Special: Guru Right to Reply with Chris Williamson
Listeners might remember Chris Williamson from our episode on Gad Saad. He was the former love island contestant who interviewed Gad and appeared to have taken an IDW turn. So while Matt & Chris focused their critical attention primarily on the master of irony, Gad Saad, they also raised a rather skeptical eye towards Chris Williamson as well. And listeners, they were not kind. Not at all... Nevertheless, Chris W. reached out and accepted our standing offer for any guru covered to come on to the show and respond to the criticisms we made. The result was an interesting and wide ranging exchange that covered issues such as what it's like for a non-specialist to interview famous academics, the incentives and pressures at play in the modern social media ecosystem, and how DTG commentary feels when you are on the receiving side!For fans of cringe comedy this episode might be particularly enjoyable as off-hand comments and cutting remarks are discussed and dissected for their fairness. But (spoiler!) everyone survives to the end. Chris (Kavanagh) also took a degree of pleasure in watching the alleged 'nice guy' of the podcast squirm over his cheeky remarks. All in all there is some nice symmetry, in that everybody had something to cringe about.But perhaps this dialogue will alchemically transform that cringe into spiritual gold, and we can all learn something and grow a little as people or podcasters? Or maybe not? Time will tell, ay?Have a listen and see what you think!P.S. Sincere apologies for the audio quality, especially on Matt's end. We recorded this at an ungodly hour of the morning and Matt was too zombified to select the good microphone. Or the DISC could have interfered with it... Something like that.LinksThe original DTG episode on Gad Saad with Chris Williamson
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.
We try both to understand what they're talking about.
I'm Professor Matt Brown with me, Professor Chris Kavanagh.
It's a very bright and early morning here.
Chris, how are you?
I'm fantastic, Matt.
Look at my early morning glow that you can see through the Zoom interface.
Your pallor is particularly pallid today.
So we've had so far one guest who was sort of incidentally covered on our podcast, a certain fellow called Sam Harris, very kindly agreed to come and talk to us about some of the issues that we raised.
And we have another guest who, again, we didn't explicitly cover, but was kind of caught in the general crossfire of our main target.
If you introduce it by saying that it's someone from the Gad Saad episode, then the initial response will be, oh my God, the Gadfather has arised to give us a satire election.
But no, he did not respond to that fashion.
He blocked us as soon as the episode came out.
But as you say, there was another person involved in that episode, Chris Williamson.
Hello, Chris.
Matthew, Christopher, thanks for having me.
Thanks for coming on.
Actually, Chris reached out just to give him his jury.
He reached out ahead of Sam Harris.
He's not following in the footsteps of Sam Harris.
It's just how bad I am at scheduling things.
It's literally been months since.
And we have this policy which we probably...
We need to consider how far it extends.
And not to you, Chris, I mean, but we cover some quite bad people.
We currently say that anybody that we cover has the right to come on and discuss it with us, which probably we'll continue to do unless we cover a neo-Nazi or something.
We'll probably not invite them on.
But just to be clear, Chris, I'm not saying you're a neo-Nazi.
Thank you.
Do you have an introduction for Chris?
Yes.
Well, it's fair to say Chris is mainly a podcaster at the moment.
Chris has seen a lot of success with his podcast, Modern Wisdom.
So congratulations, Chris.
You've had some great guests on, including Sam Harris, but all kinds of people.
It seems to me like earlier on, you tended to have more guests like maybe Gadsad or more kind of culture warriors type figures.
But it seems like that trend has kind of changed.
Like you've sort of got bigger, perhaps guests, but sort of broader, covering broader sorts of topics.
Maybe that's a good place to start.
Are you happy with your podcast and the direction it's going?
And how would you describe it?
You'd obviously be happy with the success of it.
Yeah, so I think I've always had an interest in personal growth and personal development and stuff.
I'm a young guy who was just trying to work out the way that the world works.
I did some reality TV stuff, as you mentioned on the Gadside episode.
I'm an alumni of Love Island and Take Me Out and a blue tick on Twitter and free charcoal toothpaste and stuff.
That really wasn't serving me, so I decided to start a podcast.
Yeah, I think it's strange when you look back over the list of guests that you have, because you go through periods where your interests sway, right?
You have a particular topic that you're interested in, so you work on that for a while, and then you get bored with that, and then you move on to something else.
So you do see these sort of swells, these crescendos, and these drop-offs with regards to guests.
The show's growth has been really good over the last two years specifically.
I think the Gadsad episode, when you featured it, I would have been maybe 50,000 subs.
And now we're at just under a quarter of a million, which is really good.
But it's a small team.
It's me and a video guy.
So it's not some huge, big conglomerate.
It's just very much a cottage industry still.
I will say, Chris, as well, I'm sure people will remember.
And if not, they can go back and listen to the Gadsad episode.
But it's fair to say that we, unusually for us, we're quite critical of Dad, Saad particularly, and his school of satire, but also we did direct some Venom.
It's fair to say your way.
And there is this thing when you go back and listen, because whenever you contacted, I was like, oh, what do we specifically say about Chris?
I think that whenever that happens, going back over the stuff that we said, there's some unkind snipes that are directed.
Maybe at your laugh, for example, which feels a little bit like I'm a person in the glass house that perhaps you don't know that many rocks at the way that people laugh.
But also some points that probably we would stand by.
And it would be good to discuss the experience of somebody that's on the receiving end of that, because the way that we presented it, and I will get the question at the end of this rambling monologue.
You are essentially somebody who fits into the kind of IDW side of the web and that Douglas Murray, Gad Saad, Andrew Doyle, those kind of people that you would be giving a kind of softball interview to them.
So the first thing is our characterization of you, how accurate or inaccurate you considered it.
And then also...
To be on the receiving end of an episode where you're not the main character, but you're featured quite critically.
How that experience was then, now, before.
Yeah.
It's an interesting one.
I might have been probably the smallest creator, I think, that you guys have featured.
Certainly, at least the period from history that you decided to feature, right?
Like I say, 50,000 subs or whatever.
But I'm probably not going to be the last one.
And if you guys are going to continue ahead in the same vein, I think it's important that you get it right.
And Chris, me and you had a conversation about this that I think both of us might have found surprisingly productive and collaborative given the introduction to our relationship.
So yeah, I think it's worthwhile as having this conversation and also to kind of maybe educate people on what it's like to be a content creator because the particular style of show that you do where you take sections By its very nature, kind of out of context.
It's contextualized by what you're saying, but people don't actually fully get to see that.
That is an interesting dynamic that sometimes can be difficult to defend because if you take any individual section or any individual sentence out of context, it's quite easy to be made to sound a little bit silly.
So I don't know how you guys would have...
I'm not sure how you identified me.
I think you said previous contestant on Love Island, male model, Matt, you mentioned a...
A couple of things to do with that.
In terms of the experience, I knew that it was coming out maybe six weeks before it did because you guys tagged me on Twitter.
And that was all that I knew about that.
So I had this lead period between then and I knew it was the Gad Sad episode.
So I was able to go back and eviscerate myself about all of the little missteps that I made and concern myself about what it was going to be.
Some things that I think are really important as someone that's trying to do this, I genuinely care about doing this well.
I genuinely care about being as good of a podcaster as I can, about trying to provide entertaining, educational, well-balanced conversations, right?
But I'm a moving target.
My skill set, I don't come from an academic background.
You guys have been having difficult intellectual discussions for all of your life.
I did two degrees at Newcastle University because it facilitated me to continue to run my nightclub promotion business.
So I have a little bit of a different entry into this.
For me, I'm always trying to pick up, okay, where am I going wrong?
Where can I develop?
So going back and looking at something which was, I think, episode 180 and I'm now on 405 is a little bit like something that you said when you were 18 being compared to what you're thinking now when you're 40 proportionally.
So it's a little bit like, oh, well, that sucks.
I hope that they don't tear me to pieces too much.
And it made me reflect an awful lot on the fact that...
Typically, you are having a conversation with someone who is an expert in their field.
They've spent their entire lives discussing whatever topic it is that they're thinking about, and you've just read the book.
So, by its very nature, you're always going to be playing second string to whoever this person is that you speak to.
You're never the person that's the smartest in the room, at least within this particular topic.
I also realized that...
As with many people, being disagreeable and understanding how to not annihilate a conversation and make it totally disgusting to listen to and awkward and discordant, whilst stress-testing people's ideas, is a very hard balance to strike.
And we'll get into it, but some of the realizations that I've taken from being featured by you guys are actually really, really valuable.
In fact, between you and David Fuller's feature on me from Rebel Wisdom this year, probably been the most growth I've seen as a podcaster.
But that being said, there are elements of the delivery and the way that it makes you feel as a content creator that actually is bothered about getting it right that I think could turn off future situations similar to this and cause creators to not deal with it in a way that actually allows them to grow and just causes them to feel jilted and say,
fuck you and move on.
Yeah, that's a really good way to start it, I think.
And I also listened back to that episode, particularly the end.
And yeah, it is kind of cringeworthy for my part to listen to myself being so mean, right?
And it made me think about a couple of things.
One is the first point you said there, which was that you were, at the time, the smallest creator that would sort of, and up until then, we'd really focused on these huge, big names.
Who would never have noticed a tiny little podcast like us.
So there was that thing of being, you know, in the back seats, which is quite a different kind of mental state that you're in compared to...
Punching up versus punching down almost.
Well, yeah, we're just sort of too anonymous sort of person, like making fun of Tom Cruise, right?
Whereas, yes.
So then, but, you know, it's quite different when it's someone much smaller.
The other thing too is our podcast is a weird mixture of...
Kind of serious intellectual analysis, but also pretty stupid and lighthearted stuff as well.
And there's an element of kind of roasting that we do as well, and it all can kind of get blended up.
Now, in that particular situation, we knew nothing about you, just he was a guy who was sort of clapping along and...
Giving the double thumbs up to what sounded to us like completely stupid stuff.
How many episodes?
Was that the first ever time that you'd heard me before you drew your conclusions about me, that one episode?
For me, yeah, definitely.
For me, no, because I saw the Stefan Molyneux episode.
So that's possibly not the best.
Two really great examples for me there.
I've seen a bit more, but it would have been mostly around those kind of characters because of my particular focus on things.
And a couple of points I thought, Chris, in response to that was, I think there's a lot of validity to some of the things that you're saying.
But one of the issues is that we do, by the nature of the podcast, kind of take a partial view.
Of someone or content, right?
Because we don't try to take all of the content that someone's put out.
We just try to take one piece and dig into it.
And by the nature of that, it means that basically everyone has the ability to say, well, that doesn't represent what I do.
And we've found that a lot of cases that it does, like when you look at a Jordan Peterson piece of content from a couple of years ago, it's different from now.
But what he does in the interviews is very similar.
So there's an aspect of that.
But I take the point about that not really taking into account when people grow and change in what they're doing.
So this is something that I really wanted to bring up.
I think...
The fact that you guys previously have been able to hide behind or utilize the fact that you're a small podcast, right?
That you have a low number of plays.
This therefore means that we're this tiny mosquito buzzing around these mythological titans of academia.
They're never going to even feel our touch on them.
And a lot of the time when you look at the guys that you're featuring, they are kind of relatively unmoving.
Maybe their ideas change, but you understand what I mean?
They're kind of quite set.
They understand.
Whereas for somebody that, for me, has been doing this for three and a half years and is within the space of six months basically unrecognizable from the person that he was six months ago when it comes to doing this because the growth curve is so steep, I think, again,
to wave the flag for the small creator that may end up being featured on Decoding the Gurus, I think that that's something that you really need to be conscious of because You have a responsibility to familiarize yourself in depth with someone.
If the externalities of you featuring them on the show are actually going to be quite large, there is an amount of care that is needed before you condemn judgment onto somebody.
And the main reason for this, first off, the show now for you guys, the plays, they're not that small anymore.
We're just a small creator card has now been revoked officially.
I'm sorry to say.
And also...
The particular thing for me is that the audience that you guys reach is specifically impactful.
So the people, the sort of people that listen to your show, for instance, I'm a fan of Robert Wright's work.
I'm a fan of Paul Bloom's work.
I know that both of those guys listen to the show.
I've had both of them on the show, but I reached out to them before you featured me.
Now, if the first time that Robert Wright or Paul Bloom heard of Modern Wisdom with Chris Williamson was me being accused of being this sort of I've now got doors that are permanently closed to me for something that I genuinely care about.
And that doesn't feel very good to think that I may never be able to get somebody back on the show because of how I've been portrayed.
Stand by the work.
I made the episodes in the past.
They're part of my immutable history, right?
But the fact that there is now particular doorways that are permanently closed, that doesn't feel too good to me.
So one thing that I would say, Chris, is that I suspect you slightly overestimate our influence over...
For one, I didn't even know Paul Bloom listened, so that's nice.
But the other thing is that people like Robert Wright...
I completely agree with you that it's definitely something that we probably didn't consider that much, partly because of not assuming such a big reach.
But with specific people who like us and pay attention, it could definitely have an influence.
But specifically with someone like Robert Wright, I kind of think that you're dealing with a force of will that we can only push so much in any direction.
So that would just be one.
Caveat with specifically Robert Wright, but the point about us being able to potentially close doors or to make it at least so that somebody is coming into things with a negative view.
And I think the last time we spoke, you mentioned that that could potentially push someone further down a particular, like interacting with certain kinds of people, because the kinds of people that would like us or would listen to us are a specific kind, right?
We have a tribe.
Not to dwell on that point, but yeah.
So our influence, I think, is not as great, but I take the point that it does exist and it has an impact.
And it is something that as the podcast has been more successful, that it's kind of become more something to consider because before it wasn't so much like, as I'm sure you've...
Experience when you have a different audience size and a different level of reach.
There's different considerations about the impacts that you can have.
So, yeah.
Yeah, I definitely, I take what Chris has said on board.
I think I speak for both of us when I say that no interest actually in gatekeeping or deciding who gets a good reputation, who gets a bad reputation.
We try to focus on arguments and so on, but it is.
You're quite right.
It does end up being about the person as well, inevitably.
One little bit of pushback I've got, though, is that it's a difficult circle to square because on one hand, it's good to not be mean.
It's good not to be highly critical and all that stuff.
But there's also this sort of civility fetishism, which you see going on a lot in sort of heterodox type circles where everyone is always patting each other on the back and treating each other with soft gloves.
They do speak extremely harshly when they're talking about the woke or whatever.
They're just these terrible, evil people or whatever.
But in terms of these individual relationships, it's always very soft.
If we take Gad Saad, for instance, he doesn't pull any punches at all in describing other people.
So I think I stand by the idea of harsh critiquing, but I do agree that I want to detach it from...
It's all about...
All of this is trying to find where the line is appropriately drawn, right?
So, for instance, in the episodes that I did with Gad, Matt, I think you brought up the feminist glaciology paper, which I wasn't aware of, but seems to be a sort of a regularly lambasted example of crazy woke academia or whatever.
And I think that you said...
One thing that people are losing out on here is maybe there is some goodwill to be drawn out of this particular paper.
Maybe there is something, a kernel of useful truth that people are not noticing.
And then, Chris, you said that Sam was falling prey to tribalism because he made an incorrect assumption about you based on an identity marker.
He labeled you as being from a particular camp based on using your Twitter bio.
I don't know how this is any different to Matt saying that you can't expect much from me as an ex-Levine contestant and a male model.
It's the same.
In my defense though, because I listened to that again, I immediately apologized for that.
He said it was below the belt and retracted it.
That was not a serious criticism, but you're right.
We're making fun of you in a mean way.
To wrap the final issue from that episode that I can bring up.
Chris, your final word on Chris Williamson was, it would be depressing if he becomes a more prominent figure in this space.
Now, if that's not underwriting or underlining me as this is someone that really, if you're listening to this show and you're an influential academic, you shouldn't speak to, I don't really know what is.
Yeah, so I will say, I forgot I said that until I listened back to it yesterday when I was driving back in the car.
And I don't think we talked about that when we...
Discuss that particular line, right?
And I was like, oof, that's like, that's pretty harsh.
But I will say that in line with what the kind of points that Matt is making, I think if you listened, if you were that far into the episodes with us, right, like into the two and a half.
You had context, right?
But if I take it out of context.
Well, sure.
Yes.
I agree with that.
But so the distinction I'd make here is that if I'm drawing that conclusion from the Gadsad interview, like if that's what I know of you, I kind of think that's a valid conclusion from that content.
But I, you know, subsequently and from interactions and I think for our listeners as well, it's important.
And useful for them to hear you here, and giving pushback, and maybe to see that our presentation of you was not entirely fair, right?
Or not even, maybe that's putting it mildly, but you know, so I would say though that if you were doing that kind of interview, I would stand by that conclusion.
And from what I've seen, what we've talked about since then, I don't think that you are, Just doing that anymore.
And so if people ask me now, you know, would I stand by that?
I wouldn't voice the same opinion because that's not what your content, at least from what I see, looks to be now.
But if I'm imagining another channel, which is like Trigonometry and it's Sargon of Akkad interviews and Stefan Molyneux and Jordan Peterson and so on.
I like my expressed exasperation was like a reflection of my assessment.
But this is one thing that I think me and Matt always tried to emphasize.
And I understand this, like Matt said, when he was making a joke and he said it was a little boho.
But we use disclaimers too.
But I do mean it when I say like our assessment is intended as our I'm sure that you guys know better than anyone,
given your background in academia, just how easily influenced people are by those that they perceive to have status.
You know, if you're speaking something fluently and eloquently and you're coming at it from a position of status, You influence people below you.
That's how it works.
That's completely true.
And I think you're, again, granting me too much eloquence in the way I speak.
You've got a lot of lift on the edit.
It's nice.
That's true.
The raw is much worse.
But yeah, you're definitely right that even with saying that, it doesn't mean the level of influence is definitely there.
And you can frame things in a certain way.
I'm not disputing any of that.
And I agree that the assessment that I offered at the end was quite totalizing by the way that it was expressed.
So if you took that clip out of context, though, in the same way I am now, I would say, yeah, at the time on what I'm discussing, I think that's a legitimate comment.
But that's a different thing, I think, than like, I know that when you went back and listened to the episode.
That you told me this and I had great sympathy that you were hoping we didn't pick the line out where you said James Lindsay and Gad said we're two of the greatest thinkers of the modern era.
I'm not sure.
I might be getting myself even into deeper water here.
I want to say it was something like true polymath.
Oh, you did say that as well.
Oh, shit.
But it was basically a part where you were lamenting that these kind of thinkers would have to devote their time to this topic.
And actually, I think the point you made earlier that you're not an academic, and actually I think there should be less academics in the world, not more.
There'll be this podcasting.
Well, yes.
But for us, Gadsad and James Lindsay's claims about their kind of academic credentials, they're real in the case of Gadsad and also in James Lindsay, he has a PhD in maths, but they're not as impressive as they...
If you're immersed in academia, what Gadsad claims is obviously inflated.
And what James Lindsay presents himself as is...
It's almost Weinsteinian in terms of the hyperbolic.
But that's easy when you're in academia and you can spot that.
But I think you have a valid point that if you're not an expert in those kind of fields and somebody says, well, they are, and not only they are, but they are a professor in a university with books on the topic, that there is an issue there about who...
Who are you to kind of say, well, you're not that good.
The guy with a PhD in pure mathematics actually doesn't know what he's like.
Yeah, I'm not in a place where I can assess that.
Yeah, so the thing I would say, and I don't know where James Lindsay was on his death spiral at that point in that moment of time.
I don't think he'd gone fully where he has ended up now, almost certainly.
It just gets worse every day, so it's kind of hard.
To work out.
But even then, I think the reliance on credentialism, because for example, Matt has more statistics chops than me, but Taleb is a much better mathematician, statistician than me.
And I don't feel any hesitation to point out that, or Eric Weinstein for that matter.
But I can see quite clearly when they're...
Being hyperbolic and trying to use their credentials as a kind of smokescreen.
And I think with James Lindsay, that is something that's been evident fairly early into his career.
Just this tendency for people to reference.
And you must have experienced it now with lots of people.
I'm not even talking about culture war people, but just people inflating credentials or using their credentials as a way to kind of smooth over claims.
And since you can't be an expert on all topics of the people that you're interviewing, how to avoid that people can just appeal to credentialism and kind of shut you up then?
With difficulty, I think.
That's the answer.
This is a really interesting conversation.
And I haven't come on here to finger wag at you guys and try and rehabilitate my identity in your eyes.
I think that the conversation that we had already did that.
The more interesting conversation for me is around what I learned from being featured by you.
And one of those things is to increase the skepticism muscle.
I would say that that had atrophied a lot of people, their jobs, mine was standing on the front door of nightclubs.
My goal is not to get a bad TripAdvisor review, right?
If the customer comes up, I'm actually going out of my way to try and be as agreeable as possible to finagle the situation so that they turn around and go inside as quickly as possible.
And then porting that across into a world where you're expected to stress test people's ideas in real time when they're the expert on a topic that you've just read the book about.
You have the decision to make.
Every single decision that you make in a conversation is contextual and it's journalistically difficult.
What do I know about this topic?
What do I know about this person?
What's the relationship that I have with this person?
How much has the audience had this conversation fractured out into little branches and how much are we moving down the main one?
It may be in the audience's interests for you to stress test every single thing that someone said, but it would be such a disgusting listen that was going out in all different directions that no one would ever end up listening to the podcast.
Also, when you're on the come up, it may well be in some corner of the internet's interest for you to try and absolutely hammer someone.
Every single question, like the hard-nosed, hard-grind, like Jeremy Paxman-style interview.
But you can only do that so many times when you've got 30,000 subs before people stop calling.
That's not to say that you're supposed to permit people to come on your show and do whatever they want, using you as their mouthpiece to just spray things out into the world.
But on the same token, there is a degree of game playing that has to be permissible or else you cull your ability to actually move forward at all.
So how agreeable are you supposed to be?
That was something that I started to play with.
And since the episodes, that's something that I've really, really worked hard at developing.
To think, okay, what does it feel like to push back against someone's ideas without destroying the conversation, without actually having to go into specifics sometimes because you don't know the specifics of what this person's talking about?
All of these have been really, really interesting realizations.
And I think that that's come off the back of the discomfort that was raised by being featured by you guys.
The only thing that was the problem was the snide topspin.
That made it difficult for me to see the true and useful elements of the criticism.
But again, that's part of the reason that people tune in for the roast, for the jovial kind of energy nature.
And I'm not sure if you can get rid of that to have more impact without losing some of the signature elements that actually makes the show good in the first place.
Does that make sense?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, you got me thinking too.
I mean, yeah, I think we can stop.
We don't need to.
Relitigate or fixate on the previous episode, we can leave it.
But I think a good learning for everyone is that issue of responsibility.
You mentioned doing some self-reflection on what's the journalistic responsibility to not give guests a free ride and be deferential with it.
And for our part, it was your part in that episode.
I was just looking through our catalogue there, and I think it does actually stand out as one in which we made a misstep.
In terms of being overly snide, as you said, having that tone.
Generally, because the main topics that we cover, we spend a fair bit of time looking into them, thinking about them, all the rest.
You, you were sort of a, you know, at least for me.
Didn't watch season one of Love Island.
No, no, no, not up on Love Island.
So it was definitely much more shit from the hip and off the cuff.
We criticized Sam Harris in quite a mean way, if you like.
As well.
On the other hand, we stand by all of those criticisms.
We had him on.
Well, Chris attempted to have a reverse debate.
But it was still, at least from my point of view, I feel comfortable.
You know what I mean?
I feel like we did the right thing in that situation and in most of them, even though with some people like Heather and Brett Weinstein, or Scott Adams, where we really don't pull any punches at all, but we have people that are basically anti-vaxxers.
And I don't stay away from that kind of hyperbolic harm language, but they are killing people when they are telling people not to get vaccinated and take ivermectin instead.
So yeah, I think it was good that you've come on and made this squirm a little bit in terms of, I mean, you haven't intended to do it.
Well, I don't know, but that, you know, it's good.
I mean, I think that's a healthy thing is what I'm saying.
Chris, I will return the fever because I think there's a good example of this.
And I know we've talked about this specific example, but one of the previous content that I I came across with you was the Stefan Molyneux one.
And you mentioned that it's important to get a balance of having someone on and kind of looking into their background or familiarizing yourself with the work before you platform them or before you discuss their ideas.
And with Stefan Molyneux, I have this particular issue because I came across him years ago, years ago, like even before he'd made his Trump turn.
I watched one of his videos and kind of got, oh, okay, he comes across as kind of authoritative, but he doesn't seem that bad, like, you know, in one video.
And then I went on and I looked at more videos and I started to see issues.
And then I looked up articles, saw the things about him running a predatory cult and looked into that, came across a survivor forum with loads of, a whole forum dedicated to people that were.
Free Domain Radio X members who now had a discussion forum dedicated to their experiences.
And then the clips of Stephen Molyneux raging against women or women who sleep with assholes will end the society and so on.
For me, I have an interest in these kind of communities and stuff, but it wasn't hard to find any of that content, like even Joe Rogan.
Find it before his second appearance on Rogan.
So what kind of surprised me was not that you could have an interview with him and that he could come across charming and or not, you know, not charming in his way, authoritative and avoid any direct reference of stuff.
Why definitely not the same as Dave Rubin, right?
Like kind of talking about the size of black people's brains and whatnot on your show.
How you didn't come across that stuff before you interviewed him.
I'll avoid layering more terrible things that he's done, but your decision to have him, because that in turn colored how I interpreted what I seem of God with you.
So yeah, a lot of points, but I'd be interested to hear your thoughts.
Yeah, I can understand why your first introduction to me being an interview with Stefan Molyneux causing you to pattern match me as having a particular leaning.
The reason I brought him on was because his channel got deleted from YouTube.
And I thought, this is newsworthy.
You know, this was episode 170 something for me.
So I'd been doing it for maybe a couple of years.
And I thought, this is a guy who's got tens of thousands of videos.
He's been on the platform essentially since it started.
I'd previously had Sargon on and Carl, his removal from YouTube and Patreon and stuff obviously was newsworthy.
So I thought, well, this is just another one.
Previously in the buildup to that, the most high profile thing Stefan had done was a live debate with rationality rules, a guy called Steven Woodford, who is a big philosophy guy.
I'd watched a good bit of Stefan's content, but it was things to do with why you shouldn't beat your children and all manner of different sort of subtopics.
A specific problem with Stefan is that he has so much content out there that if you decide to go, well, I've watched some of his videos.
I know what he's about.
It's so broad ranging that there can be quite sinister undertones within things that you're going to completely miss.
On reflection, like the stuff that David Fuller sent me, the Timber on Toast section of one particular video, which is like 40 minutes long, and he goes into some incredibly sinister stuff about Stefan.
On reflection, the interview.
Well, here's a question for you guys.
Are there people out there whose pasts are so reprehensible that you cannot bring them on your show to have a discussion about something, even if it's not related to their past?
So if Milo Yiannopoulos brings out a Bums and Tums DVD, or if Richard Spencer decides to release a cookbook, are we allowed to talk about the cookbook without bringing up the past?
What's the responsibility of your creator to do that in your eyes?
No.
I mean, you can do it from my point of view.
You can do whatever you want.
You can talk to anyone about any topic.
But if you have somebody who's a famed white ethno-nationalist and xenophobic racist and they release a cookbook and you discuss their cookbook without reference to the primary things that make them controversial,
it feels to me like you're doing a disservice.
And we specifically criticized Jordan Hall.
For doing something like this, where he spoke to a properitarian, anti-Semitic neo-Nazi.
And that neo-Nazi, it's a very specific ideology he has, but it's like a far-right one, in any case, pro-fascist.
And their conversation wasn't about that.
It was about meaning-making and sense-making.
And then David Fuller pushed back on Jordan Hall in a discussion with him, kind of saying that...
The way that you were introducing that to your audience was irresponsible because if they come across this figure from that content, they seem relatively unobjectionable.
And I have the same criticism.
Matt, by the way, you can respond and have a completely different opinion, by the way.
But whenever Michael Shermer also went home with Stefan Molyneux, that interview with Michael Shermer and Stefan Molyneux, almost entirely unobjectionable.
They just talked about skepticism and the importance of science and that kind of thing.
And it was basically a puff piece from Michael Shermer's book.
But after that interview, Shermer, being the diligent man that he is, he tweeted out to his followers that Stefan Molyneux is an articulate podcaster for a reason, right?
And I took issue with that then, and I would take issue with it now because Shermer's defense later was...
He didn't know anything about Malnew and his publicist had just rearranged the interview.
But to me, that's not enough of an excuse.
It might be an excuse for showing up.
It's not enough of an excuse, though, for saying to people, this is an interesting voice and an articulate guy for a reason.
So yeah, that's my view.
Matt, you might have slightly less strident.
Yeah, I mean, I pretty much sign up to what you just said then.
But that's, I think, one half of it, which is, look, I don't buy into the kind of hard left work kind of thing where you can go too far with this guilt by association and you have to ostracize this person because they're the gondipal and you develop this extremely narrow Overton window of people who are acceptable because they haven't said anything.
I'm obviously not arguing that.
It can be taken too far, but I definitely agree with what Chris says, that there is an Overton window, that there is some limits.
I was recently having a discussion with a philosopher who was very proud, mentioned very proudly that he would go on Alex Jones' show and be happy to, and be polite to him, and so on.
For him, it was like a badge of honor.
This is being an open-minded.
Brave, courageous, heterodox type thinker who can wrestle with any kind of idea from anywhere.
But my response is, well, why?
I mean, what possible benefit do you see in talking to someone who believes that literal demons are roaming Democrat cities in human form?
At some point, you have to say this just isn't a good idea.
There's definitely a responsibility for me as a podcaster.
To do my requisite research, right?
Like, if I'm bringing somebody on, I need to make sure that I know enough about them to get the cobwebs out.
But I didn't, you know?
I didn't know these things about Stefan before I brought him on my show, and that's to my failure.
Again, that's another really important strategic learning opportunity.
I can't use that.
Every single time that I make a mistake, go, oh, well, it's really important that I made that mistake because now I'm not going to make it again.
And I'm aware that there's only so many times that that particular excuse is going to fly.
But genuinely reflecting on that has been that David and you guys has changed the way that I podcast probably more than pretty much anything else.
And that is if I'm going to find silver linings in clouds, that they're really, really valuable.
The ability to understand.
That you need to push back against people.
That you need to do probably more research than you think.
And outside of the body of work that they're coming on to talk about.
For instance, I'm having a conversation, as far as I knew, with Stefan about his channel being deleted.
So it was a conversation about free speech.
You could argue, perhaps, that his channel being deleted encompasses his entire body of work since the beginning of time.
But that may be a little bit too much of it.
But I thought that was the conversation I was having.
However, should I have done a cursory Google search to try and find out a little bit more?
Yes.
Yes, I certainly should have done.
I totally accept that, because to be honest, in my case, I entirely lean on Christopher Kavanagh's obsessive knowledge of things and get away with doing a little bit.
You know, less research than I should in many cases as well.
And I appreciate what it's like when one is producing quite a bit of content and we're all busy people.
And it is easy to cut corners.
And it's all very well to say, you know, you have to do your research and so on.
You've got to dig into it.
But yeah, human beings can, we don't.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And Chris, I want to say as well that one of the things that I find very, I don't know, like positive, I can't think of a big word.
It's too early in the morning.
But the previous conversation we had whenever you were talking about the experiences with Stefan and you just did now as well is that it's actually really rare in this space and especially in the guru sphere where we occupy that people admit they made a mistake or that they didn't know something.
It's refreshing.
Yeah, it's extremely refreshing to hear when somebody just says, if I could go back and do that, I wouldn't.
And I don't want to put words in your mouth, but I pretty much, from what you just said there, I gather that it's not like Stefan was on your show promoting white ethno-nationalism.
But the downstream consequences of...
He doesn't need you as a stepping stone, but...
It's the Richard Spencer's cookbook again.
Yeah, exactly.
And I think there's one thing I will say.
You raised this when we previously discussed that, and I think it's a very good point, that when you're on the side of, as an audience, or in Matt and I's case, as somebody critically assessing how somebody else...
Is presenting things that there is an element where I think we can critique the content of conversations and there is an issue like Matt highlights with civility porn, but there's also an issue that conversation dynamics and interacting with a guest,
especially if you are an interviewer that you're hosting someone, that there is some difficulty to navigate about how much you interrupt someone, how confrontational.
You make the conversation.
And what do you do, for example, if somebody monologues for extended times and doesn't engage in turn-taking?
Just like it could happen.
It could be anyone that does that.
But those are things that I think people wouldn't necessarily appreciate unless they have interviewed someone who's done that.
And you might think that you would be Jeremy Paxman or that you would just cut someone off and say, excuse me, But the reality is that people tend to be much nicer in person.
This might be an illustration of that.
Why don't I give a couple of examples for people who are never going to start podcasts, but might be interested in what that dynamic's like.
You're in somebody's inbox for weeks, sometimes months, maybe dealing with an assistant, but often dealing with them directly.
And then you're, as a smaller creator, as I was and still am now.
You're essentially asking someone for a favor.
You're asking them to kind of, through osmosis, get some clout yourself.
And that dynamic is a little bit, it's quite palpable.
And you notice it with Rogan as well, that when people go on, he controls the frame because he's the guy that's bringing the power, right?
He's the one that's got the audience.
The reverse is true when you're a smaller creator.
And you're in this person's inbox, then you greet them for five minutes before you go on.
And you go, three, two, one.
Jordan Peterson, welcome to the show, or whoever it might be, right?
You haven't got to do a dry run of this conversation last night.
We're practicing in public.
We're learning out loud.
We're failing whilst being watched by everyone.
So there's no such thing as running drills.
You don't get to practice doing what you're doing in private and then come back and actually fix all of the mistakes when people hear.
Your mistakes are just there for everyone to bear.
So you've got this conversation.
You've got this dynamic.
This person's controlling or at least has a little bit more status within this situation.
And then...
It's kind of like bringing somebody into your living room to then start shouting at them.
There is a difficulty in that to be able to say, well, I know that you're almost kind of doing me a favor here.
So you think, okay, well, shouting at that person is a bad way to go.
Here's a really good example that happened to me recently.
I had Dr. Patrick Moore, who was the ex-president of Greenpeace on the show.
I thought, interesting guy.
Like he's counter to some climate science.
This looks like he's got a new book out.
This looks interesting.
I'll bring him on.
And this episode goes berserk.
Half a million plays on YouTube.
And I can see the first weekend that it's up, I ring David Fuller.
I'm like, man, this episode's going to go crazy.
It's only done 30k so far, but I know it's going to finish on a really high number of plays.
What do I do?
Because this guy has got some views about skepticism on climate that I pushed back as best I could, but there's only so far that I can go.
I then go through a whole list of people.
With David, in an effort to try and counter that, Charles Eisenstein comes on to discuss what the rhetoric around climate debate is.
This week, I just released an episode with Richard Betts, who's the lead author on two of the IPCC's papers.
So I'm constantly trying to, and you guys can take a little bit of credit for this, that I do have this sort of miniature Matt Brown and Chris Kavanaugh on my shoulder that says, look, guys, was this sufficiently well-balanced?
That's the place that you have taken.
Had it not been for the feature, had it not been for David bringing up the Stefan thing, that wouldn't have been there.
You know, I hesitate to say it was fortunate that I got featured, but in a way it was because I now have this dynamic that runs through my mind.
For instance, I knew that I'd probably leaned, I'd given my particular audience a type of dynamic over the last couple of years that I wanted to see what would happen if I counted it.
So I brought David Pakman on.
David Pakman came on the show, who I think is pretty well regarded as one of the The best meaning, most eloquent, really well-balanced left-leaning guys that talks across the aisle.
I've got Destiny coming on in a couple of weeks as well.
If you want to be whatever the IDW's pretty boy gateway drug, like that's not necessarily the conversations that you want to have.
But to round this off, and I've said a lot there, there are very few incentives to do that.
Specifically on YouTube, I lost less than a thousand, but a significant number of hundred subs by bringing David Pakman on.
And having a conversation where I just asked him what the state of the conversation about the left was.
The same thing happens with Richard Betts.
I bring somebody on that is counter to a previous narrative.
So the incentives for creators to have conversations that cross across the aisle are really, really, really diminished.
It's a very, very rare audience that's going to say, well done, well done for speaking against a narrative that was new to me.
It's far more often that they're going to say, what are you doing bringing this cook-servative or this libtard on?
Why are you bothering to do that?
Yeah, that's a dynamic that as a creator, you're always battling and this is where audience capture comes from.
This is precisely, this is the genesis.
It's the seed of audience capture that you know that by taking a wrong, taking a U-turn, that you're going to not only I know specifically that Sam does this sometimes where he'll say things that he knows will purposefully sort of cull some of the barnacles from off the hull of the ship.
But man, like how many different layers am I trying to juggle here whilst having a conversation with someone who's an expert in real time?
And I'm just like, I just wanted to have conversations.
Look, I think you've hit the nail on the head.
The fastest and quickest way to build an audience is to provide bread meat to a partisan wing.
So that could be a socialist, revolutionary, woke kind of thing where you go hardcore on that side and you will generate.
You don't have to have very good content.
Because you're preaching to the choir and you will very quickly generate an audience.
Likewise, if one veers towards the right or some other direction, God knows how many directions the political compass has, but you veer off to those sides, which could just happen automatically or without even much conscious thought, then you're pretty much assured of an audience.
As you say, the incentives are there.
It's difficult to not.
Pay any attention at all to how much engagement something is happening.
James Lindsay always comes to mind as someone who's a victim to this, if you like.
He's made himself a victim.
That's what he does.
It's hard to identify much that he offers except ringing that bell.
As you say, doing the right thing in terms of having conversations across the aisle, being moderate, being reasonable.
Not being a hopeless political partisan, that is not rewarded.
That is not incentivized.
And ultimately, it's a decision people have to make for themselves.
Someone like James Lindsay makes his call.
You're talking about making your call.
We do our thing by our lights.
But I find it tremendously hardening.
The pretty boy gateway to the IDW, then it's sounding to me like maybe that's a good thing.
Don't give our endorsements before he interviews a Nazi.
I haven't done any real research on you, Chris, but that's what I do.
I just shoot from the hip.
You seem like a nice guy.
I'll also say that I can point this out, Chris, because peeling back the curtain again for our audience.
We had a very nice conversation before.
Interpersonal conversations are what they are, right?
It's easier to have a one-on-one nice conversation, especially when you're not recording because you're not so much thinking about it.
Somebody might be secretly recording you, minus that.
But whenever we were going to have this conversation, Matt and I said, okay, we better have a look at Chris's channel because we haven't checked your content lately.
And the first thing I noticed was Richard Betts.
Was that the name of the guy, right?
And then climate.
And that's an immediate red light for me because whenever climate is discussed with Jordan Peterson or something, it's rarely going to be somebody giving the IPCC's version.
So my initial immediate check is Richard Betts, climate skeptic.
That's the Google search.
And then see that, oh, he's not.
This is a guy who argues against climate skeptics.
And I didn't have the context for why he's appearing, right?
But the immediate thing I had was, oh, that's unusual.
You don't see somebody giving, you know, the IPCC kind of position usually on that kind of channel.
And then looked at a couple other stuff.
And that's partly why when Matt was talking at the beginning saying, it seems like comparing your content.
Back from the sad era, that's probably not the way you want to frame it.
But to know there's a difference.
And for me, it looks like a positive difference.
And it also looks like, I'm not just saying this because it fits with the things that I like, right?
There's bound to be stuff that people that you'll talk to and content that I won't like politically or thing.
And I'm not somebody who thinks that you...
You can't have conversations with people that don't fit in the things that I like.
What I do like to say is that it doesn't just fit the partisan mold and that it isn't utterly predictable, the conversation that you will have with all of the people, right?
And when you're talking about where's the potential benefit or the cost, I think that is part of the thing which people don't acknowledge that.
There already is a Dave Rubin.
There already is trigonometry.
You might not want to.
I'm casting this version, so I'm not asking you to.
But those channels already exist, and there's so many smaller versions of them that will do the exact same thing.
And I think that you can ride that wave, and it certainly seems very potentially lucrative if you hit.
But I kind of feel like you're selling your soul.
If you're not capable of recognizing that that's what you're doing, that you've got bigger problems.
So I'm perfectly fine with making a value judgment about people that push partisan content because I think it does harm to the discourse and the world.
So, yeah.
It's a difficult thing to make work, though.
You know, as a creator, to think I'm going to do something that I know is probably going to damage the channel.
Like, genuinely might actually set my channel back.
Simply out of some fucking higher sense of virtue.
I mean, you know, Chris, that I've said no to particular episodes that I know would have got me a large number of plays because I wasn't able to bring up things on there that I wanted to.
And that means that I'm making a sacrifice that no one, not even my audience knows about.
I'm choosing to neuter my growth simply out of some...
Fucking misguided sense of virtue because Chris Kavanagh and Matt Brown are sat on my shoulder.
Chris, I've got a framing that will help.
You can think of it as enlightened self-interest in a way because I think, and I'm not talking about you specifically, I'm just talking about everyone now, but the incentives you write are there.
But once you go down that track, one can find oneself in Like painted into a corner.
Often, in some sense, there's no coming back from that.
There's a lot of immediate rewards.
The views tick up, the shares tick up, and all that stuff.
But you'll find yourself in a place, I think, again, I'm not talking about you, I'm talking about anybody, where there's no coming back from.
So again, I'm thinking of the people who, if any content creator, not just Bret and Heather Weinstein, if any content creator had jumped on the ivermectin anti-vax train, any content creator.
Would have gotten a whole bunch of quick metric improvements.
But thinking long term, if one wants to be around for more than six months or 12 months, then that's actually in that creator's worst interest.
Do you think that that's the case now?
Do you genuinely think that that's the case in 2021?
I would also say that you're probably, I think that you're talking about their ability to access kind of respected.
Or, like, figures and audiences because, like, the anti-vax audience in 2021, like Chris says, it's not insubstantial and it seems to be becoming more significant.
I appreciate it, guys, but, I mean, yes, there'll always be anti-vaxxers, right?
You'll always have that audience, but you're putting a great big red line through, if you like, the respectable audience, right?
So there's a cost.
Is what I'm saying.
You can go there.
Yes, you can have your conspiratorial.
It could be anti-left-wing, partisan stuff, whatever.
And that's fine.
Those people will always be there.
They'll always be that audience.
But a content creator, once they make that call, is kind of stuck there.
It's very difficult to walk back out of that little niche once you're in there.
I'd also finesse, Chris, that maybe it's a slightly different point.
But to me, when people go those routes, It often looks that they pick up narratives and they pick up a whole network of associations that they didn't make and that they might not even have any awareness of where it comes from.
Like when I look, I know we keep going to this example, but it's just, it's so illustrative.
When you look at James Lindsay, right, and forget about the anti-woke stuff for a minute, which is like his core being, but he's picked up a lot more besides that.
He's now anti-vax.
He's also toying around with Christian nationalism and he's against the UN talking about the depopulation.
So he's picked up a whole bunch of narratives which existed long before there was James Lindsay on the scene.
They'll be around long after he's gone.
And I'm not saying his audience will know about the history of those, like the tropes that he plays with.
Or the kind of Christian nationalism part.
It might not become the forefront part of his content, but I've made the point of when we covered him with Michael O 'Fallon.
Michael O 'Fallon is a Christian nationalist and he's supported James through the relationship with sovereign nations.
His ideology hasn't changed.
He's the exact same as he was the first day he met James.
But James is the person who has went from a secular, atheist, Pro-science guy to an anti-vax, anti-globalist, New World Order, George Soros, or depopulating the world.
And to me, that's an example of how his reach has definitely increased.
His influence has increased.
He seems to potentially be having a role on political content of the Republican platform.
But look at the cost.
What did he have to give up?
Everything about his worldview.
He won't see it as that.
He'll see it as consistent.
I think the problem is that any nuance or divergence away from what people that are part of your in-group presume your views to be,
any divergence away from that is seen by your side as a lack of commitment and the other side as a weak link in your chain.
Don't hold the party line on, if you hold view A, and view A is correlated with all of these other ones, and you don't hold all of those as well, it looks like a lack of commitment.
Or, if from a critical side coming in, it also looks like you don't fully understand what you're talking about.
It looks like a weakness.
And I think that to give Sam his due, that's one of the reasons why he gets criticized from both sides, that some of his views are kind of difficult to predict.
You wouldn't necessarily put Anti-Trump with anti-woke.
Those are two things that typically wouldn't go together, and they get seen by his in-group as a lack of conviction, and they get seen by his out-group as a weakness and a lack of understanding around what he's talking about.
I just see that as a good sign.
If you are getting criticized by both sides, then I take that as a signal that you're probably doing something right.
That's only to a very particular type of person, though.
You know, the incentives just are not there for a content creator.
If you can 10X your Patreon and you can grow your YouTube channel and you can do all of these things, it has this simulacrum of virtue as well.
Whether it's that you're a useful idiot or you're willfully ignorant or whatever way that you manage to rationalize this so that it doesn't tear you up inside to go and do this.
Or maybe you just don't have any morals or whatever it might be, right?
However it is that a creator gets.
Or, or perhaps...
You happen to hold the exact cookie cutter view and that is your truth speaking forward.
All of these people are exactly the same.
That's exactly how they manifest their content moving forward.
And there's no way to tell from the outside looking in, but the incentives are there for a lower resolution view of the world.
That's what the incentives are there for.
If you dial down the finesse and the resolution that you see the world, you can have a more effective channel.
What about, so one counter to that.
I would say there are channels that specifically kind of present themselves as not doing that, that seem to be doing quite well.
Like, for example, Lockdown reported, they just had an episode where they pushed back about the most recent kind of cultural, one of the most recent, there's a new one every day, but about the minor attracted persons controversy, right?
The academic, there was an academic who has been kind of fired.
Because of an outrage campaign.
And they are in the unenviable position of talking to a heterodox audience about defending pedophiles or minor attracted people or whatever, you know,
the specifics of the issue.
But Blogs and Reported is a hugely successful podcast, right?
And I know that's like one example.
But I can think of all those where it seems that there is a kind of desire for, even like me and Matt are, I think, an example in a way because although we're sometimes presented as the kind of the woke warriors destroying the IDW,
we're not that.
And we make no illusion about where we stand, right?
And we've talked to people who are much farther left on us, including on here.
And I think it's clear where our distinctions lie.
So I'm not saying that we have found this massive audience, which is like Tim Pool or something like that.
But I just mean, we are able to do quite well.
And we are a minor thing in that pie that suggests there is an audience for that kind of nuance.
And if you take Sam Harris as somebody with nuance...
Then he's got a huge audience.
There might be some issues with it.
Sorry, Ma.
I have another example, which is a little bit different one, which is the fifth column.
Have you heard that one, Chris?
No.
They're like a libertarian.
If they have an angle, they're kind of a bunch of libertarians.
They're journalists and stuff.
They punch both ways.
They pop out to me as a podcast that is, and they are very successful.
Yeah, so I don't think it's inevitable, I guess is the point.
It's definitely a little bit of a rarity though, right?
Yeah, I don't know.
I mean, I guess I've got selection bias going on, but I sort of seek out these ones, I suppose.
The interesting thing, I really enjoy Blocked and Reported.
I think it's great.
One of the problems that you have is that...
A lot of the channels that speak across the aisle and purposefully try and challenge their own audience, they break the fourth wall, and that's almost what the show is about.
The show is almost about challenging the preconceptions of the audience.
And for me, I'm not sure...
I can only speak for my own channel, right?
I'm not sure that I would be able to fit that in.
If I'm talking to a porn star about what it's like to be a porn star, that doesn't necessarily always work.
You need to filter that audience into...
That being their expectation.
I'm coming on here.
I'm almost coming on to be challenged.
You said, Matt, that that's one of the reasons that your selection bias for the type of shows that you listen to is precisely there.
Yeah, it's an interesting one, man.
I had a question for you guys, actually.
You often say, you use the word rhetoric, and you sort of highlight that as one of the things that people need to be concerned about.
What do you mean when you say rhetoric?
That's an interesting question.
Yeah, look, I'll have a go.
So, yeah, look, we're both...
Yeah, we're academics, we write academic papers and science-y type stuff, right?
So the sort of thing that I would describe as not being, now certainly not all academic papers are good, right?
We could talk about the various ones that don't get a lot of airplay, but a good academic paper is one that is not trying to convince somebody, if you like, trick them or just find compelling arguments on one.
To sort of push with the idea of pushing them in one direction.
So, you know, it goes right back to classical times they made the distinction between rhetoric and dialectic, right?
So dialectic is the idea that you are working together, if you like.
There might be two sides or more sides sort of, but coming together with the joint objective of figuring out what is true.
And that was contrasted with the idea of a rhetorician who would often be a political type of speaker who's attempting to sway the crowd and convince them to go and invade Sparta or something like that.
So that's the distinction.
So good academic writing is often not the case and often people just pretend and really they secretly are trying to push people this way, but at least follows the form.
Of dialectic, which is that you present, like if I'm marking a student's assignment, for instance, an essay, what they need to do is present the various theories, the pros and the cons, providing a critical analysis of all of them.
They may well come to a conclusion that is heavily on this side or that side.
It's not like they're coming to sort of the average of everything.
But it's quite different from a persuasive communication where you're looking for snappy zingers and stuff that will change someone's mind.
How does that manifest in a podcast?
Your turn, Chris.
Okay.
Well, so to follow on from Ma, when I'm teaching students about like debate and how to present arguments and stuff in the courses I teach at university, I meet the distinction between substance and rhetoric.
And that rhetoric, you can use both to make your argument and both work.
And everybody uses a mixture of them.
There's no argument which is completely devoid of rhetoric that is persuasive.
But the issue is that rhetoric can be used to promote any argument effectively, including very bad ones.
But substantive engagement with content or arguments is often quite different because you shouldn't be able to make evidence just saying anything unless you use rhetoric to do it.
So when it comes to...
A podcast format.
I think there is a difference between when somebody is presenting evidence selectively and highlighting narratives in a very partisan or partial way to construct an argument which in the moment can be persuasive,
can be compelling, but it's about using techniques of persuasion to push people in a way and being able to.
Identify that or aware when people are doing it.
I think all podcasters, I'm not talking about people like trained to be academics or anything, everybody does have these kind of detectors when they know somebody, you know, the used car salesman or whatever is trying to sell them something.
And I think when you're dealing with charismatic individuals, it's very important to build up the ability to detect when rhetoric is being...
Deployed in the service of an argument.
And I would like to see people called when they make a rhetorical argument, but I realize that's hard because there are people who are very good at what they do.
And when we look at the gurus that we look at, they have a very strong fluency with language, a kind of incredible ability with metaphor and the very good grasp of technological terminology, which they can use as much as.
Described so eloquently with Eric Weinstein with like a squid squirting ink in your face whenever you're challenged, right?
Just a big smokescreen of technical jargon and references to 14-dimensional space and maths and so on.
So it's a long-winded answer, but I want to say that for me, being able to recognize rhetoric and to kind of be prepared to push back on it is something that should be That's the problem,
right?
That fluency gets conflated for truthfulness or how compelling something is.
The sexiness of the delivery that Someone has.
And I see this as well with myself.
You know, go back and listen to episodes from when I very, very first started, which was three and a half years ago.
And I can barely manage to get through them or even like a tiny little bit of them.
I'm sure that you guys as well, you know, you're going to go back and listen to the ones that you first didn't think.
What was I saying?
Delivery is awful.
Why am I saying so much?
Why am I interrupting so much?
Why do I keep saying every second?
But when you realize how uncompelling is that?
Is that your one?
Yeah, that's one of many.
The idiosyncrasy.
Yeah, and then you realize, well, hang on a second.
If I find that less convincing, then that means that if you draw the development forward, as I become more and more adept at talking, I become more convincing.
Well, hang on a second.
How much of that is me actually knowing more about the topic and how much of that is me simply refining my delivery to be so much more smooth and so much more eloquent and fluid and articulate that...
The fundamental foundations that underpin what I'm saying may not have changed.
They have, but they may not have changed.
But my delivery and the wrapping that it's delivered in has changed so much that it sounds more compelling.
Yeah, it's a big problem.
I mean, you know, it's one of the things that we identify with our gurus, right?
It's this fluency and people use the fluency and the form as an indicator of substance.
It's much easier to sort of pay attention to.
It could be jargon or it could just be nice words, big words, words like mellifluous to describe someone's.
These kind of signifies that you know what you're talking about, that you're making deep and profound and interesting points when one can be following the form without having any of the substance.
So the actual points underneath that could be quite thin.
This is one of the problems of the modern world where a lot of the people that actually do know what they're talking about, like technical experts, In whatever the problem of the day is, covert or something else, aren't great public speakers.
They don't have the delivery, yeah.
Yeah, like that nerd who works in a lab all the time.
They haven't done 500 podcasts.
So one of the things that really sort of grabs our attention are people who act very science-y and talk very intellectual, but have none of, according to our lights anyway.
Don't have that substance.
I think they're a real danger.
This is the crazy thing.
I think they've convinced themselves.
They truly believe that they've got this galaxy-brained brilliance, which means they can just skim a couple of abstracts and suddenly they're an expert on XYZ.
That's just not the case.
These people don't exist, but the imitation of it does exist.
I also think, Chris, you probably have a bigger problem than us with the potential for sexiness to influence the content and the way that people receive it.
I'm just upset that we couldn't do this on video, so I could have done it topless.
We can't see your torso, but you do have a very symmetrical face.
This is apparent.
No, but you have a good delivery now.
I can see the 500 podcasts in the thing.
Extremely articulate and not saying kinder.
And he's good at turn-taking.
He can do turn-taking.
He's good at turn-taking, yeah.
There was another element that I actually wanted to bring up, which is increasingly online I'm seeing content creators who weaponize mutual hatred of an out-group rather than mutual bonding of an in-group.
This to me seems to be what's holding an awful lot of communities together at the moment.
The only reason, it's like the enemy of my enemy is my friend, but that's inherently incredibly fragile, right?
Like if you're only bonded together over the fact that you all have a bigger enemy, it only takes one more enemy that's within that group to occur for you to then fragment off and decide to go after them.
And that's something that I think, for better or worse, I'm particularly bad at weaponizing.
I'm not good at finding the enemy.
And pointing at them and saying, this is the reason for why whatever's going wrong is going wrong.
But that binding effect, I think, is something that does concern me a little bit because it's inherently fragile and it's built around hatred.
The bonding is built around mutual distaste for an out-group rather than mutual love or commonality with the in-group.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, it sounds like it can even be better not to be even thinking in terms of...
In groups and out groups in an ideal world, right?
Certainly there are a lot of people that started listening to our podcast and I think are attracted to us because they will see us as an IDW hater podcast.
And we could probably just do episode after episode on various characters there and a large section of the audience would never get tired of it.
But our last episode was on Brene Brown, a sort of self-help psychologist who has absolutely zero connection to.
True.
Any political faction.
Do you find that one a little bit more difficult to do?
Do you find it, obviously you have settled into a particular type of routine of speaking about culture and being able to talk about Twitter beef and, you know, the same sort of references come up.
And you said that you struggled to find things to sink your teeth into on the episode with Brene Brown because broadly it seemed like maybe you had a little bit.
You would have delivered it differently, but it was fundamentally okay, what she was saying.
Do you feel within yourselves the compulsion or where audience capture would manifest?
Have you noticed that, that you could just lean into IDW bashing all day, all night, and that would be the quickest way to get reach?
Yeah, negativity is easy and it sells, yeah.
And I would say, like, Brene Brown isn't the best example because I think, in general, she's relatively...
Unobjectionable.
If it was a different person that we had covered recently, I think that wasn't non-woke.
She is just slightly difficult because it's like arguing with an inspirational poster.
There's only so much you can argue with because the underlying sentiment is okay or even good.
I'll grant to an inspirational poster.
But on the point of whether it's harder for us When it's people that we might have more sympathy with and that our audience might not be as okay with us criticizing, it definitely is harder because one,
because we have sympathy for people.
So that automatically influences things.
But two, because like all people producing content and whether or not they are upfront about it, you are thinking About the reaction that you'll get when you release something and what you've released recently and what impression this gives, right?
And I actually think that's not necessarily a bad thing to have that.
Like, it might be bad if you were playing 20-dimensional chess to hide what your real intentions were, you know, to reignite anti-Semitism, but you're going to talk with whatever the case may be.
But in our case...
A lot of the considerations are about reflecting what we actually want to say and put out and that we don't want to just be that we're just going to take down all the people who we might politically be on the opposite side of the spectrum with.
And it wouldn't be interesting to us in the long run if that's what we focused on doing.
I don't think we've picked up a hardcore Trump contingent that we need to prune.
But I do think that Matt and I are pretty clear about where we see ourselves.
And so we try to create content that reflects that value.
And that means that sometimes we will annoy people who are, for example, dislike the IDW and are on the progressive left side.
And they might find some of our other takes annoying, but they still appreciate the anti-IDW stuff.
And I kind of think, well, the cost is that you have to listen to the other stuff that you might not like.
It's the candy episode and so on.
So I think being aware of audience capture, like in the same way that we are directing critical commentary or attention to you.
It applies to us because we're content creators now.
So, yeah.
Do you feel an additional level of pressure being the enforcers?
You know how videos of policemen who are driving and texting at the same time feels particularly egregious?
Do you feel the pressure that by being the guys that are kind of enforcing this, that you almost need to be held to a higher standard?
Matthew?
I haven't felt much pressure.
I think partly, like...
We make dumb jokes and we say silly things sometimes, right?
And we make fun of each other.
And I'd be quite… I mean, I'm trying to imagine, maybe it would feel differently, right?
But we haven't had anybody do a critical episode on us specifically.
Oh, we kind of have, actually.
We have.
We have, yeah.
We have had people, yeah.
I just don't listen to them, Chris.
This is the secret, right?
Well, let me tell you, man, it took me a number of weeks before I plucked up the courage to actually be able to listen to the episode that you guys did about me.
You know, you do something that you think is, that you feel, you're connected to emotionally, right?
And you're like, oh, fuck.
This is going to be uncomfortable to listen to on the back end.
So, yeah, I can...
Well, you may have done it just because you don't want to waste your time.
You've got better stuff to do with your time.
But mine was fear, existential fear.
No, no.
To your credit, you did.
I mean, look, I've certainly read an awful lot of hyperbolic, really harsh criticism.
Like everything you can imagine about stupid voices and funny faces and, you know, one-eyed and, you know.
It's all there.
You can read it.
It's not quite as bad when you're reading it as when people are actually hearing it.
But look, it's a bit like, you wouldn't know about this, but if you've ever done teaching at a university, you get student feedback.
You've probably filled out the student evaluation forms of the teachers, right?
Now, let me tell you, out of a class of 300 or so students, there's going to be some pretty harsh stuff in there.
Every term, every academic gets this.
Like really nasty stuff.
You get used to it.
You know what I mean?
You sort of learn to just kind of realize that sometimes it's more about them.
You know, a lot of times it's more about them than you, obviously.
And you can sort of pick out, well, you know, that's fair.
And you can sort of strip away the sort of, you know, mean and unfair stuff.
So yeah, I mean, I genuinely think I've got a reasonably thick skin because I kind of don't.
I think we're all kind of idiots, you know, like deeply.
And it's okay for people to point out that I'm an idiot too.
And I think that there's lots of problems with academics and there's lots of egotistical, annoying academics in the world.
You might be talking to two of them, but the thing that the academic world, I think, does well and why it doesn't fit so well with lots of the gurus that we've covered is that it fundamentally is critical.
So, you know, you write an article and you get reviews and it's like, it's a genre on Twitter, in academic Twitter, of people complaining about reviews because they're so harsh.
But the thing is, they are harsh and presentations at conferences disputing your work are very harsh.
It builds up, it's kind of a value in academia that you're able to accept criticism and maybe you're wrong or that you can push back against that.
But for me, part of the thing that attracted me to academia because of my personality was this or law.
This is academics in a nutshell, Chris.
Mentally very brave, physically very cowardly.
That's the type.
But yeah, it's true what Chris said.
I do research in addiction and particularly gambling.
There's a lot of money involved in that.
And where there's money involved, there'll be people incentivized to...
And I've been critical of the things that are associated with the gambling industry.
So that has inspired 300-page reports written by professional consultants just systematically describing all the ways in which everything I've done is wrong.
And it's all shit and mistaken and misplaced.
And I've got an agenda and you name it.
I've had guys that I'm very friendly with, we meet at conferences and have a drink and so on.
They've written these commentaries on my work, which is just, again, you're totally wrong.
Making elementary mistakes, your methodology is bad.
I guess that sounds quite abstract, like no one's making fun of my nose or whatever in those things.
But for an academic, that's kind of...
It's more central to you than your nose.
Yeah, exactly.
It's kind of like a compliment in a way.
The worst thing is to be ignored.
If you're not even worth criticizing and not even worth paying attention to, then for an academic, that's the worst thing.
It seems like the background in academia prepares you quite well for podcasting, at least as you start to gain an audience.
And this is something that...
David Fuller talks about an awful lot.
You know, what are the rules about sensemaking outside of the institutions?
There's your first sensemaking bingo bell that we can ring for today.
Nearly two hours without saying it.
But it is difficult, man.
Like, I'm coming into this using...
My background is standing on the door of a thousand club nights and watching a million drunk people go in and out of them.
And then you go, okay, now go and speak to a guy with...
Two PhDs about this book that has taken him 10 years to talk about.
So I think that I can't appeal to the entire internet to give their creators a little bit more room to breathe, but understanding that they're a moving target.
People don't mind you missing a penalty if they think you were trying to hit the goal, if that makes sense.
If they genuinely believe that you're trying to move forward towards something, you actually care about what you're doing, as opposed to the fact that you meant to miss because you're just...
Audience captured or you're being a sycophant or you're being a grifter or a shill or whatever.
But the slime of that term, the slime of being accused of any one of a number of different things is so hard to get off.
And this is why if you sort of sell your integrity, it's essentially impossible to buy it back.
There's certain creators online that we would all agree have gone so far down a particular cul-de-sac that they're irredeemable.
Now, there is nothing that you can do for the remainder of your days to get that back.
But the incentives are all aligned to going that way.
So a piece of advice to audience members would be if you are as invested in the outcomes of your favorite creators as the vitriolic comments online would suggest, why not use that opportunity to guide them in a better meaning way?
If somebody goes out of their way to send me an email which is a couple of paragraphs long and explains...
Hey man, I really appreciate the episode that you did with Dr. Patrick Moore, but I really think you're off and here are some of the people that you should have a look at.
I'll take time to reply to that.
Whereas someone going, this is fucking bullshit, in a YouTube comment, it doesn't work.
So, I don't know, maybe this is the way that you get to have an audience that's like the Blockton Report or Sam's audience, which appears to go out of its way to appreciate.
A little bit more the challenge or the nuance or the difficulty or the pushback against their existing worldview.
Maybe that's the way to do it, but it's a hard balance to strike, certainly.
I think even in their case, both of their cases, they're battling the same audience dynamics that we're talking about.
And there's a pool of certain topics that they acknowledge, including in their content, that maybe they don't want to fixate on.
I think all of those points...
Are well presented as well.
And that, at least for speaking personally, I'm kind of in favor of positive reinforcement for not treating people like dogs, but more like in my real life, when somebody does something good, I don't just react by only chastising with negative reinforcement.
Well, no, I'm much more self with my kids than it might seem.
In fairness to Chris, a recent example of that is, didn't Claire Lehman?
She's the editor.
Yeah, I was just about to bring it up.
I'm looking at your tweet.
This is nice to see.
Yeah, that's going to be nice.
But that is also, like you said, Chris, for a lot of people, especially people who might otherwise agree with a lot of what They would see that as us being naive to somebody who has promoted race science and has a magazine with a whole bunch of right-wing editors.
From my point of view, the thing is, I know all of that.
I'm still going to be critical about the stuff that I'm going to be critical about, but I can say something positive about a specific thing.
And I'm very careful in what I say.
I'm not going to endorse somebody's I think we do need to have the ability to have charity, not just to our people that fall within our spheres.
I guess the one little caveat, though, that I would add to that is what you're...
Describing, I think, with people being willing to extend charity and that kind of thing that I completely would sign on to it.
And I think like this conversation, for example, people who might have consumed our episode and had you as a caricature, this will probably cause them to reevaluate that.
And I think they should, because like all of the people that we look at, they are people, even if they're polemical people who...
Or snakes like Scott Adam.
But, you know, there's still people that interact with people in their daily life and get on with things.
And I think it helps for people to know that.
But the other, the like small thing I would put potentially as a point to raise there is that when you're having a discussion that potentially can, like anti-vax stuff at the minute is really big.
It's not okay for somebody to kind of Pull the card that, well, I don't know enough about this topic and I'm just having a conversation and yes, maybe I should have challenged them and so on.
Because for things like that, there's potentially very real consequences.
And I think for lots of people online, they view stuff with the potential rise of right-wing populism and stuff to be stuff that has real consequences.
So part of the reaction is them saying that, you know, they view, well, If they're regarded as hyperbolic or not, I can kind of understand why if they think that's introducing a very real threat that they would respond so strongly.
And the same would go for those on the right who might regard anything that could justify communism as immediately needing to be stamped out.
So I guess I'm probably just saying something similar, that there's lots of fuzzy boundaries at some areas, and there is legitimate...
Push back.
And then there's also people will just have different values that mean they react more strongly to some content.
And there won't be a part where we can all come together and say, well, this is all the things which, yeah, because people will disagree.
And that wouldn't be a good piece of content either, I don't think.
If you try to appeal to everybody, you'd say nothing.
It would just be this bland, vanilla, very boring.
Yeah, I mean, people's different tolerances are going to color what it is that they find acceptable or unacceptable or completely heinous.
And yeah, man, I mean, that's the balance.
That's the balance that everybody's trying to strike.
But I think from my side, seeing your quote tweet of Claire as she's publicly conceding that she's getting things wrong, that is something that is super important.
Like it or not, you guys have...
Tumbled arse first into a position of status within certain cultures.
And like I say, man, I was at Thanksgiving dinner, my first ever Thanksgiving in America a few nights ago.
And I was sat at a table with a bunch of different people who have really big platforms.
And I mentioned that was coming on the show and they all knew who you were, every single one of them.
So whether you guys understand it or not, there is an impact that's coming off the back of this.
Do you need to be held to a higher standard because you're the ones that are doing the criticism?
I don't know.
Is it the case that you have to do even extra research because the externalities, that I would say maybe a little bit more.
As you go a bit further down and as the show begins to grow, the potential externalities of doing something, the responsibility increases.
But I have to concede that as well.
I have to concede that on my side, that me having a conversation with Stefan Molyneux when I've got 20,000 subs.
Isn't the same as me having a conversation with Stefan Molyny where I don't push back where I've got a quarter of a million.
So yeah, we're all on a similar sort of path.
Can I ask one thing about that dinner?
I won't ask you to disclose the participants, but was there food beyond meat served?
Yes.
I'm just like Chris's portrayal of us as like the Velvet Underground or the Brian Jones style mascot, like this sort of hipster kind of band that the public doesn't know about, but other bands say when they nominate their influences and stuff.
Man, I'm telling you, the show is a guilty pleasure for industry insiders within this space.
There will be as many people who sit on the right of the aisle as on the left who secretly want to see someone that they maybe thought was a whatever thing taken down.
Because of the position that you have cultivated, you're able to say the things that very few other people can say and definitely not publicly.
For better or worse, it seems like it's going to continue going and growing.
It'll be interesting.
I wonder what happens when the big names...
I don't know whether you think that there's a bottomless pit of people that are obvious targets.
But every time that you tick one off, there's one fewer to go down next.
It's bottomless.
Yeah, like the way you describe it does make me feel a little bit uncomfortable because we never thought of ourselves as being the deciders or the judgemakers or whatever.
And I could see how it obviously can happen.
It's a bit unfortunate though or uncomfortable to be aware of that.
Yeah, we do see it as being a bottomless pit of discourse.
Right.
And the idea was not so much to say, okay, that's a good one.
That's a bad one.
That one's so, so, whatever.
But more about saying, here's some stuff we can analyze critically and use it as an exercise in critical thinking and at least give out bio lights anyway.
Do that kind of analysis of the material.
And there's obviously an inexhaustible font of that.
Mainly though, I completely agree.
We've come across people with Small, relatively small platforms, but actually seem to be kind of, they seem to be on a trajectory kind of up and they fit our criteria for gurus absolutely perfectly.
Like they're more guru-esque than our star gurus.
So I would like to cover them.
For the reasons that we do the podcast, which is this is useful discourse to analyze rhetoric and so on, stuff that we can pick apart and in a useful way.
And it's not about saying, oh, is this person who's super popular, who shouldn't be popular, and we're going to tell people that they shouldn't listen to them.
No, no, it's a good example of material.
So I would like to cover people that are not necessarily in any way, shape or form famous.
But that means, as you say, and as Chris said, we have to remember that these are real people.
They may have all kinds of flaws and may be babbling away in a way that we find super-duper annoying, but we have to try to find a way to do it responsibly.
I also would say that we complained about this with selection bias, specifically in the episode that you did with God, Chris, that relying on your inbox is never a very good way to get a sample of a general population because...
It'll tell you about people that like your contact or don't like it, but it won't give you the general full population.
But we know from our inboxes that there are a bunch of people who are much more sympathetic towards the people that we cover that can still consume our content and appreciate, and they might even have changed some of their views or so on.
It's horses for courses, so some other people will prefer things that are incredibly vitriolic.
Really eviscerating people on a personal level.
And I don't begrudge people enjoying that kind of content if they want.
But I think that the notion that that is what we give, or at least what we intend to do, it isn't like that.
And we'll have fun with the episodes and that.
But when you've talked about how being featured on the episode had an impact, and it's nice to hear, right?
It's a positive reinforcement for us that, oh, well, this is kind of what we want to do.
But in the same way, it also makes you reflect on some of the things that we said about you and the way that we characterized you.
I think from this conversation, from the previous conversation, and just from your content, it's unfair and potentially just mean.
So it also does, when I'm covering content now, and as we get bigger, I do generally think about, okay, there's no chance that the person will hear this.
And it obviously hasn't stopped me being critical, but I hope it has somewhat made me less mean.
So, yeah.
I just want to thank you, Chris, for reaching out to the other Chris and coming on to talk to us.
You can thank me as well.
It's okay.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
You're all great, yeah.
But it's generally helpful.
Like, you explained how it was unpleasant and it was squirming to have to listen to us.
And it also makes me squirm to talk to someone who I have said these very many things about, right?
And that's a good thing, right?
Because it's all part of the learning experience, I think.
It's all part of the sensemaking.
And the other thing I want to...
This is the sensemaking self-congratulatory.
But it's true though, which is that you're open to it.
Despite the harshness and the meanness and the unfairness of some of the comments, you were able to extract other parts of the criticism which were valid.
And we do stand by intellectual-type criticism of the content and stuff like that, particularly of Gad Saad or whoever.
We generally stand by it.
But not many people, I don't think that's easy for people to do, to pull out legitimate criticism, put aside the nasty shit and take it on board.
And as you've explained, it's actually had a positive influence.
And well, that's probably a better reaction.
I think that's one of the reasons why your open door policy for people who get featured is important because As soon as David Fuller mentioned to me,
he was like, hey man, just FYI, the Guru Pod guys are going to do a feature on you and it's the Gad Sad episode.
I'm like, okay, heart rate's going up a little bit.
But then he said, I think I might be able to put you in touch with Chris if you want to try and have a conversation with him at some point.
And as soon as there was a let-off valve for me to go, okay, no matter what happens, if I'm represented well or badly, I have the opportunity to come on and thrash it out.
With the guys, that pressure release valve, I think that that carries an awful lot of weight.
So yeah, I think that if you're going after someone that isn't monumental 2 million, 20 million subscriber account person, right?
That's kind of not even probably going to see what you do.
If you're going after a smaller creative, that's totally legitimate.
As long as you've got a little bit of understanding, all right, what's the snide topspin that we're throwing on top of this?
Like, how much does this mean and how much of this is legitimate?
Whilst not totally nerfing the reason that the show is enjoyable in the first place, but the open-door policy just means that it kind of doesn't really matter in a little way.
Any misrepresentations today, I feel like vindicated.
Yeah, yeah.
And, you know, we've come to a point where maybe you guys have a better understanding of what it's like to be a small-time creator that's growing.
And also building a skill set from literally zero of not having any understanding about how to have intellectual or academically rigorous conversations.
And having that policy just permits people to come on and then do the same thing that we've done today.
And I will just add that I'm kind of glad when the online discourse is not just populated by academics or aggrieved known academics.
That shouldn't be the criteria and nor do I think me and Matt believe you need to be an academic to look critically at content or anything like that.
Like I've never thought that and I don't like that kind of elitism.
So we definitely bring biases with us from academia and potentially from expecting that people know things, right?
Like just recently we referenced a study in a conversation and then one of our listeners sent a message saying, What the hell was the study that you were talking about?
Because you two clearly knew it, but we don't.
And that's just myopic thing that everybody has to some extent.
Yeah, I'm glad that there aren't more academics around taking off the thing.
So I don't think everybody needs in any way to become more academic, just more critical.
That's the thing that I think, That's what I would have taken away.
You know, that's the primary change that I've seen, an increase in skepticism.
And then also understanding all of the different layers around how do you deploy that?
What does that mean for your relationship with this person?
How far can you push?
You know, re-controlling that frame about who's got the status, who's got the power within this particular situation.
You said something that I thought was really interesting from the Brene Brown conversation.
Where you were talking about how heavy criticism can cause people to shy away from speaking so much that they don't bother anymore.
And that's what I think particularly you guys need to make sure that you steer clear of.
If there's almost people are scared to have conversations in case the Guru's Pod guys get a hold of it and schwack them.
That's really, you know, that's kind of how I'm like, fuck, like what if they do another one?
What if they do a double header and then it's Gadsad and me and then just me guruing my way through whatever?
It's a legitimate...
Fear.
So yeah, like I say, to fly the flag for the small creators, I'm glad that I've put that on your radar today.
Yeah, definitely.
So the sun is beginning to rise and my children will soon be emerging from their coffins as well.
So Chris, it's been a genuine pleasure and as Matt said, coming on and talking to us is to your credit already, but I hope Our audience can also get,
maybe it'd be funny to go back and listen to the Gatsad episode if they haven't heard it.
You can do that.
There might be people who this is your first exposure and they'll be like, oh, what was he?
They don't need to.
I don't think that they need to.
And by the way, the only one last thing, Chris, that I just mentioned, I was Snarky about the Call of Duty metaphors that you employed.
I heard myself talking about them yesterday.
You were talking about Gadsad selecting his weapon.
Okay, of satire, yes.
I have to say, I did enjoy that because I was being kind of snarky, but I did enjoy the first-person shooter reference.
You also accused me of owning Bitcoin, which I don't, sadly.
That was Matt.
That was Matt.
I think that was Matt.
I stare by my take that you seem like a Bitcoin holder.
That's still true.
Somebody made a meme that there was a Venn diagram which included Matt as not having Bitcoin and not knowing what they are, and me as having Bitcoin and knowing what they are.
But it's probably actually the...
The opposite way.
I was going to say, that's just the spectrum of accusing Matt of being a boomer.
Yeah, that's right.
Well, Chris is always accusing me of being near to death.
So ancient.
Yeah, the visual component for the listeners who can't see.
Clearly, the three of us look closest to death, but I maintain that this is partly the filter and the lighting in this room.
It's not purely my reflection.
Neither of them look convinced by this, but it's true.
I'm not this alabaster in real life.
Anyway.
All right, Chris.
Enough of your trailing off Babel.
We're going to wrap this up.
Thank you.
Thank you very much, Chris, for coming on.
It's been a pleasure.
Thank you.
And enjoy your night, Chris.
Enjoy your day.
Look after your children.
I will.
And you can grovel at the feet of a genuine muscle master, Mark.
