Noam Chomsky: Lover of linguistics, the USA... not so much
OK, so we're finally getting around to taking a chunk out of the prodigious, prolific, and venerable Noam Chomsky. Linguist, cognitive scientist, media theorist, political activist and cultural commentator, Chomsky is a doyen of the Real Left™. By which we mean, of course, those who formulated their political opinions in their undergraduate years and have seen no reason to move on since then. Yes, he looks a bit like Treebeard these days but he's still putting most of us to shame with his productivity. And given the sheer quantity of his output, across his 90 decades, it might be fair to say this is more of a nibble of his material. A bit of a left-wing ideologue perhaps, but seriously - what a guy. This is someone who made Richard Nixon's List of Enemies, debated Michel Foucault, had a huge impact on several academic disciplines, and campaigned against the war in Vietnam & the Indonesian occupation of East Timor. Blithe stereotypes of Chomsky will sometimes crash against uncomfortable facts, including that he has been a staunch defender of free speech, even for Holocaust deniers...A full decoding of his output would likely require a dedicated podcast series, so that's not what you're gonna get here. Rather we apply our lazer-like focus and blatantly ignore most of his output to examine four interviews on linguistics, politics, and the war in Ukraine. There is some enthusiastic nodding but also a fair amount of exasperated head shaking and sighs. But what did you expect from two milquetoast liberals? Also featuring: a discussion of the depraved sycophancy of the guru-sphere and the immunity to cringe superpower as embodied by Brian Keating, Peter Boghossian, and Bret Weinstein mega-fans.Enjoy!LinksTrust Science, Not Scientists | Peter Boghossian & Brian KeatingA new Epistemic courage/humility matrixGeorge Monbiot's Correspondence with Noam Chomsky on DenialismPiers Morgan Uncensored (2023): Piers Morgan vs Noam Chomsky | The Full InterviewPolitics Joe (2023): Noam Chomsky on Keir Starmer's attack on the Labour left, the war on unions and the future of AIUpon Reflections (1989): The Concept of Language (Noam Chomsky)Jones (2020): Academic article on Chomsky's views on GenocideDaily Beast (2017): How the West Missed the Horrors of Cambodia
Hello and welcome to Decoding the Guru, a 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 Matt Brown, with me is Chris Kavanagh, and I don't know what, do I say something after that?
Was that the end of my spiel?
Is that it?
It's hard to tell.
It's hard to tell.
Is it consistent?
It's vaguely consistent.
Mostly consistent.
You reach into the possibility space.
Of introductions.
You've got a grammar there and you construct your introductions from different parts that are pre-existing in your cognitive capacities.
That's what you're up to.
I think what you're saying is that there's a deep structure to my introductions even though the superficial grammar might vary from episode to episode.
Yeah, there's an endless tapestry but underlying it is an introductory.
Grammar that we can all agree is universal.
Topical, eh?
Topical, topical, topical.
Well, how are you, Chris?
How was your day?
How are you since the last time I spoke to you, since you're asking me for statistical advice?
I'm frustrated because I'm looking at spreadsheets and data and writing things.
And that's an infuriating experience always, especially when you're towards the end and you keep...
Finding niggling things which require you to change stuff in manuscripts that you want to be done with.
So yes, I'm irritated.
I'm upset too.
I'm upset.
I submitted a paper 48 hours ago and this morning I got an email saying it was desk rejected.
They said that they do triage on incoming papers and apparently my paper wasn't worth saving.
It sounds to me a lot like...
Some of our enemies have gotten the positions of editorial power at journals that they know that you are likely to publish in.
There's no other explanation, Matt.
I mean, academic of your stature, being desk rejected, this is unheard of.
Frankly, Matt, I don't think we can stand for this.
I appreciate you being outraged on my behalf.
I really do appreciate that.
Look, they're not necessarily against me.
It could just be that their puny little two-dimensional minds can't encompass.
The wonderfulness of my paper.
The 84 dimensions that you're constantly spinning simultaneously in your papers.
Yes, that's one possibility.
Or, you know, the editor was having a bad day.
Or your paper's just not up to snuff.
There's lots of possibilities.
But that's not what we heard to dwell on.
We're not the type, the monger in grievances.
At least not about our academic publishing.
We are doing a decoding episode today.
About a guru that we've mentioned probably since the start of the podcast as a potential candidate, but haven't got around him for various reasons.
Not because we're scared, just because there's so many gurus in the guru-verse that sometimes people just slip the net.
And this one is one Noam Chomsky.
Noted linguist, political figure, Dorian.
Of the left, the revolutionary kind of left, at least anti-capitalist, somewhat skeptical of America.
Anti-imperialist.
Yeah, that whole oeuvre plus an advocate for universal grammar, generative grammar, the minimalist version of it, recursion.
Being the key factor.
Many, many different things, but a significant figure in the academic, political commentary space for many decades.
Many decades, and he's still holding on.
He's still in there.
Yes, that's right.
He is currently at the ripe old age of 94 years.
A spring chicken.
And it genuinely is quite impressive how active he still is.
I listened to a random podcast he was on, and he casually mentioned that he was doing three interviews on podcasts a day.
He has a schedule.
So, he seems like he's still commenting as much as he possibly can.
He obviously accepts all invitations.
He'd come on this podcast, I think, Chris, if we asked him.
I don't know.
I'm not so sure he would write that.
But he does accept a lot of invitations on him and David Attenborough.
I think they're putting the rest of the world to see him with their...
Productivity in the later years of life.
But that is impressive.
Whatever you think of old Gnome, to be still kicking it at 94, that's an achievement.
And one issue that we had is that he's got such a long career.
He's been around for decades.
And he has linguistic work.
He has his political output.
He does punditry.
And he has more recent stuff and older stuff.
You know, the way this show goes is that we focus on usually a specific piece of content or two pieces of content, but that feels a little unfair.
So in this case, we've opted for a smorgasbord of different parts of content that we will get to after we have a short introductory topic map.
Okay.
So it's going to be short.
It's going to be sweet.
What is our introductory topic today, Chris?
It's not sweet.
It's the opposite of sweet.
Sour?
I guess that is the opposite.
I'd say it's more an irritation.
I would say this is a Weinstein watch, in a way.
We have been watching the Weinsteins and what they've been up to, most recently with Eric and Mick West.
But both of them have been referenced.
By other people.
I think it's worth mentioning because it's actually a very similar dynamic that I want to reference.
And it's not actually them themselves so much.
It's more their orbiting spin-off gurus.
So our friend BadStats clipped a few clips from PeterBogossian.com where Peter is talking to Brian Keating that Peter Bogossian is one of those so-called squared...
Noted apologist for Hungary more recently.
He kind of does tours of Hungary and recommends that people listen to the government spokespeople on various issues about freedom of speech and whatnot.
So that's old Boggs, a philosophy lecturer of some description, but he retired himself from the academic grind.
He got an existence in the...
Substack podcast sphere.
What an unusual trajectory for someone in that neck of the woods.
That's unheard of.
Yeah, so he's having a chat with Professor Brian Keening.
He's like a physics influencer, popularizer person.
He's an American cosmologist, but he's probably most notable, I think, for writing a book about losing the Nobel Prize.
So it kind of might explain why he is so fond of Eric.
They might have somewhat similar personalities in that respect.
Although I've actually heard from Tim Nguyen that his book was actually pretty good.
Like it wasn't just a kind of wallowing, ranty book.
It was more an interesting look at somebody who believes that they almost...
Could have won the World Prize.
The other thing about Brian Keating is that he is an academic who's featured in Prager University and tends to have a Rather soft spot for creationist, intelligent design type arguments.
Maybe you don't know that about him.
No, I didn't know that about him.
No, he's an odd character because he's kind of tangential, but he's sort of related to a lot of these figures.
There's a tweet here where he's talking about listening to conceptual James, that's James Lindsay, and Ben Shapiro.
And saying how wonderful they are.
Yeah, I don't know.
We're reserving.
We haven't covered him, so we won't cover him.
No, I'm not reserving judgment.
Brian Keating's terrible.
He's like...
He was one of the people in the clip we played before where...
You remember when Eric was being asked about criticisms for Geometric Unity and then he started saying, excuse me, who are you?
Who are you?
Theo Poglia and all that.
And Brian Keating...
Was moderating that space and just, you know, reinforcing anything that Eric said.
He's extremely sycophantic towards Eric.
He's basically like in the mold of God sad.
He really would like to be considered within the Jordan Peterson, Sam Harris kind of IDW sphere.
But most people...
Yeah, that's how I would frame it.
Even though his background is cosmology and purportedly he's like a popular science guy.
He seems to be an aggressively focused influencer person and that's drawing him more and more into culture worry type things.
Yeah, exactly.
Now, just to illustrate this, Matt.
So, you know, he has a YouTube channel and I believe he's still I'm constantly in a state of amazement about the levels
of sycophancy that you can find.
In these guru waters that we paddle.
I'm on a constant state of amazement about what levels that people can plumb for that particular behavior.
So shall I play a clip to illustrate what I mean?
Why not?
Okay, this is the first one.
So now we're getting into some really controversial stuff.
So Eric...
Eric is perhaps the most interesting and mercurial and delightfully challenging person that I've ever met.
I was listening to an interview with Sam Harris, who I hope we can get to Sam, talk about him in a bit.
But I was just thinking, I get to talk to Eric, and Eric, just to my mind, just completely obliterates in the public intellectual space.
Sam, on every level.
And he's so much more kind of just articulate.
But his ability to articulate and his humility, which I don't believe Sam has at the same level.
I forgot.
Do you know Sam well or not?
Very well.
And I'd love to talk to Sam.
He's never been on a very high-level, scientifically-oriented podcast.
I mean, he's been on with many people.
He's not a physicist, though.
No, but I've had on, you know, I talked to economists, Nobel Prize winning economists.
I don't need to, people come on the show not just to talk about physics.
Oh, I thought you meant to talk about Eric's theory.
No, no, not at all.
I'm just saying, like, he was talking about other things.
What I mean to say about Eric is that he, there's no, Eric's mind works in multiple dimensions in ways that normal people can't really contemplate.
Yeah.
So, well, he's right.
That last statement is correct.
Like, Eric's mind does work in ways that normal people cannot contemplate.
He's operating on different dimensions.
But so part of it there is just the absolute praise about how wonderful and how articulate and humility, Matt, the one word that's...
Brings into mind, when you think Eric Weinstein, what's the thing which he's most noted for?
His humble character and soft-spoken humility.
And he just obliterates the competition in the public intellectual landscape.
But very specifically, he destroys Sam Harris.
Sam Harris in particular, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
It's that as well.
Like, it's that, you know, again, we talked about the passive-aggressive narcissism type.
Yeah, well, you know, you're always playing around with the praise and the criticism.
Yeah.
Like, we talked about how the gurus have, like, these fractious collaborative relationships with each other.
Yes.
Where it tends to be either, like, unbridled love.
Unbridled, flattery, and sycophancy.
Or they're having a feud and they're letting people know which side they're on.
It's very much about the personalities.
Because there he's trying to say, look, Sam, just to my mind, he's nothing.
He barely scratches the shining surface that is Eric's mind.
And then...
He says, you know, Sam.
And Bukowski says, yeah, I'm good friends with him.
Well, you know, I haven't talked to him, but, you know, he hasn't come on the show.
It would be great to talk to him.
And you're just like, my God.
Like, if slime could ooze out of the speakers, they can turn on a dime.
But it's exactly that.
It's that, like, back and forth between.
Oh, you know, yeah, he's an intellectual lightweight, really.
He can't really hang with people like Eric and, you know, the kind of people I have on my podcast.
But it'd be great if he came on.
I'd love to have him.
I'm sure we could discuss our differences.
Yeah, and you know, by the end of that conversation, if Sam, in this case, were to play ball and to say flattering things back or whatever, then you'd come into the fold and you'd be one of the best friends again.
Yeah, so there's that aspect.
And then this is another part of the same conversation, Matt.
It doesn't stop there.
They don't move on the conversation.
What Eric should do is indeed publish it and indeed look for criticism of it, respond to that criticism.
The problem with Eric's theories, ideas, is because he's such an influential public intellectual, because he's probably one of the brightest living human beings.
And I've interacted, you know, I've had 14 Nobel Prize winners on my podcast, and I'm not saying this lightly, but Eric easily can held his own with any of them, from economics to astrophysics, okay?
But his intellect goes beyond that.
Because of that, he's attracted a huge cadre of people that would love to see him fail, be humiliated.
I see that 100%.
He has a massive, massive target on his back.
And just to buttress what you're saying, every time I've hung out with Eric, I found him to be...
I found everything you've said about him to be absolutely true.
He's very affable as well.
I really like him as a person.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah. So...
Yeah, but it's not just sick of fancy.
I feel that downplays the extent of this.
He refers to him as probably one of the brightest living human beings.
Somebody that eclipses 14 Nobel Prize winners because of the breadth of his knowledge.
And Bogossian then needs to jump in and say, well, I agree.
Everything you say there, I completely agree.
Plus, he's really nice.
He's so affable.
I've met him and, you know, like, Jesus fucking Christ.
I don't speak about my mother the way that these people speak about their acquaintances within the fucking online spheres.
This is a guy where the focus of his attention most recently has been almost entirely on UFOs.
Like, just the brightest mind of our generation, Chris, is baffled and confused by...
The UFO menace.
I mean, we just recently dissected Eric's conversation with McWest.
And if you want to hear the caliber of his thought and argument, I recommend looking at that episode.
But even ignoring all of the UFO stuff, just digging into Eric's thought, it's not good.
Superficially.
It's impressive.
It's littered with references to physics and economics and complex equations and scientific works and works of fiction.
But when you dig beneath the surface, it's extremely empty.
Extremely empty.
extremely conspiratorial.
And the fact that people like Brian Keating and Bogossian just absolutely wet themselves whenever they're talking about him,
It's just, it's hard for me to understand this one because there has to be an element of it where they, you know, I'm not even saying consciously, but they're aware that Eric may listen to this, right?
So they want to say nice things or have it feed back to him that they're saying nice things.
But I actually also just think it's kind of in their nature to be this absolutely, just irrepressibly fawning towards people that they consider You know, within their in-group or oeuvre.
Yeah, I'm getting increasingly interested in this Brian Keating guy, Chris.
Like you say, he does seem to be like a Gadsad type figure.
Like he's really grinding.
He's really focused on being an influencer, being an influential pop science figure.
And he seems to have sort of zeroed in on this IDW adjacent kind of...
Anti-woke, you know, what's going wrong with academia?
Why is everyone wrong about everything?
I don't know enough about him, but he seems like an interesting candidate for our show.
Well, yeah, I don't think he warrants an episode on his own.
But just to highlight that it's a lot of the stuff we've heard before.
See if you recognize this kind of talking point.
So this conversation was from 2020, and it was all about the dangers of re-electing Trump and how it's an existential threat.
So Scott and Sam Harris were debating how it could lead to a new invasion of Ukraine.
It could lead to tensions with Iran, and it could lead to Chinese interference.
I'm like, do you guys ever do an audit on yourselves like Scott Galloway or Sam Harris?
Do you ever look back and say, look, when...
We predicted this.
We were wrong.
I made a mistake.
And that's fine to do that.
And it's a totally different context.
I just did an interview with a renowned theoretical physicist.
You know your paper, the hermeneutic penis?
Oh yeah, the conceptual penis is a social construct.
One of the highest in gender studies.
It's one of the most cited papers in all gender studies.
Do you know what your H-index is?
Or what that paper is?
No.
The answer is he doesn't, Matt, because he's not a real academic.
They don't publish, they don't do this kind of thing.
But did you notice any points there that you may have heard in similar content?
I'm curious about this paper being the most influential, most highly cited paper in gender studies.
Seems unlikely.
I just pulled up Peter Bogossian's Google Scholar page.
Down here, we have the conceptual penis as a social construct.
15 citations.
Maybe it's not the most highly cited paper.
Well, who knows what gender stuff could eclipse the average paper.
But yeah, again, it just speaks to the conceptual penis paper that they wrote as well was in a pay-to-play.
Journal, this was like a criticism of that specific thing that James Lindsay could never properly grok.
And he later claimed it was an intentional thing that he was also criticizing pay-to-play journals.
But that wouldn't make any sense because you shouldn't be combining the two things, right?
Like you could write an article about potatoes and publish it in a pay-to-play journal.
Yeah, yeah.
Actually, I do see the original paper, I realized.
The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct was cited by 40, which is not nothing, but it's certainly nowhere near being the most highly cited paper in any discipline or sub-discipline or whatever.
And it's cited by papers with titles like Lying in an Age of Digital Capitalism.
So it's not, you know, it would be cited as an example of academic malfeasance, so not always on its own merits, right?
Yeah, just to mention Judith Butler's, I have no idea what this is, but the book called Gender Trouble, cited 86,851 times.
I imagine that she falls within the gender studies rubric, so it doesn't matter.
It's such an obviously false game.
It's so obviously false, but they can't grasp that.
But that's even a minor point, because the one that I wanted to highlight there was him referencing, you know, Sam Harris being unwilling, like he can't admit.
How wrong is Bing?
And in another part, he refers to the vaccines as the so-called vaccines.
Because it's different than even the COVID vaccine, so-called vaccine.
I don't really call it a vaccine because it didn't really seem to do what a vaccine typically does with dead viruses and so forth.
But anyway, let's call it a vaccine.
And this is all in reaction because they got triggered because they thought that Sam Harris was too hard on Donald Trump, right?
Sam Harris called.
Donald Trump, something like an existential risk in the United States.
It's that, and it's Sam Harris fooding with Brett, and it's Sam Harris saying the thing about the Hunter Biden laptop on trigonometry.
But the thing that I've got to mention, Chris, is that these guys are, I mean, this is not nominally a politically oriented conversation, and these two would not profess to be right-wing, but all of their takes, all of their stuff is always in that right-wing direction.
You know, oh, you've criticized Trump too much.
Oh, you know, Fauci this and, you know, lab leak that.
Like, every time it aligns.
Yeah, anyway.
Yeah, it is.
And again, Matt, just to highlight, there's a mini-decoding of kidding in a way, but you know the way that Eric speaks about his critics and good faith criticism and all those kind of things.
Here's a pill imitation of that from Brian.
But when you have people on the internet...
You know who want to see him fall that like dedicate podcasts that that go on venues and then attack his paper using the pseudonymous names so that you can't verify is this person The same person that said something that was misgendering somebody.
Or is that person somebody who's causing people to come to people's houses?
We don't know because that person's name.
So at that level, now there is a very public critic who has made his name known online and is frequently critic.
And he also loves to try to engage me in it.
I know who that is.
I think he's a brilliant...
We won't use his name.
Let's not use his name.
I don't care.
But he's had four or five podcasts, Peter, on his podcast about me, my book, Eric, trying to get other scientists to comment on the quality of my science or some of the things.
Why is it bad that I don't have him on my podcast?
Look, I find it flattering at some level because every time he mentions me, I get this great boost because he's such a brilliant young guy, this guy who's criticizing Eric.
However...
I don't find that he's acting in good faith.
Yeah, that's the problem.
And I've seen attacks.
Anyway, I'm happy to talk to anybody.
They have to be doing it in good faith, and they have to be doing it from a point of view of trying to have clarity, not just taking somebody down and standing over them and revealing them to be the grifter and everything else.
That's what happens when you move at high levels in the public space.
Is that the number of lunatics who come out of the woodwork in bad faith accusations?
I mean, if you think it's bad for Eric...
I don't think this guy's a lunatic at all.
No, no, no.
I'm not talking about him specifically.
I'm just talking about the number of insane people who come out who literally has a huge target.
And if you think it's bad for Eric, it's so much worse for his brother.
I mean, they come after Brett like crazy, crazy.
And just the sheer vituperation, the sheer nastiness, the sheer...
And that's part of the problem is you don't really know if it's 50 people or 5,000 people, like 50 people with 100 kind of sock puppet accounts.
Who are they talking about, Chris?
Tim Nguyen.
Tim Nguyen.
So they're like that thing again.
You heard the double-edged knife, right?
He's a brilliant guy, young guy, brilliant guy, but bad faith.
And he's always mentioning me on this podcast and maybe misgendered someone.
Again, that random use of social justice stuff to try and discredit someone.
Like, who is Tim Nguyen misgendered?
Who is Theo Polya?
Yeah, like they throw in those little digs and...
Like Tim Nguyen is just someone who's, he's a physicist who understands gauge theory, right?
And he's someone who's well qualified to be critical of these things, but he will be on the outer and he will be subject to those kinds of slurs until he bends the knee and plays nice and says that they're all brilliant.
But and that notion of like, yeah, all my haters, you know, I love it when they talk about me and I'll talk to anyone except anyone who strongly Critical.
Because that's in bad faith, right?
As I said, he's like an influencer.
He's grinding to be an influencer.
And those references to getting a boost for my metrics and stuff.
People who are really focused on metrics, you know, just think twice.
Just think twice about that.
It's unpleasant, Matt.
It's unpleasant to look at this.
But I do have to just mention as well, and this one doesn't have any audio, so it'll be a quick sidetrack, but just on the...
All our Weinstein front.
Brello Brett was praised by one of his long-term consistent Uber fans, Alexandros Marinos, who we've had various run-ins with the past.
But Marinos made a thread in which he debuted a new four-quadrant model where it's epistemic courage and epistemic humility.
And you can be low and high in each of them, right?
So the worst would be low epistemic courage, low epistemic humility.
That's where he puts people like Peter Hotez, for example.
And on the opposite side, at the high epistemic courage, high epistemic humility, of course, you have your Brett Weinsteins, your Joe Rogan, Glenn Greenwald, as he describes it, the real intellectual dark web.
So he wrote a long, fawning post about this, basically outlining what a great, courageous, and humble person Brett was.
And Brett retweeted it, saying, a very useful remark.
A powerful four-quadrant model from two fundamental characteristics that predict capacity to find and hold a rational course despite a rapidly changing chaotic information environment.
An antidote to the fog of information war.
Yeah.
How come you never make a four-quadrant model with me positioned at the upper apex of it, Chris?
It's not me that should do it.
It should be our fans that do it and then retweet it and say how accurate it is.
How accurate it is, yeah.
The model that means that we're wonderful people.
Yeah, yeah.
They're immune to cringe.
Immune to cringe.
Immune to cringe.
It's a superpower, just like Trump's superpower.
If you could just brazen your way through it and just go all the way, then it seems to work.
Unheard of levels.
Really, they are pioneering new heights of sycopency.
I'm in astonishment.
Alexandros Marinos is special, though.
I mean, you know, he puts Brian Keating to shame.
Good try, Brian.
But I'm sorry, you've been outshone by Alexandros.
There was a fantastic interaction deep in Weinsteinian lore where Eric was saying something about ivermectin and poor breath and his mistreatment.
And Alexandros chimed in to say, I haven't forgotten, Eric, that you said that you were concerned.
About what Brett was doing.
Don't think we've forgotten.
And Eric responded by saying, excuse me?
Who are you?
Have we met?
I don't remember seeing you at the Weinstein dinner table.
He did a, you know, good day, sir.
I say good day to you.
That's how you can tell you're a superfan.
When you're criticizing your beloved's brother for not supporting their brother.
Enough.
It's quite something.
And just the dynamic that's interesting is this little orbiting pattern of wannabe gurus or superfans becoming not just sycophantic, but the kind of bulldog defenders of their chosen gurus.
So they will make the long substack post or the huge Twitter thread to interact with the enemies while the main guru can retweet it.
And, you know, head pat them for pointing out this person has shown how those criticisms don't apply to me and so on.
Yeah, I think there's two kind of dynamics.
There's that sort of follower-master dynamic that you described there.
And then there's the kind of aspiring, up-and-coming, thrusting young bucks that want to...
Carve out a place for themselves in the Pantheon.
And that's where you have this unbridled flattery and back-slapping going on where everyone is buttering up everyone unless you don't play ball, in which case you'll get the nasty illusions like Tim Nguyen,
like Sam Harris, or whoever is not currently on the inn in the inner of the club.
Yeah, and it's just the fact that it's constantly presented as if that's not what it's about.
It's all about ideas.
Yeah, exploration of ideas, epistemic humility, epistemic courage, combining those two things together so you can fearlessly tread into these exciting new intellectual realms, yet they still find themselves talking about the same old cultural bullshit every day.
That they completely agree on.
Endlessly.
I know.
So we'll get out of this fucking quagmire.
But Chomsky, in a way, will be a nice, refreshing hair wash in that respect.
He'll be a relief compared to this.
I don't care if he's like a completely ideologically blinkered anti-America...
Genocide denier.
Pingo genocide denier.
At least he's not that.
He's not what we just talked about.
He could be bad in completely different ways, but I'm just up for a change.
So that'll be good.
Agreed.
Agreed.
So I almost feel like I need a shower.
It's so against my nature.
Just aside from all the issues about the intellectual problems or whatever, just that unbridled...
Phoning.
I think it also would make any English person's skin crawl.
It should.
Yeah, it should.
If they haven't been pilled, then it should.
Yeah, it definitely does go against your nature.
I know that you just can't compute.
Like, in your universe, it goes against nature so much.
People shouldn't be able to do that yet.
It's so embarrassing.
It's so cringy, but they don't feel it.
They have no cringe within their soul.
They're cringeless creatures.
That's the thing.
So, you know, but that's what they are.
So, anyway, that's Weinstein World.
The Weinsteins themselves are not...
I'm not entirely to blame for this.
This is just the environment that they encourage around them.
And look at what it breeds.
What treasures.
Well, I'm not going to hold my breath for a flattering four-quadrant model from you, Chris.
But that's fine.
I don't need it.
It's all right.
And I'm just going to say this, Chris, in case we decide to do it.
Since we've been playing clips provided to us thoughtfully by BadStats on Twitter, citations, you know, we cite our sources.
He also created a replacement theme song for our show, which could be better than our standard one.
So we might play it now before we get into the main episode and you guys can decide whether or not we should make it our new theme song.
Oh, yeah.
I can play that now.
Decoding the gurus.
Those wacky, wacky gurus.
My name is Matt.
My name is Chris.
Let's have some fun.
And take the piss.
Decoding the gurus.
Now on to the show.
Wow.
I don't know.
It's uncanny.
AI me.
Signs exactly like me.
Beautiful stuff.
I like it.
It's an up-tempo, bouncy kind of theme.
Just what the podcast needs to inject a new kind of joie de vivre into it.
That'll be good.
That'll be good.
Well, on to the man of the hour, old Nomsky.
And people thought we were putting this off because we were so scared to touch the tiring intellect of Chomsky.
And that's not it.
The reason why we haven't done someone yet is always the same.
It's just that we haven't got around to it yet.
We haven't got around to it.
There's a list of people that are always referenced, like, you'll never do Teal, you'll never do Chomsky, you'll never do...
And the answer to all of them is, well, just give us some time.
Yeah, I'll decode anyone, anytime, anywhere, as long as I feel like it.
Yeah.
And I will say, Matt, like, Chomsky is someone...
That constantly, online, ever since I've been on forums, people are like, oh, you think that?
Well, Chomsky said this, right?
Because, you know, if you're left-wing, I don't know if you've experienced this, but people always throw Chomsky at you as if the fact that he has said something means that all people on the left therefore now sign on to,
like, whatever Chomsky's take is.
Like a George Orwell meme quote.
You got a George Orwell quote for that, then that's the end of the story.
George Orwell said that.
I've genuinely experienced this since I began using the internet.
People citing Chomsky at me as if I have cited Chomsky.
You know, as if I brought him up and said, well, you know, as the great Chomsky said, blah, blah, blah.
But I think it's because online, left-wing people...
Must reference him very often.
This is why people think that completely undermines your argument, if they can show you that Chomsky has said something.
So I think he is, in that respect, a good candidate for a left-wing guru, because his influence on the left is certainly high enough that he could fit the bill, and he's not religious.
Secular?
Tick?
Guru?
Tick?
Yeah.
No, if people are citing him as, like, the last word, like, unassailable, then come on.
That's got secular guru written all over it.
Yeah, treated a little bit like a prophet, but we'll see if that's justified.
Yeah.
Let's see.
Does he make the gurometer sing?
That is yet to be determined.
Let's find out.
Yeah, we'll dive in.
Okay, Matt.
So, we have four sources.
They are an interview from 1989.
The University of Washington in Seattle, some series called Upon Reflection, where he talks about linguistics.
So we wanted to get one kind of classic Chomsky thing, talking about his academic area of expertise.
Then we have three more recent interviews.
We have his appearance on Piers Morgan, talking about his general career and his current opinions, like kind of...
Chatty show kind of thing, but an overview of his life and work, which isn't actually particularly contentious given the difference in politics.
It is a relatively friendly interview.
Then we have an interview with something called Politics Joe.
I think this is a UK outlet.
In any case, it's Chomsky talking with someone else about Keir Starmer, the Labour left, the war on unions, blah, blah, blah.
I chose this in part because he's talking about UK politics, which I know a bit better than America.
But in this case, the guy is fairly sympathetic about Chomsky's point of view.
You know, he largely agrees with the way that he frames things.
And lastly, Matt, and I think I might not have mentioned this to you, so he probably doesn't listen to it.
So this will be surprise clips for you.
There's a Times interview with Matt Chorley.
Also from this year.
It's about his opinion on Ukraine.
Also again, his opinion on Jeremy Corbyn and UK elections and so on.
And a bit more contentious.
A kind of classical British style, argy-bargy interview with Chomsky.
So we've got a selection of different Chomsky content.
And this is just scratching the surface.
But I think it does allow us to get...
Into at least some of the different facets of his character, which is perhaps fitting for somebody of his stature and age.
Advanced age.
In any case, he's mid-90s and he's still being interviewed multiple times.
So, you know, that's quite an achievement, whatever you think of old Mr. Chomsky's politics.
Okay, so we're going to start, I think, with his linguistic stuff.
Just a tiny little taste of it because he's written so much.
Because whenever we announced that we were going to do Chomsky, one of the things that people were concerned about is make sure you get his linguistic stuff because that's a significant part of his intellectual output and it wouldn't do injustice just to focus on his politics.
But I do think one issue is that he actually has done a pretty good job of keeping the things Separate.
Like when he talks about linguistics, he doesn't do what Jordan Peterson does, which is constantly connect his academic point of view to his politics.
He does sometimes, but I think broadly he views it like an old school academic mat that the two should be kept slightly independent.
So I'm not opposed to that perspective.
No.
Makes sense.
Non-overlapping magisteria, Chris, is politics and linguistics for the most part.
Yeah, so I don't know that we're going to have much we find objectionable about his linguistic content, but nonetheless, I think it's good to cover it.
And also you'll hear a younger Chomsky in his prime in the 80s when he was only, I guess, 50. Like me, in my prime.
Yeah.
So, well, here's some talking about language and how it changes and some of this stuff.
How does language change over time?
How did 18th century French change compared to 12th century French?
Well, you know, when we talk about language change, it's very misleading.
I mean, there is no such thing as a language in French.
I mean, up until, say, the turn of the century.
You could find people in nearby villages in France who virtually could not understand one another.
The idea of a national language is a pretty modern phenomenon.
It has to do with the rise of nationalism and communication and so on, or take, say, Italy today or Germany today.
I mean, the differences among the things that we call German are enormous, so enormous as to lead to non-mutual intelligibility.
You have to learn the national language when you go to school.
It's a different language than the one you spoke at home.
And when we talk about language changing, what's actually happening is that there's some...
It's kind of like species changing.
There's a mixture of all sorts of dialects, and the mix changes over time, either because of conquest or some political change or boundaries are drawn in a different place or some kind of commercial interchange or whatever.
Got any problems with that, Chris?
Any hot takes in there?
I don't, but I do think that the interesting thing is, one, just I actually think when you first start to consider stuff about linguistics and how official languages are formed, it is interesting, all that history about, you know, we imagine languages very much like French,
English, German, but of course...
That's an artificial imposition because of all the diversity that was there.
And prior to the rise of nations where you had standardized official versions of the language.
So I do think that's all interesting to consider.
And I think this is a good clip that introduces his cadence and delivery, which hasn't really changed.
No.
I mean, he's gotten older, so he does sound older in the later clips.
But he's very much got an academic delivery style.
Yeah, he does a good job in that sort of public intellectual role there, sort of explaining to a general audience, you know, this is how spoken languages evolve.
And, you know, I like the evolution sort of analogy before mass communication and published sort of standards and things.
You know, you had all this diversity from village to village and in the modern era became a bit of a monoculture associated often with national boundaries, but not always.
So, you know, like he was pretty brief there, but...
It was a good little introduction to the topic for a layperson.
Yeah, and I like this, Matt, where he was invited to speak on his ability to predict where languages would go, and I just appreciated this answer.
But if you were in France in the 12th century and you understood all the nuances of language, could you have predicted how these various languages would have evolved over time?
No, it's totally impossible.
But is it partially random?
It's not so much that it's random.
It's not actually random.
For all we know, it might be completely deterministic.
There's just too many factors involved.
It's like predicting the weather.
There's just too many things going on.
Human life is a pretty complicated affair.
And now, our culture...
Speakers of English can be misled by this.
English is relatively homogeneous.
You can go a long way in the United States.
I mean, I just came from Boston and I understand everybody in Portland and Seattle and so on.
But that's not true of most of the world.
Most of the world, language areas, you can get very different languages pretty close by.
And much of the world is what we would call multilingual.
Yeah, I thought that was a good answer too.
It's not right, is it, to call it random, but it is.
Totally unpredictable because it's like any super complex dynamic system.
And no lies to tech today, Chris?
No, and I appreciate, you know, when invited to talk about how his superior knowledge would have allowed him to, you know, determine what would have happened.
He's like, nah.
Of course not, nah.
It's just, it's refreshing.
That's all, you know, when you hear people recognize that, no, I'm not, you know, I...
I have limitations to my abilities.
It's probably a bit early to be making commentary, but I'll say real quickly, Chris, that I was thinking recently about how a lot of our gurus are differentiated from more normal people, including normal public intellectuals, by just how much of what they say is connected to self-presentation in some way,
shape, or form.
They're always talking about themselves and trying to...
They conjure an image of themselves in the listener.
And you can hear with Chomsky that he's just someone who doesn't do that.
He just answers the question.
He's not thinking, okay, well, how can I answer this that makes me look good?
Yeah, in the way that makes me look good.
Yeah, it is nice to see.
And this is also pointing me at, Matt, that I think our listeners should pay attention to.
They need to fully absorb.
That's knowledge from Chomsky.
But what does it mean for the language to be pure?
Or when people say they want English to be pure, what are they talking about?
Was Shakespeare pure?
I mean, in fact, every stage of history, languages are...
First of all, there is no such thing as a language.
There are just lots of different ways of speaking that different people have, which are more or less similar to one another.
And some of them may have prestige associated with them.
For example, some of them may be the speech of a conquering group, or a wealthy group, or a priestly caste, or one thing or another.
And we may decide, okay, those are the good ones, and some other one is the bad one.
But if social and political relations reversed, we'd make the opposite conclusions.
Is the matrix the wrong way to say it, Chris?
Or is it so right that it blows your mind?
I think he's trying to say the priestly classes who think that their English is the correct pronunciation, the English and the Americans out there.
What delusional words they live in.
That's the problem.
So we're doing our part, Matt.
We're doing our...
That's right.
If we could predict the future of language, which we can't, Chomsky's quite right, then it may well be the case that everyone will be saying the matrix in future.
We can't say at this point, but it's possible.
Yeah, and Chomsky talks about his limitations, which again, maybe our listeners need to consider their own limitations in regards to this.
A bit more elaboration on the point I think is warranted.
Sometimes, in order for that decoding system to work, the systems have to be close enough.
You and I can do it.
Actually, if you listen to us closely, we're speaking different languages.
But they're close enough so that I don't have a problem decoding you and you don't have a problem decoding me.
But again, that's a little artificial.
That's because of the artificial unity of the English language spoken in the United States.
I happened to be in England last week, and I confine myself in places in England where I don't understand what they're saying.
I mean, if I listen to them for a while, we can establish communication, but you have to kind of retune your system in some manner that's not understood so that you can begin to decode what you're hearing.
I feel sympathy for him.
You know, he goes to places in English, they're talking, what's happening here?
Just calm down, speak slowly.
I need to decode them.
So, yeah, it's something we can all relate to, dialects of the English language.
It's fair to say he's not a prescriptivist when it comes to linguistics.
I learned this pseudo-controversy.
Prescriptivism versus what's the opposite of prescriptivism?
Naturalism?
Descriptivists?
That sounds right.
Yeah, probably.
But yeah, you know, there's like an old-fashioned fuddy-duddy version of linguistics is that there's like a proper kind of way to use English and there's the right way to do it, there's the wrong way to do it, yada, yada, yada.
And, you know, there's people that says, you know, let a thousand flowers bloom and whatever people do is okay.
He talks about, you know, also that we use these words in ways that are not consistent.
Like we talk about dialects of Chinese, when in fact they are very much not dialects of like Mandarin Chinese, right?
They're completely different languages.
But because of the political situation, they can be classified as dialects.
And as opposed to, for example, Hiberno English, which is just a dialect of English.
Perfectly correct way to speak English.
That happens to predominate in Northern Ireland.
All the different ways to use the language is legitimate, except for...
The way that people from Liverpool speak.
Yeah, that's universally understood as wrong.
So he did talk about this, Matt, that kind of official grammar versus the language of the streets.
And it created quite a nice image for me of Chomsky growing up in the hard-knock streets.
So listen to this.
The literary standard is not what I learned in the streets.
It's not very different, but it's a little different.
And when I went to school, I was taught the literary standard.
Now, the literary standard has some principles associated with it, some of which are those of a real language, some of which are completely artificial.
They were made up by people who had crazy ideas about language.
And they were all given names you'd never heard of before.
Yeah, and in fact, the reason you have to teach them is because they are not the person's language.
Nobody, your actual language, nobody teaches you.
Your language just grows in your head.
You know, you can't, you stick a child in a young child in an environment where people are speaking language, and that child can no more help knowing that language than the child can help growing.
It's just part of human growth is for some component of the brain to pick up the language.
You can't learn it, and you don't learn it anymore than you learn to see.
The hard streets.
No, he strikes me as someone who's a linguist in the streets and a linguist in the sheets.
I don't know.
Who knows?
It's actually...
It is hard to tell because Chomsky, as we've mentioned, is old.
Right?
So when he's talking about his childhood...
Adventures and so on.
It's important to remember the relevant context.
Yeah, that's right.
This was medieval times when he was growing up.
No, no, it was the Great Depression, I think.
Yeah, here's him talking about that and a little bit about political history, but his childhood.
How is it done?
We know perfectly well.
Take the New Deal in the 1930s, which I'm old enough to remember first.
Labor movement in the United States had been crushed almost totally by Woodrow Wilson's Red Scare.
1930s began to recoup, reorganize, a CIO organizing, militant actions.
Moderately sympathetic administration introduced social democratic policies, which in fact were later picked up by Europe in the post-war period.
That's the way politics change.
Something else has happened.
Forty years ago, Reagan and Thatcher launched a major assault against the population.
Class war.
Bitter class war.
First act they undertook was to destroy the labor movement.
Very sensible.
The one defense against bitter class war.
Then came...
More.
It goes on.
You can tell that this clip is from a slightly older Chomsky.
And I forgot that he goes on to outline political history.
But just, he was growing up in the 1930s.
Right?
It's just worth bearing that in mind.
He lived through the rise of fascism and stuff like that.
So I think that's important to remember.
When listening to him talk about politics and that kind of thing as well.
And saw the rise of the Reagan and Thatcher era and all that.
And you could see how his political worldview, which we'll get to later on, has been like his guiding star throughout all of those decades.
I could see how it all sort of fits together for him.
So, returning to the linguistics point, though, he's talking about a bunch of different things.
But the way that people...
Use languages and it's not purely functional, right?
That there are also aspects about maintaining group identities or signaling group membership.
And I thought some of this was interesting.
The words that are in one era are archaic and in another era can be three years or something like that.
And people are playing with their languages often.
Again, this is not too common in our societies.
Our societies, remember, are basically technological societies.
Our intelligence and creativity and so on goes into other things.
But if you go to, say, Central Australia...
Where you're finding basically Stone Age tribes, there's a lot of innovation in language.
A lot of the cultural wealth has to do with playing games with languages and constructing elaborate kinship systems and things which probably have no or little functional utility.
It's just the creative mind that works.
So you get very complex language games, a special language system taught as a puberty rite, and only a particular group of people speak it.
Nobody else understands it.
I think some anthropologists might take issue with no functional utility to complex kinship systems.
But nonetheless, he's still correct about language marking out specific subgroups and subcultures within a society and people being taught languages that apply only in certain circumstances in the country that I live in,
in Japan.
There are changes to the verbs that people use depending on the status of the other people that they're talking to and the level of politeness and whatnot.
And yeah, I think this is all very interesting to consider from the point of view of the fact that all humans develop languages or can use languages, you know, assuming that they are following normal development patterns.
And we use them in a variety of interesting...
Ways that linguistics have studied.
Yeah, it's easy to see that, you know, language is super duper complicated.
It's not just, oh, here's a dictionary.
Here are the rules for using it.
Okay, go ahead and communicate.
It's got all of these roles in signaling and social psychology.
And my particular interest in it, like your interest is sort of anthropological.
That's where you make your legs.
For me, it's cognitive, Chris.
It's cognitive.
I teach all these units on how the brain works and how knowledge is represented and stuff.
And it is a bit of a mystery, but I find it pretty fascinating how language representations sort of dovetail with just more general semantic meaning representations of information in the brain.
So, super complicated and mysterious.
There's a point that I appreciated, Mark, which I felt the...
Kinship with Chomsky when he was asked a question about poetry.
I think you'll vibe with his response here as well.
Do you respond to poetry?
Do I?
Sure.
We've got time to read it.
Does it make you think differently?
What goes on in your thought process?
Well, you know, I don't feel competent to say, but it's a topic that has been discussed quite intelligently.
So, for example, if you read, say, not by me, I have nothing to say about it, no one will pretend to, but if you read, say, William Amson's Seven Types of Ambiguity, you get an intriguing account of why poetry makes you think.
Yeah, I like that, Chris.
He's like me, I think.
He sort of hits it at it.
He talks about poetry as something that happens to other people more so than him.
And I'm the same.
Chris, when I was at school, we had to study this poem and it was about these two farmers mending a fence.
And it was a metaphor for the walls we build between ourselves and stuff like that.
It wasn't a Ralph Harris song, was it?
No, it was a proper poem.
But all of that went totally over my head.
I just thought it was a poem about a couple of farmers fixing a fence.
I didn't get any of the analogies.
Somebody had to explain it to me.
I like that.
He's a concrete thinker.
That was one of the comments that one of my teachers wrote by Life Reports.
He's a concrete thinker.
Not so good with the other words.
Just very concrete.
So, yeah, and the fact that he is like, you know, lots of people have written very intelligently about it, but not me, right?
Yeah, don't get that from me.
Like you, that resonated with a whole bunch of other things he said, which is whenever he sort of gets an invitation to wax lyric or give a personal kind of thing, he says, no, thank you.
He just bats it away, doesn't he?
Yeah, and another thing which highlights his delivery and the same tendency is he's asked about, Humor.
And the way that the interviewer asks, it kind of gives the impression that he's well known not to be funny.
So that's just like, but he doesn't correct them.
So listen to this.
We bring up another area you can claim you have no expertise in, and that's the use of humor.
We respond to people who use humor in communication, yet it's not taught in grade school.
We're not taught how to be comedians, but we respond to it.
And that seems to be the case in almost every language.
Well, see, I don't think that has too much to do with language.
We can be humorous in other ways, too.
A clown can be humorous without using language, and nobody teaches a child how to laugh at a clown.
I think we're going here to interesting topics, but topics where nothing is understood.
there's no doubt in my mind that there's something about human nature, the basic structure of the human mind brain, which makes certain things comical and other things not.
Just as there's certain things about the human brain that make some things come out to be
Yeah, once again, he doesn't wade in to just sort of giving a half-formed explanation of how it's related to language off the top of his head.
I think he knows that he doesn't know an awful lot about humour, and so he doesn't engage with it, doesn't spin a theory on the fly.
And he's not somebody that, it can be said, relies a lot on humour in his delivery.
No, well, on that note, Chris, people who love Chomsky will hate this, but isn't he a little bit like Richard Dawkins?
Like, just a bit.
I mean, you know, the styling is slightly different, but come on, there's some common ground there.
No, yeah, I agree.
He's basically an old...
That speaks in an academic way.
It's not to say neither of them could crack a joke, but you wouldn't expect Dawkins to launch into a humorous anecdote that regularly.
I think Dawkins reading out his hate mail was pretty comedic, but that was mostly just because of his delivery.
So there is that.
Matt, this might be getting into the weeds a little bit, but I think we probably should just a part, because what Chomsky is...
Famous for is his models about universal grammar, the syntactic structures of language that are innate and allow people to develop their language abilities despite what he refers to as like a poverty of stimulus.
And that has been an influential but fair to say controversial theory within linguistics.
He's credited...
With helping to kick off the cognitive turn in the linguistic field, focusing away from behavioralist approaches onto more cognitive what's going on in the mind approaches.
But in contemporary linguistics, I think a lot of his stuff is out of favor, or at least a lot of the claims have had to be revised quite dramatically.
But maybe playing a clip of him talking about...
The issue about the poverty of stimulus would be useful to get an idea of what he sees the issue as arising from.
It's amazing how somebody can walk in a room, hear a few words and walk out crying or angry or this whole series of emotions simply with a few words.
Doesn't that constantly amaze you?
It's not just words again.
It could be a fleeting picture.
Take, say, a caricature.
You see a few lines.
And it brings to your mind a person in a situation, maybe a tragic situation or a comical situation or whatever.
I mean, the human mind is a very marvelous thing.
It's got an extremely intricate and complex structure, which, at least at a scientific level, we understand very little about.
But what you're pointing to is...
The central part of it.
Little hints here and there succeed in evoking in us very rich experience and interpretation.
And what's more, it's done surprisingly uniformly for different people.
And it's, of course, done without any training or very minimal training.
Nobody would know how to train people to do this.
So it somehow must be the only logical possibility.
I mean, qualitatively speaking, these phenomena are very much like physical growth.
The nutrition that's given to an organism, to an embryo, is not what determines that it's going to be a human or a bird.
What determines that it's going to be a human or a bird is something about its internal structure.
And what determines that we are going to be the kind of creature that can speak and that can...
interpret a sign or a couple of lines or something as evoking an emotional experience or whatever.
That's something in our nature, but it's so far beyond what we know how to study that you can only wave your hands at it at the moment.
Well, you said that his theories these days are a bit...
Controversial or out of favor, but some components of his theories have since become commonly accepted.
Like the idea that humans are predisposed towards language acquisition, I think is universally accepted.
We know that there are parts of the brain that are specialized for language comprehension and production.
So it's difficult to judge him 50 years since because...
I don't really fully understand his theories, obviously.
I'm not a linguist, and it's all super technical and everything.
But the little I do understand, I mean, half of it just seems totally obvious to me.
But that's because, as you said, he was part of that sort of cognitive shift.
Like, there's these generative grammars and...
What are the architectures called, Chris?
So there's generative grammar, universal grammar, language acquisition device.
I think is originally standard theory, then extended standard theory, then revised extended standard theory, then government and binding theory to the minimalist program.
And then eventually to the core feature being mostly not the things previously mentioned, just recursion, just the property of recursion.
So that's a lot of things.
There's a lot of very specific terminology associated with all of that.
It's fair to say that he definitely inspired a large amount of linguistic work and he has still a large amount of devoted advocates of his approach.
But I think there are many detractors.
of his approach and many who argue that the attempts to preserve the theory in the face of evidence are limiting actually progress within certain linguistic quarters and persistent criticisms have been that a lot of it was originally derived from you know the structures you find in European grammars and broke down a bit when you started trying to Account for Asian languages or
more farther afield languages.
One of the things I mentioned to you, because I was just confused by it, is this idea of a deep structure or deep grammar or whatever.
And this is the idea that there's this common human universal...
Rules between objects and so on.
So you say the cat chased the dog.
No, let's say the dog chased the cat.
That would make more sense.
You've got an object and a subject and you've got like a verb which connects these two things together.
The superficial grammar can change from language to language, but underlying it is a basic graph where you have circles and arrows connected to each other and certain sort of logical relations that they can have.
And that...
Confused me a bit because it feels like it's like a bit of a tautology.
I can't imagine a way to express relationships between concepts that doesn't have that kind of grammar.
Or to put it another way, if you're saying that, oh, this is a thing that makes humans special, this is a human species constant, which I'm very much open to.
But if you're saying that the thing that's constant, the thing that sort of binds all of our language together is this deep grammar, but you can't imagine an alternative, that is, if you met an alien or a hyper-evolved octopus that could talk about cats and dogs chasing each other, then if you can't imagine a way to describe the grammar of the relations between each other that's different from the special human one,
I just don't get the point.
It's almost tautological.
It has to be that way.
Yeah, I don't know about linguistics to have a strong opinion, but I do know that there's a lot of criticisms, and I remember reading various versions of it.
I tend to find the work by Tomasello, which argues about the focus of shared intentionality being the core underpinning, and that this system relates not just to language, but...
The whole realm of human sociality.
Are you talking about ontological categories of things?
They have things that can have intentions and things that...
No, no, no, no, no.
So that's also a part, you know, and this is all, I think, in large part, various elements of this are well...
Supported empirically, the fact that humans readily categorize objects and agents that they encounter into the world, into those two things, objects and agents, and also into subcategories of plants and moving animates and people and so on.
Your brain automatically, or your mind more specifically, ascribes a whole set of ontological assumptions depending on which category things fall into.
I think that's well ascribed to.
I don't think Chomsky objects to any of that.
But I'm talking about Tomasello and collaborators have argued that basically a whole bunch of the stuff about the human evolution and language development and so on is underpinned by a hyper-focus on enjoying interpersonal,
shared, intentional Stances and situations.
This underpins the way that we use language as well.
And when you understand that, you understand more about the way language develops.
But I don't understand the details.
So I'm just saying, on a surface level, when I've read the arguments, that approach has resonated with me.
But if you want to seek out the details, you'd be better going and reading well-qualified linguistics discussion of the debate.
Yeah, yeah.
But it's interesting stuff, isn't it?
Like, it's at the interface between language, but also social behavior and cognition and also evolution and biology, because he's pretty frank about that.
Yeah, and I do think, for example, one of the critiques of Chomsky has been put by this guy, Dan Everett, who did work with the Piraha, I think that's how you pronounce it, a tribe in the Amazon, and argues that they lack lots of the features that Chomsky...
I always find that a weak critique, in part because the more that you look into Everett's claims, the more that those rebuttals from other people that have studied with the Piraha and have said it's misrepresenting their culture and language a bit, and also because even if it were the case that there are certain examples where the general features are not apparent,
I don't know that that would disprove that there is a...
Yeah.
You know, it might disprove the universal part that you absolutely need it.
Yeah, but if 99 times out of 100, you find the common feature, then yeah, no, I hear what you're saying.
But like you, Chris, I also find that sort of agent-based explanation sort of interesting.
I think that resonates with me too.
I think that probably is something that's characteristic of humans.
Maybe it'll be a characteristic of...
Smart social aliens, if we ever meet them as well.
But it feels hard to imagine a language that doesn't have a bit of a focus on agents and objects and that kind of thing, those sort of distinctions.
Yeah, there's a part where he's asked about the correct way to teach children to develop proper language or whatever.
And again, he's not actually that prescriptive.
He's kind of like, you know, well, actually...
Parents don't have that much impact because children are designed to sponge up the language that's around them.
So you could interfere with that, but actually that would be harmful.
And I was like, yeah, you know, that's a nice way to argue against helicopter parenting.
Yeah, just speak normally.
Speak to them like they're little humans.
Yeah.
He also, in one of the other interviews, he got asked about the most interesting unanswered question.
And I think this highlights that he would
Is there anything left that you would love to know the answer to, that you've never, to your satisfaction, worked out?
Well, moving to another domain of intellectual professional pursuits, there is a question that was asked by Galileo, then by his associates in the 17th century,
which is as yet unanswered.
How are you and I able to do what we are now doing?
How, as Galileo put it, how is it possible with a finite number of symbols to produce an infinite number of thoughts and even Use these symbols to allow others who have no access to our minds to access to their inner workings of our minds.
How is this miracle possible?
I like that.
It's a good answer.
And a couple of things, Chris.
Notice how he delineates his professional.
Yeah, so let's talk about another topic.
Yeah, different domain because up until then he'd been talking to Piers Morgan about his political opinions, which he frames and thinks of as his political opinions.
And then he has his work, his linguistics work over here.
I'm sure he takes them equally seriously and sees them as equally important, but he doesn't sort of just conflate them all together into a grand theory of the universe.
And the other nice thing is despite him having worked on this like his entire career.
He still thinks of it as a total mystery.
I felt that was a bit pessimistic.
We've got no idea.
I think he's overstating the case a little bit.
I think it is a bit of a shame that he doesn't seem very interested in these language models, for instance.
You can say what you like about them, Chris, but you have to admit they have the special feature which fascinates Chomsky, which is that they're generative.
It doesn't fascinate him about it.
He's quite clear, as we'll get to when he talks about AI.
He doesn't seem to regard them as particularly interesting.
In fact, maybe we should just play a clip of him talking about AI and his general views on how interesting that topic is.
I was trying to see if the...
Models that were being constructed on the basis of neural nets could teach you something about the brain.
That kind of interest has mostly disappeared.
Now it's become almost a pure engineering project, and we do something that sells, basically.
It doesn't tell us anything about language, learning, cognition.
It just works.
Well, there's nothing around the technology.
In fact, I'm using it right now.
The captions that I'm reading because I'm hard of hearing are developed by deep learning technology.
For that, it's quite useful.
Maybe it's useful for other things, but it's not teaching us anything.
It's not intended to.
It's as if somebody's studying insect navigation.
I want to figure out how insects navigate.
And someone comes along and says, "It's not a problem.
I can do it with GPS and high technology and so on."
We'd laugh, you know.
That's essentially what it is.
So the technology can be, like other technology, can be useful, can be harmful.
Our decision is how to use it.
But it's not part of science anymore.
It's not telling us anymore.
Do you agree, Matt?
No, I don't agree.
I see where he's coming from there, Chris.
I mean, the way these machines generate language is very different to how the brains do it.
I mean, we've got an architecture that's different, even though there is something of a similarity in terms of the statistical learning and associative learning.
They're called artificial neural networks because they were...
Based abstractly on human neural networks.
So I get that.
I get that it's very different from how humans do it.
But it still should be interesting, I think, to someone like Chomsky because, you know, he's got this big focus on human universals.
And if you're interested in human universals, wouldn't you love to have just one?
Counter-example.
Something that generates language but isn't a human.
Like a hyper-evolved, if you could get your hands on a hyper-evolved octopus that could talk, right?
Maybe it was just blathering away like GPT.
Boring.
You know, aliens arrive, right?
They're using language.
Boring.
I personally think it's interesting.
It is an engineering project, of course, primarily these days, but even so, I still think it's interesting.
To be honest, Matt, I also disagree because despite The discussions we've had on here and on the extended longer uncut versions on the Patreon about AI, I think it should be extremely interesting that what we have developed with LLMs is the ability to have linguistic conversations with a system that doesn't
follow the same process but can produce outcome as if...
It is a person as if it is parsing the language in the way that we do.
I think that if you asked Chomsky or various other people, would we be able to do it in the way that we can now?
He would have been much more pessimistic, as many rightly were.
I probably, not that I'm an expert in linguistics, but I would have shared the pessimism that the processes that we had could lead to the result that we have now.
But the fact that we can produce results, which are so...
Linguistically sophisticated, and which at least mimic the appearance of somebody communicating with correct grammar in every language that the trading database provides.
It is a marvel, I think, but he kind of says, well, it's just...
It's a toy, a clever toy.
Yeah, like, on this side, like, even if you're someone who's, like, really skeptical of LM...
And you think there's no cognition, there's no reasoning, there's nothing going on under the hood, it's just pretending.
Well, that makes it even more interesting that a machine that can't think or reason or do anything cognitively interesting is able to create such seamless, plausible, natural language.
So, that's our opinion.
So, feel free.
Others may disagree.
Yeah.
Now we're going to switch to talk about...
The thing for which Chomsky is most famous for, which is his political opinions or his views on contemporary social issues and ideologies.
I'm going to look at some of those opinions and the way that he presents them, but I do think he's an interesting case for us to look at because there are lots of ways that he doesn't fit into The secular guru template,
as established by many of the previous gurus we look at.
For example, he is quite reluctant to accept fawning prayers, at least without issuing some self-deprecation.
So, some examples of this.
Here's, I believe this is him talking to Matt Chorley for the Times interview, but listen to this, Matt.
is one of the most cited authors in history, up there with Shakespeare and the Bible even.
And his work covers a huge range.
Take his latest book, it's called Illegitimate Authority, a collection of interviews on subjects as varied as Joe Biden, climate change, abortion rights in the United States, the economic fallout from COVID-19, the war in Ukraine, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping,
and much more besides.
Noam, welcome to Times Radio.
Thanks for joining us.
Thank you, Ren.
Don't take too seriously the output of PR.
He's got an energy there where he certainly doesn't need any fawning praise these days.
I mean, the skeptical person could say, Chris, that while he's got such a big track record, he's been fawningly praised so many times, he's sort of got the luxury to kind of always downplay it.
But it doesn't sound like false modesty, does it?
No, and like, listen, this is him responding to the issue of whether he regards himself as a public intellectual.
Now listen, I want to talk to you first of all about how you are described.
If you're filling in a form, what's your occupation?
Do you write down public intellectual, as other people might expect?
What's your job?
I teach.
I'm a university professor, right?
Teach courses on linguistics, cognitive science, philosophy, social and political issues, and like any other academic.
Do you like being thought of a public intellectual, or is the idea of a public intellectual a sort of old-fashioned thing in a world where everyone can pump out their opinions in public all the time?
Well, I never took the concept public intellectual very seriously, and I don't take it very seriously.
Yeah.
I feel like Charlie didn't really listen to his answer, because he said, like, I don't call myself a public intellectual.
I've never called myself that.
And then this follow-up question was like, you know, how does it make you feel when you're referred to as public intellectual?
I was like, yeah, I just told you.
Yeah, he says things like this a few times in the stuff that we've heard.
It doesn't sound like a line.
Yeah, he seems to be one of those people that just doesn't deal with that kind of bladder.
He's like, okay, I'm a lecturer, I write books, I do this, whatever.
Sure, he's happy with being well-known, but, you know.
So I'll say this, Matt.
I think Chomsky is a perfectly healthy self-regard for himself.
And when you hear him talk about his ideas or defend his theories...
He basically argues as if they are self-evidently true and have been strongly supported by all evidence.
He's not a retiring wallflower about his arguments being correct.
But what he isn't is somebody that wants to say that he's this larger-than-life Einsteinian figure with an insight that's never been matched.
He very much does present himself as...
Giving voice to ideas which others have highlighted before.
He doesn't try to present himself as this lone individual, especially when it comes to linguistic ideas.
When it comes to politics, he sometimes talks about how nobody else, the mainstream, doesn't give voice to those.
But he is also highlighting voice like him or...
To be honest, I think that Ladau largely reflects that he correctly sees his strongly left-wing views as being in the minority, right?
Because they are.
Yeah, except that he thinks they're in the minority because of the influence of the media and the elites.
The whole system is keeping him down.
That's right.
But it's not personal.
That's his ideological worldview, right?
Yes.
Look, I think it's got to do with what I was saying before about how much time and effort people dedicate to self-presentation versus talking about just delivering the stuff that they think is true.
And as you said, he'll deliver the stuff that he thinks is true with absolute.
And with as much strength as you can imagine.
And believes that they're absolutely supported by all the evidence that can be seen by a reasonable person.
So I believe forcefully, but he doesn't seem to devote any time into saying, well, you should take me seriously because I'm a special person.
Well, we'll get to this, but I'm going to play it just to keep things up a little bit.
So there's a point towards the end of the interview with Matt Chorley, and we'll see it gets pretty contentious in a way that British political interviews often do.
But he's asked at the end, does he ever consider that he might just be wrong about all of the views that he's just expressed and so on, right?
And his answer here...
On the one hand, it sounds humble and self-deprecating, but hold that thought.
Do you ever think maybe I'm the one who's wrong?
What?
Do you ever think maybe I'm the one who's wrong?
That you might be wrong?
Of course, all the time.
I was much too late in getting involved in the opposition to the Vietnam War.
I began to get seriously involved when Kennedy...
Radically escalated the war in the early 60s.
Should have been involved 10 years earlier.
Yeah, so the answer there, Matt, was yes, I always considered that I might be wrong, but the illustration was I didn't advocate my beliefs more strongly and sooner.
That's the error that he highlights.
Not like I accidentally engaged in quasi-genocide denial about Cambodia because of my political sympathies or any of that kind of thing, right?
My views were not articulated strongly enough early enough.
But it's kind of a weird question, isn't it?
That sort of intellectual humility test.
I mean, like, how do you answer that properly?
Oh, have you ever considered you're wrong?
Well, like, nobody thinks they're wrong when they think.
I get that.
I know that.
But I also feel like that's the reason you ask it.
Because for normal people, it's a simple thing to answer.
Like, of course, you know, I'm giving my opinion.
It could be wrong.
I might have misunderstood things or I do consider I've been wrong.
But this is the thing, Matt.
You have to think about the gurus, the people that we cover.
Do they ever entertain that they could be mistaken?
Yeah, I guess you're right.
I guess you're right, because I asked myself that question and I could summon up a couple of legitimate questions where it was like, I was just legitimately wrong and I changed my mind after a bit.
You know, so I can't think of those cases, I suppose.
I don't know if I'd do it on the fly if I was doing an interview.
But it's not like, you know, if somebody asked you to give the examples where you've fundamentally changed your mind or whatever, I think that can be harder in the moment because, you know, like you say, people tend to think they believe things for...
Good reasons.
And motivated reasoning means that you can often shift what you previously thought that you believed to more align with what you currently believe.
But it's the acknowledgement that you could be wrong, even if you forcefully believe something.
And Chomsky does say yes, but it's telling that the immediate example is like, I should have advocated for the things I believe in more strongly, which is not, that's not the spirit of the question.
That's the opposite.
So I'm just saying.
Yeah, no, I take that point.
It reminds me of a Piers Morgan question where he asks about cancel culture or something, I think some freedom of speech issue.
Piers Morgan obviously meant it to, you know, in a kind of left-wing sense, but Chomsky answered it in terms of these are the right-wing examples of cancellations and blocking freedom of speech.
So, you know, it's a rhetorical maneuver, partly.
I have that clip, Mark.
I'll just play it now since we have it here.
I think we have more common ground on.
Free speech, it seems to me, has never been under more ferocious attack in the West than it is right now.
Why is that?
And what do we do about it?
There definitely is an attack on freedom of speech, even freedom to read.
In the United States, Ron DeSantis is running for president, as he just announced.
has imposed regulations, laws in Florida which make it illegal to teach authentic American history.
You have to teach a kind of history which glorifies the United States.
Nothing about what actually happened.
This is happening in Republican legislatures around the country.
I've been, as you know, probably very much opposed.
To the actions of small sectors of young people who are picking up the traditional cancellation, which has been endemic in the academic world and in the political world for years.
I can give you examples from my own experience.
Cancellation of the left has been constant.
It's only very...
You want me to...
I could tell you from my own experience, which is small of it.
Now, small segments of young people are picking up that same improper policy and should be opposed.
We should oppose it just as we should have opposed the massive cancellation that has been accepted for decades.
Because it was directed against the left and dissident opinion.
So yes, it's wrong.
Like you say, reframing questions in a way that serves your arguments, it's something that people do.
Because in general, he doesn't engage in a lot of the standard secular guru tropes that much.
But when it comes to a certainty about his perspective, I think he is on a very similar...
As the other gurus that we cover, he has a moral certainty to his outlook, which leads to anybody expressing that it might be wrong is immediately kind of categorized as a potential hostile force.
And you can see that where there's an interaction between him and a Guardian writer, George Monbiot, published this email exchange he had with him online.
And it's not the same as the Sam Harris.
It's a very different world views.
Chomsky is known for his anti-imperialist, anti-US foreign policy stance.
And Sam Harris is, in many respects, a hawkish perspective, especially when it comes to the Middle East and Islamic countries.
So they have a genuine disagreement there.
George Monbiot is very much in agreement with Chomsky about the condemnation of The U.S. and the historical atrocities of the U.S. and contemporary politics as well.
But he wanted him to unequivocally condemn the genocide denialism that was in a book that Chomsky had written the foreword to.
There was a book called The Politics of Genocide, and Monbiot mentioned that it contained a revisionist and widely inaccurate account of the Rwandan genocide, as well as some extremely contestable statements about the massacre at Srebrenica.
And Chomsky goes on to accusing Monbiot of just reciting these things that people are supposed to say that are part of the Western canon.
And Monbiot has written strongly about very similar topics that Chomsky was suggesting.
No, no, you know, I'm not, you know, a paid-up member of the British elite.
I criticize all the same things, but surely we agree that revisionist accounts of atrocities and so on don't serve.
Anybody's cause.
And the exchange is there for everyone to read.
But to me, Chomsky comes across as he is extremely dismissive, becomes very hostile, and basically paints Monbiot as a servant of the...
British elites and their obsession with denigrating non-Western countries.
And it basically went nowhere.
So if you want an example where Chomsky's evasiveness around these kind of topics and his fixation on switching the topic to, do you not acknowledge the genocides that have been perpetrated by the
West as being fully on display?
I think that fits into...
His tendency to see that his worldview is correct and anybody that disagrees is suspect at best.
I see what you mean about the cast-iron certainty in the bigger picture.
And he's not above using the various tools in the rhetorical arsenal to support that.
Yeah, and here I want to make a distinction which I think is important because on the one hand, Chomsky has a political ideology which...
I might describe as anti-imperialist leftist-y, you know, something along those lines.
And we'll play some clips which outline it, and it is what you would imagine, highly critical of the West, particularly the US, highly critical of corporations, extremely sympathetic to socialists and socialist countries,
even those which appeared into dictatorships.
But that's like a political...
He has a whole economic outlook and stuff that's associated with it.
And you can agree or disagree with it.
In you and I's case, I think we disagree with it.
And in Chomsky's worldview, we are part of the villains of the world because centristy left-wing people are essentially the handmaidens of the evil capitalists strip-mining the world.
Well, we've been duped by the mainstream media complex.
Our consent has been manufactured.
Yes, yes.
But so there's that, right?
And you can disagree with that.
You can agree with that.
You know, everybody has their own political outlooks.
But there's another aspect, which is the degree of ideological certitude and fixation, which I think is a different thing, because you can have all different degrees of political views that you strongly believe in, but you accept.
That there's a variety of different perspectives and people with different values can arrive at different conclusions.
I don't think that's exactly the way that Chomsky arrives at.
Maybe I'm being unfair to him, but I just want to make this distinction that you can appreciate that people have different political opinions and criticize them for the degree of ideological...
Fixation that they represent.
I think that those two things are like...
It's very boring if you like to say, well, Chomsky believes this and we don't believe that.
We think he's wrong because he's got his ideological worldview.
We've got our ideological view.
Others are available.
That's not very interesting, but I don't know.
You're saying hopefully you can tease apart that from actually...
Yeah, so I think the way to help is like, let's just play some clips to illustrate what I mean.
Here, I think, is a clip that gives a good overview, or at least, you know, general introduction to Chomsky's political perspective.
Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan
what's called neoliberalism, basically a form of class war, one of their first acts was
To attack the labor unions that made good sense when you're going to carry out an assault against working people and the poor, eliminate the means of defense.
Main means of defense are labor unions that opened the doors to corporate expansion of modes of crushing worker organizations.
I know the details better in the United States, but it was about the same in England.
That led to a very significant weakening of the labor movement and opened the doors to basically highway robbery by the very rich in England,
by austerity programs, by the huge establishment attack on Jeremy Corbyn, when he tried to create a genuine Labour Party, they weren't going to tolerate that.
And now there is a reaction, both in the United States and Britain.
And, of course, the government is trying it.
The government, which is essentially the government of the rich in the corporate sector, is trying to maintain the controls over...
Labor and repression of labor so as to enable this highly successful class war to proceed.
And it is highly successful.
I don't know the figures for England, but in the United States, about 50 trillion dollars, it's not small change, have been transferred from Working people and the poor to the top 1% during the class war mislabeled neoliberalism.
It's pretty...
The guys who run the thing don't want that gravy train to stop.
There you go.
That was a potted history 40 years back, and you get to hear the crushing of the labor union movements by capitalists Elites in the United States and Britain and elsewhere.
And efforts by figures more recently in the UK by Jeremy Corbyn to oppose this being crushed by the various forces, embedded forces that would be threatened by any changes to the capitalist system.
So capitalists are doing very bad things and there's a long history going back decades.
And in general, it's class warfare.
Right?
It's the workers and the labourers versus the elites and the capitalist class in general.
Yeah, yeah.
So, like, regardless of what you think of, you know, Thatcher, the labour movement and stuff like that, like, personally, if I look at Australian history, it's just not that different from the UK.
There's been a very strong labour movement and I totally believe it's been a good and positive thing in the main.
But, you know, at the same time, you can cite examples of, like, union activity going too far.
Like, there was strikes by the NFMEU, for instance, and violence and, like, shutting down wharfs and things like that.
And these are not poor, downtrodden workers.
They're workers that are getting paid extremely well in certain very vulnerable sections of the economy, right?
So, you know, an alternative point of view is that it is a bit like a guild system, like the kind of guild system that protects the salaries of, Of surgeons and the various other medical specialties.
Now, I just mentioned that to say that it's complicated, right?
And whatever you think about all of the modern history of the left and the right wing and the back and forth over workers' rights and whatever, and he's totally right in a lot of what he says, like more and more of income is going to the richest 1%, that the power of...
Unions and workers' groups generally has decreased.
The share of the GDP that's actually coming in the form of wages as opposed to dividends from companies is decreasing.
So I agree with a lot of what he says.
But all of that is just a long precursor to Chris just saying that I think it's clear from how he looks at it is that whether you agree or disagree, it is within a sort of an ideological straitjacket.
He looks at it in terms of class warfare.
It's just about destroying one class and one class beating the other class.
And I think that just leaves out some of the complexities and the nuances, that's all.
Yeah, I would encourage, if people want to consider the nuance about this and have leftist tendencies, just consider the police unions and their protection of the police and their opposition to prosecution.
So there are clearly instances where Unions can be effective, but potentially have negative impacts for the general public or not.
You know, it very much depends on how you see what the police unions are doing.
But I think in the context of America, unions are pretty weak as they are in Japan.
So there is a different history there, at least in contemporary history.
So this is him a little bit more talking about neoliberalism, unions and the reaction to it amongst...
One part of the class war of the past 40 years has been the effort to de-industrialize the major economies, the United States, Britain,
and to a lesser extent others.
You get much more profit if you can use easily exploited workers and lower wages.
Repressive governments, no environmental constraints.
So every move was made by the global planners to facilitate the transfer, the corporate transfer of operations to places where it's more profitable and exploitation is easier.
That's how the World Trade Organization was structured.
Basically as an investor rights system which facilitated transfer of work to places which should be more profitable for the ownership class.
There was nothing inevitable about that.
No economic theory behind it.
Just let's enrich ourselves.
There are strike waves now going on in the service sector, to some extent in the industrial, in the more limited industrial sector.
And it's very difficult.
By now the sophistication of strike breaking has become quite extensive.
A lot of it's illegal.
Well, when you have a criminal state, it doesn't matter.
You can carry out illegal acts.
So in the United States, the National Labor Relations Board has been severely weakened, which is supposed to prevent illegal actions.
Defunded, weakened, not even appointed.
Members appointed.
It's been slightly improved under Biden, but this is a...
45-year project.
There's a lot to recover.
So yeah, once again, Chris, I wouldn't quibble about what he's saying in terms of in the US, the eroding and the general lack of workers' rights and protections.
But I think just stepping back, his worldview is kind of simple, right?
There's been class warfare going on.
There's been a 40 or 50-year project for the elite class to destroy the power and exploit and take all the money.
I'm sure you can build a case for parts of that being true, but there's also other stuff going on.
For instance, he described the international trade system as just simply being a matter of exporting labour to areas where it could be more easily exploited.
But that kind of ignores the massive increase in GDP and in living standards in large.
Parts of the non-Western world that has arisen from international trade.
So I think he's for that, right?
He's for China and other parts of Asia, for instance, making more money by selling stuff to the US, I would think.
But according to his worldview, I think you'd have to have protectionism to avoid Chinese workers from taking American jobs.
I don't know.
Your guess is as good as mine in that regard.
Yeah, in any case, it's a political perspective that should be familiar to anybody who is familiar with various forms of Marxist politics, right?
Like, it's one focused around class welfare and the bastard states that develop and exploit the working class.
And there's plenty of things, as you say, which are valid, but, you know, just aspects like, you heard him describe the US as a criminal, Stay it, right?
Now, people will point out, well, that's fine because the US has broken international law and there's plenty of things, you know, it's rules with corporations that other countries wouldn't abide by.
But it's still, you know, he wouldn't use that language when it comes to...
Certain other countries which are much more willing to trample on the rights of their citizens.
So, yeah.
Yeah, that's right.
I mean, logically, if you defend that statement as being factually accurate because it's technically true, which is the best kind of true, then it's got to be true of like every country in the world, right?
In which case, all states are criminal.
All right.
Which is probably true because I think like his ultimate ideology comes down to, you know, a kind of...
True libertarian one with, like, workers' collectives and whatnot.
Anarchy communism?
Some variety thereof.
But he is also very critical of the various right-wing versions of that, saying, you know, you're doing it wrong.
But, you know, who cares?
It's fantasy, future, Mad Max, politics.
It's not going to happen.
And if it does, I'm going to be dressed up in leather fetish gear working for the toe cutter.
That's the way it goes.
So that to me is very clearly a particular political worldview.
However, the way Chomsky describes it is like this.
I would suggest distinguishing between Western propaganda and the facts.
So let's take China's military buildup.
At the risk of sounding impertinent, but you sound very trusting of China and its motivations.
No, not in the least.
I said explicitly, China is by no means saintly.
Plenty of criticisms you can make of China.
But I would like to describe the world situation as it is, not as it's presented by US-British propaganda.
Yeah, so here's where it gets tricky, hey, Chris, because from Chomsky's point of view, he isn't being overly ideological in any way, shape, or form.
He's describing the world as it is, and someone like you and I would be ideologically blinkered and misinformed to the extent that we disagree with him.
So I don't know how to get out of that particular Catch-22.
There's one example, I think, that can help elucidate where these opinions would differ.
So here's Chomsky talking about Labour, the UK left-wing party's recent results, particularly the results under Jeremy Corbyn, who was a farther left leader of the party than is typical.
How do countries like Britain and America break away from the, as you put it, No,
he didn't.
Yes, the biggest victory that Labour had won in a generation.
No, it wasn't.
He lost.
He didn't become Prime Minister.
Then what happened is the British establishment, including your newspaper, came down on him with a ton of bricks, with false, deceitful propaganda about anti-Semitism, all exposed as lies.
Totally...
That's just not true.
I'm afraid that's just not true.
Uh...
Facts checked this for us, Chris.
Who won?
What happened with this election?
Why is Chomsky saying that Corbyn won it?
So objectively, Corbyn lost.
Labour has not been in power for quite a long time in the UK.
So what he's referring to is that compared to their performance in 2015, they won a large amount.
So it was like a positive swing.
Under Ed Miliband, they won 232 seats in 2015.
So Ed Miliband lost as well.
But then when Jeremy Corbyn was leader two years later, Labour won 30 extra seats, a 12.9% increase from their previous seats, which was quite large.
However, that was not large enough to stop.
The Conservatives from winning the majority.
So Tony Blair, in comparison, in 1997 won 418 seats, right?
Or in 2001, 413.
In 2005, 355.
All of which put Labour into power.
Tony Blair's performance objectively better than Jeremy Corbyn's.
From 1990 election onwards, Corbyn's was the fourth best performance after Tony Blair.
But what Chomsky is talking about is one, that swing, because people expected Corbyn to do worse, and there was a positive swing.
But the other aspect is that the population of the UK has increased from the 90s.
So if you count it by the amount of people that voted for Labour, it's more.
But this feels to mention that two years later, in 2019, Labour lost 60 seats under Jeremy Corbyn and failed to win an election again.
So you're being a stickler for facts and that's helpful.
That's good.
That's useful.
Thank you, Chris.
But getting back to the question, the question that was asked is basically...
If you're so right, Noam Chomsky, if all the working people in the UK are horribly exploited and desperately want this sort of change, then how come they aren't voting for it?
And I think Chomsky's answer would be that's because they're being tricked.
Well, first of all, he kind of avoids the question by misrepresenting the facts as you described them.
But I think if he was pushed, he would say that they were being seduced and deceived by the mainstream media complex, which is tricking them to vote against their interests.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yes, and he was asked by a different, more sympathetic interviewer about that question.
Like, why did you say that?
And you can hear his response to why he described it, and it is basically what you're saying.
You recently claimed that Jeremy Corbyn had a historic victory in 2017.
Why do you think it's important?
Jeremy Corbyn, who's a very decent person, tried to create a Labour Party that would be a participatory party, not just run by elites in the Parliament,
and would furthermore work for the interests of its constituents, and was very successful.
The 2017 vote increased the labor vote by huge amounts, I think more than in about 50 years.
That set off alarm bells through the whole establishment.
We can't allow this.
We can't have a political party that's a participatory party and that represents its constituents.
It's not the way politics works.
Politics works run by small elites who tell everyone else what to do.
Then came the establishment attack on Corbyn, which was impressive, concocting all kinds of tales about anti-Semitism.
All exploded, even in the early days, at the beginning of this campaign.
Chris, maybe it's all the mention of the elites.
Stealing the legitimate outcome of the election.
But it does remind me of Trump's talk about stolen elections and illegitimate election outcomes.
It's kind of like the left-wing version of it, isn't it?
Like the right-wing version of these sorts of slightly conspiratorial things is very concrete.
They rigged the ballot boxes, they stole the election, that kind of thing.
The left-wing version is always a bit more abstract, right?
And not so concrete.
Not always abstract.
In left-wing socialist countries, they very much just openly say, you know, the ballot boxes have been tampered with or whatever, if they're in power and able to do so, if the result goes against them.
So I don't think it's always the case that it's couched so...
Non-concretely, shall we say.
But in this case, yes, I agree.
First of all, you could hear there, Matt, right?
Because he said the biggest increase in 50 years.
So it's trying to present it in that relative way, which again, it's completely wrong because there was an increase of 147 seats in 1997, a 54% increase.
So it's just factually wrong.
But even setting that aside, There's the notion that the will of the people would elect the leader that Chomsky wants if the people were allowed to express that.
And obviously the objection to Corbyn, any of the kind of reasons given, are fundamentally dishonest.
It's because of the threat he poses to capital.
Yeah, and forming a properly inclusive labor movement.
That's the real threat.
Corbyn is a decent man who wants to create a utopian society, and the evil neoliberal capitalists cannot allow that, so they have to determine.
Now, on the other hand, it is the case that, of course, there are right-wing smear campaigns against a liberal leader in the run-up of the election.
The right-wing tabloids are obviously...
Going to portray a left-wing leader in the least favorable light they can.
So, yeah, there are a lot of parallels that I think people won't want to have emphasized.
But the underlying logic is the same.
And I have more clips which illustrate that.
So maybe I can move on to another one.
Let's go back to the facts.
2017.
He lost.
He won the big...
He lost!
He lost!
Sorry, it was the biggest labour gain in history.
Then came the...
No, it wasn't.
No, it wasn't.
He lost.
It was the biggest labour gain in history.
On what ground?
No, it wasn't.
On what basis was it?
Then came the enormous establishment attack across the board.
Right to left, so it's called left guardian, with deceitful lies all since exposed about charges of anti-Semitism.
No, that's not true.
I'm sorry.
The Equality and Human Rights Commission in the UK, the watchdog set up by the Labour Party, found the Labour Party guilty of not protecting Jews within the party.
Less anti-Semitism in the Labour Party than among the Tories.
This has all been exposed in detail by the Labour files.
Yeah, that's interesting.
Yeah, he does seem to have a very clear narrative there about Jeremy Corbyn winning, with a capital W. But the thing is, he's not insane.
He knows that he didn't actually win.
So it's just the technical definition of winning, Wants to insert.
But it's quite impressive how hard it is to knock him off track.
Yes.
It's like a steamroller.
The interjections and disagreements just bouncing off him.
Yeah, so I guess, but what's the theme there?
The theme there is that for him, for his worldview, it has to be the case that grassroots working class movement, as exemplified by Jeremy Corbyn, can basically do no wrong.
And if they don't win general elections, then it's because of lies, media manipulation, false class consciousness or something like that.
It's also funny to refer to the Guardian as the so-called left.
I know that is a common referring, especially amongst the leftist side, you know, the so-called left-wing Guardian.
But like the Guardians, it's pretty lefty.
The real left.
That's like the real IRA, right?
It's a splinter.
It's true.
It's all in the eye of the beholder and whatnot.
I guess it's the corporate left.
So let me play another clip which highlights the way he sees this issue.
The parliamentary party, the Blairite parliamentary party, did not want to see.
In fact, they said it.
We have the documents in the labor files that say we do not want to lose our party.
The party that we own to this effort to develop a popular-based party working for working people and the poor.
We don't want to lose our party to that.
No, that's not what they said.
That's not what they said.
They did not want...
What they said, you can read it in the Labour files.
They did not say they did not want a government that wanted to act for the poor.
What they said was they did not want someone...
They said they don't want to lose their party.
So a man with a track record of tolerating anti-Semitism in the Labour Party and taking anti-West positions, including ones to give Russia the benefit of the doubt over the Salisbury poisonings was one of the big things that they protested at.
There's no anti-West position.
I do appreciate the British pundit style of interviewing because it contrasts quite...
Distinctly with Lex Friedman's approach, for example, or the trigonometry people, right?
Like, whether or not you agree with Matt Charlie's response, I think it's better that he presents the, you know, like a kind of, no, no, no, it's like this, because you can also hear Chomsky respond then to the critique.
The UK is famous, isn't it, for its competitive journalists.
They don't do these softball interviews.
So what's the background there?
What's the bigger picture in your eyes, Chris?
You know UK politics and what his vision of it is.
Yeah, so he doesn't like Keir Starmer and Corbyn was a more far-left member of the party who had for quite a long time been a kind of gadfly on the fringes but then became the leader of the party which gave a lot of power to...
Groups in Labour that had been marginalised for one reason or another.
And then they didn't win two elections.
Corbyn is not the leader.
The new leader is a kind of moderate left-wing, what they regard as a neo-Blairite type.
And so, predictably, Chomsky doesn't like him and thinks it's a coup of sorts to...
It's the real party of the people that was being built with a defined conservative party-like version thereof.
And the part which is sort of interesting is that there's these endless reports flinging back and forth about anti-Semitism in the Labour Party and accusations that it's been oversold or that it's been under-recognized,
depending on how you look at it.
I think what is pretty much non-debatable, wherever you fall, is that it's been a topic that has been used on both sides, right?
It's been used as an opportunistic attack, as well as it's been denied, you know, it's been painted as just a smear.
And there are actual grievances, there are actual reports.
But there are also reports showing that various factions are weaponizing it or accusing it of being weaponized.
So the anti-Semitism is real.
There were real concerns with reactions directed at Corbyn and Corbyn's wing from the Jewish community.
But it also was a handy thing to use as a delegitimizing issue.
Yeah, so I guess the difference between how I might look at these things and how Chomsky would is, without knowing the intricacies of UK politics, is that this is all pretty normal in parliamentary democracies like Australia and the UK, right?
You've got your centre parties, they have their different factions.
Our Liberal Party's got a right faction and a left faction and our Labour Party's got a right faction and a left faction and other factions too, I'm sure.
And when, you know, these different factions, sometimes one has control, sometimes the other has control.
If they're not doing particularly well in the polls, if there's some scandals or, you know, difficult things going on, then they get knocked over and the other group gets in and gets to run the show for a while.
So it all seems like pretty much par for the board.
Yeah, but that's not how Chomsky looks at it, right?
It's...
There's a plot, essentially.
There's the mechanisms of neoliberalism coming into play to get rid of the people's choice and what the people want.
Yeah, and for example, in the way that he presents Corbyn, it's not just that he's a person with a particular political agenda, it's that he's a very good person with a very important political goal.
That would have led to great outcomes if it hadn't been foiled.
So, for example...
You can read it on Al Jazeera.
The British press has chosen to mostly suppress it and marginalize it, but that's a problem for the British press.
Corbyn has since been virtually kicked out of the Labour Party.
His effort to try to develop a popular-based party, participatory party.
That would serve the interests of working people and the poor was smashed by the British establishment.
It's a scandal, okay?
But it has nothing to do with these other things that we're talking about.
Yeah, so he got that, Matt.
He was just trying to solve the issue for the poor and the working class people, and the establishment couldn't have that, so they destroyed.
Him and his efforts, and now he's marginalized.
It is not what you said, which is standard political horse-jockeying proposition.
Well, I guess his sympathy for Corbyn is understandable.
They share a lot of similar kind of anti-imperialist, anti-war in general kind of views.
Corbyn is against pretty much every military intervention in recent history, including in Libya and Syria.
Yeah, I see here has even called for NATO to be disbanded.
So, you know, it's not a totally mainstream stance even for a Labour Party leader, right?
No, no.
Much ink has been spilled on Jeremy Corbyn and where he stands, but he is well known for his opposition to the Iraq war.
Criticism of Israel, not particularly surprising.
These are not unheard of positions on the left and particularly not to the more progressive wing of the left, especially the criticisms of Israel.
It's interesting how the hard left and hard right positions kind of dovetail there because, you know, like withdrawing from NATO and skepticism towards those sort of multilateral agreements is something you also see on...
On the right in America and the UK.
Slightly different motivations, but I guess it ends up at the same place.
Well, yeah, there are interesting overlaps.
Although, for example, Corbyn was, I think, credibly accused of not campaigning very effectively against Brexit for different reasons than the right wing concerns about immigration.
He also...
Had concerns about stronger partnerships with Europe that primarily revolved around opposition to neoliberal globalization.
But actually, that somewhat distinguishes a little bit from Chomsky, because when Chomsky was talking about the EU in the interview, he said this.
And there's no sign of any benefit from leaving the EU.
Do you think that was a...
A sensible decision by Britain to do that?
I thought at the time that it was a very serious error, both harmful to Britain, harmful to Europe, in a way beneficial to the United States, because under Brexit,
Britain becomes even more subject to US domination than it was before.
But I thought it was a terrible mistake.
And I think the record since basically confirms that.
Good.
Yes.
I agree.
Correct.
And there is a clip of him summing up Keir Starmer for you.
I actually don't think he gets much wrong here, but this is him discussing Starmer.
Well, so far, there are people like Will Hutton, for example, who think that...
Keir Starmer has all sorts of fine plans for social reform and so on.
I don't see any evidence of it.
All he's been doing so far is purifying the Labour Party of any activist elements and putting it onto more central control, eliminating people like Corbyn,
of course.
Driscoll recently and others who do work for a constituent-based party dealing with needs of the labor constituency.
So it seems to me he'll probably move towards a Blairite-style elite parliamentary party.
That's your light, as it used to be called.
Sounds about right to you, Chris?
Well, he's got a negative spin on that, but he is correct that, like we discussed, whichever faction is in power tends to want to shore up its support and marginalize the elements that might disrupt that, which Corbyn also attempted to do when he was in the leadership positions.
But he is also right that, in general, dramatic reform happens I wait to see evidence of that.
But again, I think that's pretty common in centre-left parties that nobody's really happy with what they do.
They make too many concessions and too many promises and then everybody's fed up with them.
But as long as they get power for a little while, I'll be content for that because the Conservatives have been in power for a long time in the UK.
Generally, centre parties are pretty much focused on winning elections and adjust their policy to suit.
I guess that's something where, like, I'm just trying to identify what, if anything, is wrong with Chomsky in our view because, you know, he's a lefty with opinions and a lot of what he's talking about here is just giving his political opinions and I think almost all political opinions are valid in a way.
But I guess my issue with him is in that misrepresenting points of fact.
And creating a narrative around a very sort of one-eyed view of things that have happened.
I mean, that's probably the point at which I'd criticize him for.
Not so much just for being a hard lefty per se.
Yeah, yeah.
Let's move to him talking about Ukraine.
Let's see if we can spot any similar such issues or perhaps good things.
So he's talked about this quite a bit.
And it does come up in two of the interviews that we've covered.
This one probably goes a bit long, but in any case, let's hear it.
You mentioned the war in Ukraine.
Let's turn our attention to that.
Certainly in the UK, the left, actually under people like Jeremy Corbyn, argued that it wasn't Russia that was the enemy.
It was the US that was destabilizing the world.
And then Russia invades a sovereign...
Well, the invasion of Ukraine is plainly a war crime.
You can't put it in the same category as greater war crimes, but it's a major one.
According to the official, the only evidence that we have, solid evidence, is the United Nations estimates, Pentagon estimates, and so on.
They estimate about 8,000 civilians killed.
That's a lot of people.
What the United States and Britain do overnight, presumably it's an underestimate.
So let's say it's twice that much.
That would put it at the level of the U.S.-backed Israeli invasion of Lebanon, which killed about maybe 20,000 people.
Suppose it's off by a factor of 10. That is, the casualty rate is really 10 times as high as is claimed.
Well, that would put it in the category of Ronald Reagan's terrorist atrocities in El Salvador.
Roughly on the order of 80,000.
Of course, Iraq is just another dimension.
So it's serious.
It's a terrible crime.
You can understand why the global South does not take very seriously the eloquent protestations of Western countries about this unique episode in history.
They've been victims of far more.
Maybe the Russians will go on to air level.
Maybe.
Ah, right.
So he agrees it was a war crime to invade Russia.
That's positive, right?
Anything else?
Well...
It seems a bit equivocal, I suppose, about the question of who's responsible for the conflict.
Well, he's often accused of engaging in what aboutism that...
It focuses on America and the West's crimes over and above any other countries.
And whether you regard that as whataboutism or an accurate accounting, I think it is fair to say that's quite clearly on display there.
You can present that as he's appropriately contextualizing the scale of the conflict and highlighting that the Western nations are not...
In any sense of the word.
But it does sound a little bit like downplaying the scale of the conflict.
And, you know, basically, if somebody mentions a conflict and you immediately cite other conflicts, it is like a way to point the attention elsewhere, right?
Yeah.
But it can't be denied that he did begin by saying it is a war crime, right?
Just perhaps a lesser war crime than what the US and other countries have done.
So, a bit more on this.
Certainly from left-wing politics in the UK, this trying to create equivalence, an anti-West position, become...
Well, you're drawing equivalence.
You are drawing equivalence.
You're saying that you've literally just drawn equivalence with the number of deaths in various places.
Explain to people listening to this why...
What you're not saying is because Ronald Reagan did this or George Bush did that, that doesn't make what Vladimir Putin's done all right, does it?
I said it's a major crime, but there's no equivalence that's following the party line.
I gave figures.
No equivalence.
Maybe the casualty toll is ten times as high as is estimated.
Well, that would make it like...
Reagan's crimes in El Salvador.
It's not equivalent.
But I suppose some people listening to this will think you're seeking to excuse what...
No, that is fabrication of the right wing.
I am not seeking to excuse anything.
I said it's a terrible war crime.
That's not excusing anything.
I'm talking about the extreme hypocrisy of claims about how this is the worst thing that ever happened when it's a fraction of what we do all the time.
What about that, Mark?
Well, it does remind me of some of the less salubrious type of Twitter discourse where you might find people comparing death counts.
The gulags versus the concentration camps, for example.
Yeah, yeah.
So it seems a bit tangential to me, frankly, like precisely how many people died here compared to there, because I don't know.
There's other factors at play.
But yeah, so one thing I think which is worth noting is Chomsky remains pretty clear there, right?
First of all, he's saying there's not an equivalence.
The West is.
It has a much higher death toll.
So he's saying there isn't an equivalence because it's way smaller in the case of the Ukraine conflict.
And second, he is clear, though, that he didn't justify it, right?
Like, he says, no, I've been clear that I said it's a war crime, a lesser war crime, perhaps.
But he is quite clear, right, that he's not saying it's okay.
He's just...
One thing to say, the West is worse.
The West is worse.
Yes, you're right.
That's a good summary.
I think that's a fair approach for what he said.
Yeah, and Matt Chorley, the interviewer there, is highlighting that that response can be seen as minimizing what's occurring.
And I don't know, Matt, but there is something about, like, has the U.S. in recent decades threatened To nuke a country after annexing a portion of it.
Because that does seem to be like there are differences.
You can have legitimate critiques of a whole bunch of the stuff that Western nations have done around the world.
And there are plenty of well-documented colonial events and holdovers.
But...
Vladimir Putin's rhetoric about the willingness to use nuclear weapons, the dire threats that will be coming to anyone who dares stand in their rightful reclamation of their territory.
And it does seem different.
Look, I'm always very wary about comparing the magnitude of bad things just in terms of these raw numbers because it's terribly...
Flattening to do that.
So you could compare Ukraine to, say, the Korean War.
And you go, well, the Korean War had this many hundred thousand casualties, so the US is a bigger criminal than Russia.
But that just totally ignores the context and the causes and who is instrumental in invading whom and a whole bunch of things.
So look, there's no doubt the West covers half the world.
It's been involved in a lot of stuff.
As a result, if you want to put all of the blame for every conflict that's occurred on them, you can arrive at an arbitrarily large number.
But I think that ignores the fact that, as you said, the Ukraine conflict is perhaps just the clearest and most obvious example of a totally unnecessary, unilaterally driven invasion, and that I think is probably the key thing.
In the Troubles in Northern Ireland, there were just under 4,000 people killed during the Troubles, according to official tallies.
Not as bad as Ukraine then, Chris.
Not a big deal compared to Ukraine.
Well, yeah, so, you know, I think that is an event which had...
There's more injuries and whatnot, but nonetheless, right, like in the global...
You could say, well, so what?
It's a blip.
But actually, that's another good example.
I think we know where your sympathies tend to lie, right, in terms of the Irish-English conflict there.
But I think even you would accept that this is not a situation where you can unilaterally lay all of the blame for the troubles on the UK Parliament, right?
No.
No.
And you cannot excuse the actions of the paramilitaries regardless of the justifications offered because they committed crimes against innocent people.
So, yeah, it isn't something where you can just focus on who killed more, how many people were injured by both sides and whatnot.
I think just conflicts have to be put in context.
And also, I would note, Matt, that...
Chomsky-Roller famously downplayed the severity or called into question, would be one way to put it, the claims about the Cambodian genocide.
And there we have a genocide with numbers that are astronomical.
So I think it's the ideology which is the more consistent factor.
You know, in the cases where it has been socialist forces or communist forces that are responsible for atrocities, it's fair to say that Chomsky is quicker to call into question the relevant scale.
of atrocities that have been carried out.
And that's because of ideological sympathies, I think.
That seems fair to me.
Yes. So anyway, continuing on with this, this issue came up when we were discussing with Robert Wright about what the war in Ukraine has created.
And again, it speaks to this potential way of framing things in a particular fashion.
So here's some talking about the potential response to the invasion by other countries in the region.
Sure.
Did Putin make a mistake?
Of course.
Not only was it a criminal act of aggression, but it was an act of criminal stupidity.
He's driven Europe into Washington's control.
It's a gift to the United States on a silver platter.
Finland and Sweden is a different issue.
They have absolutely no reason to join NATO, and they know it perfectly well.
Their reason for joining NATO is they have advanced military systems.
They've been pretty well integrated into NATO operations for many years.
Joining NATO officially opens up new markets for their...
And for their military industry, a new potential for obtaining advanced equipment and so on.
There hasn't ever been, and they know it, the slightest threat to Sweden or Finland from Russia.
Really?
Anything to say about that?
I know a bit about Finnish.
History and policy in the 20th century.
And it's true, they were reluctant to join NATO, but only because they were afraid that would trigger an immediate invasion from Russia.
They're in a very difficult geopolitical situation, and it's pretty much difficult because of Russia.
I mean, all of Finnish defence policy, they have a policy called total defence, which involves everybody serving.
In the military at a young age and then coming back for regular service and so on.
And this is a policy that a very small country does to be like a hedgehog to try to protect itself against a potentially dangerous adversary.
Now, you may think Finland's fears are irrational, right?
But it's a genuinely held policy and it is a genuine belief.
In Finland, amongst the Finnish people.
So I think I'm going to side with the Finnish people here, their view of things, rather than Noam Chomsky's.
Russia has invaded Georgia and the Ukraine, two neighboring countries, in the recent decades.
I don't think any country on its border is being completely irrational to be concerned about potential military...
Yeah, so Chapsky speaks very blithely about that.
And when we had the conversation with Robert Wright as well, he very quickly steered things back to the U.S. perspective when we were raising that issue.
And it does often feel that like...
In this geopolitical perspective, countries like Sweden and Finland are just viewed in relation to Russia or the US.
And their actual internal perspective or the fact that they have their own national interests that, yes, mean that they interact with the US and want support from an aggressive Russia or whatever, but that's not all.
That they are about and reducing the country to, well, the military complex just wants to get money from the markets that being integrated in NATO can get.
It just, yeah, I just think that is a very skewed perspective about Finland and Sweden's stance.
Yeah, I think it's useful to focus on this because I think Chomsky's opinions there about a place like Finland are a representative of how him and...
You know, other people, how they look at a whole range of issues, which is, as you say, these players like Finland are viewed as players, as sort of props.
They don't have their own agency.
when you're faced with explaining a brute fact, which is that Finland would very much like to join NATO, then that is explained by someone like Chomsky as either they're being manipulated into it or coerced into doing it by the United States, or
maybe they're ruled by some neoliberal elites that is looking to build a military industrial complex for some nefarious purposes.
We're not quite sure of what.
Instead of the blindingly obvious and stated reason, which is that they are keen to participate in mutual self-defense and that they have very little fear of being invaded by a country like the United States of America,
and that is irrational.
But they do have other security concerns, and maybe that's what's motivating them.
So I think the broader point here is that I have some issues with Chomsky, and it's not that he is a hardcore lefty.
I'm genuinely fine with people having a broad spectrum of political views.
I think the thing that irritates me is it's kind of a conspiratorial worldview, which is...
Adopting a hyper-complex interpretation of the world with all of these moving parts that isn't very well substantiated and ignoring the much simpler, very obvious explanation for events that's right there in front of your face.
Yes.
If you want to hear a little bit of pushback on this point that might be cathartic, listen to this.
But why not?
We were told months before...
Russia invaded Ukraine.
There was no prospect of them invading Ukraine, repeatedly by Russia.
Russia said that they were not going to invade Ukraine, and then they did.
Why wouldn't...
If you were Finland or Sweden, why wouldn't you join NATO?
For 30 years, not only Russia, every leader, but every top official in the United States with any interest in it, that NATO...
That if Ukraine moves towards entering NATO, no Russian leader would ever accept it.
Yeah, I think I've heard that point before, which is that it's not acceptable to Russia.
That countries bordering it do what they want.
So, that's that.
That's not how people appreciate it, though.
But that is what they're saying.
Actually, I have a clip that illustrates that particular point, like, a little bit stronger.
And yet it does sound a bit like you are explaining it, because why can't Ukraine join NATO?
They're an independent, sovereign country.
Why can't they join NATO?
What would happen if Mexico decided to join a Chinese-run international military alliance with sending Heavy weapons to Mexico aimed at the United States,
interoperability of Chinese and Mexican military systems.
What would happen to Mexico?
It'd be blown away.
You know that.
So you're then drawing comparisons between NATO and China and Russia.
You see an equivalence between...
I don't.
NATO is a much more aggressive alliance.
NATO has invaded Yugoslavia, invaded Libya, invaded Ukraine, backed up the invasion of Ukraine, backed up the invasion of Afghanistan.
It's an aggressive military alliance.
Everybody outside the West, in the West, were not allowed to think it because...
We're deeply controlled by adherence to the party line.
But everybody else can see this.
Yes, well, I respectfully disagree with Chomsky about that point that NATO is a far more aggressive entity than Russia or China.
But I suppose, look, the reasonable part of what he's saying, I guess, is that a relatively powerful country, very powerful country like the United States, is going to have influence and exert influence on countries.
Mexico.
That it views as geopolitically important.
I mean, it did that with Cuba, of course, right?
It certainly helped launch an invasion by, what were they, nationalist rebels, whatever you want to call them?
In the Bay of Pigs.
Bay of Pigs, an infamous fiasco.
And, you know, has had a long-running blockade and, you know, exerted all kinds of influence to show its displeasure with Cuba, I suppose, for similar kind of partly ideological, partly geopolitical.
Yeah, though, the issue for me, and this is recapitulating a conversation that we had with Robert Wright, is that, yes, I agree that America would not like a Chinese military force installed in Mexico on their border and would regard that with hostility.
However, the notion that Chomsky says is that Mexico would be blown away.
If it made a military alliance with China, would it?
It's 2020 now.
So the notion is the US would just go to war with Mexico because they formed an alliance with China.
I would dispute that.
And I would dispute that if that happened, the whole world, Europe and whatnot would be, well, that's fine.
That's okay.
Like, yes.
Countries can be displeased with other countries forming alliances.
They can be worried.
You can definitely be concerned if people are amassing military weapons aimed at your population, right?
But I feel like even if we take for granted his premise that the U.S. would not stand for it and would militarily engage, that just condemns the U.S., right?
Because then you can say, well, the U.S. Is interfering with the sovereignty of other countries because of its geopolitical things.
But that is not a reason to say, well, we should tolerate that everywhere else.
We shouldn't tolerate the US dictating what every other sovereign country can do.
And we shouldn't tolerate Russia doing that.
But I feel a little bit with the Chomsky perspective is, well, look, the US would do that.
So we can't condemn other countries when we do it.
And I'm more like, why not?
Even if that's true, why don't we just condemn them all and say you can't do that?
Ukraine is a sovereign country.
Mexico is a sovereign country.
Ireland is a sovereign country.
You cannot dictate what policies another country follows.
And if they aggressively, militarily build up in your direction, yes, then you might have conflict.
If you put nuclear warheads pointed at the country's home, you will get a response.
But it's again defaulting to...
The US as the key thing that we should focus on.
And in this case, it's a hypothetical experience because the US is not happy with Cuba.
It has engaged in a blockade.
It hasn't tried to invade Cuba, to my knowledge, in recent decades.
No, it hasn't declared Cuba to be American territory and attempted to annex it.
I mean, last time America annexed something, I think it was Texas, wasn't it?
Well, but people are going to say Iraq.
They did change the regime in Iraq, but Iraq is not annexed as part of the United States now, Chris.
Well, is it not?
Just give it time.
I mean, if it has been annexed by the U.S., then words have lost all meaning, Chris.
Well, first of all, the rationale doesn't make sense.
Russia has declared Ukraine as not to be like a genuine state, basically, that it's not legitimate and that it properly belongs to...
Russia should be part of Russia.
I mean, that's a different motivation than a geopolitical one saying we're very worried about nuclear weapons being stationed here and we can't have an unfriendly country in this strategic location.
Therefore, we have to do something.
So it's a different situation from Cuba or this hypothetical example of Mexico suddenly becoming best friends with...
I feel that we are just repeating a particular perspective on the war in Ukraine that is popular in some hard left circles.
But this is Chomsky highlighting a bit more about why he sees NATO as strongly at fault and the US in particular here.
Take a look at what happened.
In 2021, 2022, we have a record.
The Biden administration offered an enhanced program to Ukraine, enhanced program for entering NATO.
It increased weapon supplies, interoperability of weapons.
The attacks in Donbas continued.
This does not justify the invasion, but it's a background.
Up until February 2022, Russia was still saying, why don't we try to, if you will, consider our security concerns, we can have a negotiated settlement.
That's flatly rejected.
Gets worse.
Last March, there were negotiations between Ukraine and Russia under Turkish auspices.
What did Britain do?
Prime Minister Boris Johnson flew to Ukraine and informed that Britain and the United States don't think this is a time for negotiations.
He was followed by Lloyd Austin, Secretary of Defense for the United States, who presumably gave his typical message, extremely clear, we have to continue the war to severely weaken Russia.
Well, the negotiations collapsed.
We don't know why Western media don't cover these things.
We only know mainly from Ukrainian sources.
For the Western media, like your journal, you don't cover peace and possibilities.
You cover war.
But those are all the facts we know.
Well, does that justify the criminal attack?
No.
Is it an act of criminal stupidity?
Yes.
Okay, so I don't have my...
Fact-checking hat on, Chris.
So I can't speak to all of the little things he mentioned there.
But the general picture is pretty clear, isn't it?
So the way he frames it, which is that...
Russia was very reluctant.
Very reluctant.
United States and the UK, very keen to get Ukraine into NATO, presumably so that they could mount aggressive forces there to threaten Russia.
Ukraine has kind of been, I don't know, led into it, coerced into it or something, somehow inside into it.
Like it isn't the driving, Ukraine isn't the driving force.
So that narrative I think is just totally opposite.
I think Ukraine has been keen to join NATO for understandable reasons for about 10 years.
And there's a lot of reluctance in NATO always to include new members.
You know, a lot of prevarication and a lot of kind of wait and see.
And, you know, there's all kinds of ways to delay it.
So I just think that the way he portrays the history is not accurate.
It's very skewed.
And, like, also, you know, the presentation of Russia as reluctant to invade, you know, provoked to the point of where it's intolerable what's happening.
And we have documents that show that Russia planned to completely chop the head of Ukraine, to take out the leadership in Kiev and take the country.
So they had a view about the war, which was not this like defensive thing where they're just going to shore up the borders and push back.
Like, no, they wanted to absolutely take over the country and install a puppet regime that would be pro-Putin.
Like, it doesn't chive with that.
And even where...
It does benefit from that.
And there are undoubtedly war hawks or anti-Russia hawks in the U.S. who are happy.
But it's this notion that basically the response of the West is, let's sacrifice Ukraine in order to damage Putin.
That's the primary drive.
As if there was the chance for peace and they would just say, no, no, no, screw it.
We can make more money and do a bit more damage this way.
It just feels like an extremely...
Well, Chris, I'd put it like this.
It feels like jamming the...
Round peg of history and recent political events into the square hole of Chomsky's worldview and ideology.
You know, he's a very clever guy and he says some things that is like approximately correct.
Like as you said, he's not totally delusional.
Like you said with the Corbyn thing, it's not that he thinks that the election was literally stolen in the sense that they rigged the ballot boxes and so on.
So it's different from the Trump style.
Distortion of reality.
It's done in a more abstract way, but it sort of fulfills the same purpose, though, doesn't it?
Yes, it does.
And it's a frustration.
And we call other gurus out on this when they say, I'm not doing something.
And then they proceed to do it.
So, like, Chomsky is careful with his words.
And he did say the invasion is a war crime.
He did say it was a criminal attack.
But he spends a lot more time focused on the context and portraying Russia as essentially responsive to the threats presented.
By NATO, which he highlighted, NATO is a much more aggressive military alliance in his perspective than any of the other ones.
They're invading countries willy-nilly.
He's not saying there's a justification.
But all he's doing is piling up things which are used as justifications by Russia.
So how is that not offering at least partial justifications?
Because it's the difference between saying this is relevant context from...
This is a justification, but it is used as a justification.
And I think you can get around a lot of that by just saying, I'm not saying that that's correct, but you are.
You're saying Nido and the US are aggressive military outfits that are more dangerous than the other ones that you've described.
Finland and Sweden are joining just purely for mercantile military contracts, not because of any real perceived threat.
So in all of this, the presentation is presenting Russia as reactive to a belligerent NATO that is encircling it and posed to invade.
Who knows if you're Russia?
Yeah.
What's that phrase of yours, Chris?
Strategic disclaimers.
Strategic disclaimers, yeah.
Like when you lead with the strategic disclaimer, you say it very forcefully, then you've got that settled, and then you can go out and spend 95% of your time talking to the opposite point.
I'm not a racist.
But you can go on for as long as you like.
So it gets called out at that point, but listen.
It sounds to me like you are justifying the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
You're saying the very act of wanting to enter NATO is grounds for Russia feeling sufficiently threatened to then invade Ukraine.
The Western Party line, which Western intellectuals are instructed to adhere to rigorously.
Says that if you tell the facts, that's justifying Russia.
No, it's not justifying Russia.
There's not even a hint of that.
Not even a remote hint.
It's saying, here are the facts that we should face.
That's the facts.
If you get out of the little Western propaganda bubble, move to the global South, everybody says this.
feels that way, that the facts are on his side, just like you and I generally feel like the facts are on our side, Chris.
When I see someone like Jordan Peterson creating this warped worldview, I have the feeling that it is influenced by the attention and the narcissism.
I don't think he's doing it.
To be popular, to get clicks or to sell more books or whatever.
Like, he seems to be genuine about it.
What do you think?
What do you think's going on?
Why exactly he perceives the facts, as he calls them, to be so differently from us?
Yeah, because he has a strong adherence to his particular ideological perspective, which is the same reason that he was sympathetic is perhaps a way to present it.
He wouldn't agree with that, but...
At least looked sympathetically at the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia.
The same reason he had questions about the Srebrenica massacre during the Bosnian War.
His questions around these topics always relate to downplaying the atrocities committed by regimes which are more strongly associated with Socialism or communism than their counterparts and emphasizing the atrocities amongst the capitalist Western countries.
So his latest round of commentary on the Ukraine war, I think, falls into that category.
And, you know, there's a lot of ink spilt on the degree to which you can describe what Chomsky has said about Cambodia.
Or Bosnia or Armenia as genocide denial.
But a lot of it, Matt, is, you know, asking questions about the photos of, oh, there's a fat person in this picture.
So, like, maybe there wasn't the mistreatment which was claimed.
Or maybe the accounts being provided by refugees fleeing the Khmer Rouge's mass atrocities are being over-egged by...
American sources because it serves our purposes.
It's always in a particular direction.
And what I mean is these are pretty...
When Stephen Molyneux says he's not a Holocaust denier, but he wants to emphasize that the leftist Jewish people in the positions of power meant that people were skeptical about the role that Jewish intellectuals played in World War II.
He's just asking questions.
He's just being skeptical of the mainstream narrative.
Yeah, they don't say that.
They don't say that.
They say, you know, that that is in the vein of Holocaust denialism.
Yeah, well, I'm just looking at a summary here of an article that Chomsky wrote with the guy Edward Herman in 1977 about Cambodia, about the Khmer Rouge and the genocide.
What filters through to the American public is as seriously distorted of the evidence available.
Emphasizing alleged Khmer Rouge atrocities and downplaying or ignoring the crucial US role, direct and indirect, in the torment that Cambodia has suffered.
So they write that even though the refugee stories of the Khmer Rouge atrocities should be considered...
Seriously, they also need to be treated with great care and caution because refugees are frightened and defenseless at the mercy of alien forces.
They naturally tend to report what they believe their interlocutors wish to hear.
So, also praised, a book by a couple of others which painted a very favorable picture of the Khmer Rouge's programs and policies.
So, you know, that does sound quite similar, doesn't it, to what we've just been talking about with Ukraine, showing skepticism.
Of the official narrative and, I guess, showing a lot of, I guess, empathy, cognitive empathy, as someone might say, to the alleged perpetrators and sort of shifting attention to the allegedly criminal role of the United States in all of this.
And yeah, and I want to highlight this while we're doing this episode because, to be honest, I find very little worse than when people are downplaying War crimes or have engaged in variations of genocide denialism.
And Chomsky is very clear that he's not denying all these events have happened.
He contests the use of the word genocide for them because of restrictions that he wants applied to that term.
But in the same way, you can hear in these responses.
It's very often like saying, yes, bad things happened, but when we put them in context and when we consider the US's crimes, should we really be focusing on these, you know?
And I just find that absolutely worth highlighting because to me, Chomsky's a smart guy.
People can have different views on politics, right, left, and center.
But anybody engaging in...
Downplaying atrocities or denying war crimes, I think deserves stern criticism and a consideration of how far their ideology impacts their perspective.
Because you can advocate all the same things and the condemnation of the US without downplaying atrocities by communist regimes or other opponents of Western nations or capitalism.
Yeah, I noticed that Christopher Hitchens, who most people think of these days as some sort of, I don't know, near-liberal hawk, actually defended Chomsky on the Khmer Rouge issue, saying that he was simply trying to engage in the admittedly touchy business of distinguishing evidence from interpretations.
On the other hand, you know, I see even back in the 1980s, Chomsky was being accused of attempting to demonstrate some sort of moral equivalence between the Khmer Rouge and the Americans to sort of postulate these significantly lower numbers of victims and essentially downplaying and minimising.
And, you know, whether or not you see that as just being appropriately sceptical and just asking questions or whatever, I mean, I think we have to, you know, we understand the motivations, which his primary concern is the...
Crimes committed by America.
But I think we have to admit that there is a consistent theme throughout his career to downplay and minimize crimes committed by others.
Regimes of this particular political ideology, or at least in opposition to a specific political ideology.
Yeah, so I will put links, you know, for people who want to look more into it and there are people who may think that his approach is more legitimate to these topics than I do, but I really genuinely think that those comments and his approach are a stain on his legacy.
He never revised or reviewed any of those opinions to your knowledge, Chris, that he's made over the years?
Well, typically he argues that whatever positions he's taken were justified at the time and that if you look carefully at what he said, he did not do what his opponents are accusing him of.
But I feel that in general, he remains rather steadfast in his perspectives.
And I believe that, you know, when times when he's asked if he would do anything differently, none of it.
It focuses around, like, his comments on massacres or atrocities, right?
He never expresses regret for that.
So I don't think he sees those as legitimate errors.
Rather, people, like, misrepresenting what he said to make it sound worse is the way I think he would perceive that.
But I don't think that's accurate.
So there we go.
So now...
Let's see where to go from here.
So we've done Chomsky on Ukraine and the UK.
We've covered his anti-Gurism.
Maybe to finish on a slightly positive note, as opposed to, you know, potential genocide, denialism, or that kind of thing, we can look at some of the questions where he was asked.
About his legacy or how he sees what the future will hold.
I think there again, you do get to see some of his positive attributes.
So let's see.
What would you like your legacy to be?
If you could write your own heading on your own tombstone.
Here lies Noam Chomsky.
What would you like the rest of that sentence to say?
He tried his best.
Yeah, that's a good epitaph.
That's good, and also here's another one.
If we knew this was going to be our last day on earth, I asked Professor Hawking this actually.
I said, how would you spend it?
And he said he would get his family together, he would play Wagner very loudly, and he would drink fine champagne.
If you knew it was all about to end, how would you spend your last day?
I would get my family together, but skip the rest.
I mean, he's very likable.
I like the way he responds to those questions.
He doesn't put some sort of flair on it to ingratiate himself or trying to think of something clever or whatever.
He doesn't seem to be particularly concerned with impressing people.
No, and he's not into, like, he cares about his political opinions, he cares about his linguistic views and whatnot, but in terms of him personally and his importance as a kind of guru figure, I think he doesn't see that, and this is another example of that.
If I had the power to let you relive one moment in your life, what would you go for?
Some moments are almost miraculous.
Like the birth of my first child and many other things like it.
But I don't see much point talking about my personal life and situation.
There are more important things in the world.
Again, this is very different from most of the gurus we cover who are very keen to talk about their personal revelations and their personal traumas and their personal moments of enlightenment.
Yeah, and I'll also say, Matt, he doesn't fall into the traps that a lot of the gurus we've covered do in terms of, like, automatically sneaking out contrarian positions on whatever issue.
He doesn't just oppose mainstream narratives in general.
Maybe 40% believes in divine guided evolution.
The rest say the world was created 10,000 years ago.
This is...
Expanded by an enormous anti-science movement, which is quite powerful.
It goes back a century.
The corporations that were producing lethal products like lead, tobacco, asbestos, recently fossil fuels, scientific information was beginning to accumulate.
About a century ago about the harmful effects of these products.
Corporate sector recognized that it's no use to deny the facts.
If you try to deny them, you'll just be refuted.
They picked another path.
Let's sow doubt about science.
Why should we believe scientists?
They keep changing their minds.
They're bought by big corporations.
They're a bunch of liberals.
They're mostly liberals.
Why should we believe them?
So let's sow doubt about science altogether.
That's had a big effect.
That's had effect in all kind of areas.
It's a large part of the basis for the anti-vaccine movement.
Which I was surprised to see in recent polls is pretty large in Britain.
I think about a third of the population thinks COVID was a conspiracy.
All of this is coming out of the major corporate-led anti-science movement which is going on in the first century.
It had extremely harmful effects.
I can't calculate the number of people murdered.
Lethal products like lead tobacco and so on, but now it's survival of human species.
We don't deal with the fossil fuel overuse.
We're finished.
But it doesn't matter to the corporate sector.
They have to make profit tomorrow.
Incidentally, I don't blame them for that.
So, I mean, a couple of things there.
Like, if you did a straw poll of all of Chomsky's views, you know, sampled them.
Equally, then you'd find that there'd be an awful lot of overlap, I think, with what you and I would believe in and also the issues that you and I would be concerned with.
And I think that's worth remembering.
I think he's got perfectly sensible views about a wide range of things.
I remember when one of the questions he was asked in one of these interviews was, what are his two main worries about the world?
And he didn't come up with some obscure, weird pet obsession.
He said, climate change, And nuclear war, which I think is a very rational pair of global concerns, thinking in the long term.
The only point at which he lost me there, and I think this speaks to his ideological slant, is he mentioned the corporations as being responsible for the anti-vax wave that he was quite surprised by.
So we obviously share his concern with the anti-vax movement.
You and I pay very close attention to it.
I think pointing the finger at Big corporations as being the driving factor there.
I think he's letting his ideological slant show a little bit.
Yeah, just a little bit.
So it is true that corporations have historically and are involved in various efforts to downplay climate change, to argue that tobacco wasn't causing cancer or muddy the water and whatnot.
So there's plenty of legitimate things to call out.
The notion that they are primarily responsible for anti-vaccine sentiment just seems incorrect.
He's on slightly stronger ground blaming the corporations as the instrumental factor for lack of sensible policy on climate change, which is one of my biggest concerns personally.
Because they obviously do fund advocacy groups and do...
Essentially, lobbying and things like that to influence policy.
But as someone who really shares with Chomsky the view that it's one of the greatest frustrations of my life, that the world hasn't been taking it more seriously and acting faster, you know, I have to say, you can't blame entirely the corporations.
I mean, it's the governments that basically let them do what they do, mined coal.
Deliver energy in this particular way.
And those governments are voted in by people like you and me.
And yes, they're influenced by shock jocks and lobbyists and money.
But at some point, I think us individual people need to take responsibility as well.
Well, I'll leave you and Chomsky.
Climate change.
I probably do agree with him on it.
But yes, I think his conspiratorial tendencies or anti-corporate position leak into his views a little bit.
There's actually been a very strong movement in the corporate sector.
I mean, it's been criticized as being this sort of woke corporatism where they've actually, like, there's business groups and stuff like that.
They may not have coal miners.
But they've got an awful lot of other corporations involved, you know, doing things in their corporate jargon and their corporate way of doing things to actually basically make decarbonization a corporate policy, even though it doesn't necessarily contribute to the bottom line.
So it's controversial because it's like a corporate objective that isn't based on maximizing profits.
But there are movements within the corporate sector which...
Yeah, no.
I just don't buy that sort of traditional view, which is, okay, corporations, the bad guys.
The United States, the bad guys.
The wonderful grassroots people, we're the good guys.
The non-Western nations, they're all good guys too.
I just don't like that Manichean view of the world.
Spoken like a good neoliberal Shilma.
Your check is in the mail.
So, I think we've spent enough time on Chomsky.
We've covered quite a range of things, and this is a little bit of an unusual episode because of all the different parts that we've tried to get.
But Chomsky is 94. If we do another guru that's in his 90s, we'll probably have to do a similar level of material in order not to feel like we're not doing him justice.
And people will take issue with various things that we've not covered or that we have covered too much or whatever the case.
And if that is so, so be it.
So be it.
You do your own decoding.
Leave us alone.
We did him.
And we've got...
So I think I'll say in...
Very brief terms, uncharacteristically, that in terms of a bunch of the figures that we typically associate with the secular guru set, Chomsky doesn't fit the mold because he does seem to genuinely dislike being presented as an important special figure,
public intellectual.
He presents himself as just an academic, just a...
Political commentator, whatnot.
But in terms of his commitment to his ideological outlook and his certainty that his perspective is correct and the slightly conspiratorial framing of the world that he operates under,
I do think there are tendencies that he shares with.
So I would anticipate that they will score in the mid-range.
And just to be clear, for the 100,000th time in this episode, this is not to say anybody with a leftist or hard-left perspective automatically falls somewhere into a guru camp.
No, there's lots of people who just hold those politics and are not really guru types.
These are separate things.
There are also moderately...
People who share the same politics as me and engage in secular guru type stuff.
You know, probably people like Yuval, what's his name?
Yuval Harari?
Yeah, you know, might fall into that.
And we will have a look at them.
So let's see.
So I'm just saying my main issue with Chomsky is his ideological fixation that leads to potential genocide minimization.
Or atrocity minimization.
That, to me, is very bad.
And I think it's on the spectrum of why he presents the Labour defeat under Corbyn as a victory in the interview that we heard.
Yeah, I concur.
I think he'll score quite lowly on the Garometer.
We'll see.
We'll see.
Basically, like you said, don't pick up these guru-esque vibes.
And it's not because I'm sympathetic towards lefties.
He's far more left than me, and I think he is ideologically blinkered on those hot-button, kind of anti-imperialist issues.
I understand why he's kind of obsessed with the bad things that the United States and the West has done.
There are heaps of legitimate concerns and...
Recriminations that can and should be made there.
But I think that obsessive focus, in my eyes, leads him to have a blinkered view of the world more generally.
So I think he's a smart guy.
He's quite interesting.
You can hear him talk about linguistics or other random things, and he's always interesting to listen to.
You see the ideological...
Glasses, impinging from time to time.
But, you know, in the end, he's a smart guy, an academic, very productive and prolific with opinions.
I don't really see many guru-esque qualities.
So, fair play to him.
All right, well, we'll see when we quantify where he falls.
But, yes, so that's Chomsky done and dusted, at least for now.
Should you want...
Some reflections on the topic.
More discussion of Chomsky.
There will be the Grometer episode on the Patreon.
So look out for that.
Now, Matt, to finish off this short little episode, we need to finish with two things.
The shout-outs for the Patreons and the review of reviews.
But I also want to just give a personal shout-out to somebody on Twitter.
Who goes by Terence T, Research Remora on Twitter, who produced these very nice visualizations of our Garometer scores.
So if you want to see them, go on Twitter.
Matt and I have retweeted them.
The account has retweeted them.
And they're very nice, these little, I don't know the name for the chart, but a nice visualization of our very subjective scores.
On the gurometer for each of the gurus, at least up to 2022.
Yeah, absolutely gorgeous visualizations in that infographic style.
So we might have to commission it to make some big posters for us, Chris, and people can put them up on their wall and gaze at them before they go to sleep.
Yeah, no, reviews, Matt.
We've had a few.
No, I quite enjoyed.
One of them.
We've had a raft of five-star reviews.
Not so many negative reviews.
And I think given the length of this episode, I'm just going to read one of the good ones.
I think this is a nice one, the end on.
A positive note for us.
Is that alright?
Or do you demand that I get a negative one?
No.
No, I could do with a bit of encouragement today.
Okay, that's good.
So this one is titled My Boyfriend Regrets Recommending This Podcast.
Five stars by Lady Bird Lawyer.
It's a promising start.
So my boyfriend regrets recommending this podcast, or at least he should.
He innocently suggested I may enjoy the podcast, and I do.
As a result, he is subjected to my frequent attempts to discuss episodes that have long faded from his memory.
However, I knew nothing of the IDW, and now he must shoulder the responsibility of knowing I may have remained blissfully unaware of the Weinstein brothers, if not for his suggestion.
More to the point...
I have transformed into a conspiracy hypothesizer, and this is a review of the video version of the podcast.
My reviewer.
Ah, they have very nice smiles and look like they're having fun.
Boyfriend's reviewer.
Chris seems more coherent when you can see his face.
Matt sounds like his hair.
Stunning five stars.
That sounds like he's there.
I like it.
I love it.
That's an excellent review.
I like it on all counts.
It must be amazing to have a partner with whom one can discuss the content in Dakota and the Gurus with.
My wife knows nothing of this world.
I mean, I try to tell her, but she zones out immediately.
So I've got the message.
I should change the topic quickly.
But, you know, I get enough of it talking to you.
And with the Patreons on the get-together.
You glided over, Matt, the fact that I was remarked to be more coherent if you can see my face.
What does that imply with many millions of people that can't see my face?
Yeah, I know.
It doesn't imply good things.
Yeah, I took it to mean, yeah, your coherence is, the baseline is so low, but being able to see your mouth move, you know, helps.
It makes you slightly more coherent.
I sound like my hair.
My hair, as everyone knows, looks amazing.
So I took that pretty much as a straight-up compliment.
Alabaster white floating.
Just imagine a young Gandalf and you've got a very good image.
Yeah, so that's that.
That was a good review.
Thank you, Lady Bird Lawyer and Boyfriend.
And Boyfriend.
For recommending us to be her.
To you.
That's it.
Thanks.
Yeah.
What else?
Oh, yes.
Patreon shoutouts, Matt.
That's the people that support the Enterprise DTG in all its facets and sign off on all of our analysis of Chomsky and other figures.
Yeah.
And just before we thank them specifically, generally, big thank you to our...
Top tier Patreons.
I forget who they are.
Well, I know who they are, but I forget what the tier is called.
But the ones who come to our monthly, whatever it's called, live stream.
Why are you thanking them?
My!
Well, it's just a general thank you because it is more of a donation than a, you know, we realize that the benefits that they get just from being in that tier, it's more supporting us rather than them getting anything returned.
So I just want to say we are aware of that and thank you.
Come on, Chris.
The benefits aren't that great.
Let's face it.
They get an audience.
A monthly audience with us.
If I tried to sell an audience with me to anyone in real life, I don't think I could get $10 for it.
Agreed.
I agreed.
You couldn't.
But the point is, by doing that, you've now made me have to shout them out because it'd be weird to double shout them out.
So now I have to start.
For example, we might thank Mike S. That would be one of them.
We might also thank Samuel Rivas.
We're thanking Kyle Wilson, Polly Surf, Jim Brown, Mohammed, and Shane Burke.
Thank you guys and girls.
They're galaxy brain gurus.
That's what you call them.
Galaxy brain gurus.
That's the ones.
Yes.
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.
Let's see.
We'll get to you some hours.
They don't sound a lot like Chomsky, do they?
Not quite.
Not exactly, no.
No, Matt, we're going to go backwards because of what you've made me do in the document.
We're now going to thank the revolutionary genius tier.
This is the mid-tier people who get access to decoding academia, which is a beneficial thing.
You say people don't get any benefit.
Have you not listened to our decoding academia episodes?
Multiple hours on linear regressions.
Discussions of meta-analyses.
Who wouldn't pay for that kind of thing?
Everything you wanted to know about multivariate statistics, but we're too afraid to ask.
You can hear it there.
So that's right.
That's the benefit you get at the $5 tier.
Hey, that's the medium tier.
You get Decoding Academia.
And you get it if you have the $10 tier.
You get it as part of it.
You can listen to them twice at the $10 tier.
You're licensed to listen to them twice.
Yeah.
You can probably request that we do one.
We might.
We should do that.
We should take requests for the Decoding Academia.
We're open to that.
We'll put it up on the Patreon.
We can ask people.
So there we have to find people like Ymir's Dreams, Chad Jones, Dulce Maria.
People really are called Chad.
Sorry, Chad.
Sorry, Chad.
Sorry.
It's a fine name.
It is a fine name.
Martin Mason, Mr. PJ Bellchamber.
I hope that is his name.
Roderick Boyd.
Dead Eye Nick, Durple, Josh White.
You should all reconsider your names.
I know most of them are just...
Terry.
No problems with Terry.
No problems.
I like Terry as well.
Logan Bank, Matthew Meyer, Ian Tierney, Angus, Dirk K, and Dazai.
Yes.
All those guys.
And gals.
Which tier is this again?
Revolutionary Geniuses.
Okay, great.
Well, that's good.
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.
Those are a nice combination.
I like it backwards.
Yeah.
So, the last, the meek shall inherit the earth.
The conspiracy hypothesizers who are the most popular tier, Matt.
Is it?
What a surprise.
What a surprise.
No, no.
I think, what is it, $2 or something?
That's very reasonable.
In the game of chess, the pawns are important.
You need them.
If you just had castles and knights and stuff...
When are you going to sacrifice?
Nothing.
You have to be sacrificing someone more important.
Someone who's earning $10 a month.
This is right.
World War I revealed the tactics.
You just send them in weaves.
Human wave of $10 Patreons and then see what happens.
That's it.
That's how you visualize them, isn't it, Matt?
Intellectual cat and fodder.
We should rename it.
Now, what do $2 patrons get, Chris?
Access to the Patreon and the bonus material that goes up there.
Things like the Garometer, things like bonus episodes, of which we have like 50 of those things in the bank and stuff.
That's actually heaps.
Actually, you guys are getting a really good deal.
A lot.
You just don't get the code in academia because that's $3 extra.
That's so good.
And it's so good.
I just, I can't tell you how good it is.
No, no.
I mean, it's a dilemma, isn't it, Chris?
Like, if you like, like, say, 10 podcasts, that's like, you know, $2.
It's just $20 a month for people to get away on the internet.
Well, most other podcasts put their lowest tier at $5, Matt, but we're not like that.
You know, I remember it was me that suggested we make a $2 lower tier because I just had low self-confidence.
Feelings of self-worth, I think.
It was you that suggested and I that accepted.
Yes.
That's true.
But yeah, we don't mind.
That's fine.
$2, I think, is a fair amount.
The $5 and $10, as you've highlighted, are symbolic gestures of support as well as we provide you with benefits.
But, you know, that's it.
I wouldn't suggest to anyone to increase your overall podcast Patreon spend.
But if you wanted to redirect, Some of your support from other podcasts to us.
It's like I wouldn't encourage anyone to start smoking.
But, you know, if you're smoking one brand, you could switch to another.
If you were supporting the Weinsteins, have we got you out of it?
Maybe you or us.
Have you considered it like that?
But no, I'm good.
It's all right.
You don't have to contribute anything if you don't want to.
If you want to, you can.
Especially if you're young.
If you're under 20, you probably don't have much money.
Don't want your $2.
Keep it.
Buy yourself an ice cream.
Buy a coffee.
But nonetheless, people that we need to thank, those are people like Kyle Ferreter, Stuart Eacob, Peter Ross, Jonathan Howard, Anders Norman, Wesley Maffley-Kipp,
Will VZ, Avic Roy Chaudhry, Alexis Neil Horwoff, Stephen Hench, Peter Musgrave, Gabriel, Marie Caldwell, Engons
Burgess, Cameron Osborne, Zach, Two Leg Humanist, and Saad Amhed.
Fantastic.
Fantastic.
We appreciate you.
Good bunch of people.
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.
And boy, is he continuing to do so.
Brett and Heather barreling down the anti-vax tunnel of death.
They're just nightmares.
But we've given people enough nightmares already, Matt.
So thank you, everybody, for listening today.
I will clock the traditional guru clock signal at the end of the episode.
