Special Episode: Welcome to Weinstein World with special guest David Pizarro
The Weinstein brothers have been busy bees over the past few weeks/months(!) and it left Matt and Chris with a conundrum. How do they cover them as part of an intro segment without it turning into a five hour podcast? The solution was to make a two hour stand alone special episode purely dedicated to exploring the wonders (and shivering at the occasional horrors) as we try to map the terrain of Weinstein World. To help us navigate the alien geography and provide a 'relatively normal person' sanity check we have enlisted the help of the famed psychologist, David Pizarro, also known for co-hosting Very Bad Wizards (a small, upcoming ghost-hunting/philosophy podcast).Together with David we decode ancient mysteries, like why does Eric always wear a jacket?, we solve deep existential puzzles, like whether vodka can cure all conflicts, and we ponder heretofore unimagined possibilities, like how successful an audiobook of Fifty Shades of Grey read by Sam Harris and Heather Heying would be.So we hope you will join us on this exploration and remember our core message: *You do not have to promote anti-vaccine rhetoric & unproven miracle cures during a global pandemic*LinksVery Bad Wizards(!): David's excellent podcast hosted with philosopher Tammler SommersVery Bad Wizards Episode 191: All the RageRebel Wisdom interview with Eric Weinstein: Vaccines, Ivermectin & Dark HorseRebel Wisdom: Better Skeptics for the Dark HorseRebel Wisdom: Yuri Deigin Responds to Bret Weinstein on Vaccines, Ivermectin & QuilletteBret and Heather 92nd DarkHorse Podcast Livestream: The Blankest SlateClaire Berlinski & Yuri Deigin's Article on Quillette: Looking for COVID-19 ‘Miracle Drugs’? We Already Have Them. They’re Called VaccinesArticle on Medium by David Fuller: On Vaccine Safety, Ivermectin and the Dark Horse Podcast: An Investigation
Hello and welcome to Decoding the Gurus, the podcast where an anthropologist and a psychologist listen to the greatest minds the world has to offer and we try our best to understand what they're talking about.
I'm Professor Matt Brown and with me is Associate Professor Chris Kavanagh and we have a guest with us and we know his name but I'm not sure of his title actually and it's very important.
I suspect it's Professor.
The king of all the worldly realms.
Is that above professor or below professor?
Definitely below professor.
That melodious voice that you hear is the world-renowned David Pizarro, host of this very small, obscure, academic niche podcast, Very Bad Psychics,
Very Bad Wizards, that's it, which he hosts with...
A ghost hunter and philosopher, Tumblr Summers.
So, David is a psychologist.
Moral psychologist, is that?
Or social psychologist?
I'm a social psychologist only because moral psychologist wasn't really a title when I started doing it.
But yeah, I'd say social psychologist.
And to answer the question, associate.
But there's a story behind that.
I just haven't filled out my paperwork.
There's nothing wrong with associate professors, even specially appointed ones.
That's the title you want, the non-tenure equivalent.
So thanks for coming on, Dave.
We've got another special episode.
It's always a special episode when we have a guest, but this one is extra special, special, special, because we're going to get you to help us.
Do a bit of a review of the crazy mixed-up world of the Weinsteins and give everyone a bit of an update of what's been going on since our last episode on them.
And even though we've probably talked about them far, far too much and we don't want to be thought of as obsessives, even though Chris arguably is, it definitely deserves a whole episode to...
Just see where we were and see where we are today and how we got there.
And it's great to have you on in particular because the Very Bad Wizards episode 191, it feels like an eternity ago, but that was around the time of the Black Lives Matter protests and there were some tweets and things there from Brett and Eric that got under your skin and you hit some really good points.
So do you remember that time, Dave?
I do.
And first of all, thank you so much for having me.
I just want to say, not only am I excited to be on your podcast so I can talk to you guys and meet you because I've listened to you guys and have not had a chance to meet you, but to be on the...
The Weinstein podcast episode.
I mean, the Weinstein episode.
This is some big shit for me.
Because I've been waiting for you guys to do the episode, and here I am, inside of it.
This is guru royalty.
This is like being there with Dickum and whoever I'm married with.
But yes, I very much remember...
I don't remember the content of what...
What I said when I was upset, because you might feel like once we publish an episode, I forget everything until the emails and the tweets come in angrily.
And, you know, we have been doing a podcast for a long time in podcast time.
And we have, I think, a fairly...
A big chunk of our following has come to us from people who first listened to Sam Harris and people who would be sort of sympathetic to the thinking of the IDW in general, which is fine.
We appreciate them.
But it wasn't so obvious to us until we said anything against them.
And then all of a sudden we realized, oh, wow, there are a lot of people.
Who are not happy with us for criticizing them.
But yeah.
You guys haven't been that shy about criticizing them, though.
Even, I mean, there's a connection, which listeners of your podcast will know, that Hamlet's stepmom is Christina Hoff Summers, right?
Which is a very interesting and entertaining dynamic.
It actually makes...
The endless interpersonal psychodrama of the intellectual dark web.
In Tamler's case, it actually is a family drama getting blocked on Twitter by your stepmother or that kind of thing.
Yeah, it's very close to home for him.
Yes, Christina has, you know, she is part of the original dark picture spread of the IDW.
Oh, was she in the bushes?
She was in the, I think she was in the bushes and she was, you know, she was dressed fabulously in, you know, whatever dark outfit.
She had a leopard print.
Yeah, that's right.
Just like Brett in the same photo shoot.
They have matching leopard prints.
This is going off topic, but I have to mention it.
It might even be a lie, but the photographer who posed the people for those photos, I've seen online that that...
Photographer is skeptical of most of those figures and that he partly intended the pictures to be subtly undermining.
And if you look at the Brett Weinstein photo, it does look like he's stroking a phallic-shaped shrub.
Oh my God, I want that to be true so badly.
I'm not saying that makes Brett wrong.
I'm just saying if he's stroking Phallic shrubbery because of some photographer's Disney.
I would quite enjoy that.
That would be, you know, it's like those Disney animators who would secretly put in a phallus in two frames of a children's movie.
Yeah, this is a bit like the episode you did on the Stanley Kubrick, The Shining, where I don't know if you've heard it, but it's a movie about people doing interpretations of The Shining, right?
And reading.
And there's one guy that just was reading a lot of phallic imagery into stuff which seemed highly...
Highly unfallic.
Yeah.
When you see dicks everywhere, maybe the problem lies with you.
That's funny.
That's funny.
But yeah, no, we've not been shy in criticizing, I think.
But it is important to us to always, this is hard to do, I think, and people, we may have failed miserably at times, but to...
Speak of people with respect, even when we're criticizing them.
And there's certainly people we've disagreed with who I would consider friends, Sam Harris included in that number.
And so I think that day, though, might represent the time when I had just gotten...
Pissed off enough at some tweet that it just set me off.
And I don't have a relationship with either of the Weinstein brothers, of any of the four famous Weinstein brothers.
So I certainly didn't feel any, you know, I didn't feel any of that, oh my God, they might hear this kind of, there was no sentiment holding me back from expressing my anger at what I...
What I think might be a theme of what we discuss, what I view as sort of deep irresponsibility, not just about what they believe, but about how they are leading, like who they're leading where.
Like there is a, I think in general, an unwillingness to deal with the problem of having followers who you know are...
Going to misuse your information and work in ways that even you would disagree with.
And that's really what I think pisses me off the most about some of these, especially lately.
Yeah, I think when they've, like, part of the issue with the Weinsteins and the IDW world in general that most robs me the wrong way is when you present as a kind of secret value that you're willing to have.
The hard conversations and get into criticisms and you don't care about the personal elements or the tribal factors.
And then the reality is much more like most of what you see is very strongly tinged with interpersonal psychodrama stuff, right?
Like you criticize this person and they're my friend or this person is a bad thief.
Oh, that term, bad faith, by the way, has been getting on my nerves so much.
It started off as something that made sense as a phrase, and now it's just completely meaningless.
All it means is somebody who disagrees with me in a way that I don't like.
Yeah.
Well, it's a bit of a trend, isn't it, where every term, every good thing gets weaponized.
Turned into this awful imitation and charade of the good thing.
And, you know, sense-making isn't a word that triggers me now.
Whenever people say sense-making, it's a fucking red flag.
Trade-offs.
Trade-offs.
We can just trigger words.
So I think that we've been accused, mainly by critics in the leftist side of the sphere, I tend to think that there are aspects of what the people in heterodox or sense-making spheres are complaining about that I think has legitimacy to some of the complaints.
And I don't have any problem saying that.
So it kind of annoys me that it's taken if you want to Yeah,
absolutely.
I mean, I think that there's...
There's so much irrationality.
There's enough irrationality to go around.
And yeah, depending on who the last person it is, or we've criticized on our podcast, that's who you might get lumped in with that month.
And I think that, for instance, when the Black Lives Matter started happening, a lot of people, I think that their feeling was something like betrayal, that I was actually so liberal in my views about race.
But it's something that, to me, has obviously been a part of the way that I see the world ever since I was in high school, let alone since I started the podcast.
It's just that we don't talk that much about it.
But in the absence of talking about it, people will impute all sorts of beliefs onto you.
And this is one of the reasons that I like you guys so much.
Tell us more.
Hopefully you'll edit this out so I don't look like a simp.
You guys are just reasonable seeming.
It's a weird thing to make into such a big compliment, but nowadays it sort of is a big compliment.
As if you are moved by actual reasons.
And this means that you won't ally yourself with somebody just because you will criticize them.
And I've seen you say both, for instance, of Sam Harris good things and bad things about the things that he says.
And that that would be a breath of fresh air in the landscape of podcasting in our little corner of the internet is sad.
It's sad that you can't predict before an episode is recorded what somebody's going to say.
About a particular person.
It's interesting, isn't it?
That's no great thing, is it?
To be moved by reasons.
Yet, it shouldn't be a big thing.
Look, my co-host is often not moved by reasons either, but I have to put him in check.
The mystic forces.
And again, it's not as if I think of myself as better than these people.
I think I just don't have that much stake in espousing the particular views.
It doesn't matter that much if I say I don't like this particular viewpoint.
I'll be huge credit to our audience for, I think, over the years, either learning from us or being...
Drawn to us because they were already like this, that it's okay to disagree with each other, criticize, and still actually like each other.
I think that's one of the things that might have drawn people to our podcast, where we can yell at each other and be angry and disagree, but it says nothing about the respect we have.
Yeah, I really...
But in these circles...
Yeah, it's all bound up in the personal and the emotional and egos and things like that, and it's odd.
Yeah, I just wanted to echo that.
It's something I've said a lot, which is that I think dispassion is really underrated these days.
It's an old-fashioned academic virtue to have a dispassionate interest in a topic and for it to be just sort of intellectual and at a distance from your self-image and all of those things.
It's kind of not a cool thing to say, but I see it as a real benefit to, you know, when I think about my non-online research, the fact that you do treat it as a puzzle to be solved and not something that's connected to your deeply held values and how the world ought to be.
That's a plus.
Yeah.
It's not a great feat.
I think part of the issue with that, though, Matt, is that's so often invoked.
Now that people say, look, I don't care about, I'm not emotionally invested in this, or I'm just rationally looking at things from an objective point of view, you know, dispassionately.
And it's so often not the case when it's invoked that there's a legitimate thing, you know, the same with sense-making or whatever.
There's nothing wrong with the term sense-making, right?
There's nothing wrong with this passionate analysis.
But when I hear that...
When I hear somebody say, I don't have any tribe or I don't belong to any political tribe, I immediately think you're the most extreme partisan who just doesn't recognize it.
But there are non-partisans.
They do exist.
Yeah.
I mean, look at the word rationalism already indicates probably where you fall.
Yeah.
It's sad.
And I think a lot of this is just wrapped up in the incentives that are around us, right?
So we can see ourselves sometimes being drawn to saying certain things and podcasting about certain topics because those get us the most tweets, it gets us the most retweets, it gets us the most new whatever,
Patreon subscribers, and that's...
Just, you know, sometimes to the point where if we've done some episode where we made some political statement, we're just like, next time let's talk about a movie.
Because we would just want to cool people down a little bit and just be like, that's not what we're, it's not the kind of audience we want to cultivate.
I'm just saying, ghosts.
If you guys went by ghosts, that's all people care about.
It doesn't matter who your guest is or what your culture war take.
If you want your attention to be swamped, just get Tamler to talk more about the evidence for ghosts.
It's funny that you say that.
The next movie episode will be Scooby-Doo, you know, the documentary.
Yeah.
The moral of that story is that it's never a ghost.
It's always an old man.
He never watched it until the end.
Are you sure that guy wasn't a ghost?
I think there was a deeper commentary about skeptics.
While we're lightly mocking my co-host, I'll say another thing, which is that I think the relationship that I have with my co-host and the mutual respect that we have is what allows us to disagree.
And so, you know, we're constantly mocking each other.
But that's also something that's missing in some of this discourse, where it's like, you know, even though people allude to this all the time, the very topic of this episode, we'll see.
Eric tweeting like, oh, why can't Brett and Sam just get in a room together and hash this out?
Well, because that's never what they were going to do.
They were never friends like that.
Whatever mutual respect or the stroking of each other's egos or the sucking of each other's dicks that goes on in some of these circles, it's not really about mutual respect.
It's about whether or not you will get your followers to agree with me and we can get everybody...
Mad and show the other people who disagree with us that they're wrong, as evidenced by the fact that the minute a disagreement arises, things go to shit within that space.
Yeah.
It's interesting you talk about, you know, that having...
A wellspring of respect for your co-host allows you to have arguments because I just don't have that with my...
It's obvious.
We offer it from mutual esteem for each other and lack of respect.
Well, the problem, this is where I went wrong.
When I tell Chris too much, he knows too much.
So he knows, for instance, that I'm hungover and eating a cookie in the shower.
It's hard to have respect for someone.
This is true.
We do share too much about our personal lives to each other in incidental conversations about recording a podcast.
But, yeah, but, I mean, this feels like, it feels so mundane to simply say that, like, being able to disagree with someone and not lose your shit and cut all contact, right, when you receive criticism.
It's, like, this isn't unusual.
And especially in the academic.
You know, academics can be thin-skinned.
They can be super invested in their theories.
Anybody who thinks academics are these objective paragons of rationality, they haven't interacted with many academics.
But the thing that academics can do is really harshly criticize each other and their ideas and then be on relatively good terms, like at the next conference.
People devote book-level critiques, and then, you know, they might hate each other, but they kind of are forced together.
And we interviewed Evan Thompson, the scholar of Buddhism, and he recommended at the end of it, I think, a 10-piece special issue of a philosophy journal that was dedicated to his book.
And you know the way those book symposiums are, that they're often very critical pieces.
And, you know, I just cannot see...
The Weinsteins or most of the people in the intellectual dark were being able to handle that fairly mild critique where people take your work, search for critical stuff, and at the end of it, you come back and say, "I really appreciate the critical engagement with the content,
but here's why you're wrong."
It's like a weird thing that that's...
In any way virtuous?
Because it's so normal.
Yeah, yeah.
And I don't know, you know, like, I don't think that this is specific to the intellectual dark web.
These happen to be the people that are on our Twitter feeds and who are interested in the topics that they discuss.
I'm sure if you went to, like, whatever, any industry, that you have a collection of people who are thin-skinned.
But it just, what bugs me is...
That they can be people who very, very outwardly proclaim to be not that.
At least you know that some Hollywood exec or some actor who's a diva...
If they tell you you're never going to work in this town again, you were never under any guise that what they really were seeking was the truth.
You know it's an industry, but when people purport to be dispassionate truth seekers and treat their followers like a cult leader would treat their cult followers, it seems.
It's odd.
Well, on that note, steering this back to Eric and Brett, I think your episode 191, I'm going to refresh your memory about it because I think it's a good starting point for this.
Okay, good.
Thanks.
Because, yeah, as you guys mentioned, like us, you guys in principle are fans of heterodox takes and free speech and all that stuff.
But what you noticed at the time of the BLM protests, and this was before...
I was really tuned into these guys.
Chris probably was more so.
I might have listened to a couple of things.
You know, here's some of the tweets you mentioned of Brett's and Eric's, where Brett called the BLM protests, described them as threatening every value and principle that binds us together and the American Revolution.
Eric Weinstein said that the crime of driving while black has become the crime of thinking while white.
And the thing that really annoyed you guys was Brett Weinstein drawing this strong parallel.
This is the thing we've noticed too, where everything gets related back to them and their personal kind of history.
And they related these national protests to...
The local drama that happened at Evergreen and his personal grievance.
And here's the thing, the points that you guys made, which is that does the IDW have to be such fucking drama queens?
Do they have to be doing so much catastrophisation, these hyperbolic comparisons and these personal narratives of grievance of being persecuted and suppressed?
And also, just this underlying current of narcissism running through everything.
And I'm like, holy shit, these guys have got half the garrometer going on there.
I could never accuse you of that, given how clear it is to anybody who's not that invested in these teams are.
But it's an amazing...
I'm not a fan of attributing...
Mental illnesses to people I don't know.
Just as a psychologist, a non-clinical psychologist, I can't even diagnose somebody who might obviously have.
But there is something that is very labile about the responses and is, as you say, catastrophizing.
So let's point to the behavior.
The behavior is...
I mean, it's like Evergreen was like his personal 9-11, you know, this is like the roots of, this is his 1619 is when he got kicked out of Evergreen, or not even kicked out, I don't know, I actually don't know what happened exactly.
But it's a disgusting amount of self-involvement of the sort that I think a healthy mind ought not have, and by definition does not have.
I just, yeah.
This will be jumping forward, and we should move on to the reel of the narrative of what they've been doing.
But I just want to mention that in a recent interview Eric did with David Fuller, this host of Rebel Wisdom, which we'll get to that channel, but he mentioned that you may wonder why in his videos he wears a suit.
I'm sure that's something you were...
Concerned.
You've often been curious.
Why is he so well presented in videos?
You'll notice that I almost always wear a jacket because I am the establishment in waiting, not, you know, the sort of rebels living in the trees, enjoying terrorism, calling it freedom fighting.
Yeah, it requires an incredible amount of discipline to do this.
People claim, you know, I was just talking to Sam Harris two nights ago.
He said, well, you're anti-institutional.
It's like, no, I'm anti the group of people who inhabits the institutions.
Why do you think I'm wearing a jacket in sweltering heat?
I am the institution class.
I'm just in exile.
He explains the mystery of that to David.
It's not because he likes suits.
It's fucking hot and he's uncomfortable in the suit.
So he's taking on that burden because he wants to signal to the ruling class that he's ready to step in at the elite level of institutions and right the ship.
So that's why he's wearing the suit, to show that he's ready to join.
When they invite him up, he can step in there.
And the thing is, that wasn't a joke.
Right?
I'm sure in this video, you've been wondering, since you can see me, Dave, like, why is Chris wearing a shirt?
And the reason is because, you know, if the COVID pandemic, if people need to see that they can...
They can bring me up to the panels so that, you know, I can let them know how to resolve this shit.
I mean, what he's just said is that I take myself too seriously.
Like, he has said of himself, the reason I wear my suit is, I mean, look, I'm wearing a Marvel Comics t-shirt, so clearly I'm not going to be able to, like, pop into the ruling class and say shit.
But that's hilarious.
In actual effect, usually in the movies, the Hollywood movies, it's the guy in the ironic Marvel shirt who is the one with the crazy idea.
What we should do is test the ducks and we can get the serum.
Don't listen to him.
No, he's a brilliant genus.
Look at his shirt.
Nobody would wear that without some deep wellspring of insight.
We learned I've learned something new today, which is that some people, when they wear clothes, they have reasons.
Yeah.
You obviously haven't paid enough attention to Jeffrey Miller and Gad Saad.
It's all about signaling when you're ready to fuck.
Your fertility period.
You need to let people know when your testosterone spikes.
Your t-shirt choices.
Oh, God.
All right.
So, yeah, like, as Matt said at the start, you're being treated as a relatively normal person.
Okay, good.
This might be a fiction that we've created, but in comparison to me and the level of Weinstein knowledge, that's probably fair.
Matt's somewhere in the middle.
He's devoted several podcasts to the Weinstein, so he cannot claim to be.
I do blame you guys for a lot of what I know about them because I follow you on Twitter.
And sometimes, as I was saying off-air, I can't help myself.
I'll click through.
Because you'll say, can you believe that they said this?
And then I'll be like, no.
And so I'll click.
I was doing this yesterday.
In fact, I was on a long flight.
I got...
But delayed.
I was on a layover.
I had Wi-Fi.
And I'm reading my Twitter timeline.
And I was like, I guess what I'm going to be doing is watching large chunks of the Dark Horse podcast.
I can remember when I gave my...
As an assignment, a four-hour conversation between Douglas Murray and Eric Weinstein.
And I think that's possibly the closest maths came to resigning from this podcast.
There was a point in our three of that conversation where, like, I think both of us were questioning our life choices.
So, yeah, we shouldn't meta-analyze this too much, Matt.
It's dangerous.
Verging on self-harm sometimes.
Okay, so Chris, you're going to take us through a little bit of what's happened.
What's our jumping off point here?
After that brief introduction, I'm going to do this in succinct fashion, Matt.
I'll be the master of ceremonies and take you through Weinstein World from where we left them.
And let me remind you, we've got two brothers we're dealing with here and a wife.
To Brett Hellerheim, who is an entity in her own right, although Matt sometimes suggests otherwise, because he's a raging misogynist.
So, yeah, you know, you've seen it, David, off the air.
I mean, I can tell.
I could just tell.
So, I mean, he's Australian.
So, where we left him was that Brett was firmly on the ivermectin anti-vax train, but they...
You know, they're doing the usual thing of framing it as that they're just asking questions.
They're worried about institutional capture and so on.
And Eric has, in the meantime, remained relatively aloof from the conversation.
He responded a couple of times just to say, thank you for asking.
I don't have an opinion, uncharacteristically.
On Ivermectin.
Oh, and also, Eric's podcast has been on an extended hiatus.
In typical Eric fashion, he's given several conflicting reasons hinting at dark forces that were conspiring to prevent the podcast.
But Eric's contribution is mostly around detailing what those dark forces consist of and what he's going to do about them.
Maybe Eric is the easiest brother to deal with.
Yeah, look, in some ways, Eric's gone the high road in terms of this sort of abstract, nebulous, conspiratorial stuff, whereas Brett's gotten, since we first covered him, he's gotten really specific.
He's intangible.
He's gone all in on the anti-vax stuff.
So where things began to unwind is since taking that very hard stance, they were pushing ivermectin.
Making pretty strong claims around vaccines being unsafe, having some very strange people, some very strange guests on, talking about the vaccines causing terrible...
Babies' brains to explode.
Babies' brains exploding, that kind of thing.
And meanwhile, all of the studies around ivermectin, which was at the time quite an ambiguous thing, all the subsequent evidence seemed to...
Be pointing in the wrong direction for ivermectin.
Yeah, I would maybe clarify that ivermectin had like many, many potential treatments, low quality studies, some of which were positive.
But it wasn't the key is that like there was a strong body of evidence suggesting, you know, it's a very promising thing.
It was like many things in the pandemic, just simply...
Something that people were starting to look into.
There have been positive results in in vitro studies, which again, I feel like I'm not a clinical drug developer or anything, just somebody with an interest in science and skepticism.
And I understand the pyramid of clinical evidence, which is in vitro studies where you see this amazing fact in cells in test tubes is often not translatable into Humans or animals,
it's kind of like battery technology.
People find these initial great effects, but they can't actually turn it into anything that would be usable.
So the level of skepticism, I think, was flipped on this, you know, in the same way hydroxychloroquine got.
So that's all, Matt.
I know you weren't suggesting it was strong evidence-based, but I don't think the attention it was getting was warranted.
So, Dave, let me ask you this.
Have you heard of the Better Skeptics project?
You know, in passing, because again, from you guys' tweets, I started going down that rabbit hole and I couldn't for the life of me figure out what happened.
And whatever that day was, I didn't have the time or emotional energy to dig too deeply into it.
From what I understood, it looked like some attempt at You know, like good faith, antagonistic sort of, you know, dispassionate presentation of evidence.
But I don't know, was it started for this ivermectin stuff?
Well, I don't want to put you off it, but it is described by the people who run it as an exercise in guerrilla sensemaking.
Oh my God.
Yeah, so Matt, you've drawn us onto the Better Skeptics wormhole.
So we'll leave Eric in the dust for now because he's not really involved in this.
So Better Skeptics is a project organized by a guy called Alexandros Marinos, I believe his name is.
This person could be described as Brett's uberfan.
You know, I'm not a man averse to long Twitter threads, but I have never seen Twitter threads the length that he produced to defend almost every claim that Brett made.
Like, Sam Harris released a podcast with Eric Topol, which was quite explicitly targeted at Brett.
And this is part of the emergence of people within the...
Heterodox, IDWSVs that began to be quite critical of Brett, right?
Claire Lehman, Sam Harris, Yuri Dagan, who's a character that will come up in this Better Skeptics project.
But it wasn't people just like, you know, us who have been long-term critics of the Weinsteins or that.
It's people who would be seen as ideologically on their side.
So Alexandros made an uber for Ed, which essentially, line by line, attempted to dissect Sam Harris's And essentially declare it all, all bad faith, all wrong, no valid points made in any of the contentions.
And this is the guy who was organizing the Better Skeptics project.
Now, he was organizing it with his wife, who I think is a journalist, and they put up $10,000 of their own money to act as an incentive to get people to participate.
Off air.
Tana, you mentioned, you know, Sam Harris.
You called me Tamler.
This is your one warning.
It's the second time.
He's done it to me.
He's done it to me if it makes me feel any better, Dave.
Have I called you Tamler?
No, you've called me Matthew Smith because Smith is a very boring last name, like Brown.
It's the ghosts in this here building.
So, yeah, that project.
Like you mentioned off-air that Sam Harris had put up some cash if people could convince him he was wrong with him being the judge.
It's sort of similar in that vein.
So sorry, it was a project where it was going to be targeted specifically at the evidence for ivermectin?
So specifically three podcasts that Brett produced, including the mental one.
With the two guests called Three Steps to Save the World, which has the unhinged entrepreneur Steve Kirsch talking about baby's brains exploding and whatnot.
I didn't see that one.
Was it Pierre Curie?
Was Pierre Curie the other one?
Pierre Curie with Rogan, I think, was one.
And Robert Malone was the person who claims to have invented the...
MRNA vaccine, but nobody else agrees that he invented that.
So this colorful cast of the fringe pseudoscience or people with obscure claims, Alexandros decided that like these three podcasts, that if anybody could find any factual errors in that, that this project would be designed to show that.
And he framed it as basically, he believes in bread.
But he wants to incentivize people to really dig into the claims and, you know, try and take it apart.
And he's going to get independent judges to score the claims and the whole thing will be, like Matt says, an effort in guerrilla sense-making.
So one criticism that would immediately be made is that you're actually, you've already taken a side in this.
It's kind of strange for a partisan to be targeting their own side, right?
I'm turning a cannon onto the things that I actually consider to be largely on the right side.
So it's a bit of an odd partisan, I guess, and I'll take that.
I'll own that sort of characterization.
But at the same time, the whole challenge is structured in a way such that if somebody is...
Truly cares about the truth, and it doesn't matter what their preconceptions are, if they agree with me, or if I disagree with them, or if they've never heard of anything to do with this before.
And they were interviewed by this YouTube channel called Rebel Wisdom, hosted by an ex-journalist, David Fuller, which started out as spinning off pro-Jordan Peterson content, like made a documentary about Jordan Peterson,
and then...
Went into other figures offering Rebel Wisdom.
So Brett has featured there and various other figures from the alternative sense-making ecosystem.
So this project was heralded on this Rebel Wisdom channel as, okay, let's get down to the nitty-gritty.
Enough of the interpersonal drama.
Let's just get down to the brass tacks and assess the details of the claims.
It's where the rubber meets the road for a lot of the topics we've been covering on Rebel Wisdom.
The problems of finding truth, the challenge of sense-making, and it shows all of the problems with the fragmented media ecosystem.
The difficulty in agreeing what's true, and it has huge costs and consequences on what are life and death questions.
So on the basic steps of it, it sounds like not a terrible idea, right?
It's almost like setting up a scientific community and having them review things by their peers.
There is a clip for this project basically saying that their goal is to do better review of the evidence than all of the relevant experts, like all of the medical authorities, all of the scientific communities.
They want to do it better because those guys have been doing a bad job of it thus far.
I think the philosophy is kind of to see if collectively we can produce something that is of higher or at least as good quality as official or expert sources.
We've seen with COVID that the official authorities have sometimes been slow at catching up or they haven't been that reliable always and so forth.
And on the other hand, you've seen groups of just Random people like Project Evidence that came up, I think it was in the spring 2020, were one of the first to put together an extremely detailed case for the lab leak.
And they were just an anonymous group of researchers and they put up a phenomenal amount of work.
And that's just collective.
Or you have the drastic group of people, right?
Again, just like grassroots, organic people who collectively managed to really change the narrative.
It's like people who want to do away with taxes but then pool their money to help each other build roads.
So you'll be shocked to learn that this project did not go exactly as planned.
So I have no idea what...
I'm kind of excited now because I have no idea...
Is it over?
It's over.
It's finished.
It's issued its final report.
Now, let's see, given that you're a naive person here, and all you know is that the CEO of the project is an uber Brett fan, so with no other information and no details about the judges, just to guess, what do you think the outcome of this project will have been?
My hope is that the final report...
While overwhelmingly favoring the evidence for ivermectin, at least found one or two potential problems on one reading of the evidence so that they could preserve their air of skepticism and rationality.
Oh my god!
How did you guess?
If this isn't evidence of psychic perception, I don't know what is like that.
That was spooky.
Yeah, so they got, I think, three or four that they validated out of 40-something submitted objections.
But Brett and Heller, in their recent episode, take this.
Look, this project was designed to take us down.
It was an adversarial attempt.
And we actually, we thought this was the bad way to do it, you know, because you can take individual statements out of context and so on.
And yeah.
It passes us with a clear bill of health.
So what does it matter what all these supposed experts say when this BS project, that's the initials they chose for themselves, give them a clean bill of health?
And sorry, the people who were submitting their objections were then getting judged by whom?
Well, first it's interesting who was submitting because there was very little engagement from virtually anybody.
It's almost like people didn't regard it as a good faith.
But there was a big fly in the ointment in the form of Yuri Dagan, right, Chris?
Yes.
So are you familiar with Yuri Dagan?
Sorry, Dagan.
It's only the name that I saw amongst all the Twitter threads about this project.
I think you'll love him.
Because Yuri Dagan, first of all, he's one of the strongest advocates for the lab leak hypothesis, which I have.
Various reasons to be critical and skeptical of the claims made they're in.
But Brett had him on his podcast as one of the valued resources.
I think he called them the A-star, the best available for parsing the research on the genetic stuff to do with why lab leak is likely and other evidence.
So Brett pumped him up as a very, very competent, reliable sense maker, if you will.
Yuri Dakin's background is that he's a Russian entrepreneur focusing on life extension technology, like cryogenics and that kind of thing.
And he also is a fairly combative Twitter presence, it's fair to say.
So the interesting thing was that he came out strongly in support of the vaccines.
And drew the ire of the lab leak community, large portions of it, because strangely, it's almost as if the lab leak community has attracted like a fair share of conspiratorially minded people.
It's weird.
There's like an unexpected overlap there between anti-vax sentiment and lab leak hypothesis advocates.
What a strange corner of the world where the thing that lumps truths together are simply Their conspiratorial nature.
It's just so odd to me that these are two completely independent things, like the truth or falsity of the lab leak hypothesis and the effect.
There is nothing wrong with a world in which one of these is true and the other one is false.
It's just solely a desire to see the world in terms of...
The rebels and the gorillas and the outsiders who know the truth and the insiders who are part of the system.
And it's like, for people, you guys probably, I think, have touched on this, if I recall correctly, but for people who have worked in a system, like a university system or a professional society or a loose collection of people studying the same thing,
It's just impossible to think that these things work out so cleanly in the way that they think.
I couldn't get a conspiracy going.
I'm not saying that there aren't...
The CIA has done plenty of shit, but this is one of the organizations with the most resources in the world, and still that shit comes out.
And to think that any...
I don't know.
It's just odd.
It's hard to overstate how much that's encoded in the DNA.
Of all the gurus that we look at, it's almost always maxed out on our scale, right?
Conspiratorial thinking.
And it's just, in the case of Brett and Eric, I can't help but think it's just this desire to feel important and special and have known something.
This, again, I'm breaking my own rules, but it's like their mom told them they were smart and they have spent their life not feeling as smart as everybody else.
And now they finally have a host of followers who are telling them, no, they are smart.
They're fighting for all of the things that are true.
And the whole world is against them.
And you know what?
On any given Sunday, nobody would give a fuck about what they think.
And they just got launched into this.
National stage, international stage of people telling them they must be right about something.
So anything that comes out of their mouth, to their shock and dismay, somebody comes on and says, I believe in lab leak, but I don't believe in ivermectin.
What?
I thought you were a rebel.
I thought you were a gorilla.
Not to get into whether or not any of these people are the scientists of the sort that you would trust to evaluate.
So your podcast, to me, is fundamentally about epistemology.
And there's a crisis of epistemology.
And we're so attracted to people who tell us what to believe.
I think all of us, I think, fundamentally.
And there are people filling that need right now who should not be.
Look, there's a feedback loop that I think makes any of the, you know...
Even if you want to regard it as you shouldn't speculate about those things, Brett and Eric have specifically personally stated that they get what they described as a perverse pleasure from feeling that they believe something that the majority think is wrong and feeling that they're so ahead of the curve that other people can't even see it on the horizon.
And you imagine that when you have that...
And to go deep into Weinstein lore, they've discussed having an uncle who basically gives them an unconventional education, encouraging them to seek out that kind of thought process.
And when you have that characteristic, and then you have the modern social media ecosystem where there's just a desire for people who are just going to constantly shit on Or the orthodoxy or mainstream thinking.
It's like this horrific feedback mechanism where even if you had reasonable points, you're going to get caught up in the churn of bullshit and just driven further and further.
And in Brett's case, the Dark Horse podcast, I remember when they were hesitant to voice anti-vaccine sentiment.
Then they have on...
Geert van den Bosch, who is a fringe theorist, talking about natural immunity being better than vaccines.
And there's still like a hesitation and a lot of throat clearing.
And then it gets to the point where you have a non-credentialed entrepreneur talking about baby's brains exploding.
Did he really say baby's brains exploding?
We're paraphrasing, but he was describing it causing...
Babies to be born with their brains splattered all over the place.
Split in half.
Split in half, that's right.
That was the phrase, yeah.
You mean into two hemispheres?
Yeah, it's never been heard of before.
But claiming with no irony that it's the crime of the century and the three steps to save the world.
So there's obviously been an escalation in rhetoric just in the past.
12 months.
And now there's a walking down of it, but we'll get to that.
But just to pick up on your point, David, I really agree with you.
We're not philosophers, but somehow, actually, you're right that it really is all about epistemology.
And the interesting thing about these movements and these characters is the claim to epistemic authority.
And you can think about a lot of these ingredients as...
Whether it's the cultishness or the conspiracy theories or the fact that you cannot trust the establishment, they all work towards positioning themselves as a source of unique, trustworthy knowledge and to go to them.
It's just like, I don't think you can understand it without focusing on that.
It's scary because we've done quite a bit as a society to try to build up expertise specifically.
Specific domains, division of labor, we have to give up the steps in which we might vet every individual person, and we have to trust entire fields to produce knowledge.
And I don't know shit about climate change.
I just have to trust whatever climate change scientists there are.
And the minute that gets eroded, then we're right back where we started, where it's, you know, Big Chief told me, Big man in sky, mad.
This is my anthropology, by the way.
I assume that's what every non-white society ever, how they talk.
This is giving me flashbacks to Gatsad recording his engagement with a postmodernist, if you remember.
I don't believe in the sun, I believe in walking hyena in the sky.
But David's right.
I mean, the scary thing about it all is that it points to how fragile everything is.
And as you say, it relies on trust and these networks of trust and the trusted institutions and so on.
And look, God knows our institutions aren't perfect, sure.
But it's a bit like, you know, the economy is fueled by confidence.
And when the confidence goes, it can crash.
You know, knowledge is like Bitcoin.
We are completely volatile now in terms of our trust in our institutions in the same way that my Bitcoin investments go up and down every single day.
That's a point that didn't need an analogy, but I found one.
I'm going to, at this point, insert...
A quote from a noted philosopher who we all respect quite deeply, who I think makes this point very elegantly on the recent podcast.
So let's hear our esteemed colleague.
And I'm not so sure it is at this point.
Again, I think we're in the presence of something like a religious or pseudo-religious phenomenon.
People are just not thinking clearly.
And mere contrarianism is becoming part of their identities.
There's something pornographic about all this.
This reflexive distrust of institutional authority is like the pornography of doubt.
People are infatuated with this stuff.
And there's a zealotry around it.
And the quality of the thinking is so bad in so many cases.
Given my experience on other topics, it's impossible to shake the feeling of familiarity here.
This is what it's like to argue about religion or the 9-11 truth conspiracy.
Well said, Sam.
And by the way, just to mention, listening to that, I very rarely hear Sam at times one speed, and it's almost erotic.
He is dreamy, as I've always said.
I listened to that whole section on my own, and I emailed Sam.
And told him how well I thought he put it.
And Sam has a real shot at actually convincing that group.
I don't think the people who listen to you or I are that group that needs to be convinced.
But there are a lot of people who listen to Sam who I think might actually be affected by what Sam says there.
And I love the terms that he used.
It's just well put.
And it is perverse.
I don't know.
The podcast he did with Eric Topol was very good as well.
He's been good at this.
Just before the podcast came out, I made a tweet saying what Sam should do.
Armchair criticizing what he should do with his podcast.
But he did it.
He got an expert on and went through the claims.
So he definitely deserves credit for the stance that he's taken on it.
Especially given that he is so sympathetic to the interpersonal aspects.
He is someone who generally doesn't criticize people that he has interpersonal relationships with.
So the fact that he's willing to in this case means that he really clearly thinks they're doing something bad.
Look, if Sam took the time to chastise me that way, I would listen.
I mean, I seriously would.
Because I don't think he would spend his time saying the stuff if he didn't think it was truly dangerous.
I don't need to say all of the things that one might have to say about not agreeing with everything he says.
Certainly on record disagreeing.
But that doesn't mean that I can't in this case think that he's just like the voice of reason, man.
And this is Sam's backhand to Brett's face.
This is the...
The slap that I think will be heard across all the IDW.
It's a bit like, you know, when he released that podcast, because I think it's also directed at Eric, to a certain extent, these comments.
And his podcast attempted to resign from the IDW, where Eric responded by saying, you can check out anytime you want, but you can never leave.
Eric has some corny tweets, man.
Oh, we're going to get to that.
Look, I was supposed to be master of ceremonies, so I'm going to return you to the life extension Russian entrepreneur, Yuri.
And I actually have a clip from him to let you hear him, because I think you'll like him.
So as Matt said, the Better Skeptics project would have just farted into the wind with nobody paying any attention to it, except that Yuri Dagan, this previous person that Brett had held up, essentially...
Decided to submit a lot of criticisms in detail.
And so he kind of inundated the project, I think, on the first day with 21 submissions.
And they rejected 18 automatically because there was a rule that says you're only allowed to submit three, which already...
I was going to say the font was wrong.
Well, yeah, so equivalent to that.
And also the Twitter account that they had set up.
It was automated to tweet out that this claim had been rejected.
So it was just, you know, claim rejected, claim rejected on the first day, which is a wonderful signal.
And then the founder went to Twitter and started taunting Yuri about failing to follow the rules.
So Yuri requested that people just copy and paste his criticisms if they want free money.
There was that being rejected because of duplicate submissions.
And like the whole thing on the first day was already coming up with the limits of guerrilla sense-making apparatus.
But so Yuri eventually, despite engaging on this project, he doesn't have faith in this project.
And he has produced an article for Quillette with Claire Belinsky, which is very, very harshly critical of Brett and goes through in depth.
Because Claire Lehman is also sympathetic to the criticisms, right?
And so after he releases that article with Claire Belinsky, he then goes on David Fuller's Rebel Wisdom podcast for a two-hour episode where he takes them through a one-hour slideshow detailing,
you know, showing the pictures from studies, the kind of thing that only me and Matt might...
Be interested in, but the kind of thing which the heterodox sphere, you know, this is what they do instead of going to lectures, is watch these conversations.
So it was a really, really thorough rebuttal.
And Yuri clearly knows what he's talking about when it comes to these kind of studies, because part of his expertise is that he has been assessing clinical trials for the past decade.
So he's got a, he's actually asked by David Fuller.
For his credentials at some point.
And he's like, you know, why the fuck does it matter?
Just believe what I say or don't.
But then he teases out of him that he actually has like a decade of experience assessing clinical trials.
What is your background and what is your expertise in this area?
I don't...
Who cares?
I present you evidence and claims.
Please evaluate them on the value of the evidence.
It doesn't matter who is delivering them as long as they're delivering coherent arguments substantiated by evidence, facts, links.
So, like, this is it.
Like, people are like, "Oh, you should listen to Robert Malone because he's the inventor of a mRNA vaccine and he has a PhD."
No.
Like, if he says bullshit, stupid things, wrong things, or if he doesn't provide the evidence and there's counter-evidence coming from, I don't know, a five-year-old.
Listen to the five-year-old, because evidence trumps credentials.
Sure, I get that, but I think you have a...
What is your background?
Do you have a medical background?
No, I don't have a medical background.
I have a drug development background for the past decade or even longer.
So, I mean, if you need credentials, I have been developing new drugs, analyzing...
Drug development clinical trial data for the past decade or animal data.
So it might have been relevant.
But anyway, I'm going to play a clip of Yuri in that interview talking about his criticism of Brett and how he sees it.
And it's quite a nice encapsulation of his character.
And also to call out Brett.
Well, I mean, Brett is the biggest source of this misinformation.
He's the biggest voice.
Basically, he is the leader of the movement for ivermectin false efficacy and vaccine false dangers.
Like, Brett is the spokesperson for the movement.
So, and he's also a friend, or at least I still consider him a friend.
Maybe he no longer thinks of me as a friend.
And maybe there's a bit of a...
Disconnect between, like, what people in Russia, the level of shit they can tell their friends and still remain friends and, I don't know, people in the United States that they can't, like, they're maybe so thin-skinned to them,
like, criticism or even vocal criticism or even, like, being a little bit of a jerk when voicing criticism to them, that's a deal-breaker, friendship's over.
I don't know.
In Russia, we fight first, then we drink vodka, and then everything's fine.
In Russia, vodka drinks you.
I really can't dislike Yuri.
He's actually almost...
Encourage me to appear and debate the lab leak.
Like, I've made clear I can't debate the technical details, but I think I can highlight the conspiracism and that kind of stuff.
But I probably will do it just because I enjoy Yuri.
He seems to have the right attitude about it.
So he does a dissection.
Of the arguments.
This in-depth, each point, showing, you know, the diagrams that they showed on the Dark Horse podcast, like, for example, saying that the spike proteins are concentrated in the ovaries.
And then he shows that actually it's a graph where they cut out...
The other four organs where the concentration is much higher.
And anyway, the paper says the concentration is way, way lower than anything that could cause any significant effect.
I don't know what to call that tactic of taking things out of context, like visually or charts, but that's such a classic move, man.
As if the size of the diagram that you show has absolute meaning.
There was another sign from the diagram in one of the biggest ivermectin studies, the one that I think has now been retracted or at least has huge questions over it, was that the graphs they used were the default Excel bar charts using the default colors,
and they had the series one randomly still there.
You know, that's the kind of thing where people in the alternative ecosystem are like, what the fuck does that matter?
You know, it's just a, don't be nitpicking.
And you're like, no.
Every academic understands what that implies about the quality of the furrowness which this paper is on the ground.
And that paper is also, see if this raises any red flags, Dave.
It's in a journal with one issue.
So there's a couple of Ward insides, right?
But Yuri's debunking there is a good illustration of why that ivermectin stuff is a conspiracy theory, because none of the claims are hard to debunk.
But the thing you notice is that there's so many of them.
And it's just like playing whack-a-mole where, you know, one bit of evidence turns out to be rubbish, but they've got...
A thousand other ones.
So it just has that structural similarity to pretty much all conspiracy theories.
Yep, exactly.
That's, yeah.
It's a hydra of bad evidence.
Yeah.
And, you know, so like the Better Skeptics Project that put a capstone on it, it descends into farce, mainly internet drama with Yuri being called out by various people and judges saying that they've been attacked by Yuri online.
And then...
Various things coming out that academics would understand the issue where the three independent judges all see the scores that they submit.
And there's various discussions about how I think they need to get over a barrier of nine to even consider a submission, to do the sense-making to try and work it out.
But there becomes a tacit agreement on the second day that...
Basically, you shouldn't be assigning scores of four and five, except in very rare cases, which means that almost by default that nothing reaches the level of being assessed.
And then like the things that are assessed, there's a lot of generosity applied to the claims, right?
It's all things where India, maybe there's one academic who said ivermectin is widespread.
Therefore, we can take it because one person said.
It was widespread.
So that the person then claimed that India has reduced its cases because of ivermectin is not false.
You can't say it's false because somebody said that ivermectin is widespread in India.
So the project falls apart.
Just as an illustration of the thought that goes into the project, it's called the BS project, right?
And the reason for that is that they put the icon of the no, right?
You know, the kind of red.
But you don't hear that in an audio format, right?
You say you can't hear a diagram?
Is that what you're saying?
Is that the bold claim that you're making?
Yeah, so even the advocates are referring to it as the BS project in their shorthand.
And the judge comes out saying they felt informal pressure to lower their scores on the second day.
And there's just tons of stuff.
Even the fact that...
They baked into the document that they would revise all the rules each day according to whatever.
And there was no criteria for how they would do that.
They would just take stock of criticism on the internet and then revise.
You know what this is, Chris?
This is guerrilla bureaucracy.
They're reinventing the P-hacking.
They could have just read Bem's article and saved themselves the baller.
Yuri doesn't have any faith in the project.
And the guy, David Fuller, the Rebel Wisdom guy, he hosted them, but he was just somebody who thought the project could be useful, right?
He's one of the people that is interested in alternative sense-making and so on.
So he highlighted the project and was like, here's an idea.
He raised some criticisms of it.
And he's actually probably the only person in that space that's managed to ask critical questions of Brett and...
Various figures, James Lindsay, except for Yuri, who then goes on to get all contact cut from these figures, including Jordan Peterson.
So I think he's a good actor, maybe just a little bit too heterodox and kind.
And he features Yuri, and then this gets taken as bad faith.
They didn't wait for the end of the project to pronounce.
Yuri went on and he did his slideshow.
And he took his material, which he'd submitted to the Better Skeptics, and this is taken as, you know, they're operating in bad faith now.
They have undermined the project, and they're no longer good faith actors.
So Brett and Alexandros regards them as now hostile entities.
Oh, my.
You know, this is the kind of thing that they would say.
I don't know if they have, but they would say, you know, I'm not saying that someone got to them.
But I'm just saying that this is what it would look like if someone had gotten to them.
And it just makes me ask the question, you know, is someone...
I'm concerned maybe for their safety because they're acting as if somebody has gotten to them.
Maybe their family.
I don't know.
I don't know how somebody would...
You know, that is also the thing that then that Uber fan or very solid people would say.
What are you talking about?
He expressed concern for their safety.
He's worried about them.
And he didn't say somebody had got to them.
He said it's what it would look like if someone got to them.
Like, what are you guys?
This is reason-making in the online infosphere.
But Dave, what do you make of this?
I mean, like putting aside all of those just methodological and...
It seems to me that something like that is fundamentally flawed because what they do is they get right into the weeds right off the bat.
They focus on very particular little claims.
And as we know, one can cherry-pick and construct a grand narrative and a conspiracy theory from a bunch of little details that...
You know, the way that I have felt when I hear them talk...
Is like you would think that somebody who had consulted with counsel as to what they should say or not say.
And they seem like they're often careful to say, I'm not anti-vax.
I never said vaccines shouldn't be used.
But there is no way you can listen to them for any significant period of time and think that they're not.
So it's a kind of doublespeak that they're really, really good at, actually, where they avoid any liability or any responsibility for having misled people by denying, using the letter of the law saying,
I never said that specifically.
But you know what you're saying, and that's what bothers me the most.
They know what they're saying.
And this is a question that I came in wanting to ask you guys, which is, do you think...
That they believe this shit?
So I was talking to my girlfriend about Alex Jones.
And she's just, she's not the sort of person who listens to any of this stuff.
But she has fallen into the YouTube, you know, black hole of listening to Alex Jones.
And she's firmly convinced that he's such a grifter that he just completely doesn't believe anything that he says.
These guys are harder.
These guys are not Alex Jones.
It sounds like they might have convinced themselves.
And I don't know why they chose ivermectin.
I have no idea.
But do you think that they actually think that they're really being objective at this point?
I think they kind of do.
Yeah.
I mean, thinking about Brett and Heather, say, on this specific thing, yeah, I don't think they're very good.
I think they are conspiracy theorists.
We know how careless they are in terms of their research.
We know they don't read papers and stuff and we know they misunderstand things.
And I think it's highly connected to that narcissism thing.
I mean, narcissists really do have that amazing self-confidence so that they do a cursory glance at something and feel that they've...
Without any background, do convince themselves that they've figured it all out.
So it's a bit like asking, does Trump really believe that he's the smartest man in the world?
And all that stuff.
And it's kind of the wrong question, isn't it?
Every psychologist knows that people deceive themselves before they deceive anyone else, don't they?
Yeah.
And it's hard to...
You know, if I were them, Looking at them, I would say they're just doing it for the Patreon, sweet Patreon dollars.
But they probably don't think that.
I think there's too much, like, from being so immersed in their content.
It's clear to me that it's a whole mixture, right, in terms of their self-image as these rogue intellectuals.
It's tied up in their position now with this.
And their income is now tied into the increase in Patreon support that they've generated from it.
And, you know, just interest, appearances on Tucker Carlson and so on.
So it means that I think trying to disentangle where the influence is going, it's hard because there's influences going in all different directions, from them to their audience, from their audience to them, from their bank.
And lots of it is bound to be unconscious as well.
So I do think, however, that Brett has to consciously know that he is not addressing certain arguments.
And I don't know how...
If he is seriously deceiving himself that he's answered them, he has a level of self-deception armor that any role player would be hugely...
Envy us off.
It's, you know, plus 30 to avoid any self-doubt.
Right, right.
By the way, did you guys, I assume since you watch everything, you watched Eric Weinstein unveil his website on Joe Rogan?
Oh, that's so painful.
Wasn't that one of the cringiest things I've ever seen?
I was...
It really, really made my penis soft.
It actually made me...
That's one of the times where I felt sad for Eric.
I was like, oh, I don't...
Like, I think you're a self-aggrandizing asshole, but...
Oh, God.
It was worse than the worst episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm.
Yeah, that's right.
This is like when...
Trump is one of those G8 meetings and the French and the English are all laughing at him.
You always feel sorry for him.
Almost, but with Trump, he doesn't even have the pretense of intellectualism.
He's a buffoon.
But Eric has his water wiggle.
He calls the shots.
Yeah.
He's swinging it around and he's built a website around Pull That Up Jamie, right?
In a weird, a very bad read of a situation for something that's supposed to be flattering.
It's such a bad read.
I mean, Joe, I don't watch a lot of Joe Rogan, but you guys haven't done a Joe Rogan.
No, we will, though.
Yeah, okay.
I was going to say, he's naturally on the list.
But I've not seen such animosity toward one of his own guests.
Yeah, and then they get into like, I actually agreed with Eric in this discussion about music and universality.
I can't remember what it was about, but it tinges all of the rest of the conversation nearly because Joe is just being argumentative and dismissive, right?
Yeah.
Super dismissive.
I mean, you know, because he had lost his patience, I think, calling him and saying, you know, I don't understand anything that you're saying right now.
Yeah.
Well, I saw an interview with Eric Weinstein and Sabine Hofstadter.
Did you guys see that one at all?
No.
Actually, they were both guests on another program, and there was a bit of a debate between them.
And Sabine Hofstadter is another sort of whatever public educator of physics sort of thing.
And she's quite good and is known for being like a no-nonsense kind of physicist.
She's not into, for instance, things like string theory and stuff where you can't actually collect data and get evidence.
And they're talking about his grand unified theory, and she's making...
A lot of very sensible points.
And Eric is doing what he usually does, which is to use more complicated language and kick it up to a higher level of abstraction.
Yeah.
And, like, she's a physicist, and I just appreciate it because she was flat out saying to his face, I have no clue.
What you were talking about, Eric.
Yeah, so it's one thing if Joe Rogan doesn't get it or if we don't get it, but I found it refreshing.
And, you know, this is connected to some of the other little dramas we could briefly revisit.
Whereas when people who really do know their stuff look at these highly technical claims to, you know, special accomplishment, it never seems to stack up.
Yeah.
No, there is a...
There's a reason that these big paradigm shifts that happen in things like physics have happened from within the academy.
I don't know.
I mean, it just seems like a reasonable thing to believe that some fringe person isn't going to upend all of physics.
People would be worshipping at his feet.
Yeah.
This is something, though, I did notice that you mentioned where he ramps up that level of...
Jargon and abstraction.
Yeah.
Maybe abstraction isn't even the right word because he's just jargony.
And I thought, well, he must not have been a very...
I don't know that he was ever a professor, but he can't be a very good teacher.
Is this Brett or Eric?
Eric.
Eric was never a professor.
Yeah.
He's in the private sector where that actually makes you more respected in the room when you can say big words that people think are smart.
You actually get the consulting gig.
But in academics or whatever, Richard Feynman spoke in a way that we would understand.
It's not even super uncommon.
It is relatively rare.
For instance, at my institution, for a little while, they had a specialist statistician who was hired specifically for the purpose of helping me with the stats.
And it's a small university where I work, and I didn't have anything to do with it.
But people were sending me his stuff because they'd begun to notice that something was wrong because he was the expert.
He claimed to be an expert in statistics, and I wasn't around when he was hired.
But they found that nobody could understand anything that he said.
Nobody could understand anything that he wrote.
And people with just a tiny bit of statistical ability were noticing that some things and the stuff that he submitted just kind of didn't add up.
And they asked me to check.
And look, it turned out this guy was exactly the same.
He was actually a total fraud.
He'd been hired out of desperation because it's very hard to hire a statistician in Australia, actually, because they're kind of rare.
And yeah, so these people are around, like people who can...
Sell themselves and get by, as you say, much more common in the private sector than in universities.
It is, and I have some experience there, and it's hilarious.
It's hilarious.
To illustrate this, I'm just going to read a recent tweet from Eric, which is discussing his relationship to libertarianism.
So let's see if this illustrates any of the points you make.
I view radical libertarianism as almost literally...
The linear approximation to a free society where you take all nonlinear ways we impact each other and send them to zero in the libertarian limit.
Conversely, they see my world as perturbation theory on a completely free society.
I don't know what you're talking about.
To me, that's very clear what he's saying.
He's made it more complicated.
No, that's clearer.
It's a perfect analogy.
He needed to draw those references just to make it clear.
It wasn't clear until he mentioned perturbation theory.
You can either add all the nonlinear interactions in or approximate them, but you need freedom and its adjustments.
My Weinstein translator is I want libertarians to like me and I want to sound smart.
It's often fairly straightforward to see what is involved and getting lost in the jargon.
A Chinese finger chop or whatever.
I'm sure that's racist.
We were talking offline about our verbal tics and how when we listen to ourselves, they annoy us and how we could feel that they are...
Linearly.
How's that?
Linearly related to the degree of our lack of confidence in what we're saying.
But they're not verbal tics for him.
They're just throws out complicated words for people to sound smart.
So that's the kind of insecurity that is very typical of narcissists.
But you should be able to...
I feel like just a little bit of listening to him, anybody should be able to pick up that he's not.
Actually, he's not smart smart.
Even when he doesn't have the water wiggle.
Yeah, he's not smart.
He's not smart smart.
I just got to say, he didn't have a water wiggle when I was talking to Sabine Hofstadter, but he did have like a cardboard toilet roll holder.
Which he was using like a water wiggle.
It's good to have props.
Yeah, he was holding it.
I think there was a rubber band around it and he was using that.
But speaking of insecurity, I could read another.
Tweet from Eric Weinstein.
Yeah.
Boom.
Look at the itty-bitty balls on little Timmy.
That's my wife's and my work, which Juan Maldesina used initially knowingly and without citation.
As you know, you scum.
You just called me a crackpot and simply to take our work.
Look forward to hearing from me.
Good day.
Hashtag parasite.
Hashtag harasser.
Oh, hashtagging.
Oh, my God.
You two postmodern bastards have jumped around from the very careful narrative that I had scoped out.
And Matt, you've now leapt onto Eric before even finishing the Center Skeptics project.
With the itty-bitty balls tweet, which requires context, right?
Because who is little Timmy itty-bitty balls?
I'm the chaos dragon, Chris.
I'm just noting something that, one, David needs to go to bed at some point.
And two, that we may not have time for the entire saga.
You guys are going to have to devote two more episodes.
We will have time if we follow the regimented plan.
But look, okay, we'll get rid of itty-bitty balls, Timmy, at this point.
So do you know who that is?
Your guest.
Oh, yeah.
Yes.
I listened to that episode with great interest because I wanted to know what was going on with gauge theory and if it was going to finally provide us with a unified theory.
And I enjoyed it.
And anybody, anybody can listen to Eric and Tim Nguyen speak.
And if you don't come away thinking that it's very clear which one of them knows their stuff...
Then I think that there's something broken in your basic perception of other human beings.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I think, Matt, we can tie up the Eric Boo in a very simple knot, which is what he's been doing in the meantime is insinuating that he's going to destroy, potentially legally sue his critics who have been preventing him.
From releasing podcast episodes via some unspecified mechanism.
And he's essentially suggested that he has the dirt on all of these figures, many of whom have appeared on our podcast, right?
Tim and Dan Gilbert, Bad Stats.
So he started releasing his evidence, and it's fair to say the first one went down just like a lead balloon.
He basically took a comment where Dan Gilbert...
On the Discord server had made a thing saying, oh, I heard Eric said that he wanted to rape children.
So that's what I'm going to spread across the internet.
So it's obvious in that framing that that's a joke, right?
Like that somebody is saying, oh, I'm going to interpret this in a malicious way and spread.
And he didn't do that.
But he used this as an illustration of like, this is the kind of information.
I have about my critics.
And these are the kind of people they are.
They make these horrific child abuse jokes.
Well, no, no, no.
He describes them as threats against his family.
Yes, threats against his family.
Yes.
So, like, you would imagine that you probably lead with your strongest evidence.
And he basically said, in the coming days, you will learn what I've been enduring with.
And, like...
There's a possibility that Eric has to deal with some unhinged fans.
I imagine that's possible.
But from my experience with Tim Nguyen and Dan Gilbert, they're just, like, they're reasonable people, you know, to online, like all of us.
But they're not going to be hunting Eric's family down or, you know, trying to accost them at the crossroads.
So this notion that this tweet is the, you know...
And we got tagged in, by the way.
I saw that.
I saw that.
Is this the kind of guru that you want to protect us from, decoding the gurus?
What have you got to say for yourselves?
You're officially bad guys, TM.
Yeah, and this is the first time Eric's ever directly referenced us.
So a watershed moment.
And then in the days to come, he actually tried.
One of his fans and various people were saying, what can we do, Eric?
Although it's fair to say most people responded by saying, What the fuck is this, Eric?
This is someone making a joke on the Discord.
Like, even his fans were like, this is, would like, just release the podcast.
But the next day, or a couple days later, somebody released, he retweeted somebody who said, you know, what can we do, Eric?
And Eric's advice was, I'm paraphrasing, but it was essentially, please get my critics and, like, deal with them because...
If these people can't be addressed, I don't have the ability to do it.
Yes.
Yeah, so he's very concerned about the...
Is it the Streisand effect?
Is that the one?
Where he doesn't want to...
Yeah, that's right.
No, he coined a new term.
Streisand squeeze.
Streisand squeeze.
Oh, the Streisand squeeze.
Nice.
There you go.
So he's mentioned that a lot and he very much encouraged his fans to...
Go into back for him and, you know, do your thing, Twitter type stuff.
And there was very little response.
Yeah, it didn't work.
Except, oh, this is beautiful.
I have to tell you this.
There was one account, FreeFloat55.
You've not heard that name before.
No.
This account just joined Twitter randomly.
And it was an unusual account because it was mainly interested in the minutiae of the Tim Nguyen and Eric Weinstein feud.
It had an odd tweeting style saying, in what world is little Timmy a respected person over Eric Weinstein and so on.
And it's the only other account that used the hashtags harasser and parasite, which Eric used.
So it's a very strange account, but...
I'm not insinuating anything.
I'm just asking questions about FreeFloat55.
Well, you know, you should be deeply afraid of the inevitable litigation that will come your way.
It's just a hypothesis, Dave.
This is just that we don't deal with conspiracy theories.
Is that account still up?
It disappeared and it came back.
And I didn't want to...
Name it because I was enjoying so much.
If it's not Eric, I will eat my shoe live on camera.
Nobody else tweets like this.
The only account to use the hashtag.
How bad do you have to be at making an alternative?
It's called FreeFloat55 and I'm just checking now.
It's since been deleted and I can't believe I didn't screenshot those.
Tweets, Dave, because just in terms of the use of language, like, Eric has a distinctive mode of expression, and I tried to approach it in a very skeptical way that I would eat my hat if that wasn't Eric tweeting that.
It was referencing minutiae about, like, Weinstein world that I don't even know.
So it's like it's either an Uber fan that just appeared or...
Yeah, right.
It's Eric.
So...
Can you imagine the embarrassment of being like, followers, get him!
And then, like, nobody...
Yeah!
It's so cringy.
And it was abusive.
That, like, FreeFlow account was, like, swearing and stuff.
So that's why it was...
I, like, didn't want anybody...
I mentioned it to people, but didn't want anyone to call it out because I just wanted to observe Eric in his natural habitat.
Like, unleashed Eric Weinstein.
But even with that, about four or five people that are not me said, aren't you just an Eric sock puppet?
And he was like, sock puppet?
What's a sock puppet?
Wait till he finds out about IP addresses.
Okay, so that's Eric.
He's gone.
We'll close out the Weinstein saga by...
I've got a couple of clips, you guys.
I like to take Weinstein clips and I think you need to hear them.
So first of all, since we've been talking about Eric, here's Eric.
So he did the podcast on Rebel Wisdom.
This Rebel Wisdom channel has a lot to answer for in the recent months with the Weinsteins.
And this is Eric talking about...
He basically said he didn't agree with Brett.
Actually, first of all, this is him talking about Sam's criticisms.
So listen to how he framed them.
Well, I think Sam kept his sword mostly in its sheath.
I think that Sam is a...
Sam and I both maintain different versions of a principle.
I'm more radical than he is.
I believe that there is a lot of residual wisdom.
In a corrupt system.
I believe that our institutions are degrading.
They are greatly degraded.
I cannot stand the leadership class.
But I believe that all of those things, like all the things that are in place in a hospital to make sure they don't cut off the wrong leg if you're having an amputation or something.
These things are part of the wisdom that they were put there in part by people who are now dead where nobody remembers why they're there.
So I think Sam has an instinctual feeling that the system works.
Now, obviously, there's the personal dimension here, but we shouldn't get distracted by the soap opera.
These are hugely significant topics of importance to everybody.
That weird music wasn't in your head, by the way.
That was in the background of the clip.
What?
Yeah, I love that because he's essentially saying, like, we are the descendants of, you know, the real geniuses who, you know, discovered fire, built aircrafts, but we are like the monkeys who don't know how to do it.
So we're just worshipping the technology and some of the...
Information of the ancients is still there in the institutions, but it's now run by corrupt bureaucrats who don't understand how any of the systems actually work.
By the way, you know, those systems, like what's in place to prevent you from getting the wrong language amputated, those are the ones that Sam trusts, but I'm a rebel.
Yeah!
Yeah, I'm pretty...
I trust those as well.
I'm pretty sure that's just a marker on your leg as well.
Oh, man.
So that clip was just to load up the better clip.
Okay.
Okay.
I mean, it borders on gibberish.
It does, but this is how Eric needs to frame that.
He thinks Sam has a point.
Yeah.
Right?
He has to coach it in all this kind of vague stuff because he can't directly just say, Brett is wrong.
This is him talking about, like, he does express that he disagrees with Brett, but this is how he frames it in that discussion.
What's going on with Brett, what's going on with Ivermectin, the Joe Rogan podcast, with all of this stuff, is downstream of a total leadership vacuum.
I know what to do to build leadership.
I know what I would do if I were a member of the establishment in terms of sitting in a seat at an institution.
We have careerists.
We have peacetime careerists where we need wartime generals.
And I know what to do as a wartime general.
I don't know what to do with peacetime careerists in a war footing.
Now, everything is downstream from that.
Like, blaming Brett Weinstein?
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
You told people not to wear masks?
Because they don't work, or in fact, they retain germs so you can get sick from your masks, so don't wear masks, but make sure that the health professionals...
I mean, that's such an affront to the mind.
And you're still sitting in your position.
You're still lying to the public.
I don't think we understand that the era of pre-internet public health is permanently over for the rest of our lives.
You cannot...
Come up with cute little rhyme schemes.
Or, you know, my personal favorite is there's a tradition of storytelling in public health where you try to get celebrities to do things.
Sorry, I let that go on too long.
I got interesting.
Oh my God.
So you can't blame Brett, right?
Because the WHO said they didn't recommend mask wearing for the public at the very start of the pandemic.
This is something, Dave, that I just, I'm so, there's like a personal thing that deeply upsets me because if you followed the recommendations of the WHO, the CDC, from the beginning of the pandemic, what you would have done is social distance, practice good hygiene after a month into the pandemic started wearing masks in all occasions.
But you shouldn't have been out in public in crowds anyway because they were saying, avoid those, don't do that, right?
So this notion that if you followed the advice, Of the experts.
You basically had a death wish.
It's just bullshit.
Even the mask thing, it's a short-term thing.
And they were already recommending that you don't go out in public or meet in groups.
So...
Right.
And if they were wrong about the masks, then they became right when they said, start wearing masks.
And now you're still mad at them for lying.
Like lying.
Not being wrong.
Lying.
Why?
Why were they lying?
Why does he think that them switching a month in to say, no, shit, wear masks?
Why were they lying for that month?
What was the endgame there?
And why are you still mad?
Now, look, either you're supposed to wear masks or you're supposed to not.
I think the interesting thing here is the subtext or the reason for making such a big deal out about this.
He's so keen to destroy the credibility of public health.
And this is just like he made such a big deal over their finance, the thing that they did with inflation.
What was that called, Chris?
Oh, the Boskin Commission.
The Boskin Commission or whatever.
This was the smoking gun, apparently, that completely invalidates all of economic theory and economic management.
His revelations about physics demolishes physics, just like Brett's revelations about mouse telomeres destroys the entire pharmaceutical industry and probably evolution as well.
So the point to all of this is to try to...
His term is FUD.
Have you heard of FUD?
Yeah, fear, uncertainty, doubt.
Yeah, so he thinks that these nefarious groups are all about sowing fear, uncertainty, and doubt, whereas the truth is...
To what end?
Yeah, that's what they do.
That is their entire thing, to take any little ambiguity and to use a crowbar to turn that into a huge amount of doubt and fear in order to attempt to disparage other sources of...
knowledge and center themselves as being ready in his nice suit to step in and be a wartime general and take the reins.
Wartime.
You know this guy owns a sword.
You just know it.
You know he has some samurai sword over his mantelpiece.
I'm wondering why he's not dressed in army fatigues.
The COVID is supposed to be signaling readiness.
He should go the whole hog.
Just wear a general suit with badges and purple hearts and shit.
Captain Crunch.
Just Captain Crunch himself out.
But here is the...
Fucking cowardice that really makes me mad.
Where it makes me just say, like, fuck you.
Because he, to deflect the very real damage that his brother is doing, to not even in an honorable-sounding way.
defend his brother.
He is wanting to have his cake and eat it too.
He wants to still stay in with the cool kids
He's playing this line where anybody who wants to continue to believe in Brett's ivermectin bullshit can continue to do so because, you know, Eric didn't come out and say he was wrong.
But clearly sounds like he knows that his brother is wrong and is...
Too much of a coward to call him out on it.
And I would not give three-fifths of a fuck about these brothers if it weren't that so many people are listening to them and this is just causing grief, causing suffering, and causing death.
That you can't just get up and say, you know what?
Get vaccinated.
I don't care what my brother says about this.
He's a smart guy.
I love him.
I don't care what he says, though.
Get vaccinated.
Have some fucking balls, man.
Yeah.
Or ovaries or whatever it takes.
Because, you know, you mentioned, David, about the actual consequences and the context around this and part of the reason that a lot of the criticism of Brett became more pointed was that there was this case where there was a British man.
who had been vocally skeptic about the vaccines and the relative threat of COVID.
And he was sharing Brett's content and he basically live streamed almost up to
the point where he died right from it.
So it's like, it's a tragic event.
And of course it's a, you know, it's, it's just an anecdotal story.
We can plug in, we can plug in the statistics, Chris, can't we?
And we can, we, we know by the audience reach and so on that we can confidently expect he's
There's more than one.
Anyway, go on.
Sorry.
Yeah, it's just that it's a dramatic illustration of something which Yuri and various other people are saying has to be happening behind the scenes.
And obviously it is because when people don't take the vaccines and there's a deadly virus going around that is killing millions of people in the global pandemic, people die.
And there's an amusing element to it where...
Brett's fans are leaving reviews for horse paste on Amazon, right?
And it's hard not to have a kind of macabre, that's the way you say that, humorous reaction to it.
But it also, like, that shit's real.
Like, people are not getting vaccinated and eating horse paste.
And you're like, man, it really, all this stuff, all this drama around the IDW and how hard it is to call people out and stuff.
In this situation, how hard is it just to say what you said?
You should get vaccinated and you can still have all your criticism of institutions, but this is a deadly pandemic and the evidence shows that these work, so get vaccinated whatever else you do.
Yeah.
If Eric thinks that Brett is wrong and he's talking like this, then this is just evil.
It's just evil.
Shameful.
It is.
It is.
Look, Matt, there's two final clips.
So maybe this will bring us back.
We can come to end on a positive note.
These clips are going to really lighten your day.
So one is, you remember the Better Skeptics project?
Remember that, Matt?
That we were trying to finish out?
Well, here's Brett responding to that.
This is how he reads what that project find.
I thought this is a dangerous way to do this.
It's prone to several different kinds of bias that I don't see protected against in it.
And I was very concerned about, you know, a process that...
You know, instead of people having skin in the game, it incentivized them to go nitpicking and all of this.
But anyway, in the end, it gave us not a totally clean bill of health, but a remarkably clean bill of health in light of how much landscape and how many complaints certain people had made.
So, given that that process concluded...
And that that process does say something about the quality of what we've been doing here on Dark Horse.
Didn't David have some obligation to say, well, you know, here's the process that I suggested might evaluate this, and here's the conclusion, which is not what he did.
He actually circumvented it.
Frankly, I resent it, which David knows because I've said it to him.
There you go, David.
Totally...
You can take all that back, what you said there, because...
It's almost like he addressed you personally.
I resent it.
I let him know.
I felt it.
At least he didn't call me Tamler.
I mean, what an amazing, amazing ability to read into something the way that you, only the way you want to read into it.
Imagine, it's like you delving into your Reddit and finding someone issuing a defense of you and saying, well, we had our criticisms, but on our Reddit, if you look, there's somebody who thinks that we are the dog's balls and like,
really?
What else matters at the end of the day?
To wrap it in that rhetoric, I was really concerned.
I know that there are biases that creep into the process.
And then to use, I believe, the phrase that his name, Nassim, his skin in the game, who just reminded me that I think that Taleb actually has shit on Brett.
Quite a bit.
Surprise me.
To wrap it all into that.
Oh, man.
Sometimes when I see The Dark Horse, I think...
Who isn't hate-watching this?
Aren't we all here to hate-watch it?
And then I have to remind myself, no, no.
Don't read the YouTube comments because...
Don't go into the...
This is the one thing I truly can say to all listeners and you, Diev, and anyone.
Don't go into the corner of the internet where Brett's true fans reside.
The Dr. Roller Gator water is good God.
Stay away from that end of the internet.
It's a...
It's a horrifying place.
Yeah.
I just went on to the IDW subreddit, and there's a nice little list of names of people who belong and links to Eric and Sam and Jordan.
Is this one of theirs?
Well, there's lots of subreddits which are now pretty critical.
Sam Harris' subreddit is half-heat.
I think there's usually a healthy...
If you've got a healthy mix in your subreddit, that's good.
There's one, I think it's just called IDW.
And it's like, it is not that.
It is like pure.
It's the pure distilled essence of the IDW in subreddit form.
And so if you're looking at that, that's a beautiful thing.
So you thought that that clip was bad.
This is the last clip.
We're going to let...
You go to bed very soon.
But I think this is a good one to end with.
So to editorialize, this is at the end of the process where you've had Sam Harris release two episodes.
You've had Yuri Dagan do a two-hour slideshow presentation with David Fuller.
Then David Fuller comes out with a massive long article in Aereo.
Which is quite sympathetic to Brett, which essentially says, you know, he's just trying to make sense in this ecosystem, but it at the same time says, but he's got trapped in the neck bubble and he's promoting disinformation.
And so there's that article.
Then there's this huge article in Medium, which David Fuller also releases, going through the evidence for each of Brett's claims and collating all of the refutations.
He releases a video series where he's interviewing people, kind of slamming Brett.
So these three things come out on the same day.
And that's part of what Brett is reacting to.
So he has that.
Eric has appeared with David as well, essentially doing as much as Eric can do to say negative things.
And then Brett and Heller released a podcast which essentially avoided all mention.
of the ivermectin vaccine controversy until it got to the Q&A section.
And then they addressed it in a few short segments.
So this is an extract from that clip of why they haven't talked about it and what they're going to do moving forward.
I mean, there is a lot more to say, but basically there's been very little careful scientific pushback.
There's been a lot of social pushback and what we have said privately to people is this feels very postmodern.
It feels very familiar.
It feels very much like there's a social universe and a set of social conclusions that people insist that we must come to and trying to figure out what is actually true should not interface with that social universe nor does social pressure change what is actually true.
And so we have made a conscious decision to not be talking about it as much anymore absent big changes in what we understand to be true.
We are not going to play defense.
We are not going to respond to critiques that don't have new information in them and the people making them know what that means.
And there's just a lot of
that continues to grow that suggests that the position that we have laid out both in what we wrote and what we have said on many previous episodes holds.
And if that changes, if anything about that reverses, we will absolutely come to you.
There you have it.
You know what?
Can I just say fuck you guys for ruining the rest of my night?
First of all, it's because of you guys that I can even, just through hearing, I can recognize all of their voices just because of your tweets.
Second, tonight I'm just going to be on like r slash IDW trying to get into the minds of these people.
But third...
Her voice is kind of sexy and smoky, which is giving me that misinformation.
I'll talk to that as well.
I think most of these figures have a very good, authoritative voice for what they're saying.
I would pay to listen to two-channel audio of Heather and Sam Harris, you know, in each ear, like whispering, blowing down.
What's that book that was like a spinoff from the Twilight series that became like an erotic sensation, the BDSM?
Fifty Shades of Grey or something?
Yeah, like Sam and Heather reading Fifty Shades of Grey.
I feel like, you know, that would be, forget the Patreon money.
That's where the real...
Rubber hits the road.
But David, this is all sounded very postmodern.
You're not discussing the substance.
You're not discussing the scientific.
Who cares that Heller has a sexy reading voice?
It is insane making.
It is being gaslit by somebody I don't care about.
It's like when she says that stuff, I'm like, wait, how is it postmodern to disagree with you about the scientific facts?
And how could you accuse a scientist of being postmodern when...
It is the most post...
What she's doing is the most postmodern, postmodern thing that you can imagine.
It's like, I literally feel just anger bubbling up in me at being gaslit by the sexy-voiced woman.
I should have ended with the Russian.
You should have ended it with the Russian.
Then I would have gone straight to sleep like a baby.
Maybe we should tell your listeners that we are in very, very different time zones.
Yeah, I mean, just to reiterate, we scheduled this at a time that's extraordinarily convenient for me and Chris, and well beyond Dave's bedtime, and I'm consciously aware of that.
So thank you so much, Dave, for staying up late, despite all the glass of wine.
I appreciate it.
I had a lot of fun.
I hope that we can do something similar again.
The only question is, who can not make me go crazy?
The second thing I feel like apologizing for is that we...
Not only kept you up very late, but we kept you up late mainly to sit there and listen to us ranting about our obsessive pet projects.
I don't know.
Next time we'll have to let you in.
No need to apologize for that because, as you know, listening to podcasts is an intimate medium.
And so if I had the option of just listening to you guys as I was trying to fall asleep...
But in this way, I get to talk back.
Yeah.
I tried to tell Matt, Matt, we don't need to put out another Weinstein episode.
It's too much.
And Matt is just always, no, Chris, give the people what they want.
They want it.
Come on.
I know you don't like listening to it, but I care about our Patreon.
So, I mean, he's now trying to editorialize that he's reluctant to do it.
But behind the scenes, I'm...
Just his little monkey.
He grinds around.
Talk about the Weinsteins, Chris.
Say what they've said.
You know what I love?
If you're not patrons of these guys, then you should be.
Because if you would just get the visual, you would know who's lying and who's telling the truth very, very clearly.
Look, Matt has seasoned all his research on gurus.
He's perfected the facial twerks.
He's got, like, charisma oozing out of his pores.
I'm thankfully grateful that none of our listeners can be seduced by his boyish cumheller looks because, yeah, the common comment that we actually get when people see videos is, like...
They're just surprised that I don't look like a fucking craggy, thousand-year-old man.
And they're generally very complimentary about your appearance, Mark.
Silver Fox has been mentioned more than once, right?
Well, I think there's one thing we can all agree on is that everybody must.
Start listening to you guys because of the sexy accents.
That has to be what's driving most of your traffic.
Maybe we should read Fifty Shades of Grey.
I'll do the female voices, Matt.
I'm imagining a new tier for the Patreon.
It's a black label.
He stepped firmly onto the little chair and strapped me down rigorously.
Nobody wants to hear that.
My only question is how...
Two English accents could be so different.
Oh!
Okay.
That's problematic.
That's problematic.
That's just got to go.
That's got to be cut.
That's for your patrons.
Yeah, but like Matt said...
I have to say, Dave, you handled me and Matt's obsession and the meandering postmodern route that we took despite our extensive notes to try and avoid otherwise.
And you also handled about 30 or 40 minutes of random banter before we began the 30-minute banter introduction to the podcast.
So this man is a podcasting...
Because you also recorded an episode, right, prior to starting this?
We only recorded our little support section, which for Tamler and I is 83 minutes.
That's good to hear.
I'm glad to hear that.
Well, there's almost no need for us to recommend our listeners to check out Very Bad Wizards because I'm pretty sure the Venn diagram of our audiences is we're like a very small circle embedded within that large circle.
For the three or four people that don't, do check it out.
Yeah, and when you guys start your anti-vaccine descent, we will call you out.
You guys are going down.
That's right.
That's what friends do, Dave.
Yeah, we're going to step into your Patreon gap.
We both know which one of us would be falling into an anti-vaccine trap in it.
It's going to be the guy who believes in ghosts.
Yeah, people keep insinuating that basically we're, you know, quite chasing.
We want to take down the Weinstein so that we can enter the intellectual dark web as the...
I don't know, like a Sith.
You kill them and you inherit their power.
The kings are dead.
Long live the king.
Long live the gurus.
But the real mission we have is really to take your spot.
It's a very bad business.
Our Reddit is a fucking polyp which is talked off from your subreddit.
That's maybe not the nicest way to describe the kind effort of our fans to develop a subreddit, which is really good.
So we owe a lot to you.
You're grandfellers in many respects.
Well, thank you.
We are old.
You'll be able to take our spot soon.
We're near death, I promise you.
But thank you guys so much for having me on.
This was a blast.
Yeah.
According to lineage selection, we're all working for the CMNs anyway.
So at least us white people.
All right.
Well, enough.
Bantery, exity things.
Cue intro music.
So cheers, Steve.
Everybody listen to Very Bad Wizards and don't listen to the Weinsteins for medical advice, but do listen for entertainment every so often, not every week.
