This week a bonus Gurometer episode has sneaked out from behind the golden curtain of the DTG Patreon pay wall.We aren't out of the Rogan-verse yet. Our last task is to try and scientifically quantify the precise guru nature of the two good doctors using our patented Gurometer instrument. Are they guru wannabes, mid-tier, or high level? Join us to find out.Next week, we will be back with a full length guru episode!...and for those who would like to see all the ratings of previous gurus, you can find those here.
Hello and welcome to the Gurometer edition of Decoding the Gurus.
For people who don't know, this is where we take the gurus that we have recently decoded and we supplement it with a highly scientific enterprise of putting them into our trademarked gurometer system,
scoring them according to alchemical and scientific procedures.
And quantify their guru essence, extract it into a single number, a numerical score of gurucity, if you will.
So if this is the first time that you've joined us for this exciting adventure, get ready for entirely subjective numbers to be thrown around for a whole bunch of categories that we consider quintessential to our gurus.
Good evening, Matt.
Good evening, Chris.
It's late here, but I'm ready.
I'm ready to crank up the gurometer, get those numbers in there, give it a big spin.
And we're going to quantify two gurus simultaneously.
It's never been done, Matt.
It's never been done.
We're not afraid to tread new ground on this podcast.
Yeah, we can handle it.
It's a robust device.
It is.
It's Peter McCulloch and Robert Malone, the recent guests of Joe Rogan, who we...
Looked at and found to be pretty much anti-vaccine misinformation specialists.
But whatever your views on them may be, there is one thing that we didn't emphasize on the original episode that we just wanted to cover before we start the grometer, because I think it bears highlighting.
And there was so much nonsense.
We were kind of overloaded that I think it would be useful just to play.
One clip and to highlight what they are actually claiming occurred.
If you want to see the Johns Hopkins planning seminar called the Spars Pandemic in 2017, where they had a symposium, people showed up.
They wrote up their symposium findings.
They published this.
It says it's going to be a coronavirus.
It's going to be related to MERS and SARS.
It's going to come over here to the United States.
It's going to shut down cities and frighten people.
There's going to be confusion regarding a drug, hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin, and we're going to utilize all that in order to railroad the population into mass vaccination.
It's laid out in the Johns Hopkins Spars pandemic training seminar.
The only thing that got wrong was the year.
They said it was going to be 2025.
Instead, it landed a few years early.
But that wasn't the worst clip I heard from McCulloch.
That was a bad one, but...
The point, I think that clip highlights it a bit better, that what they're alleging, actually, it's Peter McCulloch, not Robert Malone, these particular clips, but they're highlighting that the whole thing was planned.
And in particular, they want to highlight this training exercise that Johns Hopkins had, a kind of pandemic planning preparation exercise.
And because they talked about a potential coronavirus and kind of game-planned how to respond to it, that that shows that this is not a natural virus, right?
This is a thing which the globalists are releasing in order to induce their vaccination campaign.
And just to highlight that that's Alex Jones-level conspiracies, right?
This is not people who are just saying, oh, we need more safety data on vaccines.
It's people claiming that the pandemic was planned, that the vaccines are a social control mechanism, and that they have these documents to show it.
And that's exactly what Alex Jones says.
And I don't know if I played this clip, but this one was another really extreme one that I thought it would be good for people to hear.
So here you go.
And we've had a giant loss of life, a giant number, millions and millions of unnecessary hospitalizations.
And it seemed to me, and I've told Tucker Carlson and many others, it seems to me early on there was an intentional, very comprehensive suppression of early treatment in order to promote fear, suffering, isolation, hospitalization,
and death.
And it seemed to be completely organized and intentional in order to Create acceptance for and then promote mass vaccination.
So you believe this is a premeditated thing that they were doing.
So they realized that in order to get people enthusiastic about taking this vaccine, the best way to do that was to not have a protocol for treatment.
It's not just my idea, now it's completely laid out by the book by Dr. Pam Popper, the book recently published by Peter Bregan, COVID-19 and the Global Predators, We Are the Prey.
We are the prey.
Yes, and you did play that one, and it came in at about two hours in, two hours and two minutes, if people are keen to focus on it.
Yeah, so at the time when we were recording that, we just listened to so much of this nonsense, frankly, that...
Some of it just slipped by us.
In fact, some of the leads like that, there was just so crazy.
So we didn't talk enough about it.
But yeah, if you want to go back, it's about two hours in.
That's where the crazy really gets going.
So just to be clear, he's saying that the pandemic was planned, that it was orchestrated, one.
Two, that they deliberately suppressed life-saving.
Early treatments, by which he means hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, which would have saved people's lives, so deliberately killing people, and did all this to put the population of America, I suppose, into a state of fear so that they would be forced to take these vaccines which he thinks are dangerous and don't work.
And this is a postscript to the episode before we get to the grometer, but just to point out that there's a guy online called Vinay Prasad, who's a doctor who produces content online about COVID and that kind of thing.
And he wrote a thread responding to the claims made recently on Joe Rogan.
And he very much took a line of, I disagree with them about the dangers of vaccines, but they raise...
Very important issues.
And if you read it, you come away with the impression that despite getting some things wrong, these are important voices that we need to have.
And it's good that Joe is introducing this discussion to the public.
And what he didn't touch on was any of this, right?
Like this kind of thing or the promotion of HIV AIDS denialists or RFK junior anti-vaxxers.
The claims made are sanitized into a version where it's reasonable disagreement.
And I want to point out that this is a step which often happens.
And then people will respond and kind of say, so you're against free dialogue and you're against, you know, you want to close down all debates.
And what I'm highlighting and what we highlighted on the episode is what these guys are alleging, it's not within the realm of...
Reasonable debate and stuff.
It's outright conspiracism.
It's Alex Jones-level stuff.
And if you want to treat it like that and discuss it, fine.
If you're appropriately critical, if you're actually arguing back.
But Joe Rogan is incapable of doing that.
So what he's doing is introducing to a huge audience people that are advocating very extreme positions, but they're presented as reliable.
Cautious figures who have very important information, which is being suppressed.
As for Vinay Prasad, he either hasn't listened to the whole thing.
He did.
Or he's being just greatly irresponsible, perhaps because he's angling for an appearance on Joe Rogan or something.
Who knows?
Whatever.
I put my flag in the ground that he or somebody like him, but I suspect him because Joe cited him recently positively as well.
He will be brought on.
And he will respond to some of the points that McCulloch and Malone raised, and he will be generally in fever of vaccines.
But he will also say, you know, but a lot of the points that they raised are important and need to be discussed.
You do not need to both sides of shit, do you?
No, it's just that it's going to be presented.
As you see, Joe is opening a debate and he's willing to have people that disagree, but like Vinay...
In his threads is just praising Joe.
So what Joe will do, and again, let's see if I'm right or not, is that he will have someone on who's willing to say that what he's saying is good, that he's an important figure.
And that is a pushback that he can cope with.
This is a point that from just me personally really highlights the limits of this.
Free speech discourse culture.
Let's, let's hash it out and sense make the shit out of this and we'll get to the bottom of it.
It is really unhelpful.
Like what you end up doing is giving dignity to and legitimizing absolutely batshit crazy as if the truth is somewhere in between that batshit crazy and some version of reality.
And it is not a good thing.
It isn't a healthy thing.
And it is so easy to Present yourself as the peacemaker, as the sense maker, as the person who's willing to come along and talk this stuff out.
Because Joe will go right back to having his conspiracy fruitcakes on.
And the occasional appearance of someone like Vinay Prasad will help legitimize what he's doing, which is disinformation, dangerous disinformation.
Like this stuff just needs to be mocked and laughed at, which is...
Which is what we do, but more people need to do it.
Benai Prasad and all those like him that are definitely more reasonable than Malone, definitely more reasonable than McCulloch.
But there's this kind of set that are kind of the darlings of Barry Weiss and others.
You'll find them often.
And you will also see them penning papers saying that a year ago that the pandemic is going to end in four months' time or something like that.
And I'm not saying that nobody else has made Predictions which have turned out wrong.
But what happens is like the mainstream and the institutional things get slammed by the heterodox figures for their takes, which turned out to be wrong, right?
Or their kind of advice, which should have changed quicker with the evidence or that.
But these heterodox doctors who make extreme claims that turn out to be completely wrong.
They're brought on to take victory laps about how badly the institutions are getting things wrong and stuff.
And it's kind of difficult because in a lot of respects, they're more reasonable.
But I was thinking about it in terms of waves that I've seen in this pandemic.
And you have the first wave, which is the anti-vaxxers who are always anti-vaxxers, the Andrew Whitefields, the RFK Jr.
Then you have...
This kind of second wave, like the people that we are looking at, McCulloch and Robert Malone and Brett Weinstein and so on, who are directly connected to the anti-vaxxers, right?
Like they're recommending RFK Jr. and they're going to marches together with him now.
But they had that kind of appearance of separation initially, right?
They're not anti-vaxxers.
They just have some concerns.
And I think there's a kind of third wave, which is...
Which is not...
There are important distinctions because generally they are not saying that people don't get vaccinated.
But they're very much on the side of both sides to the point of arguing that people like Malone and McCulloch not pointing out that they're disinformation, they're people spreading disinformation, but rather that they just have different opinions and they've got some things wrong that I disagree with.
The institutions have got things wrong too.
And it's a lot of their concerns are very legitimate that people have.
And it's a kind of enlightened centrism, which tries to argue that everything is a golden mean, that there's excesses amongst the heterodox, Brett Weinstein and so on.
They may have took things too far, but didn't the CDC and the WHO?
So like both are equally at fault and like, no, it isn't equal.
One has been saying vaccines are good and helpful.
And that, you know, the COVID is a serious disease and the other has been implying that it's a conspiracy, that the vaccines are harmful and that ivermectin is a miracle cure.
It's not equal.
Well, the thing that unites a lot of these characters is the motivation to stake out some territory in that independent commentator space.
All of these people.
Have an interest in being a public communicator, having an online platform.
And it occurs to me that the incentives for someone in that position is very much to pander, I think, to some degree, to popular sentiments and to stake out a position that is recognizably different from the mainstream orthodoxy.
Because if it's not, then they don't really have any added value to add to the ecosystem.
I can see the incentives and the siren called that inexorable pull towards hot takery, you know, and it's not, like you said, the distinctions are important.
These people are not equivalent to Malone and McCulloch, but you know, it is, it's a slippery slope and the incentives just pull people in the wrong direction.
There's just no online cache to be made for Moderation, tepid takes, the CDC, WHO positions, which, despite them getting it wrong occasionally, are the most correct positions.
So the issue that people take with that is they'll say, well, look, CDC is political.
You know, it says five days is now the quarantine time and so on.
But I think a point I would want to make clear is our position is not everything that the CDC and WHO ever said was exactly correct.
Like, no.
You factor into institutions that they get things wrong, that there are political considerations.
That should be your baseline standard for dealing with any institutions, that there will be mistakes, that there will be differences of opinion, and that there will be times when there are politics which influence the things.
So it isn't that you can't be critical of these institutions or the decisions that you make.
And all scientists and all policymakers are critical, do have debates about what is the appropriate thing.
But the point is that the fundamental basics in most cases, like if you follow the advice of the mainstream institutions, they are things like stay socially distanced, wear masks for the vast majority of the pandemic, right?
Wear masks, get vaccinated.
That's it.
Right?
The kind of course and all this stuff about, you know, the correct time for school openings or the appropriate time for quarantines after exposure and so on.
There are differences of opinion there.
Well, yeah, I mean, like those are all legitimate questions, right?
I fully support people having, you know, expressing whatever opinion they may have.
So I'm all for heterodoxy of opinion.
I guess what we're talking about is what seems like a detectable bias, a bias of the heterodox towards a certain kind of take, which is more, is going to appeal to Joe Rogan type audiences.
And I think specifically and pragmatically appealing to these bigger figures so that you can align yourself with them, go under their wing.
Look, if your sense-making apparatus cannot detect the conspiratorial undertones in the content of Robert Malone, Peter McCulloch and Brett Weinstein, your sense-making apparatus is faulty and it's not correctly detecting conspiracy theorists and anti-vax sentiment.
So that's my general thing is, you know, whatever your opinion of the CDC, the WHO or whatever organization, whatever institution, whatever public health body.
That's one thing, but if you're not identifying what the problem is with the figures that become luminaries in the heterodark sphere, your bullshit detector is miscalibrated.
That's all.
That's it.
That's all.
That's all.
Have whatever opinion you like about school openings.
That's fine.
Grometer.
Grometer, Matt.
Let's kick it up.
Kick it up.
So now we're going to demonstrate the validity of...
These features that we have identified as important to gurus.
So there are 10 of them.
The first one is galaxy brainness.
And this refers to the tendency for gurus to claim expertise over a wide constellation of topics, not limit themselves to a specialist area, but to kind of opine across a constellation of areas and concepts.
So how do you think this applies?
For McCulloch and Malone.
Peter McCulloch has shifted over to virology from cardiology.
What about Malone?
Well, I think, you know, it's a little bit tricky this because they tend to stick to their theme of like vaccines and virology and public health.
But within that, they range quite far, right?
We saw Malone claiming credit for a whole cavalcade of different technologies and vaccines and so on.
And I think they do also have these broader worldviews that kind of fill in with the great reset and all this kind of stuff.
But the fact that they limit themselves primarily to the health and vaccine space, I'm going to give them a three, I think, for this because of that, like in the middle, both of them.
Yeah, I agree.
I mean, these guys are a little bit different from many of our gurus in the sense that they...
They've come to prominence largely through this anti-vax stuff.
So they're kind of the single-issue type people.
So look, I'm going to give Peter McCulloch three, Robert Malone two.
Nice, big, nice.
So cultishness, the second, what's that?
What do we call these?
The second...
Domain?
Axis.
Axis?
We've got ten of them?
God.
Well, in any case, it's about strong in-group, out-group boundaries and disparaging of people in the out-group as sheep or the kind of brainwashed masses, victims of mass psychosis, mass formation psychosis.
So, in my case, this isn't hard.
Five-five for both of them.
Everyone is against them.
Everyone that doesn't agree with them.
It's a sheep that wants to kill patients.
We saw a fair bit of demonizing, which is really on the nose of healthcare workers and frontline people being more concerned about their own safety, being these box checkers, just really unconcerned with actually helping patients.
The other people who care are them.
Unbelievable.
Can you imagine that?
I'm only, look, I'm going to give them fours just because they don't do, you know, they don't actively, I mean, they have their clique of similarly minded people.
And what you said is true, but unlike some gurus, they don't actively maintain a community as far as I know.
I think you might be giving them too much credit.
Malone is cultivating a community on Substack and...
He praises Alexandros Marinos who makes threads about him, you know, defending them, kind of giving the little guru pat, you know, the people that say nice things and whatnot.
I'll give him a five then.
That's the guru influence of me on you, Matt there.
But the next one.
Again, this isn't very hard for me, but the next axis is anti-establishmentarianism.
Yep.
So this is the sort of reflexive opposition to any forms of authority and other experts and the establishment believing it's corrupt and has nefarious ends and so on.
This isn't hard for me either, Chris.
Did you detect that sentiment?
Yeah.
I mean, if you guys have heard the episode, you'll know why we're giving them five on this.
We just played the clips.
They're trying to kill you.
The system is trying to kill you.
And the next one, again, it's almost like the grommeter was telomere for them in some respect.
Grievance mongering.
Following after and feeling beset by the system that hasn't given you enough credit.
Did you detect a hint of that in any of their statements?
A bit of a backstory where I haven't been properly recognized for their accomplishments.
Yes, I did.
So should we briefly reprise that for people?
So let's see.
Malone claims he was the inventor of the mRNA.
Vaccines and that people are failing to acknowledge this.
What am I forgetting?
Your memory is better than mine.
Well, he claimed to have invented or been on the spear tip of a variety of vaccines, including the vaccine against Ebola.
Both of them are claiming that they have developed protocols, which in Peter McCulloch's case, he identified early.
And would have saved 85 to 90% of deaths.
Robert Malone got the protocols from China.
He sent them to the CIA, but they didn't put it in.
So all of this is they were on the cutting edge.
They were ignored and they've been mistreated by the establishment simply because they're trying to bring the truth to the masses.
Strong.
Grievance mongering on both cases.
When they tell those stories too, they emanate grievance.
I know.
It's almost like they're grievance monsters.
They were created purely from grievance.
In Aristotle's framework, they are the...
The forms, right?
The pure forms, the concepts.
Grievance embodied.
Embodied, yeah.
That's my image of them.
Yes, the rest of us.
We're pale imitations.
We can't approximate that.
Just shadows.
We're just grievance shadows dancing on the cave wall.
Exactly.
So the next one, again, I don't think this is hard.
Self-aggrandizement regarding themselves as Important figures and like...
Robert Malone's wife had to be banned from Wikipedia for changing his Wikipedia page to make out that he invented all of these things.
And he was upset about it.
He regarded that as a, you know, an example of the system feeling to operate correctly.
So yeah, like if my wife edited a Wikipedia page about me, if such a thing existed, which it doesn't, it would be to correct.
Don't give him that much credit.
He didn't.
That's him just making too large claims.
So it just speaks volumes at them.
Throughout those interviews, so much of it is these I statements.
I was trying to tell them this and I developed that.
What is it?
The tip of the spear, cutting the edge, whatever it is.
Yeah.
So it's not hard to detect.
Well, it does seem hard to protect for some of Joe Rogan's audience who regard them as humble figures.
Cassandra Complex, Mike, your favorite one.
My favorite one.
And boy, does it give me a warm feeling deep inside to know that this addition to the Garometer, paying dividends, Chris, paying big dividends, I'm giving them a five for this because this is, of course, them being The voice in the wilderness,
trying to warn people of this terrible impending danger, being doomed to be ignored.
That's all I talk about.
That's all I talk about.
How they were trying to warn people.
For three hours, that's all they talked about.
One objection to the Cassandra complex, which has been raised to the label, is that Cassandra was correct.
But to those people who raised that objection, I just want to point out that Matt preempted you.
You know, a prescient scientist that he is, because he didn't call them Cassandras.
He said Cassandra Complex, meaning they believe themselves to be Cassandra.
Not that they are, in fact, Cassandras.
So there you go.
Checkmate critics.
That's right.
We will not rename it the Chicken Little Complex, as some people requested.
Next is, and again, man, it's like shooting fish in a barrel.
Revolutionary theory.
So this axis, I hate that description, but anyway, this axis is referring to the belief that they themselves have created a revolutionary insight, a new theory that can transform some field,
some topic, some area.
They're not just...
You know, people contributing, there are people out there forging new ground.
And yeah, I mean, yeah, five, five, five, five, five.
Yeah.
Now, like Malone in particular, that's just really obvious, right?
But what about with McCulloch?
No, it's there too, because McCulloch was a hydroxychloroquine guy and he's from there, you know, he's He's constantly claiming that my protocol, Joe, my protocol, if it was put in, it would have,
this pandemic, I went to the Congress and I told them that we need to, you know, to start doing these treatments.
I told them, Joe, I told them, I told them.
And they listened to my testimony and I told the American people, Joe, so he believes he, you know, worked out this protocol that can cure.
90% of the, or prevent 90% of the deaths from COVID.
And both of them, this was the other funny thing was, they both were saying to Joe, you know, basically what you took, Joe, that's the, I call that, you know, that's my protocol, basically, Joe.
And then Malone similarly saying, yes, you know, Joe, those are all, those are things that I identified as important that you took.
So they both want to be the source.
Yeah, yeah, they both invented that.
This cocktail of drugs that don't work, almost certainly, by the way.
Yeah, some of them, you know, monoclonal antibodies, but these are the things.
They don't need to invent the things that work because they work, but they add in everything else as well.
Hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin as well.
Chuck everything in, except for the kitchen sink, is not an invention, guys.
Pseudo-confined bullshit.
Okay.
This is the one.
So this is, this is an interesting one because it's, it's got to do with the language, right?
And the exposition.
It could be a combination of technical jargon, could be gish galopping with a whole bunch of citations and references to things.
It could be using a lot of academic-y or philosophical sounding words in creating new phrases.
Oh, a new phrase was coined by, I forget which one.
Mass formation psychosis.
Mass formation psychosis, not hypnosis.
No, and he is taking it from someone else, but McCulloch is the one who popularized it.
I think that's a good example, though.
It's a really good example.
It sounds like it might be a thing.
It sounds like something a psychologist or sociologist might say, but it's not a thing.
And he uses it quite effectively.
Both of them.
Yeah, they rattle off a whole bunch of features.
And it's just something that's just made up.
Very conveniently serves the ends that they want.
So I'll also add to this, Matt.
I know it's an anecdotal data point, but I don't have any reason to doubt it to this point.
I had a friend who's a medical doctor who listened to the episode and he was kind of shocked when he listened to it.
But I said, Matt and me are not medical experts.
So I was just curious, when they're talking about...
The medical topics and, you know, they're saying the various facts about the way that the, you know, immune system works or whatever.
Like, is that, you know, is that medically pretty much accurate?
Or like, how does that sound to a medic?
And he said, it's using the words, they're kind of talking about things, but it's just gobbledygook, which sounds scientific, right?
They're mixing in things and they're just kind of saying stuff.
So he was very much of the impression that it's like technobabble designed to impress, even if the people have actual expertise, right?
And they are able to do so, that its function is medical technobabble.
And that's his view.
He's not a culture war guy or that kind of thing.
I can't judge that myself.
And I was slightly convinced by the...
Well, that's what I was going to say.
That's quite interesting because you and I can detect the psychology, sociology type, anthropology, influence type, academic-y psychobabble.
We can just smell that and go, that's not right.
But that medical stuff, yeah, that went by me as well.
It's quite effective.
I trust my source, Matt.
I'm outsourcing to him.
I'm going to give McCulloch a five and Malone a four, just because I think Malone is a bit more softly spoken, not in terms of tone, but in terms of his ability to rattle off the terminology.
Yeah.
I think I'm influenced to give both of them a five on this because like, as well as that, the fact checking that we did that, you know, we did, we did some ourselves, but you know, a lot of what we relied on other people doing fact checking, you know, it obviously revealed that.
So much of what they said was just factually wrong.
Yet the way in which they would cite articles and cite studies and cite this, that, and the other, like a whole bunch of evidence, evidence, evidence.
It was cosplay, man.
You're completely right.
If I take the pseudo-profound to include citing studies in a way that is performative to give you credibility, it's not accurately representing them, then they...
They definitely did that a lot.
So, yeah, I'm going to bump Malone up a point for that.
You've influenced me in return.
Good.
And so we're down to the last two axes on the parameter.
We can call them something else.
What would you like to call them?
I don't know.
What do you do when you do a, what do we call it, a factor analysis?
Factors.
What do you extract when you have a back turned nose?
I don't know.
It's just, it's too...
Mathematical babbable for me to say axes.
I can only deal with two axes, X and Y. That's all I can handle.
Oh, really?
I can visualize ten dimensions.
That's easy for you, is it?
It wasn't until I became a professor that I could do that.
Yeah, well, they don't tell you about the ability to see extra dimensions.
As a lowly associate professor, I can only master three.
When I get a graph for three dimensions, I'm not able to, you know.
Manipulate it mentally in my mind, but when I get promoted, that's it.
The 10 dimensions will open to me.
The graphs just look like a straight line.
That's right.
But we can't call them factors because...
We haven't done a factor analysis, and they didn't emerge from us.
Matt, look, we're using our technical, incredible know-how.
See, that would be TechnoBevel.
Well, so you think Axies is better?
You're the statsman, Matt.
You're the statsman.
I'll go with what you tell me.
Axies it is.
Okay.
All right.
Instead of Axies of all four, Axies of all four.
Foundations?
Foundations?
Anyway.
No, that's too much like Hyatt's moral foundations.
We can't use that.
Yeah, that's psychobabble nonsense.
This is psych.
Throwing shit.
Throwing shit on moral findings.
Let's just call them stuff.
Anyway, enough, Matt.
I don't even know why you brought it up.
Conspiracy mongering.
Oh, now this is a difficult one.
This is a hard one.
It is.
You know, they were very reticent to invoke any conspiracies and I didn't really detect that much.
You know, it was pretty much mostly factual stuff that's actually happening.
Yeah, yeah.
Just some reasonable concerns.
No, no, no, no.
What?
Was that Australian sarcasm?
It wouldn't be Northern Irish sarcasm because I would never mention that.
So I just detected a hint of Australian sarcasm slipping in there.
I didn't do a good job of it.
I'm too tired to be properly sarcastic.
I mean, I think that's the thing about them.
Like, you know, you're a proper anti-vaxxer when you're a conspiracist.
Like there are people that are just vaccine hesitant.
You know what I mean?
They do exist.
They are a thing.
Yeah.
And they just don't want to get a vaccine.
They just don't have the idea of it.
You know, they might have some strange ideas about natural health or something like that.
You don't have to be a conspiracist, but when you're properly into it and you're in the Facebook groups and you're sharing stuff around, there's always a conspiracy.
It's all about the conspiracies, man.
Like, why are they doing this to us?
And these guys are not reticent about the reasons.
They're talking about, you know, striking fear and controlling people.
But Chris, just jog my memory, and you might have heard something that slipped by me.
Like, I don't remember them ever making it clear.
Like, I'm in no doubt that they are full-on conspiracy manuals.
But they're never quite clear about why.
Why does the American government want people and Fauci?
Why do they want to push these dangerous and useless vaccines on an unsuspecting public?
I think it...
Fits in eventually, like in the case of McCulloch, at least, he's a super hardcore conservative guy.
He has all these other views, which are like quite hardcore right wing views.
So I would expect that it fits his view, probably fits in with, you know, the globalists are trying to take over.
And they both talk a little bit about social justice and woke and that kind of thing.
But I don't know that, like, I honestly don't know.
The extent to which...
I haven't spent enough time with them to know what their broader worldview is, but I would imagine it's pretty much standard.
It's okay that you're not sure too, because I wouldn't be surprised.
It's not surprising why they kept that a little bit quiet during these interviews.
Like the why is where it starts getting really crazy.
You know, that's when you start talking about China and you're going to control people and institute neocommunism or something.
Um, but they did get them out of the bed.
I mean, they did, but it wasn't the main thing.
They hinted at it.
They definitely hinted at it.
Um, like I know Rogan believes it's about making money so that they can make money from the vaccines as opposed to other treatments.
But, uh, yeah, anyway.
The last foundation access factor is profiteering.
And this is not just about how wealthy people are, but really how much they're leveraging their particular ideology or guru speciality to enrich themselves in an excessive way, that the focus is on profit.
Now, in this case, there is a limitation with this particular Reading this because it's often not transparent in the material that we cover what the people's activities involve, right?
Like what they're up to, where their income streams are coming from.
And this is especially the case if we don't know them well.
I don't know what Malone and McCulloch's kind of...
If they are promoting a whole range of stuff on the side, if they're...
Marketing their courses.
I know that they have their treatment protocols.
I know that Malone is trying to associate himself with alternative vaccines, which he's going to be promoting, alternative protocols.
But I don't know the extent to which the motivation is profit for both of them.
So I actually, I'm kind of ranking them low out of ignorance because I don't know.
So that's my caveat.
Yeah, no, I understand what you're saying there.
And I thought of the same things, which is they both have their alternative protocols.
They're both involved with medical companies of some kind, you know, to run trials, to validate their protocols.
They talked about that, as you said, even associated with an alternative vaccine.
The degree to which those interests influence what they're doing or sort of dovetail with the stuff they're doing.
You know, we can't be entirely sure.
If history is the judge, whenever anti-vax people are arguing for an alternative vaccine, which they have a state in, it's never good.
This was part of the thing with Andrew Wakefield arguing that his initial stance was that we shouldn't have a combined jab, right?
The MMR should be separated out into three separate vaccines.
Was planning to market three separate vaccines.
Really?
Yes.
Yes.
So this is part of what got him his license revoked.
My goodness.
It came out because of the work of an investigative journalist, not because of the medical establishment as well.
So very much distasteful and including lots of stuff to do with some of the parents of the kids that were enrolled on this study and wanted to sue.
You know, to make claims about autism and vaccine and stuff.
So there was tons of conflicted financial instincts.
And to be clear, we have no idea the extent to which this applies in that case.
But I'm just saying, judging by history, I would not be surprised if stuff like that emerges.
Interesting.
Yeah.
So, but I'm not giving him a high score now because I don't know any about that.
So I'd probably put it at, I'm going to put 2.5 right in the middle.
Yep, appropriately cautious of you.
So they got 45. They both got 45. Yeah, 45.5 on mine.
And that's up at the top of our scale.
That is high.
That is high.
But don't worry.
Don't worry, Eric and Brett.
You're still top of the flagpole.
You haven't been dislodged with the all-time high score of 47. But man, do these guys give you a run for your money.
But this is a good illustration, you know, like you read this point off air, Matt, that when we came up with these features, we were thinking about the Weinsteins and Nicholas Taleb and so on of the world.
We knew nothing of McCulloch and Malone, right?
But they perfectly fit into this mold because they are modern secular gurus.
And that's why this score is so high.
That's why they were annoying for us to listen to.
But that's also why lots of the things that we have talked about with all our gurus were relevant to looking at them.
And it doesn't require medical expertise to detect these gurus.
It just requires paying attention to these kind of features.
You can ask the question as to what degree are these things subjective or a little bit vague?
To what degree is there potential for us to be like shoehorning people in and saying, And, you know, going, oh yeah, if you look at them this way, then you could say that they're doing conspiracy mongering, whatever.
So I think that is a useful thing to always to think about.
You don't want to be over-diagnosing people and so on.
I think to a large degree, it's not an issue, especially with the more specific ones, like conspiratorial ideation.
You know it when you see it, it's pretty clear.
The Cassandra complex, like running around like Chicken Little and telling people the sky's falling, whatever.
Again, it's pretty clear when someone's doing it, you can't mistake it.
And you can't pretend they're doing it when they're not doing it.
Having this backstory of grievance, you know, and talking about it often.
Endlessly.
Endlessly.
About how you've been looked over and people, you weren't giving proper credit for your wonderful discoveries.
That's really, really clear as well.
So I think that's true for most of the domains.
I mean, I will admit with some of them, it can be a little bit like the pseudo-profound bullshit.
All of us use big words sometimes.
I think there are some of them which can be a little bit vague, so we have to be all careful.
Yeah, I agree.
So fundamentally, I agree with the critique, but I don't see it as a problem because first of all, anybody that is so inclined, go make your own.
Rankings, right?
Using the features and see how people score and see if your ratings diverge dramatically from ours.
My inclination is the people that imagine that it won't if they do it correctly.
Or maybe there is always a degree of subjectivity when you're reading things according to some coding scheme.
But that's the point.
If you have like a coding scheme that you develop, you can get multiple people to read different things.
And then you can look at how consistent readings are amongst different people or specific kinds of people, specific experts, if you want.
And we are not arguing, except tongue in cheek, that this is a highly calibrated scientific instrument.
We're just saying these features are recurrent in the guru set that we look at.
And that if you see a lot of these dinging up, Together.
They're warning signs.
And that's what they are.
And maybe our grander plans are to write this formally up and submit it somewhere to academic standards.
But even in that case, I don't treat it like an academic publication about these kind of features of secular gurus.
It would make it no less, you know, a things to do with subjectivity and so on, right?
I don't think converting at their publication makes it dramatically more scientifically valid.
Yeah, we have a bit of fun.
We call it the gurometer and call it very scientific and all that.
But what it really is, is a framework for us to be clear about what we mean when we say people are acting like a secular guru and be clear about what we mean.
When we are talking about these unhealthy traits that they display.
Now, it's useful just for us to give us a framework, to give us some sort of structure to check ourselves.
Now, it's just useful in all kinds of interesting ways.
And like, here's an example.
Like we both agreed that Peter and McCulloch and Robert Malone scored universally pretty highly across the Garometer, with a notable exception of the galaxy brainness, right?
Because the Galaxy of Brandness is about that, you know, having that polymathic kind of, you know, hot takes over a wide variety of issues and you're an expert of everything and whatever's in the news today, you're the person who can sense make your way out of it, right?
Yeah.
Now, that is definitely on brand for many of these people.
You know, the Weinsteins are obviously perennial favorites, but other gurus do this too.
Joe Rogan's got an opinion on everything and you'll hear about it.
But these guys are kind of single-issue gurus, at least so far.
They've got this one big focus.
So that stuff is interesting.
It helps us refine our thinking.
Maybe we see this sort of thing cropping up with single-issue ones, and there's another type that are more kind of these generalist type ones that are in it for the long term.
Yeah, who knows?
Well, part of the thing as well for me is that the motivation for doing this, apart from that it just builds on The paper that we were initially writing together is that it's a record of each episode that we do, and it gives us something that we can refer back to.
And as it grows, we will be able to run very basic statistical analyses and compare, like, do we find these little clusters and stuff?
If the podcast goes on and there's hundreds of gurus coded, then it would be an interesting data set.
And it's our judgment.
But there would be nothing to stop the people who listen or the people that were interested to listen to the same material or listen to other material from the people and rate them themselves.
And just as a framework for kind of introducing discussion and to realize that there are people that we can fit within our guru category, but they don't all reach the same level and they're doing different things.
That's why it's useful.
Because it was a conversation point in some of the early episodes.
Well, what do you mean when you call ContraPoints a guru and Jordan Peterson and Gwyneth Paltrow?
Like, what are you saying is the same?
What are you saying is different?
And this is just one way that you can kind of see the differences and the similarities in different kinds of people.
So that's it, Matt.
That's it.
Don't take it too seriously, folks.
It's just an interesting tool.
It is indeed.
Well, it was certainly a useful tool for Michalica Malone.
Certainly has come of age, Chris.
That's right.
And it's going to be our ticket to fame and influence across the known world.
And then you all listening can be, I was in the ground floor of Garometry.
And when Matt tries to run away and claim he invented it, I'll say, no, I deserve the credit.
I was there.
And then you can all back me up.
So that's it.
Decoded.
Quantified.
Garometerized.
Heist.
Recorded.
Filed.
On record.
Put away.
And there we go.
And we're on to the next one.
So hopefully some less annoying people.
And Robert Wright.
It's going to be a much less annoying person next time.
Robert Wright.
Well, let's see how he scores.
And he's going in here, Robert.
You're joining the other gurus in the constellation.
Congratulations.
That's right.
It's like when you put your underwear in with someone else's underwear.
Are you saying Robert is like the pink underwear?
It's going to change everyone else's color.
Or vice versa.
Well, Matt, you go to sleep.
You've suffered enough for the science of grometry.
I'll go to sleep and you go and do whatever it is you do at night.
I'll get into my coffin and hang out.
Oh, no, it's night.
I need to go and feed.
I'll be in the coffin when the daylight comes.
So, yeah.
So, yes.
You travel at the feet of your muscle master, maybe?
