Interview with Josh Szeps, The Rumble from Downunder
Hot on the heels of our Joe Rogan Trilogy, the big red phone at Decoder HQ rang with an intriguing proposal. Well, it was more of a DM, and it said,"Hi, love your show, would love to come on talk about Joe. Josh Szeps"."Josh Szeps?" we thought. "Who's that?" 5 mins of internet research later we found out it was none other than the voice of Olly the Kookaburra at the 2000 Sydney games! Well, we have to have him on, we thought. And as a bonus, he's also been on the Joe Rogan Experience where he famously gave him some real talk about COVID, vaccines, and the relative threat of myocarditis. In so doing Josh become, for a while at least, something of a reluctant hero to Joe Rogan cancel mobs everywhere."Book him!" intoned Matt, decisively."Right you are sir!" chirped Chris, obsequiously.Recollections of the specific events differ, but essentially just like that, podcast interview history was made.Josh Szepps has been an ABC journalist, panelist, TV and radio host, raconteur, and general opinionated and interviewer in Australia for donkey's years. He also has his own podcast, (Impossible) sorry Uncomfortable Conversations, which some say is pretty, pretty OK. Matt's been listening to him for years on the radio, so he tried not to be star-struck. While Josh managed (some would say too easily) to conceal his awe of Matt's towering intellect and impressive academic achievements. Chris meanwhile, knowing nothing of Australian culture and etiquette waffled on with his usual wild abandon.The conversation does include chat about the shiny-headed, supplement-infused, muscle master himself, but (fortunately) soon turns to broader discussion of disinformation, censorship, responsible heterodoxy, the general health of the info-sphere, and many, many more topics crucial to Saving our Civilisation! We argue constructively debate many topics including the impact of deplatforming and whether there is a need for greater editorial oversight (or if we are taking the first step to the Gulags). We don't see eye to eye on everything, but Josh is a super cool guy so enjoy some civility porn as we engage in the kind of debate that would make even the IDW superstars proud.Check it out!LinksUncomfortable Conversation with Josh Szeps'The Facts about Myocarditis' On Afternoons with Josh SzepsJosh on TwitterThe CDC requirements for certifying deaths as due to Covid The Joe Rogan Experience #1762 - Josh Szeps on SpotifyThe Fifth Column: 348 w/ Matt Taibbi "Richard Perle in New Jersey, Putin in Hell, Ukraine in Crisis"Clip from James Lindsay on Dr. PhilThis Week's SponsorCheck out the sponsor of this week's episode, Ground News, and get the app at <a...
Hello, and welcome to Decoding the Gurus, the podcast where an anthropologist and a psychologist listen to the greatest minds the world has to offer, and we try our best to understand what they're talking about.
I'm Professor Matt Brown, and with me is Chris Kavanagh, the epistemic little online street fighter, scrappy messer abouter that he is.
Welcome, Chris.
You missed an opportunity to reference Scrappy-Doo, and I guess it's because you don't want to be Scooby-Doo.
If I'm scrappy, you're Scooby.
I think that's an accurate description.
You're just interested in eating sandwiches, a bit cowardly, but you're fundamentally lovable.
Whereas I'm the new character that was introduced and annoys everyone and I'm running around trying to start a fight.
That sounds about right.
That sounds about right.
But, you know, we also solve mysteries and unmask villains too.
We help.
That's right.
We help the team do that, don't we?
We do.
Isn't that what they do?
The team of investigators.
The people.
Yes.
It would be helpful if I remembered what they're called.
So everybody listening, now shout it into your podcast.
The Something Gang.
Those guys.
We don't need that many of us, though.
We just have the two of us and that's all.
And sometimes we have guests, Matt.
Sometimes we have guests.
So maybe we do have a gang.
This episode and the next episode will involve us having discussions with insightful guests, helping us decode things, arguing back, telling us where we got wrong.
So yeah, the Scooby analogy holds.
It's even better than I originally anticipated.
And who have we got with us today?
I mean, I know, but I'm asking you for the benefit of the audience.
I know.
I understand how this game works.
I'm a podcaster.
I've got this.
Don't worry.
It's Josh Zeps, a cultural commentator, a journalist, a TV personality in Australia.
What was that?
In Australia.
A compatriot?
That's right.
Yeah, one of your fellow convicts.
And he's going to talk to us about a variety of things.
But of course, the subject of Joe Rogan will come up because we covered Joe and I think Josh listened to our episode and thought some points we made were good, some were bad.
So we decided to have a little chat about it and other stuff to do with the culture war and the heterodox space and online punditry.
So you have that coming up today.
And then the next episode will be with Julian Walker from Conspirituality, where we're talking about a range of things, including getting an update on Conspirituality and international culture wars and so on.
So these are the two episodes that people are going to get within a short duration next to each other.
So two interview episodes coming together.
Lucky you, dear listener.
And all for free!
And congratulations to Julian and the Conspirituality Guys, because they've got a book coming out, haven't they?
Oh yeah, I'm sure they will announce it in better fashion.
But yeah, they do have a book coming out.
And so that's good and well-deserved because they've been doing a lot of good research on the topic.
So yeah, we will have a decoding episode up next week, but we'll talk a little bit more about that at the end of the episode.
For now, Matt, in breaking news coming through the telegram, I had something that annoyed me on the internet.
And I thought you might want to hear about it.
I can see in your face that you're just like, what?
Tell me, please, please.
Well, you might have noticed, Matt, that there is an ongoing war and invasion of Ukraine by Russia, which is not.
A laughing matter, I want to emphasize.
I'm not saying dark humor doesn't have its place, but, you know, fuck Putin and all of that goes without saying.
That's the stance of the podcast.
But there was a recent guest who I think falls squarely within the guru sphere.
One, Matt Taivi, from various things, used to be a journalist at Rolling Stone, but he's quite well known for being very critical.
Of the Russiagate stuff, right?
He thinks that that was all hugely exaggerated and in general has been accused of being something of a Putin apologist.
And he quite confidently predicted in the build-up to the war that it wasn't going to happen.
Then it did happen.
And he issued a mea culpa on his substack.
And that was roundly applauded for, you know, admitting that he made a mistake.
And then he recently went on the fifth column to discuss the war in Ukraine and his takes.
And so the fifth column, it's an interesting podcast.
I know you listen to it as well, Matt.
For people that don't know it, it is a libertarian, American libertarian podcast talking about, you know, politics and current affairs.
And my experience with it, it's kind of like a roller coaster.
Because they have some very nice takes and deep dives on topics, good discussions.
And then because they're libertarians, sometimes they just car crash into terrible takes and incredibly annoying episodes.
And they actually have been quite good in their Ukraine coverage.
They've been pretty straightforward that this is something that needs to be condemned.
They haven't been...
Both sides in it.
And they've basically taken sensible points that totalitarian state invading a neighbor is not something that anybody really needs to think that much about in regards to who's to blame in that situation.
But they had on Matt Taibbi and some reasonable points of discussion and whatnot.
And Matt Taibbi sort of indicated that he might be in favor of military intervention.
Which was quite surprising now.
But the part that was more surprising to me was to hear Taivi explain, you know, basically the position of cognitive empathy for Russia, right?
And he wanted to say about NATO expansion being threatening to Russia and that you have to take this into account when they're looking at the events in Ukraine and so on and so forth.
But I thought the 5th column guys did a good job.
Of pointing out that most of the countries that are referenced about joining NATO and being concerning to Russia have not been admitted to NATO, like Belarus or Ukraine, for that matter, over the space of 30 years of talks.
And it was not really on the cards.
And then secondly, that if you view NATO as a kind of imperial force or whatever, there's actually no cases of NATO invading A country, like aggressively annexing another country's territory.
So you might be concerned about that, but the two things are not the same because Russia has done that, whereas NATO has never done that.
And Matt Taibbi took that point, but then was saying, you know, well, but Russia has a, you know, it's concerned about the possibility of the West coming in and invading and taking its territory.
And it remembers the historical events.
And the host pushed him.
What does he mean?
Which historical events?
And can you guess, Matt, when he said the West has invaded Russia in aggressive wars.
So what would you think a historical event with that reference?
Oh, he cited the Nazis?
The Nazi invasion of Russia?
Yes, he did!
He cited the Nazi invasion and said, you know, Russia has a legitimate thing because Before, Germany got quite aggressive on their borders and, you know, attempted to invade them.
They got to the point of saying, "You mean Hitler, World War II?"
And he's like, "Yeah, you know, it's the West.
It was a Western country."
Oh, yes.
The Third Reich and NATO, very similar.
Very similar organizations.
It was a quite remarkable take, especially when you consider that Russia has engaged wars of aggression with ex-Soviet satellites in the past 20 odd years and actually invaded countries.
So, you know, yeah, you don't need to go back to World War II to remember armed conflicts involving territory being annexed, involving Russia.
You can go to this lifetime.
It's such a terrible take, isn't it?
The false equivalence is such an annoying stance.
When Russia has brought other countries into its orbit, it's generally done so at the head of tank columns that roll in and force countries to become part of its organization, whether it's part of the Russian Federation or part of Warsaw Pact or something like that.
That is not the case with NATO.
In fact, countries are clamoring.
To join NATO and NATO is reluctant to admit them.
Not the same, Chris.
Not the same.
Well, Matt, is Germany or is it not in NATO?
Answer that question!
Oh, that's a good gotcha.
You got me.
And was Germany not the country that invaded Russia in World War II?
Answer me that, Matt.
All right.
Oh, well, enough dunking on poor Taibbi.
I don't know him that well, but he sounds like a joker.
Yeah, I have the same conflicted relationship with the fifth column as you do.
On one hand, I like the banter.
They talk about, like you described it as a libertarian podcast, but a lot of the time, they're also just journalists.
And a lot of the time, it's just that kind of thing.
It's that kind of insider-type talk, and it's informative and fun, and many of their takes are good.
But yeah, when they veer, you can almost tell when their brains have been contaminated by the libertarianism because they say terribly stupid things when that happens.
Yeah, and on this episode, the tick was that if you want to punish Russian oligarchs to try and deter, that you need to also punish.
Russian oligarchs who have left Russia because of their opposition to Putin, otherwise you're not being consistent.
And it was like, that doesn't follow exactly.
Yeah.
When your libertarianism means that you are so laissez-faire that you are ideologically against any kind of sanctions on dictatorships for invading other countries, then maybe you've...
Gone a little bit far down that road.
And then just to be clear to our fifth column brethren, like their takes on Ukraine have been pretty good overall.
So this was just a frustration.
It was just Guru Sphere takes hitting my eardrums because Tyvee appeared on it.
So we will cover him at some time.
So there we go.
But now that they've got that out of my system, Ma, I hear something in the air.
Whenever I hear this, I start to get the feeling.
I get concerns.
I'm worried about clickbait and sensationalized content, manipulating our minds, media bias and political polarization.
It keeps me up and light.
And what I want is people to engage in...
More skepticism.
More critical thinking.
And do you have any idea, like, is there any sort of tool, any app that we could recommend that people use that might help them with this?
I think it could be referring to Ground News.
This app, this website, I'm looking at their website right now.
They provide this service.
It's not a silver bullet, but it certainly does give you some helpful contextual information around news stories.
I think it shows you how breaking news is being covered across the political spectrum.
That's the kind of thing it...
It does let you see stories being presented left and right-wing media, and this is actually quite...
A useful tool, I think, in the ongoing coverage of Ukraine, the conflict over there, to see what's been presented on certain news channels and not on others.
So you can use it to sort news by bias and factuality or prioritize local or international coverage.
So there's a variety of functions.
You know, overall, Matt, I think this is a good little app, and it's not just the music making me say that.
It's good.
If they wanted to get this app, I suppose they'd have to pay a million pounds or something like that.
No, I'm pretty sure it's those five easy payments with $19.95.
That's how you get it.
No, Matt.
Wrong.
It's free.
All you need to do is go to the website, ground.news.com.
That shows them we sent you, and you can download a free app.
My God, man.
Do it.
Yes.
Give it a try.
It should be helpful for you.
Do it.
Go!
Good night!
Don't be it.
This offer will end soon.
You get a free set of steak knives if you go there now.
You won't get those, but go anyway.
That's right.
Listen to that.
He's going mad.
So, yes, that's it.
Ground.news.com.
Go check it out if you're interested.
And with that out of the way, Matt, with that covered, let's jump to...
Mr. Zeps.
Let's go.
Hello and welcome to Decoding the Gurus, the podcast where two academics listen to the greatest minds the world has to offer and try to understand what they're talking about.
And sometimes we have people on to help us.
And today, that person is Josh Zeps.
Am I one of the world's greatest minds now?
Am I one of the gurus now?
Is that what my introduction just was?
I, ladies and gentlemen, am hereby.
I mean, you heard it here.
I'm one of the world's greatest.
You're an assistant decoder.
That's your role at the moment.
Lovely to be here.
I love this show.
I've been bouncing around since the Joe Rogan episode with you guys doing extensive deep dives into what he got right and wrong.
So I'm glad that our paths are crossing about the validity or invalidity of speech.
Let me get this straight.
You guys want him executed?
Do you want Joe Rogan executed?
That's pretty much it.
Is it the electric chair?
It's whatever means is effective against the level of supplements that his body houses.
That's what we're going to go for.
Wouldn't you to bring that man down?
It does feel like he's a kind of a stocky little bald son around which all discourse now orbits online.
And so if he was to be executed, it might be for...
The betterment for online discourse.
I don't think so.
You know, it would definitely be less articles released.
There would definitely be less clickbaity articles about Australian owning Joe Rogan or like guest owning Joe Rogan or someone or other owning Joe Rogan.
There's always a lot of, like those journalists don't like him.
They love to write articles about how he's getting owned on his own show.
Yes, they are fond of that.
And in a bizarre way, you were the hero of the liberal media for a little while.
Just on the basis of that clip.
Yeah, people don't know.
I just happened to be on Joe's show at just the moment when Neil Young's Spotify threat happened.
And like those 270 healthcare professionals or something wrote an open letter to Spotify saying that they wanted to boot it off the platform and everything.
So I was momentarily like that.
15 minutes of fame in the bad tabloid sense.
But it was weird because he and I had an exchange in which I corrected him on some piece of vaccine misinformation.
And so then everyone thought that I was like some hero for just having a conversation in which I simply made the most rudimentary and basic scientific facts available.
But what's funny is that then you've got these allies who you really don't want to have, who are people like...
Yeah, we should shut down all of this misinformation from the conservatives and we should make sure that social media companies boot off everybody who disagrees with progressive equity and justice causes.
Go, Josh.
And I'm like, wait a second.
No, that wasn't my position at all.
I was just correcting one small piece of data about myocarditis.
I didn't want to become a poster child for getting rid of Joe Rogan.
I will say when I listened to that episode, though, Josh, that I think you're slightly underplaying because it was quite Cathartic when you appeared.
I listened to Joe's content, not all of it.
There's a lot of it every week, but various episodes.
And I've heard him talk about COVID a lot.
It's a very recurrent topic on the show.
I've seen his interviews with mainstream scientists and whatnot as well.
And to your credit, you are one of the first people I've seen who strongly Pushback on some points.
And I don't mean in an aggressive manner.
I mean just more exactly what you're saying, you know, saying, well, it's not like vaccine versus nothing.
It should be vaccine versus infection for most of the outcomes that you care about.
So I think it was unusual because amongst Joe's multiple guests, I haven't seen...
Many people push back that strongly.
I think that's kind of you to say, but I think that just tells you more about what total wusses most people are and how low the bar is for conversation everywhere than anything about me.
I mean, if you were at a pub and your mate said something that you sort of were pretty sure isn't true, if your buddy was like, the best way to get over a cold is to light aromatherapy candles or something, and you were like, I don't think that it is.
And he was like, no, no, no, I'm pretty sure it is.
You wouldn't just leave that.
I mean, I wouldn't just leave that.
You'd go, what are you talking about?
It's not.
It's not.
And that's the way that we would communicate.
All of a sudden, people walk into the Rogan lair and suddenly they have to hang up their own opinions at the door because of the power of this Wizard of Oz character behind the fucking screen.
What are you talking about?
He's a bloke.
I'm a bloke.
We're just talking.
Maybe it's a cultural thing.
Maybe it's an Australian thing or something.
I honestly, like, I know that this is true because I remember thinking to myself as I left the studio, did I say anything that's going to get me into trouble?
And I mentally went through a good half dozen exchanges and that moment didn't come up to me as being a moment where I had like courageously made a bold point or anything.
Like five minutes after that happened, it was just over.
It was one of those things.
There's way too much politeness.
Politeness is cowardice, really, in our conversations.
People think that to challenge someone's stupid point is a mark of disrespect.
I'm much more along the lines of what Richard Dawkins says, which is my criticism of your stupid idea is a sign of respect for you as a person to believe that you are capable of dealing with me on a rational basis and having your idiocy pointed out to you.
I'm almost condescending to you if I let your bad point slide.
I like that.
Yeah, I like that too.
You mentioned not being overly polite.
And I've got to say, this is one of the things we've noticed that seems to have gone seriously wrong in the, whatever, heterodox IDW-adjacent free speech type crowd, which is there's a very big influence of the importance of personal relationships and civility.
And, you know, it's so great we're being able to have this conversation and they make such a big deal about this sort of meeting of minds, but they don't.
Disagree with each other on anything substantive.
And they're just afraid or something.
It's just weird.
I mean, sometimes, I know what you mean.
Sometimes they do disagree with each other about substantive things.
Take, like, gay rights or something.
And you might have, like, a Ben Shapiro under Joe Rogan or a Ben Shapiro under Sam Harris or something like that.
And to their credit, they're being civil.
To their credit, they're not stoning each other and hounding each other out of a job.
I also feel the same way about not wanting to interrupt people during conversations.
People will occasionally text me when I'm on the air, listeners, because I have a radio show on ABC Radio Sydney for people who are in Australia, and they'll say, let the guest speak.
Now, you might conclude from that that I'm a big blabbermouth who should just shut up and let the guest speak, but actually, if the guest is filibustering and is just going off on some long tangent...
It's the job of the interlocutor to rein them back in.
And in the same way, it's sort of the job of the person who's in the conversation to not regard civility as the only goal.
Otherwise, you end up with a succession of speeches, right?
And again, at the pub, that's not the way we talk.
You don't stay quiet until your friend has completely stopped talking and then you just talk for as long as you want to and they have no recourse about interrupting you.
They just have to sit there silently and listen to whatever you want to say, even if it's four hours long.
That's not the way humans communicate.
All right.
I'm going to interrupt you now, then.
Interrupt me.
You've signed your own down for it now, Josh.
Exactly.
That's right.
I reckon about 12, 18 months ago, I was very much more in the free speech absolutist camp and really having a visceral dislike of the cancellers and that kind of thing.
I move a great deal in where I stand.
Joe Rogan's a good example of this with the Malone and the McCulloch kind of episodes and the way in which misinformation and bad information seems to have so much more power than true and good information, which is often boring, often uncomfortable,
doesn't hit the right intuitive and emotional buttons.
And it's given me a sense that This idea that, oh, just have this free market of ideas and the good ideas, the truthful information will rise to the surface.
I don't think that happens naturally.
I think it needs moderation and curation and editorial oversight of some kind.
There has to be someone somewhere who takes responsibility for things, because certainly someone like Joe Rogan doesn't.
I mean, until you can articulate what that someone somewhere looks like...
To me, that sounds as naive as the Marxist who says, the economic system of capitalism is broken, therefore we need something somehow better.
And I would just have a Churchillian rejoinder, which is like, this is the best system apart from all the others.
Sorry, this is the worst, you know, his point about democracy being the worst political system apart from all the others.
I mean, I think a free exchange of bullshit is the worst, you know, information system apart from all the others, isn't it?
Yeah, no, that's a good rebuttal.
But I mean, a good analogy is say, yeah, let's stick with the sort of democracy idea, right?
So we have democracy, but we don't have direct democracy in the sense that we're having a plebiscite on every single thing at every instant of the day.
Californians do.
The Swiss have always gone to the polls about whether or not they should ban minarets or something.
We've had enough.
And so similar to more the legacy media type apparatus, the sort of stuff that existed before social media, you know, God knows it wasn't perfect and still isn't.
You know, there's these sort of checks and balances and some kind of institutional culture that arises that moderates the good thing.
In this case, the good thing is free speech and free exchange of ideas, just like various institutions moderate democracy so that it's not totally unfettered.
And it's like the difference between regulated capitalist system like we have in Australia and some sort of anarcho-capitalist thing.
I mean, what would that gatekeeper look like?
Traditionally, that gatekeeper has been people who have the money to own newspapers and radio stations and television stations.
So publishers have basically employed editors and really for quite a short period of time from the 50s until the 2010s.
We had those people as gatekeepers.
And they did a great job at keeping out total wild bullshit.
But they also had their own faults of having a bias towards the institutional power structures of the states that we live in.
And they would take a very long time to get any information out about lies that would lead us into wars like Vietnam or Iraq or whatever.
And they would be complicit with all kinds of misinformation that powerful people wanted us to.
And so now those structures have crumbled and everyone can talk to everybody else.
And we're still in the first three seconds of this social media podcasting experiment in which, of course, there's going to be a fire hose of bullshit.
I think your critique is cleaner when you're talking about someone who persistently presses bullshit into the public sphere.
And we can think about people like that who make a conscious effort to willfully inject I'd say Joe,
from my experience, is pretty good at creating a large amount of people that are peddling.
That misinformation, to put it mildly, like I take the point about where you draw the boundaries is always going to be a tricky question, right?
There can be disagreement about the validity of deplatforming Alex Jones, but most people have some line, like they'll say, you can't have people out promoting that you allow children to drink bleach, right?
And it sounds an extreme example, but you may or may not know that there was a kind of group and movement.
That was promoting just that, like parents to get their children to drink like quite strong bleach, which had predictable effects, right?
There were various cases, court cases and so on around the legality of what they were doing and that.
But I think for most people, there's kind of like, okay, we don't need to permit that or we at least should have some minimum standards about promoting medical misinformation that will harm people.
And when it comes to, if we stick with the Malone and McCulloch episodes because we know them quite well, or just recently Joe had Majid on as well, right?
The level of conspiracism that we're talking about, it isn't people debating how many cases of myocarditis there are for under five-year-olds in one study.
The level of conspiracy there is them saying that doctors in hospitals are Getting gunshot wounds and recording them as COVID deaths.
That the pandemic was planned years in advance.
And we know this because of Johns Hopkins training documents.
And that they have the solution that could cause 90% of fatalities not to have occurred, but they're being suppressed by medical authorities in order to profit.
Then you can take that as Joe is just entertaining somebody with, you know, on fringe positions.
But at the end of those episodes and subsequently, including in the apology video, the way Joe editorializes that is these people have extremely impressive credentials.
They were not promoting wild conspiracies.
These are the kind of discussions that we need to have.
These are genuine debates.
And if you do what he did very recently, for example, where you get Peter Osterholm, I think, the kind of mainstream vaccine doctor on.
And you have him.
And then next week you have Majid Nawaz, the episode that was kind of held over.
I think that Joe is doing what he promised to do in the apology video, which is balancing a mainstream opinion with a fringe opinion.
But that gives the people listening a large portion of them.
One, they know that Joe is kind of being forced into that position because of the controversy surrounding that and because he mentions it on subsequent episodes.
But also, too, it gives the impression of having a climate change denier and a climate change scientist one week and the next week.
But I think we've got to be clear about what level this conversation or this criticism is taking place on.
It sounds to me like you're making essentially an editorial criticism of Joe's show, wherein you're saying, if you were the content director of the Joe Rogan experience, then these are the...
Changes that you would make.
You and I would probably concur about all of those changes.
I mean, if it was my show, I just wouldn't have McCullough on the show.
And you know that's true because I haven't had McCullough on my show.
Right?
And that's prima facie true.
And you guys haven't either.
You've taken a long time to try to dismantle his view.
But then there's another level on which this conversation can take place, which is the level on which it's taking place mostly on social media and among the mainstream press as well, which is, given that we don't run Joe Rogan's show.
Given that Joe Rogan runs Joe Rogan's show and that he's not beholden to anybody apart from his audience and himself, what should be the appropriate limits that we as a culture or a community put on his ability to speak and to project that speech to whoever wants to consume it?
And it's that latter question that I think is the more interesting one.
We can nitpick about whether or not he's giving this false equivalence.
To batshit crazy ideas as to legitimate ideas.
I think we should be more cautious than we are being, in general, about thinking that there's no downside to making life intolerable for kooks.
And that it's actually quite a difficult thing to say that people don't have a right to be a bit crazy or eccentric.
And I'm talking about the guests here, not so much Joe.
Joe is intrigued by crazy, eccentric people, by people who have fringe opinions.
The first thing you said was he claimed that people with gunshot wounds are being listed as COVID victims.
I thought that was crazy as well.
So then I did a deep dive and a fact check about it.
And it's actually not the case that that doesn't happen, that that never happened.
It doesn't happen to such a large extent that it would skew the numbers.
But if you Google it, it's a state-by-state thing.
And each hospital, especially at the peak of the pandemic in the States, apparently, I mean, this is what I found.
They would list it.
It wasn't that they would say it was the cause of death.
It was that in all of the chaos of things, it would get listed as a COVID thing.
And there's no central database accumulating all of the COVID data.
So that would go off.
And it may be the case that states would be counting as COVID deaths, deaths from all causes of people who died with COVID.
But that may be immaterial either way, but that's a different question of whether or not the whole thing was planned two years in advance, which is a different question of, and now I can't remember what the third criticism was.
Do you remember what your third?
There's a variable smorgasbord to choose from, but the one that I referenced was that they have the protocol which is being suppressed, which could prevent 90% of the deaths.
So that's a piece of actual medical misinformation, an anti-scientific claim.
So all of those are very different, and I'm not sure that I want a board of media bureaucrats deciding whether or not they're legitimate to be aired.
We would agree with you there, I think, 100%.
And I think that's a good point you make about Distinguishing what level of criticism we're talking about.
Chris and I, with our Decoding the Gurus thing, we're just doing our free speech thing as well, right?
Criticizing these other people who are out there.
And we do it forcefully, I think, and that's fine.
But to talk about what should be allowed or not allowed, I mean, we've never called for Joe Rogan to be cancelled or there'd be some law or something made such that Joe Rogan can no longer make podcasts.
There's nothing like that.
In fact, we haven't really thought about it that much.
To the extent that I have, the only thing I would say is that I would push back on the free speech absolutists who would say that not only should any speech be allowed, but also no one is allowed to not help spread or platform any kind of speech for any grounds whatsoever.
No one is allowed to not help spread.
There are too many double negatives here, Matt.
I know.
I'll try again.
I'll try again.
That was terrible.
I admit it.
So let's say hypothetically Spotify said, look.
We're not comfortable being the platform that hosts this kind of stuff.
It's medical disinformation.
People are literally dying from not getting vaccinated and relying on ivermectin instead.
Joe's not going to change, so Joe's not welcome on our platform, right?
Now, I personally wouldn't have a problem with that any more than I'd have a problem with you deciding, oh, look, I'm not going to have McCulloch on my show.
I think there can be not some sort of central office of bureaucratic oversight that That decides on these things, but rather just like any kind of curation or editorial decisions, there can be an organic kind of thing where platforms or magazine editors or the ABC or whoever can make decisions about what they think is a good thing to be associated with.
Yeah, just before it becomes like completely irrelevant, I'll say that on the issue of the recording of gunshot wounds, I would say like...
I'm sure there is an occasion or a handful of occasions where things have happened like that, where there's been an error.
But the notion that doctors are deliberately misrecording deaths in order to gain profit, which is what the strong inference was there, and that this is such a common occurrence that it's hugely inflating the death numbers.
Like it wasn't presented as...
Oh, there was a single case in one county which was covered in right-wing media that you can find.
It was presented as this is a policy from the CDC and the WHO to inflate whatever the relevant bodies are, to inflate the numbers.
And I think that's different.
And Matt and I often say that when people are defending the stuff that the people promoting misinformation present, they'll present it in the nicest way, right?
The most charitable way possible.
But that's not the impression they give in the content.
And those examples that I listed, that's just like three things out of three hours of constant innuendo and references and extreme claims that people then do take apart.
But I think the effect is cumulative and that that has to count into the analysis.
And when it comes to what Spotify execs should do, I agree with you that it's a tricky...
Topic.
And there's going to be platforms that have different regulations and say Spotify did kick Joe off, like they won't.
But if they ever did, we could just go somewhere else or he could be on his own.
He's got enough of an audience that it's not like he's going to be silenced.
Well, yeah, I mean, as I tweeted during the whole Spotify brouhaha and everyone should follow me on Twitter at Josh Sepps for many more such nuggets of ingenious as this.
If Spotify dumped Joe Rogan, he would go from being the number one podcaster in the world to being the number one podcaster in the world.
Like, he was already the number one podcaster in the world before he joined Spotify, and he's in a walled garden at Spotify, and if they booted him out, then he would no longer be behind a Spotify wall, and he would be available on all platforms, including iTunes, again, plus he would have all the new followers who would regard him as a free speech martyr.
I mean, my main point during that whole thing was less about whether Joe Rogan's a good or bad force.
And more about, just think about the consequences of what you're actually trying to achieve.
If your goal is to turn down the volume on misinformation, the best way to turn up the volume on misinformation would be to kick him off Spotify because he'd be equally popular and he'd have all the benefit of victimization and victimhood and he'd be available on more platforms.
Chris, your quibble about exactly whether or not the gunshot wound thing was part of the conversation about there being a CDC-inspired conspiracy in order to inflate COVID deaths or whether it was simply a way for McCullough to articulate that there was a lot of messiness in the data is precisely the kind of reason why these conversations about what should and shouldn't be aired.
Are so difficult.
Like my recollection of that particular part of the conversation...
It was Malone.
Malone, sorry.
Yeah.
I get my quacks confused occasionally.
So do I. I had to stop listening after 45 minutes of that conversation just because I can spot a quack.
Like I don't mean to demean the guy, but...
The kind of, and you guys got into this a bit on your dissection of Malone as well, where like the or shucks, I don't mean to imply anything, but here I am, one guy not suggesting anything, wink, wink, got a little bit rich for me.
It's like, I interview a lot of medical experts and they tend not to talk like that.
They just tend not to make such grandiose insinuations while pretending not to.
They just tend to be a lot more cautious.
But I found that one You know,
I remember it was a Washington Post or NPR or something, which was fact-checking that, and they were saying that did happen.
you have to acknowledge, though, that with all conspiracy theories, they're often built out of these little kernels of truth.
Yeah.
And the issue is they spin them up into this narrative, obviously.
So we can probably stop litigating that, but I guess we still see.
Certainly, because the other point that I tried to make on Joe's show and I continually make on Twitter, but Americans don't want to hear, is the world outside America exists.
America is not a majority of COVID cases.
There's a lot of data.
So people are like, people are trying to do their best, but people are like, people will always talk about VAERS, the vaccine adverse incidents, you know, schedule and how inaccurate it was and whether American hospitals were paid to inflate numbers or deflate numbers or something.
Like, you can just carve America out of the whole data set if you want to.
If you're suspicious about Big Pharma and the Biden administration or something, then just ignore all of that and look at...
South Korea, Taiwan, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Western Europe, all of the Middle East, Africa.
There are a lot of countries that have public health systems that do a reasonably good job at keeping track of numbers.
And unless you think that they're all coordinated by the WHO into manipulating their own data, and all of those political entities from all over the political spectrum are all in cahoots, it doesn't make any sense to like...
To keep cherry-picking these arguments about why America's data might be incorrect.
Have you listened to James Lindsay recently?
Let me just make one last point.
I want to get to James Lindsay because I'm very frustrated that I just lost a podcast interview with him.
We were talking about this before we went on the air.
I spoke to him for almost two hours for my podcast and the damn platform that we were recording on, Zencastr, lost the audio.
And nonetheless, before we move on from Spotify...
A couple of points just about, Matt, your point about Spotify's a private company, so they're allowed to choose who they want to be aligned with and what ideas they want to be associated with.
It's true.
I think it's also sometimes a fatuous dodge to say Twitter is a private company, Facebook's a private company.
There are no free speech implications of them booting somebody off.
We all know that these are the places where civilization currently has its arguments with itself about things.
If you're very on Twitter or very on Instagram or very on Facebook or very on TikTok or Snapchat, I guess someone uses Snapchat to chat still, then that's a significant portion of the way that you communicate.
Yes, they're private companies, but a phone company is a private company and we would all regard it as being something of an infringement of your rights if the phone company cut off your phone because it didn't like what you were saying on your phone calls.
They are clearly some sort of a hybrid.
You don't have full First Amendment constitutional rights to say whatever you want to on it.
You shouldn't want to compel social media companies by law to keep horrible bigoted monsters on their platforms.
But by the same token, I think it's a bit cute to just be like, they're private companies.
There are no free speech implications.
I mean, imagine if it happened to you and you were no longer able to do a podcast because you were being barred from everything because you were a political dissident or something.
You wouldn't regard that as being a legitimate use of power.
And then the second point I would just make about that particular line is, It depends how the platforms are making their decision about who to kick off.
Part of the concern about quote-unquote cancel culture is that the decisions are being made in haste and in response to mobs, essentially.
And the point that I made in print during the whole Joe Rogan thing and also on panel shows when I would be invited on to talk about it as an unlikely Joe Rogan defender since I'd been the savage beast who'd call him out on his own show.
The point I would make is, who exactly do we want to be dictating the contours of our public conversation?
Do we want it to be aging rock stars who are responding to...
Do we want it to basically be 22-year-old skateboarding millennials in Silicon Valley who are software engineers who are responding to boycotts by aging rock stars that are motivated by Twitter mobs?
There has to be a better way of deciding.
Who does and does not get to use the most powerful communication tools the 21st century has offered.
On that subject, Josh, though, on the opposite side of the ledger, to step away from Joe for a minute, although I do have something I want to ask you about the way that he responded, and you kind of praised him for responding.
But before I get there...
Stefan Molyneux, I don't know if you're familiar with him, a kind of ethno-nationalist.
I mean, I know who that is.
I don't consume any of his content.
A wise choice.
So he was deplatformed, right?
Along with a more well-known figure, Alex Jones.
And both of those people, I think it's fairly straightforward if you look at their content, were promoting white ethno-nationalism and conspiracism.
Right.
And people were arguing that if they were deplatformed, you know, people would just go into the dark crevices of the Internet and seek them out and that it wouldn't damage their audience size.
Now, I don't think you're making that argument because the point I want to make is it did.
Right.
Deplatforming works.
And there are people that are they're not removed such that you can't access the material.
You want to look up Stefan Molyneux.
You can do it right now and find all this material online.
What he doesn't have is access to.
Twitter or Facebook or these large platforms that give them access to an audience.
And it doesn't seem that that's an automatic right.
And on that point, setting aside the misinformation conspiracy sphere, the medical misinformation issue in particular, you have an example outside of COVID where HIV /AIDS denialism was a popular fringe medical view.
Joe Rogan had Peter Duisberg on the show to promote it.
And very recently, Referred to him as, you know, a brilliant guy with these ideas that people shouldn't be silencing.
That ideology came to have influence in the South African government.
And there's been various calculations made, but even in the lowest orders, it's potentially hundreds of thousands of people that died needlessly because of medical misinformation reaching the higher echelons of government.
And I think that often when people are talking about those issues, They're not weighing, they're kind of saying, you know, well, if people choose to take Ivermectin, that's their choice.
And they're not grappling with what the other side of that ledger is.
Medical misinformation can result in a serious amount of deaths, especially if it reaches big influential people.
And Rogan and a lot of people in his position who have like a huge, huge platform because of the success of their program, it definitely does seem like I think having some standards or some concern about promoting HIV-AIDS denialism,
like Joe did that when he was much smaller.
If he did that now, I wonder would your position be that, well, that's fine because it's the marketplace of ideas.
Like, where does that line fall for you?
Well, that's interesting.
I mean, I think that guy has all that blood on his hands because wasn't he a minister in the South African government or he was like the senior advisor to the office of the prime minister or something in South Africa?
The health minister, I know, hit antiretroviral drugs as like a plot by the West, but I don't know what Peter Duisberg's particular role was.
Yeah, I mean, you put it this way, it wasn't because of going on Joe Rogan that he was able to exert an outsized influence on the policy of South Africa.
As I said, from an editorial point of view, I just wouldn't talk to someone like that, and I wouldn't talk to...
I mean, if you remove McCullough and Malone from the Rogan archive, it strikes me that...
90% of people's criticisms about his medical misinformation vanished, don't they?
Well, I think those episodes, because of their focus on COVID, are the kind of black holes sucking in the attention.
But Joe has been talking pretty consistently for nearly two years about COVID.
Maybe Brett Weinstein's appearance with Pierre Corey and even earlier than that.
I think it has become more of a central topic.
Joe is now pretty much like the biggest platform for anti-vaxxers in the US, possibly in the world.
That seems like something that you can have opinions and debates about without it being necessarily focused on.
We'll cancel culture that we need to take him out because we don't like his show.
I mean, in a way, it's always like the pushback achieved a good outcome in the sense that I think the goals of the people who were trying to cancel him were misguided in the sense that it would only have empowered him.
And I take your point that I'm only saying that it would have empowered him if he'd been booted off Spotify.
I'm not saying it would have empowered him if he'd been booted off Spotify, Twitter, Facebook, Apple, and YouTube.
Yes, if you cancel a person from everywhere, like Molyneux or Alex Jones, then they do go away to a large degree.
I'm just saying in the narrow case of the Rogan example, what people were calling for was that he should be booted off a closed system and allowed onto an open system like iTunes.
Yeah, I don't know what that's a good point about.
Just to finish the thought about it being a good outcome overall, the anti-Joe people were kind of pushing for what I think was a misguided solution, but in meeting them halfway, Spotify implemented solutions like putting warnings on McCullough and Malone and then including more contrarian pushback against the crazies when the crazies do come on.
You're shaking your head, Chris, as if that was too little too late or just too little altogether.
No, I just feel like...
The disclaimer thing is kind of pointless because who cares, you know, like parental advisory, that's the album that you want to listen to.
I guess the, like one point that I also made on TV when I was interviewed about this on a panel, which was interesting, it was like, it was a panel show in Australia called The Drum, and I'm there as like the Joe Rogan expert, and there are three panelists who are all there.
Now, they're critical of Joe because he doesn't do enough research before he talks to these people, so he can't give adequate pushback against the expert ideas that are being presented that are incorrect medically.
And there are three people on the panel, none of whom listen to Joe Rogan or use Spotify.
And the host of the show is asking them all their opinion about whether Rogan should be booted off Spotify, which, of course, they all roundly concur with generally.
And I didn't have time to say this, but I wish that I had had time to say, so let me just get this straight.
We are all talking about a man who we don't listen to on a platform we don't use, with a show that we don't consume, and our problem with him is that he doesn't do his research.
And we're talking about how important it is that he be deprived of the right to speak and to interview whoever he wants to.
So, one point that I did make there...
Was that there is a shifting ground of opinion about what is correct or not correct.
I mean, the example that the host of the show gave me was like, at some point we all have to agree on facts.
You know, if we're talking about Rio Tinto, we have to agree that it's a West Australian mining company.
For people who don't know what Rio Tinto is, it is indeed a West Australian mining company.
And my point was, well, that's the sort of fact about which there's no dispute.
But there are all kinds of facts that...
There is still a legitimate dispute about that we think are true now and we don't necessarily know what we'll think of them in a couple of years.
The pandemic has been full of misinformation from a lot of different sources.
Joe has made the point that if you were to, you know, say that everyone should be wearing masks in April of 2020, you were hounded down as wanting to kill doctors because, you know, masks didn't work back then because we were all supposed to not get
them because we wanted to keep the masks that don't work for the doctors who apparently don't need them.
You know, there have been all kinds of flip-flops about the lab leak theory.
It was originally ridiculous, then it was less ridiculous.
Now it seems to be a bit more ridiculous again.
Without a space in which we can talk about some of the kookies
Not in a news show, but in a conversation show hosted by a mixed martial arts...
Like, without a space in which that can happen, I think culture is poorer, not richer.
I mean, I'm simply calling for our conception of the public square to be as wide as possible, and the scope of rambunctious, crazy conversations to be as generous as possible to each other.
And the downside of that is that you're right, a lot of bullshit will get picked up by gullible people.
But the upside is that...
Hopefully over time sunlight is the best disinfectant and people will not be so suppressed in the ideas that they can consume that they're all sort of conformist sheep.
At the moment it seems weird to be making that case because we're so obviously in an environment of totally chaotic misinformation and disinformation that even I feel overwhelmed by it and I wish there was some way to get our arms around it.
But I'm not quite sure what the way to get our arms around it is that doesn't cause more problems than...
Just allowing people to speak their minds.
I think Matt might have some takes on that, but just very briefly, Josh, to say that when it comes to the de-platforming issue with Rogan, my stance on that is not so strong.
I do think the Malone and McCulloch episode should be taken down.
I think that Spotify should implement a strong misinformation policy, especially during the pandemic.
But whatever the case may be, each platform designs its own policies and whatnot.
I'm just arguing that I think that would be better.
And it kind of relates to the point that you're making that both Matt and I think it is important that whatever your stance you take on Joe's content or any content, you have to actually know and address what's there.
And so many of the commentariat, whether pro or anti Joe, are going off a version which is in their head or which is based on very small And we find that as well as the people critiquing Joe,
the people defending Joe often present it as if he has no editorial line.
He doesn't really care about COVID.
He doesn't have strong opinions one way or the other.
And that's completely wrong as well.
Josh, yeah, you know, you're right to be frustrated with people calling for Joe to be banned without knowing anything about it really and not listening to it.
We struck a lot of people who...
Call the criticisms of Joe, like cancel culture and stuff like that, and defend him as just an average guy who's interested in having conversations.
And if he's got any faults, it's just he's a little bit open-minded or too trusting or something.
And my prize before listening to too much of Joe Rogan's content was pretty much that, actually.
He was just a man in the street type guy.
And I thought, actually, that fancy pants academics could probably learn a thing or two from him in terms of knowing how to speak to people.
But having listened to a lot of it, I've become convinced that he is a conspiracist.
He is absolutely ideologically committed along certain directions that often changes depending on the climate.
He was a conspiracist back when he thought the moon landing was a hoax.
He's fully committed on the anti-vax globalist.
The Democrats are evil.
Australia's a penal colony.
He's right about that one, isn't he?
Yeah, it's hell here.
It's hell.
Regarding the lab leak, that's an interesting example because I think the danger with people like ourselves is we can pay too much attention to the chatter on a topic like that.
And having a few connections to people who know a lot more about that than us, these professors of virology and stuff like that, it wasn't like the lab leak was completely out of not even a possibility.
Then, oh, it seems like it's very possible.
That was just in.
The chatter sphere, the actual science on it.
Yeah, of course.
But the chatter sphere is what we're talking about, isn't it?
The chatter sphere is what gets people deplatformed or not.
Not a dispassionate observation of the science.
But the way people present that science in the chatter sphere is as if that was forbidden for scientists to discuss.
It never was.
It's discussed in all of the relevant papers.
It was forbidden in polite society.
You were laughed out of Brooklyn parties for believing it.
Now, that I can accept, but not the first part.
Being laughed out of some Manhattan cocktail party.
A similar thing happened whenever Sam Harris said to me that CRT is in all the schools across the US.
I know nothing about the curriculum in the schools, but I said, "Is that true?
All the schools?"
And he said, "Well..."
At least in the elite schools in Manhattan.
And like, sure, maybe it's more influential there, but that's a very different claim.
And I think when people were talking about the lab leak and how vilified it is, like Joe, for example, claimed that if you discussed it, you could be kicked off Twitter.
Now, I discussed it plenty at the time and seen many other people do the same thing.
And when I went back and even looked at articles that were on Slate and Vox, which I'm no great fan of those sites for their editorial line, but they often were much less extreme than what people, like people were only taking a headline.
And when you read the article, there was a whole paragraph saying, you know, now we can't rule out that a lab leak is a possible scenario.
And virologists said they want to make clear that they can't, right?
But then that's presented as you were hounded out of the street if you ever mentioned it.
And I think that is like another issue of the chattering sphere.
Yeah, but I think you're imposing an unfairly high bar on what the claim is.
The claim need only be that having a conversation which took seriously the lab leak hypothesis in April of 2020 would have ruffled feathers in the same way that the McCullough and episodes that claim now that gunshot victims are being classified as COVID deaths.
Ruffles feathers.
It doesn't have to be that you would get fired from your job or kicked off Twitter.
I don't know if Rogan said that, but if he did, that sounds like hyperbole.
But the claim need only be that there are things that we regard now as being misinformation, which in two years we may not, in just the same way as it would have been regarded generally by most people and by most editors at most newspapers and news organizations and cocktail parties in Brooklyn as being misinformation to say that you believed that it came from a lab two years ago.
But not amongst the relevant scientists or most of the science journalists or those kind of people, right?
So we're talking about...
What purchase does that get you?
Well, so when you were talking about ruffling fellers, you mean amongst a partisan liberal commentariat?
Yeah, I mean, because the critics of cancel culture are not saying that cancel culture has infected...
I mean, maybe James Lindsay's saying that.
But I think the main criticism is that the mob will come for your podcast and get Spotify to boot you off because you're talking crazy talk, even if the crazy talk is crazy talk that is being discussed in scientific papers.
It doesn't matter if it's being discussed in scientific papers if it's going to get you booted off Spotify for saying it publicly.
I mean, look, I think we probably agree on a lot on this stuff.
Chris and I are mainly about criticising stuff that we think is shit.
Not about calling for people to be cancelled.
And I think you're okay with that.
Yeah, I mean, I know.
I think you guys do a great job.
And it's fantastic to hear it all kind of compiled in one place because I don't have your patience.
Like, I hear I'm alone and I just roll my eyes and I have better things to do than dissect every single way in which he's wrong.
But I'm very glad that you guys do.
I'm interested in your thoughts then about, you know, we mentioned earlier that I'd just done this podcast with James Lindsay, which I'm really frustrated that I didn't get to release because the software packed up and I didn't have a backup for it.
And he and I spent almost two hours arguing.
I think he came into this thinking that I was going to be a left-wing wokester.
Completely dismissing it.
I think all he knew about me was that I had contradicted Joe Rogan.
Therefore, if I am the non-Joe Rogan, then...
And I think he'd read me in like Barry Weiss's substack or maybe heard me on the Fifth Column podcast or one of those things defending Australia.
So if I was a pro-concentration camp, like anti-Tim Poole...
Anti-Joe Rogan person, then by definition, I was a soft, squishy butterfly just flapping my way towards Marxism.
That's accurate.
Yeah.
That's the impression I got.
I think when he then learned that I get most of my shit, well, probably equal amounts of my shit from the left, from the woke left as I do from the alt-right.
Maybe I'm not allowed to call them the alt-right.
Everyone gets angry when I call sort of right wing, well, not even right wing.
When I call shit posters, when I call shit posters online, who have, who care a lot more about Liberty than you do and who are very performative in that way.
If I call them alt right, people get angry because no, no, technically right wing.
I'm like, okay, they're not all right, technically.
But so, you know, when James Lindsay then found out that I am generally fighting also, I think, for the ascendancy of a conception of egalitarianism.
That embraces liberalism and does favour free speech and is not obsessed with identity and equity and what I regard as being the divisiveness of identitarian movements.
When he heard that I'm the anti-LGBTQI plus type of gay who doesn't really care very much about my own identity as a gay person or that I'm not banging on all the time about my Jewishness or my whiteness or whatever, then I think he liked that.
And we were able to argue in interesting ways about his worldview, which, as I'm sure you guys know, because I believe you've just recorded an episode about James Lindsay, which you're about to release, which I can't wait to hear.
He sees this movement as being not just a fringe bunch of cancel culture fanatics, but an ideology that is set in almost totalitarian opposition to all things that...
We hold dear.
So with James Lindsay, it is interesting to talk about him.
And I think like in some respects, he's a, to me, seems a much less difficult case than it comes to someone like Rogan, because James Lindsay can be reasonable in conversations, like not his last appearance on Rogan,
but the appearance before that.
I don't know if you saw it, but he kind of presented this argument pretty well, right?
Like the position that's outlined.
Outlined in his book, Cynical Theories.
James's content and the episode that we will release has gotten really, really much more extreme.
And I don't know to what extent he was referencing how far his beliefs go.
But I mean, you must have seen that clip recently of him talking about a communism inside a fascism and a fascism inside a...
I'm afraid I somehow missed that.
If you look at it afterwards, it's a piece of internet brilliance, the details of which are irrelevant, except to say that in James's worldview, and we tie this very tightly to a guy that he's collaborated with for many years now,
Michael O 'Fallon of Sovereign Nations, a kind of Christian nationalist guy.
It's become very much anti-globalist, tied in with the World Economic Forum.
Referencing that their plan is to make all of us eat insects in the Great Reset.
What's this Klaus guy?
Everyone's always on suddenly about Klaus.
You know, everyone like I've heard him on Joe Rogan like six times, people talking about Marjid's onto him and James Lindsay's onto him, this Klaus Schwab or something.
I'd never heard of this dude.
It's like all of a sudden he's the poster child for a conspiracy.
He's the new George Soros.
He is.
It sounds like.
Or Hillary Clinton.
And he's a figure that you can hear on Infowars.
You could hear on Infowars a couple of months before he started appearing on Rogan, on James Lindsay's output and so on.
And that's something I would, I guess, push back on when it comes to anybody suggesting that Lindsay is a reasonable person or somebody that we need to heed.
Because his conspiracies are...
Now at Alex Jones level, like, I mean, he was feuding with the Holocaust Memorial site, but you can just regard that as bad judgment.
But his current take on the Ukraine crisis is that the president of Ukraine is a psyop and that it might all be a plot by the World Economic Forum to introduce wokeism and the Great Reset, right?
He is talking about billions of people being killed in order to introduce Chinese-style communism to the US.
I can't see why we need to entertain people like him or a lot of people in the heterodox sphere currently who are trying to interpret the Ukraine crisis through the lens of wokeism and the culture war.
It's incredible.
What has amazed me over the past five years or so is the infinite parochialism of people and social media.
And in particular, Americans.
Sorry, Americans.
I mean, we all do it.
But I think people outside America are embarrassed by their own parochialism.
And Americans have never learned that trait because America is so large and such a cultural influence on the world that it has its own gravitational vortex and you never need to sort of see it from outside.
And because Americans don't travel as much as everybody else, they're sort of insulated from that.
It's one of the things that bothers me most about wokeism itself, which is that it's a very peculiarly kind of Americanized conception of racial identitarianism that gets superimposed on the rest of the world.
It's very, in this kind of essentialist idea about the African-American experience.
I mean, I have white American friends who, like, I've been outside of America traveling with them, and they've referred to black people outside America as African-Americans.
That's just a black person.
They've never been to America.
They're not African-Americans.
They don't have the same history.
A French-African person has a very different experience and a very different conception of what it means to be black in France than an African-American person might.
Not to mention the fact that a lot of African-Americans will also have very diverse ideas about their own racial identity.
In the same way, I do see this kind of...
It echoes a little bit what we were saying earlier about the COVID statistics, and you could just carve America out of the data set, and you would still see that COVID is a very bad thing.
And in the same respect, there's a deep parochialism on the anti-woke, whatever that movement is, that sees everything around the world as being about trying to impose critical race theory on America's schoolchildren, like even the war in Ukraine.
Ukrainians exist.
Central Europeans exist.
This is one of the things that I find so weird.
I was even having a shot at Tulsi Gabbard the other day for tweeting about how America could have avoided this because if only America had this and if America had that.
And there's this kind of old school American diplomatic corps which is kind of self-flagellating about America.
And if we hadn't done this with NATO, and if we hadn't done that with NATO, then Putin wouldn't have this and Putin wouldn't have that.
And I'm like, there's 100 million Central Europeans.
Talk to them about what they think of Putin.
Talk to them about what they want out of their lives.
They're the people who we need to be thinking about right now.
This isn't a geopolitical game between Washington DC and Moscow primarily.
This is about 44 million Ukrainians and however the fuck many Polish people there are and Estonians.
These are the people who are actually there.
It's their future who's on the line.
Stop with all this.
Yes, you've clearly triggered something in me here.
Not everything is about your fucking woke wars.
Grow up, dude.
It's a big world out there.
There's a lot of problems out there.
In fact, you know, one of the best things that I've heard about wokeness, which gave me pause in my sort of anti-woke crusade, was by Tyler Cowen, you know, the libertarian economist Tyler Cowen.
One of the best things that gave me pause in my sort of anti-woke vendetta was by the libertarian economist Tyler Cowen, where he said, like, he's no fan of wokeness.
He's no fan of cancel culture.
Given that America is so good at exporting cultural phenomena and movements, if you could export wokeness to the world and just make the world 10% more woke, wouldn't that be a good thing in Nigeria, in Indonesia,
in Bangladesh?
In Hungary?
You know, yeah, in Hungary, like all over the place.
So yeah, it might be a little bit extreme for us here where we're all getting caught up in the revolution and like we're worrying about whether or not we went too far with Louis CK.
But the reality is, if you could make the rest of the world just a little bit more woke, that would be a great thing.
So we should probably not worry too much about it.
Yeah, Josh, I think I was thinking just before you sort of articulated where you generally come from politically, philosophically, maximizing liberalism and stuff like that.
The stuff that you spoke about, I think Chris and I are pretty much on board in the same place.
And I was trying to identify where, if anywhere, we might diverge.
And I think probably my one message would be to, you know, exercise that kind of moderation that goes along with the liberalism and like the anti-war crusaders, like James Lindsay.
Are a bit like the sort of anti-communists of the 1950s and so on.
It's a thing.
It's real.
If you get on the internet, if you get in certain parts of academia or journals, whatever, it can certainly be extremely annoying.
And I'm not saying it's insignificant.
But what I will say is a lot of the people who have a big focus on that kind of thing and are extremely worried about the terrible threats to free speech and so on, really don't seem to be very worried at all about all the crazy shit that's going on.
The right side of politics as well.
You know, Fox News is still around.
Fox News is doing its things.
Fox News isn't going to be deplatforming anybody.
And there is, I see amongst the free speech absolutists, this kind of head in the sand kind of thing, which kind of pretends that these annoying academics or people on Twitter...
It's like the only thing that exists in the universe.
So I'd probably just be preaching a little bit of moderation and worrying about the grand threat posed to free speech by cancel culture and so on.
I think what you're saying, Matt, is too many people are too fucking online.
I mean, that's the impression.
Honestly, that's the impression that I got from James Lindsay after our two-hour-long chat, and that's the impression I got from Marjid, listening to Marjid on Joe Rogan's show.
Like, these are actually very brilliant people.
who are spending way too much time on twitter and
world views have been deranged by it i don't think it's necessarily a bad thing that we live in a world where such people exist but they're essentially the town cranks who have have gone too far down the rabbit hole of suspicion they're
the people who are constantly whispering about you know how they saw the baker down the street going out in the evening and maybe he's got some body bodies buried in his basement you know
One in a thousand times, that guy's right, but 999 times out of a thousand, he's just the town crank.
He's just been spending too long peering out the window with the curtain drawn, snooping on everybody on Twitter.
One thing I've thought in decoding all of these gurus is how they actually have something in common with the very ideological, academic, woke person, for want of a better word, is in the sense of constructing these cloud castles.
Based on a few premises and these very strong ideological things are constructed from that.
And I think there is a real similarity there.
Sometimes reality is just messy and often boring and there isn't a grand conspiracy and there isn't these hidden dark forces that are at play.
So I think...
I don't know what I think.
I just think there's a similarity.
When you see, like, James Lindsay, after you just complained about people being too online, Josh, I feel self-conscious doing this, but I'm going to reference it anyway.
He appeared on Dr. Phil, and he went on this unhinged rant about critical race theory, but he was citing papers, and he wasn't doing that in a way that came across as he knows his stuff.
It came across as what you're describing, like the town madman saying, you know, and in 1998, there was a paper published.
And if you looked on page three, they said, and it struck me that in opposing or seeking to oppose the influence of wokeism or extreme social justice, that often, it's very often,
it's not a rare occurrence that the people themselves are either They're already mental or they go further down that path.
And they come to a place of that they're still all talking about these same studies.
The friggin' feminist glaciology paper, which I ever hear about again will be too soon.
I know that I'll be hearing about emojis and which color they should be for years to come as well.
And these things, it feels like actually, like with the Ukraine event, as you described, They can't get out of their wheelhouse.
They talk about as if they don't want the culture war.
You know, they want wokeism to go away and all this.
But it feels very much like they wouldn't have anything to play with if they didn't have the culture war.
And they wouldn't have podcast content for every week to talk about the newest, you know, thing that somebody said on Twitter.
And I think the Ukraine takes, which have been insane, have revealed to people in much the way the COVID takes.
That there's a lot of people with melted culture war brains, where it's culture war 24 /7, and that's all that exists.
When, as you note, it isn't.
I'm sorry.
I'm sorry, but it's true.
It is an amazing sociological thing to have witnessed, the derailment of so many skeptical minds over the past five years.
It has to be just an incremental thing.
People who are naturally drawn towards questioning Conventional explanations for things.
Like a sailboat that's just tacking a half a degree to the left but keeps on doing it every single day ends up veering way off course.
They somehow end up, you know, you come back and check in with them three to five years later and all of a sudden they're babbling like lunatics.
But to them, every incremental step has been completely logical.
Yeah, that's how conspiratorial ideation develops, of course.
At one step at a time, one premise builds on the next.
Whereas we, of course, are uniquely wise and free of cognitive biases.
We've got rid of all those biases.
Exactly.
I know everything and everybody else doesn't know anything.
Everybody else is an idiot.
That should be on my tombstone.
At least I was right.
Everyone else was an idiot.
In terms of skeptics, you made me think of Michael Schirmer.
He's the head of the skeptic organization in the US.
He's not completely nuts.
But he just incrementally is going down this road following this kind of inexorable path.
So it feels like there's like a systemic kind of push that pushes people in this direction.
I mean, we've noticed this even with COVID.
For instance, I don't know if you know, but there's a couple of figures, ZDogMD, and what's the name of the other guy, Chris?
Oh, uh...
Vinay Prasad.
Vinay Prasad.
Thank you, Chris.
Anyway, um...
Certainly.
A couple of formerly good medical people, but also public commenters on COVID.
And they have social media platforms, which I think is critical.
And you've been able to observe this in real time.
They're like normal people that have been pulled towards the kinds of takes that get traction, that are emotionally, intuitively appealing.
There's another guy, Campbell, I think his name, an English guy, Chris.
What's his name?
John Campbell.
John Campbell.
Another guy who was providing good information on that topic, but has drifted towards the conspiratorial.
So it makes me think that in trying to understand what's going on with these opinionators, it's not so much that there's like a few bad apples or there's a few people that are just intrinsically crazy, but rather there's also these...
Whether you call it audience capture or just the dynamics of social media, you know, Dawkins memes, you know, there's bad toxic memes spreading faster than good ones.
There's some sort of force that is pushing things in a bad direction.
And that's what makes me a little bit skeptical of the let a thousand flowers bloom kind of optimistic view of the international, you know, infosphere.
Let me end then with just one, grant you one point there, which is that what is deranging a lot of this is that The incentives that the platforms themselves have are warped.
So you could let a thousand flowers bloom if every post was treated equally by the algorithm.
But the fact that the only thing that social media platforms in particular care about is the amount of time that you spend on the site because they're funded by advertising.
That consequently means that things that get the largest amount of engagement are the things that get bumped up to the...
Top of your viewing feed.
And that means that things that elicit responses that make you either like or share or comment on them are going to be prioritized over things that are perhaps more reasonable.
And of course you're going to be stirred up by things that are more extreme.
So it's an extremification machine.
That logic doesn't entirely hold with podcasts, but it sort of does, because of course a podcast that's incredibly controversial is going to go viral and have more people sharing it and more people liking it and commenting on it.
So, yeah, I'm sort of with you there.
I think you'd go a long way towards solving a lot of these problems if the platforms that we share things on weren't biased towards more unusual content that elicits more of a rise out of us.
Yeah.
I want to add a note there, just that ZDogg and Vinay Prasad, although I think they definitely hugely fall into The both sides in camp too often.
They're not people that overall are opposed to vaccines, right?
They tend to be people who just have a lot of sympathy for people that have concerns about vaccines and might spend a large amount of their attention, especially in the case of Vinay, talking about how children don't need to be vaccinated, but they're not in the same category as Malone and McCulloch.
But it's definitely clear from looking particularly at Vinay's content that there's a pool and there's a reward Luke, for taking stances which appeal to a heterodox or against the mainstream audience.
And Josh, I've got a question relevant to you for that.
When I look at the heterodox sphere, heterodox thinkers, and of course, there are people within that on certain fringes that are easily dismissed that you wouldn't have that much sympathy for.
There might be people that have extreme taste.
Really an outlier, right?
Most of the people in there were not in the same status of Ben Shapiro as an open right-wing partisan.
But something that I've noticed is there's a lot of people in the heterodox spheres, your Bret Weinstein, Jordan Peterson, James Lindsay, who have took this death spiral that we've talked about.
At first with COVID, also with the stolen election, then with the insurrection, and more recently...
World Economic Forum, Great Reset, take your pick.
But when there's so many in that sphere who otherwise would have been well-regarded, maybe would be people that you would have happily talked to, probably still would talk to, does there seem something concerning there, which is, if not on a par,
at least a big problem that the heterodox sphere doesn't seem good at grappling with, and I'm including this.
The tendency that Peter Boghossian at the minute is in Hungary giving lectures for Orban.
Jordan Peterson met with Orban.
James Lindsay happily promotes, you know, the most extreme wing of the Trump party.
And that seems to me an issue that the heterodoxy are good at getting together, complaining about mainstream institutions, complaining about woke journalists.
But they don't look in the mirror very often that the extremists in their midst.
And there's a lot of them.
I mean, well, the ones who don't look at the extremists in their midst tend to be extremists themselves.
I mean, I think the ones who aren't extremists do look at the extremists in their midst with some bafflement.
I mean, Sam Harris does, and like, you know, Andrew Sullivan does, and I suppose Barry Weiss does, and I suppose, you know, the members of the original ID, and, you know, I don't know, Matt Iglesias or whoever else you might want to broadly, Matt Taibbi.
Glenn Greenwald, I don't know how wide a network casting for this collection of people, but there's a collection of people who are, you know, who would have been considered in the same basket as, I don't know, Dave Rubin and James Lindsay and Brett Weinstein and Marjit Nawaz five years ago,
but who now are equally baffled, as baffled as you and I are about.
What's happened to them?
And I think you're right.
It's a really cautionary tale.
It's a cautionary tale about how a little bit of skepticism can be useful and a lot of skepticism can be deranging.
And yes, it's got something to do with audience capture.
It's got something to do with being too online.
It's got something to do with losing perspective.
There are obviously conditions that conspire to encourage otherwise intelligent people with critical...
A lot of critical thinking faculties to become possessed by ghosts and goblins and demons and to build these castles in the sky, as you put it, to ward them off.
It is something that I think about a lot.
It's something that I think about making sure that I don't do it.
I also spend a lot of time thinking about the related problem of the opportunity cost of focusing on all this stuff at all.
One of the things that we're not talking about that we could have been talking about Here for the past hour that would be more fruitful, that are really important.
So, I mean, I certainly want to privately in my own career, in my own relationship to my own output, spend a lot more time thinking about things that I think are still going to seem relevant in 10 or 20 years, let alone 50 years, than all this nonsense,
which I really don't think is hugely consequential either way.
I think the culture war will reach eternally though.
It was raging in the 90s and will continue, but whatever the weekly controversies are, are probably not going to stay that constant.
I would say though that my general approach has been one of perpetual cynicism for a long time now.
Maybe a side effect of growing up in Northern Ireland, but the trajectory that people like Brett Weinstein And James Lindsay and so on.
It didn't surprise me that much when I looked at their content, because when you dig in, you see the tendency towards conspiracism.
You see, like, long before the events of Evergreen and all those kind of things.
Brett had alternative theories about evolution.
He had conspiracy theories that he discovered the one smoking gun flaw that undermines all pharmaceuticals in the US, if not further afield.
Alternative theory of everything, right?
These are not average people.
And I guess with people like Sam, part of my contention is that there's a bit of a blind spot amongst heterodox people to those issues.
And they've just become in sharper relief with COVID and with things like the voter ballot conspiracy.
But they're perhaps weaknesses that are quite difficult to plug.
Position is an inherent, deep skepticism of anything mainstream, like a kind of reactionary contrarianism.
Yeah, I mean, I'm not sure that there was never a there there.
I'm not sure that the lesson is that you were always right and you were right all along, tempting as that might be for you to believe.
It's possible to notice.
A problem.
Let's articulate the problem as being a kind of a groupthink in academia that is too identitarian and too disrespectful of the rambunctious exchange of free ideas and smaller liberal values, that you can identify that as being a problem.
And, you know, you can have been right in identifying that as a problem, even if half the people who also identified that as a problem then went off and started chasing pixies.
I'm very, very, unfortunately, all too aware that I am often wrong.
And a fantastic take was I remember telling people that COVID was just going to be like SARS and we won't be talking in a couple of months.
A great thing that stood the test of time.
And I also agree just to say that I'm not arguing that because of the trajectories that people have taken, that there are no issues about...
Woke overreach or those kind of criticisms that people might raise.
There's no validity to them and we can just dismiss them.
I wouldn't go so far.
So just to be clear.
I'm kind of with you, Josh, in that I'm a bit more...
I'm not as cynical as Chris, put it that way.
And I think despite all of the bad stuff that we cover and have been talking about, all of this profusion of different voices, all of the podcasts, a lot of it is absolutely great.
I was just looking at the podcasts I subscribe to, the history podcasts, astronomy podcasts, the psychology ones.
Uncomfortable conversations with Josh Sepp.
Sorry, sorry, yeah, yeah.
That's kind of the best of the lot, you know, the king, really the crowning achievement of all podcasting.
Yeah, but for instance, say the fifth column, I remember enjoying your episodes of the fifth column.
I think they're crazy libertarians, but I also think that they're pretty cool and I'd love to hear them.
So there's a lot of good stuff going on and, you know, you talk about what you're trying to do, which is to move things in a positive direction, not get caught up in the froth and the...
The nonsense of the culture war completely until we disappear up our own arses, but actually deal with things that are important.
I mean, we're trying to do the same thing a little bit, I think, in that we are pointing out stuff that's bad, but we're trying to cover people that we think are good and we show how they don't do deceptive rhetorical tricks and all that.
So, look, I think there's some positive signs there.
And I think maybe it's just a cultural thing where us as a global society has to adjust to.
This new technology.
I think where I was getting at with that sort of moderation, editorial things, whatever, I don't know what shape it will take, but I think there's got to be some sort of cultural or institutional adjustment that sort of accommodates the new technology.
But like you, I don't think we have any ideas or great, like we don't know how to fix this.
We don't think there's any sort of magic bullet that'll fix it.
So we'll just keep criticizing people in the meantime until somebody else sorts it out.
The only solution I have for you is for everybody to listen to Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Sets available on all good podcasting platforms where we have those conversations, the uncomfortable ones, and we don't care about triggering any tripwires with all the people who are,
I suppose the people who you pick apart on this show.
I don't pick apart, I just banter with them.
That's the selling point.
You get all of that, you get all the Josh, but you don't have to deal with me or Matt.
You don't have.
Imagine Chris and Matt's show without all of the annoying nonsense and with no Chris and no Matt.
But everything else is just me and interesting people.
Definitely better spoken.
Well, Josh, I will say thanks heaps for volunteering to come on.
No, it's great to talk.
It's lovely to talk to you guys.
I've actually, I will say also that I've listened to in the car radio and stuff like that for many years.
So it was a bit of a buzz to hear that you listen to our little podcast.
So yeah, really good.
Well, that's lovely.
No, you guys are great.
And I love your show.
So thanks for the invitation.
Yeah.
Cheers, Josh.
Well, Matt, that was Josh Zeps.
He's gone.
He put us through the ringer.
You know, it was a punchy dialogue.
There were good points made on both sides, and we've stumbled out of the ring, battered and bruised, but obviously victorious.
Those are very bland, platitudinous comments.
You don't remember what we spoke about at all, do you?
You've totally forgotten.
Matt, no, you're spoiling the magic of podcasting.
We just finished the conversation, just went out the door.
Just now.
Of course, I remember everything we said, and it was thrilling.
So thank you, Josh.
Sparkling repertoire from beginning to end.
He's a smooth talker, he's Josh.
He's a good talker.
A good thinker too.
He is.
He thinks on his feet.
Yeah, and if anybody is interested in following him, he mentioned it on our episode, but we'll also put the relevant links and whatnot into the episode notes.
So if you find Josh, An interesting guy.
Just look in the episode notes and you can find other ways to follow him and see his podcast.
So with that said, Matt, we now need to turn to the opinions of other people on the internet, various folks around the intersphere who have listened to our podcast and have decided to review it.
And for their reward for doing so is that we will review their review.
Tit for tat.
Yes, that's right.
That's what you get.
Keep that in mind before you leave a bad review.
Keep that in mind, everybody.
It's the prisoner's dilemma in action.
Yeah, that's right.
That's right.
You had your tit, now we're having our tat.
Yeah, so you need to think about this when you're going to leave your reviews.
Now, Matt, this week I've got two, but actually I don't have a...
A strong negative one.
I do have a critique, though, but it's a five-star review.
So this one says, an explosive show on James Lindsay, and it's by Elvin Knob.
Five stars.
But what they said, Matt, is you might say it was nuclear, but instead kept pronouncing it nuclear, giving show a hard George W. Bush vibe buzzkill.
Five stars, though.
No one should have to listen to that much Lindsay Blarney.
Wow, so much.
What do you think about that?
Well, let's get to the bottom.
Let's figure out once and for all, how do you say nuclear?
How I said it, right?
What did you say?
Say it again.
Nuclear.
Nuclear.
The word of the day is nuclear.
Now, listen, you folks on the internet.
Let me just help you out here.
There's more countries in the world.
America!
Alright?
And there's more pronunciations and more dialects than your parochial concerns might suggest.
So maybe you might want to look into how that word is pronounced across the globe.
The gloob?
That's not right.
That's not right.
That one's not right.
The globe.
The globe.
But yes, so I'm not saying Matt and I are perfectly...
You know, eloquent, pronouncing everything.
Pronouncing?
What the hell am I doing?
What am I doing?
Pronouncing everything correctly, as illustrated.
But you might want to check about how nuclear is pronounced in the UK or in Australia, for example, before you throw some shade.
Just a suggestion for internet people out there.
That's right.
It's the Queen's English.
You just listen to how the Queen says it, and that's the right way to say it.
Am I right?
That's not what I was...
But anyway, yeah.
So that's all.
Just saying, you know, maybe check in there before you start bashing people's pronunciation.
But thank you for the five stars, though.
Thank you for the five stars.
Yeah, but that was good.
The five stars.
Yeah.
Elvin Knob.
So thank you for that.
Now!
We have another, so this one is from "Andymanisawesome", if he does say so himself.
And the title is "sagoodpod", "sagoodpod".
It's all right, it's all right.
It's all right, yeah.
And it's five stars, it's five stars, so I'm, you know, I'm patting our backs here.
But let's see, there's a little bit of an egging in it.
Can't stop listening.
Don't know if this podcast will save Western civilization like the portal, but it scratches my snarky commentary itch whenever I listen, which is almost as important.
Also, fun accents abound.
If your brain has been permanently damaged by the culture war on Twitter, then this is a must listen.
Otherwise...
Please spare yourself this experience and go outside and do something productive instead.
Or listen to a different podcast where you'll learn something actually useful.
Great job, guys.
That's actually good advice.
That's good advice.
People should be listening to astronomy podcasts, history podcasts.
They'll learn all kinds of useful things.
The fifth column.
The fifth column.
Literally anything.
Yeah.
I don't know what's going on.
Yeah.
Go outside.
Touch grass.
You know, look at the clouds.
These are all good options.
That's right.
Faces and clouds.
They're all there.
So there we go, Matt.
That's our review of reviews.
Not too negative this week.
You know, negative points, somebody wrong about pronunciation, and then we have some praise.
That's good.
Nice little mix.
A cocktail of reviews.
Yeah, that's right.
Just another day in the guru's sphere.
And speaking of the guru's sphere, Matt, we need to thank...
Some people who deem to enter it, our patrons, our lovely patrons, who enter the Gurusphere to support us, the real Gurusphere.
They become galaxy brains, revolutionary geniuses, or conspiracy hypothesizers in order to help us listen to idiots talk nonsense.
That's not what this show is about.
No, no, no, no, no.
They're supporting a worthy endeavor.
So I thought I'd mention a few of them unless you object.
Go right ahead.
Go right ahead.
Okay, so this week, we have, for Galaxy Brain Gurus, Gareth Lee, we have Juanita Custance.
Stop!
That's my cousin.
Juanita Custance.
That's how you pronounce it, by the way.
I even did a name right.
Juanita Custance.
Yeah, that's right.
Really, after all that talk about correct pronunciation, you really have...
You really shot the bed on this one, Chris.
How do you have a cousin with that kind of name?
Your genetics are a mystery, Matt.
Thank you, Matt's cousin.
Let's see if the rest of them are your family, but you should say something nice.
She's a family member.
Well, Juanita is a lovely person and her family are lovely and they're very cool.
They live down in Melbourne and they're the coolest.
People that I'm related to, I think.
I like that.
In Melbourne.
And they've got good taste in podcasts, or at least she does.
One of them does.
So that's good.
She was the one who left that review.
I'm pretty sure it was her.
We can't be entirely sure.
But she was the one who said, I started listening to this podcast made by my cousin.
You can just imagine my...
My thoughts.
And she wasn't expecting it to be good, which I understand.
I completely understand.
I would expect cringe as well.
And there's a fair bit of cringe, but clearly we've done all right.
So she's still with us.
That's great.
She's still supporting.
So thank you, Juanita.
We also need to find Det Stablor.
Det Stablor.
Detective Stablor.
Maybe it's Detective Stablor.
I'm not related to him.
It's death.stablor.
So yeah, that's a detective stablor.
And then last for this week, Rob Baird or Bard?
Rob Baird.
Rob Baird.
Is this another?
That's not another family member, is it?
No, but I think I know him.
Matt, don't give this away.
Not all the people supporting us are like your friends and family.
That'll give the wrong impression.
These are all pity subscriptions, Chris.
They're all pity subscriptions.
They are in a certain way.
So thank you to all of those nice galaxy brain gurus.
You're sitting on one of the great scientific stories that I've ever heard.
And you're so polite.
And, hey, wait a minute.
Am I an expert?
I kind of am.
Yeah.
I don't trust people at all.
And so for this week, Or revolutionary geniuses.
We have a couple of those.
And we have Lewis Price, Samuel Brooks, who I think you may know.
I believe you might have been on this podcast.
No?
Am I there?
Isn't that right?
A second cousin or something.
I'm not sure.
Samuel Brooks, thank you.
And Rebecca L. Shanawani.
I think I also know from Twitter.
So thank you, Lewis, Samuel, and Rebecca.
Maybe you can spit out that hydrogenated thinking and let yourself feed off of your own thinking.
What you really are is an unbelievable thinker and researcher, a thinker that the world doesn't know.
We're now going to thank the lowest tier.
The conspiracy hypothesis, but they're no less important, Matt.
They're no less important.
They support us and they get access to the bonus episodes.
So, you know, these are important people in their own right.
That's right.
They're just as worthy.
I won't hear you say a bad word against them.
No, I won't.
I won't.
And they are, for this week, Samantha Ray, Emma, Kyle S, and Charlotte Goodall.
Yay!
That's right.
We may not love them quite as much as the top-tier Patreons, but we love them, like, infinitely more than the people who are not Patreons.
That's a fair statement, isn't it?
The bad people.
Yeah, that's right.
We're muleing my mark.
We better move on.
Conspiracy Hypothesis, thank you all.
Every great idea starts with a minority of one.
We are not going to advance conspiracy theories.
We will advance conspiracy hypotheses.
All right, now.
Before we finish this week, there's just one more thing to take care of.
And that's that people might be expecting that the next guru that we're going to look at is Jerome Lowneyer, because we mentioned that.
And he is coming up soon.
But there's somebody who's jumped ahead of the line.
We've done a decoding episode with an unexpected character, Reverend Moon of the Unification.
Church.
And we've done this because we did some crossover episodes with Elgin Strait from the Falling Out podcast, who has a podcast for ex-members of the Unification Church.
So we have an interview with Elgin coming out next week, and then we have a decoding episode with some of the historical recorded lectures by Reverend Moon.
So that will be interesting.
So we haven't forgot about...
Drone Larnier, but this was an interesting opportunity and Elgin had a lot of interesting things to say.
So that's coming up first, the historical decoding in the vein of Anthony DeMello and Carl Sagan, I guess.
Yeah, quite a character, Reverend Moon.
Absolute sex!
You'll find out what that's about.
He's a fan of saying absolute X, Y, and Z. So yeah, absolute sex.
Look forward to learning about that.
Don't make promises you can't keep.
That's my advice too.
Yeah, that's good advice for old Reverend Moon.
All right.
Well, Matt, it's been a pleasure.
I have had quite enough of Australians after this episode now, so I need to go and be here for a while.
Yeah, one is enough.
Next out will be Julian.
He's not Australian.
No, he's of indeterminate origin somewhere in the Indian Ocean or Atlantic, I'm not sure.
Yeah, I believe he's a collection of cells which became the sentient.
So that's Julian's origin story, surprising.
But, you know, an interesting character because of that.
That'll be good.
That'll be good.
So, Matt, go grovel at the feet of your muscle master.
