Today we are joined by Jamie Wheal, who comprised a full one-third of the subjects covered on our prior "Sensemaking Cubed" episode also featuring Daniel Schmachtenberger and Jordan Hall. Jamie has kindly taken advantage of our standing offer of a right to reply to all podcast subjects and here is our conversation in its entirety. As well as being a sometime interlocutor with Daniel and Jordan, Jamie is an author of books such as Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, Navy SEALs and Maverick Scientists are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work and Recapture the Rapture: Rethinking God, Sex and Death In a World That's Lost Its Mind. He's the founder of the Flow Genome Project, an organisation that aspires to train ultimate human performance, and does leadership seminars and wilderness excursions with many famous organisations such as Deloitte, Red Bull, Google, Lululemon, Facebook, TD Ameritrade, Nike, and Goldman Sachs.So, the three of us get into it a bit about that sensemaking about sensemaking video, but pretty quickly move into the issue of making sense of things more broadly, as it's transpired with fraught issues such as COVID; both in the popular social media space, and within the 'blue church' of academia.From what we knew of Jamie, we expected to have a pleasant chat with him, and as you'll hear: it was a pleasant chat! Even if our worldview and understanding of things diverged a fair bit, there were a number of things we could agree on as well. A big thumbs-up to Jamie for taking our (relatively scathing) coverage of the infamous video with the best of grace and, in the best tradition of what the IDW purports to do, be willing to have a frank public chat with a couple of blokes who have been highly critical of some of the people and ideas he's (somewhat) aligned with.Our intros and outros are - as usual - quite indulgent, so be sure to take advantage of those bookmarks if you want to skip straight to the interview proper.Enjoy!LinksMike Duncan's Revolutions PodcastBeyond Synth Podcast (Chris is a guest on ep 342)Gizmodo fact-check on Elon's claims about AppleJamie Wheal @ Linkedin Feature on Jamie Wheal in the Texas MonthlyJamie Wheal's appearance on ConspiritualityCritical analysis of Rebel Wisdom & Jamie Wheal by Psymposia
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 to understand what they're talking about.
I'm Professor Matt Brown.
This guy I'm looking at right now is Chris Kavanagh.
I'm the psychologist.
He's the anthropologist.
This is Decoding the Gurus.
Good morning, Chris.
Top of the morning to you, as you like to say.
How are you feeling?
Wow, I'm feeling good.
That had very morning zoo energy.
I'm impressed.
You got the whole spiel correct.
You added in personalizations, off-the-wall references.
That was great.
All the jigsaw piece puzzles were there.
Puzzle pieces were there.
Piece puzzles.
It's finished now.
We're back to normal.
No, but I'm feeling good this morning.
I had my swim.
And I've been swimming pretty regularly recently.
So instead of it just making me feel exhausted and old, it actually makes me feel innervated.
It gets the old juices flowing.
And I've had like three or four coffees.
I see.
We're going to have a health off.
All right.
All right.
Let me hit you with some information, Matt.
So long-term listeners, people who will care deeply about these kind of minutiae updates, Matt, people are dying to know.
Did Chris kick?
His sweet coffee addiction.
In effect, did he also only mention that in Patreon bonus material?
Possibly.
Possibly.
I don't remember now.
But I'm here to tell you, I have stopped consuming sweet convenience store coffee as of maybe a couple of weeks now.
Without any.
Maybe it fell off the wagon.
Well, I say without any.
I may have had one or two, but one or two in the space of weeks and weeks.
So, let's go on.
And the other thing I did, Matt, look at this.
This is a very recent thing, though.
Don't know if it's a full-time change yet, but I'm going to try.
Snacking.
You know snacking, the downfall of many weight management plans or healthy lifestyles.
That's one of my remaining vices was just, I like my snacks.
And Japan is good for snacks.
But you know what a Discovered, man.
I couldn't stop myself from snacking.
I saw all the stuff that people said about, replace your snacks with a fucking piece of celery or whatever.
And I was like, no, come on.
Come on, that's not going to do it.
But one of those pieces of advice was like, nuts.
Nuts.
Eat nuts.
Those are good.
They make you feel satisfied.
And they're also like, they are like a treat.
I've eaten nuts in the past.
At times, but I've never been a nut guy.
I was feeling dejected one morning.
I was like, okay, there's many packets of nuts constantly in the convenience stores in Japan.
I was perusing the shelves for alternatives.
I was like, all right, I'll give these nut things a chance.
Fucking nuts, man.
Nuts are great.
I've been growing a few days now without snacking except for nuts.
And I'm digging.
Nuts.
I'm a nut guy now.
Well, that's good, Chris.
But a couple of things.
First of all, whenever I hear you talk about this stuff, it's hard not to think about Alan Partridge's medical addiction to Toblerone because it's on the same level.
You don't know addiction, my friend.
You do not know.
But the other thing, be wary of nuts.
I love nuts too.
Nuts are great.
But they're dangerous, man.
Nuts.
It's like, it's concentrated energy.
It's fat and it's oil.
What?
No.
Don't ruin nuts for me.
But they're better than chocolate or something like that, right?
They've got protein in them, but that's probably about it.
I was feeling like a hunter-galler, you know, with my little pack of nuts.
And they don't taste that good for the candy.
They're not good for you.
No, they are good for you.
Some of them are good for you, aren't they?
They have nutrients in them, but they're packed full of fat.
I think if you looked at like a weight for weight per 100 grams, I'm pretty sure you'll find they're about the same as chocolate.
I'm sorry, man.
Oh, no!
That's why they taste so good, Chris.
There's no way for things to taste good without just massive amounts of salt and oil.
But I still have the basic heuristic that bad taste pain equals better for you, generally speaking.
But I know what you're saying is true.
Well, by the way, this is middle-aged men talk about their health and diets.
I'm sorry.
This is what you sign up for with intro, but this is what DTG is now.
But there we go.
So this episode, Matt, we should mention.
It's not the Elon Musk episode, which everyone is eagerly awaiting to close out the Tech Guru season.
That is coming.
But this has jumped the line because we have a write-of-reply clause.
In our guru contracts where anyone that we cover can request that we have a chat with them.
And unless they are soulless and evil, and even if they are and we still think it'll go reasonably well, we might have a chat with them.
But one of our sense makers from the Sensemaking Cube episode, Jimmy Wheel, got in contact after...
Hearing a bit of the episode and asked if we could have a chat about it.
So that's what this episode is.
It's a guru right to reply for people who haven't had that before.
So we're going to be talking with Jimmy Wheel, but we haven't yet.
So we don't know how that went.
It's probably okay though, right?
It's probably okay.
I'm sure it's going to be fine.
I just hope it's not going to be one of those situations where you like play back me saying something mean and then...
Oh, I should get some clips of you saying, poor Jimmy.
But, you know, we were quite nice about Jimmy.
We pointed out that Jordan Hall was slightly bullying him on the episode, or from our perspective, seemed to be doing that with his policing of metaphors.
So, you know, it'll be interesting to see how it goes.
We'll find out.
But that's what the main segment of today's episode is.
But on Elon Musk, Matt, I don't want to Gild the lily?
Is that correct?
Like, I don't want to reveal the horse before you buy it?
Put the horse before the cart?
Whatever the metaphor.
Definitely not gilding the lily, but go on.
Just go on.
But I just want to note, there's two things about the...
You know, he's on Twitter every day.
He's Trump-like in his...
Attention getting, tweeting out.
But since we've been doing our research on him, we both have noticed that he has a penchant for lying in a remarkable way.
It is Trumpian, where he just says things that are not true and then they just get lost in the midst of time or it doesn't really matter.
And I just noticed one before this episode that had the reference because it just sums these things up.
So beautifully.
Elon Musk was claiming Apple was about to kick Twitter off the App Store.
And he was also saying, oh, they've stopped buying ads for Twitter, right?
They're pulling out.
And there's a Gizmodo article that says...
Apple spent $84,000 on Twitter ads the same day Elon tweeted it mostly stopped advertising now.
And they mention, they go on to mention that Apple had spent more than most other companies advertising on Twitter.
So it's just like, it's just not true.
Also, he said that Apple had threatened to remove Twitter from the App Store.
And this is what sent him on this war.
And then...
Just today, he tweeted out, Thanks Tim Cook for taking me around Apple's beautiful HQ.
Good conversation.
Among other things, we resolved the misunderstanding about Twitter potentially being removed from the App Store.
Tim was clear that Apple never considered doing so.
He tweeted out, Apple has threatened us to remove, you know, they're against free speech, and he went on this week-long war, and then today he's just like, oh yeah, apparently that didn't.
That didn't happen.
And it had a massive impact.
Like every bloviating chucklehead, to use your term, leapt into this white knighting for Elon Musk.
He was symbolizing to Eric and Brett the institutional gated complex diving in to squash the heroic Elon Musk for his brave championing of free speech.
And it was just all a fantasy.
It was just all fictional.
Somebody suggested it might be...
An automated message, because apparently Apple sends out automated messages about, like, please make sure your thing is in line with content moderation, or it might be pulled from the App Store.
So they might have, you know, just reacted to your standard automated notification.
But in any case, whatever the truth is, it's just amazing.
It just seems like he can tweet out or say things.
And, you know, we're going to cover this in the episode.
And nobody...
It is something to behold.
It's quite impossible to overstate how sycophantic people are.
And you mentioned Brett Weinstein.
Colin Wright, who is a figure who has a blog called Reality's Last Stand and is active in the gender-critical trans debate.
And he basically positions himself as arguing for science and biological differences are real and this kind of thing.
But he also made this very...
Juvenile illustration of a political spectrum, right?
It's like a little line with a stick man in the middle, and then it shows the left running far away, and the little stick man who was on the left at the beginning is now getting closer to the right, which has stayed still, because the left has gone crazy.
And as so many people pointed out, this is insane because it shows the right being stationary for the past 20 years, which is absolutely insane.
Point of view, if you just look at the right wing, this is the context of American politics.
But Elon Musk retweeted that cartoon.
And Colin Wright has taken that retweet and he now, one, he made limited edition sign posters of the ad and talked about the historic day that Elon Musk retweeted his meme, like, get your own piece of internet history with this.
And he's become a kind of, you know, Musk responder.
Just commenting.
And Musk is also occasionally patting him and various other right-wing accounts on the head with kind of good boy pats.
Usually just smiley faces are 100% right.
But it's amazing.
And it's very much the same pattern that happened with James Lindsay when he got retweeted by Trump.
And he initially tried to play it off as just a joke, as if that's going to affect me.
And then it became his entire personality.
Right?
Like a MAGA, Trumpist idiot.
It's definitely a pattern you see with these second-tier personalities that are competing with each other for the attention for people like Joe Rogan as well, or Elon Musk.
Yeah, yeah.
These sort of big daddy figures that are sitting there at the top of the food chain.
Or Gordon Peterson.
Yeah, yeah, that's right.
Here's another good example.
And actually, this is connected to Sam Harris and another DTG-related thing because Sam Harris quit Twitter recently.
Mainly just for personal reasons.
He just thought Twitter was stupid and a waste of time, and he's right.
It wasn't some sort of political gesture so much, but it was amazing, Chris, didn't you think?
The reaction of all of the IDW web slash Elon Musk fan crowd, they took this as just this damning indictment of Sam Harris.
And Elon Musk did it too.
I'm seeing a tweet from him here where he said that Sam lost me.
When he said that any lies at all would justify Trump losing.
You know where that comes from, don't you, Chris?
Yeah, it's the Hunter Biden comment that he wouldn't care if he had dead bodies in his attic or basement, whichever little kitchen.
This has become an article of truth, hasn't it, on the more deranged side of the IDW, that Sam Harris has gone woke or something.
It's a deliberate misreading.
But just the way they react to someone like Sam not...
You know, he's in general presented as having Trump derangement syndrome.
But, you know, I do think Sam badly worded things there when he was stating his position on that.
But his position was completely coherent.
He was essentially saying he didn't think the story merited the attention.
And it's primarily about Hunter Biden in any case.
But as far as he was concerned, you know, the media were right.
To be cautious, given that previously, when Trump was elected, they had basically been very credulous about any news story that appeared.
So his position was he didn't think it was that big of a deal.
And because it's about Hunter Biden, you'd have to have really strong evidence that Joe Biden was doing as terrible things as Trump was doing with all his family.
That's a perfectly understandable position.
It's not like this huge...
Controversy thing, but yeah, the right-wing ecosystem went crazy over that.
I mean, he was already in the bad books because of the anti-vaxxing opposition, right?
And being critical about that.
But yeah, so the victory laps that people have taken on various figures, it's always remarkable how much gurus make it about them or their particular relationship, like Gad Saad.
You know, it's all about how they inject themselves into it.
And it's not a mystery.
He's talked incessantly how, you know, deranging he views Twitter and social media and stuff in general.
Like Sam's stance on it, whatever you think of it, it's pretty clear.
It's pretty consistent.
Him being on Twitter.
It was something that he saw as a vice, a necessary vice, and then he just decided it wasn't worth it.
Like, big, big effing deal.
That's my point.
It's the making mountains out of molehills, which seems to be the common thread running through all of this.
But, well, they're going to keep doing what they're doing.
They are.
And it's presented, you know, like a battle for the future of civilization.
If free speech is lost, even in America, tyranny is all that lies ahead.
Brett Weinstein.
Jumping in.
Really appreciate that you're taking this battle on.
Brave is a term that cowards have abused to the point of meaninglessness.
But you are clearly brave in the deepest sense.
Win or lose.
Hashtag got your back.
Fucking hell!
It was the hashtag got your back that really made my head explode.
He's so cringe.
He's such a cringing toady and pearl clutching and...
Hyperventilating.
Fight the system while licking the boots of a billionaire who's just arbitrarily shitposting all over the place.
It is so annoying to see.
Anyway, look forward to the Elon Musk episode where we'll delve more deeply into Elon's stuff and then hopefully not talk about him.
He can recede into the background as far as I'm concerned.
He has yet to unleash the hordes of Milo and whatnot back into the Twitter sphere.
But we've already seen very recently from Kanye's appearance with Milo and Nick Ferrantes, white nationalists on Tim Pool and various other platforms that if they come back...
People will just remember why it was that they disappeared in the first place.
So, something to look forward to there.
Yes, yes, yes.
We'll do the Musk episode, then we'll hopefully be able to put it behind us and not think about it too much.
Right.
So, one thing, a little advertisement to note, just a piece of content that people might be interested to hear.
I appeared on a podcast called Beyond Synth.
The clue is in the name.
It's a synthwave podcast where they play synthwave music during the interview.
I didn't hear it at the time, but the interviews interspersed were actually quite good synthwave music.
And it was like a two or three hour interview conducted at 1am.
So my voice sounds like I've drank 12 bottles of whiskey, but it was quite fun.
It was mostly about gurus and stuff, but we ended up randomly talking about a whole variety of other things, including Star Wars and pop culture and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and whatnot.
So people might enjoy that or they might not.
But if you ever wanted to hear my voice talking about gurus combined with synth wave music, now your time has come.
So Beyond Synth, that's the name of the podcast.
So yeah.
I'm sure you haven't listened to it yet, Mark, but it's just a matter of time.
I might.
I might.
Actually, if we're giving recommendations, I'm going to pop one in too because I've been ravenously consuming a history podcast called Revolutions.
I reckon many people who listen to our podcast already listen to this because, well, he's much more famous and does much better work than we do.
The guy's name is Mike Duncan and he also did, I think, the History of Rome podcast and some other ones.
But he's just a stalwart and he's so good, Chris.
He's so good.
It started off with the Glorious Revolution, the English Revolution, and French Revolution, American Revolution, and now I'm in Haiti.
Which, let me tell you, that's pretty crazy stuff.
It's a pretty hardcore revolution, is it?
It is.
Yeah, yeah.
But it's just so good.
It's informative, it's educational, and just the tone of it is just so engaging.
So, yeah, if you don't already listen to it, then don't waste your time listening to Culture War podcasts, except for ours, to the extent that we are one.
You can learn about nuts.
You can learn nutritional information about nuts.
You could listen to some weird synthwave thing and teenage music.
Ninja Turtles, or you could listen to Revolutions.
You know, all your options.
That's right, that's right.
Well, on that note, so let's head into our interview with Jimmy Wheel.
So, with us today, we have Jimmy Wheel, who featured in our Sensemaking Cubed episode.
We offer any of the people that we cover, within reason, the right to respond to any of the points that we made or discuss things that we said or that kind of thing.
And people have taken it up before, Chris Williamson and Sam Harris and Jamie reached out after the episode to suggest we have a discussion.
So thank you for doing so, Jamie.
But before that, do you want to inform people a bit of...
Who you are and your current position or background, I'll do a bad job of it.
Sure, sure, sure.
So I'm an academic refugee, so I was all but done on a PhD in history, ethno-history and anthropology, really.
So similar neck of the woods to you, Chris, I would imagine, at 22. And then I bounced and went into mountain guiding and a bunch of other things that led to a career in fundamentally...
I would say developmentally informed leadership in human development.
So everything from my wife being a Montessori teacher and us having a, you know, working within the Montessori community all the way through secondary and collegiate to mountain guiding and taking people to 23,000 feet on the north face of Everest, you know, the youngest group of Americans to do that to working in the conscious capitalism space,
which, you know, has all sorts of air quotes.
At this point, but working in management consulting to now, for the last decade, founding an organization called the Flow Genome Project, which is basically a combination of kind of the neuroscience and developmental psychology of optimum human development and leadership.
And we do that kind of stuff, again, in wild environments, backcountry winter environments, rain canyons of Utah, that kind of thing, as well as front country situations.
We work with All sorts of organizations from, you know, SEAL Team 6 to Deloitte to Google to Facebook to Disney to whomever.
And I wrote a couple of books, one Stealing Fire and one called Recapture the Rapture, the most recent.
So really, I mean, that's what I was excited to talk to you guys, because right in the middle of both of your wheelhouses.
Yeah, thanks, Jimmy.
That's a very helpful outline.
And one other question that I was curious about is, so...
You know, the way that our listeners will likely be familiar with you is from the content that we covered in the episode with the Sensemaking About Sensemaking episode.
So how did you come to be involved in the sensemaking sphere?
Or not necessarily that specific video, but I'm talking, you know, more generally the sensemaking ecosystem.
Would you locate yourself in that ecosystem?
And how did you get involved with that?
No, categorically not.
I think sense-making is a fucking awful term, and we should just say making sense, like any other solid Englishman.
So, no, and I come here to bury Game B, not to praise it.
So, I think you have mistaken me for another guy.
But honestly, dear readers, dear listeners, if all you know is that solipsistic clusterfuck...
Clocking it two hours and 45 minutes, that for some reason you guys bent out of your minds, dredged out of the internet archives, and spent even more hours on?
I mean, hats off to all of you.
Because, yeah, my sense is, I mean, I hadn't even got the microphone off, and I was telling David, I was like, this thing should never be the fucking light of day.
I said, at best, with ruthless editing, you get maybe 30 to 45 useful minutes out of this.
So it's an absolute hoot that that's the one you guys...
Get to take the piss out of, because I'm like, we don't have a leg to stand on.
Absolutely.
But, and why I'm, you know, happy to chat with you guys today.
You know, and what a missed opportunity.
Right?
Because the, I mean, yeah, utterly lucrative.
And we can unpack game B and where I feel like it's parked itself into some goofy and avoidable corners as well.
But, right, you know, like if those guys were just quote-unquote galaxy brains.
And utterly ineffectual, then that kind of taking the piss would be just completely warranted.
But they both have really significant and interesting bodies of work, as hopefully to some whatever extent I might also.
And that was not the place to find any of it.
So Daniel is a self-taught autodidact who is currently advising pretty much every transnational three-letter organization and the heads of those organizations around the world on I'm going to go
roaming the rest of the halls of Harvard and get the education I actually want.
So now, that said, the premise for that specific event.
Was can we, unrehearsed and not even desired by any of us, was can you explore collective coherence, some form of emergence, something or other?
Can we get to what Quakers might call a gathered meeting?
Some sense of, is there enough resonance and affinity and novelty to be playing good jazz?
That was it.
And then Jordan opens with a minor modal seventh.
You know, he's like late stage Miles Davis or Coltrane and you're like, oh shit, okay.
Wasn't planned, wasn't rehearsed, but since we are attempting to do this live experiment, right, I guess we're in that key for a while.
I thought we were going for a campfire strum along, right?
And we ended up in some fairly abstruse, and I was like, this is going to be anywhere impossible for folks to follow or track if, you know, I would just say that full stop.
So what you guys took as me being a little brother, To Jordan, it wasn't that at all.
It was like when one guitarist is sitting his guitar on fire and playing with his teeth, the best thing to do is play some vamping backup chords and maybe take the piss out of the situation, deflate, play the fool, right, on behalf of any poor beleaguered listeners.
So that was the setup.
And as far as...
Well, I mean, we can take this any way you'd like.
We can talk about group coherence, whether you believe there is such a thing.
You can knock that around.
We can also go over to Game B. I'm happy to chat about, you know, any of it that comes out.
So there's some points there.
Matt and I would be, it's fair to say, fairly sceptical of the kind of description you gave there, Jamie, of, you know, autodidactic self-taught geniuses who are able to...
That was one.
Right.
That was Dane.
Yes.
And similarly, there's a lot of people that advise a lot of influential people who have impressive resumes but say a lot of silly stuff.
Especially in the people that we look in day in day out, one of the things that's most impressive is actually their ability to kind of self-promote.
And if you listen to their account, All of them are unrecognized geniuses, and many of them are extremely wealthy and extremely influential, like Scott Adams or Nassim Taleb, and also have genuine areas of expertise and knowledge,
like Dad Saad, for example.
I've just been seeing more of his stuff lately, like this week.
Yeah, yeah, he's hard to avoid, unfortunately.
So our critique usually...
Isn't that people don't have any expertise or influence, but one, that those tend to be overestimated as signals of value.
And two, that people can have a very good skill at promoting themselves in that way.
And we've actually looked at other content with Jordan Hall in particular.
And that's very much the similar impression from that other content.
So I'd just say that we'd be skeptical of the kind of revolutionary nature and not least because like making a large amount of money in DivX or in PayPal, for example, especially with the current...
Ecosystem is not really an indication of you having a great analytical mind and foresight.
It can also just be you were in the right industry at the right time during an economic boom.
Spoken like a better lefty postmodernist.
Well done.
Well done.
You're being too salty out of the gates on that.
Yeah.
No, so I just mean that, like, even, you know, setting aside Jordan or Daniel and the relative merits, I think those heuristics could get you in trouble, right?
Oh, for sure.
The kind of status and the amount of wealth that someone has as indications of intellectual value.
Yeah, no, no, but all I was saying was extrapolated third-party verifiable metrics.
So Harvard Law Degree, not that you can judge it or not judge it, but you should say outside there in the world.
So you were just pillorying.
The guys, as word salad gobbledygook, know they're there.
And I'm saying, hey, there is a there there.
Absolutely.
And not that they made bank.
I don't give a fuck about that.
That he was one of the wizard brains behind innovating the entire thing.
So systems analysis, just pragmatic.
I don't care about market cap.
I'm talking about hard things done in the real world.
And just to say, they're not lightweights.
Now, you can critique their philosophy.
You can critique their impacts.
Like Doug Rushkoff is another fascinating thinker, a good friend.
And we have all kinds of lateral and horizontal critiques of where everybody's showing up.
Tristan Harris and his critiques on social media, lots of kind of extended friends.
And quite often, it's hammer and tongs.
I mean, people are fundamentally at odds with how the other people impact or application in the world, even if we're generally...
Rooting for them as people and friends.
I think Matt and I, because we're academics, and you've been through the academic ecosystem as well, so you come across a lot of people who, one, have PhDs, and two, are impressive.
intellectuals in some particular domain.
James Lindsay has a PhD in mathematics.
He's an idiot promoting conspiracy theorists about globalists and, you know, the Marxist revolution that's underway.
But he does have a PhD from an accredited institution.
And in my particular case, I have a PhD from Oxford.
And look at me!
I agree with you that it isn't fair to just treat people as if they're people who have never achieved anything and have no expertise.
Most of the people that we cover do have expertise and have achievements, but part of our critique is what they use that as a signal of.
Yeah, absolutely.
Especially when it's cross-disciplinary.
Like, they're out past their domain of expertise, but they're still talking as if they're a subject matter expert.
Right?
Like, scope creep of their punditry.
I think that's probably something we...
And I will also completely agree that, you know, we did select the sense-making episode because it was particularly egregious about the kind of issues that we see in that...
Ludicrous.
In that ecosystem.
It wasn't we didn't take it like just to poke fun.
It was more that it highlighted the Issues that we had covered.
We'd covered some other content from Rebel Wisdom and that kind of thing.
And it encapsulated some of the issues that we have and similar issues that we would have with people like Eric Weinstein, who, like, you know, you could highlight, he's a manager.
Well, do you want to do the psychology or the ontology?
What do you want to jam into?
Like the psychology of the pundit and what you guys are doing in the IDW and everywhere else.
And like, why are people getting so wacky with hot mics?
Or the ontology, because Matt, you were just mentioning beforehand that I reminded you of a family member and then you sort of asserted a certain position or believed worldview that you thought I had.
So I'd love to hear what you thought that was as well, and we can kind of, you know, clarify Calvary.
Yeah, what I was getting at with that, and Chris, you weren't around to hear this, and I was not assigning his worldview to yours, but I was seeing someone in my personal life who is a great guy.
He does good work in the world and has an extremely different worldview to me.
Has a spiritual worldview, kind of expansive metaphysics and talks about things like ontologies a lot, Jamie.
And to me, none of it makes any sense.
It seems to have some sort of meaning for him, I guess in the same way that certain kinds of spiritual beliefs might as well.
He would find it supportive in many different ways, but we would enjoy having a glass of whiskey together and sort of shake our heads at each other.
To him, I would be this hard-headed, obtuse, scientific naturalist type that deals with these concrete things and doesn't sort of understand these fascinating abstractions that he really loves.
Well, I mean, here's a quick question.
Are either of you guys...
Familiar with psychedelics from a first-person phenomenological perspective.
Do you mean, have we tried them?
Have you tripped balls?
Have you shot the life-surging lightning?
Yes, sir.
Yes, have you sent it?
I have, yes.
I don't think Chris has.
Matt is more of the psychonaut variety and I'm more of somebody who has experience of like...
Introspective traditions, various Buddhist traditions and meditation retreats and that kind of stuff.
And my original degree at university, my undergraduate, was in study of religions, specialising in East Asian religions because of that interest.
So I'm familiar with the kind of contemplative, introspective stuff that a lot of...
David Fuller and the rebel wisdom ecosystem is interested in, but I'm not a psychonaut.
Psychedelics know not a big part of Northern Irish life during the Troubles.
What was your question there, Jamie?
Well, I mean, just to state, if we're going to talk ontologies, then you ain't seen shit till you licked a toad.
So, like, what is study of religion, it's not religiosity, it's not Christed experience, it's not any kind of direct, self-referential, and again, not abstract into empirical truth claims, just within that domain of reference, the testimonies of mystics through the ages, what is that?
That goes, you had an I-it relationship with religiosity, right?
It was an object you were studying, right?
But the I-thou experience...
Whatever its substrates are, whatever its mechanisms are, you can leave all sorts of giant hunking great question marks, but that it is experienced and has been consistently with variations is legit.
As a domain and zone of inquiry, then my question back to you, Matt, would be, with your psychedelic experience, did it inform, infuse your worldview?
At all?
Was your worldview impervious to it and just took it as, oh, this is just excitable neurons in a serotonergic system with 5-HT2A receptors and interactivities, you know, creating the patronicity of these simulations of insights and ideas, which were probably already within me, and any externalization of that is anthropomorphization of the,
you know, basic cognitive perceptual field, which I was basically making sense of myself anyway all the time.
Did you do that one?
I would just say you didn't do enough if you were able to pull off that sleight of hand and stay in your snug harbor.
That was an impressive spiel.
You're very loquacious, Jamie.
It's good stuff.
Look, actually, like Chris, I was very interested in Zen Buddhism when I was younger and actually practiced a bit of meditation.
And I think Chris has had the first-hand subjective experience of it as well.
But to answer your question, I think my answer broadly would be no.
It hasn't infused my worldview.
I don't think...
I mean, I think I've got a conventional view of it, which is psychoactive experiences.
You could include stuff like MDMA, for instance, which people use for, say, couples therapy or even people that are terminally ill, and it can be helpful.
Certain kinds of perturbations through just the normal operation of our...
Biophysical functioning can be helpful in certain situations.
And likewise, meditation can be deeply relaxing and calming and quieten the chatter in your mind, all that stuff.
All that stuff can be good.
Do I think it gives some sort of cosmic special perspective on things which is fundamentally better or elevated above just how I am now, which is basically caffeinated and little else?
No.
The answer.
Yeah.
You know, I would agree.
I mean, ultimately, I would say that I'm much more of an agnostic mechanist, like figuring out the neurophysiological mechanisms of accident that prompt certain interiority, right?
And then you just move those knobs and levers in a very agnostic way without any fucking storytelling about all the, you know, all the imaginal and hypothetical.
So you just back out any faith-based, untestable things whatsoever.
You create neurophysiological, you know, protocols, put your...
You know, EEG into this state, do this with your vagal tone, increase endorphins, oxytocin, serotonin, dopamine, whatever you're optimizing for via endogenous and exogenous mechanisms, and then see the fuck who's home.
And then you start constructing a sort of N equals 1, gather your own data, falsify all statements, be Bayesian as fuck throughout, you know, and Occam's Razory too, right?
And you basically just steer that so that you have a sort of...
Rational mysticism or an agnostic Gnosticism.
The Gnostic part is like, okay, definitely something happens subjectively to a host of peak states that people have had throughout the ages.
All the stuff at Madison with the MRIs and the Tibetan monks and Mathieu Ricard and all those things.
You're like, okay, there are neurophysiological empirical correlates to the subjective interior.
It may not be one-to-one.
We're probably only just starting to figure it out.
But if you do that...
Then you just, you completely flip the script on all the storytelling, which I think is where you guys take issue, right?
You're like, all these just so stories, right, are kind of push it and not really falsifiable.
So let's just back them out and then say, we're going to be agnostic about the content you have, but we're going to be specific and protocol driven on the neurophysiological setup.
Go have your thing.
Now come back.
Now you pass it, you make meaning of it, and you can bring it back into contextual paradigmatic rationalism.
You just...
Name which lenses you're laying over it, and therefore what kinds of results would you expect to glean from that dataset?
Yeah, I guess you touched on the other issue I've got with it.
I don't feel like it's really meaningful to wax that lyrical on those transcendent subjective experiences.
But yeah, as you say, the other issue I've got...
With it is that there is no reality testing.
Like, it's not observable.
It's fundamentally a revealed truth, right?
The interior experience that we have.
Yeah, so it could be someone that's practicing Zen.
It could be someone who's claiming that they're running, like, I forget who it was, running thousands of different paradigms in their head simultaneously.
70 different paradigms simultaneously.
Oh, 70. I was exaggerating, sorry.
Who was that?
Jordan Hall.
Jordan Hall.
On a bad day.
But the problem is none of that stuff can be tested.
We have to take it on faith that these things are happening.
So it's very easy to talk about it.
When you say take it on faith, which things are happening?
Well, say running 70 different paradigms, right?
Well, for sure.
That's true with any.
Yeah, so that's why I don't subscribe to it as a...
Something that one can talk about sensibly or disagree about.
You know, you either have to just accept that it's happening or not.
I probably have a slightly different view on Matt, on it, Jamie, because, like indicated, I do have an academic interest in the topic around ritual psychology and the biographical transformative expect.
Effect of like imagistic experiences, high arousal dysphoric rituals and that kind of thing.
So I think there are ways that you can look.
Did you say dysphoric ritual?
Yeah, that's my particular area.
Like unhappy ordeals?
Yeah, like fire walking or self-flagellation or extreme deprivation, cold water immersion, those kind of things.
I wrote all about that.
In my last book, I wrote about exactly that.
The penitentes and the Spartans flogging.
Right.
So that's my...
Core research area and I've taken part in like Misogi events and firewalking events and stuff in Japan as well.
Not hugely involved but I have some experience of them and like a personal experience of training in various martial arts which generated similar experiences, dysphoric experiences through training.
But one thing is to say that I'm not approaching the topic from like a strictly non-experiential approach and particularly, you know, study of religion.
It actually, to a fault, is phenomenologically inclined in a lot of ways.
But where Matt is talking about...
I think what Matt is emphasising is...
The claims made about introspective enlightenment experiences or appeals to special knowledge gained through introspection are inherently subjective.
And there's so many cases where people throughout history have claimed that, have even been recognized as meditation masters in their personal lives and in various other ways.
Being, you know, sexually abusive alcoholics and kind of cult leaders.
And so, Matthew Ricard and the kind of empirical approach to quantifying what goes on in meditative states and stuff, I think there's value to that, but I also think that that is slightly oversold in the same way like neuro-theology is oversold about locating the God.
Like Andy Newberg's work?
Yeah, or long back Platinga and the God helmet.
So I don't think there's nothing there about transcranial stimulation being able to present.
Euphoric experiences that might, you know, seem similar to the kind of religious ecstasies, but that isn't our critique.
Like, in large part, if people are into psycho-not stuff and kind of spiritual reflection, more power to them.
Like, it's not an art jam.
We're, like, kind of empirical rationalists, but...
That's not the issue, because there's plenty of people that I see do that, that I find interesting, take value from.
It's more the connection to the kind of guru side of it.
And there it would be things like, to give a concrete example and let you respond.
A lot of the figures around what we would call the sense-making ecosystem or the IDW or the alternative media ecosystem, they had a big issue when it came to parsing the evidence about vaccines and still now have a big issue with it.
And to me, that's an illustration that...
For all of the kind of discussions about metacritical faculties and, you know, other ways of knowing and stuff, that there's a fundamental just lack of critical approach to things.
People didn't notice the issue with, like, Brett Weinstein or address, really, the criticisms, except David.
And David suffered.
For that.
And even Ivermectin or other such things.
So to me, it's kind of those issues where the rubber hits the road, you know, like the...
That was specifically Brett and Heather's position, yeah?
Yes, but like, so Daniel Schmachtenberger was doing updates on the pandemic with David Fuller, which I listened to, and his take was not as anti-vaxxing as Brett has become, but certainly very ambivalent about the Evidence around hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin at a time where the evidence is not really ambivalent around those treatments and the mainstream science position would be there's very weak evidence and
you shouldn't be recommending at that stage and similarly Jordan Hall has in the same way like Jordan Peterson made various statements suggesting that pharmaceutical companies are inventing variants or may be involved with that kind of stuff so I would say that a lot of the sense-making ecosystem is,
if not anti-vax curious, they're certainly very tolerant of anti-vaccine views.
To certain institutions' narratives, they're not very defined when it comes to talking to Robert Malone and Peter McCulloch or anybody like that.
Well, come on, I think that is specifically Brett and Heather, hasn't that been?
Because I'm not aware of...
I mean, Daniel for sure comes up from a Vedic background with very different orientations too.
Health, medicine, etc., etc.
So whatever he was expressing was probably as he's been conceiving of it.
And they were also backing, they were funding a meta-analysis of hydroxychloroquine well before it kind of blew up and went sideways in the culture wars.
And they had a panel of physicians and they were actually doing legit stuff.
So it wasn't just coming from the social media system.
It was coming from, you know, recent specific and dedicated research and analysis that...
Professionals were conducting, and so he was feeding that up.
I'm sure there's that.
In that kind of case, would you say Daniel or Jordan or anybody in that ecosystem is well-placed to run clinical trials on the efficacy of vaccine treatments?
Well, I mean, they have a nine-figure nutritional supplements.
That would be a really good example.
For us, Jimmy, nootropic area is a fertile minefield for shoddy studies conducted by companies with lots of money.
But designed with researchers' degrees of freedom to get desired outcomes.
So, like, Onnit has run studies, you know, and they're useless.
They're absolutely useless.
And in general...
Have you guys actually tracked them?
Have you run them and run independent ones to cross-reference?
Not run independent, but...
Or you just look at the study and you just say, oh, I don't sign off on the study design?
No, it's more like, you know...
Like, what's making you say they're crummy?
Oh, because in both of our cases, we're academics with...
Training in assessing the methodology of studies and that kind of thing.
But even just from coming up from scepticism and that kind of circles, you learn to identify low-powered studies that have large amounts of degrees of freedom.
When a company that is selling supplements is finding research which is...
There's some motivated reasoning there, isn't there?
Right.
And there's also, you know, a whole bunch of end outcomes and then only the significant ones are reported.
So there's like basic...
Some happy pee hacking in the mix and you rub it to your mother's brain.
Right.
So like, you know, the kind of, not just nootropics, but the whole supplement ecosystem is awash with like junk research.
Absolutely.
That's why people in that sphere, they might have the money to run studies, but by and large, what they would be better off doing would be paying an independent research lab that wasn't, not Cochrane, but something akin to that,
like an independent research body that is ambiguous.
That's what a neurohacker has done.
They work with their parties to oversee their stuff.
I'm curious because, I mean, so far, it feels to me like we're sort of in violent agreement.
Well, basically, everything that you guys are concerned or skeptical about, I am also.
I mean, I just wrote a book with a culty cult checklist, which, you know, is highly resonant with your guys' galaxy brain, sense of grief, like your guys' checklist.
That's what actually clued me on.
You're like decoding the gurus.
I just wrote a thing about gurus and about culty cultic tendencies.
So, to me, you know, and...
Yes, let's agree that we have had different lived experiences, different academic trainings, perspectives on life, etc.
And, I mean, I'm the son of a fucking Royal Naval test pilot.
Like, I grew up hyper-rationalist and remained that way.
I just happened to start having some neck-snappingly interesting life experiences.
Big mountain powder skiing, surfing and kite surfing and windsurfing, psychedelics, live music, and just being like, "Oh, fascinating.
Here I am studying history and ethnographies and culture.
What the fuck is this?"
And let me go and hit the books and then try and unpack the rational academic understandings of what that was and then leave that in the realm of unfalsifiable, imaginal, experiential content.
But on the other hand, it's where we live.
Right?
We only, our entire experience, our entire life is experienced via our interiority.
Try and suppress it or deny it or mock it or ridicule it or modularize it and be like, wait a second, that's fucking bizarre.
We're going to privilege weights and measures.
We're going to privilege, you know, fucking EEGs on screen as more real than actually our self-awareness and intersubjectivity in this moment.
Like, what the fuck?
Doesn't that seem ass backwards?
Well, Jamie, I mean, someone like myself, I'm not a behaviourist.
I recognise that people and animals have interior lives.
Except me.
I do have my doubts about Chris sometimes.
So it's not that.
It's more that when things are not directly observable, it can be a happy hunting ground for bullshit.
Inflation, distortion, misrepresentation, so many shysters out there.
So that's why I would say, just don't ever presume to map it or cling to it as your reified interpretation.
You just say, that's all just phenomena.
And then just stay back to, you know, I mean, you guys know how to do this.
This would just be running multiple, you know, like Korzybskian sort of reality tunnels at a given time.
You're like, okay, we tap on that window, this is the world we're in.
We're discussing interior experiences or we're strict rational materialists.
Whatever it would be, you just acknowledge the truth claims of the paradigm you're going to tap into and then work within.
But you also have the ability to tap the fuck out of those and then be still in your whatever, your balcony, your dashboard, the home screen, take your pick, but you're there before you've clicked into.
So then absolute truth of any of those specific reality tunnels or phenomenological frameworks, you just take as contextual and provisional.
And it's like, does it do what it says it does?
And does it shoot more or less straight?
And you can sort of assess it.
And then you can have a sort of utilitarian view on which tool, framework, perspective, worldview, gestalt, whatever the fuck you want to say, you're going to use at that given time.
But you have the ability to click back up to the level above all of them and still be self-aware in your time, place, and perspective taking.
And then also intersubjectively, like, how are we doing, right?
Also having shared...
Shared mapping of what the fuck's going on in a trialogue.
Yeah, like, I think Chris and I tend to give people a fair bit of leeway when it comes to that kind of very personal phenomenological stuff.
That's what I mean, like, shut the fuck up about your story.
Like, I don't want to hear your story because it's unfalsifiable, right?
So just tell me the outcome.
I want to understand your patterns or your source code, not your fucking personal narrative.
Yeah, it's a bit like Jordan Peterson and his self-help books, right?
I don't really have a problem with somebody writing a self-help book and creating a kind of framework whereby people can create structure and find meaning in their lives and whatever.
It's not really something where science and analysis and logic and reason is necessarily the best tool for the job.
Where I tend to have a problem is when someone like Jordan Peterson, he likes to live in that world where he believes genuinely and truly that But underneath the material world...
It's a realm of spirit or...
Yes, exactly, which to him is actually more real than the observable universe.
And that can lead to some very strange places.
So I want to go back to one thing you said at the beginning, and I want to concede something here, which is that...
Chris and I are not in a good place to throw stones for people for having long, indulgent conversations because our podcasts are always way too long and we are very indulgent.
So I just want to concede that.
We do just take, and our format is to take a piece of content and almost use it as a demonstration or as an exercise.
So I'll concede that, you know, the three of you guys.
A lot more than it was just going on in that conversation.
That one, I think, did come across our radar because somebody had seen it.
This is wild.
You should cover this one.
I was mortified to see that it had like 100,000 views.
I'm like, oh, dear God.
What are you people thinking?
So, yes.
But here's the other thing.
Here's what I would...
I challenge you guys to do, because I feel like it's yours to do, right, is take the piss out of anything you see, right?
Use and analyze frameworks, but don't get sloppy with the application of your model.
Because I was super intrigued when I first started.
I'm like, "Oh shit, galaxy brainers.
Oh wow, that's a great term and here's the things and here's all the steps.
This is really tracking with the kind of stuff I've been modeling."
And then it felt like you just blunt instrumented everybody and kind of taught them with very similar brushes.
And it was like, "Look, for this to work over the long term, you've got to have real differentiation.
Like the application of your model applies contrast that wouldn't otherwise be perceivable."
And the people are like, "Oh shit, now I'm seeing the ones and zeros of this whole fucking IDW space."
And constructive critique, even if it's not.
Well, on the one hand, they did this other thing kind of nicely.
If you're going to trash someone, fucking trash them well.
Give them a clean execution.
But what would be your best suggestion?
So if we're talking about group coherence, do you reject the notion outright?
Are there better models?
Is there different research?
On the other hand, devil's advocate, that kind of thing.
Because to me, that's your fucking training.
And my God, you'd be making a generative contribution to the broader conversations versus just be negging.
I'd love to say that.
Yeah, we do do a lot of begging, that's true.
But we also, I do think, recognise a lot of differentiation.
We don't lump all the people that we've criticised into the same bucket, nor do we think that they're...
Equally bad or good in the various different ways.
We're very much aware, by the way, that these terms, like calling someone a guru, you can just use it as an easy slur, right?
So we have to be really careful about that stuff.
But when it comes to more substantive things that you guys were talking about, say, in that conversation, like putting aside the excesses, perhaps, or the indulgences, I mean, you know, because I went on to do a lot of reading about game...
B and coherence and all of these things, right?
And, you know, like, you know, what you guys were talking about, you know, that's real stuff.
It was much bigger than just that conversation.
That's a whole program that a bunch of different people to different degrees are heavily invested in.
And, you know, there are claims that are made there.
For instance, that, you know, game A, i.e.
everything that's happened and is happening, is totally broken.
So I think science It was described as completely useless at this point, like a completely useless way to understand the world.
And Game B was sort of treated as, it was taken as an assumption, really, that this is a fantastic solution for doing things better.
But I guess I'd probably put it to you, like, what evidence can you point to that Game B, as it's described, can improve on what's going on at the moment?
Look, I think there's a bunch of well-intentioned people in and around and near that space.
Some form of proactive civilization.
So, whoops, this one seems to be self-terminating and not putting on the brakes fast enough.
What are the lifeboats?
So, in that respect, hats off to everybody who's even attempting to give a shit.
That said, I think Plan B is his goal.
Fucking so many structural issues.
Just the starter, at least in the States, you're bringing your A game is the one you want to bring.
Bringing your B game is not the one you want to bring.
So just branding-wise, I would have said they're gimped right out of the gates.
The next is that...
You essentialize all of human culture and all of civilization post this mythological East of Eden, out of the hunter-gatherer groovy time like Harare, you know, and into 10,000 years of patriarchy, agriculture, bureaucracy, priest class, taxation, all bad things, right?
And that's that.
And then game B is nothing more nor less than the antithetical solution to all of those bad things.
Well, what are they exactly?
Well, we don't know yet.
It's emergent, right?
Like, then you're just into a fucking cargo cult.
So there's no validating it, and there's no steering.
And the moment you get a bunch of people who think they're all allies and confederates under the game B umbrella, and they get together and try and do anything in the real world together, and it will blow apart within months, because no one has any fucking idea what they're there they all supposedly said yes to actually is.
So, Jimmy, there's a bunch of stuff that would be interesting to follow on there.
And I think we can talk about whether we see collective cohesion as a reasonable goal or ways to achieve it.
But one thing I wanted to respond to was your suggestion that it would be more productive for us to...
To be critical, yes, but to highlight areas of agreement and provide productive feedback.
I think Matt and I would probably...
Or even better propositions.
Like, it doesn't have to always be acknowledging that they did something, right?
Although that's nice, if it's true.
But also, what the fuck do you guys do?
Like, triangulate, give us a synthesis of your antithesis.
Yeah, so I think there is probably where there's a, like, slight disconnect.
You know, you were asking, like, areas where we wouldn't see eye to eye.
I think I can identify some there.
So, you know, you guys described on that episode the Omega Rule, right?
The idea of...
Which I always say, shouldn't we say benefit of the doubt, guys?
Doesn't everybody already know that one?
Let's just do that.
So, you know, the terminology issues aside, like, I would frame that as be extremely charitable to people.
And if you take that in a...
The Mott or Beely, whichever one is the easily defensible one.
It's just like, oh, don't be immediately dismissive of ideas.
Sometimes wacky ideas can be useful.
And yes, of course they can.
However, I think my critique of a lot of the sense-making ecosystem is that it isn't critical.
It's too indulgent of people's ideas, and there isn't enough pushback.
And what Matt and I are articulating is a different worldview, one which is pretty mainstream in science, which is be extremely critical of yourself, of all the people, and usually the existing expertise and stuff,
the people who have spent decades on the topic, they are often right.
About things more than the people who have just discovered, you know, about viruses in the past six months.
And in the case of, like, where that would come into actual focus as a difference.
I watched your interview with Brett Weinstein.
Now, I know in that interview, you guys basically didn't really discuss COVID and that kind of thing.
However, if I was having a conversation with Brett Weinstein in 2021, after he had been Promoting strongly anti-vaccine rhetoric, one of the main anti-vaccine figures in the COVID pandemic, I wouldn't have had a conversation like that.
And I would also, because of what I know about evolution and what I know about Brett's view of evolution, I think he's got a pseudoscientific view of evolution.
So that would be like places...
Which is the pseudoscientific bit?
Oh, a lot of it.
Specifically the hunter-gatherer's guide?
What's in there?
Or stuff you said elsewhere?
Well, both.
In a nutshell, there's so much.
Basically, he and Heather would claim that anything that exists as a property of humans, human behaviour or physiology or anything, even something that exists in society, something that's happened historically.
Everything can be traced back directly to an evolutionary cause.
So Brett famously once talked about, to Richard Dawkins I think it was, he talked about the German invasion of Russia during World War II and gave an evolutionary...
Cause for that specific event.
Now that's probably at the extreme end.
Lineage selection.
Another one, like there's Omega rule, but Brett outlines the Omega principle.
The Hunter Gallagher's Guide to the 21st century is just an extension of his worldview.
His worldview in general is skeptical of toothpaste and of vaccines and of, you know, very familiar to people.
Toothpaste or the fried in toothpaste?
Fluidisation, you know, six to one, half a dozen the other.
But the rationale is that it's not natural, right?
That you didn't...
So that thing, like the mega principle, is that if something has been around for a long time, is costly, it is likely an adaptation.
And that led Brett, for example, to say...
Rogan suggests that when people are hung and they...
Ejaculate in the throes of death, that this is an adaptionist thing, because in some cases that might have somehow entered the adrenal cavity.
That seems like some unsuspecting maiden in the ear.
But that shows such a fundamental misunderstanding of evolution.
So Darwin selected for dudes with...
Boners when they die?
Like, we're really making this case?
Like, maybe the Galapagos, there's just this closeted full bunch of autoerotic asphyxiators and they're just elevating ahead of us.
This is loopy.
So, was your question, though, that you had seen an interview or a talk that we had, you presumed that it happened after he'd already been coming out publicly against ivermectin and other stuff?
You can tell me which one it was.
I mean, so, one of the older ones?
We've been together in person.
We've had them out to visit when they were here in town to be on Rogan.
And we talked heart to heart and expressed all, you know, trying to calibrate, like, hey, where are you guys?
Hey, what are you thinking?
And actually, no, we're not even interested in talking about vaccines since COVID and quarantine.
We'd like to hang out, fucking drink some wine, listen to some music, catch up on our families, like, you know?
And hey, goddamn, if there's any way around it, guys, don't die on that bill.
You know, don't.
The fucking dead end.
In the heat of battle, it may feel like it has to happen now, but you can just see, structurally, there is no defending.
Take the position of, hey, there's a bunch of off-label, off-patent, potentially useful drugs out there.
And hell's bells, while we're sitting on our hands waiting for this brand new tested shit, we should absolutely be screening and vetting, regardless of economic incentives of big pharma.
And that is their root position.
And I support them in that.
Once it came betting on specific horses to win, I was like, I don't know.
I have zero capacity to judge and make an informed assessment, but I'm not going to take a public stand and get sucked into the echo chamber.
So that would be like a point that I would make.
So that particular conversation, the time that I've seen it, at least as it released on YouTube, was in 2021.
So I presumed it was within the past six months or something like that.
But Brett started his anti-vaxxing stuff in 2021.
So that's something that Matt and I talk about.
We've talked about it with Sam Harris as well.
We have no doubt that Brett and Heller, or any of the figures that we cover, interpersonally can be extremely nice people and can also be engaging people to talk about and may have expertise and knowledge about specific areas.
But in that case, and this is the...
Like a critique that I guess I have of you guys collectively is that there's a half-hearted acknowledgement of criticism.
But what Brett and Heller were doing, it wasn't like it's a small part of their output promoting anti-vaccine.
It was a huge thing.
They were the people that introduced Rogan to Robert Malone and Steve Kirsch and Peter McCulloch.
And even now, Brett is very strongly claiming vindication.
So by choosing not To address that or address it in a very, you know, slight way.
That is to me like indulgent in a way that like...
Who are you experiencing?
Wait, wait, who are you experiencing doing that?
So what you just...
You're saying sort of accommodating...
Like what you just...
Accommodating things that should go more strongly challenged.
Yes.
So that would be, you know, the thing that I would say.
Would you be willing to say like that Brett is openly anti-vaxxing?
Because to us, that's obvious.
And I think to most people outside of the sense-making ecosystem...
Honestly, dude, I don't honestly really track all these substrates and different paths, you know, because...
Then some people will say, I'm not anti-vax.
I'm asking for more research on novel vaccines, right?
And they might split between the existing old class, the Johnson and Johnsons and that kind of stuff.
Even though then, having said that, a majority of their public statements and definitely soundbites and tweets and lower context things start coming across in a consistent fact pattern closer to where you're describing.
So that's a tricky bit to be like, where exactly are you?
One thing to be aware of, Jamie, as it happens, I've published on the psychology of vaccination, and I was researching it before COVID came along.
And Chris, too, there's obviously, as you would know, there is a very long history of this as a cultural phenomenon.
Oh, for sure.
And it just got re-skinned and re-populated with updated talking points.
Yeah, that's right.
And it's actually super interesting how the old talking points were just kind of recycled and re-badged.
Yeah, that was the tell.
That was the linguistic fingerprints.
Yeah, and one of the things that's just a constant that's well-known is that an anti-vaxxer claims are not an anti-vaxxer.
They just have concern about these specific vaccines.
So we're back into Russian, right?
So, you know, my sense is, you know, Chris is just, I honestly don't think we were talking at a time when it had been acute.
That's one point.
The other is...
We're not journalists.
If we're getting together as mates and friends to have a conversation about a specific topic that's current, present, animated, and mutual, we're not going to be taking each other out to the woods for the fucking recording later.
We're going to be in a good conversation.
Now that said, I had Andrew Cohen, the fallen guru, on our program.
You can listen to it.
Fucking take the piss out of him and absolutely hold his feet to the fire and he didn't want his feet held to the fire and we had fun with it and it was mutually respectful and bowed off the mat when we were done sparring and me throwing everything at him.
That kind of capacity is absolutely there.
I think it's just contact and consent as to what are we doing with each other and what's the highest and best use of the rare times we do get to carve out.
Time to shoot the shit and, you know, maybe, you know, share it.
So there'd be, like, the divisions and lines, right?
Because, like, I would imagine in that case you would regard some of the stuff that he was involved in as, you know, beyond the PLO.
It needs to be addressed.
Or you'd be, you know, it would be an example that comes from the, you know, actually somebody involved in the conversation.
So Jordan Hall had a conversation with a propertarian.
Oh, yeah.
I watched that.
What's his name?
Curtis Doolittle?
I don't know.
He's got a cartoonish name.
But in any case, David Fuller spoke to Jordan about that conversation and about the fact that Jordan really didn't challenge him on anything.
And he didn't highlight to his audience about the context of why the guy was controversial.
He's an ethno-nationalist.
He's a neo-Nazi anti-Semite in the 20s.
That was exactly my feedback.
Yeah, so that was exactly mine.
I called him and I said, mate.
He goes, what, are you going to tell me that I shouldn't have done it?
I was like, fuck no, you should have done it.
You should have leaned into it and really gone someplace edgy and interesting that really put proof to that guy's claims.
So, absolutely.
So that, I guess that is, one thing is that the lines are different because, like, for Matt and I, strong anti-vaccine stance is not something that we wouldn't mention if we had someone on for an interview.
Like, regardless of what else we agreed with them on, we'd feel the need to address it.
In the same way of, like, HIV AIDS denialism, like, it wouldn't be something that we could overlook.
But the other aspect of that is that...
When challenging people respectfully, like David did with Jordan, for example, a similar argument is presented that, you know, like what Matt and I are not saying is that it isn't okay to have conversations with people that have extreme views or have different views to you and to not constantly be like tearing them a new one.
That's not what we're saying, but it's more like Louis Farouk Talks to a whole variety of people with extreme beliefs.
Nobody is under any confusion about whether he's endorsing their perspective or whether he's critical of it, right?
It's very clear in his content.
It's not always so clear in the content that is around the sense-making ecosystem.
And indeed, the message is more like that there's an avoidance of direct Criticism of a perspective in lieu of maintaining interpersonal relationships with influential people.
And that seems, like, that's concerning.
Well, come on.
That's inference at the end.
So you slipped that one and everything else I was tracking.
Yes, so I would take that particular critique, not, you know, like, for specific people, I think that applies.
But I wouldn't say, in general, it's just because people want to increase their influence.
So I'm just, that specific point is more like, I think that applies to specific people, but not everyone.
No, for sure.
I mean, I think I call it sort of the model train set, right?
You've got a bunch of Asperger kids on the spectrum down in their mum's basement playing with their model train set.
And they've got a badass fucking model train set.
And they've done the little trees and the hills and the tunnels and the fucking lake and the ducks, the whole shooting match.
And they do not like messing up their model train set to play with other people's.
And so you end up with a fragility and a reactivity, basically a traumatized middle school.
Bunderkind still playing out through many of the conversations and the interactions and the debate.
And then there's not just bypassing in some of the fringier communities, but there's also just metacognitive bypassing.
There's such a level of dissociation and, again, lack of falsifiability, because this is just pie in the sky, fucking word salad.
And really, it's just down to the persuasiveness of the rhetoric to who holds the day.
So, yeah, I mean, I think all of those things are true.
And it would be fantastic if there was...
Because, I mean, we do have this conversation offline, we just don't fucking film it.
But it's basically been like, look, guys, I don't think any of us would back any other person's flag they're flying.
Right?
Like, each of us are hell-bent on having to do the thing we have to do as best we can.
But, and I was like, you know, even though none of us would follow each other, we all would be like, no, I'm going to do my thing, and I think it's better for me or for any other assessment.
I still want your flags flying at the end of the day.
So rooting for the success, showing up to challenge each other and hold each other fucking accountable, you know, because what you guys were alluding to, which is, I think, a super interesting passageway to explore is what are the psychological effects of being a thought leader in a globally connected,
you know, like limbic capitalism feedback loop?
And what's happening there to otherwise?
Because, I mean, doesn't it seem people tend to get crazier the more into it they all get for longer?
Like, it does seem to be a dose exposure to something.
And I think it's, you know, structural narcissism, mania, and righteous aggrievement.
Yeah.
I know, Jamie, you said at the beginning you've got a bunch of your own issues with Game B and Amiga principles and all of the other stuff that's kind of described there.
So I don't want to attribute...
You guys are signing on to all that stuff, but I thought it might be helpful.
The specific things that we talked about then, they really point out, I guess, why fundamentally Chris and I just don't like pretty much the whole kit and caboodle, right?
And firstly, there's a thing that you guys were talking about, which is that mixing of the personal and the professional.
It's difficult.
If you've got a crazy uncle, right?
There could be a crazy anti-vaxxer and stuff like that.
And it is sensible to say, look, let's just not talk about that.
We're going to have lunch.
You know what I mean?
And encourage them not to talk about it.
It's different, obviously, if you put on your professional hat, you go into a conference or something like that, and you are an expert on this.
So what we see, and not just of the sense makers, but also IDWs, but also the whole alternative...
We don't have a good word for it.
Is that firstly, ecosystem.
They do mix.
And we're probably guilty of this too.
We, I say we, we mix, right?
The personal with the professional.
And that makes it more difficult to actually deal with these issues rigorously.
The second problem is that that sort of generalized sense-making concept, which is that if you have this kind of, these sort of Polymathic type abilities that kind of equips you with these meta skills or something to dive into any freaking topic,
right?
I know for a fact it's just not possible.
You need 20 years experience in rocket science if you want to do rocket science.
And the other thing too is just at the discourse level, right?
You have this Amiga Dream Charity.
Basically, that playing with ideas.
In an expansive kind of way, not cutting things down, but rather building on them and exploring them and so on.
And I think, you know, that's a vibe I get, not just from that conversation, but more generally.
And I'm actually strongly, I mean, that's fun.
Don't get me wrong.
It's fun to pot and drink a couple glasses of wine and have those chats.
But as a motive, actually...
Figuring out how the world works, that's actually a terrible way to do it.
What I like is exactly how academia does it, right?
Which is, I'll give a manuscript to a good colleague of mine who wants me to succeed, wants my work to be done, and they tear the shit out of it.
They try to find every possible problem with it, every possible criticism.
Fair ones, even unfair ones, because their criticism could be bad, but that would be the same kind of thought that many readers of my article might possibly have.
And the bad criticisms are good criticisms.
What they don't do is, hey, wow, that's amazing.
I love all that.
Now let's take these things and then build on them.
Come on.
It sounds like you're just sad that we're friends with each other.
I mean, honestly, what you're presuming is that the only fucking conflict we would have, we would have on fucking recorded video.
Rather than that's the last fucking place we would have head-to-heads.
We have head-to-heads all the time.
We radically disagree about a ton of shit, right?
I actually, well, probably, Matt, while you were doing your bit on anti-vax psychologies, I wrote, I was like, what the fuck is happening to all my friends?
Like, we used to be together, and even if we had wildly different perspectives, we were, you can meet on the same boat.
And now we were just like drifting apart in the ocean.
I had, I'm planning for what the hell was sucking people off the middle path.
You know, of cognition, right?
And it seemed to me that there were psychological, four psychological types that leave you specifically susceptible to random whack-ass shit and conspiracy thinking.
So the first one, and it was generated from these conversations, the anti-establishment rebel, right?
Who will always back the counter-opinion, even because the establishment can never fucking be right, right?
The next was the guilty liberal, right?
The vote for Hillary, masks or citizenry, the whole bit.
Then the loyal foot soldier, always just looking for a Manichaean.
Light and dark and a good leader to follow.
And so, absolutely, we've all been wrestling with this, right?
And I find it sad, basically, just to see different folks get pulled by different forces.
And to your guys' point about both having...
Contemplative meditative experience, right?
My sense is it is a degree of egoic inflation that people's psychologies were not wired to handle it.
And if somebody hadn't, or let's just say they came up through an academic path and suddenly blew up in their 40s, right?
They might have not any exposure or practice with that kind of recursive feedback, intersubjective feedback.
So what the fuck, so many people caring about what I say, so in conversations with so many people, so many bad faith miscommunications, right?
And then so much more as incentive to keep going back to it and stoking those fires.
Like, that's not healthy for anyone.
Yeah, I understand.
I understand that principle in the context of social media, because obviously platforms like Twitter are just, you know, horrible systems of bad faith, mean criticisms, and nothing can get off the ground.
To me, like, it...
As a heuristic, it's the kind of thing that's very appealing when you think of it in those terms.
But when I translate it and think of, okay, now this is not social media anymore.
This is not just a casual entertainment.
This is actual genuine research work about...
How does it work?
Or how do vaccines work?
Then I just like game A. I'm a game A guy.
I prefer it.
I think it's working pretty well.
I think there's always ways to improve it.
We had philosopher Liam Bright on, who was arguing strongly for getting rid of peer review and going for the post-publication open-source peer review.
Lots of interesting ways, if we talk about concrete things, which we could improve the way we go about.
Epistemology, essentially.
But it's more the vague, hand-waving, utopian stuff that rubs the wrong way, I think.
Jimmy, before you respond, can I just layer on top?
Because it's kind of the same point that Matt wants to make.
Matt and I are both advocates for open science practices and reform in methodology, more robust statistics and that kind of thing.
So, you know, Stuart Ritchie being...
Goldacre's books, which are very critical of the current scientific system, we'd totally be on board with and willing to discuss those things and have our own critiques of journals.
And all academics are.
To some extent, you know, there might be some who are like slightly, you know, typically people who are tenured professors who have been very successful might be a bit more defensive of the status quo.
But a lot of people, especially younger academics, are very open to reform efforts and those kind of things.
So to me, that kind of...
Atmosphere that you find in academia, which is like robust, harsh criticism, which is not...
It is taken personally in various conferences and whatnot, but like the value, the kind of guiding star, is that that's what you needed to do to get published and work.
And in the...
Alternative ecosphere, there's a lot of talk and a lot of back-padding about people having difficult conversations and hashing things out, but by and large, and this is an exception, this conversation is an exception.
I would generally, you know, to your credit, say that, that usually people like us or anybody that would have like a strong critique is labeled bad faith, right?
Eric Weinstein was asked by David Fuller: No, no, come on, come on.
You guys were just taking the piss, and I thought pretty good faith.
There were some places where it got a little redundant, that kind of thing, but in general, I thought you guys were taking a fair crack at it, so I had a smile on it.
Yes, so I'm not saying you haven't accused us of doing that, and the very fact that you're willing, you know, to have a conversation with us speaks to the fact that you think we are not operating just, you know, to be cruel and to take the piss out of people, though, you know, that comes up.
It's more that you must have noticed as well.
In the alternative media sphere, there's a very thin skinness to criticism that doesn't come with a large amount of, you know, you know, you're a really great thinker and you've got this, but you haven't just considered this slight alteration to your approach.
It's a very like yes and and any criticism where you would be direct and kind of harsh.
Like Sam Harris, for example, recently.
He is, in large respect, excommunicated from areas because his criticism was direct and he is accused of badly of criticism.
And it seems obvious to me that none of it...
In which direction?
So Sam's criticism directed at the anti-vaccine, at Joe Rogan, at Brett Weinstein was...
Is largely dismissed as being motivated by Trump derangement syndrome was the most recent explanation.
But it applies across the ecosystem.
Like what I was saying was David Fuller asked Eric Weinstein if he'd ever encountered good quality critiques of his position that were in good faith and he couldn't name one.
And that's insane.
There are people in academia that are like that and they're regarded as egomaniacs.
Because there's always valid criticisms of your position.
So it seems there's a kind of ideal presented of hard debates and openness to criticism that actually happens, but there's no evidence of it or very little evidence of it in the public sphere.
I guess that's it.
And you here now, I have said to your credit that you are not demonstrating that kind of thin-skinned So that's to your credit, but you must have noticed that as well, right?
Yeah, well, I mean, for sure, most of them are Yanks, right?
And they have no culture around just taking the piss out of each other, right?
And that there's joy and delight in the backing and forthing, you know?
So that part, they are rather self-serious, right?
And so banter, playful, generative banter, is not necessarily, I think, a handy vernacular.
And so to engage it goes more of a, this is a conflict situation versus a tempering, you know, a mutual kind of hammering in tongues.
There is an element of that.
We've noticed that in other gurus, right, Matt, that there's a...
Kind of American cultural sensitivity to bigging up everyone and being positive.
People wrote about positive cultures and negative cultures, and cultures like Australia is a negative culture and American culture is positive culture.
In Ireland as well.
On Chris's point, it's just, I guess, in conventional academia, you know, we'll write a paper, and I've had this happen to me and I've done it to other colleagues, where I'll put something out there.
And they write a public commentary on my position that I've outlined, my interpretation, my results, my methodology, you name it.
And they will not hold back.
And we are friendly at conferences.
We'll have a drink together.
It's fantastic.
But they don't hold back at all.
And I welcome that.
And then I don't hold back, again, in the public sphere.
And I think that's just a good approach for epistemics.
If you're talking about serious topics, then you need to...
It all sounds rather kinky.
You know, it's just like, thank you, sir.
May I have another?
This is the funny thing, actually.
Obviously, it's not kinky.
It sounds kinky when we talk about flagellating each other.
And we're not even very good people, right?
I see these critiques of me on my stuff, and I'm like, oh, that's a bitch.
You know, he's wrong about, you know, how could he?
That's just stupid or whatever.
And then I calm down, and then I write my best possible rejoinder into it.
And you're proving my point precisely, which is I think you're both suffering from just a smidge of Stockholm Syndrome for the academy, right?
And so just bear with me for this thought experiment.
I never thought in my life I'd be doing this, but I'm potentially going to defend hypothetical for game B. Okay, go for it.
Go for it.
So we're trying to integrate this anti-vax skepticism, right?
So taken at the level of fingers in your ears, tinfoil hat, anti-vax, congruent with the last 30 years and Jenny McCarthy and Bobby Kennedy and the whole shtick, right?
You're like, oh, there's a longstanding pattern here.
Back all that out and just get to the place where you come to the kind of fundamentally civil cognitive liberties and a quasi-libertarian system.
Citizenship obligation, responsibility, and decision making such that it could include people being like, I'm not sure if that fucker wiggled out of the Wuhan lab or not.
I'd like to know more.
I'm not sure a six-month rush testing and approval process is enough for monkeying with these things.
I need to learn more.
And we don't necessarily want...
I didn't take...
I had the first two vaccines, got completely sick, the entire fucking...
Public health model completely broke the moment.
People were three months in to that first initial booster, the world opens up, everybody's free to be you and me.
Bullshit.
It was lagging three to six weeks behind the published stats, what was actually happening on the ground epidemiologically.
It was a complete gave light to all the things.
The mainstream media, including mainstream science, The Lancet's been compromised.
New England Journal of Medicine has been compromised.
Everything is fucked these days.
So, for you guys to be solely in the tank for academia, for Blue Church academia, without acknowledging your own very equally serious critiques about the validity, I mean, the peer review process and how ridiculously politicized that is, the number of pay-to-play journals, the amount of corporate money making into influencing research methodology,
p-hacking outcomes, publications, you name it.
It's a fucking dirty business also.
Right?
And so, you know, as long as we're at that stage, then you could say, oh, because I think you set up almost this moral conundrum.
You're like, you know, vaccines are generally safe and effective, overwhelming scientific consensus.
These guys are outside beyond that pale.
Therefore, it must be immoral.
But what's actually happening is that Brett and Eric, I know for sure, and probably I'm presuming Heather too, would say, we actually take question with your presumed baseline.
What you're saying is canon or gospel or verifiable, peer-reviewed, objective truth.
You know, we're saying it's actually riddled with subjective errors, blind spots, politics, captured interests, and all sorts of perversions of the purity of that platonic ideal.
So, you know, back at you, fellas.
And is there a game B, for instance, that could come up with interesting, innovative governance that would allow for all these perspectives?
I had the first two vaccines.
I did not get the fucking boost just because by that point it was like three variations passed and all the studies were going like sub 30% on efficacy.
And I had absolutely had some expression of longish COVID somewhere in the middle of things.
And I wouldn't vaccinate my kid under six, maybe 12, maybe even 18. I would postpone that shit and let them ride things out naturally until we understood more.
If we don't have the choice, the chance to make considered and responsible decisions as individuals, then we end up setting up, especially in this increasing surveillance society, increasing global cultures and economies, we run our risk of the panopticon.
How do you preserve some version of, I fucking hate the term, but sovereignty?
Right?
Like the ability to make my own free choices balanced against civic responsibility, social responsibility, and greater good arguments.
And that has to be fucking navigated.
And when you do like Taiwanese or democracy voting systems, you can sort of navigate some of these things in ways that are tech enabled.
You know, proof of concept today.
And what if we built, you know, what if we started exploring?
And there's parallel democracy movement.
Throughout the U.S., we had folks from D.C. come to one of our trainings and programs.
They're really standing up shadow-fucking governments and different ways to start organizing post-structural break or interruption.
So that, to me, that seems...
That would be super cool, right?
And you can then reconcile where Brett and Heather were.
They were saying, we are not actually on the same epistemic layer.
We've questioned that one and dismantled that one for our own decision-making and perspectives.
You're still there and haven't presumably interrogated it or you have and you chose to double down on it versus shift stance.
So that's a good articulation of the counter argument, Jamie.
And there's tons of threads to pull on there to respond.
So I'll pull a couple and then let Matt.
Pick up whatever I miss.
So, first thing would be, I think when it comes to having doubts and having questions about a new vaccine or being critical about the...
Authority's ability to get things right in a fast-moving pandemic that people haven't experienced.
It's perfectly reasonable to have questions and to have doubts.
And you should factor in always, when dealing with institutions, academia included, that there will be errors, there will be misstatements, there will be imperfections and there will be disagreements.
That's the norm.
It's not an unusual situation.
But all of those things that you talked about with P-hacking, publication bias, the issues with the peer review system.
The people who identified those issues, by and large, are academics.
The people who are working to create alternative systems and to address them are academics.
Most of the people that commentate on it, like Eric or Brett, they misuse those critiques and they don't even discuss or understand things like preprints and pre-registrations and how they're used.
Whereas, I like, take Matt, take me.
We're published on advocating for people to pre-register studies because to reduce researcher degrees of freedom and when it comes to looking at research literature critically like we suggested at the start that's the default stance so it isn't a like a simple non-critical acceptance of blue church doctrine it's rather you have the ability to critically assess a literature and when you compare it to the way that people like Brett and Heller Examine studies.
They show no ability to do that.
They don't even read abstracts correctly of studies.
They completely miss the boat on assessing the strength of literature, the validity of studies.
And this is along the lines of not even like detailed methodological criticisms, which they often get wrong, but simple things like they are unable to note that a study claiming 100% effectiveness for all 2000 with perfect follow up and with Default Excel graphs but mislabeled is a study with huge questions,
right?
Many people are looking critically at that literature from inside academia.
So whenever things become...
Was that that Argentinian study?
Yes, but there's an endless litany of examples with Brett.
And as we discussed, you know, he doesn't have a track record of demonstrating that he is good at assessing research literature, quite the opposite.
Eric, also along those lines, he's claimed to have a theory of everything that will revolutionize physics, which has been shown to have like fundamental errors from the The few people who have looked critically at an Eric for a tantrum at their response.
So their ability to parse the scientific literature, I wouldn't read highly.
And it is always the case in the situation.
But why are we talking about this?
It seems like you guys have built your entire worldview around Eric.
No, no.
It's just an illustration because that's the actual...
The point is there will always be people claiming that.
And you mentioned Brett and Eric as examples of people that would have a different epistemological approach and judgment, and they would.
But our argument is that's not just a subjective value judgment where people arrive at different conclusions and the evidence is completely ambivalent.
It's that Eric and Brett are misreading the evidence on ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine.
And it isn't complex.
Low quality studies.
That are positive in vitro studies and then small, low-quality studies that find positive results.
This is like picking a jury.
This is like the two lawyers picking a jury, right?
You have a whole bunch of people come in and then you guys each take turns chucking ones you don't like out until you're left with, you know, 12 angry...
No!
You have to do that with studies.
Just for some kind of common ground, you get to take the piss out of the ones you think are flawed and then they're like, "Okay, okay.
You're applying that standard.
These fit that standard.
Don't fucking like it, but okay.
Now, here are the ones that we discount and don't consider in our own fact pattern."
Because if you don't actually just check, "What's on your kitty?
What's in your kitty?
I don't even know what you're playing with."
Until you get that sorted, then you're really talking about each other.
Ideally, you find some studies you both agree on.
Right.
But you can have conflicting meta-analyses that reach different conclusions because of the studies that people put in and out.
But the body of evidence with ivermectin is not, in any sense of the word, 100% effective prophylactic.
And at best, it would have been, as you indicated at the start, a possible Treatment that we should investigate prior to having extremely effective vaccines.
And you have to factor in, alongside these advocacy for hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, that there's a very strong signal about the dangers of vaccines.
And what you said, Jamie, about not taking boosters and that kind of thing, that to me shows like...
I wonder if they'd made a fucking good one yet.
So that would be the point, is that is, to me, that shows that you're misreading...
What the studies are showing?
No, I'm not misreading the fucking efficacy of the post-Omicron hypermutation efficacy of the old ones that we're still getting stuck with.
In terms of the cost, the dangers posed by not being vaccinated versus the dangers posed of being vaccinated, they're wildly...
Dude, I would say, look, I mean, that question, look, I mean, A, I don't even know why we're talking about this.
This was neither the subject of the reporting you analyzed nor anything I have anything to do with.
So, you know...
If what you're secretly saying is, why don't you yell at each other on camera more?
You know, all I got for you is, right?
We're having these conversations.
And you can say, ah, there's footprints and whispers, but no proof.
Like, what the fuck?
These are our lives.
But, you know, let's move on to something more interesting, which is the bigger picture, psychology of punditry.
Yeah.
In the digital age.
And what are you guys seeing?
And what are you vigilant about?
And are there any patterns or deeper structures that are impacting a bunch of people congruently or concurrently?
We got, you guys got bogged down with those examples, right?
But remember, Jamie, you outlined a robust defense of a non-Blue Church counterculture alternative space.
And Chris, you cited those things as an example, and Chris responded to those examples.
But I think what we would say is that the scientific process is correcting inside the church, right?
It starts off with a great deal of ambiguity, like I remember.
Quite well.
Before we had a vaccine, before there were lots of good studies on ivermectin, it was treated very seriously in the blue church.
It didn't just dismiss it out of hand, it was treated very seriously amongst the alternatives.
And then as more and more evidence came in, the people that were good at assessing evidence of Regarding RCTs specifically, and there are people who are better at this than others.
Me and Chris have got a general background in statistics and so on, so we have some degree of skill.
There are people who are better than us, people who are in the field.
Another example is the lab leak scenario versus the natural origins of COVID.
Where did you guys come down on it?
My understanding is that the evidence currently is that it's very unlikely that it was a lab leak, rather that it's zoonosis.
Yeah, that seemed like that sort of last three months.
But there was a sea change for the sort of prior 12, right, where increasing potential evidence was going to be like, and more, you know, serious agencies and other people being like, okay, it's back on the table in some capacity.
We are sifting evidence and a lot of compromised data because they wouldn't fucking let us in to see anything.
The crime scene.
Yeah, that's right.
There was the difficulties by the inherent...
Nature of the CCP.
But, I mean, one of the interesting things there, Jamie, is that the public perception, and this is probably a fault of science journalism, is that there was this kind of new evidence coming in, which dramatically was changing the likelihood of a different thing, point of view.
And the discourse, if you actually just ignored what was being written in...
The Guardian or The Times or some newspaper and just looked at the research literature.
There were no sort of big back-and-forth revolutions in the evidence base.
It was kind of a gradual increase in certainty, basically.
Yeah, but come on.
What about that Lancet one that got fully fucking discredited?
And it was basically also conjugation.
It was this kind of long wind-up and throat clearing to get to the point where we do not see it would be reasonably possible that...
The leak was a lab leak.
And you're like, wait, you guys established nothing.
There's no hard evidence here.
This gets fronted in a prestige journal and then turns out to have been politic.
I think that's a misreading.
Here's my point.
That's a misreading of that evidence.
Here's a both end.
But yes-ish, right?
Like, here's the thing.
Science is coming down with the collapse of the entire edifice of Western civilization.
All truth claims, all power formats.
I mean, this seems like sort of Foucault on a bender.
And science and scientism and the compromises, the hijacks, the replication crises, the fucking corporatization, the IP, the feudalism and serfhood of large universities.
The whole thing is teetering just like the church, just like Wall Street, just like all of these things.
And for you guys to simply go back to propping it up.
Uncritically, would be akin to sort of clicking your heels and sort of wishing that, you know, that the dam hasn't burst on the rest of this cultural collapse.
Like, science is coming down too, guys.
And if COVID showed anything, right, and 2008 and all these things, there's a bunch of fucking naked emperors.
The people have been absolutely handed a bill of goods as far as the American dream, the world, you know, and IMF and all the goody things of neoliberalism.
And science has been a fucking patsy and an accomplice to some unforgivable shit along the way also.
Point I would make here, like, there definitely are emperors who have been unmasked in the COVID pandemic, but I think we identify them quite differently.
Jimmy, the way that you present us as, like, defenders of the status quo and the potential patsies for the blue church ecosystem, like, I have to draw, I have to draw...
No, I know you guys think you're rebels.
No, no, but...
You're just not that.
Yeah, but allow me to draw a distinction, right?
You give talks...
At Goldman Sachs and Google and advertise your influence in those kind of powerful elite performance athletes, so on.
Matt is currently testifying against or helping that court case against the thingamajigger, the gambling, the gambling industry.
Right.
And so the person there that is.
More in bed with industry and corporate management consultants and whatnot.
It's not us.
We're perfectly free to critique those people.
We are free to critique scientists, and we do.
And we look critically at our own literature, at our friend's studies, but that is not...
Is that the case in the ecosystems that you play in where people pull their punches and you are more invested in the capitalist kind of ecosystem than we would be?
Oh, that you think I am.
That you think I am.
Well, you've said so.
Would you like to hear what I told the thousand senior partners at Goldman, right?
Tore up my speech.
They had asked me to speak about peak performance and flow.
And I'm like, "Fuck that, guys.
I'm not coming in here to say that to you."
And I completely went rogue.
And I pulled up a stool with no lies.
I completely just winged it and had a little notebook.
And I was like, "Hey, one of your founding partners had said, be short-term patient and long-term greedy."
And that's been one of the mantras.
And I was like, "Hey, guys, here's the deal.
How are you going to be short-term patient when there's no long-term?"
You guys have a choice.
You can either be the vampire squid of late-stage capitalism where you can step the fuck up and double down on your roots to actually move capital to seed innovation and entrepreneurship and improve general equitable distribution.
There was a PhD, Princeton Quant, who was on the Obama White House at the time, who was also a partner, who came up to me afterwards and was like, fuck yes, this is the stuff we're doing.
And then a whole bunch of Goldman vampire squids.
And I did not get invited back.
But the person who had invited me was like, high five, I'm glad you stirred some shit up.
That's going to make some waves.
So I put my head on the fucking chopping block and consistently do.
I mean, talking to SEAL Team 6, a room full of fucking those guys.
And I had a whole...
And this was on neuroscience of peak performance, flow states, all of these kind of things.
And what's the cutting edge of performance training?
And also realizing you're training the most lethal tier one special operators on the planet.
And I forced...
20 minutes of my hour was into the ethics of weaponizing consciousness.
And everything from AI to the history to MKUltra to, you know, just like, guys, you're playing with real things here and where this goes and why and how has to stay on site of impeccable ethical guidelines.
So I do.
I get back to a lot of those places, but I get invited to another interesting one.
And I don't know the why or the how of that, but I am committed to not go along with that along.
I don't want to be a fucking gadfly Cassandra.
That's not cool.
But I do absolutely want to have the most heartfelt and sincere conversations.
With the people doing important things in the world, they're going to do it.
I accept the clarification, Jenny, and I apologize if it was slightly too personal in that regard.
I mean, it's partly...
I want you guys to better get where I'm coming from, is the real picture.
I think we're absolutely on the fucking same team.
And I've seen there was a YouTube video where there were some in the kind of psychedelic space who had the same critique of rebel wisdom, and you specifically.
Oh yeah, those guys.
Those guys are bad faith little shits.
They've got too much student loan debt from their fucking recent PhDs and a fucking chip on their shoulder a mile wide.
They're not helpful.
Chris, here are these people.
Do I know them?
No, you don't know them.
The psychedelic community, broadly speaking, had some...
There was a video put kind of critical of Jamie and Rebel Wisdom as like being...
But I mean, ludicrous, like so hysterically reactive that to be like, hey, I'm on your team.
I don't think those guys are good either.
I've just written a book pillorying them, McKinsey, the whole fucking lot, Facebook, all of those folks.
And let's actually talk about now, can we get, can we refine?
Right?
Between our points of view, some fairly obvious mutuality.
And they were just having none of it.
And it's the same with those conspirituality guys.
They've become...
It's almost sort of like Queer Eye for the Cult guy.
They're just catty.
So I think that...
Where I would see an area of agreement is that we all appear to agree that, you know, it's important to have robust criticism in whatever field.
And this includes, like, academia and whatnot.
But I guess I'm...
I just find that there's, like...
There isn't consistent application of critical approaches to things.
Because, like, you know, the supplement industry, nootropics, is hugely profit.
It's a multi-billion industry and the studies there are, if you have an issue with the quality of studies when it comes to vaccine approval or that kind of thing, the quality of studies when it comes to supplement evidence of efficacy is incredibly low.
But that kind of stuff doesn't get focused on so much as what you are talking about, Blue Church and stuff.
It feels very much like Denigrate whatever is seen as the traditional authority and then usurp by that system having problems.
It by default makes the alternative better, but it's not the case, right?
You know, Joe Rogan illustrates.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I mean, I think the biggest question is...
I think the spot you're going to occupy in...
The broader conversation, right?
So saying, "Hey, there needs to be some rigor.
There needs to be some consistency.
We need to sort of understand these."
Because this is a relatively recent space.
Folks are post-institutional.
They're even post sort of media.
I think David Fuller was echoing some of your guys' points, right?
He said, "Hey, there's very few checks and balances in this space.
There's a lot of perverse market incentives, right?
And there's a ton of echo chambers and algorithmic fucking warping and a thousand other things that are all taking place."
To the quote-unquote conversation, whichever one is being had.
And you guys are, I think, offering good yardsticks.
And I don't, honest to God, know what to do with it.
There's clearly this boom in podcasts, this boom in all these kind of longer form, bigger thinky, often rambly kind of explorations.
There seems to be this voracious appetite for it.
I don't know whether it's because cable media and conventional TV became so god-awfully bad.
Yeah.
So it's creating this cultural marketplace of ideas that has all sorts of capitalist market perturbations.
Well, actually, Jamie, it's funny, it's ironic, almost in the way that I think that the criticisms like the ones you've voiced before at institutional stuff are over-egged and a bit over the top.
I also think it's worth reminding ourselves that an awful lot of the alternative media It's freaking great.
I don't know about you guys, but I listen to heaps of podcasts.
I listen to history podcasts and podcasts about neutron stars and stuff like that.
I'm absolutely loving the Revolutions podcast at the moment.
I keep spruiking it.
It's a very famous one by the guy who did the History of Rome.
Learning all about the revolution that happened in Haiti.
It is scholarly.
It is informative.
It's entertaining.
It's just extremely high-class.
You know, that's why, just at a very personal level, I get saddened when whatever, you know, I suppose I feel the same way about Big Brother or something, reality TV, that people are watching so much trash on mainstream media.
And I just feel sad, you know what I mean, that people are spending their time watching Joe Rogan or listening to Joe Rogan.
Talk shit with Kanye West or something.
If we can steer people towards good stuff and away from stuff that's just wasting their time and filling their heads with...
Surely we agree that's a good thing.
Yes.
I think we should convert the entire great books canon into TikTok dance videos.
Then we'll have a discourse.
Then we'll have it.
So yeah, guys.
I mean...
My sense is, for whatever reason, time, space, and technology, what we have as far as a non-traditional intellectual mediascape, right?
And it's all pretty novel.
I don't think anybody's really...
Like you guys said, all the checks and balances of your peer review system and academia as a medieval guild, basically.
You guys still identify as members of that guild and it has its arcana and its secrets and its prohibitions and norms.
And then you've got a bunch of fucking ronin galloping around like fucking Monty Python out there with no lineage, no discipline, no checks and balances, no peer buffering or dampening.
Yeah, I think that's fair.
And plus market incentives.
So yes, those things, that'll go bad every time.
I like that tongue-in-cheek characterization of the guild and the townsfolk and the Ronin rampaging around outside the walls.
The only thing is that I do think, Jimmy, that a lot of the people in the alternative ecosphere, they should pay more attention to things like the open science movement because those people were called data terrorists for being the people Who critically evaluated the influential studies.
And to me, that's a really good thing.
And it's an embodiment of the spirit that you're talking about, like a willingness to challenge the authorities and the institutions that exist, even like theories with loads of well-established, you know, like highly influential studies at journals.
People look critically at the standard of the evidence and call bullshit.
But the difference is they win out.
In the end, because the replication crisis happened and journals are critiqued.
And you're right about, you know, things like Elsevier's influence and all that kind of thing is very distorting in science.
And the pharmaceutical industry deserves to be critiqued.
It deserves like robust criticism of what I was talking about, flexibility with outcomes in the supplementary industry.
It's exactly the playbook of pharmacy and gambling and so on as well.
So it isn't that academia is good and anything outside of academia is bad.
It can be a shitshow.
Just assign it a reasonable golfing handicap.
That's it.
As we're calibrating our compasses, how much declination is there in our needle?
Exactly.
So I think we just like being critical is the I think that's the point that we do agree on that there's like this value to being critical and whatever our particular role in the eco sphere of like information is that's possibly a slight difference is like Matt and I although we completely acknowledge that we are in the same realm as you with podcasts and commenting and all this kind of things but
we are We're slightly object to narrative surfing and we're conscientious objectors in a way that...
But hold tight, because you said theme surfing or idea surfing?
Yeah.
Is that people being too broad?
Because here you are, a psychologist and an anthropologist, and I've heard now...
from either of you about your subject matter and the interpretation of this conversation.
You guys have been punditing your asses off also.
Yeah, kind of.
But my punditry about something like COVID involves injecting zero.
Novelty or special insight into the evidence base or the interpretation of it, really.
All I can refer to, and we do refer to, bona fide experts in those fields.
I mean, yes, we can make fun of someone like Brett Weinstein when they dramatically misinterpret or fail to detect that a study is laughably bad because, to some degree, our general methodological background allows us to see that.
But yeah, I don't think you'll find any of the stuff that we've said is contributing anything novel or unique in terms of these spiritualist areas.
I mean, look, my sense is that...
I think we were trying to pass this, and I'm sorry to have to do this, but I'm going to be against my better judgment, which is I'm going to mention him, capital T. So I think you cannot back out of the equation.
The reality distortion field and utter psychosis of Trump as president and his management of that, and due to the U.S.'s outside role in CDC, WHO, all the other ripple effect policymaking, that we ended up in a schizophrenic double bind during a global public health emergency.
The amount of disinformation and chaos that was happening behind the scenes in the establishment basically broke the blue church, right?
It started just shattered on its ruins.
Like, wear moss.
No, don't wear moss.
You don't need moss, but we don't have enough moss.
This is good to go.
No, it's not back and forth.
Like, the six feet was bullshit and made up.
I mean, there was a Virginia Tech hydroengineer that broke that down and was like, where was the original citation for that?
And went all the way back to, like, 1936.
The unreferenced textbook that had never been validated at all.
Endless amounts of that stuff after the schizoid double bind left all sorts of people being like, "Oh, authority has no idea what's actually going on and their efforts are so transparently self-correcting or self-implicating that now we're going to double down on alternate."
If the consensus worldview was creaking and groaning, and a lot of people were spooked.
I mean, everybody's nervous system was in hyper-vigilance.
So the whole high-dopamine, apophenic, paternicity and hyper-recognition.
And I think it pulled a lot of folks.
I think impact of that specific human individual behaving in the way he did that was so wildly outside all norms and expectations broke people's fucking brains and massively hampered coordinated global technocratic response.
Yeah, I think there's something to that and one way in which you can see that is the contrast between the discourse in Australia compared to the United States and a place like Australia, like we have our fringe.
Libertarians or conspiracy theorists just like everywhere else.
But what we do have is two relatively normal centre parties, both of whom basically, you know...
In public, in politician terms, follow the science, or rather take advice from their chief medical officers and so on, and don't actually make it a political football.
I think you're absolutely right.
People kind of forget, but it kind of started with Trump.
He kind of kicked this thing off.
It became a partisan cultural football.
You can see the response from...
And remember, the public health authorities whose job it is to advise the public in a little 30-second...
Sound grab.
It's identical to the scientific consensus, right?
It has to be simplified and made into a concrete kind of actionable action.
Was this a formative event for you guys?
The whole anti-vax thing?
Because I'm just curious.
We ended up talking about it for a meaningful chunk of time and I don't have a dog in this fight.
No, no, it's not.
Actually, you...
You brought it up again.
Your last comment was to bring us back to Donald Trump and how it led to the institutions cracking under COVID.
But that was a deepening of why scientific materialism, you know, sort of the peer-reviewed status quo.
Mainstream science, right?
That is part of the reason where they lost their ship pilot street cred with a ton of own goals that were needless.
And they could have been public messaging gaps.
They could have been pointless fucking reversals.
They could have been trying to transparently massage and manage public opinion, which of course they should be doing.
They should be running good public health informed propaganda all the time.
Right?
If you're trying to actually move needle public behavior.
So then somebody suddenly paranoid and freaked and is like, that's propaganda.
That's coercive.
Edward Bernays, you know, and you're like, okay, you're off to the races, aren't you?
Well, to answer your question, no, it wasn't a formative event for us really, because in retrospect it seemed absolutely inevitable that we would have all these conspiracy theories and a new round of anti-vax stuff going on.
I actually thought the public health messaging was pretty good.
I thought the vaccines, they were amazing.
Nobody was expecting them to be developed so quickly.
So that was just a massive win.
They got into production very quickly.
And the public health advice has been generally good.
Was it always perfect?
Of course not.
It was a fast evolving situation with a brand new virus.
I remember right at the very beginning, people were like spraying like boxes that came to the house because we're wearing surfaces, right?
Because we didn't know.
Right?
At the beginning, there was very little information, but you still have to advise people something.
So, you know, that's the nature of public health advisory.
They're always happening on the run.
And if we look back at how we've fared, and a place like Australia has fared really well, because we have actually just done...
What the public health people advise us of, if you compare that to a place like the United States where people have done so to a lesser degree, a lot of people still aren't vaccinated, a lot of people just sort of ignore the distancing rules and things like that.
They haven't done so well.
So, yeah, I mean, we should get it off COVID because it's not a special topic for us.
There's one last...
There's a disconnect.
There's just one thing I want to inject, Jamie, that, you know, like, when it comes to masking in particular, and I think it speaks to a broader point, so I'm not going to argue about the individual studies or that kind of thing.
All I want to say is, like, at the beginning of the pandemic, when there was the debates around masks and various conflicting statements and countries were adopting different positions.
I live in Japan.
People wore masks as a...
Like precaution in general when they have the cold.
So it's completely normal.
People still wear masks here now.
But when I looked at the literature, the studies, right?
And as Matt says, it's not our area of expertise.
I saw a generally not very well developed literature, especially when you look at like cloth masks in public settings.
Mixed studies, you know some overall positive and not but like a fairly good case that could be made for like a common sense if it's a infectious disease which is respiratory that wearing a mask will be conducive to that but when I saw that literature my immediate reaction was okay people can take different positions on this exactly what you were talking about you know Different groups,
different institutions, different researchers will take different assessments of that evidence and some will recommend...
I would say a mosque would be generally more cut and dried.
Then, you know, like a mask stats and performance under control conditions, I think, should be more cut and dried and less subject to disqualifying than something much more complex.
But, you know, advanced mRNA, you know, efficacy over time.
Yeah, I agree with you that there's all our complexities there.
But just, you know, it's actually hard because, you know, most studies with masks prior to the pandemic were conducted in hospitals in controlled conditions.
And we're looking at...
How things spread from doctors and patients.
They weren't looking at people wearing cloth masks in community settings or in the context of a pandemic because we didn't have a global pandemic before.
So the quality of evidence wasn't very good.
And all I'm saying is, you know, there were different perspectives.
So when I saw Different institutions, different countries, take different stances and then more studies come out and people evaluate and change.
That completely fit with my model of what would happen in this situation.
And I can also see some institutions, it might just be some people in the institution who had a very strong opinion which wasn't well supported by the evidence or they wanted to preserve masks, you know, as famously.
Happened to try and reduce the run on N95 masks, like all of those factors playing, but none of that is surprising from my worldview because that's low quality evidence that is a bit mixed.
Public health authorities take different decisions and then over time there comes to be broader consensus on issues, but for people in the alternative ecosphere and I would say people who are less.
Familiar with assessing scientific literature, they seem to take this as like whiplash.
Every week when there was a new article in the New York Times or a new article critical or Fauci said something, that was taken as this huge sea change of opinion.
And that's how I experienced the lab leak as well, is that every time an article comes out in ProPublica or Vanity Fair or there's a Washington Post article.
There's a big reaction amongst the online sphere and the Twitter sphere.
Oh, yeah.
But that's the social media algorithm.
That's the hot take in the structure.
Yeah, and you can't change it.
But I think that's the part that, you know, you were asking where we fit in or where we see ourselves contributing.
And in part, we try to say, like, consume all that stuff critically and also basics.
It's helpful to know the scientific method and that kind of thing, but it is also the case that you cannot expect the majority of people to have spent time researching, studied design and that kind of thing.
People don't have the time to do that.
So the institutional mistrust that you talk about is very real, but to me...
That is not just caused by the institution's failing and sending mixed messages, but also these actors who intentionally sow mistrust of institutions and in a self-serving way that sets themselves up as alternative authorities.
And those ecosystems, which include anti-vax ecosystems, which include gurus and whatnot, they need to be looked at.
Just as critically as the institutions.
And that's what I see as lacking.
There's strong critiques of institutions.
Yeah, so basically a recursive critique.
Yeah.
I mean, it's totalizing.
Yeah.
So, you know, if we are all signing off on everybody should be being more critical, I'm down with it.
I just wish I seen it applied more consistently.
And I realise that we've kind of badgered you.
You've been a very good sport, but it feels fair to give you the wrapping up space if you'd like or if you want to respond to any points, feel free.
Yeah, no, fucking fun.
I mean, a good way to spend some time.
So thank you for all of it.
No, it's great to get to hear and, you know, kind of understand the things you care about, basically.
Sort of why did you build this thing in this way to address what stuff you're seeing.
So I think that's cool.
I think there is, for sure, there's just right next door to this goat path we've been on.
You know, it's kind of a...
Flowing river, which is way more fun.
And that would just be, if you guys just loosened your ties just a bit, you know, maybe had a pint, you know, and then allow for, like you can stop the clock at any point.
And as long as everybody knows all the coordinates and time, space, dimensionality, and perspective, then you can keep playing, right?
If somebody's lost the plot, then you got to go back to your last known waypoint and recalibrate your instruments, right?
And it just becomes, again, much more sort of...
Intersubjective jazz.
Because I would say, if anything, fundamentally, ironically, it's the benefit of the doubt.
It is that pesky rule omega that actually is the key to unlocking it.
Because if we're engaging in the hermeneutics of suspicion, we're always hitting the brakes.
And you're hitting the brakes right over the rocky section or the icy patch, rather than carrying speed over it until the next place that's good to turn.
So if we do that together, we can still hold each other accountable, bust each other's balls, but it's done in a much more quick in and out dialectic to get to jazz.
And yes, absolutely.
While we descended to the point of caricature with everything from Daoism to Harry Potter and every other metaphor possible, it is fundamentally the way that can be named is not the way.
So it is all via negativa, which is in some respects your guys' jam.
So well done on shining a backwards light on the thing that you insist does not exist.
Well, that was good.
It was both complimentary to us and also, I guess, a robust defense of your own position.
And I think it's only fair that you should have the final word, Jamie.
So just thanks for coming on.
And I think that's an excellent note to end it on.
Fantastic, guys.
I look forward to checking this out when it drops.
Fantastic.
Cheers.
Cheers, Jamie.
So there, Matt, the interview is done.
I wonder what happened.
I wonder what happened.
Well, so we are recording this before the interview, so we're not sure what happened.
Did Jimmy storm off in a reage over some insult that Matt proffered?
Did we convert to game B and did we see the lie?
Did we come to some higher synthesis?
Yeah, were we caught into sense-making?
These are all possibilities that You, the listener, will know, but we don't.
So hopefully it went well and everybody ends up slightly more enlightened from the encounter.
Or at least, you know, we just have a chat.
That probably would happen.
Well, I remember from watching that video that Jamie Will interpersonally seemed like a perfectly nice chap.
And we are both perfectly nice, so...
So why wouldn't we have a nice chat together?
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, I'm...
What's...
Garrulous?
Garrulous.
Garrulous.
You're garrulous.
Yeah, yeah.
You catch you in the right mood, you could be garrulous, I suppose.
Yeah, isn't that like good-bad?
That's like grunkly, but you're also friendly.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
You know, you're being boisterous.
You're wrapping your arm around someone's shoulder and you're saying...
You're like a dwarf.
You're like a dwarf.
You're like a drunk dwarf.
Yeah, who's...
Dwarfs are...
I'm going to give up saying that word.
So, yeah.
You know, there was when we were initially starting this episode, I did want to...
I was thinking to inform people or have a discussion about guilt by association.
That whole concept.
But I've decided, you know, not this time.
We'll leave that for another time.
We've caused enough...
Confusion and we've given enough information about the nutritional content of nuts or what Elon Musk has been saying on Twitter at the time of recording.
So I don't want to keep people longer.
We'll save that for next time.
Instead, we should hear back from what other people have said about us in our review of reviews.
Yes, the good, the bad and the ugly.
It's like getting student teaching feedback.
It's a rollercoaster.
Particularly insightful students.
That's it.
Although, again, your students have not been doing your duty because I didn't have a wide array to choose from.
So I demand that people leave us more reviews and give us funny content from their own labor.
Otherwise, we'll have to think of a new segment.
Imagine that.
Imagine that, Matt.
Yeah.
Come on, everyone.
This is a cooperative enterprise.
It is.
Give us another review if you've done it.
Just change your review.
You probably wouldn't see it.
Any family members of mine listening to this, even if you've already left a review, leave another one.
Friends, colleagues, people who just heard Beyond Synth fans joined the podcast.
Now's your time.
Now's your time.
So we usually try to aim for a negative, a positive, or something interesting.
I've got one that I really, it's from a good username, Elegant Octopus.
Very good.
I like an octopus and an elegant one.
Sounds fantastic.
And they've given it a five-star love it review, so that's all right.
But it's a very short request, Matt.
And now, bear in mind, they give a good review, so you have to do this well.
It says, can you get Matt to say, war like Crash Bandicoot?
Please and thank you.
What?
I don't even know who Crash Bandicoot.
Crash Bandicoot.
Crash Bandicoot, Matt.
He's your national symbol.
And you do bear a kind of passing resemblance to him.
Okay, look, I just Googled this.
I've done it, Jamie.
Just imagine what he sounds like.
I've got Crash Bandicoot.
Whoa!
is the title of the thing.
It's eight seconds, so let me listen to this.
You won't be able to hear it.
Okay.
This is cheating, though.
This is cheating, I feel like.
Okay, Matt's face there was like an entire journey on its own.
But Matt, we've done the preparation.
We've got it ready.
When you're ready.
No, I'm not going to do it.
What?
I can't do it.
I do a really bad job.
Okay, at least you've got to show me what the bad job is.
So here you go.
Oh, alright.
He goes like, in this one, he goes, whoa!
Whoa!
And then he goes, hang on, whoa!
Whoa!
Whoa!
That's what he does.
That was really good.
I think you went and looked at a compilation clip, and there you got all the different intonations of, whoa, what?
Only famous, more like saying, woo!
Or something like that.
Well, it was a sequence of him doing a bunch of woes.
So there you go.
Look at that.
This is where I've come to.
I'm 40. I'm in my late 40s.
I'm a professor.
I have a distinguished track record.
And I'm here on air saying, whoa, like Crash Bandicoot.
That was good.
I like that.
Thank you for that elegant octopus.
That was a treat.
Now!
A negative review.
Hello, is it, Matt?
Because it's a five-star review and the title is Waste of Time.
Is this one of the ironic satirical ones which we request?
You be the judge.
Okay.
If you are an incel playing video games in your mom's basement, this podcast is for you.
An annoying Irish bloke and a guy from a penal colony gets mad at people who are cleverer than them.
Plenty of insecurities and resentment to be enjoyed, but be warned, they frequently unfairly get angry at some guy called Brett Weinstein just because he is smart, a keeper.
And this is from Swart in the Netherlands.
Okay.
Well, so the question before us is whether or not this is...
It's satirical.
I'm firmly in the situation.
Nobody thinks Brett Weinstein is a...
I mean, people do.
People do, Chris.
They don't write reviews that well.
The people that do that, they just say...
No, that's not fair to Brett Weinstein's audience.
That was a friendly troll.
That was a good troll.
Because I was getting a little bit triggered.
Well, there's some hard truths in there.
There is resentment.
There is speaking down to our betters.
So, you know, those bits are fine.
But, you know, come on.
Brett Weinstein, that's gilding the lily, Matt.
That's gilding the lily.
Yeah, that's right.
He showed his hand there.
But that's good.
That's a good review.
Yep.
Yep, and that's it.
For today.
So what that remains for us to do is to thank our patrons.
And I probably should have put this at the beginning.
Maybe we'll mention it again next episode.
But just to clarify for patron folk or would-be patrons, we have three tiers.
They're mostly like a kind of legacy thing that we set up at the beginning.
But in any case, we do have differences between them.
There's a $2 tier.
Which means that you get bonus content that we put out, which is like the Garometer episodes, or sometimes we do little bottled episodes, like we did a thing about Elon Musk buying Twitter, our thoughts on that, so we don't have to keep endlessly repeating them, even though we did on this episode.
Stuff like that, right?
There's a big backlog of bonus content.
At the $5 tier, you get that.
But you also get this series that we do called Decoding Academia, which is where we look at academic papers or academic topics and kind of do a mini-episode critically evaluating them.
Yeah.
It's like a university course in a podcast format.
It's like a university journal club, but where only two people are allowed to speak and everyone else has to just sit there and listen.
Yeah.
So, good.
That is very much what it's like.
It's more academic-y stuff.
But if you're interested in the kind of things we cover, you probably would find it interesting.
And then we have the $10 Galaxy Brain tier, which has all of these previous benefits.
Plus, should you so desire, you can come and hang out with us on the live stream once a month and ask us questions or insult us or whatever you want.
So that's what you get for that.
Extra $5 or $8.
You do what you want.
You don't have to contribute.
The podcast will always be free.
But if you want to, it's there.
And that's what is available for those different tiers.
You forgot to mention the most important thing people get, which is that warm glow inside, knowing that they are throwing us a bone, just giving us a little something that we can point to when we've spent our weekends.
Editing these monumental, multi-hour long episodes.
When I'm sitting there listening to Joe Rogan for six hours, I can say to myself, you know, this isn't for nothing.
I might eventually get a few bucks for this.
You know, I could buy myself something nice.
That must make people feel good to sort of know that.
I'm sure it does.
I'm sure it does.
So we'll thank a few of them now.
Look, I know this is a haphazard way of thanking people, but just say we've got a bit of a backlog.
I won't get into the numbers.
I'll just say that, you know, your shout-out is coming.
So, you know, if you don't hear it this time, don't worry, it's coming.
It's coming.
Just hold on for that.
So, first of all, Matt, conspiracy hypotheses for this week.
Cassidy Cade, Margaret Drennan, Philip, Those are all our conspiracy hypothesizers for
this week.
Yes, the entry-level tier.
But still loved and respected.
The foot soldiers.
The Koopa Troopers of our empire.
Goombas.
Koombas.
Koopa Troopers are slightly harder to kill.
We do appreciate it.
And look, I wouldn't donate more than $2 for this podcast either.
So I get you.
Don't worry.
Don't neg the hired donators.
But here we go, Matt.
I feel like there was a conference.
That none of us were invited to.
That came to some very strong conclusions.
And they've all circulated this list of correct answers.
I wasn't at this conference.
This kind of shit makes me think, man.
It's almost like someone is being paid.
Like when you hear these George Soros stories, he's trying to destroy the country from within.
We are not going to advance conspiracy theories.
We will advance conspiracy hypotheses.
Mm-hmm.
Kerov Martin Wesselus.
Yes.
Again, just another shout-out to a conspiracy hypothesiser himself, nonetheless.
Don't those clips just make you want to grab those people and shake them?
Maybe just a light slap across the face and just say, wake up to yourselves!
You mean the people having the secret conferences that none of us are invited to?
I wasn't invited to them, but, you know, they're there.
Well, so we also have our $5 revolutionary thinkers, the people with us in the Decoding Academia Club.
And here, Matt, we have Ben Makin.
We have Oscar Henke, probably.
The money is in a different denomination, so we can't entirely tell.
But River Pebbles sounds familiar, but nonetheless, there we are.
Robert Chapman Smith.
I said that as if his name is like, you know, the Chapman.
Chapman Smith.
Tim Graubauk.
Walter Fotis.
Etienne.
Oliver Daniel, Daniel Barclay, Lily, and Natalie Ardman.
Hey!
Revolutionary thinkers.
I went to school with the Daniel Barclay.
I wonder if it's him.
Maybe it's him.
Probably not.
People, these are the lieutenants and the non-commissioned officers.
They're the Coopers.
These are the Coopers.
What's a Cooper?
Koopa Troopa from Mario.
From Mario?
Mario, Mario Brothers.
The hip new game that all the kids are playing.
Is there no Mario?
I know of Mario Brothers, but what's a Koopa Troopa?
Is it like a turtle?
Turtle, yeah.
Oh, my God.
Okay, all right.
All right, so that means the next tier is going to be gorillas in your framework?
No.
What gorillas are in Bowser's army?
What are you thinking about, Matt?
You'll find out.
But those are the revolutionary thinkers.
Okay.
I'm usually running, I don't know, 70 or 90 distinct paradigms simultaneously all the time.
And the idea is not to try to collapse them down to a single master paradigm.
I'm someone who's a true polymath.
I'm all over the place.
But my main claim to fame, if you'd like, in academia is that I founded the field of evolutionary consumption.
Now, that's just a guess, and it could easily be wrong.
But it also could not be wrong.
The fact that it's even plausible is stunning.
They never stop being funny.
Never stop being funny.
It gets funnier the more you listen to them.
I like these clips better than our original clips.
Don't get me wrong, Chris.
You did a sterling job to get those original clips together, but these ones will make me laugh.
These are funny.
Yeah, well, that's Martin Wessel, to his credit, not ours.
So that was the revolutionary thinkers.
Now we have our galaxy brain gurus.
Rarer, Matt.
Harder to spot in a spreadsheet because there's less of them.
So let me just dole for more time while I...
Find a couple.
Anything good happening?
I've been studying the way these gambling companies operate online with these social casino games and stuff, and they're all about converting lower-value customers to higher-value customers.
So I was just thinking, how do we solve your problem, Chris?
How do we convert more of our...
Lower tier people into the higher tier.
You know, we've got to think of psychological and behavioral manipulations that can, apart from flattery, abject flattery, we're not above that.
Usually you have to give them something.
That's the problem.
Yeah, then we have to make it and organize it.
It's, no.
Well, I find one of them.
It's D-A-V-W.
How would you pronounce that?
I don't know.
D-A-V-W.
Davwa.
Kyle S. That's easier.
Tom Yasko.
I like that.
Tom Yasko.
Aaron Doherty.
I know Aaron from Twitter.
Yeah.
A wise soul.
William Resnick.
I like that name too.
SM Jenkins.
David Smeal.
And...
Collapsing.
Well, I appreciate it.
I mean, it is a nice thing to do, to donate $10 a month to us, Chris.
It is nice.
You're supporting the podcast for the...
Umpteen billion people who don't subscribe, which is, by the way, totally fine.
I don't subscribe to the Revolutions podcast and I've been getting an awful lot of value about that.
So what goes around comes around.
I probably wouldn't subscribe.
But, you know, that's quite a lot because there's a lot of podcasts in the world and, you know, you can't give them all 10 bucks because it's crazy.
Unless you're really rich, you could.
Maybe these people are just rich.
We shouldn't be thanking them at all.
Maybe this is like...
They should be giving money back to more people.
For 10 bucks, there's nothing.
That's just like...
They use it to wipe their nose with and throw it in the bin.
Could be.
Could be.
And you were wondering which Mario Brothers character I would compare them to.
I would say Hammer Brothers.
Hammer Brothers, Matt.
Or maybe Shy Guys.
One of the three.
Hammer Rollers are Shy Guys.
Are these like bosses at the end of a level?
Not exactly bosses.
Many bosses, but yeah, yeah.
They're not Bowser level.
It could be Bowser's children.
Lemmy, Iggy, Roy.
These are real names.
I could be saying anything.
But yeah, so that's where they are.
You know way too much about Super Mario Brothers.
I watched the Mario Brothers trailer.
With my children.
There's a movie coming.
I know the feeling.
There's a while there that I could sing all the Dora the Explorer songs and do a pretty credible job of them too.
After that Crash Bandicoot thing, I can well believe it.
So, here we are, you Galaxy Brain Gurus.
Thank you so much.
Thank you.
We tried to warn people.
Yeah.
Like, what was coming?
How it was going to come in, the fact that it was everywhere and in everything.
Considering me tribal just doesn't make any sense.
I have no tribe.
I'm in exile.
Think again, sunshine.
Yeah.
Yeah.
As always, I feel kind of sorry for Sam Harris.
Feels like he doesn't quite deserve to be.
He's in exile, Matt.
He's in exile.
That's fine.
He's in the galaxy.
Floating around, non-tribally aligned, as always.
So we salute you, Sam Harris.
We salute you, Galaxy Brain Gurus.
And we will see you back next time when we have a decoding episode with Elon Musk.
And it won't be too long, probably next week.
I think it'll be kind of straightforward.
I'm not going to take three hours to describe what's going on there.
Famous last words.
Well, note, Matt, if you would, Distributed idea suppression complex and accord the gated institutional narrative on your way.
I have an entire wall of my house full of documents pinned up there and with red string connecting everything and the disc and the gin.
A well-represented nexus of little red bits of string connect to each of them.
I like that.
I like that.
All right.
So see you all next time.
And thanks, Jamie.
Bye-bye.
Thanks.
See ya.
This is...
What was the thing?
Oh, yeah.
In Japan, you get this health checkup once a year where they take your blood, they scan your...
They do x-rays and stuff.
Actually, relatively thorough.
And it's very efficient.
And you get it every year and then they give you grades about your health.
And generally, I'm all right.
But this year, some results were just a little bit...
You know, on the high side or a bit thing.
A funny thing is, I actually appreciate this about Japan.
Like, I'm 174 centimeters, 5 '9", and I'm 75. Just a little bit shorter than me.
Right, and I'm 75 kilos, right?
And I prefer to be about 70 kilos.
A little bit more of a slider build than me as well.
Yeah, so, well, this is what I want.
When I competed in jiu-jitsu, I competed at 62 kilos, which is insane now.
But in any case, that's not really hugely overweight or whatever by any standards.
But because this is Japan, and because of the health check thing, I got an email, a very friendly email from the nurse saying, you know, some of these results are a little bit out.
Your weight just went off a bit.
So, you know, maybe you need to get some exercise and, you know, and it was very nice.
And I was just like, imagine in the UK if I put on like three or four kilos and my work, please, will be to say, maybe you need to do a bit more exercise or stuff like people would be freaking out, I think.
But I appreciate it.
It was I agreed with the.
They shouldn't be evaluating you on Japanese standards.
They need to be treating you on the Irish metric.
Yeah, by that standard, I'm a fucking god.
But it's refreshing in Japan.
I remember there is no sense of...
It's okay to just tell people what's wrong with them, especially if you're a middle-aged woman.
I remember meeting people, like acquaintances.
You don't mean it's okay to tell Middle East women what's wrong with them?
No, no.
They can tell you.
They can tell you.
Yeah.
I remember meeting this lady and I met her like two or three times.
And the second time or third time I met her, she just looked at me and just pointed at my belly and went, you've gotten fat.
Yeah.
Some people don't like this Japanese culture, but I appreciate it.
