Interview with Coffeezilla on Cryptocurrencies, NFTs, and modern scammers
In this episode we are joined by the irrepressible "Coffeezilla" (aka Stephen Findeisen), a man who is, it's fair to say, kind of a big deal on YouTube. And rightly so! His channel focuses on exposing "scams, fraudsters and fake gurus" and he has received a great deal of praise for the detail, depth, and quality of the research that he goes into for each episode. Coffeezilla has been particularly active in digging into cryptocurrencies, NFTs, and other financial Ponzi and pump and dump schemes. Indeed, he has received praise from the MSM in relation to his coverage of the infamous Sam Bankman-Fried, and has most recently managed to arouse the ire of mega-influencer Logan Paul, after covering Paul's total NFT scam ‘problematic’ failed NFT offering.We share a lot of common interests with Coffeezilla and this interview as a result is pretty broad-ranging. To mention just a few, we discuss Elon Musk, the way unscrupulous individuals leverage capitalist financial systems, the death of expertise, modern online ecosystems, the differences and parallels between financial and secular gurus , and the psychological and technological tricks gurus use to seperate people from their hard-earned cash.Coffeezilla's hard work on financial scammer has made him extremely knowledgeable. He's also as sharp as a tack and really fun guy to chat with. So, we were super lucky to be able to snag him as a guest. We enjoyed ourselves thoroughly, and we hope you enjoy the interview too.Oh, and Chris and Matt talk about Lex Fridman and that damn booklist in the introduction, and introduce a new segment the 'Weekly Wisdom of Mikhaila' at the end.Enjoy!LinksCoffeezilla feed on YouTubeCoffeezilla's Investigating Logan Paul's CryptoZoo seriesLogan Paul's attempts to address and redressCoffeeZilla on The Lex Fridman PodcastMIchaela's Q&A to end 2022Lex being sad about people dunking on his reading listNassim Taleb on LexNathan J Robinson: The Guy Who Just Loves Everyone
Hello again 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.
With me is Associate Professor Chris Kavanagh.
G'day Chris, good afternoon.
Hello from Australia.
How is Japan today?
It's 2023, Matt.
We're in the future.
There weren't really any movies set in 2023, were there?
It's not a very good number.
It's not a good number.
No, no.
2022 was good.
Like, it had a cyberpunk feel to it, but that 3, it really messes us up.
Yeah, it does.
Yeah, I think the next movies will be set in 2050 or something, so we've got a while to go.
Yeah, but hope springs eternal.
Maybe this is the year of the Cybertruck.
I saw some release notes on the Cybertruck.
That's Elon Musk's truck, isn't it?
That's his truck.
It is, the kind of Rubble Cup looking.
Truck.
I'm interested about this one, actually, the robot truck.
Because if you've seen it, it's all angles.
It's like...
It's very EODs.
It's like if a kid who really liked straight lines drew their concept of a truck.
But, you know, what I also know is that, like, car designs have all converged to, you know...
Cars are boring these days because they all look the same.
It doesn't matter if it's a Mercedes-Benz or a Toyota or whatever.
If it's a sedan or something, it'll have a...
I can't have shape because it's all optimized for aerodynamics and maximizing interior space, all that nonsense, right?
So here's my question to you, Chris.
Like, has Elon Musk discovered something in car design that everyone else has missed?
Like, they're all converging to the same point.
And he's realized, no, no, no, you just need to do, like, two or three big square blocky angles and that's a better car design.
Is that?
Or is it?
I don't think it's about design, but it's supposed to, you know, the thing is it's not just another truck, right?
It's interesting because it's so jarring in the way that it looks.
So, yeah, I guess that's the bold new concept, but we'll see.
The main thing is whether people buy them or if the truck ever comes out, that's the other component, which is necessary because it probably does have enough people willing.
To buy something that looks so distinctive, at least initially, but you have to release it first.
Yeah, yeah.
Oh, well, we'll see.
We'll see.
We'll see.
You know, I mentioned because our last episode was the Elon episode.
We should say we did talk about this a little bit on the Patreon when we were doing the Garometer, which for non-Patreons, after every episode, we put people through.
The grometer, the 10 factors, and give them scores.
And Elon scored reasonably high for me, reasonably middling for Matt, a bit of a discrepancy.
You can judge who's the better decoder if you listen to it.
But one feedback that we did receive and we talked about was some people were a bit upset because we included Thunderfute videos and Common Sense skeptics, and they thought that they were haters, and you can't trust their criticism.
Just to say that we're not endorsing every critique that those people have made of Elon Musk.
And they do indeed seem to be not favorably disposed to him.
But the main point was in those videos, they're just talking about a whole bunch of stuff that's documented elsewhere.
It's like a very nice condensed thing of a lot of common criticisms, including how Tesla was...
Founded and claims that he made about the solar cells and stuff.
So yeah, there might be individual aspects or there might be parts where YouTube commentators get over their skis, but not everything that we link to in our links is a full endorsement.
So just to be clear on that point for future going forward as well.
Yeah, no, I noticed that when we were doing the research for it that...
There really aren't any sort of balanced documenting people that I've noticed.
It does seem to be fanboys and haters.
And they do get ahead of their skis a little bit, it seems.
I'm not really qualified to tell when they talk about some space stuff and satellites and so on.
But they definitely get their facts right when it comes to documenting the...
Basic.
Exaggeration.
Discrepancies between truth and what he's saying.
So, yeah, and that's what we linked it for.
Someone said they're going to write a blog taking down your comments about space shuttles, Matt.
Oh, God.
Those sorts of criticisms are so annoying because you make a very small point, which is that...
It's not completely new.
The concept has existed.
And then they exaggerate your point to make it much more sweeping than you meant and then rebut that straw man.
Go for it.
Write your blog post, mate.
Enjoy.
We welcome criticism.
We welcome criticism.
Which actually leads me to a topic.
So this week's episode is an interview, which we'll discuss in a little moment.
But at the start of the new year, one of the earliest culture war kerfuffles was that Lex Friedman, Episode, person, and podcast host released a book list of books that he wants to read in 2023 and it led to the great internet wars of January 2023 where people were disgusted with the list.
They were vomiting all over their screens.
Tearing apart anybody that would dare read their books.
And on the other hand, people were diving in front of bombs, you know, as the tweets exploded saying these books meant everything.
They changed their lives.
They saved them in dark places.
How could anyone criticize these books?
And the majority of people just didn't care or were somewhere in the middle.
The issue was that the books were seen as...
It wasn't that they were seen as fundamentally basic.
It's like the list didn't really have much personality.
It was like a kind of thing that if you asked the GPT bot to generate a list of books that will make you seem deep and pretentious and have an AI twist to them and you're a 20-something meal, it would generate those books.
But lots of them are great.
And so people...
Largely fell into the predictable camps about whether it was okay or not.
A strange thing for discourse to swirl around, but Lex responded to that event with love, as he is wont to do, and he released a short 10-minute video responding to the controversy.
Yeah.
What did he say?
What was his response?
Well, yeah, so let's hear what he said.
So I wanted to celebrate my love for books, and it was very strange to me that, and if I'm just being honest for a second, it's kind of painful that some prominent figures that I respect were...
Kind of cruel about the list.
And they responded, they mocked it, and all that kind of stuff.
And basically taking the worst possible interpretation.
And...
I have to be honest and say it was...
It wasn't fun.
So, it sounds a bit painful, right?
The Twitter pylon.
And who he might be referencing, Matt?
As some of the people that are prominent and responded quite negatively would include Nassim Taleb, another former subject of an episode.
And he commented on the list saying that if you wanted to understand why he's turned down exactly 10 requests, the list will provide a succinct...
And he said that you tech people are not getting it.
Anyone who pretends programmatically reading, discussing, and digesting these books one a week is a total fraud.
You fall for the shallow, vapid, overactive poser inflating his scientific image.
Idiots, you deserve Lex Freeman.
He didn't mince his words.
And when Jordan Peterson responded, like, kind of saying, no, no.
What a cruel response.
He said, Jordan Peterson, you idiot.
Stay out of this.
Tell us what you really think, Nassim.
Yeah, there is something just a Taleb episode.
People should go and listen to it if they want to hear.
But we did enjoy that aspect of him where he just kind of he is what he is.
He's a bull in a china shop.
He's a fool.
Strength in every discourse.
He's blocked me and Matt for being idiots, so just to be clear on that.
Yeah, but it is still funny.
I remember I very politely didn't agree 100% with one of his comments about statisticians.
Yeah, he called me an idiot and blocked me.
That's funny.
There's a funny aspect to that.
I think he did the same thing for me.
I can't remember what I did, but maybe I deserved it.
There's a chance.
But in any case, I'm playing this clip not to mock Lex, but to highlight something, which is, one, that Twitter pylons are not fun, right?
You can hear genuine hurt in Lex's voice about that incident.
And he elaborates a little bit on it.
So listen to this podcast.
It was just a silly kid, me, kind of in a joyful New Year's mood, sharing with the world books I love.
And I think what was happening, and this seems to be happening a bit more, is there's a bunch of people that are just...
Almost waiting or hoping that I fail or maybe that I'm some kind of bad human being and they're looking, they're trying to discover things about me that reveal that I'm a bad human being and maybe somehow this reading list reveals that.
I don't know.
So, cruel humans on the internet, Matt, is that a thing?
Yeah, it's a thing, isn't it?
Look, I think, yeah, it's one of those things, isn't it?
Like if it was...
If it was a nobody who made a little reading list or whatever, then nobody would care.
I think the reason why people are particularly nasty in this case is that Lex Friedman is regarded as some kind of genius, some kind of brilliant and profound person.
By who?
By his audience, I think.
By his fans?
Yeah, I think so.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know if that's fair.
I mean, I think Lex's audience often, even the people that are fans, they regard him as good-hearted and intelligent, but they don't tend to, I think, regard him as like, you know, an Einsteinian or Weinsteinian figure.
More like he's got just a genuine curiosity and like he is...
Intellectual, but I don't see many people presenting them as an intellectual powerhouse.
Okay, fine, fine.
Oh, well, in that case, the dynamic makes perfect sense and it's the kind of thing I think which would encourage his fans to think even better of him and less of his detractors because it is him being the starry-eyed kid full of wonder,
just deeply absorbing these products of modern culture.
And deeply appreciating them.
Yeah, like a child, wonderstruck by the universe.
And I guess that's his appeal to his audience.
And so, anyway, the dynamic makes sense, I guess.
Yeah, the dynamic does make sense.
But for me, one thing that struck about this is that there are people that are cruel online, there are people that are partisans, and there are people who will automatically...
Disparage Lex because of his associations with people that they don't like, right?
Like Joe Rogan or whatever.
Now, people might put us into that category, Matt.
They might have slotted us in there and say, you're just Lex haters.
Just because he's friends with Joe Rogan and just because he has talked to Ben Shapiro, you've categorized him, you've pigeonholed him as a right-wing maniac and you just want them to feel.
And to some extent, this is what Lex Seems to be responding to, but I would say that, well, first of all, that our episode covering Lex, that we didn't paint him as like a right-wing partisan.
I do think that he is a little bit unaware of his skew.
And because he presents it as like he wants to just see everything across and he's got no political preferences whatsoever.
But...
If you look at his guest list, there is a wide spectrum of people.
But then there are things like the people that Lex admires are folks like...
Joe Rogan.
His good friends are, you know, Michael Malas.
He subscribed to the Daily Wire for diversity of political opinion.
He hosted Brett Weinstein whenever he was promoting COVID contrarianism.
And people could selectively choose things like, oh, he hosted Destiny, he interviewed Chomsky.
But there's not currently a balance in that.
So it seems that Lex might not be entirely aware.
Of the skew in the way that he approaches things.
Yeah.
I think it's analogous to Joe Rogan's self-presentation as just an average guy.
He's interested in ideas.
He wants to hear all kinds of sides.
He's open-minded and he's just figuring stuff out as he goes along, right?
Yeah.
If you listen to how that dynamic plays, first of all, it's a very convenient...
Excuse for having complete deranged lunatics on your show and then like goggling in wide-eyed disbelief going, "Wow, the Democrats really are executing people in hit squads.
That's amazing.
And they are lying to us about vaccines."
And so Lex's sort of naive wonder child thing is kind of the same thing.
I'm sure there is a real bedrock of reality to it, like it's genuine.
But I just don't think it's good content.
It's not healthy content.
Well, so I think that Lex is different than Rogan in that if you go back and listen to our episode and if you just spend a week listening to Rogan, he is a political partisan in lots of ways, at least in terms of how gullible he is to conspiracies at different ends of the spectrum.
But he doesn't think he is.
No, he doesn't.
No, no, no, no.
So there's a definite parallel there.
He presents himself as like, you know, just a man in the street centrist with a diverse array of political opinions.
But so from the content of Lex's that I've seen, he is what you say, which is, you know, a little bit, not a little bit, a rather large dollop of kind of open-eyed, just asking questions from figures who are partisan.
And like I said, There's a skew in the guests that he has and how he approaches issues.
But I don't think he's a Rogan type in that I don't think if you listen to his content for one week, you're going to hear all of the right-wing talking points that you hear on Fox News.
Absolutely.
That's not the correspondence I'm making.
There's a similarity in that naivete.
Yeah?
Yeah, yeah.
It's a studied pose, which is kind of convenient, even though I'm sure there's some degree to which it's real.
Whether it's real or not, it doesn't really matter.
It kind of leads to bad decisions.
And there is a discrepancy.
I mean, Flex Friedman clearly arranges his guest list on what will get the most amount of exposure.
He's quite happy to...
To talk to, oh, here's that guy.
Here's the latest one he was trying to talk to.
Andrew Tate.
Andrew Tate, for instance.
Well, so that's what, you know, this is a part where, though, I think he is slightly different in that, you know, he historically, I think, has majorly had relatively reputable guests alongside culture war figures.
And his content seems to split in that way between, like, Culture war events, you know, the Kanye West is the obvious example recently.
And then, you know, more tech people.
Like I heard him do an interview with somebody who was like a computer game designer.
And it was like a three-hour interview with an influential computer game designer.
And it was interesting.
And, you know, Rogan also does the same thing, sometimes has a non-culture war.
But I think Lex is more to that, but has started to lean...
More towards the culture war stuff.
He's talking about interviewing Andrew Tate.
He just had Kanye West.
He had Ben Shapiro, so on and so forth.
On the other side, he had Destiny.
He had on an editor for Jacobin.
So that to me is one of the reasons why, like, the more that you lean into culture war content, of course, the more that you're going to attract attention.
Yeah.
And I think the less tenable it is to take the position that you're just being full of love, apolitical, full of love, just wanting to understand about the common humanity between people.
I mean, you can't do both those things, I think, at the same time.
Well, yeah, because even if you talk about that you want to understand Andrew Tate psychologically and you want to put hard questions to him and you think it would be good for people to understand him as a man.
Maybe you don't need to do that now when he's in the news cycle or when he's controversial.
Like, why not wait a year when it's not the thing that would get you loads of clicks and exposure?
You want to talk to Kanye?
Talk to him in the year whenever things have died down and you can reflect on the period.
Like, when you're striking on these controversial figures, when the attention iron is hot, there are people that rightly or wrongly will perceive that as You're trying to get attention.
And you definitely will get the attention practicing that.
So like you said, there's this dual aspect of it where people court controversy and then say, you know, I'm becoming controversial, but I really don't want to be.
And you're like, well, you don't have to interview Andrew Tiet.
And especially when he's just arrested for human trafficking, coming out and saying, Or not arrested, you know, charged or whatever the thing is, the police are interested in him related to human trafficking.
That's telling you about the kind of person that is.
So if you come out and tweet and say, I want to interview him and Greta Thunberg, obviously people are going to see that as your kind of...
You're just following the attention spotlight around.
Yeah, although, you know, Lex wouldn't free himself as that.
Anyway, it's something that happens a lot.
You know, people get into controversy and they kind of present it to their audience as if it's come out of nowhere and they're a very good-hearted person and these mean mainstream sources are starting to try and take them down.
I saw Matt Taibbi was complaining about some...
Some article which was presenting him as somebody offering apologetics for repressive regimes.
But again, that pose was taken of, oh, they're only attacking me because I'm a threat to them and they need to try and take me down at Pegartoon.
It's like there's never that it might actually be they're trying to make legitimate criticism.
And this is what made me want to talk about the Lex.
Apart from all the things that we've already highlighted, because at the end of the discussion about the books and the hurt and whatnot that he feels, he says this.
So it's a trade-off.
Anyway, it's just a temporary thing, but it did suck for a short amount of time, for a few hours, for a couple of days.
But in general, I'll persist with my love of reading, but I might not talk about it publicly.
But again, let me sort of emphasize that this kind of response and mockery will not affect anything of importance that I do.
I try to read comments.
I try to see criticism.
I really value especially high effort criticism.
I try to grow and constantly try to improve.
But that's for things that I Take very seriously, like the podcast conversations that I do.
But for silly things like book lists, Spotify, music playlists, the food I like to eat, I don't know.
What else?
Anything, any fun like side thing, it's not that important.
So do you know why I would highlight that clip?
Were you picking up the receptiveness to criticism, Chris?
Is this something that's...
Yes, I was.
I wasn't drilling down on Lex's issues with food, which I agree, fairly insubstantial fodder for criticism.
But the issue is that pose of, I look at the comments, I'm open to critical feedback, I welcome it, right?
Now, with Lex and with...
Almost all of the gurus we've covered, with a few exceptions.
That pose is taken, and yet they never seem to encounter good faith, high effort, criticism.
Unless that criticism is very mild, and it's something like, you know, you could ask questions a little bit more tougher.
Like something like that, right?
Like a feedback from Joe Rogan, or something in that direction.
But it's just, this, Mythical creature of good faith, high effort criticism that Lex is so willing to engage with.
And the Weinsteins too, as it so happens, and all of the sense makers and so on.
Like, that's a very useful thing, right?
Because what Lex's actions indicate is he has a subreddit, which is...
Moderated extremely strictly.
Post a critical thread.
It will be gone within a day.
Maybe not directly influenced by Lex.
He's not a moderator there.
But that speaks to something about the culture.
And then Lex blocks fans on Twitter who issue very mild criticisms.
So...
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, I know.
Yeah, I think it's connected too, too.
You know, that victim pose and, you know, the sort of centrists and liberals and right wing like to accuse work people and leftists of victimhood culture or something like that.
Culture, yeah.
Yeah.
But something that Lex, I think, has gotten in common with all of them is that these little episodes, I mean, look, what happened is that he did something a little bit cringe and he's a famous person and he got dunked on up for it.
But he also got a lot of love.
You know, he had Elon Musk and stuff coming out saying this is a great list.
He had people saying, you know, it's pretentious assholes who are criticizing the list, so on.
Yeah, and we see this with all of our gurus.
They tend to present themselves as being the victims of an orchestrated campaign of lies and hate.
And implicit in what Lex was saying was that none of the dunks on him really were very fair.
You know, there was no validity to any of them, right?
He was just, you know, he explained he was just doing a lighthearted thing, a very personal thing, communicating something he loved to other people.
So, really, there was no concession that anything in that criticism or dunking was anything apart from mean-spirited nastiness.
And, you know, it's the kind of thing that does rally the audience around them to want to defend them.
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, yeah, it's just an interesting dynamic, that's all.
Helen Lewis has talked about it a bit as like, you know, adapting a kind of wounded bird pose.
Yeah, I almost use the same phrase of sort of going about like a bird with a wounded wing, you know.
Yeah, and it's coupled with the message though that like you're strong enough to endure it and you'll take the slings and arrows and it will not knock you off your course because your mission is too important.
You know, indicates that in this as well.
So, like, the thing for me is this isn't an example of, like, a Jordan Peterson-esque self-indulgent moan, right?
He's the king of that.
This is Lex talking about a bad experience in a way that's quite personal and makes you feel quite empathetic for him.
I agree.
A whole bunch of the donks were very harsh and mean.
And that is inevitably what happens.
But it's just that added bit of like, this is a brick in the wall of Lech's persecution.
And as he goes on this year, and he says, you know, he's still going to interview controversial figures and so on.
This will just be trotted out as an example that all the criticism directed at him is just, it's bad faith.
It's just...
Interpersonal bullying as somebody who dares to talk to, you know, people that are on the other side of a partisan divide.
And it's frustrating because I can see it happening and I see it recurring in all of the content.
But calling it out, for example, with Lex, if what we're doing now, right, if we were to do it on Twitter, it would be presented as bullying, right?
Like you're evil to deflect the criticism by painting everybody as...
Cruel bullies.
So, yeah, it's like this double standard thing.
Yeah.
Okay, well, there you go.
We've analyzed that tiny little internet incident to death.
Good job.
Good job.
Yeah, we can always...
One thing that we could do is we could always take this out.
Yeah, just too long and rambling for the main thing.
We're going to...
Yeah, we might do that.
We'll see.
So, thematically...
Matt, this is actually linked to our episode because in this episode with CoffeeZilla, he had recently been interviewed by Lex Friedman before he came on our show.
We are just hoovering up after Lex.
You know, we've got Andrew Tate booked in a couple of weeks.
But in any case, we do talk a little bit about these kind of issues at the end of the interview because CoffeeZilla wanted to...
Highlight to us that he found Lex a nice guy interpersonally and also like a smart, switched on, seemed to have good insights and not be a kind of empty shell Dave Rubin marshmallow head guy.
So we do talk about that at the end and I discuss some of the critiques that we have.
Of Lex in regards to his approach to interviewing people with extreme opinions and whatnot.
So it comes up in the interview at the end.
So maybe slightly Lex heavy, but that's why he comes up in the interview, just to flag it in advance.
Okay.
Very good.
That's all right.
I've justified it.
I'm not sure if I needed a reply.
All right.
As long as you're okay with it, that's it.
All right.
Chris, I have to mention, just in case you weren't going to mention it, I was looking at your timeline and I saw that you came across episode 321 of the Jordan B. Peterson podcast.
The title of it is just so wonderful.
It's called A Conversation So Intense It Might Transcend Time and Space with John Vavacki.
I mean, it's impossible to parody.
No, and the annoying thing about that title as well, Matt, is that they will claim when necessary that it's tongue-in-cheek, right?
Like, ah, yeah, that's just us having fun because, you know, it's a high-level competition.
But it serves the dual purpose of being extremely hyperbolic and self-aggrandizing.
So self-aggrandizing that you can immediately cast it as a joke, right?
If you need to.
And if you listen to that conversation, there is very little in it which indicates that the two of them find themselves figures of fun to mock for their grandiosity.
No, I would think not.
They're not characters that are known for self-affacement.
Yeah.
Oh, well.
Yeah.
That's a problem.
The problem is that they're impossible to parody.
This is the difficulty that we face in our chosen jobs.
So, Matt, we will have now an interview with CoffeeZilla that we recorded before the new year.
One thing that happened after this interview, it's actually been continuous developments, is that Logan Paul, the well-known YouTuber, influencer, used to be a Vine person, also a boxer, does celebrity boxing matches and whatnot.
Anyway, big, big deal influencer type.
He was covered by CoffeeZilla in a three-part series of videos.
About a kind of NFT scam.
An NFT project which looked a lot like a scam.
And it was a very good investigation, very detailed.
It got a lot of attention.
And then Logan Paul came out and threatened.
Coffeezilla, that because of the series, it had defamed his reputation and that he was going to destroy him in court, sue him, and he did a thing saying he's got all his facts wrong.
So temporarily, Coffeezilla became the main character of the internet because one of the most popular YouTubers was threatening to sue him.
Yeah, yeah.
Oh, dear.
Yeah, so it's timely.
Well, I hope it turns out.
Fine for him.
I mean, I'm sure.
The good news is, good news is, after releasing two episodes, which were full of very strong threats about, see you in court, you've defeated my reputation, you're trying to get clicks using my name, blah, blah, blah.
That was very negatively received by the internet, which regarded it as a large creator targeting the smaller.
Creator and threatening them with legal action to bully them, even though they know that they will lose because, you know, defamation case for a public figure, very hard to win.
So he's now withdrawn the threat and sent a message to Coffezilla saying that he's going to release a new video, not targeting him.
He's not going to take him to court.
And sorry.
Oh, good.
He backed down.
That's good.
Yes.
So that's an ongoing saga at the minute, but we don't focus on it in this interview because it hadn't happened at the time.
But we do ask him at the end, you know, what if people targeted you to sue you?
So, yeah, that's just interesting context that came up.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, good.
All right.
Well, let's go over to CoffeeZilla and see what he's got to say.
Okay.
So joining us today, we have...
Coffeezilla, the YouTuber, investigative...
Wait, investigative journalist?
Does that count?
Like investigative YouTuber.
Yeah, a little recently, definitely.
Yeah, and so I had heard of your channel many times actually over the past, like, I guess past year or so, but it was only recently that I...
I started looking at a bunch of your content, and I also saw your long-form interview with Lex Friedman, which was very good.
We covered Lex recently as a guru subject, but it was very interesting to hear.
So for people, maybe you are probably better placed to do this.
So if people have no idea what it is you do on your channel, how do you...
Sure.
I think I exposed scams and fraud.
It started with really predatory advertising.
Probably the reason you guys have heard of me is because I ran a show called Fake Guru.
So people, very smart, put two and two together, said, Decode the Guru is a guy who does Fake Guru.
These guys should be buddies.
And that's probably how I first heard about you guys as well.
I was telling you, Matt, I had heard about you before you reached out.
I started with the predatory advertising stuff and the fake gurus selling get-rich-quick courses.
They flash the lifestyle.
They sell you an unrealistic dream and it's your fault if it doesn't succeed.
All that stuff.
And then recently, it's kind of gone very much kind of a hard right in the crypto direction because it's even more grifters and even more scammers and even more blatant and outrageous and it's insane.
So, it's just fascinated me.
But I have a soft spot in my heart for the people out there, the good old-fashioned people out there, hucksters, I guess.
Yeah, so one interesting thing for me is Matt and I in our content have tended to avoid the traditional religious gurus or alternative health figures, the kind of spiritual
gurus, the people that are outright cult leaders.
We did do Reverend Moon, but that was mainly because we had a friend who has a podcast for ex-Moonies.
And so we've focused on people that are in what we call the secular guru space.
You're kind of Jordan Peterson is prototypical or Eric Weinstein would be another one.
But we did do recently and are about to finish like a tech season and we ended up not going too far into the Bitcoin or cryptocurrency.
But your content, at least recently, and in the discussion you had with Lex as well, heavily digs into that world and also looks at figures that are popular celebrities and their interaction with cryptos and NFTs.
And it was in the spirit of, I noticed both.
Things that overlap and things which seem to differ between those kind of characters that were interesting.
And so you mentioned the traditional gurus having an appeal, but one of the things I noticed is for your investigations, especially the recent ones, it seems to me as like an outsider with a not very good grasp on finance and that kind of thing,
that they're very technically involved and you have to know a hell of a lot.
About complex financial systems to be able to ask the right kinds of questions.
And so I was wondering, is that something that you had or did you develop those skills and how specialized are those skills?
Do they cross boundaries or do you think you really need to know a lot about economics and finances to deal with crypto and Bitcoin kind of stuff?
It's a great question.
I mean, I think with this crypto stuff, I, so I'll give you my backstory.
My only background really is I did an undergraduate in chemical engineering.
I got some decent math.
I got some decent science, just critical thinking, but nothing related to the tech of the blockchain or crypto or anything like that.
I have no formal education in it.
I've just always had an interest in fraud.
And I think.
I just started paying attention to the blockchain because it was interesting to me.
Oh, you can actually trace where this money goes.
So different than traditional finance.
And I think more interesting in a way because of that.
I mean, you don't have to rely on what somebody says.
Like if you know their wallet, you can see what they're doing at such and such a time.
You don't have to ask questions about it.
So that really scratched an itch that I didn't know I had.
I was just like, what is somebody doing with their money at a certain period of time?
It's actually kind of...
Kind of interesting, kind of fascinating, especially if they make public statements to the contrary, right?
Like if they say I'm holding and then you see they're selling, like that's so interesting to me.
So I really feel like my skills are not, it's nothing crazy.
It's just like knowing how to use a few tools.
I just feel like I'm slightly ahead of the curve.
And so when people see my investigations, they think, oh, you're so specialized.
You're so technically savvy.
It's like, Well, not really.
I'm just like probably six months ahead of everybody, like most average people.
And so being six months ahead in such a nascent industry feels like you're, you know, miles ahead.
But there are, going to your point, it is very interesting where crypto is this strange thing where you're promising a very simple idea, but you're selling a complex one.
So you're promising, or sorry, I'll say you're selling like this dream, right?
But the actual product you're giving someone is very complicated, and to understand what it actually is does take some level of sophistication.
It's not as simple as like you're giving someone a book.
It's oftentimes some sophisticated computer code written in solidity, which most people don't know how to read, have no idea what any of it means, and the complicated economic dynamics of that particular coin are not immediately obvious.
What you said is true, where people can get stuck in just believing what whoever it is that's selling them the coin says.
They say, hey, we're going to the moon.
Okay, it's a very simple idea to understand.
I'm going to make a lot of money.
But it's complicated to understand the market dynamics and how this might end up just being a Ponzi scheme.
So, yeah, I don't know if I answered your question all the way.
Yeah, you did.
And there's a very specific follow-up that I have that is about a specific case, but it probably applies a bit more widely.
So, I watched your videos on Jake Paul and his tendency to promote various different NFTs.
I'm sure he has.
Many other things that he does, or cryptocurrencies, I might be actually mixing the two up.
You did both.
Both.
Yeah, that also stands for reason.
Checks out.
You did what you just described in those videos.
You traced identified accounts which are likely to be his wallets and not incredibly sophisticated.
Hidden, as you mentioned, right?
All going into things which are labeled around usernames that he has referred to himself as.
But in that circumstance, I was wondering, are you ambiguous on this point?
Or do you think it's actually him that does that?
Or is it somebody who would manage his finances?
Is Jake Paul likely to be setting up, you know, wallets and kind of moving money around?
Or is that somebody who is working on behalf of him who would, you know, like have special, not that special of skills in it?
I'm just curious as to what extent that's likely.
It's a great question.
I mean, I don't know.
It probably just depends on the individual influencer.
I'm sure some of them sort of farm it out.
But all of them know about the deal before they do it.
Usually, I know personally as just like a person on the internet who's gotten offers of brand deals, you just always look at it before you say yes.
So as far as like, it doesn't really matter to me in sort of culpability.
I'm not saying you asked that.
You asked about like, who do you actually think did it?
The answer is, yeah, I guess I do leave that ambiguous.
I don't exactly know if he's the one who touched the button at that particular time.
Interestingly, that actually becomes hard.
I've talked to a few people.
Sometimes my videos will get some attention of people in law enforcement.
I've wondered openly and complained very openly about why there isn't more prosecution of this stuff.
I've talked to a few people who...
Who know about this stuff?
And they say one of the hard things is exactly that.
You know, it's one thing that this person did it, but if they didn't press the button, you know, how can you prove that they're ultimately the person who sold at that day?
How do you know that?
Even if you've tied a wallet to them from one transaction, how do you know 100% beyond a shadow of a doubt that it was them?
It's hard to get that last, like, inch of proof, I guess.
You can get the first 99 yards, but then the last one's tough.
Yeah, and with like Sam Bankman 3, for example, it feels like, and I guess for all of them, that degree where the last 1% is a plausible deniability, even if it's highly implausible,
I still think it wouldn't be enough to protect them.
But it's like if I were them, I would get someone else to do it, just like to create at least some layer.
But it's...
The fact that it's, in so many cases, so straightforward to do, and it is tied to people tweeting and immediately a thing happening, it does seem like the circumstantial evidence stacks up.
Well, it's hard also to talk to, I mean, how do you pitch this to a jury, right?
Jury of your peers, when most people do not understand crypto.
It's kind of hard.
You're going to talk about a...
A DEX.
What's a DEX?
Oh, it's a decentralized exchange.
Okay, thanks.
You've explained nothing.
Oh, well, it's just a liquidity pool.
You replace the market maker with a liquidity pool.
Well, what the hell is a liquidity pool?
It's like, well, okay, there used to be market makers.
Now we use automated market makers.
It's like every single thing is like stacked layers of terms and terminology you have to explain.
And you have to explain then, now that you understand all that terminology, how that terminology can be used to scam you five ways to Friday, right?
So, it's, yeah, it's pretty tough.
In the case of SBF, I did want to say, I mean, I think the evidence is quite overwhelming in that case.
I don't know if you guys saw, he got arrested today.
Yeah. And they just released the seal on the SEC documents and CFTC documents, and it's pretty clear.
Yeah. And there's also the notion that, you know, in contrast to that point that when I, I think your videos do a really good job, by the way, of like going through technical aspects in a straightforward
way.
Thank you very much.
The other part is that even with that, all those parts about liquidity pools and other wallets and that it might be difficult for juries to follow the technical details.
The part that is really clear to me.
One, when I see the people, the online figures or celebrities or CEOs talking, the way that they talk is really, really similar to the gurus that we cover.
And when they're asked direct questions...
Their tendency to be able to just fluff around, kind of almost like dancing, waving their hands.
And they're using technical terms, but it's the exact same as when Eric Weinstein is using mathematical terms or Jordan Peterson is using psychology terms.
So in that point, it seems to me that a lot of it is rhetoric.
And the one that is coming to mind is, I was watching one of your investigations.
What is it?
Moonbase?
Safe Moon.
Safe Moon, yes.
And I think it was the Papa character was talking about evolution, something as an evolution.
And the description was just, it was pure sense maker.
There was nothing there, but it just sounded like the dream.
And they referenced like kind of visionary terms and technologies and stuff.
So that to me seemed that on rhetoric aspects.
There's a lot of overlap with your kind of classical guru figures or even cult leader types.
Yeah, I think it's really interesting how you don't actually have to be that sophisticated to appear sophisticated to the unfamiliar, the uninitiated, I guess you would say.
I mean, you could absolutely not know what you're talking about, like in the case of crypto especially, and you can just blast people with jargon.
And I just blow them away with nothing, with absolutely nothing insightful to say.
And I think that's what's been interesting is all the big guys in crypto this summer, specifically, like all blew up.
All these guys who buy the numbers before this year, you would have thought, oh, they're so smart.
They're getting the check boxes from all of the mainstream media.
I guess one thing I have to ask you guys, what do you think about how It appears to me like guru figures have figured out ways to capture media in a way that they're very often not criticized by anyone.
I should say we talk about very different figures.
I don't know much about Eric or Jordan, but...
Besides the fact that my 3D artist hates Jordan Peterson.
That's like all I know is like he despises Jordan Peterson.
But I have found that generally these people are very mainstream, appealable until they're exactly not, until they're anathema, but until then they're very loved.
Yeah, well actually I was watching your coverage of Andrew Tate and I think you made a point that applies perfectly well to a lot of the characters we look at, which is that these people...
One way or another, stumble upon a recipe for attracting attention.
And then once they have the spotlight on them, they can then use that to promote themselves more.
And the attention gathering stuff is usually something terribly controversial and gets a lot of polarized opinion on both sides.
And then once they have the floor, they can then speak to...
Stuff that indicates their access to secret, or not secret, but deep and meaningful information that people could benefit from.
Sometimes it's very bland and boring, like Jordan Peterson's 12 Rules for Life is a very bland and boring self-help book to a large degree.
A little bit like you were saying about Andrew Tate's training courses.
It's just bog standard.
Yeah, you don't even know how to judge it.
You're like, what am I like?
I know in the case of, well, I know, okay, I don't know nothing about Jordan Peterson.
I know he's like clean your room guy.
Like you can't say no to that.
You're like, all right, yeah, sure.
I don't know if this is one of the rules to life if you had to pick 12, but okay, like clean your room.
Okay, that's fine, I guess.
It's almost so milquetoast that it's uncriticizable.
That's what's so strange about it.
But then they'll throw in some like wild stuff.
I mean, that was like the thing with Tate.
He would say something that sounds reasonably plausible.
But people will look at the reasonable stuff and they'll go, well, he's a pretty normal guy.
Like, what are you talking about?
Do you disagree you should make your bet?
Yeah, I think a lot of our gurus play the same Martin Bailey technique.
But I mean, perhaps a figure that sits somewhere in between both worlds is Elon Musk.
I hadn't thought about Elon Musk.
You know, I would actually love to hear y 'all's thoughts about this.
Actually, I'm fascinated by Elon Musk because anyways, I go back and forth out of him.
I'm like, well, first of all...
You built these incredible companies.
I say the quotes because did he build them?
Okay.
But he kind of did.
He kind of took, like, they weren't, yes, he took over Tesla from two other guys.
But, you know, he kind of did make it what it really is.
I mean, it's one thing to have a good idea, but to execute is hard.
And then, you know, he's got a few ideas which seem pretty cool.
SpaceX really is doing things.
And then you see what he's doing with Twitter and you're like, oh, this guy's an idiot.
And you see what he's doing with Hyperloop and you're like, oh, this guy's a con man.
So it's really hard to tell.
Is this guy just the best salesman?
And part of his pitch is that he's really smart?
I mean, what is it?
Yeah, well, I hadn't thought about Elon Musk at all until we are intending to cover him for the end of our season of Gurus.
Oh, I didn't mean to spoil.
No, spoilers are good.
We actually know something about him.
He's interesting.
I was actually reading about Elon Musk in a very dry investment type publication that I subscribed to.
And they were making the point that a company like Tesla spends nothing on advertising, which is very unusual for a band-oriented company like that.
Right.
And Elon Musk's antics and his stage performances, like they don't care about Elon Musk.
They're not fanboys.
They're not haters.
But they're making the point that he's worth like a billion dollars in free.
Absolutely.
And I think that's the best way to understand him because if you just stop for a moment and do a bullshit reality test, it's absolutely ridiculous to think that any one person is making a substantive engineering contribution to both rocket science And brain surgery.
And electric cars.
It goes on, of course.
Yet that is the implication.
Now, like you, I give him credit for definitely being at the helm, being in that position.
But everyone has different jobs in the company.
I'd say his job is getting out there, maintaining confidence, getting investment, ensuring the investment money keeps flowing, keeping that share price going up.
So, yeah, it doesn't feel like too much of a contradiction to me.
And the one thing I...
The hyperloop does seem like a contradiction to me.
I'm sorry, Chris, go ahead.
Oh, no, no.
Well, it was probably a very similar point, actually, because I was going to say that whenever Matt raised that point with me about the advertising now, I could see the benefit.
But when we initially looked at his content, some of the guru figures that we cover are extremely bombastic, and they're like...
In some respect, the nefarious characters are the most interesting to cover because they're so cartoonish in a way, right?
And the ones that are a little bit arch are also interesting because they're doing something unusual.
But Elon was different because his delivery was not very gripping.
Like, it was quite dry and his personality didn't seem to kind of match the attention that he's able to get.
His claims were very big.
But it was drier than I expected.
And then I started, you know, I think a lot of people go on this journey of finding him, okay, he's, you know, somebody that has like a vision for the future and is motivated by these ideas.
And he might be exaggerating slightly, but, you know, he seems like, you know, reasonably not a terrible person.
And then you look into the claims and you find out he says the same thing every year that he's on stage holding a solar panel saying this is the real technology and it's like a plastic thing, right?
Which he knows is a plastic thing.
You realize, wow, he's a Trumpian level able to lie bold-facedly.
And that to me struck as he's kind of interesting because he really is like the ultimate.
Hype man for the companies and the thing that is striking me looking at his content is like that he lies and it's so easily demonstrated as a lie and so often but it doesn't dent things.
That's the surprising thing for me is like it doesn't seem to matter.
You can demonstrate that what he said isn't true but normally that takes people down eventually.
It doesn't with him.
There's this really interesting thing that I've noticed.
I don't know how to identify it, but you came the closest in just describing the phenomenon where someone gets a sort of cult of personality around them that becomes immune.
It's almost like they're inoculated from any criticism of a certain variety.
Sometimes they get...
Taken down in very orthogonal ways you wouldn't have expected by some other scandal that has nothing to do with them lying, but it ends up really hurting their reputation.
But essentially, if you can go long enough lying and the lies are not core to your appeal, then somehow...
Even lies that might be core to your appeal end up getting written off as like all the like if you can just convince people that you have haters and people just don't like you.
Yeah.
But not for reasons because they're just when they're saying you're lying it's because they're trying to find reasons they don't like you.
They're just hating you because you're successful.
You're this or you're that.
Then it's easy for your little in-group to be like oh well we're just not going to listen to that because you know it doesn't matter.
And for Musk, the core thing, I guess, is like, oh, well, he has Tesla and he has Starlink.
So unless you can prove to me that Starlink and SpaceX and those guys aren't doing what they're saying they're doing, then I'll believe you.
And sometimes the claims come close, like the Tesla stuff hasn't lived up to the autopilot hype.
Ever.
But it kind of is a thing.
I've ridden in a Tesla that was automatic.
It is pretty cool.
It is pretty fast.
It almost does it.
It's hard.
He's a confusing figure because, as you say, there are real technologies.
There are real businesses amongst his suite.
There are other ones like Hyperloop, which just seem to be nonsensical.
Crazy.
I would include Neuralink with that.
I happened to do my PhD in cognitive neuroscience and was working on a topic that was very closely connected to brain-computer interface research.
So I paid special attention to that.
And I think I was in a way that I can't do with rocket science or how plausible it is to put a Mars base in the next few years.
The way he talks about that is he's either lying or he has a childish, childlike science fiction understanding.
I think it has to be that.
It reminds me of Theranos.
I mean, actually, it reminds me of to the uninitiated in blood science.
You go, oh, we've been doing this crude thing where we draw this blood.
That sucks.
Technology just advances.
So people just have this naive assumption of technology.
It's like, oh, just like over time, we will naturally just grab more things off the tree of knowledge.
And like, it will always progress towards the sci-fi.
So it was just the idea was, yeah, doesn't it sound great that you're in your room and we just don't have to draw so much blood and we get all the information and it's painless?
It's like, yeah, that sounds great.
Except all the people in the room who are, who are, what do they call it?
It's a word for like a doctor who deals in blood like thrombol.
I forget.
Oh, yeah.
Anyways, if you're one of those people, a lot of them didn't buy it.
They thought, oh, this is absurd.
But they weren't the ones who had all the air in the room.
The person with all the oxygen was Elizabeth Holmes and then the rest is history.
But in his case, I don't think he'll ever go down because he'll just, you know, pivot to the next like thing.
But I absolutely agree with you.
Ever since Neuralink came out, I've been like thinking to myself, there's no way it's this easy.
Yeah, Matt was talking to me about his description and, you know, that if the description applied, it would involve, like, the way to recharge the battery would involve, like, heating up the implant inside the brilliant.
Right.
That's not something that you want.
It's not something you do.
You don't want a hot thing inside your brain.
There's no nerve cells there to stimulate pain, but cooking your brain is just generally...
Even I know that's a bad idea.
I've got a question for you guys.
What's interesting to me is thinking...
On the one hand, I'm fascinated by the individual.
On the other hand, I'm fascinated by the systems that allow them to occur.
So, in the case of Elon, a lot of it is that the venture world lionizes people who lie until they don't.
It's actually part of the job description is you have to be basically a storyteller until you get enough money to make the technology later.
And that's, as stupid as it sounds, that's how a lot of companies have been built.
What do you think that's like, doesn't that make us sort of prone to grifters?
And because those people are great storytellers, right?
Like that actually is one of the hallmarks of a grifter is you really tap into emotion and people's beliefs.
Yeah.
Well, if we're talking about systems and societies and stepping back to that level, I've got a couple of things to say.
Technology and science is real.
It delivers real benefits.
But in the popular imagination, it can still occupy the same kind of place in their minds as religion and magic did in the old days.
And just like a traditional shaman would basically say to an audience that they are in touch with powerful forces beyond their audience's understanding and they have a conduit and they can deliver the good things and save us from the bad things.
There is a place for people to do that, whether it's crypto or a venture capitalist.
The other thing too, and looking at these other gurus, is some of them have very strong links with the very apex of the corporate power food chain.
And it is amazing to us that these blue chip top executives at these blue chip companies will pay large amounts of money to these people to Clearly speak utter bullshit to them.
Flatter them and just talk nonsense to them.
So the people running the world are not quite as smart as we might hope.
And so I don't have strong sort of economic political opinions one way or another, but it did give me a little bit of a crisis of confidence in capitalism, which is based on the idea of efficient allocation of capital.
But maybe that's just the price you pay for You know, economics and changing technologies coexisting.
There's always the human element and we're all just primates in suits in the end.
I don't know.
We talked with Manvir Singh, somebody who studies shamanism, and about the connections and disconnections between traditional shamans and the guru figures that we cover.
And he noted a whole bunch of parallels.
And like Matt said, you can almost treat anything...
Any topic, if you obfuscate enough, as if it's like a mystical realm that you can go into and extract, you know, the science from, even real science, right?
Like what Theranos was promising, it was like, it was science fiction, but it was close enough to actual technology that people could, like you said, kind of get a handle around it.
And, you know, in the content that you...
Especially when you're looking at celebrity figures and their endorsements.
It feels that it's very hard and probably impossible to get people not to transfer the admiration they have for a celebrity or an influencer in one area into the financial product or the cryptocurrency that they're...
Hawking, right?
And that's the exact same reason Hollywood stars have been selling wearing watches.
And you're not going to be able to ever really remove that element from people's psychology.
But as depressing as that is, the part that I saw in your video when you looked at the celebrity cryptocurrencies or how they're doing or the NFTs.
And they're all down, with a handful of exceptions.
But there is the initial hype period, right?
So the celebrities make money, and some investors are making money, but the majority of people don't.
And it's the same as Matt said.
Watching that, it is hard not to become cynical about...
There's no...
There's no solution because humans are, we're not, we're good.
So it's a pessimistic thought.
The solution is you call them out and you shame the people who are doing it.
But that's about all you can do.
Yeah, it's no use trying to wag your finger at people because the real problem is that 80% of people...
Well, this is not a hard stat.
I shouldn't...
Site figures that I have absolutely no basis for.
But there's some figure of people who they get scammed the first time and it's kind of like a shock to their sister.
Oh, I won't do that again.
And then there's sort of a smaller percentage that are repeat offenders.
But both of those people you can't really help.
You can't really help the naive person who's never been scammed in an industry before who will never get scammed again.
And it's hard to help the person who's...
Consistently getting scammed because there's usually something in the psychology, whether it's desperation or whether it's just a perpetual belief that in the next person, it's kind of like hard to parse that.
So what I realized is, okay, I'm not going to try to talk.
And also oftentimes it's like it's useless to try to like shame victims.
It makes no sense.
So it's better to just go after the people responsible for this and just basically call it out, call the behavior out and try to...
Try to create negative incentives where there previously were none.
So in the case of influencers, these people are happy to scam people right until it affects their relationship with their audience.
Now you're touching their pocket.
And so then they go, oh man.
So I've actually seen a lot of these guys after I'll call them out like...
They'll start disclosing ads.
They'll start saying, okay, this was an ad.
I will admit it, guys.
Or they'll stop promoting crypto altogether.
I mean, there was actually an interesting phase where everyone was producing their own crypto coins.
And largely, that stopped.
A lot of people now do NFTs.
And then we called that out for a while.
And they do less.
And it wasn't just me.
It was like the whole community had started being like, hey, this is really scammy.
This is really strange.
I don't know.
It's sort of like a grift cycle where they just find something new.
I mean, this is just the state of perpetual state of grifters.
And I'm sure it'll go back to that.
Before I got involved with crypto, it was something called an ICO, the initial coin offering.
There's just always something new way to extract money that they're inventing.
And crypto just happens to be a very convenient one.
But I think regulation is coming.
And with that, things will get better.
Although...
It won't feel that way.
If there's anything I've noticed, it always viscerally feels like it's the worst, but it's not.
And it will get better.
Yeah, it probably will get better, but just like there were tulips before and now there's bitcoins and there'll be something, some new flashy thing, I suppose.
Yeah, I don't mean to be like naively optimistic about just like, it'll always get better.
That's not true necessarily, but you know.
Yeah.
It also doesn't help to just be cynical and be like, okay, well, then what's the point of doing any of this?
No, no, you have to.
You have to.
That's right.
No, no, sorry.
I didn't mean to sound negative.
I mean, you have to, you know, and society does adapt to the current strains of misinformation out there.
And it's a cycle that continues.
I wanted to ask you really quickly.
You're familiar with, I don't know how to pronounce it, Ruja Ignatova, the crypto queen?
Is that someone you've come across?
A little bit familiar with her.
Yeah, OneCoin, right?
Yeah, that's right.
Well, if you're not super familiar with her, I maybe won't ask this question, but I...
I only consumed the BBC series on that phenomena.
And it was fascinating because on one hand, it was purportedly crypto.
There was no crypto in it.
They had a database that just kept, like an Excel spreadsheet that kept track.
It's fascinating.
It's almost like the crypto doesn't even matter.
It's a vehicle to communicate the message.
Okay, so you're actually getting to a really interesting point, Matt.
I forget.
There was some, gosh, what was the name of it?
It was like, it was some Bitcoin mining scheme, okay?
And when I heard about this, I thought, oh, this is genius.
It probably made tons of money.
And sure enough, it made like hundreds of millions.
But basically, they told people, you just, basically what you have to, so everyone knows, oh, if it's too good enough to be true, it probably is too good.
It doesn't exist.
But it's a huge caveat.
If you can convince people.
With a plausible enough reason to pass their doubt, their bullshit meter, if you can convince them of some way that too good to be true could be true, people are dying to believe you.
They're dying.
They're like, we'll line up.
So the scheme was this.
They told people that they had...
So mining Bitcoin was starting to become popular in 2016, 2017, 2018.
But it started to get too expensive.
The electricity wasn't worth...
The cost of the GPU and the cost to run it.
But so these people said, hey, we're buying miners in Iceland, where because of the geothermal energy, the energy is cheaper there.
And so we can run these at this huge profit.
So you just buy a Bitcoin miner from us and we will go buy a Bitcoin, like a GPU, and we'll mine Bitcoin.
This is brilliant because who's going to fly out to Iceland and check that they actually have the stupid miners?
But like, so I just thought, oh, it's made hundreds of millions.
And yeah, sure enough, it made hundreds of millions.
Basically, the point is, is that if you have a good enough vehicle to convince people as a grifter, if you have a good enough like kind of story, it's kind of, it always has to have some kind of wild twist to it that sounds like a little implausible, but like maybe it's true.
And yeah, it's crazy.
You can just...
Take people's money for free.
Yeah, I'm glad you said that because that was where I was going with that question, which is that the technical details of SpaceX or Neuralink or crypto is interesting, sure, and we could talk about the validity behind it, but I think what you said is true, which is at the psychological level,
in terms of the appeal, the substrate doesn't matter.
What you need is a good story, a plausible story.
Because people want to believe.
This is scams and snake oil salesmen have been around since forever.
How are we going to stop having hope?
There's no way to fix that.
Yeah, yeah.
Because it's kind of hard.
You become the bad guy for calling it out.
You're like, hey, this guy's scamming you.
They're like, how dare you take away my hope?
You're like, I don't want to take away your hope.
It's a bad thing to hope in.
Yeah.
I wanted to say something about that.
What's maybe interesting about crypto, why it's a particularly virulent, scamming substrate, is that A, it's just a currency itself, which is interesting.
It's a direct investment.
You get in it that way.
But I also noticed something in my time looking at MLMs that maybe you guys have seen before.
You almost need an amount of complexity that's hard to penetrate, like that's too opaque to really get.
Into.
So when you go into MLMs, there's always these impossibly complicated like pyramids and ladders.
It's like you would think that, oh, like make it simple.
Keep it simple, stupid.
Just like be like, you know, just a straight up pyramid.
But no, it's always some weird leg system and there's always some strange compensation structure that is not straightforward and it's not easy to parse out like what you're actually going to get paid.
But this complexity actually helps you kind of surrender to the bigger system because you go, well, somebody above me has it figured out.
And of course, they don't.
And I think crypto is great at this.
It's great at, hey, well, it's just this magic bean counting system anyways.
Obviously, somebody made money.
And sure, they did.
But it doesn't mean you're going to.
There's a nice analogy that springs to mind that probably crypto people wouldn't like.
But you know the traditional religious cosmologies.
There's, you know, there's the monotheistic, like, there's God at the top, and that's straightforward, right?
But, like, actually, almost all religions have these very, very complex cosmologies where they've got, you know, demigods and angels and different classes of angels.
And if you look at, like, Buddhist Tanka painting, you can see all these different categories of beings and, you know, alternative worlds and so on.
And the complexity is...
Seems to be intoxicating, right?
Like people like to think about there's this knowledge which is esoteric and that you can master if you, you know, if you devote enough time to it.
But there are people more competent to understand how these things connect together.
And it can be, it can have any kind of skin on it.
So it can be like supernatural beings and all these different realms, or it can be...
Financial systems and cryptocurrencies and NFTs.
Or it can be, you know, when it comes to Scientology, how to progress up the self-actualization and become clear.
So I think you're really hitting on something that giving people the sense that there's this super complex system and that you as a guru figure or like a master, you know, like.
CEO can give them the guide to navigate that.
That's like a really powerful narrative.
And there's lots of occasions where that is also a narrative that applies in an actual thing where there are people with expertise and they teach you how to do something better.
I was about to bring that up too.
What's so challenging is that sometimes there is that thing.
I mean, I play jazz piano.
And it's incredibly complicated.
Like the music theory behind it is very complicated.
And usually I'm like, I'll get confused.
And at one point, because I taught myself how to play, but eventually I got a professor at a local community college to give me private lessons.
And it's like opening a door.
It's like he knew all this stuff that really kind of was like locked away knowledge.
It wasn't, you know, I had read books about it, but it was like something about having a guy sit there and kind of explain it was really helpful.
But yeah, so this is the hard thing about grifters is usually what makes them so successful is they're pulling on something which is like real usually.
Or they're drawing power from something that is true.
Like the Andrew Tate figure.
He's talking about, oh, the world's messed up.
Well, yeah, from a certain perspective, the world is messed up.
Like you can draw a lot of power from that narrative.
You can draw a lot of power from the narrative.
Oh, you know, as men, you haven't been spoken to.
I think that's like...
Probably a Jordan Peterson narrative too, right?
Like, you know, disaffected young men.
You feel lost.
You feel like you don't have a strong role model in your life.
Yeah, this is a powerful narrative.
And then just kind of comes everything else.
It's like then they sell you something on the side.
Yeah.
The anti-establishment, like, pose is also really powerful.
And, you know, in your interview with Lex, I heard you talk about the fact that, you know, People were rightly disenchanted with the traditional financial systems, right?
Because they saw what happened with the Wall Street collapse and all of the various systems and Ponzi schemes and so on that go on.
So institutions and traditional financial systems did seem to be screwing people over.
It's not an unwarranted conclusion to draw that decentralized currencies which are not tied to banks and governments would be...
Would be better and could be this emancipatory force.
And that's what, in part, makes it so much worse.
They then go on to screw the exact same people in a new way.
Yeah, there's always a boot, unfortunately.
Some people just wanted to be the new boot.
The people who were really smart wanted to be the new boot.
Some people thought it would get rid of the boot altogether.
Yeah, I think that's fascinating.
There was a point that I just wanted to talk about.
What were you saying right before the crypto stuff?
Oh, about establishment figures.
I'm dying to talk about this.
So, I read this book called The Death of Expertise by Tom Nichols, I think.
Anyway, good book.
But it basically talks about how people are increasingly losing trust in Yeah,
to us.
And never before in my life had there been these big questions.
What do you think is causing that?
Do you think that is largely a social media emergent phenomenon or do you think, what do you think it is?
Yeah. I mean,
I think that's a real thing that's going on.
The death of expertise is...
It's linked strongly to the conspiracism and the anti-establishment stuff that Chris was talking about.
Those things go together.
So you'll see otherwise relatively normal people sort of say in a cavalier way that all the virologists out there and all the universities are corrupted by the perverse incentives and they can't say what they really think.
When it's just so clearly implausible, it requires a conspiratorial frame of mind to believe that.
It's been conspiratorial and probably people have always raised eyebrows at authority figures.
But I guess, I don't know, this is just pure opinion.
This is not really well informed at all.
But I guess the sense that I get is that in society generally, since say like the 1950s, that there has been a general, I guess, equalizing and a democratization.
So we don't necessarily...
Look up and respect to, if you live in a small town, the schoolteacher and the policeman and the judge or whatever, you know, for various reasons, you know, and for some of them are good reasons.
A lot of these people or institutions have shown in some respects to have feet of clay.
But that's a real thing over on top of the social media effects, which just allows people to share their conspiracism and to focus on the stories that make institutions look bad.
I think it's quite interesting that if you look at American politics at the moment, it's quite different in where Chris is and where I am.
But it's interesting to me in telling that it's like both sides of politics.
You can have, obviously, the right-wing Trumpian type QAnon people think the entire system.
Right?
Is corrupt.
But if you look at the bleeding edge of left-wing online discourse, in a way, it's not so similar, right?
They would say the entire thing- They are similar.
Yeah.
So, yeah.
You said not so similar, but you meant similar.
I meant not so dissimilar.
Yeah, not so dissimilar is what I meant.
Yeah, yeah.
So, I feel like it's a real thing that's going on, but that's just a gut feeling, I suppose.
Yeah, it has to do...
I'm sorry, Chris, go ahead.
No, no, no.
My thought is still formulating, so please.
It's still percolating?
Yeah.
Yeah, I don't know what that is.
I mean, yeah, it has to do something with people being able to, I think, Google stuff really quickly.
It gives the appearance that all knowledge is grasped immediately, like that you don't have to work for it.
There's no kind of knowledge behind a degree.
You can just look up a study as easily as a doctor can look up a study.
So you just assume like, well, yeah, I could do my research just as much as this doctor could.
And there's just this appearance that if I can almost, I can basically read an academic study, well, then I must be on sort of equal footing.
And also, so that combined with the fact that...
It's always the most negative, horrible stories that go viral.
You'll never hear like, oh, the FBI did their job today.
It's like, the FBI did something terrible.
Or our health officials did something terrible.
And I think that's really bad.
I think you do always have to admit, for the sake of just being fair to the conspiracy people, our officials have sometimes made some horrible miscalculations to lie to the public, Be swept under the rug.
And what I find so interesting about events like this is that oftentimes they are swept under the rug, but they have this corrosive long-term cost on the public trust that is not immediately obvious, which long-term is very hard.
So you make these short-term optics calls, which sound right immediately, and then long-term you pay for really badly.
Matt, did you want to say I have something, but if you wanted to follow up?
Yeah, I think you'll probably talk to some of those, yeah, the issues with institutions and authority figures, making own goals essentially to decrease trust.
I was just thinking in terms of the bigger scope of it, which is if you look at the arc of...
Global history, it has been an arc towards increasing democratization and increasing axiomatic respect for authority figures.
I mean, we literally- We're ruled by kings and queens who said that they had a mandate from heaven.
And there was just no questioning that.
So in many ways, it's a good thing, right?
It's like the flip side of what is essentially a good thing, which is a democratic culture, which is, hey, I can get in there.
I can learn about how ivermectin works or how vaccines work.
Everyone gets a chance, gets a voice.
So the internet facilitates it, the technology facilitates it, but we also have an egalitarian...
Democratic culture, I suppose, which is a good thing, but has an Achilles heel.
Yeah, I guess what I want to say is a supplement to that because I think one thing that people who research conspiracy communities and cults have started to talk about the proliferation of leaderless cults or kind of low-cost membership.
Whereas before, you know, cults could have powerful control over people and they had totalizing ideologies, charismatic guru figures.
There was always the limitation that, like, how do you join a cult?
You've got to go somewhere and, you know, you've got to cut off contact with family and you've got to, like, kind of make these quite strong commitments.
So there was always limitations.
And sure, you could recruit a lot of people for certain...
Cults and the barrier between religion and cult, whatever.
But now, that's not the case, right?
Now, it's very, very easy for people to surf between gurus and between communities online.
And the cost is often just the cost of watching their YouTube video or maybe joining a Patreon or something like that.
And that is resulting in a different dynamic, but a lot of the same forces.
Like, applying to people's psychology.
And I also think in my lifetime that I was always interested in conspiracism and, like, kind of pseudoscientific communities.
And that used to be this fringe topic that, you know, HIV, AIDS, denialism was a thing.
But really, most normally people would never come across it.
And there were some counter examples, like the South African government, the health minister became convinced in it, and it had terrible consequences.
But it wasn't something you would hear most mainstream politicians talk about.
And that's completely changed, especially with COVID.
Now, you know, Donald Trump is an obvious example, but now conspiracism is just everywhere.
And it's...
It's so depressing because it does make the kind of thing that Matt and me are interested in more relevant.
You could often take some things, but the downside is that- We really wish it wasn't.
Like Chris, I was studying vaccine skepticism, the psychology of vaccine hesitancy and stuff like that.
Just graduated a PhD student a few days ago, actually.
It was the ceremony.
And we've been studying it for years.
And it really was like a niche.
A niche topic in health psychology.
You picked a good field to go into right now.
You know what's weird?
What always fascinated me about...
What originally got me interested in scams was watching my mom because she's always into some health scam and quackery.
The day I came home, she's like, do you really think these vaccines...
I don't know about a vaccine.
I'm like, Have you been listening to Sean Hannity or something?
She's like, well, and I was like, all right, I've got to unplug you.
But that always got me interested in it because when I started looking at really studying these people, what I realized is all their message came from, hey, look at all the terrible things the big pharma has done.
And in a way, it's easy because...
Big Pharma has a long history to draw from.
They have a lot of stakeholders.
There's tons of blame that's fairly assigned to them.
Okay.
But then they go, okay, buy my product.
Well, who are you?
Well, we have no history on you.
You're a nobody.
That came from, you know, Tennessee.
You have no credentials.
Or maybe you even have some, I don't know.
But you then promise the world.
And because you don't have any skeletons under your closet, you buy in, right?
And then what they sell you is worse than what Big Pharma was going to sell you in most cases.
And the worst thing about that is like, Then when they go down, they don't have a long history.
They don't get a stain on the record.
They just disappear and another grifter pops up and takes their place.
Or they hide it or they have all these mechanisms.
But I wanted to go back to something Matt said that I thought was really interesting, which I thought you hit on one side of the coin and I think it's interesting to take the other.
So you talked about, oh, we used to have kings where we had this axiomatic trust in them.
And now we've democratized knowledge, which is true.
Also true is that...
There's an increasingly, as we gain more knowledge, it becomes increasingly impossible to know enough about any field to be even just reasonably knowledgeable.
Like it's just like so specialized.
So we have all these sort of miraculous technologies in our life that we just sort of trust, which usually isn't a problem because they just do the things they do.
My phone just, you really don't have to trust it at all.
You're getting on an airplane.
Okay, that's a little different.
I trust those Boeing engineers, but I don't know them.
All right, I trust that they probably did their homework, but I don't really know.
But then when you go to something like vaccines, I think that's where it like really, I think that's why it's such a, that's like where that rubber really meets the road is when you don't need the trust for so much of life because we've democratized knowledge.
At the same time, there are some things that are so incredible.
MRNA vaccines.
It was incredible to me.
The number of virologists in my life I suddenly found myself with.
Everyone's a virologist with an expertise in MRNA.
I said, you didn't know what MRNA meant last week.
How are you an expert now?
And they're like, I'm telling you.
You know, it's insane to me.
But people spend their lifetime understanding this technology.
And it's like, yeah, it blows me away.
But I think it has to have something to do with that fact.
If you don't have that underlying trust in institutions and you're just relying on yourself, it's impossible to learn about these technologies in a reasonable way.
Yeah, I think that's an excellent point.
There's three distinct things that are different today than a few hundred years ago.
Yes, communication technologies reduces the friction, just like high-frequency trading.
High-frequency memetic transfer happens so quickly.
Yeah.
I mean, I think the democracy, the cultural stuff there is one thing.
But like you said, the other thing that's fundamentally different is that our technological landscape in which we inhabit is just vastly more complex than a couple of hundred years ago.
And it is just not possible.
You have to learn to take things on trust.
I think the information that's available to us on the internet actually encourages us to do the opposite.
Oh, I'm going to do my own research on climate change or something.
And one of the things that Chris and I try to encourage people is to say, don't do that.
For fuck's sake, do not do your own research.
What you should be thinking about is, how do I decide who are the right sources to trust?
So, even myself.
I know how to use Google Scholar.
I'm a statistician.
I understand about research methods.
I can do a passable job at looking at a randomized control trial.
But why the hell would I?
What I should be doing is read good meta-analyses, good summary articles, also published in literature, and I can easily, without much, like, fuck.
I was amazingly bewildered by how complex the human immune system is.
We saw some introductory material.
I went, wow, this is...
That's not what you want to do, is it?
What you need to do is learn how to read critically sources that are providing high-level summaries.
And I guess I'm still a little bit baffled.
I mean, we've had people on the show, we're a bit stuck on vaccines, we'll get off it.
But we've had virologists on, like professors at Oxford, at King's College London, places like that, with 30 years history, like working in labs, like doing research on vaccine and viruses.
Why don't people just listen to them?
Why the hell are you listening to some rando who's parachuted into this topic last week?
So not the current podcast.
I can feel that scraping people's bones.
I think part of it is that in some ways the naive amateur is better able to talk in the naive amateur's language.
So they talk to the issues that the naive amateur sort of thinks about.
Like they're like, oh yeah, like this.
And they will talk to the issues that...
A naive amateur can quickly reach to.
Whereas an expert won't even think about it.
It's not even in their realm of thought because it's so far in the undergrad world or it's even, oh, I thought about that when I was a grad student, but then there's this and this reason.
And they just take it all for granted.
In some ways, sometimes being an expert makes it hard to teach in a strange way because you forget what it's like to be a novice.
So maybe that's what it is.
There just also is a mega problem on the internet where And this is, Chris brought this up, where everyone should have an opinion about everything.
We were talking a bit before the show about your galaxy brain thing.
That was so funny because this is my number one issue.
I used to have a podcast.
I still go drop in occasionally.
And I stopped it for a variety of reasons.
But I was losing time.
But one of the reasons, which always annoyed me, was...
I'd be forced into talking.
We'd be talking for two hours and we kind of were just like talking with a buddy.
But we talk about all these pop culture issues that I have no idea about.
And I was just like giving opinions, like just like giving hot takes.
And I realized, oh, it's kind of strange because I have this platform where I'm very thoughtful and like I like actually know what I'm talking about usually.
And then I'm like giving like these hot takes that I'd be giving at a bar or something.
But I have an audience now.
This audience, I mean, I'm sure they don't actually think that I'm really that smart, but they might take me as seriously with those things as they take me with these others.
So I think that's a huge problem.
I think some people exploit that, like natural trust in the people you've listened to on one thing, you listen to them on others.
But I think we've, I'm sure this is probably a lot of what y 'all talk about.
We've seen so many people who they're studying one field, they are an expert in one field, and then they actually make their career talking about something completely different.
There's so many good points there.
And there's one thing that I noticed in your interview with Lex.
We have various criticisms that we have leveled at Lex.
But it's normal at the end of a podcast where people ask you to give some big thoughts or this kind of thing, right?
And at the end of the interview, Lex asked you about what advice you would give to young people.
Right.
And the interesting thing for me was you started giving advice and, you know, we're like hesitant to do so, but then we're saying, okay, you know, maybe don't give up when people say you can't do something and stuff like this.
But what struck me was in the middle of giving that advice, you said, you know what, this starts cordy and like, I don't know, I don't know, you know, but there was a feeling there that that self-consciousness about giving, you know, advice.
Is something that when we look at guru figures, they don't have that.
They're willing, if someone asks them, what do you think about this?
They'll just launch off and they'll usually find some way to claim expertise about such a wide variety of subjects.
And people like yourself, and I genuinely mean this, and other people that we cover, and relevant experts.
Are often hesitant.
And as a result of that, it's what you said, that the people who can kind of do the science cosplay, they're often willing to overstate their expertise and stuff.
They look more certain and confident, whereas the experts look like people that are a little bit, you know, they're not that sure of themselves and they add too many caveats and academics waffle too much like we do.
And you can't compete with somebody.
Who is an incredibly loquacious guru who will over-exaggerate their expertise.
So, yeah, I'm not calling you out, by the way.
I mean, genuinely, that was one of the things that I really wanted to...
Talk to you about...
I'd love to talk about that.
You know, it's funny.
So I had a whole...
People probably don't know this.
I did have a self-improvement phase in my life at like 18 or like...
And I feel like most people do.
They read a few self-help books.
They go, oh, this is a game changer.
I'm never going to have to...
My whole life's going to change.
And to some extent, you take some high-level principles that might be useful.
But one interesting thing was I had...
My brother, we'd always talk to each other about these various ideas.
And we'd always be like, "Hey, I found this new idea that changed my life."
And we'd always say that.
Like, "Oh, I got this one idea that changed my life.
It's going to change everything."
And then I'd say that, and then my brother would be like, "Whoa, wait, hold on.
You can say that in a second, but I got one idea that's going to change your life."
And it was like, we at first were kind of saying it like half sincerely.
And then we started laughing because by our nature, just talking to each other, we were very confident and whatever.
But we started to have this meta-realization of what we were doing.
So now we have this joke, like, hey, I've got this one idea that's going to change your life.
But it's like, the joke is, it never changes your life.
So I kind of got some early experience, just like with my brother, with friends, of just the ludicrousness of just one piece of advice that will change your life.
I think it's so stupid.
I mean, when you actually experience life, you realize how absurd this is.
You live a little bit.
But yeah, it's funny how viral that is and how much it obsesses us.
Solutions could be simple.
It could be just one thing that I have to like...
And it's not even that I have to apply it.
I have to hear it.
It's one thing.
It's a piece of advice.
Your life will spin on advice.
Yeah, it's very interesting.
I think that's a good heuristic.
Chris, you might have to remind me of some of the names of these books, but I'm thinking of books in the vein of Guns, Germs, and Steel, or what are some of the more recent ones, which people read and they go, that's just changed my entire...
Now I look at everything, history, humanity, completely differently.
I love the books that they do all of history in one book.
It's like, oh, that is millennial crack.
It's like, hey, I only have to read one book to understand everything?
Great.
I'll buy it.
The one you're thinking of, Matt, is The Dawn of Everything by Wengro and Graeber.
That's a current...
Even if not familiar, you can get a sense just from the title that...
And this is where relatively respectable people go some degree down the guru trail because to sell a book like that, you need to promise...
A breathtaking new vision.
You want these easily consumed kind of truthy feeling insights that people feel like that they're getting.
And for me, it's become a real red flag.
Like I love, you know, I like consuming.
Content about history and stuff like that.
But the stuff that I feel is real is the stuff where there's no grand, simple, beautiful narrative that ties it all up in a bow.
It's just, you know, here's some crazy shit that happened.
I mean, listen to the, I keep saying this, the Revolutions podcast is quite a guide to the history of Rome.
It's a good example.
It's just a good illustrative example.
It's because he's covered the French Revolution, the Heidi Revolution, the Glorious Revolution.
Like, yes, there are some broader principles, some broader themes and so on you can pick up, but it's also a complex mess of shit that happened.
And yeah, so for me, I just think that's a good heuristic to, yeah, if there's some bit of advice or some new way of looking at the world or some technology like crypto that is just going to change everything, then your warning light should be going off.
Yeah, and there was another point that I heard when, so there's been some videos, Matt, if you haven't seen, where CoffeeZilla has spoke to like Sam Bankman Freed directly or other crypto scammers or people potentially engaged in scam,
whatever we need to say it.
And directly put the criticisms to them.
I'm right.
So one thing is that people like that, right?
I like that.
I enjoy hearing somebody have to respond to direct, pointed questions.
And so I do have a question about how your comfort level with doing that, because that's not something that people are typically very comfortable with doing.
But the other point I wanted to ask about before that was, so...
And Lex was discussing the possibility of, you know, if it would be a good idea for him to, like, for example, interview Sam Bankman-Fried and to, like, not focus on the technology aspect but try to get to know the man, right?
And the kind of personal bit.
And it struck me that you responded, like, kind of negatively to that, you know, saying that, well, these people are actually quite good.
And I can imagine what they would say in those circumstances.
But what Lex was voicing is something that I see a lot, and we see it in this sphere that we cover, which is adjacent to the IDW or heterodox sphere, the sense makers, they're called.
And they put a really strong premium on interpersonal face-to-face discussions that if you spend multiple hours speaking with someone and you are charitable to them, That you'll basically be able to peel back the layers and get to the real human.
And I think that this is an extremely bad heuristic, because it just doesn't account for people who are good at presenting themselves in a particular kind of way.
But I wonder, with the people that you deal with, who do seem experts at managing their image, at presenting, and at obfuscation, Past that when you have, like, limited time to,
you know, make questions and also, like, how much of an issue do you think that is?
Like, could you have a long extended interview where you, you know, you bury through the psychic defenses to get to the real person?
Do you think that's more worth doing than I do?
Or what's your general opinion?
Yeah, I'd love to.
I have so many things to respond.
You guys can't see it, but I have, like...
Actual, like, little notepads of, like, all my little notes here of things I wanted to respond to.
There's so much here.
Okay, all right.
Let's start with the, like, sort of last question in the work backwards.
Let me start by saying I actually liked Lex Friedman a lot.
We talked for, like, eight hours, and I had a great time with him.
Okay?
Let me just say that up front.
We were generally positive of item.
Generally.
Yeah, yeah.
Like, there were some things that...
Which goes back to what you said, which is like, what is the value in having these conversations?
And like Sam Bankman-Fried, I just think...
Especially when you watch his other interviews, it quickly becomes apparent that he's very good at deflecting, even if you know what you're talking about.
So I felt like I knew what I was talking about, and it took me three interviews to get a really substantive answer out of him, where I finally pinned him down and I got him to say something that I don't think he was comfortable saying, which is why he later got mad at me.
Like, that was the only time I've seen him sort of crack in an interview.
And he's like, you're grandstanding.
You're monopolizing this interview.
But he had just admitted that he had co-mingled funds.
But it took me three interviews.
I studied the interviews of other people who had also, I felt, failed.
And so basically, I was basically five interviews deep in trying to chess my way through all the different techniques he was using.
And most of it was obfuscation, gish galloping, moving to different topics while it seems like you're talking about the same thing, but you're not, deflection.
It's all these techniques he was using.
And unfortunately for him, he just had like, he was, I realized if you kind of asked him similar questions, he'd always give the same answer.
So then I just like kind of plotted my way through in a way that I'd seen the answers before.
So I was like, all right, we're not going to take that path this time.
We'll take this other path.
And so that was kind of interesting because it was a pretty unique experience.
But to your point about the value of these things, it's really tough.
I know what you're talking about.
There's this sense that you can talk to anyone.
And obviously, we've seen this play out with Kanye.
I really thought...
It really challenged my belief on this because I think I have a bit of that bias.
Like, oh, just talk to people.
Just talk to people.
What's the problem?
Just talk to people.
And watching Kanye, I don't think I saw that much production.
I admired some of the interviews.
I thought Lex actually tried to challenge him.
Did it make a difference with Kanye?
He goes on Alex Jones the next day and does the whole like...
Or I don't think it was the next day.
It was like sometime soon after that.
And does the crazy, you know, I love, you know, so-and-so rant.
So that was not good.
I think ultimately, like these are all Wade decisions based on A, do you think this person is coming to you in good faith?
I think most of the time...
People assume that everyone's talking to them in good faith, and it's quite frequently not the case.
Even if you can have a private conversation in good faith, it's very rare that you have a public confrontation in good faith.
As soon as it becomes confrontational, for a lot of these guru types, it becomes about optics, it becomes about power, it becomes about winning and losing.
And knowing that, if you are going to...
Engage in that.
You have to understand that they're not going to behave in good faith.
And so you need to make sure that like you bring your A game.
So one thing that I always try to do is I just like try to be really prepared.
I mean, I just try to have facts on my side and just like be like, whoa, you're saying this.
Because a lot of times, a lot of times the way these people are pretty cocky.
So they think they can kind of talk their way out of anything.
But frequently you can't talk your way out of like, I'll usually...
Say something about like, oh, did you say such and such?
And they'd be like, no, I didn't say that.
And then I'll pull up a clip on like live and like play it.
It just like destroys credibility.
I mean, you're gone.
But usually I'll do stuff like that.
And I mean, that's kind of the best way to kind of engage with these people is not let them do that.
I don't know.
I feel like I'm all over the place.
And honestly, I don't feel like I am that good at this.
I feel like I'm learning.
It's not easy.
You have to learn to not be the friendly guy on the call, which is not easy to do.
And I've definitely picked up the skill over time, but I think it's even harder in person.
I think being confrontational, heavily confrontational, which some of these conversations need to be heavily confrontational.
I think with Kanye, if you're going to have a conversation with that guy, the only way to do it responsibly is like, Really confront him.
Not do the whole, like, oh, you seem like you're a good guy.
Like, you can't.
And I think the interpersonal thing, like, there's something about that.
There's very frequently heavy confrontation.
I think Zoom helps in some ways.
Or, like, online calls.
It's easier to be, like, harder.
Yeah.
Those are really good points.
It's certainly something I've struck myself.
I've realized that, like a hard-nosed professional journalist.
Is a real job with a real role and they go in to deal with a politician who's going to be obfuscating and bullshitting and they're not going out to be their best friend and they don't mind if things get awkward and people become unhappy.
I'm not good at that.
That's not something I ever really signed up for.
So it's something that I've kind of had to realize that unless you're up for doing that kind of interview then...
Sometimes you should say no to some opportunities, but I think you are definitely on the way to mastering that particular skill, mate.
Having said that, I am going to leave you to Christopher's tender mercies.
I have to get to my next engagement.
Matt, it's been great talking.
Oh, you're taking off, right?
Yeah, I'm going to take off.
Yeah.
Did you have any final thing to say to me?
I did have one last thing.
I've been hanging on to this.
So there's this paper called That's Interesting by Murray Davis, I think.
Anyway, his thought is, the summary is this.
How do theories which are generally considered interesting differ from theories which are generally considered non-interesting?
And this goes back to your point about what makes a pop.
Yeah.
And his idea was, you have to subvert expectations of weakly held beliefs.
If you subvert the expectations of strongly held beliefs, people double down.
Yeah.
And if you confirm their preexisting expectations, then they don't care.
But a theory is interesting if you go, huh.
I didn't know that.
I feel like I could have known it, but I didn't know it.
Wow, that's interesting.
I'm going to go tell people that at a party.
I always thought that was a fun little idea.
And I generally think that's true.
Well, I still like Malcolm Gladwell to some extent, but you can fit all of his books into that.
I think truth aside, I think it's just like he's very good at subverting people's weakly held beliefs and I think he's made quite the career on it.
Yeah, I think that's an excellent little thing.
I hadn't thought about it that way, but that sounds like an excellent paper.
I'm glad you mentioned Malcolm Gladwell.
He was one of the people I was trying to think of.
But yeah, I mean, we could also point to a lot of psychological papers that have since been debunked during the replication crisis because a lot of...
A lot of lazy research work was a bit like that.
It was just like, oh, look, this one simple trick actually does this surprising thing.
It's a problem, by the way, funny enough, it's a real problem, the social sciences.
Yeah, yeah.
Excellent.
Fantastic to meet you, mate.
Fun talking, Matt.
No worries, no worries, no worries.
Cheers, Matt.
Talk later.
Do you still have a little bit of time?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Let's go.
I'm loving it.
Because there was a couple of specific things that I was curious about.
But on that point about the social sciences and the replication crisis, this is something Matt and I have an interest in.
I've published papers in favor of pre-registration and methodological reform that kind of open science practices as well.
But this is a thing which we've noticed.
The guru figures, much the same way that the cryptocurrency traders can kind of point to the banks and the corporations screwing people over.
And it's true.
And the same thing with our gurus will often say, the replication crisis shows that science has these problems and things can't be replicated.
And they're right in a large way, the same way they're right about critiques of the pharmaceutical industry.
What they then do is apply no...
One, they don't really care about those criticisms.
They just take them as delegitimizing.
They're not actually involved in reform efforts or anything like that.
And two, they then apply a very credulous and much lower standard of evidence when it comes to things like the supplement industry or anti-vaccine rhetoric.
It's just enough to criticize the mainstream.
And then that means that whatever the alternative is, the credibility goes up.
But it shouldn't, right?
It should be that you just realize, okay, so this is bad.
Pharmaceutical companies are bad.
But that means supplement companies, we should be very skeptical.
And people like Joe Rogan, it feels like they're constantly...
Talking about, you know, the pharmacy industry and all the profits and all that kind of thing, which there is legitimate things.
But then they shill supplements, which are overhyping, which are billion-dollar industries.
No one ever talks about the supplement industry, do they?
The supplement industry is absolutely massive.
And there's so many people are selling these crazy pills with crazy promises.
And with no evidence to back it up.
I mean, it's exactly what you said.
You criticize the thing.
You build up your standing with that.
And then all of a sudden, now you're the expert.
This is something I try to be very careful about.
It's because I feel like anyone in the position of criticism has this vulnerability or has this propensity.
You could do that because people start to look to you.
It's like people all the time ask me, oh, what crypto do you hold?
Oh, what finance?
As if...
Because I can criticize that I'm now an expert.
And it's like, no, no, no, that's not how this works.
And if I taught you anything, you should know that's not how this works.
But yeah, it is certainly the case that I actually was very interested in the replication crisis for a while.
Before CoffeeZilla, I had a pop science YouTube channel.
And I started to get bothered by the...
Like, A, the videos I was producing, and then, like, B, like, the, like, science YouTube as a whole.
I was like, oh, this kind of, isn't that interesting that I got looked into science, and I was like, oh, man, there's all sorts of problems in science.
Like, it's not just, like, Bob science that kind of, like, has troubles.
But it's like, science has problems.
But it is certainly not the case that, like, you would look at that and go, well, it's all, like, we just should throw it all out.
Like, that is the, that is certainly not the answer.
I'm definitely of the reformer mindset.
I mean, these things.
Because, you know, what else are we going to do?
Are we going to go back to the days where you just trusted a guy who is hawking you, you know, pills or whatever?
For better or worse, it's sort of like the case that the big pharma industry is the best we have.
Sort of like people's criticism of education.
They're like, education sucks.
Okay, great.
What are you going to homeschool?
Look at the stats on homeschool.
It's like not better.
You know, ironically, it's like usually the case that...
Public education, for all its very, very documented faults, is the best we have.
And this is the case of a lot of our institutions.
For all their faults, they're usually the best we have.
But this is one of the criticisms that we get recurrently is because we are so critical of the people in the alternative ecosystems that we're essentially, you know, we're just rubber stamping.
The institutional take, whatever the mainstream take is, that's the right one.
And we're not.
We're actually not.
But you can see, I can see why people would kind of go to that as the, you know, if you're saying like that...
If you are defending the track record of science, for example, in the pandemic, like noting, yes, there were changes in public health policy.
Yes, there are decisions which can be rightfully criticized.
And there are things for which the scientific evidence isn't great and is overstated by people and so on.
But still, the track record is amazing.
We had a vaccine produced incredibly quickly, which were vaccines produced incredibly quickly that were extremely effective, right?
And that shouldn't be lost sight in the kind of hears of the discussion.
But highlighting that gets now presented as like, oh, so, you know, you pray at the Church of Fauci.
It is difficult to walk that.
The tightrope of like, because the message is not just accept what the pharmaceutical industry says.
Just accept.
Certainly not.
Yeah.
And like, that's why sometimes like when Matt who acts as lyrical about, you know, don't do research and don't think, I know how that sounds to people.
But I also know that Matt is not saying like, don't develop an interest and look critically at studies.
He's just saying, acknowledge your limitations.
And like you said, you know, you just learned about mRNA vaccines last week.
What you should care about is the people who have spent entire careers on those vaccines, and not just one of them, what the majority of them think, because there's always crazy people.
There are always crazy people.
Or people that are just wrong.
They have their pet theories, and their pet theories are just like flat wrong.
I mean, that happens all the time.
Yeah, it's, you know, I always view these things as like, What is it?
It's like the thesis, antithesis, synthesis.
I think like culture is always moving in some type of like a title direction.
And I think for a while there was like...
I think these anti-establishment figures kind of rose up and then I think you guys are a reaction to that a little bit.
Like, I don't know.
I don't see you guys as being establishment shills at all.
I think you are just doing...
A very similar criticism that like, I'm not saying you guys are the same, but just in the way that establishment figures should be able to be criticized by people, anti-establishment figures are the same way.
And the problem is usually anti-establishment figures aren't used to any real criticism because nobody at the establishment is going to criticize you.
So it's like you're not used to it.
And so you go, oh, well, you know, you kind of get this free pass.
I think there's rightly a response because a lot of people are getting huge audiences, almost as big as the mainstream media sort of isn't that mainstream anymore.
You look at the viewership of CNN and Fox and you put it against the big podcasters.
Who's really mainstream?
Yeah, yeah.
And you talked about the response to critics and it being so...
It's not even vitriolic.
It's almost like you're immediately cast as a heater, right?
There's basically only two positions that I think critics are allowed to fall into by guru types.
It's one, that you're an obsessive critic, or two, that you're an uninformed dilettante who doesn't know enough to criticize them.
There is no good, well-informed critic.
Whenever I saw a video that you...
You had critiqued somebody who was kind of promoting an AI investment system.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
And they did a response radio to it, right?
Like, at least this is what it was framed up.
But it seems so familiar because there's so many times where the figures that we cover were the responding to criticism, but it becomes clear they haven't read the criticism or they haven't watched.
The thing that they're responding to.
And it's almost unbelievable because you're like, but surely, you know, you would at least just listen.
You know, like I listen to what the people are saying so that I know how I can argue, you know, against their point.
But it's sometimes really impressive that people can just like kind of, they have so much confidence.
And, you know, Matt and I think a large part of it is narcissism, but whatever your view on that, they certainly have the level of confidence that, like, they don't feel the need to engage with the critical point.
It's enough to just kind of dismiss it in a very backhanded way.
And there's a guy, an example would be, there's a science writer called Stuart Ritchie.
You might be familiar with it or not.
I've heard of his name.
He wrote a book called Science Fictions.
It's very good.
And it's basically a critique of modern science and pharmaceutical industry and various things.
But he's a pro-science guy.
He's just highlighting issues with publishing and stuff.
He wrote a detailed critique for The Guardian about the Hunter Gallagher's Guide to the 21st Century, Brett Weinstein and Heller Haynes' book.
And on their podcast, they said, there's a hit piece in The Guardian written by a postmodern person who has no interest in science.
Stuart Ritchie is like a scientist with a long published track record and has published books critical of science.
He is the farthest thing from a postmodern person.
But I was just amazed, like, either they didn't look him up or they're just lying.
But it's kind of impressive to me that, you know, I couldn't do that.
I couldn't look in the camera and say, That person is a postmodern person if I didn't know or think that.
Yeah, what do you think that is?
Because I don't think...
I don't really believe in monoliths, and I think all of this stuff exists on a spectrum.
Yeah.
So there's levels of self-awareness, there's levels of guruship, and sometimes...
When you have a podcast, people just start looking to you for advice.
You're not even looking to give advice.
I mean, that's like a pretty natural thing.
Yeah.
So has there ever been somebody who you've criticized who says, you know what?
I agree or I've reflected or sort of like has taken your thoughts in stride and said, hey, like, you're right.
Maybe I can do this a little bit better or...
The closest is Robert Wright.
The person who wrote Why Buddhism is True and has a non-zero newsletter.
He's a long-time kind of intellectual commentator or political pundit.
But even our episode on him was highlighting that, you know, in some respects, he does fit the model of a guru because he's offering this kind of...
Very cosmic worldview, which eventually ties down to his political theories as well.
And he's not afraid to do that, but he is unlike other gurus in that he's very clear when he's making speculative claims and when he's, you know, kind of feels he's on firmer ground.
And he's also unusual in that he engages regularly with critics.
So, like, he came on.
The podcast.
Yeah, pretty unique.
And we had feedback with him, but that is rare.
We had Sam Harris on.
Oh, is Sam Harris a, I guess, well, secular guru?
Maybe exactly he's a secular guru.
Yeah.
Yeah, of course he would be on y 'all's list, right?
Yeah, we did an episode on like a short thing that he did and he didn't agree with our analysis, but we ended up having a very long...
Conversation with him.
But there, I'm not throwing Sam under the bus by saying this, but I do feel that maybe in the long term, there were some parts where his view shifted on things.
But at least in that discussion, it felt very much like you're hitting up against someone that has a very, very strong position and confidence in their...
You know, their views.
So you're not going to shift people.
And I think in Matt and I, our case, like, we view what we're doing as, like, critically looking at the content and giving an opinion on it.
But we're not claiming that we have, like, the name of the podcast aside, we're just offering our perspective from our, you know, read on something and, like, our backgrounds.
Sure.
On a particular piece of content.
So it's kind of fine if people don't agree with it.
But I would say to answer your question, it is very rare for the figures themselves to appreciate critical feedback.
Like Lex immediately blocked us where we covered him.
But he blocked us before because we just said something, or at least he blocked me because I said something critical about Eric Weinstein.
I think that's, you know, a lot of people just...
Do they all run in the same camp?
The thing is, I like Lex.
I probably would like Eric.
I mean, I'd at least have a conversation with him.
I don't know if coming on here is going to make him get mad at me.
Well, no, usually okay.
I feel like, no, I really feel like, look, you should talk to everybody.
I mean, in the spirit of...
Talking to anyone, if we can talk to anybody.
Yeah, the way that I view it is like, well, one, I don't think so.
There are petty people who would be annoyed, but they're usually people that you would want to talk to.
But in our case, it's kind of the position that you stated, which I'm pretty fine with people talking to whoever they want to talk to.
Talk to a neo-Nazi if you want, but you have to be responsible for what you say to them.
And what you do by talking to them.
Sure, sure.
Yeah, yeah, no.
You know, this is interesting too.
Like, I also think it's kind of strange because, like, there's a lot of people I'd have a conversation with that I might disagree with.
But, like Joe Rogan, I really don't like his takes on COVID.
Yes.
I think he's been like deeply irresponsible with his platform.
At the same time, it's like, ah, yeah, I'd totally go on there.
And generally, I've enjoyed his podcast.
I think he has some great guests on.
He's a good interviewer for the most part.
And so I'm like, I'd love to go on a show.
So it's kind of this interesting thing where...
I don't know.
That always bothers me.
It seems like in internet communities, there's always like this, like these clicks that form that, uh, I was just, the only reason I bring this up is I was just talking to somebody and this normally doesn't happen to me because usually I stay out of clicks altogether.
I just like stay on my own.
But just recently I've gone on a few podcasts and already I'm, I'm reminded of like high school because I was going on this podcast and I was talking to somebody about going on their podcast and I said, Oh, you know, Hey, what's that?
And they go, Oh, well, yeah.
That might be able to be possible, but because you just went on so-and-so and they just had a fight with this other guy, I have to check if it's okay.
And it's like three levels removed from what I actually, like, we never talked about this person.
I was like dumbfounded by it.
And it just made me realize, oh, am I just not aware of all these dynamics that are going on?
That's interesting.
It's so strange.
It's interesting to hear because, like, my impression is actually...
The kind of reverse.
Well, not that there aren't people, you know, there's a lot of online clicks and there's a lot of people that are very sensitive to criticism.
That is definitely true.
But I also feel that the YouTube ecosystem is particularly prone to these like dramatic blow-ups between people and like feuds, right?
And maybe it's something about the visual medium that makes it...
Like, possible?
Or the ease with which people can, like, kind of do reaction videos, you know, to people's content?
And they can clip you out.
Yeah, they can also, like, hey, check out this clip of this guy trashing you.
And it's like, oh my gosh, they trashed me.
And then you missed the whole thing where they, like, said you were great.
But you're suggesting, like, from what you've just said, it's that you've largely avoided that despite being active in that ecosystem.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, no, no, no.
I just, in general, Try to avoid making friends on YouTube.
Like, I mean...
No, no.
Well, it's kind of like because of the fact that...
I do have YouTuber friends, but I always pick ones that I'm almost...
Like, I'm positive they would never do a scam.
They're not even grift adjacent.
They're not even close to that world.
They're a gamer or something random.
What I realized is you talk to these financial people, if you become friends with them, then it's very tough to criticize them later when it turns out they promote something shady.
It's like, well, you can't say anything.
It's kind of hard.
Profile gets a bit bigger.
Everyone wants to talk to you, and they want to be nice to you.
And it's hard to deny that, like, oh, it feels good.
They want to talk.
They care about me.
But they don't care.
They just want to use your platform.
But also, it's hard not to want to build that network.
But to some extent, I've tried to stay aloof a bit.
Because I think in my position, you kind of have to be independently voiced.
You can't have your own...
I didn't even think about that consideration, but it seems obvious now that you would need to be wary of that.
And actually, that kind of links to a question I had for you about a difference I've noticed in the kind of people we cover and the kind of people you cover.
Because there is overlap.
There's definitely overlap in techniques and rhetoric and some of the figures overlap.
But one thing that...
In the people that we look at, with a couple of exceptions, they haven't much gotten into minting their own coins or releasing NFTs.
Some of them have talked about it.
Some of them have conversations with figures in cryptocurrency or that kind of stuff.
But by and large, they're doing the traditional thing of having advertisers on their podcast.
They have Patreon accounts or they have merchandise, that kind of thing.
Sure.
Yeah, I'm also sort of interested, just from an anthropological point of view in a way, in the Twitch streaming ecosystem.
And there, it seems much more common for people to have been involved in cryptocurrency or NFTs.
And I wonder, do you have any feeling about why that...
Because it seems like an obvious thing that Jordan Peterson could make bank from releasing NFTs and stuff.
Yeah, but I just don't think Jordan Peterson...
I think you could fairly criticize Jordan Peterson as like...
Insofar as what I've seen of him as like a reactionary...
But he's not really like the...
Like you have to be a grifter who cares a lot about money.
And a lot of these guys who I follow, all they think about is money.
Like they're constantly looking for that is the end.
For some people, the end is not money.
For some, it's fame.
For some, it's attention.
Just like raw attention.
So they all have all these different motivations.
And in a lot of cases, minting a crypto coin would be kind of productive to...
Establishing a long-term fan base.
I mean, it's like you could ruin your reputation on that.
Why would you risk it?
So...
And then also, like, to some extent, you wonder, okay, well, what if these people...
Like, a lot of my people are...
I feel like they know what they're doing.
I wonder how many of your kind of guys you go after are, like, knowingly...
Grifters versus they just know how to talk successfully to a crowd.
You know what I mean?
I don't know how to parse this successfully, but there's...
No, that makes sense because we're often highlighting there's a kind of superpower with...
Fluency at speech and metaphor and the ability to reference technical terms and dredge up references that make you look very impressive.
There's this verbal fluency, which is the superpower.
Way overrated.
Way overrated by humans.
I don't know why.
People just lose their mind when you can use the English language fluently, as you said.
I actually thought of this indictment I just read.
There's this indictment of this guy.
I forget his name, so I don't want to say it, unless I butcher it.
But he basically just got accused by the SEC of pumping and dumping all these crypto coins.
And in the indictment, he says, black and white, or one of these guys, one of his co-conspirators says, F these guys were robbing them blind.
Okay?
That is on the far extreme of negative intentionality, right?
There are...
There's influencers that I've talked to who I believe are somewhere in the middle there.
They want the money.
And if you ask them, they would say, well, I don't want to hurt anybody.
But they really don't put two and two together.
Like, of course you're hurting somebody.
Money doesn't come from nowhere.
You're getting money.
Your audience is probably losing money.
So they don't actually, they try not to think about it, right?
And then you have the guy who's like, he's like, no, no, no, we're robbing these people.
And so that's what I'm trying to, I guess that's what I'm trying to get at is...
No, that makes perfect sense because that contrast is I cannot imagine, even behind closed doors, most of the people we cover, they would never say that.
And I think even the ones that are profit-motivated, I think that it is still, they do have a lot of faith in what they're doing.
is right.
And it sounds like you're dealing with more people who...
It's the finance world.
I mean, it attracts people who all they want is money.
Ins justify the means, sort of the worst of the worst, and some of them do.
I don't want to say all, but certainly some.
And crypto especially was notorious, especially in the beginning.
It was all the rejects from finance who weren't allowed to trade because they'd already been barred by the SEC.
They'd come to crypto and start grifting in the crypto world.
So it's literally like the worst of finance would trickle in.
And kind of matriculate down.
It was terrible.
I know this is possibly a very specific example, but I'm just curious about the psychology.
Maybe it applies more widely.
Because Jake Paul, for example, is insanely wealthy.
Has attention on him for all sorts of reasons.
Like the boxing alone would be something that could drive attention.
And to me...
It's insane that he would want to pump and dump cryptocurrencies because it seems like I get why some people would want to do it because it could make their income.
But he doesn't need that.
I'm just asking you, square the circle for me.
I can't explain it.
I never understood this, actually.
This took me a while.
It was actually explained to me by a friend of mine who knows, who understands influencers really well.
It's a psychology thing.
So when you first look at influencers, you think, oh, they're making tons of money.
Why would you do anything?
Why would you sell your fans out?
What you don't see is the envy in Los Angeles.
There is an incredible amount of competition.
And trying to keep up with all your fellow influencers that borderlines on the pathological.
So you're doing great, but hey, the guy next to you, he's got more followers than you.
Okay, well, I got him.
We'll get more.
Oh, so you get more followers.
Well, actually, hey, that guy over there, he made more money than you this year.
Well, how do you make more money?
Oh, he found this like new trick.
Well, what do you do?
What do you do?
Because I'm just doing, I'm just doing like a little sponsorship right now.
No, no, no, no.
The real money is in crypto ads.
He did a crypto ad and he made all this money.
Oh, I got to do my crypto ad.
He's got a crypto ad.
I got to have a crypto ad.
He's got a car.
I got to have a car.
He's got a mansion.
I got to have a mansion.
So it's this competition that I didn't understand before because I never moved out to LA.
I just stayed in Texas where I've always lived.
You know, I'm just like living a pretty normal existence with my wife and just like my friends from just like, you know, growing up and people I met normally.
But when you're in this LA world, it's a completely different ballgame.
It's not the same.
So I think that really answers your question to how you could get into this world where it's never enough.
It's a lot of that.
And then when you have the car, when you have the mansion, you're living way beyond your means and you have to have income.
So it's like, well, now I got to do the ads.
I got to do this.
I got to do that because I've got all these payments to make.
I got to keep the cycle going.
I got to keep the rat race going.
Yeah, so that does answer it.
I just wouldn't have considered that.
Neither would I have.
Somebody had to explain it to me who knew about the LA culture because I didn't understand it.
I was like, I don't get it.
I don't understand why you would chase this.
And they go, no, you have to.
So once they explain it, I go, oh, that makes so much sense in a really weird way.
There's a question I have, which I know you will have been asked a bazillion times, and I'm probably sick of it, but I still am curious because, like, Matt and I, right, we criticize public figures.
There's the potential, you know, that they could respond very negatively to that and, like, blocking us, no big deal, but, like, suing us or something.
It is something you have to consider when you're making public criticism, especially of wealthy people.
But in our case, we are going after the kind of people that we talked about, like public intellectuals.
And sure, there are people like Russell Brand and whatnot, but by and large, they don't need to be concerned with us because they have their huge audiences.
People are not going to stop listening to Russell Brown's conspiracy theories because he got like a critique on our podcast.
But in your case, you can cause people financial damage and you obviously are dealing with extremely wealthy and as we just discussed.
People whose morals are often like...
Sometimes sociopathic people.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So how, like, you know, you have a wife as well.
So I'm just wondering, like, are you just risk prone or like you don't think about it that much?
Or like, are you really, really careful?
Yeah, it's some combination.
I mean, I am somewhat risk tolerant for sure.
I just hate like bullies.
I hate the idea that somebody would just bully me into silence.
So that propels me a lot.
That kind of like, I guess, chip on my shoulder.
It's a good chip.
It's a good chip.
Yeah, it just bugs me.
Well, it's not even like me.
I watch them bully everyone else.
And so then I get mad.
I'm like, all right, not me.
But...
Yeah, I mean, we take precautions with that.
We do as much as we can.
We have certain types of insurance for legal stuff and there's considerations you have to take there to try to protect yourself.
But after you do, you cannot let it consume you because ultimately it is a complete distraction from the work.
It will lead you nowhere.
You will not produce any meaningful work worried.
So, yeah.
You do all the precautions.
You set up all the stuff.
You make sure you can protect yourself.
But besides that, you know, live and let live, I guess, so to speak.
I always think about it like this.
My...
I will much...
I am much more likely to die by a heart attack, a car crash, cancer.
Or anything like this than any kind of physical problem from any of these people.
And that's like to take the most extreme hyperbolic example, right?
But I think that puts the risk in perspective, right?
Every job has risks.
Being a pilot has risks.
Doing, you know, if you're a base jumper, you have risks.
If you're a motorcyclist, you have risks.
And every job, you eventually decide, okay, am I comfortable with the risks?
If not, I shouldn't be in this business.
So what I've always...
One time my wife literally told me this.
She's like, if you don't want to do this, you shouldn't be in this business.
If you're scared about this.
And I think that's the correct approach.
You take precautions and you realize this is the business of real journalism.
You're not just playing public relations for people.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, that's beautifully said.
And we have a, you know, there's also, I don't know how much of it's...
This is actually true, but it's just like if I have a religious fear, if it applies to specifically this, that I still hold that, you know, if what you're criticizing is, like, what you're saying is true, right?
You're criticizing someone for something they did that you can demonstrate and, like, you can show why you are saying they did this, right?
And it's like you said, you know, you play people the clips and say, you said that, right?
Like, it feels to me like, That has to count for something.
Like someone, if there is ever a jury or something, they have to be able to see that, you know, yeah, look, but the guy did say that, right?
And so it's okay to point out to people.
And that, you know, we talked about the interpersonal thing, and that seems to me one of the bits that we often, like, kind of, if we get in disagreements with people, I don't feel that...
Being critical, harshly critical, should be something that disqualifies you from therefore having a conversation with someone or therefore being able to discuss other aspects.
Because like you said, it's not like everyone is equally terrible.
You could cover someone who is doing something untoward and they can argue back and say, yeah, but I was doing it because of this.
I think there's a tendency, this tendency to treat all criticism as if it's just aimed to destroy the person, to burn them to the ground.
It's an unfortunate thing.
I don't get from your content that that is what motivates you.
I do get that there are people that annoy you and that you feel they need to be called out on what they're doing.
But that sense that it's like a personal vendetta to destroy them, that doesn't know.
And I think that's really important because when that is there, that's what other people seem to imagine that motivates you.
And if that was, you know, not you, but I mean any critic.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
If that is what's motivating you, it wouldn't last, right?
Because you just get like, it just feels like that would be such an unsatisfying.
Existence.
It's very empty.
It's very empty because you never get a...
There's no closure with that, right?
There is no satisfaction.
Listen, there have been people who were grifting and they've had their grifting business harmed.
And I don't take pleasure in that.
In them.
It's really for the victims that I think about first and foremost.
I mean, that's mostly what I'm thinking about.
It's almost sad.
I talked to one...
Actually, I'll never forget this.
So, I remember this is way back.
I don't want to give any hints because otherwise people are really good at picking out...
Sometimes I have some...
Some of my fans are like, they know the deep lore.
So, I'm not going to give any hints this time.
I had this one guy, though, that...
I criticized him and I guess for a variety of reasons, his business, like he had a business selling these courses, get-rich-quick scheme courses, and that business failed.
And he texted me.
He's like, hey, I cannot pay my employees.
I'm laying off employees because of you.
I want you to know it's all your fault.
I can't sleep.
You know, I can't put food on the table right now.
You know, all these things that make me feel horrible.
I'm like, I have no...
That is not why I do this.
It's not about you.
It has nothing...
And that's what I told him.
I said, listen, my criticism has nothing to do with you.
I want everyone to be well-fed and have a roof over their head, whatever.
But the problem is, is that you were...
Taking money from people who are desperate, who wanted to make a better life for themselves, and you're selling them vaporware.
You're selling them snake oil.
So, you know, that's a little cold comfort.
But I say this to say that, like, I don't particularly, you know, love, you know, there's some people like Sam Bankman-Fried where I think I will probably be, I think he's done enough harm to where there will be a slight sliver of, you know, happiness when he goes to jail.
But there's a side of it, too, where like...
If you spend any amount of time thinking about his mother or his parents, it's not that you take pleasure in that.
It's just fundamentally that there is this bigger picture.
Which is about all the people who've been affected by these guys.
Yeah, and that is something like when we're talking with people and they're saying, you know, but these people are very nice and personally.
If you just spoke to them, you would.
And it's like, no, that's never the point.
We're not saying these people are like evil people slavering around, you know, thinking about how they'll destroy the world.
I'm sure there's plenty of the gurus that we cover that we could sit down and have very nice dinner with and, you know, be regaled with interesting stories.
But it doesn't change what they're...
Actually doing.
And that's the thing we're critiquing.
Like, you know, the output and the rhetoric and that kind of thing.
But there was...
I realize I've kept you for quite a long time.
And I have tons of stuff that I want to ask.
But there's no need to do it all in one go.
But there was one thing that I was curious about that I didn't want to forget to ask.
So you are somebody...
Who publicly advocates for more regulation of financial products or these relatively unregulated markets.
And I was curious about that because, you know, do you ever get kind of labeled?
Because that stands to be, seems similar in a way for us saying, like, you know, science is actually good.
It's better than, you know, mainstream.
Medicine is better than the supplement industry.
People don't like that message and the notion that the government should regulate those markets.
It feels like that one, you could get labeled as politically skewed in a particular direction and two, that libertarian types would take issue with that as a solution.
Yeah, by the way, I love talking.
I don't mind talking.
I've actually kind of found a love for podcasts because I'm so used to these 10-minute videos I'll do or even a long video for me is like 30 minutes.
But having the ability to just kind of spend some time with somebody is quite a luxury.
So I don't mind at all.
Oh, that's great.
To the point.
But yeah, so about my stance about regulation.
I've never been criticized too strongly about it.
And I guess maybe that's because when you look at the problems that I keep covering, it's so clearly a systemic problem as well as an individual problem.
You can't take away the individual agency of Jake Paul to take the deal.
But you'd be a fool to not see the commonality between him and all the other kind of influencer grifters.
And all you have to do is ask, well, how do you stop this?
Well, the answer is not.
Rely on CoffeeZilla to make videos forever, you know?
The answer is clearly, because, you know, I only have so much time in the day.
The answer is clearly, you have to make some meaningful laws.
That's the reason laws exist.
And, you know, I don't know if I've ever spoken publicly, but I'm not, like, the biggest believer in, like, government, what do you say, competency to fix everything.
I think they face different, but...
Very also big structural problems that business often face.
So I'm not like just this naive believer in the power of government to solve all problems.
I mean, they certainly have issues.
So I say that to say like, I'm not a naive believer in government or a naive believer in regulation.
But I don't just like...
The fact that you acknowledge there's a replication crisis doesn't exclude you from believing in the ability of science to discover truth.
Just because you acknowledge that there are problematic regulations doesn't prevent you from believing in the need for regulations for some areas of life.
And I think when you explain that to somebody, it's pretty hard to argue with that.
I mean, I think you have to be pretty disingenuous to not...
Kind of see that as, even if you don't agree personally, you go, okay, I know how you get there.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I completely, that's the impression I took.
And I didn't like clock you to be, you know, just saying, like, please government, come in and take control of all these, nationalize it, nationalize it.
But American content, like...
The libertarian response, especially online, just seems so vitriolic at times that when I heard you mention regulation on Lex Friedman, I think I winced because I was just like, oh, he was scared.
Oh, no.
You know what?
I actually love libertarians.
Look, they just want to live and let live.
I think it's a beautiful philosophy.
There are just challenges when you have a, like we talked about how complex our society is, and you have these systemic issues pop up that are not obvious, that would pop up, and you eventually realize like there have to be mechanisms that are not profit-based.
Like you have to have rules that have nothing to do with everyone earning like more dollars.
And I think when you look at grifters and scammers, what's interesting about it is frequently what they're doing might not be illegal.
Oftentimes it is some purposeful exploitation of a lack of regulation.
So I think when people see that, when people see those exploitations of the law, it's pretty easy to see why, hey, okay, you don't have to be a big believer in the...
The nanny state or anything like that to see the problem with somebody exploiting a grandma due to a loophole that you can, with free speech, say that your pill is going to cure Alzheimer's.
Everyone can see an issue with that.
It doesn't take a, you know, even if you're a bleeding heart libertarian, you can see a problem with people promising pills that don't work to grandma.
Like, that is a problem.
So, yeah, I think it's the nature of what I do that I get a little less flack.
And I'm just really not that interested in politics anyway.
So, I don't know if I attract those types.
Well, that's...
Like, the really politically heavy-handed, you know, I'm sure everyone has political opinions, but yeah.
Yeah, that's good.
That's, like, positive to hear.
I just, you know, in the same way, we occasionally build ourselves as, like, relatively, at least attempting to be apolitical in the episode.
Like, obviously, we have our political opinions, like everyone does, but our show is not a political show, right?
It's like...
It's supposed to be analyzing the rhetoric and techniques of guru types.
And you can do that if you're a conservative or, you know, a bleeding heart liberal or a libertarian.
They can do it too.
I love libertarians as well.
They're just an interesting bunch in America.
But yeah, so...
Sorry, I was going to jump in.
Some of my best friends are libertarians.
And we'll have these long fights over coffee about why taxation is theft.
And I'm like, it's not theft.
But then I'm like, how could you think this?
But then in real life, they're super nice.
Yeah.
I grew up in Northern Ireland where we have the NHS.
So for a large part of my life, I didn't realize that people had...
You know, when you go to the hospital, anybody had to ever worry about that.
So that's definitely colored, like, my interpretation of things, like growing up with, like, socialized healthcare and that kind of thing.
But I'm not...
I always get accused of bringing up Northern Ireland, so I've just mentioned it in passing.
But so I am still, like, aware of your time.
And is there...
Is there anything on your list of notes about the gurus or points that we didn't cover?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Okay, actually, there is one thing, okay?
I'll pitch this to you, okay?
And this is going to involve sort of a confession on my part, which is weird.
I'm intrigued.
And I say this with all sincerity.
I mean, I really mean this.
So this is going to go back to the Lex Friedman thing.
I actually wasn't planning on saying this, but I think it's an interesting, like, maybe data point for you.
So when I was going to...
I've kind of gone through...
How do I say this?
So...
I've been vaguely aware of Lex Friedman for a while.
I didn't watch a lot of his content.
Then I started watching a little bit of his content.
And then I stopped for a time.
And I don't remember what my general impression was.
I was like, oh, this is kind of an interesting show.
But I was like, kind of thought to myself, oh, is this like a pop psychology guy?
You know, sort of a Malcolm Gladwell figure, you know, all that kind of stuff.
When I went on his show, I have to say I was actually impressed with him.
And I think it's interesting for you guys because obviously I'm sure that's probably sort of how you guys view him.
He's really sharp.
We ended up talking for eight hours.
And yeah, I don't know what that means to you as like a data point.
But coming from a guy who's reasonably skeptical.
As a rule as well, I was pretty like, I don't know, maybe I fell under the charm a little bit, but I was like, ah, this guy's pretty interesting.
So that is interesting, and I would say when we did our coverage of Lex, our mean point was basically that in one sense he comes across as a techno monk, in a similar way to Jack Dorsey.
Oh, sure.
Very invested in technology, but with this very strong spiritual side to it, which is just creating when you are a cynical person or somebody from a culture where expressing love unconditionally.
So on the aesthetic thing, there's just that.
But that was not...
That was noted as just a fairly aesthetic practice or preference that it doesn't really make any difference.
Some people like that, some people won't, and that's the way it is.
But with Lex, the critique that we had, and the episode he did with you, various episodes I've heard him do with figures, are good interviews that I like.
I really liked the interview he did with you.
And I think you covered a whole bunch of interesting things.
And he's a good interviewer, right?
Yeah, I agree.
I know some people think he's too dry, but I think that with the right people, he really does delve into stuff in an interesting way.
So I enjoy some of his content.
The part that we had the strongest critique for is the...
The potential for that kind of narrative about that you're motivated by love and that you just want to make the world a better place.
But you're going to interview Andrew Tate and Kanye West.
Okay, yeah.
I understand.
I actually genuinely think that Lex...
Is motivated by what he says, you know, the intrinsic belief that he can have a conversation with them that is worthwhile and help to understand them.
But I think that in a bunch of ways, and it's not just Lex that does this, it's other people, that there's a lack of critical reflection on the The possible downsides to just having a conversation.
So Lex in particular spoke with Joe Rogan about encouraging Joe Rogan to have an interview with Trump.
And Rogan, I've got plenty of critics of Rogan, but Rogan said he wouldn't have Trump on because you can do a lot with having an indulgent conversation with someone where you actually can really help their image.
And Lex was like, yeah, but you aren't responsible if other people...
You know, for how other people think.
And he actually suggested, wouldn't it be fun to, like, have a long conversation and, you know, you could have Alex Jones on as a chaos element.
And to me, if your position is that you're about love and increasing, you know, science's relevance in the world and whatever, encouraging Joe Rogan to do an interview with Donald Trump and saying, The political impacts shouldn't be Joe's consideration.
And maybe add Alex Jones in for fun.
And then you're going to interview Andrew Tate, who's an overt misogynist and various other things, multi-level scammer.
I feel there has to be the ability to really critically go at people.
And you, for example, have that ability.
Various other people that I see do.
Lex, I'm less certain of.
He was critical with Kanye, but he often reverted back to, you know, look, you're a guy that's just trying to do good in the world, and he's a guy that's pumping out anti-Semitic here.
Yeah, Kanye's like, he's beyond the pale.
No, no, no, that makes sense.
I think the Rogan comment's interesting.
I think, yeah, I think probably that was content brain.
That's what sometimes people call it on YouTube.
They call it content brain, where you're just thinking, like, what is going to make the viral hit?
Like, they just know, like, because as you put out stuff and these systems give you all sorts of feedback loops, sometimes you can get stuck in this thought of, like, oh, how can I get, like, the most entertaining?
So, obviously, Trump with Alex Jones would...
Probably for a lot of people, just be funny to watch.
And probably also, you know, for a variety of other reasons, probably not further the love in the world.
But certainly I think it'd be like probably very funny to witness.
So I think that's probably the thought.
But yeah, no, I didn't mean to like...
I'm not challenging you guys about it.
I just wanted to give you guys that data point.
From the perspective of, I have this love-hate with all pop science types.
I love Malcolm Gladwell.
I have a soft spot for Malcolm Gladwell, even though I know so much of his stuff is kind of whatever.
And so when I went to Lex, I kind of thought of him as like, oh, I like his podcast, but I think he's a little bit like the...
The pop science stuff.
But then I was...
When we talked afterwards about the AI stuff, I kind of thought that the AI thing was kind of a side byline.
In the same way, I'm a chemical engineer.
I'm not...
I didn't actually ever go do anything with my chemical engineering degree.
I just have credentials in it.
But from what I heard, I didn't go fact check him afterward, but everything he was saying, he's pretty well-versed.
We talked about LLMs and he kind of taught me some things about it.
It's pretty interesting.
But anyway, I don't want to dwell too much on that.
I just wanted to kind of give that data point.
I actually think, like, I know that you weren't, you know, like, your point was not to litigate Lex.
It's just, like, because we covered him recently, it's all of these things are on my mind.
Sure.
But the one thing that I will say in response to that is, like, the...
So that content brain thing that you reference, like obviously because we produce a show, right?
And we know about downloads and that kind of thing.
We are also aware of stuff that people like or don't like.
Like just for example, we put out an episode where we had an interview with a cognitive anthropologist, Manvir Singh, who specializes in shamanism.
And we were talking about the kind of overlaps between shamanism and gurus.
And for me, it was great, right?
Academic-y kind of topic and really enjoyed it.
And people did like it, but that episode, for example, will get two comments.
Whereas a recent episode that we did, which was a right to reply with somebody who we covered as a guru and got at times, not heated, but quite contentious, has hundreds of comments, right?
Because people like that more.
So I get that, but I also...
I have noticed from dealing with some people, and I won't mention who because I know I brought them under the bus, but they did the right thing.
They're a content creator, and they were considering the host, Brett Weinstein, at the time that he was promoting his anti-vax stuff, right?
And they knew that they would get a whole bunch of downloads and attention by hosting him, and they didn't.
They decided not to because they kind of thought that they didn't have enough expertise and it was likely he would just say stuff that they couldn't respond to.
But when I was talking to them...
They were like, well, where's the benefit for me not to have done that?
Because I don't get the downloads.
Nobody knows I made that editorial.
Oh, that's horrible.
Yeah.
That's a horrible way to think about things.
Yeah.
A horrible ethical system.
Wow.
But, you know, the correct thing is because you know it's the right thing to do, right?
And that was when I was like, maybe I don't have the exact same kind of approach as content.
Korean, in some respect.
No, yeah.
No, I feel like that person's way off base.
That is a crazy thing to say.
I think that person is just too far gone to some extent.
I mean, I just mean from the perspective of I'm all too sympathetic of the...
Like, views and analytics is something you resist, but it's like...
You've really achieved something if you've completely removed thought of analytics.
And it's something that you're always...
I personally am always working to pay attention to less.
Even as these platforms try to shove it further in my mind.
Because I think it's unproductive to art.
I think it's unproductive to actual creating something interesting or cool.
But it is something that...
You know, we always try to focus on what we can measure.
And I think it's just like views and downloads.
And it's the easiest way to measure impact, but it's a poor proxy.
So, I'm always sympathetic to people who sort of get stuck in that loop.
But ultimately, I don't think it's enough to just say that that's a thing.
I mean, obviously, yeah, at some point, there's some accountability for it.
And like, whoever, I don't know who that person is, but that's an insane thing to say.
Like, where is the good in that?
Like, what do you want to clap on the back?
No, I...
Yeah, everyone just has to make their own line.
And I think we just have to recognize that analytics and content does not produce good things for people's long-term satisfaction necessarily, the focus on those things.
It's like Goodhart's law, right?
That which becomes a target ceases to be a good measure.
So we target views because we think, oh, that's measuring satisfaction.
But then it actually is a poor proxy for actual satisfaction.
Yeah.
And this is in a little part for me and Matt why we are slightly better placed, I think, than some others in similar spaces because we...
Like, we have academic careers, right?
This is a side gig for us.
And that allows us to, like, not really...
We've done advertisements, but we, like, we've never focused on that.
And if we want to do an episode, which is with, like, an academic talking about shamanism and gurus, we're just like, yeah, well, you know, we're doing it because it's fun.
So, like, we've already had more success than we ever intended.
Or expected.
And that means that everything from there is a bonus.
But it is also the case that, like, I realized if I wasn't an academic, that the metrics that you're, you know, downloads and stuff, it's still, you still notice and stuff like that.
And it would definitely become, like, you know, academics have their own metrics, the H index and the, like, the career ladder.
So you can't escape it.
It's just which ones you pay attention to.
Yeah, and everyone to some extent is just trying to fight when those biases can become bad.
There's nothing wrong with having a good career, but when those biases towards careerism just become like sort of make you make bad ethical decisions or bad.
It like taints your decision making that it becomes a problem.
What's the benefit?
What's the benefit of making the right call?
That's so funny.
I need to know off the podcast who that was whenever we wrap this up.
I need to hear about that.
Well, it's been...
An absolute pleasure.
I'm sure it's obvious, but we really value your content and what you're doing.
I'm very glad I came across it.
If we are covering anybody in this space, you'll probably get annoying DMs, so I apologize for that.
No, I love it.
I love to connect with people because I so rarely get the opportunity to because I kind of have to stay wary.
But yeah, no, I had an absolute blast.
You'll have to give my best to Matt as well.
I mean, you guys are absolutely thrilled to talk to.
Very thoughtful, very insightful.
Just fun to kind of run the gamut of topics here.
So thank you.
Yeah, much obliged and all the same back and keep getting those bastards.
There he is.
That was that, man.
You left.
You had to go in the middle of it, and I took over.
I don't think I was as good when I drew there, but, you know, I still got some useful questions, and he's a very nice guy, very smart as well.
I really enjoyed talking to him.
Yeah.
Yeah, really switched on, go away.
So, coming up next.
We have a slight program change, don't we, Chris?
We are substituting one segment for another segment.
It's a new year.
It's a new year.
The review of the reviews, somebody on Reddit said that they thought that the Apple review process was merely a way for people to submit content for us to read out on the show, and they were quite correct in that.
That's right.
You know, we can still read out a particularly good thing.
We're not tied to any format.
We're more loose than that.
We just go where we float.
And I listened to Michaela Peterson's end of year Q&A.
Why would I do that?
I don't know.
Why I do many things remains a mystery to me.
But we could devote an episode to it or we could have a recurring wisdom of Michaela.
I think it's worth doing this because she's got a lot of wisdom to offer, Matt.
So should we just jump into it?
Shall we hear the opening gambit for her first wisdom of Michaela?
Yeah, I think it's going to be an excellent way to round out each episode.
Just a little nugget of wisdom from Michaela for us to take with us and use in our day-to-day lives.
That's right.
So this part is just, you know, you might be wondering, well, what qualifications does Michaela have to, you know, diagnose these kind of things?
So for this first segment, let's hear a little bit about why we should pay attention to what she's going to say.
So I went back and got my high school sciences and then I started taking night school for a biomedical science degree so that I could get good enough grades to get into the day school program.
Then I got into the day school program for biomedical science and I went into biomedical science because...
I was in makeup school and my wrist was like not working.
My right hand.
And I went to my rheumatologist and I was like, I think maybe I'm going to need my wrist replaced.
Because this was quite a bit of pain.
I was taking painkillers at night to sleep on my shoulders because my shoulders hurt.
And I'd already had my hip and ankle replaced.
And he goes, not.
This is a good rheumatologist in Toronto too.
He goes, joint replacements are very rare.
It's like.
Not really.
I have two.
That's what's going to make me feel better?
They're very rare.
They're not rare for me.
They're fairly common for me.
Okay, so there's a lot to take in there, Matt.
This is Michaela studying biomedical science after getting her high school diploma or something.
She dropped out due to health issues and came back later.
And now she's doing night school in biomedical sciences, but she was doing makeup school, but she dropped her lap.
But now she thinks she might need a joint replacement.
And the doctors are thinking no, but she's thinking yes.
I didn't know you could replace.
She said you replaced your wrist, but she meant replace your wrist joint.
Well, I have no idea.
I have no idea.
Given Michaela that...
Time would have been in her 20s.
I would imagine that is a rare thing to happen.
And even if you have had other joints and hips replaced, you're not like a potato man.
The doctors are not just, oh, you had a knee replaced?
Well, fine, we'll take your elbow and give you a new one.
I can see why she might think that doctors are not considering her circumstance specifically.
Decide that you need your wrist replaced.
Yeah, it does.
Okay.
So, well, that's the initial setup.
But just, again, why Michaela might have some special insights into this kind of thing.
And why she's an important figure to listen to.
I used to do my exams, for instance, when I went into biomedical science.
I used to do them in a special disability room that people now take advantage of so that I could type because I couldn't write out the essays because of my wrist.
Anyway, so I went into biomedical science and I thought I'd need to get a PhD in microbiology or immunology to figure out my autoimmune disorder.
And two years into that degree, I came across, you know, I was researching.
The medications I was on and how the immune system works and I was taking cell biology and things like that.
And I figured out the rash that I had was a celiac disease rash called dermatitis herpetiformis.
You guys might know this part of the story that is my life.
And I started going down the diet route and then the diet just, paleo diet, like simplified, very restrictive paleo diet just fixed me.
It's like, okay, maybe I don't need a PhD.
So there, that's, you know, look, Michaela got sick.
She worked it out.
She Columbo'd that shit.
And then she realized, you know, what do these doctors know anyway?
They, you know, the paleo diet worked.
She self-diagnosed a rash.
So what do you even need medical degrees and shit for Matt?
Well, there you go.
Lived experience.
It can change your whole worldview.
Who knew?
Who knew it was important?
Yeah.
The paleo diet really helped her understand that all of that medical stuff is a lot of crap.
Yep.
You've got insight-based vibes, and that's the way to go for it.
So we'll hear more from Makila in the coming weeks, but this was just the initial, like, a little bit of a background about where she's coming from, the phenomenological experience of Makila Peterson.
And now, Matt, As is traditional, we should give a shout-out to various patrons that we have, the people who supply us with support.
Yes.
Would you object to that?
No, I'm all for it.
I vote yes.
Okay.
You vote yes.
That's good.
That's what I like to hear.
Okay.
Here we go.
For conspiracy Hypothesizers We have James
Proudfoot Stefan Kat Barrett Christine M. Slaughter James Pulver Rosanna Michael R. John
Toot A. Alex Kondratov
And Rafter.
Oh, and Rebel Teacher Network.
We have Rebel Teacher Network as well.
So those are conspiracy hypothesizers, Matt.
Brilliant.
Thank you, one and all.
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.
Okay.
Next to that, Matt, we have our revolutionary geniuses.
And here we have ropes.
Jack Hogan, Andrew Demos, Enchant-O-Matic, Eliza Millican, Robert T. Weltson Jr., James Reid, The Sian Weinstein,
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.
That will never stop being the best response to an absolutely speculative, like, Clem, which someone says, well, that could be wrong.
And, like, the fact that you could even suggest it is what is amazing.
The thing about that, which gets me every time, is the undercurrent of urgency in his voice.
You know, you can feel the emotion.
The tenor of it is just wonderful.
He's a good speaker.
I'll hand it to him.
He's good at conveying what he wants to convey.
Which one?
The Brett or the...
The Brett.
The Brett.
Yeah.
Yeah, he does.
He's got a very...
He does.
He's got that down.
Now, Galaxy Brain Gurus, Matt.
The Galaxy Brain Gurus who we...
You know, they're big brains.
They travel around the guru sphere, hoovering up details and engaging with the Patreon content.
That's what they're up to.
Those guys include Marcin Stan, Nodge, Chelsea Tremblay, Zed, Joachim Amundsen, Kyle Wilson, Chris.
Matthew Brown.
What?
Wilkie.
Theo O'Donnell and Paul Wilkie.
Those are all our Galaxy Green gurus.
They're great, Matt.
All of them.
All of them.
Wouldn't you agree?
All of them.
Every single one of them.
Yeah.
You should be thanking me.
You thank me for subscribing to our own podcast.
I do thank you.
Yes.
Oh, that was you.
That was you, was it?
Yes.
That's not a different, Matthew Brad.
It is a common first name and a common last name, but that was definitely, that was me.
One of our top contributors, so thank you, Matthew Brad.
Yeah, I've been very loyal and consistent.
Been right there from the beginning.
$10 a month.
Boom, boom, boom.
Otherwise, there's no way for you to get it.
If anybody knows a way that we can do that, please let us know.
Matthew is a subscriber.
He's just a man of the people like the rest of you.
There we go.
It'd be an interesting exercise to calculate once you take the money that's in your bank account and you transmute it through the credit cards and they take their charges and it goes through the processing fees of the thing and then goes to the patron.
And then goes to the, whatever, some international account, then gets the currency transactions, whatever.
And then one way or another, it'll one day eventually dribble back into my account.
I wonder what percentage of that $10 actually comes back.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, that's a reasonable question, although I suspect that overall when we take, you know, the contributions of the Patreon.
You're working out in the positive.
You know, just, I don't know, back of the envelope, back of the envelope.
We're coming out in the green.
So, yeah, so thank you all.
Thank you all.
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.
Well, there we are.
Now, Matt, our next episode at your behest is a beauty philosopher, Daniel Dennett.
Yeah.
I know how much you love them.
Yeah, I love those philosophers.
Loving the bits.
Yeah, it'll be a fun one.
He's kind of a pop philosopher.
He straddles a whole bunch of different disciplines.
He writes popular books and he's looked down upon, I think, by other philosophers.
And I think they just basically cordially dislike any of their colleagues who are.
Popular?
Yeah, I think that's a thing with philosophers.
I thought you were throwing shade already.
Yeah, he's a popular philosopher.
He's not, you know, he's not like one of our usual guests, but he'll do in a pinch.
But yes, Daniel Bennett, I find him an interesting sort and it kind of was at its peak during the...
The new atheist era, but I think still has substantial things to say.
So it'll be interesting to look at him.
And in part, that's a good palate cleanser before we move on to the following episode, which will be less intellectually robust, I think it's fair to say, because we are planning to look at Bill Maher and Dave Rubin together.
So, yes, lots of things to look forward to.
That is really showing the extremes that the pendulum can swing between those two episodes.
But we'll do it.
Yeah, no, I think it's good.
I think it demonstrates the breadth of our podcast.
I think he's a legitimate guru.
It's not necessarily a bad guru, but he definitely qualifies.
So it's good to juxtapose him.
With some of these other characters.
And of course, they're all white men, which is one thing that we simply will not stop focusing on.
That's non-negotiable, but partly, yeah, the Anglosphere guru world is a little bit male and white heavy.
But we're thinking in this year, we're going to try and get into a bit more younger, hipper crowds, some female Representation as well.
We'll see what we can do.
We can't make gurus.
We just have to find them.
We'll go hunting.
Yeah.
We had some good suggestions at our last, you know, what is it?
What do we call them?
Mind meld?
I don't know.
What are you talking about?
Oh, you mean when we were talking about the Galaxy Green gurus?
Yeah.
That thing, that thing we do once a month, which I don't remember what it's called.
