Interview with the Conspirituality Trio: Navigating the Chakras of Conspiracy
Back in the early days of the podcast, we tried to take a rest from the wearisome repetition of polemical partisan gurus by covering JP Sears- an alternative-health self-help coach with a sideline in 'comedic parody'. Sadly, we soon discovered he was a red-pilled Roganite 'just asking questions' about all the usual right-wing partisan topics, but with an added dollop of pseudo-profound, self-indulgent spiritual blather.JP Sears wasn't an isolated case; he exemplified a disturbingly prevalent trend. One that was supercharged during the pandemic and can be observed clearly in figures like Russell Brand, Aubrey Marcus, RFK Jnr and a whole slew of QAnon and anti-vaccine influencers.To help us disentangle this quagmire and the dynamics at play, we are joined by the three co-hosts of the popular Conspiritualty podcast: Matthew Remski, Julian Walker, and Derek Beres.We've spoken with them many times over the past few years about a variety of topics but in today's conversation, we explore the contemporary state of the Conspirituality sphere and discuss broader themes they have observed (& how they relate to the gurus we cover). We also examine whether they view activism as core to their podcast, how they handle attacks or engage with legitimate criticism, and how they feel about their own place in the ecosystems they discuss.We hope you enjoy the conversation as much as we did!Also covered in the opening segment is a cursed guru-sphere crossover between the Triggernometry guys and our old favourite, Scott Adams.LinksThe new Conspirituality Book!Our recent appearance on Conspirituality to hear the tables get turned!Review of Conspirituality at Science Based Medicine by Jonathan HowardNY Times: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the Coalition of the Distrustful'Why I quit the Conspirutality Podcast' by Be ScofieldMedium article referenced on the Defamation caseTriggernometry: Trump Must Win to Avoid Prison - Scott AdamsOther LinksOur PatreonContact us via email: decodingthegurus@gmail.comThe DTG Subreddit
Hello and welcome to Decoding the Gurus, the podcast where an anthropologist and a psychologist listen to the greatest minds the world has to offer and we try to understand what they're talking about.
I'm Matt Brown, with me is Chris Kavanagh.
As always, it's the middle of the day.
I've done all my meetings.
We thought, it's time to record.
We're going to record.
How are you doing, Chris?
I'm doing all right.
I'm doing all right.
It's mid-week.
No, it's not.
It's the end of the week.
Oh, God, I've even forgotten what day it is.
I'm counting down the hours.
Yeah, this is again the kind of thing that we always say you shouldn't do because then people know the day.
I don't understand why people shouldn't know.
Why shouldn't they know?
So they feel that they're part of the eternal present of the decoding the guru universe.
That's the reality, guys.
You're listening to this in the future.
This is the past.
We're in the past.
I can stop you, like the Bill and Ted time-traveling guy.
Just go back and undo what you've done.
But yes, so Matt, we have an interview episode today with the fine folks over from the Conspirationality podcast.
We were on there recently and they grilled us relentlessly about our obsession with secular gurus.
And we returned a favor by asking them, Conspirationality!
What's the big idea?
We did.
We did.
That's right.
And it's not just a gratuitous cross-promotional thing.
No, no, no.
Not just.
It is that.
It is that.
But, you know, we are kindred spirits.
We are fellow travellers.
Our podcasts came up together, grew up together.
They subsequently became much more successful than us due to doing a lot more work and producing much more.
Finely honed product.
But nevertheless, we think of them as our brothers-in-arms, or bigger brothers, our more successful brothers.
That's it.
So, yeah, like clike goblins, we must reach out to them and extract the crumbs from their audience that we could get.
Now, just, you know, we like to chat to people like good public discourse combatants.
So there we go.
We'll talk to them.
In a little bit.
But before that, Matt, before we get to that tasty treat, I have some news from the Guru Sphere.
It continues to rotate.
It's vacillating all over the place.
It continues to be a target-rich environment.
There is no shortage of choices, are there?
And you get to choose.
You're the decider.
And we have so many things forthcoming that are on.
The docket to do.
I haven't forgot about Matthew McConaughey.
Sam Harris is coming up.
We have Brett Weinstein and the UFO people.
And we keep having random ideas.
I see good ideas on the...
Reddit.
And I have my own ideas.
Like, oh, we could do Destiny.
That'd be interesting.
I want to do Destiny.
Huberman and Adia did a thing about reading a paper.
There's so many things.
The Red Scare, ladies.
We got a lot to do.
But we'll get there.
We'll get there.
Today, though, Matt, I'm just dipping my toe into a toxic pool of gurury because...
There was a cursed crossover between Trigonometry and our old friend Scott Adams, the original sneak-like guru from the early days of the podcast.
Yeah, and you were telling me about this.
I haven't heard any of this yet, but like you, I think.
I remember that Scott Adams was really bad.
He was.
Shivers up my spine.
I remember my reaction viscerally, but the actual...
The actual specifics of the stuff that he said and how he said it.
It's kind of faded away.
I think my mind has blocked it out.
And you, I think, had the same experience.
You'd forgotten how bad it was.
I think I had vaguely, you know, I had the flashbacks where I woke up in the night.
No, Scott!
I also thought, well, you know, maybe we covered him quite early in the podcast.
So maybe if we had more experience with worse gurus, we wouldn't have found him.
Quite so terrible, right?
Yeah, that's right.
Like maybe it was just a contrast effect or whatever.
And maybe it would become hardened and actually he's just one of a crowd.
But is that the case, Chris?
Is that the case?
Well, I'm going to show you.
So shall I play your clip?
Before you play the clip, I need to tell everybody about my dream.
I know people like to hear about you and your peanuts and your green drinks.
But this one is apropos because in my dream, I was trapped in the backseat of a car.
With Russell Brand.
And Russell Brand was talking to me incessantly.
He was like staring deeply into my eyes and he was waving his hands around and he was going on and on.
Think about vaccines and governments and the new world and stuff.
It was like a stress stream because you had canvassed the...
Possibility of us covering another cursed crossover.
I think Sam Harris spoke to...
It wasn't even me that suggested that, Matt.
That was the subreddit people.
So you were just reacting to the mere possibility.
I was, I was.
And in my dream, I was saying to him...
Just please, shut the fuck up.
Please, for the love of God, stop talking.
And then he wouldn't.
And then I eventually woke up in a cold sweat.
That happened at 2.30am in the morning.
I could not go back to sleep, Chris.
I could not go back to sleep.
And it ruined my entire day afterwards.
And then sometime after, I saw on the subreddit, somebody had posted a thread about telling Russell Brand to shut the fuck up.
They wanted Sam Harris to just break down during the interview.
Angela, Adam.
So isn't that cosmic?
Anyway, it's all connected.
This is what's happening to me.
It's interfering with my life.
That's the crystalline structure of resonant patterns of thought that you're experiencing there, as the sense makers have taught me.
And maybe an egregore is involved in some respect, but the clear...
Takeaway there is we don't need Dr. Freud or Dr. Jung.
It's obvious that you're terrified about what I'll make you listen to.
So that's what we should take away from that.
And on that thing, Matt, I'm now going to make you listen to this.
Scott, I would ask you this.
You're watching what is happening with Trump.
Now, I'm in agreement with you.
To me, at a very surface-level analysis, it doesn't look legit.
It looks targeted.
It looks political.
But doesn't that make you worry that come election time, which is literally next year, things are going to get very ugly?
Yeah.
So here's the warning that I try to give everybody.
It does look like there might be some attempt by the Democrats or whoever's running things to get the Republicans to overreact.
Because if they can get another January 6th kind of reaction, some kind of a mass protest, then once again, they get to say, well, look at all those white supremacists, insurrectionists, Trump's the devil, you know, he's the one who caused it all.
So they can just recreate the same op, and people are already primed to fill in that frame with whatever new confirmation bias they give.
So I don't want to say, if this happens, there will be, you know, violent acts.
Because then I would be part of, you know, maybe encouraging people to think in those ways.
And I don't.
I don't encourage any violence.
Instead, I'd rather say that we're creating a situation which has no predictability.
In other words, if Trump were to lose again, let's say worst case scenario, he runs against Joe Biden, which looks to be like that's going to happen, at least some people imagine.
Biden continues to degrade until it's just obvious there's nothing there at this point.
But imagine if Trump lost under that situation.
Do you think that his supporters would say that was a fair election, they just preferred the guy with no cognitive ability over Trump?
Would you say that?
Or do you think they're going to say, well, there's proof.
First time we weren't positive, we were suspicious, but this second time he was running against an empty suit.
If he loses then, that's unpredictable.
Now, if I were to advise people how to act, if they were sure an election had been, let's say, not completely fair, definitely wouldn't be with guns.
Definitely wouldn't be with violence.
But the same thing I would recommend if Trump spends a day in jail.
Everybody should show up.
Everybody.
You should just walk off your job.
And just show up.
Get a couple million people standing around the jail and you don't need any violence, right?
At some point, peaceful energy can be as big as violence and more productive.
So I think something massive in terms of physical action, short of violence, would be the right play.
But I don't know exactly what that looks like.
So there are not a lot of options if we reach that point.
Does that bring back fond memories?
Yeah, he slips and slides and twists and turns, doesn't he?
So the original Capitol riot was an op.
It was an op.
Yeah, it was obviously like a kind of trap set for Trump, right?
Like by the Democrats.
They wanted that to happen to justify.
Because remember, Scott thinks that the election was also stolen.
Or he doesn't know for certain, but there's no way to tell that the election was fair and blah, blah, blah.
So the MAGA people were maneuvered into accidentally storming the Capitol building.
And if Biden were to win the next election against Trump, then that would be just clear and obvious evidence that it was stolen.
Yeah, and if he were to advocate violence, that would make him a target.
So he's not advocating that.
He's not advocating that.
But if everyone were just to do some form of mass protest, if that were to happen, if they were just to shut down the country, wouldn't that be something, right?
Yeah, yeah.
Like you said, it's easy to forget that he is like a, Like a rank, conspiratorial, partisan operative.
And that's kind of all there is to it in some respects.
Well, let's hear another clip to see.
Maybe you're being unfair to him, Matt.
Maybe he's a bit more nuanced than all of that.
Yeah, look, I agree.
I don't think there's a lot of options.
Do you think that this has damaged Trump's chance?
I think he's going to win.
I think he's going to win the nomination.
But do you think that's actually damaged his chances of winning the election as a whole, the fact that he's got all these indictments against him?
I think there are only two things that could stop him.
Well, maybe three.
One would be a rigged election that could stop him.
Two would be if he keeps talking, because, you know, things he says, they take out of context.
So if he says a new thing they can take out of context, you know, they've got a whole new weapon.
So if he plays it cool and doesn't say much more than the things he always says, he should just coast into the presidency.
Now, the other thing which has no scientific basis, maybe, is the idea, Elon Musk says this, and I like to say it as well, that reality tends to be biased toward the most entertaining outcome, not for the people in the story, it might be all bad for them,
but from the observer's point of view, the most entertaining outcome.
And by far, the most entertaining outcome, if you know a standard three-act movie play, at the end of the third act, the hero of the movie is in such a bad situation, you can't even imagine how they would get out.
And somehow they do.
Here's what the perfect movie would look like.
I don't predict it.
I'm just telling you, if that way of predicting works, this is what it would look like.
Trump is either on the risk of going to jail or even maybe spends a day in jail.
And somehow, at about the same time as the election is nearing, proof of election irregularity in 2020 is provided.
It actually comes out of nowhere.
I don't see any.
Let me be clear.
I'm not aware of any election irregularity that I think is credible.
But that would be the perfect movie if the thing...
That most people have discounted at this point.
I don't think there's going to be any smoking gun.
We're not going to find anything, if there is anything.
It would be the perfect movie to sweep him into office based on finding out that was true.
And then to clean house and take care of as much business as he needs to.
Now, at this point, I think it's an existential risk to Democrat leadership.
I think they're looking at jail.
They're not looking at just losing an election.
And I think they know that.
Yeah, that was confusing, Chris.
That's astute analysis, Matt.
I don't know what was confusing there.
So Elon Musk has said, you know, the thing that will happen is the most entertaining.
And Scott thinks the most entertaining thing would be for the 2020 election irregularities to be foolproof evidence.
Now, of course, he said he hasn't seen any...
Evidence.
He doesn't think that's coming.
He's not even saying that's coming, despite the fact that he has said that in content that we've covered before.
And he will go on to say that in this very episode.
But he's not saying that.
And he's just saying that would be a perfect ending.
And then the Democrats know that?
And it's an existential risk to them?
That they will go to jail because...
Why?
Why does he think?
Because they stole the election.
They stole the election from Trump.
So Trump won't go to jail and they will.
Well, no, Scott's not predicting that.
He's just saying that would be funny.
Yeah.
Yeah.
What do you do with that?
What does any of that even mean?
Yeah.
No, Matt, the here you're going to hear, you heard.
Francis, whose main contribution in this is to say, yeah, that makes sense, Scott.
Yeah, I think you're right.
Yeah, you know, it is politically targeted and whatnot.
But now you're going to hear Constantine come in with a bit of balance, you know, bring in their centrist cred.
Because once you say, you know, Trump, we're going to put you in actual jail and we're trying as hard as we can to do it.
The gloves are off.
There's nothing to keep Trump from saying, all right, if I can find any ridiculous reason that you broke a law, we're not going to play the old rules where if it isn't a good reason, you don't pursue it.
Because that's not the way they played.
So, in a way, I think he may have brought it on himself, his very first statement about Hillary Clinton should be in jail.
I feel like when he started talking real jail, then politics changed.
And they said, if you're going to talk real jail for us, we're actually going to put you in jail.
And it looks like that's what's happening.
So if he wins in this third act, you know, miraculous, you know, don't expect it, but who knows, you know, find something about the election that sticks, then a lot of people, I think, he'd try to jail.
And I'd be in favor of that, actually.
Well, if you think about your scenarios in part three, I mean, him winning as a result of election interference in 2020 being revealed, if there is any, I think is unlikely given what we've seen in terms of, you know, the Hunter Biden laptop.
That got suppressed a few days before the election.
So even if there is anything, which, as you say, there's no evidence that we have that there is, I don't know that that would get there.
But what I'm curious to ask you, Scott, is a bigger picture question, which is what you've described is actually a very sad downward spiral for your country.
And the question, I suppose, is this.
I am old enough to remember when Al Gore lost the election to George Bush.
It was very close.
The Democrats fought, but eventually conceded.
That he'd lost and George Bush became president.
When Hillary lost to Donald Trump in 2016, she took a long time and in fact I don't know if she ever fully accepted that she lost.
She called him an illegitimate president.
I believe he knows he's an illegitimate president.
He knows.
He knows that there were a bunch of different reasons why the election turned out the way it did and I take responsibility for those parts of it that I should.
And so it goes on, like Constantine pointing out that actually Hillary Clinton is the one who, the Democrats, you know, they are the one that brought this on and Trump is really just responding to a general trend to deny the legitimacy of elections.
To not concede elections.
Okay, Chris, so your memory is better than mine.
Did Hillary Clinton concede?
No, Hillary Clinton notably conceded on the night.
Of the election and called Donald Trump up to congratulate him.
And although she did then go on to talk about the role of the Russian campaign to support Trump and various other campaigns, that is not the same as refusing to admit that you lost an election.
Alleging in very clear terms that the count was rigged.
That's different from saying that foreign disinformation campaigns and stuff like that, which led to people voting for the other party.
It's different to say that the actual ballot machines were tampered with and votes were stolen.
That's quite a different thing, isn't it?
Yeah.
And people like Constantine would point out that some Democrats did believe that Russia had hacked election boxes or whatever.
But the point is, it was not a mainstream position.
Of the Democratic Party.
And they did not attempt all these maneuvers to get people in positions of authority to make that claim.
That's the difference with Trump.
He actually tried to pressurize people to lie about results and to get people in positions of power to claim that.
So that's completely different.
And that's why he's been...
Indicted, right?
For various things, because what he does is less ambiguous.
Yeah, and just a small point, perhaps, but in terms of this trend of all the Democrats refusing to concede elections, Barack Obama had the transition to Trump.
That doesn't matter, Matt.
That was also, he was reluctant.
He didn't look happy.
He didn't look happy.
Also that bit where, you know, Scott says, you know, Well, we didn't have evidence about the election being rigged.
And Constance says, you know, yes, that's right.
But like, let's bear in mind that the media suppressed effectively the Hunter Biden.
Laptop stories.
So even if there was evidence, we wouldn't know.
But let's be clear, we don't have evidence.
But they would suppress it if there was.
It's just, it's the two snakes in a bush wiggling around, like, wrapping in each other's little stories.
It's so obvious.
And it goes throughout the whole interview in this vein.
Like, everything that is brought up is...
The Democrats are doing this and Trump is being persecuted.
And there's occasional throwaway lines about, oh, Trump isn't the best candidate or that kind of thing.
But like 90% is just always, always endorsing the claim that the election was stolen and things were red.
And this specific clip, Matt, the last one, I think you will recognize.
The kind of motif that we often hear from other gurus, including Constantine, including Eric Weinstein, about the failure of institutions and the doubt this shows in things like democratic processes.
They can check their vote, but nobody knows who they are.
So then you can do a random sample and say, okay, did these 10,000 people, did they check and their vote actually was recorded as they voted or not?
You wouldn't have to check everybody.
You could check 10,000 randomly.
So there's probably a whole bunch of things you could do that would get you to full transparency, but I don't really see an effort anywhere.
Well, that's really interesting, and that's exactly what I was going to ask you while you were talking, and you bring up the point of not seeing the effort.
Why is that?
It can only be because there's not enough benefit to all the people at the top.
My suspicion is...
All right, let me give you the worst-case suspicion.
Every single one of our large entities we've seen is corrupt.
You know, from the FBI to the DOJ, and I'm not talking about every person, but at least leadership elements.
We've seen that our Congress can be corrupt.
We've seen that the CDC, basically everybody's corrupt once you find out what's really going on.
The exception, we're told, is all 50 separate elections for a national election.
All 50?
All 50 of them are all good, but everything else is corrupt, but not those 50 things.
So here's my speculation.
Pure speculation.
No facts to back it up.
That's what we like, Scott.
That's the basis of every claim about reality online.
It's just my speculation.
You're just honest about it.
He'll go on to explain, Matt, that the elections are shams and whoever's in control is basically just manufacturing the outcome that they want.
That little bit at the introduction was the tail end of the extended thing about how we don't really know.
We've got no means to verify the results of elections in the US.
It's all unknown and people aren't really making any efforts.
The fact that people who spend their careers doing this say that actually...
The US has very robust election procedures.
It's all Scott saying, you know, we don't have two cameras on every ballot being counted and why don't they let one person from each side observe every ballot and so on.
Yeah, the logic seems to go, well, they haven't implemented Scott's random idea about drawing a random sample of 10,000 votes or tracking them to voters or something.
And Scott also knows that every major...
in the United States is totally corrupt.
So if you put those two things together, Chris, it's obvious that the elections have to be stolen, right?
Yeah. It's just, ugh.
It's that layering of premises, you know, like you say, where he says, we all know these are completely corrupt institutions, the CDC, everything is corrupt.
So he's got that premise, which is just his premise.
Then he says, and now you're saying that All of the states, 50 of them, are robust and not corrupt?
Really?
Are you that innocent?
And you're like, no, that's, again, just all the slimy, sneaky inferences where you could say systems are imperfect, there are issues with institutions, but not that allow them to be inherently, totally corrupt.
And actually, there are procedures in place to make sure that elections, Are fair in the US and they're taking quite seriously.
But Scott is just this like sleazy inference.
And then Constantine and Francis just doing their bit to say, well, you know, Scott, you're just being very reasonable.
At least Scott's being honest about it.
Yeah, I mean, the sad irony is, of course, if you define corruption in a very broad sense, in the sense that the institutions of people not operating in exactly the way.
That they ought to or envisage to, but rather operate, at least to some degree, as a function of other incentives, interest groups, lobby groups, things like that.
You know, the sad truth is, of course, there's some truth in all of this, but it's not the weird cartoonish conspiracy that they portray.
It's really quite obvious.
If you just look at how these systems work, you could spot them and you could actually do something about them, but they never focus on the real stuff that is happening, right?
No, and they also have that issue that when there is documented corruption...
On the Republican side, for example, right?
Like, when you have Trump on audio saying, find the extra votes, and they have the records of him conspiring with people to subvert democratic processes, they're not interested.
And they say, that's all targeted.
It's all, this is unfair prosecution.
So they've no interest in, like, ensuring democratic processes.
They just...
It's all taken out of context, like he was saying earlier on.
And I just laughed at myself thinking of, like, how do you find the votes for me?
Yeah, it would be very bad for you.
You know, people are going to say that you counted fake votes.
This would be very bad for you.
You know, my lawyers are telling me, what's that implying, Scott?
That's, you know...
In context, it's just advice, Matt.
It's just helpful advice from Trump.
Such is life.
Yeah, yeah.
It feels like Joe Rogan set the mold here, right?
Because he's the big kahuna who also positions himself as just a guy.
Not particularly politically partisan.
It's just an average Joe trying to figure stuff out.
Let's have some people on to talk about interesting ideas, right?
The trigonometry guys are following in that vein and they're doing exactly what Joe Rogan's doing, which is rabid, partisan, conspiratorial fantasy.
Yes, I am.
Yes, Andy.
I mean, because they will change their tune a little bit when they have different kinds of guests, but that's like Rogan.
They just kind of mirror, but the lean in the susceptibility to conspiracy is quite clearly right violence.
But anyway, Matt, let's turn to some people who are less inclined to conspiracy thinking, the conspiracy guys.
Yeah, let's go.
Okay, so we have with us...
Today, three familiar faces, the guys from Conspirituality.
Hello, Julian, Matthew, and Derek.
It's been a long time.
It's been weeks, at least.
It's great to see you.
Thanks for having us.
Yeah, thank you.
So, I suspect our audience are already very familiar with you guys, but just in case they're not, you are the...
Co-hosts of the Conspirationality podcast, which cover figures that are related to the gurus that we cover, but subtly different in mystical ways that we'll get into.
And you also wrote a book recently with the easy-to-remember title of Conspirationality.
So the subtitle...
That's actually gone out of my head now, but I imagine that one of you three remember what the subtitle was.
Well, it says how New Age conspiracy theories became a health threat.
And can I just say that we went back and forth for months over that subtitle.
We had so many versions of it.
And it's funny that I think still in certain places...
Online, it says, became a public health threat, which was an earlier iteration.
And it was eventually decided that it was too Commonwealth, it was too Canadian, it wouldn't play as well to a US readership.
But it's kind of funny, and I kind of like that it's an artifact still on the internet, because it really is that we are covering how the influencers that we followed...
We're really launching a campaign against the notion of the public per se, you know, in general.
And so, yeah, but we took a long time figuring out that subtitle.
Yeah, I might have came across the alternative versions in some of the material I saw, but I also...
Your book came out in the middle of the year, right?
June of this year.
Yeah.
I think, like, for all of your cases, you've been covering this topic specifically for, I guess, four years or so since the podcast started.
Maybe three?
Three and a half years.
Three and a half.
But you've been covering this emerging area for decades.
Now, personally, in various previous work and also, you know, just your personal lives.
So I have a feeling that the book, reading it, because you detailed your personal experiences as well, must have been a little bit cathartic to release all of that pent-up knowledge plus frustration, I guess,
at observing this phenomenon for coming to culminate.
I mean, I would say when the podcast started, we each had our own kind of working models that we'd been, you know, trying to tell anyone who would listen about what some of these problems were within the yoga and wellness and New Age spirituality kind of space.
And there's something about getting to do the work that we've done now on the podcast and on the book that just...
Took that to the next level.
We were primed for it.
And yeah, it was definitely cathartic and also strangely validating.
Like, yeah, it turns out this actually is a problem.
I'm not just crying wolf.
I think timing is everything because we collectively, the three of us, were working on a similar but less evolved project beginning in 2012 that had a very small niche audience because people didn't think there was any problem in this industry.
And so I agree with Julian that it's validating.
It's all about timing because when the Plandemic documentary dropped and we started this project based off of anti-vaccination, Disinformation and everything else that we we now eventually cover it was like we've had years of being skeptical about these things and so we just kind of slid all that right in whereas most people were Just trying to make sense of where it all started.
We kind of had a head start in that sense.
So it is fortunate that the wellness community went completely batshit at the beginning of the pandemic so that we can begin this project, I guess.
You know, and I'd like to add to that, you know, we did start working together parasocially.
First in 2011, 2012, maybe even a couple of years before we were aware of each other.
But the seeds of what we individually bring to the podcast now were there back then.
I think Derek was always really hawkish on pseudoscience as far as I remember.
And then he had a long writing career at Big Think reading scientific papers and, you know, examining.
You know, supplements and, you know, health claims being made in the wellness industry.
And then Julian and I appeared as co-authors or co-essayists in a collection of essays put out.
In what year was that?
2012.
Yeah, it was called 20th Century Yoga.
And you wrote an essay about how we can actually locate a...
You know, non-theistic, but also, you know, new world and Americanized root of yogic praise in life and embodiment.
Yeah, kind of secular humanist nature spirituality.
Yeah.
That actually, that was what we were looking for in the first place with the counterculture movement, where we grabbed onto these Eastern traditions as if they were that, when actually, if you...
Dig a little deeper, they're a lot more traditional, square, dualistic religion.
Yeah, and then my essay in that volume was called, We Won't Have a Yoga Community Until Every Yoga Studio Doubles as a Soup Kitchen.
And my point was...
You've always been concise.
Yeah, really concise.
And my point was that there was a kind of false sense of solidarity that was being marketed by yoga and wellness spaces.
The word community was being used and perhaps overused in ways that didn't reflect the honesty of these are very commercial enterprises.
That have to do with, you know, selling aspirational products.
But at the same time, they're trying to or they're purporting to fulfill religious and spiritual needs like traditional churches would.
And at the same time, they're not really doing any social work while pretending that they are progressive in nature.
And so, I mean, all of our themes are there going back a decade.
And I think it was really kind of cool to feel them crystallize with really sharp angles and shards over the last three years.
And continue to crystallize.
Yeah.
Because it's evolving and we're evolving with it and our understanding of how it's mutating right now.
Yeah.
We'll get into some of the specific details and threads that you guys are bringing up in more detail in a bit, but just in case, because we often don't do this, in case there was anybody that doesn't have the broader picture of the area that you guys are focusing on related to your book,
so the Conspiraturality space, I'm sure you've been asked this a million times, but how do you guys define it?
And I might ask in a follow-up about, compared to the secular gurus that we focus on, whether you see us detailing a portion of that space or a separate space or how they connect.
Two big, broad corrections, I realize, but whichever one of you want to fill in the blanks.
I can do the first and then maybe one of you guys can do how our stuff relates to the gurometer, for example.
But, you know, we've really defined conspirituality as a mainly online social and religious movement where conspiracy theories become spiritual in nature.
And especially...
The sources are New Age, we mostly look at, but there's also Catholicism in there.
Evangelicals can become conspiritualists.
Sometimes Orthodox Jews are getting involved, and all of that gets shaken together in this cocktail of cults and pseudoscience and leanings toward right-wing extremism, often unconsciously to begin with, and people wrapped up in it.
Are convinced that terrible things are happening in the world.
They have good reason to believe that.
They have deep suspicion of authority and elite actors.
And they believe, this is the interesting part, they believe that becoming aware of...
The corruption of the world is part of a spiritual awakening.
It's a dark night of the soul that by going through it, they will heal the world together somehow.
There's not a lot of particulars about how it happens.
It's very online, as we say, right?
But they want to accelerate that process.
Through meditation, through doing the practices, through mantras, taking supplements, by refusing vaccines, keeping their bodies pure, but then also listening to channelers.
And it tracks to the right politically because it believes that all human institutions, be they government, educational, medicine, journalism, block true spiritual growth.
Those institutions do not know you or your reality or your soul, and so they cannot help you.
Yeah, the institutions are mistrusted because ultimately what they're trying to do is disconnect you from your sovereign truth, from your capacity to tap in to your own inner knowing.
You see this focus on the self project and on developing into a higher version of yourself taken to this extreme where then you have this epistemological claim that the only way to really know anything.
Is through your personal embodied intuition, through tuning in on the downloads from spirit.
And then that's related to the thing that I imagine Derek wants to touch on now.
Each of us covers a different area because we bring our own areas of expertise.
And actually, on the second part of the question about how it intersects, I think Matthew could speak to the cult research aspect and how that draws in communities.
The health aspect.
And because people think that the sovereign self is the gateway to enlightenment and perfect health, they often eschew any sort of system or anything that will tell them that anything that is not quote-unquote natural is...
by definition, false.
There's a bit of metaphysics involved because they think things like the power of their thoughts can heal themselves.
And of course, as you guys have identified most recently on your human reference,
Huberman X. You kept saying Huberman, I think.
And I'm trying to Huberman.
I don't actually know which way.
What's his actual name?
Andrew Huberman.
Huberman.
Yeah, you were saying Huberman.
I think it's Huberman.
I think you'll find that Chris said a lot of things incorrectly.
Huberman.
But then again, he probably thinks we do.
I'm from New Jersey.
So, if you've ever watched The Sopranos, how all words become one word when people speak in sentences, it takes me a long time to disentangle syllables.
So, I have the same problems.
But with the health stuff, they think that they're their own best doctor.
That's something I've heard in yoga studios dating back to the 90s.
No one knows your health better than you.
You're your own best doctor.
Only you can heal yourself.
And now, we're seeing...
So when you guys cover the health misinformation aspects on the podcast, there's a very strong correlation to what we do because it's about identifying people who are not following the science, who are definitely not doing their own research, but they're capitalizing in some capacity on their followers' ignorance of the topic matter that they're putting forward.
Yeah, and I would add too that there's a distinction there and there's an overlap in terms of charismatic influence and how, you know, when you talk about your gearometer, you have...
People who are simultaneously leveraging each of those different variables.
I don't have them all memorized, but there's the kind of fatalism, the Cassandra complex, the heavens are falling.
I alone know how to save humanity, but I've been disregarded because the mainstream has a sort of vendetta against me and my family and people like me who dare to tell the difficult truths about the world.
That's not that far off from what we see with more spiritual cults and spiritual charismatic kind of gurus where there tends to be the sense of I have access to special knowledge and the mainstream is only ever going to lead you astray because they're unenlightened,
they're impure, they haven't had the initiatory experiences that I and this inner circle are able to give you.
And so, come trust in us and you'll find the way.
In a way, that language of initiatory necessity was baked into what we, the three of us, heard over the last 10 to 20 years.
Whenever we would start to ask about, well, what is really meant in a modern yoga...
Discourse when an Iron Age philosophical concept is being used or is being commented upon.
And the response that we would usually get to the attempt to have discussions about the details of texts or ideology was You know, this is an experiential practice.
And if you haven't had the experience, then there's really no point in talking about it.
And I think that in our sphere, the leaders that we follow tend to do that explicitly.
And I think that in your sphere, it's a lot more implicit.
They don't hold out a kind of ritual carrot per se.
I think they enact it anyway, though.
Yeah, thanks for those answers, guys.
I'm actually glad I didn't share any of my questions with you beforehand because you touched on virtually all of them.
So, it's nice confirmatory validation there.
So, I can take my pick really on which one to follow up.
I think I'll choose the topic that's most interesting to me, which is, like, it's true that there's so many things that play into it.
Matthew, you mentioned about the revealed experiential truths and the rituals and so on that you tend to see in conspirituality more.
But while you were talking, I was thinking about how much of what you said is so similar to that old philosophical idea of the Rousseauian.
State of nature, where all of these systems and civilizational orders that we have are all interfering with our connection with being whole and being fully human.
So, to what degree is this phenomenon that's going on?
Is it just an old thing, these old philosophical ideas?
Floating around in a new form or to what degree is that in modern culture we're setting higher and higher expectations for us, perhaps these old existential concerns around death and around health and higher expectations for ourselves in terms of living to 100 years in perfect fitness and having ultimate optimization and being fully productive.
What's the balance, do you reckon?
I mean, the thing now is that you're a little bit leaning into the territory of the bro scientists, right?
And of the biohackers and the human optimization.
And I think that is the case, that there's a sense.
I mean, it's this overlapping thing, right?
Where we have the kind of technology now where anyone who is interested in the secrets of biohacking can have a podcast.
And, you know, if they do well, they can have all manner of very high-profile guests on to talk about those topics.
But at the same time, as you're saying, it's this preoccupation with getting back to a primal natural state.
And I think there's something really interesting there in terms of the intersection of the people you guys cover and their ideology and the people that we cover and theirs.
And this is something that Charlotte Ward and David Vaughan touched on in their original paper that we got the name from, Conspirituality, which is that I think...
There's a kind of yin-yang relationship, if you will, between the darker, more paranoid conspiracy tendencies and the light-filled, more optimistic human potential.
We are turning into something where it's almost transhuman but then the transhumanism can have this other aspect of it which is like we need to go backwards in order to go forwards or we just need to tap into the spirit realm, right?
And there's some way that they complement one another where What we saw on our end was a lot of people who were light and love New Agers become increasingly paranoid as a way to make sense of a difficult time in the world and become increasingly libertarian and increasingly right-wing as a way of trying to make sense of,
"Oh my God, I'm being told I have to sacrifice for the first time instead of just focusing on me and my sort of heroic narrative of how I'm going to become the best version of myself."
With a lot of the people that you cover, instead of having that more spiritual idealistic starting point, they seem to have found their way into the idealistic sense of possibility through the door of paranoia.
Through the door of, you know, terrible things are happening.
There's an attempt to control us all in this authoritarian way and take away our freedoms.
But by the way, have you heard about homeopathy?
You know, I think of like Brett and Heather and the journey that they took where every now and again, when I would look through their YouTube feed, it'd be like, oh, here's a video about chiropractors.
What is going on here?
Or here's a video about how there are all of these natural ways to take good care of yourself that you're not being told about.
Yeah, I think you're right.
There's a yin-yang.
There's kind of two sides of the same coin, isn't it?
Matthew?
Well, I wanted to say to your point about do we see in these movements a resurgence of older naturalistic ideas and the idealism of Rousseau's portrayal of the natural world,
for example.
I would say that we probably have always noticed that the discourse and the communities and the demographics that we cover are deeply, painfully, and naively nostalgic for a world that they have to perpetually recreate,
reconstruct, usually with I think the three of us probably knew that was bullshit,
but I probably bought the 5000 year thing for a while.
And none of that is so.
The actual postures that are the skeleton of the modern physical yoga class are probably at most 300 to 500 years old in terms of their basic forms, but then they went through this huge transformation as they met with physical culture at the beginning of the 20th century.
But the conceit was always, this is ancient.
This is timeless.
This comes from a period in which we were not violated by the industrial age, by global wars, by the changing of the environment.
It comes from a time in which we knew who we were when men were men and women were women.
But hold on a second.
Hold on a second, Matthew, because there's something that happens in there, right?
Where that new age...
Romanticism for the past.
To me, it always had an idyllic, utopian, almost progressive sense that like, you know, there was a time when we lived in peace.
There was a time when men and women were equal.
It's not the same as the fascist initially as the fascist romanticism.
It's imagining that the better world that we know is possible through some kind of...
Genuinely enlightened political progress existed in the past and it's just that we've gotten away from it because it used to be there as inspired by sort of spiritual ancient wisdom.
And that to me is so interesting because they sort of exist alongside each other.
The more traditionalist longing for a conservative, you know, when men were men and women were women and we all believed in the correct God and we all had rigid kind of ways of enacting our You know, way of being in the world,
alongside this other utopian sense that's very hippie-ish, you know?
Conspiritualists are really good at romanticizing ideas, but not at studying history.
The 5,000-year-old reference was to an archaeological dig in a site called Mohenyo Daro, where they found a small coin with a man sitting next to a line that looked like Jatawi or dreadlocks, and they attributed it to proto-Shiva.
And they said, oh, this must be when yoga started.
And that's it.
That's where that myth comes from.
That's all they had.
That's all they had.
And yet it's put forward as this notion.
One carving, one seal.
But it looks like he's kind of sitting in a yoga pose.
I've said for years when I used to do teacher trainings, we talked about the Bhagavad Gita, which is considered one of the founding texts of modern yoga.
And I would say, you know, this was written as part of a larger text called the Mahabharata, which is about all of the wars.
Going on, the tribal battles going on in what became known as India much later when the British colonized it.
And people would seriously think, oh, but that's all just metaphorical.
There weren't wars.
That's just a metaphor for your own internal battles.
And I'm like, read a history book.
No, it's not.
That's not what was going on in that era.
Yeah, we weren't there to learn history, right?
In fact, we were there to...
On a personal level, we were there to cleanse a kind of, I don't know, the karma, the psychology that we'd accumulated through daily life.
There was something discontinuous between practicing what we were practicing and actually learning about where it came from.
If we learned where it came from, it was going to actually derail the potentially rejuvenative process.
Initial interests in Buddhism being radically changed when you actually began to study Buddhism.
As you began to understand that actually texts were historical and that people argued about them and they came from different places and none of the questions were actually resolved, that you were no longer the same type of practitioner.
And let me just tack on to the end of that too, that part of what you're pointing to, Matthew, just to say it really explicitly, is that within the subculture that we all came up in as young adults, there was a profound anti-intellectualism.
The intellect is in the way, and science is in the way, and people who think that science and reason tell us things about the world that are more important than mystical truths that can be gleaned through contemplation and intuition.
Don't get it, and in fact, they're your enemy.
And outside of those walls, Francis Fukuyama is telling us, or the rest of the world, that history is over.
And so there's a larger cultural context in which the neoliberal sort of religion of yoga and wellness unfolds, which is that, well, nothing really matters anymore.
You know, liberal democracies have won.
Capitalism is the best of all possible worlds.
And so what are we really, what are you going to just, you know, just do your stretches, man.
Like, you know, optimize.
You can become the best person now because the world, because history has ended.
So there was a larger context there too.
And those two things are sort of running side by side as well, right?
Those two things are running side by side and weaving together, right?
There's the self-optimization of like, just do your stretches and don't think about it too much.
But then there's also like, let me teach you all about the chakra system.
Let's memorize these passages from Patanjali's Yoga Sutras.
There's also that piece of it.
It's just like, don't be analytical about it.
Actually, be much more religious about how you just take it on.
Because if you're not religious about how you take it on, I won't have much to sell you in my course, actually, because I'm going to teach you how to do the chants, and I'm going to teach you how to do the rituals, and I'm going to teach you how to do the sequences of postures, right?
Those details are important.
History might be over, but the details of your practice for forgetting fucking history, they're still going to be really important.
So one thing was that, as you mentioned, I had an interest, a routine interest in Buddhism and introspective.
But one that as I ended up studying about the history of Buddhist countries and Buddhist traditions as part of my university degrees, I find the actual history more intriguing and multilayered and complicated,
but also less satisfying because there isn't a simple...
Or there isn't a secret at the heart of things.
There's just like a messy tradition with lots of historical contingencies swirling around.
But I understand that that might not be compensatory for what other people are looking for from the traditions.
And that relates to something that I was curious with you guys talking there.
And it's probably a criticism that you...
Have come across of the podcast and your approach in general, that given your experiences and the characters that you deal with, that your approach is going to invariantly be a bit negatively tinged towards the yoga and health and wellness world.
You know, if you're dealing with charlatans and people that are just focused on self-development over all else, it's going to change the way that you approach that.
And so I wonder, on the one hand, do you feel that that has occurred since you've started the project that you've become more negatively violent towards the whole area?
And related to that, given all the issues within the yoga world that you guys have documented today,
Do you genuinely think that you would Recommend to people that they can practice yoga and that it will be beneficial and helpful to them as a good thing.
Do you guys in general still see a lot of good going on in that world or do you see it more at the edges?
I'm just curious.
I think it's wonderful.
I practice regularly, both yoga and meditation.
I don't take as many group classes, honestly.
But I've always, for decades, when teachers say those little truths about existence, I've always tuned them out.
So, it just gets annoying sometimes.
But I still think there's a lot of value in it.
I also...
Came through yoga, through the studio system, most predominantly two studios in New York City, one called Jeeva Mukti, which definitely has cultish qualities around veganism and some other topics.
I taught at a gym for 17 years, which was my main occupation during that stretch.
And the difference about that culture is that people aren't going, like yoga is just part of whatever else they're doing for the most part, whether it's spinning or weightlifting or other things.
And you get a much different crowd in that environment.
So I feel very lucky because I was around people who were doing yoga because they were inflexible, or maybe it just helped calm them, but there wasn't a lot of the metaphysics.
So I didn't have to teach that way and they weren't expecting it.
So I'm very skewed in that direction towards yoga.
If people came in because they're like, I just want to be tighter or tighter like muscularly or whatever, I'd be like, cool, you're not chasing enlightenment.
If this helps you in some capacity, then it's useful for you.
And I still find a lot of value in most of the practices that I used to partake in.
Yeah, I mean, I think it's a...
A totally valid question and a really important question.
And my answer is, you know, not at all.
I have not become more negative about the world of New Age spirituality and yoga through the course of this podcast.
I always had these critiques.
I always thought, oh, this could go to a really bad place at some point.
And the fact that it has and that I've had an outlet and a way to sort of...
Talk to experts and read a lot of books and have all the interactions I've had with Matthew and Derek as a result has really just been an outlet for me.
If anything, it's reduced my negative tone.
I still teach yoga.
I've gravitated towards both colleagues and friends and students within the yoga community for 20 years who thought that all of the stuff that I thought was problematic was problematic as well.
And none of those people got red-pilled.
None of them got sucked.
I mean...
Maybe there's one or two, but we were never that close.
But for the most part...
I have the same community of people around me who value these practices, and we value using the practices to sidestep some of the types of confusion and vulnerability that I think made a certain percentage of people within the yoga and wellness space susceptible to things like QAnon and anti-vax rhetoric.
It wasn't everyone, and for me, it's not a community that's just completely...
You know, it's such a great question and I'm really glad that you answered it.
And I think that for listeners of our podcast who believe that we are too negative, I'm really glad that we didn't start the podcast 10 years before because I think we were all a lot more sour then.
And for me in particular, I can say that I have warmed up to The value of yogic and religious practices in a way that I hadn't before because I came to this project from about five or six years of doing investigative journalism into yoga and Buddhism cults.
Is pretty harrowing work and it can give a very sort of negatively biased view, especially if, as I do, you identify as a cult survivor and you have a somewhat activist streak in you and so you have this feeling behind your work that you're going to try to help improve something when I'm not sure that investigative journalism actually does that rather than provide a clear picture of something that actually happened.
And so I have actually been more, I think I've been...
In relation to the critiques that we've done, I have always had this niggling feeling that there is something about the communities that we point at that are extremely vibrant.
And worthwhile and sensible within themselves.
We can talk about the philosophical crap of Charles Eisenstein or Kelly Brogan or how they lie about science or how they scare the crap out of people about what might be coming down the pipe culturally.
But attached to those celebrities are Communities of practice that consist of families, that consist of people that are forming relationships with each other.
Really, it's the backbone of religious experience for many people that is behind all of what we can identify on the surface as grifting.
And I'm trying to be warmer towards that.
I'm trying to be more curious about it.
And I'm also trying to recognize that in my own development as a cult journalist, I have often, I think, simplified the problem of religious communities into a kind of black and white schema that I think I can do some more work on.
And part of that is, I think this is really timely because I just actually finished an audio essay for, I don't know if it goes on our bonus stream or whatever, but I actually opened by talking about the three very, very special yoga teachers in my life who taught me incredibly valuable lessons,
including the guy who said, as he was teaching me postures and stages and he was teaching me how to teach other people.
That, you know, if somebody is progressing towards something that's difficult, you have to offer them support.
And if they have certain forms of support in a posture, if they're using a block or a bolster or a blanket or a strap or something like that, and they're trying to get to the next stage, and you feel you want to challenge them by taking something away, you have to make sure they have some form of internal support.
And I think that the deconstruction process and the debunking project that all five of us are engaged in, I think we have to take real care that when we are talking about subjects that might,
I don't know, impact how a community functions.
If we're talking about an idea that a community of people finds very valuable, not because it's smart, not because it,
I think we have to be, like, really mindful of...
What kind of support the ideas of Charles Eisenstein gives, not to the internet, not to his book readers, but to the community that forms around him.
And so in that sense, I feel like I'm trying to be a lot more warmer and curious towards those communities of practice.
As you guys said, when you first started doing this, it was partly a way to sort of blow off some steam, right?
Talk about the frustrations and so on you are having with the community and the practices that you actually quite like in many respects.
So, how has it been for you?
Like, you guys have written a book.
You put a lot of work into the podcast.
It's obvious to see.
It takes a lot of time.
And to the extent that this has shifted from being a hobby to being...
I'm not even sure what it is for you guys.
Do you think of it as a part-time job or a full-time job?
Full-time job for me.
Right.
How about your other guys?
Julian?
Derek?
I would say for me, it's a very demanding part-time job because I have other jobs that I do.
At the moment, full-time.
I've had full-time jobs for most of the time that I was doing the podcast, meaning I was working 70, 80-hour weeks.
But I've been let go of two different media tech jobs this year because...
That's what's happening in the space.
So I'm actually enjoying being able to focus on this, but I do have some other projects that I'm always simultaneously working on, including a pretty cool one in AI, which might interest you, Matt, but I don't want to move it over into that direction now,
but that's something else I'm focusing on.
Yeah, in terms of the question that you were asking, it's been surprising.
And amazing and stimulating and, you know, dismaying and exhausting to get neck deep in this stuff over the course of the last three and a half years.
And also like, wow, this is great.
We're doing this and we have people listening and it's turned into something that's a little bit of a job, you know, like a way of being in the world.
Something all five of us have focused on is the problems in conflict of interest with people like Andrew Huberman, for instance.
So, you know, when you guys are in a situation where you're making money from doing a job, I talk about something like, have you identified conflicts of interest for yourselves, ethical issues you have to be careful of?
What are your principles and how do you manage it?
Matt is your ethics review board.
Just consider him here.
That's awesome.
Be very careful what you say.
It's always fair to ask that sort of question.
And it is a situation where in America, right now, we have a writer's strike going on.
And one thing that is being talked about a lot is the fact that...
Writing is an occupation.
It's a long-time occupation.
It's a hard one.
And compared to the people who can do it, not a lot succeed.
But if you value the writing, then it is something worth paying for.
And I truly believe that.
I was a full-time journalist and magazine editor for years where I was paid just because I'm one of three bosses in this company.
Doesn't change that configuration because I'm doing the same level.
I think a higher level of work because my editorial oversight is Julian and Matthew.
And we get to really bounce around ideas.
Whereas when I started journalism in the 90s and the number of editors and edits I had to go through to what it's turned into with a lot of internet.
Not all of them, but some of them where it's just churning out content, there's very little oversight.
So, I personally believe that it's something worth paying for.
So, I have no problems making money off the labor that I put into this.
Yeah, and I'd say too, in terms of the time we live in and the sort of cultural circles that we all move in together, one of the...
One of the catchphrases or the buzzwords right now is audience capture, you know, in the sense of how as you become more successful, as you build an audience, as you start getting paid for your work, as it starts to turn into something more serious, that there is this phenomenon where you can find yourself leaning into what is getting you more clicks and more likes and more ad revenue and those sorts of things.
And I think that For anyone who's professionalizing whatever it is that you're doing, but especially in the realm of ideas and cultural criticism and political analysis and all of those sorts of things, it's a very important thing to reflect on.
I don't think there's anything wrong with getting paid for work.
I do think that one has to stay aware of why am I doing what I'm doing?
Is the topic that I'm suggesting we cover right now Something that I think is worthwhile to cover because of my own interest in it and because of there being something valuable there to dig into?
Or does it start to be something where you're just churning out content that you think people will like and will continue sticking around for?
I think the people that we all criticize, including you guys, you can track the arc.
Where it becomes increasingly more extreme, increasingly more conspiratorial, increasingly more outlandish, and not based in evidence.
I don't see us having taken that arc, but if someone could point out where we have, I definitely would be interested to take that feedback.
Conspirituality-branded supplements coming down the pipeline?
Not until 2024.
Not until 2024 when we announce the greater reset.
You know, I think that Julian and Derek can both validate that about every six months, I have some sort of moral collapse.
And I'm in Slack.
A crisis of conscience.
Some sort of crisis where I'm in Slack, you know, at five o 'clock in the morning on the East Coast, which is three o 'clock in the morning there.
And, you know, I have to say that there's these long like fucking text messages that they get and they probably wake up just to my brain.
And I want to apologize for that in public.
But anyway, what the crisis is usually about is like, am I spinning my wheels?
Is the conflict of interest that I have generated a discourse that I am going to keep juicing because it has found an audience and it's been monetized?
And if I'm doing that, how can I get out of it?
And a couple of things for me happened, and I'm not saying that these are right or wrong choices, and I don't think these are technical conflicts of interest, but in the larger moral question of, are you actually helping things?
This is what disturbs me.
I don't know, maybe a year into doing the podcast, we had had this segment called The Ticker, where we were doing news stories, you know, This Week in Conspirituality.
And I found at a certain point that they were repetitive, that the influencers that we were covering were almost indistinguishable from each other.
And then we had on a guest who you are very familiar with, T. Nguyen.
Who said, oh yeah, you're doing moral outrage, or you might be doing moral outrage porn.
And that kind of really set me back to thinking about, okay, how am I using my disgust reactions, my frustrations over anti-maskers,
fucking up public health COVID policy?
How am I using that?
To generate online heat that is feeding back into the sort of hamster wheel of this content production.
And is it doing any good, right?
And then usually the upside of my sort of moral collapse is, okay, well, I'm going to find people who are doing really good things.
Adjacent to this space.
I'm going to see if I can talk to an expert in trauma therapy who is actually resisting the fact that that discourse has made inroads or has joined or has brought the satanic panic back into our mainstream news.
Or I'm going to try to interview Dorothy Fortenberry about whether or not climate disaster...
Has been caused by conspiracies or not.
And so, yeah, I guess that's my conflict of interest question.
There is no end to the bullshit.
It will not end.
It will bury us.
We will die underneath it.
And I'm always wondering, what good thing can I find and platform and celebrate?
Can I just say there too that I think that we all sort of have a version of that.
I would say every six to eight months on the podcast since it's existed, we've done an episode where we sort of reflect on this and we talk about what we're thinking about it and how we want to move forward.
I think a lot of people who levy some of the criticisms at us that I've seen...
Aren't really listeners of the podcast.
They maybe just have an idea of what we're doing and so they want to go at us for it.
They've turned us into some sort of avatar who represents something that they want to push back against, which is fine.
I mean, we all do that to some extent.
But I think that if anything, over the course of the existence of the pandemic, we've become less angry.
Less needing to vent, less outraged, less seeming perhaps at times to be punching down or being really snarky.
Because initially, it was so intense and we were getting oriented and the stakes were so high and we're just like, fuck these people and oh my god, this is so ridiculous that they're saying these things.
And now we're familiar enough with it where we're like, yeah, this is that thing again that we've been talking about for a while.
Here are the layers that we understand about it.
Yeah, but still fuck some of these people.
Yeah, totally.
That's your job, Derek.
Derek, you're always going to be the fuck you guys people on TikTok with the ball cap.
But if anything, I think we've leaned into having more and more empathy and being more solutions-oriented over time, whereas a lot of the people that we cover who have gotten increasingly red-pilled, it's the exact opposite.
They keep needing to find more and more dramatic reasons why the world is going to end because of the woke apocalypse of vaccine poisoning.
We'll get back to the topic of bad faith critics in a little bit.
But I do want to follow up there because last time, it was maybe when we were talking with you, Julian, but when you were previously on, we discussed the nature of the podcast and you three guys having broadly,
simpatico, political perspectives.
Diverging in various areas, and you've had episodes on the podcast previously where you've discussed differences in opinion and approaches.
And when we recently appeared with you in your podcast, Julian and Matthew, you discussed the role of ideology in extremism.
And it's clear that while there's a lot of overlap, there's also differences in opinion.
So that's clearly a part of the podcast.
But the question I have about that is, so...
You guys release episodes on the main feed and on the bonus feed that are individual essays at times.
Sometimes it's the free of you discussing a topic and sometimes it's the individual investigation or interview.
And like Matthew has said in this conversation, there is definitely an element, a potential activist streak inside some of the content that you put out.
Like the episodes that you did, they're a bit older now, but...
With Aubrey Gordon on fat acceptance and anti-fat bias and that kind of thing, right?
So the question I have is, it's kind of, it's a two-parter.
One is that issue of the interpersonal dynamics and that despite that you clearly have differences of opinion, you are united under a brand or a podcast, whichever way you want to look at it.
The Conspiraturality brand.
Is your free guy?
So what gets put out by one person ultimately reflects on the others.
So one part is about navigating that.
And I guess very involved slacks is part of it.
But I'd be curious for any other elaboration on that.
And then the second, and maybe this is something for each of you, is how core to what you do that you view I don't want to frame this, so this is just my attempt to do so, but you can reframe it however you like.
But genuine social justice advocacy.
Like I heard recently, Matthew, on your review of Naomi Klein's new book, you talked about the need for embracing a kind of intersectional approach and genuine systemic critiques of the capitalist systems in order...
To make yourself less susceptible to what the conspirituality people are peddling or the conspiracy theorists.
So I'm curious for each of you, how core you see that to the mission of the Conspirituality podcast and how you navigate if there are differences in those perspectives.
Oh yeah, there are.
From my perspective, the individual voices is really important to keep.
Very early in this stage, I've referenced it as a band that I'm a huge fan of, Wu-Tang Clan, whereas they come together for their projects, but they all have their individual projects.
And I think that that also is...
Embedded it in our own projects.
So I've gotten criticisms being like, "You said this!"
And I'm like, "No, that was Julian and I'll tag Julian so he can field it."
Right?
Which I think is important.
In terms of the activism side, I'm currently working on a media literacy project, both in terms of being a speaker, but also a book that I'm working on.
And as I'm researching the history of media...
You only have purely objective media appearing in the 1850s with the New York Times, which is a response to other tabloid papers with a bunch of journalists who said, we want to take it straight.
But it's still, even that concept is truly difficult.
True investigative journalism, even the idea of chasing a story starts with some urge that usually has a personal affect.
And we try to distinguish between when we're doing reporting and when we're...
Doing advocacy or editorializing or doing more opinionated pieces.
We'll say we're switching over to this now.
It's not always so explicit, but we try to make it clear when I'm covering Andrew Huberman about this study, I'll reference the studies and talk more journalistically.
And then when I'm talking about him and his fucking mouth jaw thing and talking about ugly people who are mouth breathers, that's going to come across as more opinion, which I'll push back on.
So I think advocacy and social justice.
We're all left of center, for sure, and we have varying degrees of what that means, but we're all united in don't be an asshole to people and don't be a grifter who lies to people to make money.
That's succinct, yeah.
I would say that I also value the diversity of our political views.
I think being the farthest left, I think, on staff and the Canadian and the person who therefore is right, It's natural for me to hold.
It's natural for me to argue at length with both Derek and Julian about specific topics and whether or not we're going to go this far towards a culture war territory or not, or how we're going to approach figures like Joe Rogan.
There's a number of places where...
Our sparks can fly.
But I have never had the feeling that I should be in arm-linked lockstep with my colleagues on political issues because I think that we come by our politics honestly.
First and foremost, we just come from different places.
I grew up with a certain type of leftist education and did a certain type of reading in the literature that's now being sort of pilloried as woke when I was in university.
And that's just different from where Julian and Derek came from.
And so, I've never felt like It was a matter of, in order to achieve some sort of solidarity in this project, we're going to have to agree.
And I also think that arguing as hard as we have about certain things has made me more tolerant of the democratic process.
And it's also made me more, I don't know, just...
Open to the fact that it's really good to be able to work with people that you don't absolutely agree with.
And in fact, you'll learn a lot by doing that.
Yeah, I'd say there's very few things that we've really had to go to the mat over and really been like, "Jesus, how are we going to get past this thing?"
It just seems really stuck.
That's hardly ever happened.
For the most part, I think we have differences in style, differences in which context we think is most important on particularly charged issues.
And yeah, we work those out in our private conversations with one another, and sometimes that gets heated.
But I think we've built a lot of trust through that process, particularly around...
Really tricky topics of the day.
But this idea, I mean, are we a brand?
Yeah, we're a brand.
It's the name of the podcast.
I think we're a brand in as much as we agree on the certain core aspects of what the podcast is about, and that's why we're working together on it.
But then part of the brand, I guess, is that we have slightly different angles on things that sometimes...
You know, we'll come up and we might even talk about on the mic.
And that's fine.
That's part of the exploration.
Yeah, it's a brand that's a media platform, really.
And I don't think we have a kind of...
Umbrella statement for how that works.
But we do have some processes.
We should just say technically that we have a vetting process for interview subjects.
That's me.
Yes, right.
And we also consider very carefully what the sort of power level is of the particular person that we might criticize.
Yeah, yeah.
We decided fairly early on that we were going to avoid punching down.
And that's a subjective call, but sometimes it has to do with follower count or just what kind of social power does this person have?
And that's going to be an intersectional question sometimes, often.
And then we also have had, you know, good discussions about, well, how can we broaden our perspectives reporting-wise and analytically?
Like, what kinds of views and positions can we bring in that are unlike our own or that will inform in ways that will surprise us?
I can sympathize with All of you for being held responsible for your co-host's bad cakes.
Occasionally, in comments, people are like, like you said, Derek, that, oh, remember when Chris said blah, blah.
I'm like, that was Matt.
That was Matt said that.
I would never say something so silly.
So the struggle is real.
That's all.
Fortunately, we don't disagree about too much because you're as stubborn as a mule.
You're a debate bro, so it would totally break down if we did.
This is true.
We were doing video versions of our podcast for a while, but honestly, I do all the production on the back end and finalizing, and it was just too much work.
But I think that would actually help because you guys do more video.
We very rarely touch video except for individual stuff now.
But I think people have a hard time distinguishing voices, whereas when you attach a face to a voice, Remember what Matt actually says.
If people can't distinguish our voices, then we can't help them.
But can I just pick up, Chris, there was a part of your question that maybe we didn't address, which is, like, how important are...
Our own political values when we consider what we're going to put forward.
And I think that having been recently Naomi Kleinpild, I can say that I want to look a little bit more closely at how, for myself, the deconstruction process of this work,
of the journalism.
Even though it has come from a left perspective, it has not necessarily walked the best line between criticizing the incorrect interpretations of neoliberal power that are put forward by Steve Bannon and others.
The problems with the institutions that they're actually bringing up, right?
They're not wrong that we're tortured by techno-capitalism.
They are not wrong that the pharmaceutical industry is filled with perverse profit incentives.
And I think that to me, it's going to become more politically valuable to look very directly at the scrambled problems and analyses that our subjects bring up and say, okay, what are you really getting at here and where is it actually true?
And how can we separate out the feeling of getting fleeced by the state or by...
You know, late-stage capitalism from the facts of how we could actually address it together, right?
Because the thing about conspirituality analyses is that there's no real political solution that our subjects offer.
But they tend to scoop out attention from that demographic that hasn't been properly served by the I don't know, like by social democracy.
So yeah, I think that that's going to become increasingly important for me is to say there are values that are being presented by these populists and sometimes conspiracy theorists that are not entirely wrong.
So how can we sort that out?
Because they're speaking into a vacuum and, you know, maybe it would be better to stand in that vacuum instead of just sort of...
Be ironic about it.
Yeah, yeah.
We've also experienced on our end that tension between what you might call sort of objective and neutral fact-based criticism and ones where your own values and political opinions and just general view of the world comes into play.
I don't think there's any perfect answers on how to handle that, for better or for worse.
I think because we come from the more empirical science-based academic backgrounds, which again, rightly or wrongly, tries to separate out those two things.
In psychology, for instance, we have this ideal that there is this dispassionate investigation of natural phenomena that just happen to be people, that is the phenomena we're studying, and we separate that entirely from our values and opinions.
Which is itself a value position.
I know.
You go around in circles, don't you?
I'm attempting to justify that.
Yeah, because like Matt, I think the division that you talk about is real, but disputed by various sectors in psychology and in various fields, right?
There are people who would argue that actually that's a problem, right?
Adopting that.
But I don't agree with them.
But nonetheless, they exist.
Yeah, look, I mean, it comes up in very specific ways.
It's not always about sort of advanced, rarefied politics.
Like even in my field of gambling research, you have these different factions, I suppose.
You have people that are kind of in the pocket of industry, very comfortable with very liberal policies towards gambling and sort of centering on the problem with being people, you know, some people have mental problems which cause them to have a problem with gambling,
right?
And then you have...
More activist people.
It's more associated with the public health approach where you say you've got a predatory business model here and you focus on that.
And you have researchers who clearly are activists at the same time and are advancing an agenda to basically reduce penetration of gambling as much as possible.
And then you have us wishy-washy people in the center that are trying to do empirical research, but fooling ourselves, obviously, because.
I mean, do you think it's the case that where that becomes a problem is along that line where your commitment to your ideology and your values propositions mean that you start fudging data?
You start ignoring contradictory data.
You start saying anything goes against what you believe to be the case must be part of a conspiracy without providing good evidence of that.
To me, that's really the crux.
Yeah, yeah.
And it also comes down to how you structure your investigations.
You can set up a study such that you're almost guaranteed to find what it is you're looking for, or you can set it up where the evidence could come in either way and you could be proven to be wrong.
Chris?
On the recent episode we did with Huberman, I was hypothetically complaining about Big Natural Park, citing of studies that forest behaving would be beneficial, and I posed the hypothetical view.
We did a study that showed there was no benefit whether that would be promoted with the same vigor.
And obviously it wouldn't, but I think that always...
Chris, I'm going to interrupt you here because I've got a bone to pick with you here.
I introduced that.
I introduced that topic about both the ABC and the parks in Australia talking about forest bathing in a very positive sense.
I introduced that with the intent of showing how bad...
More mainstream outlets are.
And then you dived in and spoke about it very vehemently as if I was okay with it.
Now everyone thinks I'm pro-Huberman, I'm pro-Big Park.
It's totally unfair.
The reason people think that you're pro-Huberman is available on the tape.
I hate to say it, but I actually think you misunderstood Chris at some point, which derailed the conversation for about a half an hour.
So, you know, that was an interesting take, but I gotta...
Sorry, I gotta give that one to Chris.
This is a hostile environment.
Look, Matt, as I recall that thing, I believe you were introducing that.
Well, many people do have this habit of presenting things like here.
Look at the natural parks in Australia and stuff.
They are tidying the same studies, to which my point is, yes, yes, they're all doing that.
And that's kind of the point that I would raise here as well.
To make it a more relevant example, if there was studies conducted that showed there isn't a penalty to being an ethnic minority for applications for some position, right?
You know, the kind of famous studies where they email in the same resumes, but they have different names or different identity.
And there have been studies attempting to replicate some of those findings, which I think have not held up so well when they've been pre-registered.
But in that case, that would be one where I think that your beliefs or your political views could make you more reticent to promote or be interested in a study that finds that there isn't discrimination or that...
There's more discrimination against, say, white males, right?
I'm going to sound like an IDW person.
But I just mean that, like, obviously, if that happens, if your commitment is to reporting the data as is, right, then that would suggest that you put it out and say that.
And if your commitment is to fighting Discrimination and whatnot that you might not have documented in your study, but you believe is there.
I feel that people would be more reticent to that.
So, like, where Matt and I believe for would be, you always have to publish the data, even if it completely contradicts the thesis that you would politically want to support.
And I think a bunch of scholars do generally support that, but I think there's a lot more.
Hesitation around that being a naive point of view as well.
And there's been some critiques about, you know, the open science movement in this respect.
So, yeah.
You're also taking into consideration or you need to take into consideration that...
Most people don't know how to read a science study, right?
So when we're having these conversations on social media, the idea that the people actually read and ingested the study, for just one example, the FDA study that approved ketamine for clinical use, the company Janssen Pharmaceuticals, two people during that trial committed suicide after they came off ketamine therapy because there's no tapering protocol.
Now, Janssen argued that...
It was because of their prior suicidal ideation.
And once they quit ketamine, that caused them to spiral.
But the reality is they never had suicidal ideation before they started the ketamine therapy.
That passed FDA approval process.
And you can find that.
You can download that paper and read it.
And it's in there.
And that's an example of how people do not understand.
Even getting them into the introduction and understanding the basic relevance of it is a challenge.
So when we're talking at this level about understanding science...
We live in a culture that literally just reads headlines and they're usually just using the headlines of the influencers that they follow, which they then take in as truth.
And so my challenge is how do we get past that first barrier where you can even have nuanced discussions in communication networks that don't allow for those types of discussions?
I think this is a really difficult sort of topic that a lot of conversations end up circling around right now, right?
It's this tension between being so invested in a worldview, in a set of ideological commitments that you're unable to consider.
In good faith and with a kind of intellectual openness and really looking at the evidence and the quality of the arguments, anything that disagrees with something you're so heavily identified with.
And to me, it's really important to strive to be able to do that.
But there's this phenomenon that has emerged within the heterodox space, which is that there are all of these people claiming to be doing this.
And this is a callback to Nomi Klein, Matthew, right?
That there's this...
This pretense at being that, at being the people who are willing to have the brave conversations and to look at reality squarely and to consider the things that the mainstream doesn't want to look at, to consider the uncomfortable facts of the matter and the data that's being covered over.
But it ends up not being that.
It ends up becoming increasingly less fact-based, less backed by evidence, and actually more conspiratorial and more based in charisma and vibes, and actually an identification with this group.
You can list all of the different people who've gone down this road.
Most recently, people like Barry Weiss and Matt Taibbi and Schellenberger.
It's just like, wait.
This is supposed to be some journalistic, intellectual dark web, atheist, we believe in science and reason, kind of, we're going to find a way forward, which I actually relate to as having some important values propositions within it, but something goes terribly wrong.
I want to say that I personally am not immune to the charisma factor when my values are being validated.
And one thing that has recently come up, like 95% in bad faith, are the growing attacks now on the Council or the Center for Countering Digital Hate and the work of Imran Ahmed,
who has been our guest about three times, maybe four times on the show.
Yes, four times.
And I have from the outset been
Extraordinarily compelled by his career arc, by his initial advocacy for trying to remove anti-Islamic hate speech from social media platforms.
I was extremely compelled by just the...
The pluck and the vigor of his company's research and also his framing of some of the influencers that we follow, like coining the term disinformation dozen, which of course goes all the way to the White House and winds up in Jennifer Psaki's mouth as she's standing at the podium in the press room.
We leaned heavily into that research and into that material.
And I personally have to confess that I do not understand his methodology.
And Derek and Julian are probably better equipped to do so.
And as far as I know, as Elon Musk...
You know, threatens to sue him or is launching a lawsuit against him and his organization and as he might be hauled up before Congress by Jim Jordan as some sort of like, I don't know, hostile, you know, anti-American.
Influence or whatever.
Part of the censorship industrial complex.
Yeah, all of that bullshit is going to happen and I still have to go back and do the legwork to figure out, okay, what was the methodology here and does it sync up and did it give me the reasonable firepower?
To say things like, these disinformation purveyors have blood on their hands, which I said many times.
I don't disbelieve it.
I just don't know whether or not...
It's like he had a particular handle upon a kind of knowledge production and a facility with statistics.
Yeah, he was finding a way to quantify something that we already have plenty of evidence is real, we just don't know how to quantify it.
And he made it look good to a guy like me who doesn't know what the fuck he's looking at most of the time when it comes to that stuff.
And so, my honesty is I've got to go back and figure out whether or not I lean too heavily into something that may not have been as strong as I thought it was.
I haven't seen any evidence that that's so, but I got to do it.
I think the important thing is exactly what you highlighted, Matthew, of being aware of whatever the limitations might be, whether in journalistic or statistical competence or whatever it is,
because we're all humans.
We're all influenced by our biases and worldviews and things that we want to be true, and also charismatic.
Individuals, right?
So it would be a very inhuman existence to have everything based on, you know, that you first rigorously fact check everything that everybody ever tells you.
No one does that.
No one does that.
And so the main thing is being aware of your limitations and then trying to examine.
Like in greater detail when you have time or those kind of things.
I think that's important.
And I think in the case with something like, you know, Elon Musk's comments around the ADL recently, the issue that often comes up, and Julian and Derek, you've both been highlighting this as well, is that there are criticisms of the ADL and its potential overreach,
right?
And how it characterized criticism of Israel and so on.
But in the context of what Elon Musk is doing and what...
Twitter slash X is promoting.
When you look at the hashtags about the ADL, it isn't this high-level critique from deep investigative journalism.
It's base antisemitism.
And Elon Musk is not someone, I think, that has digged into the details, right?
He just, he finds anything that can support whatever he wants to say, and then he just, like, spews it out.
And then there's a whole network dedicated to promoting that, and you will get the think pieces.
Well, in this case, you probably won't get it from Barry Weiss's outlet because of her particular support for Israel, right?
So this is the one instance where I think you won't see it, at least in Barry Weiss's case.
But you will see all the other things immediately jump on.
Here's the problems with the ADL and going through it, but not looking at the very visible.
Rank anti-Semitism that's there.
So I completely understand that if you release a podcast about the intricacies of the ADL, in some sense, you can be diverting the issue and following the lead of somebody like Elon Musk.
But it is important to be able to criticize institutions and stuff.
So it's a really hard balancing act, I think.
And I'm not sure there's...
A precise line to walk, but I know that walking the line that trigonometry or the free press follows is not where I want to be, but yeah.
This is where Matthew, this is a good example where Matthew and I kind of diverge, because when that came up with Imran and we started hearing about the data, I truly believe he stayed up at night.
Thinking, turning that over, which there's nothing wrong with, because I think the methodological approach is important.
And it's also important to note that they released reports, not studies.
So you can't even find all of the proper data laid out as you would in chart form in an actual study.
It's all reports with screenshots and things like that.
So it's a different ballgame he's playing.
One thing you'll hear, you'll read in Naomi Klein's new book, and Matthew's interview with her comes out this week.
She really hammers home the point that the right gets the facts wrong, but they get the feelings right.
And I interviewed one of the Burning Man climate change activists who blocked the roadblock on the way in to Burning Man this year for a brief that's coming out on Saturday.
And I did that because I think it's really important because the left does not get the feelings right a lot of the time.
They get the facts right.
And then they argue over those facts.
And, you know, I mean, this happens everywhere.
But there seems to be a real lack of drive and initiative of just doing something like what Imran does, which is just take a mirror and say, hey.
You are doing this.
Maybe I got the numbers a little bit wrong, but this is still happening.
And I think that putting aside the pure objectivity of factual data in this sense is important if you're going to create a movement of people to push back against a whole cohort of people who don't give a shit about facts at all.
How are you going to play in that field?
There's a bait and switch that happens here a lot.
Right?
In these kinds of discussions, especially online, where the insistence on the empirical data that there's sort of like different levels of conversation happening at the same time, you know?
And it's like you might make an argument that you don't have a specific study.
To demonstrate the truth of every sort of premise in your argument, that doesn't mean your argument is flawed.
And vice versa, you might make a completely fallacious argument, say, about the dangers of vaccines and have Several links to PubMed studies that you can use to back up what you're saying, but you're still wrong.
So it's like the levels of analysis, I think, get really jumbled.
And especially when you're talking about conspiracists and people engaged in bad faith argumentation.
And then you have the other piece, which you touched on, Chris.
We're back to Teen Win and this recognition that you can't Absolutely fact check every single thing.
You have to delegate some of that to experts and so then the huge question becomes on what basis do you decide which experts to listen to?
And that's one of the crises that we're in right now in terms of the information age.
And I'm glad that you're there Julian because I want to say that I agree with Derek's position around the moxie and the gumption and the storytelling power of Imran Ahmed's work.
And it's not that I'm disquieted by the numbers being a little wrong.
It's more that I'm disquieted by being charmed and seduced in a way that Belies the fact that I criticize that same seduction when it happens on the other side.
And I think this came up early on that this is a hard line to walk.
Among the three of us, I suggested that my attitude towards public health information and medical research...
was quasi-religious.
And that's a problem because we often get the criticism of being invested in scientism, right?
That somehow we have turned science into a religious pursuit.
It's a bad faith critique.
But on a personal level, I interact with medical data, with scientific studies, and with expert opinion in many cases on the basis of Trust and identification when I don't actually have either the brainpower or the skill or sometimes the patience to fact-check the facts,
right?
Yeah, the background.
I don't have the background for it.
And so I realize that I am embedded in a community and a network of trust, right?
Who do I trust and why?
And that's why the social markers that are provided by an amazing scientific instrument like the gurometer are really important for me because they are descriptions of behaviors that are...
Trustworthy or non-trustworthy?
Well, they're non-trustworthy behaviors, right?
If somebody is galaxy-brained or Cassandra complexing or persecution complexing all over the place, I'm not going to trust what they have to say.
But if they are a bog-standard, boring, bureaucratic public health official in Canada who doesn't have good rapport at the podium and they stand up and say, well...
It seems as though masks are effective in these circumstances and we think that the vaccine is coming at this point and we really have to pull together and try.
To figure out how to get along together better.
That is going to signal to me trust more than how that person communicates the scientific data that I can't read.
And so, I have always been bothered by that particular, I would say, vulnerability.
And I try to respect it or I try to identify how...
I carry it and it mirrors the vulnerability of the people in the communities that we often criticize or we empathize with because we're like, "Oh, you got taken in by a charismatic named Kelly Brogan or Christiane Northrup."
I gotta look in the mirror, really.
I have to say, okay, well, how did I establish trust?
I do believe that I'm on the right side of vaccine science and masking and all the rest of it, but I really have to ask some questions about how I got there.
Well, and in a way, too, it's not just on what basis do you decide which experts you should trust, but it's also what might those experts do that would lead to you...
Losing trust in them.
And I think that's very important too.
It's great that we have open science and it's great that everyone can use the internet and access the primary research on any issue that fascinates them.
But I think that in many ways it's been a bad thing because it is simply not practical for a non-specialist to...
Ideally, we would all like to work from evidence and then come to beliefs from that evidence in a perfectly rational way.
But it just isn't practical to become well enough acquainted with the literature to understand all of the relevant background such that you can absorb all of the primary literature on a topic like climate change or vaccine efficacy and come to this rational belief about it.
I cannot do that in practice.
I've been a professor for 20 years and I cannot do that outside of my very narrow realm of expertise.
So, I very much believe that the advice to give people, even though we do do episodes on how to read literature and how to have a critical eye and evaluating statistics and things like that.
Really, what you need to do is to figure out who to trust.
And that is the problem of the modern era, right?
And as you said, Matthew and Chris, we're all just human beings.
We all respond to people and we use these interpersonal markers of who is trustworthy.
But I do believe that there are some pretty simple heuristics you can apply that actually will steer you right more often than not, if you could just apply them consistently.
Like, for instance, if you want to know, did the virus originate?
Did it come from a lab in Wuhan or did it come from natural courses?
Well, good luck in understanding the technical details there.
What you can do is look at the people who are advocating those different positions and you can notice a few things, right?
Some of them...
Have track records of 20 or 30 years in that specific area and have been doing the research and have essentially eminent scientists in that area.
And others have parachuted in last week.
What do they really know though?
Yeah.
But what's tricky about that so often, right, is that the conspiracists, like you see this with anti-vaxxers all the time.
They'll trot out Robert Malone and they'll say, well, this is a man with an incredible track record.
He's incredibly pedigreed and he did this, that, and the other thing.
And whatever claims they make about what he's invented and what kind of posts he's held.
And it turns out that's not actually that good of a basis, right?
So, Julian, one thing on Robert Malone, just the one point I would make is that you're right.
There's a lot of...
Indications that he's a reliable source if you go by a traditional checklist.
But there's also a load of warning signs that he's not.
Even just things about who he's on stage with alone should give you a warning.
But all the things about claiming to be a persecuted lone voice and invented so many things, not just the mRNA vaccine, but so many other things.
So I think a general other point that is a corollary to what Matt said is that You want to be able to try to distinguish general consensus, but you have to also consider that there's always insane freaks.
They don't walk around with bags of chips on their head or whatever.
That's why they're able to get followers.
So any big discipline will always have outlier positions, will always have people that, even if they're not crazy, just have a minority view.
And that's, I think that's one of the real problems is that like, you know, same thing with, it's the anniversary of 9 /11 and you have genuine, you do have some genuine experts who sign onto the conspiracy theories, but the vast overwhelming array do not.
So that scale would be useful for people to learn, but I realize it's hard.
Can I say too about how to trust and who to trust is that I think the diversity of our trio might be a good model.
Because when Derek says, there was a point where the book was going to end with, the three of us are going to sort of give our final statements.
And that kind of changed into something else.
But Derek's final statement was, well, I want to do a section on scientific literacy.
And it was great.
I think we still have the draft of it somewhere.
You know, it'll go into something else.
But it was very characteristic of him.
And if I have a criticism of it, it's like...
You know, it's individualistic in the sense that you're asking people to do a lot of work and that might be inaccessible to them, right?
So I kind of have like an educational accessibility feeling around that.
But at the same time, he's right, right?
Like you can learn more, you can do better at media literacy.
But on the other side...
I'm saying we really do also have to look at the mystery of how we form our trust bonds because, you know, that's going to be a factor for everybody.
Now, I did have a question before we returned to Sunnier Pastures that I wanted to raise with you guys.
And it is actually, I think, dealing with this issue about, like, epistemic networks and how to deal with, you know, Critical, because a lot of the people that you've covered, a lot of the people that we've covered, all of their critics are bad faith.
They've never encountered good quality criticism in their life.
You know, they want it so badly, but it's just, it's hard to get there.
And in you guys' case, because you're being critical of the health and wellness space, you're obviously going to get strong.
Pushback from those communities.
And I saw recently there was, I think it was a Medium article by B. Schofield or an article somewhere announcing why she had quit the Conspiratuality podcast, right?
And she wasn't actually a member of your podcast, but she took some issues with your approach.
And I think in that case, we've talked about The kind of reaction about you guys being too dismissive or too materialistic or this perspective.
But I want to talk about that, but also more broadly, the way to deal with critics because of that ecosystem that you guys exist in and you get such strong feedback, how you don't end up with a kind of bunker mentality.
And related to that, and Matthew, I don't know details here except for like a couple of blog posts.
But I came across a couple of years ago, I think, that you were involved with a court case about somebody for defamation where they'd written critical stuff on Facebook.
And I only know the details of that from a rather long blog post from a lawyer kind of arguing the merits.
The demerits of the likelihood of the case.
So I'm curious about that and the potential for legal battles to get in with the people that you cover or you yourselves being defamed and how you manage it.
So I realize that's a big, cloudy question, but any parts that you want to grab a hold of?
Well, let me start with the last part first.
So there is a lengthy Medium article that describes A legal action that I elected to take that, given the settlement, I can't really say anything about at this point.
But I guess I can say that it was about whether or not the core structure of a book that I published in 2019 was fraudulent or not.
And my argument was that it wasn't.
And I really wanted to draw a line in the sand.
And it was the only legal action that I've ever been involved in.
I feel ambivalent about having pursued it.
And yeah, but I mean...
From that, what's strange is that to have that in the public record now has led to a story or an impression that some people have had that somehow I threaten critics legally on some random basis.
And that's just not true.
I felt with regard to...
The particular claims at the time that the core of my work, that my livelihood was sort of hinged upon at that time, was really being questioned in a significant way, and I felt that I had to do something.
Because my basic approach to criticism is to really try hard to see what merit it has.
Sometimes there's a completely bad faith element to it, in the sense that it's being generated by Hindu nationalists who want to say that our research on the yoga world is somehow defaming an ancient culture.
Sometimes it comes from spaces that aren't well researched.
But nonetheless, somebody's reacting to something.
I really try to make it a practice to look very carefully at what that is and how I can learn more about my own impact in the world and what my research is doing.
Yeah, and I would say as well is, to me, the point is, you know, the general stance that people take on those kind of issues.
So the topic of how people moderate...
We've been critical of Lex Fridman, for example, for policing his subreddit with an iron fist, which apparently he doesn't do, but he has a team of suspicious Lex-shaped moderators.
There's lots of different ways that people react to it.
And it sounds like the paraphrase, if you can correct me if I'm wrong, but you're saying that you would be tolerant of criticism and welcome it insofar as anybody welcomes criticism.
But in specific cases where there's a strong allegation of fraud as a component of your work or something, then you felt compelled to defend it, though you might not be so compelled to go for another legal case because I imagine they're not fun.
100% not fun, very unsatisfying all the way around.
There was some moral feeling that I had about...
You know, this really shouldn't happen.
It's not fair that it happens, and I don't know what else to do.
I was also advised by various people to go forward that I trusted.
I didn't really do it alone.
So yeah, there's a lot of stuff there.
I also didn't mean to focus specifically on that, but I appreciate, anyway, the clarification.
What about you, Derek or Julian?
Is there anything you would add about that?
One thing that is always apparent, and admittedly so by some of our critics, is that they're on our social media feeds, but they don't listen to our podcast.
And our social media feeds are essentially just mini ideas from episodes or thoughts that we have.
We don't place each other on them.
We share our own thoughts as related to the field that we study.
And it's very difficult to get into a conversation when somebody does not listen to what you have to say and unpack because long-form podcasting actually is a good medium for expressing big ideas,
which take time and nuance and complexities to get through.
So I see it often as an uneven playing field trying to even engage with people.
I generally don't engage.
I will say that I have responded to good faith criticism, and sometimes I come to a different conclusion than I originally did.
Sometimes we just disagree, but we lay out our points, and that's all fair.
And I actually like that process.
But I've noticed that sometimes when I've jumped in and responded to someone, you'll initially get something like, oh, you're mansplaining.
Or when you're trying to actually engage in a debate with someone, which requires some level of rigor and intellect to do so.
And that process is frustrating because I actually, as we've said earlier about our own internal process as a podcast and how we come at each other, I like the rigor of debating these guys.
It makes me sharper.
It makes me think about what I'm saying more.
And unfortunately, it's very difficult in the environment of social media to accomplish that.
So on rare occasions, it does happen.
For the most part, I just think that I need to not engage with that.
So I don't.
And in terms of the issue of defamation or things like that, it is also baked into why we don't punch down.
We only punch up and we bring receipts to everything.
So if we're making a claim, we're going to back it up.
There are so many things that we've received DMs from people who've worked with some of the influencers that we cannot say because we do not have receipts.
We only have one person saying it.
So we never go live with that sort of stuff because it's dangerous.
So we know it's tricky territory with a lot of- Yeah, hearsay sucks.
Hearsay sucks.
Yeah, so we do try to be careful.
We think about that often and we do have- We actually have a page that has been up since very early in this project about social media hygiene on our website and our rules of moderation and how and when we engage and don't engage with people.
And I know a lot of people don't think about those things, but we did very early on and we've tried to abide by those rules ever since.
Yeah, I think some of it too is the problem of scale.
You know, the more people you start reaching, the harder it becomes to keep up with all manner of communication that starts coming in, whether it's in the form of social media comments or emails or direct messages.
I personally am open to criticism.
I'm open to debate.
I prefer it when direct quotes are being used.
I prefer it when the argument feels like it has some substance to it as opposed to being a personal attack or something that feels more stereotyped or just, oh, you're one of these kinds of people.
And I'll say that there have been, over the course of the last three and a half years, there have been several occasions in which someone has corrected a mistake that I've made and I've said, oh, thank you very much.
Yeah, I got that one wrong.
We haven't experienced that.
One thing that I'd like to say about a type of criticism that can be difficult to manage is
sometimes...
Sometimes, in my experience, the criticisms from an identitarian standpoint and embedded within a culture war discourse, especially on the left, reflecting upon your positionality,
for example, can be really hard to navigate, to listen to, to not be personally insulted by.
And I would say that the ways in which I have been well challenged and also poorly or sometimes even cruelly challenged as a white cis male have in general been extremely valuable for me personally in trying to understand better what my blind spots are.
And, you know, that's not everybody's experience.
You know, there's a really problematic kind of...
Energy that can be very self-destructive and sabotaging within that kind of discourse.
And at the same time, I think if somebody is very angry at you for some kind of content blind spot or political, I don't know, insensitivity that you hold and they attribute it to your positionality and you haven't considered that before,
That can be a really incredible moment of recognizing your general place in the world.
So I just want to say that too.
I want to use Andrew Huberman again as a bit of an exemplar here because we've covered him recently and listened to you guys cover him.
You made the point on your podcast how he's a little bit exemplifying this 2.0 version of the original generation of health influencers.
The original type might have been far more...into the spiritual side of things, much more into the experiential revealed truth kind of thing.
Whereas people like Huberman seem closer to secular-based influences that we tend to cover and rely more on their credentials and are talking the language of science.
And if there's a problem here and we...
We'll think there is.
It's that they are very much on the bleeding edge of new technologies and supposed scientific breakthroughs, so much so that it ends up being scientific, if not pseudoscience.
Now, that's the first part of the question about whether or not this is an important shift or whether it's just an isolated thing.
And the other thing is whether or not you see, I guess, a theme of scientific hipsterism in these people.
I noticed with Huberman, for instance, when he's talking about sleep, he very quickly discounts people taking melatonin.
And melatonin is pretty cheap.
It's widely used.
GP is very happy to prescribe it to you.
So, obviously, it has to be wrong, right?
And instead, what's really going to be good for you is this highly bespoke cocktail of little-known obscure supplements in some cases.
We see this on the Joe Rogan podcast as well, whereas the bespoke, hipsterish thing is always better.
And it also ties in, of course, to the grifting, right?
Because an awful lot of them do seem to endorse, if not sell, supplements.
So this is a two-part question following the grand tradition set down by Chris Kavanagh.
What do you guys think about that?
The term revealed knowledge came up before, and Alan Watts used to say that everyone likes to think they have the secret sauce.
I'm paraphrasing, but something of that nature, where people are drawn to the idea that there is a revealed truth.
They have a piece of it because whoever has told them this thing, that must be true.
They now know that and then they now can live in such a way that fulfills that expression and I think that's one through line between the communities we're talking about right now.
Well, let me say this.
In the episode where we talked about Andrew Huberman, I was suggesting actually that he was a 2.0 bro scientist where the earlier version Of the Bro Science Influencer, I'm thinking here, Joe Rogan, but also like Tim Ferriss,
Dave Asprey.
These are people who weren't really credentialed.
These are people who were saying, I am an N of 1 and I'm engaged in this self-optimization process where I'm hacking and I'm trying each of these different things and I'm learning how to very rapidly acquire skills and change the data that is being...
Givens me by my glucose monitor or by the blood test that I'm doing, that kind of thing.
So, it had a science-y kind of vibe to it.
It was spiritual only insofar as it was about self-development, right?
You know, hacking your mindset, hacking your habits, getting your sleep on point, figuring out how to be all that you can be in a way that I think the commodification of a lot of spirituality, there's a lot of overlap there, right?
A lot of resonance.
When I refer to him as being 2.0, I was saying it was more like, okay, he's doing all of that stuff that I just described.
Plus, he has a lab.
Plus, he has the PhD or the degrees in neurology and ophthalmology and what have you.
If there's anything in common with more of a traditional spiritual guru model, if we roll it back.
I think it's that there's a zone of the commodification of self-development that was created and crafted that had something in common with the spiritual guru kind of routine, but more and more was about selling books and about selling supplements and about enrolling people in workshops and trainings and in a whole alternative worldview which gave birth to the secret.
You know, that Oprah was involved in promoting and things like that.
Is the scientific, is the greater emphasis on a kind of even more qualified bro-scientist and important shift?
I think so, yes, because it continues to invest this sort of alternate reality with more and more of a sense of legitimacy and credibility.
And that's one of the things I think people are drawn in by.
Oh, this is really the cutting-edge real science that the normies don't yet understand because they're not ready to take responsibility for themselves, but we're going to get up at dawn and we're going to stare at the sun and we're going to do the smoothie and the AG1 greens,
whatever those things are, right?
And we're going to participate in these arduous rituals of becoming, but it's all backed by science.
I have to plead ignorance on Hubberman because I wasn't on the episode.
I was probably buried under a pile of books about RFK Jr.
And I didn't listen to yours, Chris and Matt.
But I think that might be an advantage, especially as we talk about what's happening to the religiosity in the Bro Scientist 2.0.
And I guess I just want to say that not knowing as much about him as you do, he still presents vocally and visually to me as somebody who is embodying something.
He's performing something.
This is super subjective, I have to admit.
But he presents some kind of Greek stoic god in his affect.
And there's something there that I think the people that you are studying who are self-consciously secular are still pulling on that's quite primal.
I think it's difficult to see.
It's difficult to describe.
It's not just about fashion.
It's about affect.
The person who's coming to mind now for me is Heather Haying, who I can't watch.
More than what bad stats posts on Twitter, right?
Like a minute and a half of Heather and Brett sort of, you know, conferring about something is just enough for me.
But I think it's enough for me because her posture, her facial expression, her kind of faux humility, it looks Catholic iconic to me.
There's something sort of pious.
And I would say faux introspective.
And it's almost like they're chewing together on some deep mystery that they both have access to.
And I think it's possible for the people that you're covering to communicate the affect of religious devotion or piety while specifically avoiding the language that seems to...
That would point in that direction.
And I wonder who's studying that.
I wonder what that is.
I can't be the only one who's seeing that.
I don't think I'm making it up.
But I think they're doing something.
I would say too, Matthew.
It's a sublimation of an explicit religious instinct and affect.
And it reads.
It reads hot.
Even with your lack of engagement with the subject matter.
I have yet to hear a really thoughtful critique of Huberman that doesn't touch on exactly this.
This is something that people note about the presence, the aesthetic, the presentation.
There's a very deliberate thing going on that has, in addition to the science and the self-optimization that has garnered him a massive audience in a very short period of time.
Zach Bush, to take the example that I'm more familiar with.
And whose, you know, pseudoscience I'm a little bit more literate in, he presents as some kind of icon, a moving wooden statue, you know,
who is glistening in the right way.
It's not just about styling.
It's not just about how 4D your camera is.
There's something else going on, and it comes from, you know, his father was a preacher.
You know, he's raised in a very religious background.
I mean, he is explicitly talking about Jesus and so on.
But yeah, I'm just really interested in the non-ideological and non-verbal religious indicators that we're all sort of, I don't know, trying to navigate and understand.
I wanted to just add a note then.
I think this is a common trajectory that like a hard agree with Everything that you're detailing about the scientific pose or story, rationalist pose that not just Huberman, but we've commented many times on Brett and Heller's ability to,
in their intonation and postures and the words that they use, sound like they're being so reasonable while they say absolutely outlandation scene things.
I'd also add, and I think that this is an interesting Component that most of the people that we cover, although we refer to them as secular gurus, they often want to be clear that they do not dismiss religion in the kind of traditional atheistic perspective,
and they see that as limited.
And Huberman recently spent quite a while on the Lex Friedman podcast detailing his developing faith, and it was a very Jordan Peterson-esque.
Approach to it.
But this is common.
And you hear Brett and Heller talk about, from an evolutionary lens, the view of religion.
And I'm somebody that's active in the field of the cognitive science of religion, which has no problem talking about the evolutionary role of religion.
But I don't see the way that they approach it having the same aspects to it.
But it's that kind of ability to conjure the impression of depth.
And like consideration, right, from tone.
And one thing that's really surprised me in looking more at Huberman is that he has a, you know, he's a scientific advisor for Athletic Greens, AG1, now, right?
There are very, in terms of the amount of science that they put out, it's rather limited.
But the other thing is that he has some branded supplements.
At least which he endorses.
I can't tell if it's like specifically him.
I think it goes through another company, but you know, it's it's Huberman branded supplements.
But the thing that you hear from his fans a lot, and this includes people who would cast themselves as not able to be, you know, bought by conspirituality type gurus that he didn't want to make the supplements.
It was his audience that kind of forced them to it because they wanted good quality supplements that could rely on.
So he, you know, produced them.
And they say, you know, he didn't want to do it, so you can't really criticize him for producing it.
And I was like, oh my God, sell you another bridge.
But the thing is, I think packaged right, that becomes a very appealing thing.
Whereas people can easily see through Alex Jones, when it's somebody that looks like Huberman with the credential of Huberman, they would see my take as inherently cynical and dismissive.
Yeah, that he's the reluctant and benevolent millionaire.
He was dragged kicking and screaming into making any money off of this.
Yeah, it's very unfortunate.
He tried not to.
He tried to stay out of the limelight.
But, you know, what can you do when your public is wanting?
I think this is an excellent point to finish up on because, like Matthew Renski, you said how you're coming at.
Human fresh.
Just going on appearances is sometimes helpful.
And like you, I know nothing about Zach Bush.
Not a thing.
Have no preconceptions at all.
And looking at his website here, Zach Bush, MD.
MD is important.
Anatomy of the soul.
The visualizations are stunning.
It could be the website for a religious cult.
If you just didn't look at the text.
Mind you, the text does say stuff like the journey of intrinsic health, a revolutionary eight-week health transformation, learning journey, and immersive community.
I could go on.
But I think this really illustrates that point, which is influencers like this have a massive power because on one hand, the content, like you said, is purportedly all about health, yet the vibe.
It's about them.
Is thirst trap.
It is maybe, you know, it's not only I've got supplements for you, but maybe I'll also send you patches of my cut-up jeans or something.
This kind of thing points to why our podcasts are often talked about in the same sentences, rightly so, because this is purely what we care about with the secular gurus, which is these are people that present themselves as doing one thing.
The content is purportedly this, but the vibe and the appeal is totally this other thing.
So, yeah.
I also just want to say, rounding off to let you guys escape the Kuning the Guru's black hole, is that I think our podcasts are complementary and have different emphases, which are...
Productive, I think, because, you know, people will appreciate different kind of approaches to things.
But the one thing that I definitely have to thank you guys for when you're here is that by publishing the book that you've had, you've now made it easier to refer to the concept of conspirituality without necessarily referencing that somewhat problematic original paper,
which may...
Oh, poor Charlotte Ward.
I know you've never claimed to originate the term, but I definitely do think your approach has made the topic your own.
Whether people agree or disagree with individual episodes or whatever perspective you guys take on things, I think it's very valuable.
You're documenting and approaching this in the depth that you do.
So just to say, we appreciate that.
And yeah, just don't end up selling supplements or becoming neo-Nazis, please.
Because we'd like some people that we interact with not to go down that path.
Well, I'm about to have one of my moral crashes in just a week or so.
So that's usually a limiting factor.
That'll steer you on the right course.
Yeah, always.
So, one final question to finish up on.
Do you guys take any supplements?
Any at all?
It's not a trick question.
What's your regime?
Most people do, right?
So, it wouldn't be crazy if you did.
I think, apart from Viagra, penis enhancement pills, I'll take that.
A boatload of those.
You know, I take my antihistamines to help me with my allergies.
Growth hormone?
No.
I take baby aspirin every day because I had deep vein thrombosis about seven years ago now.
And apparently that decreases the risk of recurrence from 10% to 5%.
But also, I don't know if I'll ever get on an airplane again.
So that probably also eliminates a lot of the chance.
Yeah, I don't have any time to fuck.
I don't.
I'm like, can I make basic food for the kids on time?
Can we put the lunches together?
Optimizing?
Are you kidding me?
I don't have time to think about my...
I don't even have shoes that are functional.
I'm a total mess.
I don't give a shit.
I used to be into that stuff and it just completely melted away.
I have no interest whatsoever.
In fact, I have these jars of herbs that I used to, I'm sure they're all past due, they're totally stale or whatever, but they're on these shelves and I'm like, maybe I should smell them to see if they're off or whatever.
Maybe that would help me.
Maybe, oh, I have this mixture called meditation aid.
Maybe that would calm me down.
I'm like, yeah, whatever.
I just can't get around to giving a shit anymore.
And you know what?
That's echoing something that a very good friend of mine from when I was in a cult said to me once, which is, I don't even care how I feel anymore.
Sometimes I'm happy.
Sometimes I feel like crap.
I just don't care.
And yeah, so that's how I feel about optimization.
That's a positive note.
Matt usually catches people out on this question by getting them to finally admit that they're on ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine.
So you're a ski-up.
Congratulations.
This is what you do.
You get us really tired and then you ask the gotcha.
Yeah.
And I will just add a very, very brief quote, I swear, to say that I noticed on the Huberman Reddit today that people were saying on the recent episode, Huberman was saying that he avoids turmeric like the plague because it causes his testosterone levels,
the creator.
So, you know, just a free tip for everyone there.
Stay away from Indian food.
Sorry.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, it's been a pleasure having both of you.
And for people who aren't here, it's also been a pleasure to have Derek, but he had to leave because we struggled along for so long.
So yeah, thanks, Derek, as well in absentio.
And yeah, it's a great pleasure.
We shouldn't leave it so long next time.
It means a lot to be here with you guys.
Thank you so much for your questions and your discussion and your engagement with what we do and bringing us into your world.
Yeah, it's a real pleasure.
Thank you so much.
All right.
Keep up the good work.
Stay safe out there.
And yeah, we'll see you next time.
All right.
So that was an enjoyable interview that winded here.
Hiller and Ditto.
And now we are here, Matt, in the tail end of the podcast where we often end up looking at reviews.
Yes, the rump of the podcast.
My favorite part.
I've got a...
Good review and a bad review.
And it correlates with their positivity and negativity about the podcast.
So this one is following on from our Huberman episode and it says the problem with this podcast dot dot dot but it's five stars by Obi-Juan.
After listening to Christopher confess to her preference for sushi restaurants run by robots over a walk in the woods in the early release of the Huberman episode, I realized something.
Christopher is terrible.
So I still give this podcast five stars, but they are all for Matt.
No sharing with Chris.
Yum, yum, yum.
I love that.
I love that.
You're quite right.
That's not what I said.
That's not what I said.
There's a red flag to me too.
Yeah.
Odd, but, you know, what can you do?
What can you do?
I've dug in too deep.
I've been doing this because for too long.
It's too late now.
I can't find a new podcast host.
It's like getting married.
I'm too old to get married again.
I'm stuck with him.
So I'll just have to write this thing out and see where it goes.
That's right.
Now, the other thing, Matt, is that we have, you know, we sometimes trigger people with episodes.
The Chomsky one was notable.
The Huberman one did its thing as well a little bit.
And I think this...
Review might relate to that.
So the title is Too One-Sided for Its Own Good, and it's by Robot Lord.
Good name, though.
The premise of this podcast is great, and I had high hopes going in.
I actually enjoy Chris and Matt as hosts.
They're well-educated, have good chemistry and humor, and don't seem to take themselves too seriously.
The end.
Well, that was good.
That was good.
We should quote that.
We get that blurb when we write our book.
We're going to put the quote on.
Sorry, there's a bit more.
The problem ends up being that they are too like-minded politically, and it just creates a fairly uninteresting left-slanted echo chamber type of critique discussion.
The net product is effectively a full-froated, snickering, cynical take on any person's idea they disagree with politically, while conversely handling people's ideas off the left with a very gentle, almost cowardly approach.
It's pretty cringy.
I guess this is a human nature to a certain degree, but not having half of the commentary come at least a bit from the other side of the aisle is a missed opportunity for a much more interesting podcast.
So that's interesting because, you know, like the valid part of it is certain that, you know, there is an element where you're kinder to people who you feel more inclined to their point of view or see them as like less heinous.
So that's definitely going to play a part.
But the left thing, we just did Chomsky.
I don't know where Huberman would fall in that category, but the D 'Angelo, Kendi, did we endorse their point of views?
Brene Brown, Richter Bregman?
I don't really feel like we did.
So, yeah.
Well, I want to say, I mean, you know, we have a laugh at many of the negative reviews, mainly because of the expression and just the level of lurid hyperbole in them.
But this was a good negative review in the sense, I reckon, and taking it seriously, RoboLord really should pay attention to what the people that are much further left than us, See our criticism and stuff of Chomsky,
right?
Because it balances out what we're...
Because I do sympathize with someone who is centrist or right-leaning.
It could be irritating to hear us always doing things.
And if you're still listening, I actually respect that you can, just like I respect the hardcore Marxists that can still hold their nose and listen to us despite our manifest political failings.
But, you know, like, it's on both sides.
I know.
How can you make people happy is what I'm saying.
Yeah, but also, I also think there's a little bit of false equivalence there because it isn't just that we're more sympathetic.
It's that a lot of the gurus that we cover that are genuinely on the left, they aren't doing a whole bunch of the things that you see with the other secular gurus, right?
So, they might be doing things that are bad.
In a different way, but they're not doing the guru thing, right?
And actually, you can see that because in general, people are not sharing around clips of their content or whatever, like they are with Jordan Peterson.
And it's because they don't have that much content.
The exception is, you know, online shows, daily shows like The Majority Report or, you know, streamers, left-wing streamers, Hassan, or this kind of thing, which are people that we...
I think we'll look at relatively soon.
But in the case of people like Kendi or whatever, when's the last big debate video that Kendi had?
Jordan Peterson does crazy things every week, makes all these statements.
Kendi, he does say things, but he's pretty consistent and he's pretty one note about what he's arguing for.
So it's a different kind of thing.
There are qualitative differences across the spectrum, and there are just more of them, I think, on the right-hand side.
Those populists, like Kendi's and D 'Angelo's, they do exist, and they still tweet.
But I don't understand how somebody can listen to those episodes and think that we didn't notice.
If we didn't have problems with them.
Yeah, I don't know either.
Look, the other thing I want to mention, Chris, is that I think people...
Who have different politics than us and are frustrated that we're not doing X or we're doing too much or Y. They should take note, I think, not just that we're criticizing someone who's left or right, but rather look at what we're criticizing them for.
And I think if you listen back to those episodes, like we would not criticize a right-wing person because they believe in traditional family values.
Free markets.
Free markets or just that, you know, people should work hard and be self-reliant, like value type.
No.
Just like I wouldn't criticize Chomsky for wanting a more equal society and less international inequality and stuff as well.
Again, value type things.
We tend to criticize them for errors of fact and errors of rhetoric or use of rhetoric and reasoning.
So, yeah, that's my defense.
But I think that was good faith negative criticism, Chris.
So, I applaud Robo Lord.
Yeah, yeah.
I agree.
You know, to some extent.
But he's correct.
He prefaced it with some very nice compliments.
Oh yeah, that bit was accurate.
That bit was accurate.
No, no.
I liked all of it.
Yeah, it was grand.
It was fine.
Now, Matt, I'm just going to do something a bit different here for the Patreon shoutouts.
I'm only going to shout out conspiracy hypothesizers because we've gathered quite a crowd of them.
I'm going to read a bunch of them and dispatch them in one go.
So here we go.
We have Tori Bova, Jordan H. Gelham Dishpand, Priyanka, Shane, Jake Fisher, Felix, Alan Dorsky, Christopher O'Brien, Adam Kearney
from Edendary County, Offaly.
Cheese Mask, Charmie, Albert Flores, Dries Tangy, Mark Allen Smith, Josephine Patricia, Becca Thomas, William Howler, Zach Scheffler,
Scotty MFG, Ryan Nestledrott, Daniel Robert Adams,
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.
Wow.
Thank you all.
There's obviously not enough time to make a funny comment about every one of your names or an interesting comment.
But these comments of mine, Chris, they're not funny or anything, really.
They're just little facts.
And one is Priyanka.
That's a very pretty name, actually.
And I know two Priyankas in real life.
So I just wanted to mention that.
Shami, another Indian name, I think.
We know a Shami on Twitter.
It is that Shami.
He's very cool.
It is that Shami.
Hi, Shami.
Hello.
We've done live cooking together.
Live-streamed cooking.
An exciting new concept in social media.
And Felix, we had a Felix in there.
Felix is the name of my dog, and he's a boy.
He's a boy dog called Felix, not a cat.
So if you're a girl or any other gender, sorry.
Matt's dog is a boy.
He's a boy.
Just to be clear on that.
Actually, that's irrelevant.
It's a cat's name.
It's not a dog's name.
It could be a boy or a girl cat.
So gender is irrelevant.
Sorry for bringing it up.
Sorry to inject.
Yeah, you do inject your gender politics into everything, but just edit it out usually.
