he universally did things badly, argued it's not serious, promoted misinformation about treatments and so on.
Whether or not he's entirely responsible, nobody's, I think, reasonable is arguing that.
Yes, any president could have to deal with a pandemic, but the notion that it doesn't matter if it's Trump or Biden or whoever.
No, it does.
Look what Biden has done since he came in.
That's a completely different response.
Well, that's the really annoying thing about this.
Nobody's saying that Trump's responsible for the death of some particular tree frog or something.
People were saying that he totally mismanaged the...
Which he did.
This running defense, so Gadstad and people like him frame it as liberals with their Trump derangement syndrome, just want to blame him for everything.
Why don't they just admit that they're MAGA, bleeding-edge right-wing people?
Because that's what they do.
Totally partisan for him, but the irritating thing is that it's just, no, no.
They're being super rational.
And what they're doing is they're noticing these mind viruses that are existing in the brains of liberals that cause them to blame Trump for everything.
So you mentioned about people refusing to admit when they're actually quite obviously in support of Trump or at the very least issuing apologetics for him.
I think Chris Williamson engages in this quite obviously.
So here is him first making the point about how...
He doesn't have a horse in the race.
It's so interesting, man, especially as a Brit.
I don't have a dog in this fight.
I mean, I don't want the world to break, but I have no preference.
And yet, I can totally see how people get confused by that.
But the bottom line for me is that, yeah, Trump is uncouth and he's...
Simple in a way, but that simpleness belies honesty.
Okay, so hold on, Matt.
Hold your tongue for a second.
I know you want to respond to how he framed that, but listen to...
So he said who wins, he doesn't have strong feelings one way or the other.
Now listen to this bit.
Yeah, so you're saying what would happen if he were to win?
No, I just think that if it happens and he does win after every weapon...
Under the Sun that has been picked out by mainstream media and individuals and movement groups and stuff like that.
I think it's a stark message about just how wrong the Democrat messaging, the left messaging generally is at the moment and how much it doesn't resonate with the normal people, not the people that live on Twitter.
So this was the lessons to be taken from Trump's victory.
They did some real soul searching after the big loss.
Yeah.
By that logic, that would suggest that actually Biden's victory suggests that maybe Chris and Gad are wrong and that the public were fed up with Trump and that even despite the hardcore social justice equity for all and wokeness as the curriculum,
people were still willing to vote for a geriatric man to get rid of Trump.
So maybe that speaks to the sentiment that they don't appreciate surrounding Trump.
Yeah, the thing that really rubbed me the wrong way was the implication that underlying the veneer of Trump's apparent lying lies a deep seam of honesty.
Like, no.
The only kind way to put that is that they're saying that he is what he appears to be.
Like a narcissistic idiot.
Liar.
Yeah, liar.
But that's not what they mean.
They mean that he's honest about his policy interests and he speaks what's on his mind and heart.
No, he's a manipulative.
He even tells you that he is just saying things that he's been told to say.
But they act as if there's a deep wellspring of a commitment to truth within them.
And it isn't.
There just isn't.
He's a famous liar.
Yeah, and he's no friend of liberalism, which Gad Saad promotes himself as being the flag bearer for.
It's inconsistent, Chris, is what I'm saying.
Inconsistent.
Let's hear Gad Saad explain why he doesn't support Trump, just why he may carry water for him.
But, you know, Professor, I look up to you, how could you support a maniac like Trump?
First of all, there's a difference between the positions that I take and supporting Trump, right?
I always say that I don't have posters of Trump, which my wife and I use in the bedroom as foreplay, right?
So the fact that I explain why Trump is a very viable option doesn't mean that I'm a pro-Trump guy.
I understand that he's brash and he's vulgar and he's non-presidential.
But as I explained recently in a clip, a sad truth clip, there is an expression that I bring from Arabic that basically says to get drunk.
That's the first part of his argument.
You know how you can tell you're a Trump apologist when The most disparaging word you can use to describe him is brash, uncouth.
It's so annoying to hear, you know, Scott Adams did a similar thing where they editorialize as if the, it's just an aesthetic, this taste that people have for the way that he presented those ideas.
But his ideas fundamentally weren't, they weren't that bad.
And like, no, it's both, right?
It's that he's a boorish, lying, idiot, narcissist.
And that the ideas that he championed were xenophobic nationalist.
And he was incompetent on top of those two things.
Yeah.
So it's like the perfect trifecta.
And listen to the venom with which he addresses Obama in comparison.
Now, do you understand the analogy here?
That means that it takes very little to get me drunk because I'm a moron, because I'm a lightweight, right?
Here's what most people do, including some of my very highfalutin, highbrow, cerebral friends.
Trump is vulgar.
He speaks in a brash way.
He's cantankerous.
He's brazenly boastful.
Therefore, he attacks my sense of aesthetics.
This is what I call an aesthetic injury, right?
But, now look, you see?
I'm getting drunk, you see?
On the other hand...
Obama, he's lanky.
He's tall.
He's majestic.
He's got a radiant smile.
I'm getting more drunk by the second.
You see, I'm getting a bit wobbly, right?
He's got a mellifluous voice.
Oh my God, I'm getting drunk.
He's presidential.
Now, what Obama says is utter garbage.
It's rehearsed, platitudinous, vacuous bullshit.
Okay?
If anything, the semantics of what Trump might say might actually be much more substantive.
But Trump is vulgar and disgusting.
He repulses me.
Therefore, he is a monster, right?
It's just such a straw, man.
The thing that upsets me about it is how it's presented as, look at me seeing through the matrix, right?
Objections are.
Diagnose yourself, you moron.
You pigeon-brained fool.
You're just making excuses for somebody that you're invested in.
And nobody was under illusions at the end of Obama's administration that he had feelings and that a lot of the hopes that they had didn't materialize.
There was plenty of criticism of Obama.
He was not given.
A free pass.
No.
He's not given a free pass, no.
Absolutely not.
And the Democrats in the United States have shown a total willingness to vote for people that are not as mellifluous or as lanky or as handsome as Obama.
Yeah, you know, it's Biden.
It's stupid.
And yes, that's what I hate.
It's very Scott Adams, this galaxy-brained rationalisation of just straight-up right-wing.
Partisan politics.
And they just don't have the guts to admit that they're just straight up political.
Partisans.
Partisans and perhaps even reactionaries.
Like I am a liberal and you are too.
I like liberalism.
It's great.
And so I like freedom.
Freedom's good.
Yeah.
And the way that Gad said, just that's what he calls himself.
Yet he's not.
You know, if you're supporting Trump, then you're not.
Someone who is in favor of those things.
Yeah, so the last tip on this topic, and then we'll get out of the cesspool that is Trump apologetics.
But here is Gadsad talking about why he feels an affinity to Trump.
And I think this is actually insightful, but not in the way that he intends it to be.
Obama was as much of a narcissist, but I didn't succumb to the court.
Because I see through his bullshit.
You get what I'm saying?
And I think, regrettably, most of my highfalutin colleagues are unable to see this because they come from a rarefied world where you speak.
I can speak as fancily and probably 10 times more fancily than all of them combined, but I can also say bullshit, right?
And that's why I say I'm the professor of the people.
So I can connect with Trump on his level.
I get what he's doing.
He's a buffoon in a style sense.
But the content of what he says, he is against open immigration.
He cares more about radical Islam.
The professor of the people.
Yeah, yeah.
So I think you're right there, Chris.
I think he has revealed a little bit of truth there.
And he does feel an affinity for Trump because he has a fair bit in common with him.
Yeah.
And I think a lot of our gurus do.
Trump is probably the archetypal guru.
So one of the things about self-aggrandizing, attention-seeking narcissists is they, in fact, this is true of anybody who is on the spectrum of having some kind of personality disorder, is one of their blind spots is that they have to,
because they're humans, all of us do this, they apply their model of themselves.
They use themselves as a model to understand other people.
Yeah, this is what we all do, right?
It's a fundamental truth about people in terms of understanding someone else's motivations.
It's agent-based reasoning.
We think, well, what would I be thinking or doing in that situation?
Oh, right, I'd be wanting to do that, right?
And that's how we attribute motives.
So one of the flaws about narcissists is that they apply their own motives and their own explanations for their own behavior to other people, and often they're totally wrong.
Because they're not normal.
They're not typical people.
They have a personality disorder, or at least they're on the spectrum of having one.
And so they often mistake other people's motivations in assuming that they're the same as their own.
Yeah, I think you're spot on.
And it's something I often find when I hear the gurus analyze how other people think.
It just doesn't ring true to me, what they describe, especially when they're projecting negative.
Everyone does this.
And you're like, don't do that.
This comes up so often with these kind of figures.
I just feel, if you want to be a Trump apologist, if you want to be a Trump supporter, and you're in the model that God is, then have the balls to admit where you lie politically and who you support.
Don't hide behind this claim that it's The people that don't get you are focused on aesthetics.
No, you like a right-wing populist because you share his views.
So have the balls, pigeon brain.
That's right.
I can respect that.
I'm not one of these people that hates everyone on the other side of the aisle of politics.
I can imagine that if you're a religious Christian, if you love guns...
Very conservative, all that stuff, right?
Then you will hold your nose and be a total partisan in favor of Trump.
And you could be those things without being like a deeply horrible person.
In fact, I know people that are way on the right side of politics and it's an obvious point, but they're not terrible, right?
Their politics might be terrible, but they...
Yeah, that's right.
I might disagree with all their things, but they don't necessarily irritate me is what I'm saying.
But people, like Gad Saad, who...
I won't even admit that that's where they are.
I mean, come on.
I know.
It's not hard.
It's not hard to see.
And Chris Williamson as well.
I feel he...
I'm not playing a lot of clips of him, but this fear and lack of interest in the way that the mainstream media is all against Trump.
I'm just interested in ideas and sense-making.
Yeah.
And actually, I think it's a good time to turn to...
This is actually a slightly positive segment when it comes to Gad because he actually pulls back from some of the attempts to invite galaxy brain reasoning that Chris suggests, at least to a certain extent.
So let's hear the first of these.
How much do you think that the shifts in sexual norms and sexual marketplace, like less monogamy and Tinder and gender imbalance on campuses and incels and so on, has contributed to the current social unrest among young people?
Any specific area of society?
The fact that we're so ready to riot and loot and also be very...
Vociferous online when we don't have anything to back it up.
It just seems like there's a lot of unrest among young people.
Is it the fact that they're not getting laid?
Well, I don't know if I can tie the incel phenomenon to the chaos that we see.
I think it's a bit of a...
I like to be very tight.
I'd like to have my nomological network exactly tight before I pronounce it.
Well, I have to give respect to Gad right there because he was offered the opportunity for a hot take, which would have been stupid.
And he politely demurred.
Well done.
Well, he did, but he's kind of forced by the situation to say, but, you know, if you ask me to spitball, I did appreciate that.
And I think this is a good illustration that when Chris Williamson or other interviewers of his ilk, when they try to present themselves as relatively neutral people that don't have a horse in the race, it's not true,
right?
They have these ideas.
His idea there is that modern feminists and trans activists know that sex has decreased, that people are just getting frustrated in their homes and that's what's leading to the riots about racial justice or whatever.
It's kind of a fairly transparent attempt to disparage that as like a silly movement just caused by sexual frustration.
Yeah, it's a pretty familiar theme, isn't it?
That the left-wing protesters or activists have some kind of mental disorder and then perhaps diagnosing that with some recourse to science, like evolutionary psychology.
Yeah, they just need to get laid.
I think that Gad Saad's claim that he likes to wait until he has all of the data in and tightly organized before he makes any claims.
I'm not sure I will.
That holds up in general.
But like you say, I do appreciate it at this particular point.
And there's actually another point when a similar thing happens.
So here's another example.
I was going to say, so evolutionary science, would it say sexual inequality is as powerful of an explanation for rage as economic inequality, say?
Well, it depends what you mean by sexual inequality.
I mean...
You see what I mean?
The imbalance.
Exactly.
There are different currencies you could use, right?
Yeah.
So this line of questioning there is not good because this is speaking to that men's rights sort of incel talking point that a few men are getting access to too many women and we need to go to some more traditionalist thing where...
Each man is guaranteed sex, and that's important.
Jordan Peterson enforced monogamy kind of comments.
Yes, it is along those lines.
Semi-impressive is that Gad Saad attempts to be more rigorous, right?
He's like, well, what do you mean by sexual imbalance or sexual inequality?
He then does go on to talk about societies where you have excess of unmarried young meals.
Harm that that can do.
Excess of low-status meals without access to wives or means of gaining status.
Which is, I think, a relatively well-established area of research historically as well.
But without focusing on that particular area, I think it's just a nice illustration that Gadzad maybe does have within him the ability to be...
Academic and focus on measurement or that kind of thing.
And he has produced work.
So I think there's a slight difference between, say, him and Chris Williamson, right?
That comes across from this kind of clip.
Yeah, Chris is worse.
Gadsat is able to recognize that during a direct link between Tinder type...
Dating behavior and street protests is silly, yet Chris is pretty keen on that kind of point.
And, you know, Matt, we've done our own disservice to the world of metaphors and analogies and parables in this episode.
But just to make you feel better, I thought I'd give some examples.
You know, we've illustrated how Jordan Peterson and other people are masters in this domain.
But here's some examples of why Chris Williamson might not be exactly on par with them.
I don't know whether you've played, you almost certainly won't have done, but Call of Duty Warzone is super popular at the moment, and my housemate plays it.
And you get to choose a preference of a loadout of your different weapons, and you can have this automatic rifle and this knife and this gun or whatever.
And it definitely feels like satire is the go-to primary weapon for you.
Absolutely.
It's like, that's the one that you get, that's the first gun that you pick up, and then maybe there'll be a little bit of this and a little bit of that.
It's a good metaphor.
It's a good metaphor, you know?
It's like Counter-Strike.
You pick your weapon.
Yeah.
No, look, if Gatsad was a first-person shooter player, he'd have satire on a hotkey.
It'd be F1.
Yeah.
He'd just be able to switch to it real quick.
Someone comes around the corner, boom, satire.
Have you seen the new version of Jumanji, Matt?
No.
No, I have not.
Instead of a board game, pewter game setting, and each of the characters brings up their profiles and it says strengths and weaknesses.
Obviously, in the same way, if Gads had his strength would be satire, irony, cutting sarcasm, and weakness might be ego and fragility.
Yeah, I just love that there was a long way to go for that.
Metaphor just to say, oh, you're good at satire.
Yeah, that's right.
Well, thanks, Chris.
That's making me feel better about my...
I've got another one, Matt.
And like most of the references Chris uses, it's tied into modern culture, gaming culture, tech, all this.
It's up to date, Matt.
So it might be a bit hard for us to follow, but let's see if we can keep up with this.
It does seem like postmodernism is the source code.
That's underwritten everything, and then what you've got on top of that are some apps.
Nice way of putting it, yes.
Yeah, so you have the particular operating system, that's postmodernism, and then you have, give us some of the apps.
What are some of the apps that people have downloaded onto their social justice phone?
The app metaphor has been used, some might say it's been overused, but I kind of appreciate the beauty of that, like the social justice phone.
Running the operating system of postmodernism.
What kind of apps?
Like, what a question.
What a wonderful question.
I wish someone would ask me those kind of questions.
I think I liked it a little bit better than the Call of Duty analogy.
Well, you know, horses for horses.
Poor Chris.
We'll have to leave him there.
Suffice to say that he's gaining in popularity in this space, or like on YouTube.
So, you know, he has interviews with the people that you would expect, Sargon of Akkad and Gadzad and so on.
It will be depressing if he becomes a more prominent figure in this space.
Everyone that we mentioned, it turns out a couple of months later, they're doing crossovers or appearances at Donald Trump's family.
I'm just awaiting Chris Williamson.
And JP Sears appearing at Jordan Peterson's next main event or something like that.
So, Gad Saad.
Now, one other thing that he does in this, which I think is pretty common, he denounces the practice of engaging in identity politics that the left is prone to, focusing on the characteristics that someone has over what they're actually saying.
But then...
As with many people who make that point, he then goes on to say this.
When you're constantly whining, when you simply don't know what else there is in the world, right?
That is frustrating to those who have lived that, right?
So Ayaan Hirsi Ali, do you know who that is?
Yeah.
So Ayaan Hirsi Ali should be someone that people seriously listen to because she's lived Islam.
And yet she is a, you know, Hitler bigot who is an Islamophob.
I mean, if a black woman from Somalia who is an ex-Muslim is somebody that doesn't carry the right identity markers to speak about Islam, then we're lost.
Like, I just, I hate that you can denounce the relevance of identity earlier in an interview, and then you can completely lean into it to support another
person.
I actually think there's an argument to be made.
We should weight things by the relevant experience or the broader awareness that people have of global trends or that kind of thing.
It's fine.
Where did Arian Hirsi Ali grow up?
Somalia.
Yeah, and underwent female genital mutilation and escaped an arranged marriage.
So definitely has undergone genuine...
Trials and tribulations.
So she sort of speaks out about Islam a bit like Sam Harris kind of mould?
Exactly.
And she's leaned maybe more towards the right wing.
I think lean towards it might be putting it mildly since she arrived in the West.
Yeah, but identity politics, not okay, except when it is, right?
Yeah, I take that point.
Yeah.
Fair enough.
A common occurrence, I think, in the intellectual dark web sphere.
So, Matt, usually, you know, we try to say some nice things about the people that we're generally negative about.
And with Gad Saad, I will say that I think if you follow simply what he claims he's making a defense of, for example, that nominological networks of cumulative Evidence or whatever,
right?
Like simply saying that you should triangulate sources of evidence and avoid making conclusions until you've looked into the topic in depth.
Yeah, I agree.
And that the left might have a knee-jerk negative reaction to anything involving evolutionary psychology or biological explanations for things related to human behavior.
Sure.
I think if you take aspects of his argument outside of what he does with them, that the basic points can be fine to endorse.
And it is true that in the same way as Brett Weinstein does, or other people in his spheres, when he's summarizing research, he's not always doing it badly, right?
He can...
He can't talk about the scientific method and stuff in a coherent fashion.
And I will say that there is one point during the episode where Chris Williamson asks him about sharing more topless photos on his Twitter account.
And he seems to show a genuine moment of self-deprecating humor, saying that that would be...
A horror show, a crime against humanity, unless he was sharing photos from his 20s or 30s.
And I was just like, oh, that's nice.
He didn't slip into the reflexive self-aggrandizement.
And so I think if he dropped the culture war shit and he dropped this need to be a budget, Taleb, a kind of shit poster and the needy personality, he might actually have something,
at least a take.
That could be worth hearing, but everything that he does is so laced with that, that that's essentially 90% of what his output is.
My backhanded compliment is that he could have something worthwhile to say.
I think he has had something worthwhile to say, and he said it.
He's been a professor at Concordia University and a researcher for many years, and I respect his research on the evolutionary basis of consumption.
I think that's...
Good stuff.
I haven't read it, but I know the area, right?
Let's clarify.
Rather than get yourself into a replication crisis pragma, you respect that field of research rather than because you don't know his particular studies.
That's right.
So I'm not commenting on the robustness or whatever of the specific studies.
It's a very niche area of research.
And I know enough about...
What he's done on it, the basic theses and so on.
Like looking into why, you know, why certain kinds of young men are all into buying Ferraris and all about ostentatious displays of wealth.
Like it's genuinely interesting evolutionary reasons there.
But...
But I have a question on that, Matt, because just to clarify that, like I agree, you know, Leonardo DiCaprio wearing a watch and like why do people want to buy that, right?
There's evolutionary...
Psychology, I think, that plays into that with high status individuals and the desire to imitate them.
But how do you feel about, say, his research that when women are particularly in a fertile period, that they will focus on buying beauty products over buying food?
Does that stuff strike you as...
No, that doesn't strike me as good, that particular one, no.
So the premise of Gadsad's specific article there was that women would be trying to make themselves more attractive during the times of the month in which they were fertile.
Of course, human beings are a species which don't display fertility overtly.
That doesn't make any sense to me because for a woman, the challenge is not to get a man to have sex with you.
And they only need to have someone to have sex with them just a few times in their entire life.
And that'll be enough sex, right, in order to...
Get what you need in order to have children.
Whereas the priorities in terms of just game theory or whatever, men have got to be playing a completely different game.
So it doesn't seem to make any sense to me that the thesis behind that little study that they did.
But look, that's really getting into the weeds.
It's a very specific paper, which I don't think is good.
But just the more general premise, right, which is the way that economic consumption is tied to social status signaling.
Like an awful lot of modern consumption is about that, keeping up with the Joneses and so on.
And men and women do it.
And even though the patterns are slightly different, it is interesting.
And yeah, so I actually respect his academic background.
And like you, looking, like the vibe I get from him, and I had a look at his Twitter feed and stuff.
A lot of it is pretty genial and good-natured, like interspersed with the cultural shenanigans.
As you say, there's some kind of self-effacing humour and just good vibes.
Obviously, if you criticised him in some way, he'd straightaway try to channel Taleb and be the tough guy.
But it does feel like a bit of an act with him.
A bit of an act.
A bit of an act, a real act.
Evolutionary consumption stuff that I referred to is from back in 2007, and his most recent book, The Parasitic Mind, which looks like just a pure culture war scrawl, is from just 2020.
On a sort of gut level, I don't dislike him that much because he's got that traditionalist uncle, politically incorrect, conservative sensibilities, fine, sure.
He doesn't feel like a dyed-in-the-wool culture warrior.
He's trying to be one with not a great deal of success.
I agree on the not great deal of success, but I think I regard him as being a bit more malignant because he doesn't strike me as someone massively far from the Scott Adams school of engagement.
I think his politics...
Is now the dominating force in his rhetoric and that the Evo Sykes stuff is, although he shows some signals of being hesitant to go too far in that direction,
he's right at home chatting with Dave Rubin and Michael Malice or whatever about the crazy social justice warriors and defending Trump.
From whatever criticisms may come.
So I regard him, I think, as a bit more malignant than you do.
But I think it's one of these cases where it basically, if you don't pay attention to him, he just, you know, is trotting along in the background, being a self-aggrandizing boyfriend.
But I think it's a bit like, you know, Eric Weinstein or someone.
The more attention that you pay, the more malignant.
That you might find the output.
That's just my hunch.
I haven't paid that much attention to his material, so I can't say that for sure.
But it's a hunch that I have.
Yeah, I guess I was just saying something similar to yourself, which is the feeling, I guess, it's almost like he doesn't have to be.
He's kind of chosen to be.
It doesn't feel like he needs to be like this.
It feels like this is a persona that he's adopted in now.
I think the personality flaws are just a core part of the personality.
So the character that comes out, like how much of it is a character versus how much of it reflects his insecurities and whatever, that's like for a psychiatrist to uncover.
It does feel very artificial.
It does.
I mean, look, I saw on his Twitter feed that he's quite proud that his book, The Parasitic Mind, is number one in the civil rights category.
On Amazon, which is a little bit funny in itself.
Beating How to Be an Antiracist by Ibrahim X. Kendi, number three.
I suspect he's selling more copies of The Parasitic Mind than The Consuming Instinct.
The impression I get from that prior book is it may have had some political overtones, but I don't think they were that strong.
He's definitely aware that he will achieve a much higher profile much more easily.
By going down that route.
Yeah.
He knows where his bread is buttered.
He's not a victim, right?
Like, he's a willing participant in the partisanship that he slipped into.
And look, of course, he's comfortable with it because he's, I don't doubt for a minute that he, in his core, he's a politically incorrect, old-fashioned, grumpy conservative in the vein of your unacceptable uncle sort of thing.
But he doesn't seem mad.
He seems like someone who's like that who's chosen to lean into it.
Yeah, I think it's fair to say that neither of us are fans of Gad.
And giving him attention feels like doing what he wants.
It makes you feel unclean in a way because any attention...
Just seems like it will feed him, like he's that kind of plant from Little Shop of Horrors, to use my own stretch metaphor, like, feed me, Seymour, attention, attention.
I don't think he's a top-tier culture war figure.
Infamously was very upset when Barry Weiss left him out of the IDW article.
But I think that's his lot in life, to be kind of forgotten that he's a member of the IDW or the politically...
Incorrect sphere or whatever.
He's a legend in his own mind much more than he is in the general cultural ecosystem.
Well, to make my own labored analogy, I feel like characters like Gadsad, and there's be a few others amongst our gurus, the ones who chose this path that had a choice at some point and didn't need to.
It reminds me of, you know, in Lord of the Rings where Galadriel is offered the ring of power and she puts it aside and...
Goes to go into the West and lose her powers and disappear or whatever and fade away.
I'm not saying Gadsad is Galadriel, but I think there's a similar narrative in terms of being a respectable professor, doing some respectable work, being completely, well, not completely, but having a low profile and not getting the attention.
And you could keep doing that and then fade away like we all do.
Or you could choose to grasp the rig of power.
Chris.
So he ended up more of a Saruman-type character, I think.
Well, he would like that comparison, I'm sure, because that's a major figure in the book, I think.
But no, no, Chris, it works because Saruman is kind of a failed second-tier villain.
It doesn't really compare to Soren.
Yeah, I get it.
He's still, you know, like an evil wizard.
So I much prefer comparisons to...
Second level enemies from the turtles.
The brother that figures from epic fantasy.
But yeah, sure, he's Saruman.
They're superficial comparisons, Matt.
Superficial similarities.
Yes, thank you.
Don't make me tell you another parable, Chris.
Okay, so that's it for you, Gad.
We're done.
We've washed our hands with you for this week.
And you're off.
Into the dustbin of gurus.
Hope you listened.
Hope you enjoyed it.
I don't think we'll be returning to him.
I think we'll be moving on.
I don't think so either.
To turn now to other matters that we usually address at the end of the podcast, before we go to our Patreon shoutouts, which I've actually organized and have the correct list,
In the correct order, Matt.
So we won't be repeating any names or giving people random roulette-style shoutouts.
This will be precise.
It's a technical exercise in shouting out people who deserve it.
Before that, I have some reviews to reference.
And we got one review.
Normally, I take a bad one and a good one.
And I've got a good-bad one.
But the good one...
It's actually got pretty neat, critical feedback.
So it's like a good review, but with a barb in the tail.
So maybe I'll start with a serious one and then get to the negative one.
So this one says, big blind spot legal, colon legal.
So give you an idea about the point.
And it's four out of five though, Matt, even with that big blind spot.
So we only got one star reduced for that.
DTG comes on to the IDW scene providing much-needed reality check on bad science flourishing outside the peer review process.
Being ethnically Irish and Japanese, my subjective favorable bias is towards Chris, an Irish Oxford postdoc in Japan.
Matt is more established in his academic career as a professor in Australia.
I don't know why they need to have those details.
And it goes on.
It could be because I keep implying it.
By way of a cursory search, both Matt and Chris have a good number of publications in respected peer-reviewed journals.
Matt seems more quants, with Chris leaning more qualitative.
I feel like I'm getting assessed here for a tenure application.
There's no shame in being compared to me and coming out wanting, Chris.
Don't let it bother you.
But go on, go on.
Your quant skills leave me in the dust.
The good.
DTG helps pull the curtain back for laypersons.
Listeners will generally gain the ability to become skeptical about claims with skill, not emotion.
Chris and Matt have a good odd-couple chemistry, and they occupy different research domains.
Nilo host is American, which arguably allows them some additional distance to criticize U.S. guru culture.
So it's all very nice.
That is nice.
Yeah, I like that they checked my Google Scholar page.
I hope they made note of my H index.
Yeah, don't worry, such metrics, they're irrelevant.
We should compare our H metrics sometime, Chris, like measure them, do a bit of a measuring contest.
As Stuart Ritchie has said...
This is the problem with modern academia, where the focus becomes on a meaningless metric rather than the quality of the underlying work.
Sounds like someone with a small h-index would say.
Well, that may be the case.
It's not how big it is.
It's how you use it, Chris.
I understand.
Don't worry.
That's right.
The bad.
The show seems unaware of its own blind spot.
I get it.
My spouse is an academic whose depth of knowledge as a subject matter expert works against him when the matter is one of law, as it does for more than a few of his doctor colleagues.
At times when Chris winds up in a rant, I wince a bit when he unknowingly takes a hard turn down a bad legal take.
It's not often, but when it happens, the magic of the show deflates and DTG borders on becoming gurus.
Overly emotional due to lack of context or ability to analyze law where needed.
Will Chris and Matt at some point succumb to the siren call of becoming gurus themselves?
I do think it is inevitable.
They'll have to balance their academic careers with show growth.
In my opinion, Matt and Chris have a hit on their hands.
Are they ready?
Ooh, that kind of took a heavy turn, Chris.
Yeah, that's a, you know, but only one star deducted.
But I'm really curious what the bad legal takes are because I don't remember offering many legal...
TX.
We have a listener, Chris Spanos, who's a lawyer and a patron who we often interact with.
And he seems like the kind of person who might...
He would pull us up, I think.
Yeah, I'm just wondering what I said.
I'm not saying we don't have the blind spots.
I'm actually curious.
Yeah, I mean, we both have bad memories, so if someone could remind us, that would be interesting and good.
Yeah, so I'd be interested to hear the details.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if you had a bad take, legal or otherwise.
No!
I'm not either.
I'm just genuinely like, what did I say?
Did I say Alex Jones should go to jail?
So I'm curious.
The person who wrote that review is Alf Gier.
So, Alfgear, let me know what my bad legal gigs are.
Yeah, and good feedback.
That was good feedback.
That was good.
So, what do you think, Chris?
Will the siren call of guruism, will we succumb to it?
Already have, Matt.
Already, I'm a guru in my own mind.
I'm on lecture tours at TEDx.
Yeah.
TEDx, that's...
Not even TED, TEDx.
Yeah, no, I mean, we get that question a lot, but...
I think that to be a guru, you have to have a degree of self-confidence and a belief that you're having these massive world-altering impacts.
And I don't feel that I have that level of self-belief.
So I don't think we're in that danger.
Have we come across a guru who doesn't strongly believe in themselves?
A polymath and genius, maybe ContraPoints, but there was questions about how much of a guru she is.
But even ContraPoints has a lot of hot takes.
She has pretty elaborate opinions, and I'm not saying they're bad, but they're certainly very creative.
And we're just too boring, I think.
We don't have exciting views.
If we develop some revolutionary theories, then that will do it.
So no, we're all right.
We're all right.
Don't worry.
We'll see.
So the negative review, Matt, after that deep soul-searching review is from Arg Burn.
And it's a shorter one.
So what if Tony Blair but a podcast?
Three out of five stars.
The comment is, "These hosts 100% abomination of brown people."
Tony Blair.
You know Tony Blair?
You're familiar with his work?
I'm familiar with his work.
So hang on.
We've been compared to Tony Blair?
We're like Tony Blair podcasters?
If Tony Blair was a podcast, then we are the outcome of that.
Right, right.
I guess it's a centrist, neoliberal thing.
New Labour.
Yeah, yeah.
New Labour.
Yeah, New Labour.
The part that I like most about that review is despite insinuating that we would endorse genocide targeting at least people who are not white, right?
That's the characteristic.
That only knocked us down two stars.
So it's like genocidal.
Maniacs, but, you know, three out of five for the Panther.
I like him.
He's got his priorities straight.
That's good.
Yeah, we would start the Iraq War, but, you know, three out of five for that.
But in a whimsical way.
Yeah, so that's what we have.
Those two reviews for this week.
Well, that's natural.
I'm probably a bit of a neoliberal shill sometimes.
I can imagine rubbing people.
Pat, more strongly on the left.
Out with your bombs.
Not rubbing them out, rubbing them the wrong way.
Collateral damage, Matt.
That's what you're always saying.
It's just collateral damage.
What's everyone complaining about?
I just cut all that out usually, but behind the scenes, it's there.
Well, I appreciate the review, Arg Burns, and we would appreciate any such further reviews in the future.
I will say as well that for people, the patrons that were about to give a shout out, that we have been putting up content there, you know, from the monthly live hangouts and from interviews done on other podcasts or things released.
So there's content there, Matt, if anybody feels like joining the Patreon.
And of course, they can get the Garometer episode afterwards as well.
Some people who already took that wise decision are Michael R., who is a conspiracy hypothesizer.
Michael R. Thank you, Michael R. Yes, thank you, Michael R. Every great idea starts with a minority of one.
We are not going to advance conspiracy theories.
We will advance conspiracy hypotheses.
Then we have actually another two conspiracy theories.
Hypothesizers, they're just beside each other nicely on this spreadsheet.
So, Nick Weeb and Appleyard.
Nick and Appleyard.
Thanks to both of you.
Nick and Appleyard.
Yeah.
Thank you both, you lovely conspiracy hypothesizers.
Every great idea starts with a minority of one.
We are not going to advance conspiracy theories.
We will advance conspiracy hypotheses.
The last one for this week, Matt.
is a revolutionary genius by the name of Patrick Dunlop.
Like the famous tennis racket manufacturer.
Yeah, and presumably a person is, well, probably a tennis player or something?
Yeah, possibly the heir to that fortune.
So just remember us.
That's why he's on the Patreon at Revolutionary Thinker.
We should make a higher tier just for Patrick, you know, because he can afford it.
That's right.
There's a lot of riffing for just somebody with their surname Dunlop, but I apologize, Patrick.
Thank you anyway for being a revolutionary thinker.
Here is your...
Reward.
Thank you.
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.
All true.
All true.
All facts.
All in this crazy world that we are.
Delivering the hard trips the gurus do it.
So mad.
The final thing that we do is announce who the next guru to cover is.
We already mentioned that we're going to have the special episode about the Weinsteins.
I don't know if we mentioned it or not, but we are going to wrap up the series with Aaron Ravenowitz looking at Michael O 'Fallon and James Lindsay with their crossover episodes.
So actually, I guess that is the next guru episode, isn't it?
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
We've got ideas.
We've got lots of ideas, but maybe we don't want to commit ourselves quite yet.
Yeah, let's have a look.
O 'Fallon has done some miniaturally interesting things to end on.
So, yeah.
He's such a character, these people.
Like, he is a lunatic.
He is a lunatic.
I mean, he probably always was, but he now has a daily Infowars show, basically.
And we'll get into the details.
I guess that's the kind of distinction I was trying to draw with Gadsad.
I'm not trying to whitewash him or minimise him, but compared to some of the gurus we cover, he doesn't smell crazy.
He doesn't seem quite as damaged.
When I look at the kinds of stuff that he does in his conversations, yes, yes, he's an annoying cultural troll and insulting, does the lightweight Nassim Taleb.
He posts a lot of wholesome stuff as well and a lot of stuff making fun of himself and the kind of stuff you would never see in a million years from someone like James Lindsay or Michael O 'Fallon or Eric Weinstein that our top tier gurus smell really bad.
I think your baseline is the issue here.
If you're not self-aggrandizing like Eric...
Weinstein and James Lindsay.
Sure, he's not in that stratospheric level, but I feel that that is a bar which is hard to overcome.
There is a comparison issue here.
Let me be even more clear.
In the same way that I was not instinctively repelled by Jordan Peterson, I'm not instinctively repelled by...
God said, despite disagreeing with his style and content in many, many, many cases.
That's what I'm trying to say.
I think I get it.
You don't view him as like Scott Adams-like, right?
As much as maybe I do.
Because I see him as essentially being opportunistic in a way akin to Scott Adams and with the condemnation that follows from that.
Or as you seem to regard him as being more that he swims in those waters, but it's not a natural fit for him.
Yeah, I see him very much like Jordan Peterson, I think.
Someone who actually has the potential to not be crazy and to actually be substantial, but because of their intrinsic political leanings, has found that...
Being a bit of a culture war troll is a convenient role to play.
Actually, Jordan Peterson today is crazier, a lot crazier than I think he was maybe 10 years ago.
Possibly, yes.
I mean, I think that's almost a given, given what happened to him.
But, yeah.
Well, so there we go.
Different opinions are available on the Coding the Gurus.
That's right.
We are not a blob.
We're not a blob.
We're not a monoculture.
Descent is allowed.
How wonderful for us for talking across these huge ideological divides that we have.
But that's just the kind of thing that you get here.
All right.
So, Matt, it's been fun.
I will leave you to the rest of your morning devices and just with my final piece of advice that you should grapple at the feet of your muscle mass.
