Red Scare: Bohemian Hipsterism x Reactionary Tradcaths
In today's joyous episode, we saunter into the loft apartment, take a draw on our gauloise, and glance icily into a world of bohemian hipsters living their best postmodern tradcath lives. Welcome to the irony-drenched world of 'Red Scare', a popular podcast hosted (sardonically) by Anna Khachiyan and Dasha Nekrasova. Also joining them in the episode we cover is hip writer and artist, Tao Lin, a pioneer in the alt-lit world. Get ready for hours of 'transgressive' insights, independent research, dorm-room philosophies and monotone delivery. Thrill at their 'edgy' humour, bespoke theories of autism, standard anti-vax bullshit, and all of the usual positions you find with postmodern conservatism. You will learn things like how Tao Lin diagnosed his cat with autism, how long each host was breastfed, why half of Americans will be non-verbal in 2050, how Trump's anti-vaccine conspiracies make him trustworthy, the best way to chug your bootleg raw milk, and that thick books are always full of reliable facts.When it is all brought together, although we might not have an episode that is lighting up the gurometer, we do have a rather contemporary melange of postmodern-conservatism, trad-cath lifehacks, new-age spirituality, anti-vax conspiracy theories, and irony-laced, not even bothered, posturing.So like... enjoy... or whatever...Also features a discussion of Elon Musk's latest grandiosity, some unexpected guru clashing, and confirmation that Chris and Matt are not cool enough to be invited to your next Bohemian soiree.LinksRed Scare: Crazy Autistic Asians w/ Tao LinElon Musk Interview with Andrew Ross SorkinJames Lindsay & Jonathan Pageau Tussle on Twitter and as usual Demons are involvedTao Lin's Essay The Story of Autism: How We Got Here, How We HealCatala-Lopez, F., Hutton, B., Page, M. J., Driver, J. A., Ridao, M., Alonso-Arroyo, A., ... & Tabarés-Seisdedos, R. (2022). Mortality in persons with autism spectrum disorder or attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder: a systematic review and meta-analysis. JAMA pediatrics, e216401-e216401.Modabbernia, A., Velthorst, E., & Reichenberg, A. (2017). Environmental risk factors for autism: an evidence-based review of systematic reviews and meta-analyses. Molecular autism, 8(1), 1-16.
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, and I can never remember what comes after this, Chris.
I don't remember how the intro finishes, but it's going to finish differently every time from now on, I think.
I noticed, Matt, you dropped the honorifics, decided to be more casual today.
None of your casual maligning of me as a beer associate professor.
That's all in the past now.
We're just two men.
We're just...
We're normal men.
We're normal men.
That's right.
Are we normal?
We're approaching there.
We're relatively normal.
By the standards of the internet, we're relatively normal.
We're relatively normal.
We do spend a couple of hours talking about random internet figures for no particular reason.
But apart from that, we're surprisingly normal.
I suppose that is true.
People that aren't normal, Matt, that we talk about.
The online gurus.
Some of them have been up to things.
One, which I thought was particularly amusing, was old favourite, James Lindsay, had a run-in with new boy on the street, Jonathan Pajot, metaphorical religious master, and they got into a little conflict online,
merely, you know, as is the case, because...
James Lindsay came flying in with guns blazing, suddenly deciding to target Pajot for his fluffy religious nonsense.
And Pajot didn't take it kindly.
So it was just interesting to see.
They fired shots at each other, talking about revealing your true colors and anti-enlightenment goals and all that.
But yeah.
But I think it ended with a suggestion from Pajot that they needed to sit down together to...
Yes, that is right.
He did make that suggestion.
But, you know, Lindsay is occasionally likes to show his bad boy credentials and prove that he's not, you know, just a simp of the religious right.
So whatever.
It was just funny.
The Twitter X drama, but it is always interesting when you see gurus collide in the night.
And this was a funny...
I'll put a link in the show notes so people can go and look for themselves if they want.
In terms of online drama, Chris, I noticed something that made the carometer go ding.
What was that?
And that was a tweet by Elon Musk on X, formerly Twitter.
X is the only platform you can trust for honest information.
All the others are bought and paid for.
Some cultish conspiratorial dynamics there, Chris.
Yeah, just a bit.
It's very on brand for Elon.
And speaking about this, there was a new interview with Elon Musk that went viral, mainly because of his comments regarding...
Advertisers.
So I'll play that.
But I think actually the more interesting bit is what came after that.
But this is the part that had the internet ablaze.
You know that there's a public perception that, and you're clarifying this now, but there's a public perception that that was part of a apology tour, if you will.
This had been said online.
There was all of the criticism.
There was advertisers leaving.
We talked to Bob Iger today.
Don't advertise.
You don't want them to advertise?
No.
What do you mean?
If somebody's going to try to blackmail me with advertising, blackmail me with money, go fuck yourself.
But go fuck yourself.
Is that clear?
I hope it is.
Hey, Bob.
You're in the audience.
Well, let me ask you then.
That's how I feel.
Yeah, that was Musk being his brash self telling advertisers who have left the platform ostensibly over his kind of anti-Semitism and general promotion of conspiratorial accounts and kind of crap on X or Twitter that he doesn't want them there anyway.
They can go bugger off because he won't be pushed around by The likes of Disney and Bob Iger and all that kind of thing.
And I will say, Matt, that I thought this part of it was pretty much on brand for him.
This is the kind of thing that he likes to say, you know, presenting himself as, you know, what are you rebelling against?
What do you got?
Like, this is what he likes to do.
So make a statement, you know, say, go fuck yourself.
It's so edgy.
And he knows that that's going to appeal.
And like targeting Disney or...
Corporations or whatever, that also just generally plays very well.
So, yeah, I didn't find this bit particularly strange, but I do take the point that he is Roller directly telling advertisers, you know, to bugger off, which is unlikely to restore Twitter's positive ad revenue.
Yeah, yeah, indeed.
Like I say, it is on brand for him because amongst the people that love Elon, I think a big selling point is partly that kind of juvenile.
Rebel without a cause thing.
But it's also the other narrative there is that he's so rich that he's above things like making money and sponsorships and things like that.
He's got his eyes fixed on colonizing Mars and promoting free speech and that kind of thing.
So, yeah, it's on brand for him to advertise this to get stuffed.
Yeah, so the part that interested me more was the segment...
After this, though.
So that's the kind of viral, crowd-stopping, look at me, I'm telling the advertisers to go fuck themselves, I can't be bought, right, moment.
But listen to this little bit that comes after.
How do you think, then, about the economics of X?
If part of the underlying model, at least today, and maybe it needs to shift, maybe the answer is it needs to shift away from advertising.
If you believe that this is the one part of your business where you will be beholden to those who have this view, what do you do?
Why?
I understand that, but there's a reality, too.
Right?
Yes.
No, no.
I mean, Linda Yaccarino's right here, and she's got to sell advertising.
Absolutely.
So, no, no.
Actually, what this advertising boycott is going to do, it's going to kill the company.
And you think that...
And the whole world will know that those advertisers killed the company, and we will document it in great detail.
But those advertisers, I imagine, are going to say...
They're going to say we didn't kill the company.
Oh yeah?
They're going to say...
Tell to Earth.
But they're going to say, Elon, that you killed the company because you said these things and that they were inappropriate things and that they didn't feel comfortable on the platform, right?
That's what they're going to say.
And let's see how Earth responds to that.
Yeah, that is more interesting, isn't it?
I haven't heard this before, by the way, Chris.
This is the first time I've heard.
Both of those.
Like one, he doesn't really care that much if Twitter slash X goes bankrupt, right?
And that actually makes sense because he's got enough other companies, I suppose.
I don't think it would send him bankrupt if it did.
But the way he sees it...
That it's almost like a game and that the whole world is watching.
Like, I don't know.
He sees it in very, what's the word?
Grandiose terms.
Yeah.
And, you know, he makes appeals to Earth.
Earth will respond.
Like, it seems to be that the people, right, you know, the everyday workaday folk are going to rise up when they realize that advertisers have fled Twitter and caused the business model to collapse.
And, like, it's an illustration of myopia, Like you suggest, it's also this weird...
View that, you know, the whole earth would care about Elon's company when there's so many Twitter clones and stuff already existing, right?
Like you and I are heavy Twitter users and we don't care.
No!
You know, it's not that most people don't use it.
And most people who do use it, use it only a tiny little bit.
Most of us don't like it and would quite happily move to a different platform if everyone else kind of did at the same time, which would happen if Twitter went bankrupt.
Yeah, and he does look and...
The mannerisms and response.
He doesn't look nonchalant in the actual clip, Matt.
He looks like kind of bug-eyed.
He looks like a surly toad.
Well, he does, yes, in that image.
He's kind of, you know, jutting his neck out and all this kind of thing.
But also that part where the interviewer, right, when he was doing the, like, pause for effect and he didn't really get the response from that.
Particular crowd.
And then they point to, you know, but your CEO is there.
They've got to sell advertisements.
And for a minute, he kind of snaps back into, oh, well, yeah, like, you know, and kind of then tries to, like, get out of it, just for a second, come out of, like, the performance, but then snaps back into it.
So I don't know, just like people were talking about, was he on stuff?
Maybe he was, maybe he wasn't, but I think he's just somebody that is.
Absolutely bought in on his own bullshit.
He thinks he is the center of the universe.
And later, actually, if you listen to the whole interview, the interviewer goes on, asks him various stuff around controversial topics, but also gets him talking about his big vision and philosophy and what motivates him in the morning and that kind of thing.
And actually, when it gets to that stuff, you actually see the Elon...
That was having cameos in Marvel movies or whatever.
You know, the kind of tech billionaire, slightly eccentric genius who has these big ideas about settling distant planets and, you know, is focused on the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and all that.
But it's interesting because it's basically juxtaposed with his new pilled right-wing populist.
Character that keeps coming out a couple of minutes later.
So he just looks like someone that's fundamentally broken.
And not in an interesting way.
In the same way that people were red-pilled uncles by, you know, the Trump election or that kind of thing.
Like, he's a billionaire.
But he's just a red-pilled conspiracy theorist billionaire.
That's all.
Yeah.
Yeah.
In terms of how he got that way, I think it's interesting as to why.
I mean, part of it would be his personality.
But I also think that being a billionaire for however many years has an effect on you.
There's that well-known effect in Hollywood where pretty much all A-list Hollywood stars become a bit weird just because they've been living so many years of their life where everybody...
Treats them as the absolute centre of attention, hangs on their every word, laughs at every joke, runs off to grab them a drink if they're thirsty, etc, etc.
And even the ones that seem kind of endearing and nice, I've heard, tend to be a bit weird after a career at the A-list.
And I imagine something similar is going on if you...
Happen to have a few billion dollars, right?
Yeah.
It's going to just exaggerate whatever flaws you have.
It's going to draw a huge amount of sycophants and it's going to, because of prestige bias and those kinds of effects, lead to people looking up to you as somebody with wisdom, not just money.
Insights and special powers and whatnot.
And I think that has a two-way effect.
It isn't just...
The audience who, you know, is kind of bowing down and becoming parasocially attached.
But the subject of that attention also gets the message that they are profound, insightful, you know, special kind of.
So maybe it's just our social primate brains are not great at dealing with like, you know, massive amounts of attention and associated prestige.
Could be that.
This is why I'd like to remind you that you're an associate professor, you know, just to help you.
Keep me on the straight end now.
Yeah, but still there are rich people who are not pilled maniacs like Elon Musk.
So, you know, you didn't hear Warren Buffett endorsing.
Pizzagate or whatever conspiracy is in the news from five years ago.
That's right.
It is absolutely not inevitable and not an excuse.
Charlie Munger, his partner, died recently and a fair few of his quotes and little bits of wisdom were floating around and he just seems like a genuinely wise and smart guy.
You could be that and fabulously wealthy.
It's possible.
Well, I've got a...
Nice pivot from well-adjusted, reasonable people.
Let's turn to the subjects of the episode this week.
So just one point of clarification before we start this, okay?
People make suggestions of folks that we should cover.
Sometimes we get a lot of requests for individuals and we don't think that they particularly well fit the secular guru.
Template.
But nonetheless, it's useful to cover some people that don't fit so well to see how well the gurometer or the heuristics apply.
Because there is an entire rainbow of ways to be terrible or conspiratorial or that kind of thing.
And being a secular guru is more specific.
So if somebody doesn't fit into that template, it doesn't mean they're good.
And I just want to mention this because this week we're looking at a podcast called Red Scare.
What would you describe Red Scare as, Matt, having listened to an episode?
I would struggle to describe it.
Maybe by the end of our episode, I'll be able to describe it a bit better.
But after one episode, I guess it was a couple of people, a couple of women.
Talking about random topics with their guest in a kind of ironic, world-weary, casual kind of way.
Yes, sardonic might be a word that I would use and drenched in irony.
So one of the issues that we're going to face here is that to even take them seriously is to lose.
Because anything that you point out...
Especially when people have such a strong, irony-drenched presentation, is to basically feel to get the joke, right?
"Oh, you took that seriously?
That's just a joke."
Or "We didn't mean that."
And that's unavoidable.
But this is a tactic which is actually very common in left-wing media, I feel.
Especially like Chapo Trapo, Funhouse.
Or whatever it's called, side of social media.
So we've seen it previously with ContraPoints in her content.
She uses irony and casual self-deprecation in quite an effective way, but it does provide you with a layer of protection.
Because you can always just present it that, well, that was just, you know, I was just making a joke and ironic.
I'm just a big dummy anyway, so don't take me seriously.
Yeah, I'm Joe Rogan.
I'm just a comedian.
But like Joe Rogan, you do notice some rather clear recurrent motifs in the content.
And I think Red Scare has come to be labeled as relatively...
Reactionary, maybe initially associated with the dirtbag left, but recent guests, if you just look at the guest list, it kind of hints about the kind of oeuvre that you have come to expect.
You might see Glenn Greenwald.
You might see Alex Jones was on there.
The guy that we are covering is a recent episode with her.
A novelist, Tao Lin, who's probably less familiar, but Steve Bannon, the Bronze Age pervert, so on, so forth, right?
It's what you have come to expect from this neck of the woods.
Yeah, yeah.
I think that would be a mistake to position them too precisely on the political spectrum because they are politically labile, I think, as we'll kind of see.
And from just the basic descriptions you can find of their podcasts and the media, you can see that they sort of occupy that.
Area on the horseshoe, where ultra-skeptical, ultra-ironic left and right sort of come together, but it's ambiguous.
It's been described as a louche hipster podcast, I see, on Wikipedia, quoting New York Times.
Yeah, anyway, we'll see.
We'll see.
It's a vibe.
It's a place.
They're from Lower Manhattan, which seems to be somehow relevant.
It's got that shtick about it.
Well, the host, Matt.
The hosts.
Who are the two hosts of this lovely podcast?
That's an excellent, excellent question, Chris.
I'm glad you asked.
Good.
That's what I'm here for.
Apparently, it's Dasha Nekrasova.
And Anna Kachian.
Anna Kachian.
I pronounced them wrong, but that's all right.
People expect that by now.
Actually, the little biography there about that was interesting because it reminded me of Dr. Evil's backstory because Nekrasova is a Belarusian-born actress who became known as Sailor Socialism after an interview with an InfoWars reporter went viral.
She immigrated to Las Vegas, Nevada with her acrobat parents when she was four.
The other one's got a similarly colourful background, so I like that.
Yeah, my father would make ludicrous claims like he invented the question mark, right?
So just out of childhood.
But yes, and the New York Times reviewer, whatever you were quoting from there, mentioned the term hipster.
I would say that is a very good description of the vibe, but it's...
It's kind of the hipsters that have got into the contrarian rights space.
So they give a little packaged history of the podcast and here's how they describe it.
We plateaued, but we had a big period of growth.
We went zero to one.
And we had some, we were both pretty active on Twitter and so we had like pretty modest audiences.
But then...
I think, well, I had the Sailor Socialism thing.
I had like a viral video that got us a lot of attention.
And then I think podcasts weren't, the market wasn't oversaturated.
And we're based in New York, which is like a media epicenter.
So it kind of like organically, I don't know.
And we said provocative things and like, yeah.
Came out against me, too, very early on.
We just started the rape apology early on.
And we got a lot of negative press.
Yeah.
And they say that helped.
Yeah.
So I'm just going to say this now, Matt.
There's going to be a lot of vocal fry and a lot of...
Yeah.
I don't have a problem with that.
I've learned that it's very sexist to have a problem with that.
It's fine.
That's fine.
So you're going to hear quite a lot of that tone.
I think the writer, they came into the prime in a period when there was still a lot of space in podcasting land and they were controversial and hip.
And questioning Me Too and generating controversy.
And one of them is the girl from a viral video making fun of Infowars.
It's edgy, Matt.
You know, what isn't the like?
And also, Dasha was in Succession recently.
She was one of the actors in Succession.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
Oh, I have to check that out.
I really like Succession.
She wasn't bad in Succession.
It did seem like playing something of a version of herself, but anyway.
But Chris, I listened to the whole episode, and the whole time I think in my mind I was imagining them as being like 20-something, young.
Oh, yeah.
But you pointed out, and I've just checked now, that they're aged 32 and 38, and their guest on this episode is, do you know how old he is?
Oh, God, I wish he was like 14 or something, but he's going to be like 40. He's 40. Yeah.
So, yes, this episode is one of the very recent episodes.
I think the most recently released episode, which was called Crazy Autistic Asians.
And it's because they have a novelist.
Tao Lin with them, who has written about autism, has some theories about autism, as we'll hear.
So let me just play a little bit to give the flavor of the podcast.
And this is from the introduction, showing the kind of tone of the podcast.
Anna, what did you have for breakfast?
Fuck, I don't know.
It's a chocolate chip cookie.
Good.
I had...
Oh my god, I did eat something weird.
I went to like the cafeteria for UN delegates by my house.
I went there and they have like a hot bar.
And I got like eggs and a caprese salad.
That sounds disgusting.
That is the general tone.
When they're talking about breakfast, when they're talking about anything else, it's the same.
And part of the appeal of it is the authentic nature of the interactions.
They're not really prepared.
They're just, you know, shooting the ship.
We could get down with that.
We're down with that, aren't we, Chris?
That's our style.
Yeah, yeah, I guess so.
I mean, I just...
We've painted a picture, Matt, so people who haven't listened can get the gist of what this was like for multiple hours.
And here's the introduction of Tao Lin.
It was just steak and onions.
He was pretty discreet about it.
He's such a humble, self-abnegating person that he didn't inform anybody.
So happy birthday, Jordan.
It was steak, you said?
Steak.
Steak and onion and cheese and some other stuff.
That sounds nice.
I made Jordan a Wikipedia page for his birthday.
So that flat-toned individual, that's Tao Lin, the guest.
And that flat-tone is going to be part of his delivery shtick.
Maybe it's a side effect of autism, as he claims.
Maybe not.
But in any case, that...
Kind of plodding, monotone delivery is going to do a lot of the heavy lifting for his various perspectives on this episode.
So Tara Lynn, a little introduction to him.
He's a novelist, right?
And I guess he comes from the same milieu.
He's very hip in terms of his output.
He's kind of one of these, like an edgy, modern novelist.
And his work has attracted a fair bit of praise, but it's also attracted a fair bit of criticism.
Again, this is just...
From Wikipedia research, so don't take this too seriously.
But Gorka called him maybe perhaps the single most irritating person we've ever had to deal with.
And then to which Lynn retaliated by completely covering the front door of the Gorka office building with stickers bearing Britney Spears' name, which is a form of protest, I guess.
Elle magazine wrote, we've long been deeply irked by Lynn's vacuous posturing.
And I know you are, but what am I?
Dorm room philosophizing.
So those are a couple of negative statements.
But, you know, he's written quite a few books and they've attracted some positive sort of arty literary feedback as well.
So that's who he is.
He's a celebrated author.
And I think he does the writing about your life in a vaguely disguised manner style from what he describes in this episode.
So I think he is celebrated by various literary critic types as well.
As well as some regarding him as an intellectual poser, I might lean more heavily towards the latter based on this conversation, but I actually don't...
I think that, in general, to be a good artist or a good writer, that you need to be somebody who is, you know, au fait with science or not a conspiracy theorist.
I'm sure there are plenty of very good authors who have very stupid insights into autism or whatever, politics, whatever you care about.
So, actually, I don't...
Think that the stuff that we're going to cover in this episode would necessarily mean that his output is bad or that kind of thing because it's art, man.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
And yeah, artists famously known for having very stable and grounded personalities.
No, but I did notice like the general theme with that stuff, which is his writing is super hip and it's cool with a certain edgy, sophisticated crowd.
He's clearly got a knack for self-promotion.
And, you know, staging events and getting media attention, things like that.
I might be showing my misunderstanding of current views around autism, but they talk a lot about his self-identification as someone with autism.
And it just struck me as a little bit at odds with that.
Got to be careful with that kind of thing, I suppose.
Don't want to deny somebody's identity.
We'll get into that, all that stuff and the claims and whatnot.
But how much of a defense that would be for the very...
I'm less compelled by.
But in any case, here's an introduction to him from the hosts.
Hi, we're back.
We're back.
We have a very exciting guest.
Novelist, poet, writer, autism advocate, nutritionist, auto fiction pioneer, needs no introduction.
Taolin, welcome to Red Scare.
Thank you.
This is my favorite podcast that I've been on.
Really?
Chris, I have a question for you.
How popular is Red Scare?
Is it a big podcast?
Yeah, yeah, it's very popular.
I don't know where it's ranked, but very popular is the answer.
Yes.
And can you not tell why?
We're such scintillating interactions.
But it is focusing on delivery at the minute, Matt.
But I don't think this reflects my age because I never find this appealing, even when I was myself an edgy teenager.
But I'm so incredibly excited.
This is amazing.
He's unbelievable.
And then, thank you.
This podcast is my favorite.
Just, Jesus Christ.
If I was at a party with these people, I would just be pointing back the shots to get out of these conversations.
I think at least part of it is a difference in social milieu.
That's it, though.
I just want to make it clear.
It's not just about age.
It's about social.
Because I have been at parties like this.
Well, Talyn is 40, right?
He's 40. He's the same age as me.
Same age as me.
I remember when I was 40, and I was a spring chicken of 40. Yeah, it's true.
I didn't like this kind of stuff then.
I previously talked about, Matt, how I went to a party in London from a friend who was working in the FX industry there, and it was very hipsterish.
Party in Shoreditch territory.
And that party almost made me want to kill myself.
Like just the escape, the conversations that people were having there.
I genuinely, it was mental torture.
And I've been to bad parties.
I've talked to plenty of idiots or people in all walks of life, even at good parties, right?
This was just something.
And this is giving me flashbacks to that event.
Now you mention it, I have mixed in artistic circles too and gone to parties that were full of musos.
Everyone had a band with varying degrees of success.
I remember a party that was hosted by a poet.
He was a poet.
And he had a little crowd of fans around him.
And he was an incredibly...
Charming and charismatic and handsome guy.
But that was similar.
That's the similar vibe.
And you're right.
It's not my thing either.
So I guess we're just laying our cards on the table in terms of, you know, it's not just individuals.
There are different social groupings.
And I'm sure it's pretty intense down there on the lower east side of Manhattan or wherever they're from.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I'm just a country chicken from a small town in Queensland, Australia.
We don't do these kind of fancy events.
But you know, I do think there is a parallel with the IDW sophisticated dinner.
Get-togellers, which they're always talking about having these big conversations over dinner.
I also don't go to those.
So I'm not taking part in any of the whole intellectual social milieu.
So, all right.
Anyway, with that clear, there's something we need to get out of the way early because it's going to come up.
You might have guessed it, but one part of being edgy is saying like edgy words and things which are...
Supposed to be offensive and that demonstrates that you're cool because you don't give a shit what normal restrictions are, man.
Like, you're too hip for that.
So, just two examples.
Are you a mama's boy?
Can you describe that?
I mean, who are you closer with, your mom or your dad?
My mom, definitely.
Yeah, okay.
Totally.
You identify more with your mother.
I think also your dad's, like, not retarded and he probably can intuit that...
You and your mother have what feels like a conspiracy together against him.
Retarded.
You know, whoa!
Say the R word!
Whoa!
Yeah, yeah.
Here, I just wanted to highlight that you might have thought that that was the cutting edge of humor when South Park came to the fore, right?
To say retarded or something like that and it'd be edgy.
But no.
Anyway, it's worth noticing another Example is this one.
Do you feel like being like the child of immigrants contributed at all to your perspective as an artist?
It's kind of a gay and cliched question, but it also dawns on me that autism aside, having shame-based foreigner parents also gives you a sense of critical distance.
It's a gay question, Matt.
You know, it's the words that used to be used offhand but now deliberately used to show that you're, you know, beyond.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Transgressive.
That's the word you're looking for.
That's a word.
Yeah, yeah.
It's transgressive.
It's hip to be square.
That's alright.
I like South Park.
If you make it a cornerstone of your personality, that's impressive.
But nonetheless, I've just said it because you'll hear it come up.
And so there's two clips.
That's it.
And if that was the extent of it.
Just to be clear, I would just be like, okay, you know, whatever.
It's not that which makes the rest of the stuff that you're going to hear, like, bad, right?
That's just a symptom of the hipster, edgy, contrarian space.
But I think one of the things is, like, if people focus on that, that gives them an easy out to say that, oh, look, people are just being triggered by...
You know, that's what it's there for.
Well, I wasn't triggered.
I wasn't triggered.
Well, bad luck.
You feel the triggers.
You're not going to get us that easily.
I'm just trying to figure out how to tell the difference between someone who's not neurotypical and someone who's just incredibly, incredibly cool.
Yeah, that's true.
So let's get into it.
So obviously this episode is going to be heavily focused on autism and there's various reasons for that.
Tao Lin has apparently been described as an autistic writer by various people, or at least they claim that.
So here's him talking about this a little bit.
You're a very evocative writer in spite or because of being very literal, which you've talked about and which you attribute to autism.
Mmhmm.
Yeah, yeah.
Generally don't like and shy away from devices like metaphor or idioms or whatever.
Do you feel like that's like an autistic trait?
Yeah, yeah.
I feel like I have two styles.
One of them is the one you're describing.
It's really literal and it just describes concrete details and also like some thoughts and feelings.
And that one's the one that everyone associates me with.
So they think I write really simply.
But I also write in longer sentences with a lot of metaphors and stuff.
Like I did in my book Taipei.
But I feel like both of them are autistic literary styles.
Like with the long sentences, I'll use really weird autistic similes.
Scintillating.
So he uses weird similes and he describes things in a factual way because of his autistic tendencies.
And you might at this point be curious, is he autistic?
And just to answer that, he explains.
But we do have a lot of questions about autism.
Have you ever been formally diagnosed as autistic?
No.
So you just suspect that you're autistic?
Yeah, yeah.
I've self-diagnosed.
And I've taken tests.
Like, I took this test pretending I was in high school or college.
And I scored 39. And above 31 indicates.
Oh, I've taken this test, yeah?
Yeah, and then you said you retook it.
From your perspective today and you scored 28. So when you say you were pretending that you were in high school or college, what does that mean?
I just sat there thinking like I'm in what was it like when I was in 11th grade and like a freshman in college and I've written about it so much I feel like I can just remember it.
And I just filled out the test.
Okay.
I was trying to think of the particular vibe that's being portrayed here, and it reminded me of, like, you know those directors, like Andy Warhol or Jim Jamush?
They both, like, hammed it up on purpose.
And Jim Jamush did a cameo in a funny sort of New York comedy.
It was about a, I forget what it was called, it was a guy, he was like a...
Private Detective.
There was a scene where Jim Jarmusch is having this surreal conversation with him while he's riding around on a little bicycle honking a little horn.
And it's just so pretentious and artsy and all at the same time.
Yeah, I feel like that's the vibe that Talyn's going for.
For me, the part that strikes me here, Matt, is cutting through all of that self-diagnosed with autism on the basis of taking a test and thinking back.
To when you were younger and that you would score higher at the time than you would now.
Now, I'm not going to argue that autism is diagnosed on the spectrum, right?
Autism spectrum disorder exists.
So it is quite possible that somebody doesn't reach clinically diagnosable levels, but they're somewhere on the spectrum.
But just that whole approach.
If you were really this focused on the topic and concerned about it, why wouldn't you just go see a qualified psychiatrist or psychologist and get a diagnosis?
And actually, if you wanted a diagnosis, I think the way that you choose to answer questions on the test is not that hard to work out.
But it just speaks to that, that's what all of this is based on, is self-diagnosis.
And self-research and all the things that you're going to hear is all from Tao Lin's own autodidactic approach to research.
Yeah, I think the point is he's...
He's kind of autistic, but ironically.
He is, but he isn't.
Don't take it seriously, but don't not take it seriously.
It's another one of the influences on his style, and I guess it's part of the gestalt that makes him pretty fascinating and interesting.
To some people, yes.
So here's him talking about definitions of autism a bit more.
The CDC's definition of it.
No, the DSM-5's definition of it is just that you have...
Deficits in social interaction and communication and just anything social.
And then you also have repetitive behaviors.
And then the third thing that these things cause quote significant impairment in your functioning.
So it's just those three things.
Okay.
So it's not like if you go to a doctor, there's no biological test or genetic test for it.
Right.
You mentioned that unlike something like Down syndrome or other forms of retardation, which can be localized to like a single chromosome or something.
I feel not that this is a little bit...
Common.
Actually, it reminds me of some of the stuff when I used to read works about mental health denialism, that whole, you know, anti-psychiatry movement.
And there's general critiques that you can have of the DSMV-5 and the history of psychiatry and all that kind of thing.
Whenever diagnoses are presented like this, it tends to be saying, you know, like the diagnostic criteria is so loose, so broad that basically it's very easy to fit yourself into these criteria if you want, right?
Like, what does it mean to be impaired?
What does it mean repetitive behaviors and stuff?
But actually, although there could be issues with overdiagnosis, I think in general, a good psychiatrist and whatnot will not.
Hand out a diagnosis without, you know, significant evidence.
And it isn't just that you read the checklist online and then that's it, right?
Like all of the things, if you read it, will say...
This requires proper extended evaluation.
So this reminds me a bit of like going, you know, WebMD-ing your symptoms and being like, oh, yes, yes, I've got that.
So I must have some rare exotic disease.
And of course, autism is not that rare compared to other disorders, but it's just the approach.
You know, it's very vibe.
Yeah, this applies.
There may be issues with clinical diagnosis, over-diagnosis or under-diagnosis, but certainly those pale in comparison to self-diagnosis.
So I'm not going to attempt a casual diagnosis, but I've met a few people on the spectrum.
In real life, I'm related to some of them.
Some people have accused me of being somewhere along the spectrum.
But that doesn't matter because I'm not a clinician either.
Then you'll be interested to hear their discussions about where the origins of autism lie.
Because you might not be a clinician, Matt, but Tao Lin has done research.
They found like the exact gene or whatever.
But with autism, they found like 500 to 1000 different genes that are associated with it.
Even though they found that many, they still think, they just still view it as genetic.
Right.
And your point, like basically the TLDR from what I understand is that all these modern chemicals and technologies are what's making us ill and the genetic explanation is kind of a scapegoat.
It diverts away from the environmental factors.
Is that correct?
Definitely, yeah.
Okay, so it's the technology and the contaminants in the modern world that is...
Environmental factors, Matt.
And the kind of skepticism around genetic factors there is a thing that will be recurrent.
And in this podcast, whenever they talked about topics, whenever I was preparing for this episode, I went and did a little bit of research.
I did my own research, right, Matt?
But I actually know how to locate meta-analyses and studies and to put them in general context of qualities of studies.
From my research and background information on this, I think the general position is there is a genetic contribution.
The percentage is debatable, but it's not insignificant.
And that there are potential environmental factors, but almost all of the ones that Tao Lin will go on to discuss are not strongly supported by evidence.
There's weak studies or they're associated with anti-vaccine claims or this kind of thing.
And some of the better...
More established ones related to environment during early pregnancy and early stages of life and so on are not so strongly focused on, right?
Except for the kind of chemicals in the environment, electromagnetic waves, ingredients in vaccines, all this kind of stuff.
So it's, yeah.
Yeah, that's right.
Primarily genetic.
When we talk about environmental factors, we're not just talking about the society that we live in and too much screen time.
We're talking about exposure to stuff during pregnancy or medicines and things like that, birth complications and so on.
Right.
Those are the things that are actually relatively strongly supported, but that's not what they're going to fix it on.
And part of the issue is when you say exposure to chemicals in early stages of life or whatever.
The kind of chemicals that they're going to talk about are not the ones that have strong evidence supporting them.
So, yeah, it's one of those things where, like, environment gets mixed in with all types of things.
But if you imagine by environment, they're primarily talking about, you know, the same kind of toxins that most of your health and wellness influencers will identify.
Fimerazole.
These kind of things, right?
Yeah, that's what's going to come up.
Now, here's a little bit more about autism as an identity category and general stupidity about the causes of autism.
Now that there's this push for neurodiversity as an identity category, you say also in your essay that they're sort of trying to destigmatize neurodivergency and in that way also failing to do the research necessary.
To actually attribute it to the certain environmental or chemical causes.
But first of all, autism gets thrown around a lot.
It's very broadly applied.
Obviously people are becoming more autistic clinically, but I also feel like a lot of normative behaviors now qualify as our times are becoming increasingly autistic and everyone is sort of...
On the spectrum.
Do you think that, like, for instance, being online makes you more autistic?
Or do autistic people gravitate toward being online?
Both.
Both of those.
I feel like it's not just environmental toxins, but just literally everything.
Like even how you're raised.
Right.
Or your experiences.
That's extremely vague and broad, isn't it?
I mean, one thing to say that being online makes you more artistic or just everything, all your experiences, then you're talking in such broad terms and you must be referring to some concept.
Of autism that is just so broad as to be entirely meaningless, surely.
Dash, it does make the point there about there being a lot of claims about behavior being autistic or people being autistic, right?
It's kind of trendy, especially in Silicon Valley kind of spaces.
But I think also in these artistic and creative spaces too, you know, I was mentioning these, you know, hip directors and you could think of names of artists.
Authors and stuff like that who have a brand.
And a bit like the Silicon Valley people, it kind of makes sense to have that brand where you're like in touch with the infinite, you know, you're somehow special, your insights are better, they're more unique.
And when you're building a brand to become well known as an artist of some kind, I could see an incentive to lean into that.
So it's kind of ironic, isn't it, that they bring that up?
With Tal Lin, who arguably could be leaning into it for the same reasons.
Yes, it is slightly ironic.
We don't need more irony in this show, Chris.
They're already supplying enough.
We shouldn't do it.
I would take it as an underhand dig because they did say at the start that they have some questions about his claims about autism and stuff as well.
So I think there is an element of that.
There, but the way that it's used here, like here's another example of it just being like used as a very broad term and diagnoses being thrown around casually.
Yeah, I feel like the increase in autism must be connected to the increase in autofiction.
If there is an increase in autofiction, I don't know if there has been, but just it seems like autistic people Do you think Joan Didion was autistic?
Sorry, I don't know.
A little, yeah.
Something was up with her, yeah.
So Tao Lin's an auto-fictional writer, right?
That's his genre.
It's a genre of literature that combines elements of autobiography and fiction.
And he was saying that that fictional style is connected to the rise of autism?
Yeah.
I think his link is autistic people being fixated on topics and linking things, seeing things from their perspective.
That, you know, having difficulties with theory of mind stuff means that that would be an appealing genre of literature for them.
But the logic there as well, Matt, is I think the rise of this, if there has been a rise in this, like you would want the first thing, right?
You'd want to...
Establish that if you want to make the claim that this is because autism is becoming more common, so now this is becoming a more popular genre of fiction, you'd first want to know that that is the case.
And also, I think, like, people writing from...
Their autobiographical perspective and disguising as fiction.
It's not entirely a new genre of fiction that I've never heard of before.
I've heard of plenty of weaves that sound very familiar to this and like previous generations.
So, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
Marcel Proust and the Rocher de Tonspo-Doux.
Exactly.
All of that, Matt.
All of that.
And you can hear the same...
Kind of loose reasoning when they're talking about autism and testosterone.
Here's an example.
That's interesting, because I have a question about autism, which there's some common sort of perceptions about it, that it's also due to an excess of testosterone, which is why most autists are male.
And that it's, someone described it to me as like being excessively male-brained.
And thus lacking kind of the more feminine instincts for like empathizing and like graciousness.
I'm sure that's part of it.
Testosterone levels.
I hadn't heard of it being too high though.
Or maybe low or some imbalance.
I feel like low probably.
Or free.
Because there's a difference.
A lot of autists are high T. Yeah, but there's like the.
The idea of free testosterone in your blood, which I don't fully follow or understand, but maybe that's a thread.
Maybe.
A bit of free speculation there, Chris.
Yeah.
So they've read stuff about the extreme male brain theory and testosterone.
Yes.
Time and barring coin.
Yeah.
And I think it is true, right, that autism is much more prevalent in...
Males than females, right?
Much more prevalent amongst males than females.
Questions about, you know, is part of that to do with the way that it presents in males being more readily diagnosable, but also the evidence around this being linked to testosterone levels, and I believe it's particularly higher levels of prenatal testosterone,
so like in the amniotic.
Fluid.
Yeah.
So it's not that autistic people have higher levels of testosterone, it's that when they were just dating.
They could have been higher levels of testosterone in the amniotic fluid.
So a bit different.
Right.
But, you know, there are various versions of the theory and whatnot.
But the general thing I would say is that it doesn't have strong evidence currently.
And more this clip highlights, and we'll see it in other clips, the way that they approach these kind of topics.
In some respect, Matt, this is the way a lot of people approach this kind of topic.
So Tao Lin has apparently been, you know, quite focused on this issue.
But when you hear...
Either the way he talks about studies or the way that, you know, he finds what Dasha and Anna say, you know, yeah, yeah, that's right.
It's kind of like that, whatever.
Like, it's just very, very superficial and vibe-based.
I heard once from a friend, yeah, my...
Yeah, it's basically Joe Rogan epistemology.
Yeah.
It's something you read once and you vaguely remember.
And, you know, it's a theory.
The evidence for it is pretty weak.
And they've kind of not even remembered it quite right anyway.
Yeah.
So this gets tied in.
This is something that's going to come up again later.
But in a lot of these podcasts that we cover, Matt, the different types of figures that we cover, one recurrent pattern that you see across a diverse range.
Is this kind of fascination with esoteric and the presentation of the noble savage, the return to the way that humans are supposed to live and this kind of naturalistic is good philosophy,
right?
You see that crop up a lot.
Indigenous peoples have knowledge that is closer to the ideal form that humans should live, this kind of thing.
And Tao Lin links this in to stuff to do with autism.
I liked what you were talking about earlier about how you think everyone's on the spectrum.
That's what I think.
Like, definitely now, compared to our pre-agricultural ancestors.
Everyone now is on the spectrum, I think.
We're on some kind of spectrum.
We're on all the spectrum.
Autistic, suicidal.
I'm feeble-minded myself.
Unstable.
Yeah, definitely.
It's intersectional.
Because that one artist, George Catlin, in the 1800s, he visited...
Two million Native Americans and South American natives.
And he didn't meet one he called an idiot or lunatic, quote lunatic, out of two million people.
And he said he heard of three or four.
You see the reference that it's intersectional.
Actually, I know that's kind of just a flippant comment, but I do think that is the horseshoe.
I think coming in that they are fluent in that way of thinking, you know, the postmodern.
Oh, yeah.
And if you think back to some of those other clips you played there, Chris, they're very much au fait with the very sophisticated kind of discourse language that you normally would associate with super ultra progressive people.
Yeah, yeah.
But there's a horseshoe going on where the levels of irony and skepticism and so on has reached such a point.
That there's a bit of a horseshoe at play.
But yeah, it was interesting, his theory, that we're all autistic now to some degree or another.
The modern world has made us this way.
And the proof of this is some first-hand account of some early pioneer who met a lot of Native Americans and didn't meet many...
Was it idiots is the word that he used?
Lunatics and idiots.
Yeah, so that's strong evidence.
Actually, I went and looked...
Because of course you did, yes.
Yeah, because I did.
This is what I do.
So he's an interesting character because he was somebody who went around and produced a whole bunch of portraits of Indigenous American people, Native Americans.
And on the one hand, presented them in an overall positive light and kind of documenting that they're...
A very varied collection of different people and that they have these traditions which are beautiful and they take care of landscapes and all this kind of thing.
But it's very much also associated with the kind of noble-savage presentation from that period.
And it's very much regarding them as the repository.
Of wisdom that can cure the ills of the Western mind, which is a very common motif.
Yeah, and I'm sure, Chris, sorry, this is an aside, but I'm sure, like, I know it's easy to mock that, right?
People coming from the sort of early industrial age, looking at people living in more natural environments, moving around.
I can imagine, I don't know for sure, but I can imagine them making valid comparisons of people being, you know, physically fitter.
Seemingly more relaxed and stuff like that compared to the sort of people in some industrial town in the Midwest, you know, going off to the factory and that.
I mean, there is that, right?
You can focus on that aspect, but a lot of it is just exoticism.
And I absolutely would not trust his assessment of how many people were suffering from mental illness.
And there's a lot about them having...
Kind of special breathing techniques which allow them, you know, to live healthier lives and all this kind of stuff.
So it's very much the exact same as the theosophists, just like a different target.
But Tao Lin treats it as, well, we can take his account as very accurate because...
And that shows that pre-agricultural societies just didn't have significant levels of autism or, you know, mental illnesses associated with that.
Yeah.
No, that's the past, Matt.
What about the future?
Have some projections about the future.
I wanted to ask you about this quote from your essay, where, if I can find it, the United States, which is of 2011, had the highest first day infant death rate in the industrialized world might succumb to autism.
Becoming a cautionary example for other countries, the autism rate here has doubled on average of every five years since 1970.
At this rate, the majority of American boys will be autistic by 2036, and by around 2045, most children here will be nonverbal.
Are you being sarcastic or facetious, or do you think that's actually true?
The nonverbal thing?
I calculated it.
A lot of times, I calculated it.
Yeah, it's true.
Okay.
I mean...
I buy it.
Yeah, I said it's like on pace to do that.
Unless...
Well, is there any...
There's no way to remedy it.
And the lonely causing debility is our environment.
Yeah.
Okay, so the truth in that there, Chris, is that rates of diagnosis of autism in the U.S. and to some degree elsewhere have been increasing a lot over recent decades, haven't they?
That's right.
But what he's doing there...
Very scientifically, Dalin is extrapolating out, assuming that there will be a consistent increase from a growth, right?
Like he's projecting an exponential increase.
So by the same thing, you could look at the production of some new type of cheese or some popular sweet and say, look, the production of prime drink is doubling year on year.
For, you know, the past five years or whatever it's been out.
And if this continues by the year 2050, the earth will just be comprised solely of prime drinks.
You know, you can't do that.
And also, I don't trust his calculations.
No.
But he did say it was an extrapolation.
It was a forecast when they pushed him on it.
He calculated it several times, but he did slip in there that he was extrapolating.
Right.
But that's the thing, Matt.
Really?
The US is going to be non-verbal by the mid-2000s.
I know they're expressing their skepticism over that claim as well, but I do feel that shows quite how seriously...
You should take some of the other claims made by Paulin.
Of course, of course.
I mean, he makes several mistakes.
I mean, the least of which probably is the extrapolation, because you could give him the benefit of the doubt and says he knows that he's just saying at present rates.
But I guess what he's ignoring is that he's assuming that the increased rates of diagnosis are entirely due to an increased underlying prevalence of autistic symptomatology in the population, where I think it's pretty uncontroversial.
It's special to say that a lot of the increase would be due to broader diagnostic criteria.
Increase attention to it and awareness of the issue.
Yes, this is part of the problem because there's an association where people are like, look, the developed societies which are wealthy and have modern medicine, that's where you're seeing these increase in autism.
Yeah, that's right.
If you're living in the 1800s in London, you would get a diagnosis of any mental condition if you were literally taking off all your clothes and running down the street attacking people, right?
Then they'll drag you off, throw you in a dungeon, give you some diagnosis.
But barring that, you know, people just, there wasn't the awareness and, you know, people had bigger fish to fry in terms of their problems, in terms of whether or not somebody
It's certainly possible.
That there are some environmental features at play.
Who knows?
Could be microplastics, whatever.
But, you know, other things like people having children.
Later in life, right?
It could be older parental age, things like that could be going on.
All of those things, obviously, do not extrapolate.
From what I could see of looking at the reviews about the evidence, one of the strongest supported predictors is pregnancy in older age, right?
But as a result, there's no time spent on that in this particular discussion.
And you heard there at the end, you know, that Taolin said there is a way to...
Reverse this dystopic future.
And it comes from Catlin.
He references, you know, what Catlin showed from the Indigenous Americans was that if you just treat it correctly, it doesn't manifest.
You don't find anybody with autism.
So here is a little bit of that discussion.
Catlin, you mentioned when he was in the field, like embedded with the Native Americans, often came across the theory that the reason that there were Less, like, deaf, dumb, and mute and insane people in their population is because they, like, called, like, killed off the...
Feebleminded ones.
Feebleminded ones at first.
Yeah.
And you say that that's actually not the case, and he, in fact, discovered that when those rare instances did occur, those people were treated with...
Dignity and almost elevated to the level of deities because they were considered to be like a special sign from God.
Because they were so rare.
And I'm sure they did function that way as special things that would just they would have a different perspective than anyone else.
And they would Figure out a way to use that to benefit the tribe, Catelyn said.
The general...
Thing is that the Indigenous Americans, Native Americans, treated people with mental illnesses like deities, elevated them, and recognized they had special insights.
And, you know, that is what allowed people to flourish.
Yeah, that's right.
I mean, that's the key thing here.
Like, the whys and wherefores of autism are a little bit beside the point.
We're going to be talking about some different topics soon, but the general vibe and the generally...
Intuitively attractive point that is being made is that modern society sucks and it's all making us all sick and we need to get back in touch with nature, right?
Yes, that's right.
And if you want a little bit more on the dystopic future that we're heading towards...
Sure.
So what you're saying basically is our society will be...
A population of extreme autists administered by people on the spectrum who are more or less functional.
Yeah, yeah.
And that could be good.
That's kind of beautiful.
It is.
Well, because you end this essay on a very beautiful and hopeful note.
The more autistic among us, the more injured and excluded by civilization, blessed and cursed with reclusion and mental independence, bent toward accuracy in numbers and language would lead society in the gradual rewarding work of healing.
Do you feel like it's going to be the functionally autistic who rescue and heal our broken civilization?
Yeah, if you hear the little quote that she wrote out from his essay, you can see that this is someone who's kind of an artist, right?
He's got a way with words.
Wrote some very, very nice prose there, but it's not well-founded scientifically.
I'm sure it's a beautiful article though.
Yeah, we will get off the autism topic soon, Matt, but there's just, there were so many, so many references to it that I can't let some of them go past.
So, you know, if you think we're being a little bit too cruel about that, maybe Taolin...
He just does have good insights to this.
And, you know, he might be off with some of his remarks and whatnot, but, you know, generally he's approaching this correctly.
Listen to this.
Oh, interesting.
I've been working on that and taking care of my cats.
Nice.
One of my cats is autistic.
How so?
A lot autistic compared to the other one.
He's really...
He moves really slow.
And he doesn't touch you.
Like the other cats will rub against me a lot.
This one doesn't.
And he throws up a lot.
It's not a joke, right?
They're laughing.
But he is diagnosing his cat as having autism because it's not affectionate enough.
That's all tics, right?
He's just grabbing a cat then.
Yeah, it's not as friendly as the other cats.
Ergo, it's an autistic cat.
And it's not just him that does this kind of thing.
So here's another classic of the genre.
That Chinese is kind of an autistic language.
Yeah, yeah.
And that you speak to them in Chinese, I assume.
With some words in English, yeah.
But so the dialogue in Leave Society is also translated.
And I think it's like...
Well, also because you're writing it, there's like a literalness.
But my impression of Chinese in general also is that it's very Russian.
It's not the case with Russians.
It's a very like kind of complicated and baroque and kind of, yeah, it has many like, yeah, like.
Yeah, Chinese is really...
It's a very emotional language where Chinese is...
Yeah, sorry, go ahead.
Yeah, Chinese is really terse.
Like, there'll often be less words in Chinese.
And I think Chinese people in America come off as very terse and autistic-coded.
Chinese people come across as autistic coded.
I think people with a background in the humanities, with a liberal arts degree, they should just stay away from topics like autism.
They should keep talking about Marcel Proust.
Famously non-poetic language, Chinese, Matt.
That's, you know, not going into like dialects or what specifically they're referencing there, but the notion that because compared to European or Russian.
The language structure in Chinese can sometimes seem bare bones.
Yeah, I get that there is a lot of poetry in China.
Yes.
Yeah, I know.
I know that because Chinese people are not displaying the responses assumed by European standards, ergo, that means there's something else.
Well, in fairness, Chris, you did say autistic coded.
Yeah.
All right.
Yes.
And there is a giggle.
It's ironic, Ma.
It's just a joke.
But is it?
But the point I got is that this is the artistic literary style where you play with ideas and you cross the streams and you combine this observation with that observation.
And it can all be very nice.
It's just you and I are looking at it through the lens of...
Is this factually accurate?
Is this grounded in any kind of evidence?
And the answer is always no, which is why I think they should stay away from topics like autism.
Yes, and I agree.
I mean, it is like that, but it leads to stuff like this.
And I don't think this is contradicting what you're saying, but it's kind of illustrating why I have such a problem with it.
That's really good.
Yeah.
And East Asians seem more autistic.
Just overall.
When I go to Taiwan, everyone seems autistic.
They say mm a lot as a response.
And you said that they smile when they're placed in an uncomfortable or unflattering social situation.
Which comes off weird to Westerners.
Because why are you laughing?
I kind of do that.
Yeah, and I feel like they're pretty quiet.
He was reused in America, by the way, this is an important context, but so because he goes to East Asia and finds people quiet and the theory that they've just reused about Chinese being an autistic language, like it is all playing with ideas and it's coming,
but also it's incredibly myopic, incredibly myopic, like they even said there, oh...
It comes off to Westerners as, like, a bit weird, right?
But that doesn't mean it's autism, right?
It's a different thing.
It's just that there's other cultures in the world that have different social behaviors and responses.
And, oh, but they say, mm, which is, like, non-responsive.
Yeah, they say, mm, rather than, yeah.
So, yeah, I know, it's vapid.
All the observations I heard were all vapid.
Last one, Matt.
Last one for the autism one.
Last one, and again, it's a concrete claim.
A very concrete claim.
When people think of autists, they think, A, of socially awkward people, and B, of people who are geniuses.
But a lot of autistic people actually have pretty limited mental capacity.
There's some middling.
Yeah, it's like 30% have IQs lower than 70. They're retarded.
Wow.
That looks like us, for real.
And the average lifespan of autistic people is only 36.2 years.
Wow.
That's insane.
Okay, so what were the concrete claims you're referring to?
The average lifespan?
I mean, it's a spectrum, so I suspect any of these statistics, whether it's IQ, lifespan, or whatever, can only apply to some threshold of severity that you put people across.
So he said the life expectancy was 36 years?
This is a thing which you actually see cited across a bunch of things.
But again, Matt, a single search on Google Scholar, you can actually find a paper from The Lancet.
This year, estimating life expectancy and years of life lost for autistic people in the UK, a match cohort story, and blah, blah, blah.
Studies on premature mortality in autistic people have often been misinterpreted, right?
So they attempt to look and...
In contrast to the dramatic claims made by Tao Lin, they find that people diagnosed with autism and intellectual disability had 2.83 times the mortality rate, reduction in life expectancy 6.14 years,
or people with autism and intellectual disability 7.28 years compared to the average.
I assume this is people who actually meet clinical criteria for the disorder, not for people that are somewhere along.
He may have been talking about people with severe autism at that particular point, but even then, this is one of the things that you can check, right?
If you spent an hour checking, you would see that those claims are based on very flimsy And they're often cited in the kind of anti-vaccine general autism discourse space.
But it's not hard to find out that, yes, while there is, of course, a expected greater susceptibility to injuries or just things that will reduce your...
Lifespan, whenever you have autism or related disabilities, if it were something where your lifespan was reduced from 36 and the average lifespan, you know, in a developed country, 70 or 80, and if most of the people in the society...
In 2045, we're going to be non-verbal, right?
So lifespan also going down, presumably, right?
I get the general gist of what you're saying, Chris.
I mean, you can take pretty much any of the statements made by Talin, and there's a theme, which is that they are all drawn from a very superficial vibe from low-quality discourse out there and aren't actually accurate when you check with the literature.
And this is someone who's done a deep dive on it.
He's written...
Essays about it.
Written articles, books around the topic.
So, yeah, this is what it looks like when an arts and humanities poet person does a deep dive.
I'm sorry.
Sorry, arts and humanities people were taking Tal Lin and whatever applies to him.
No, that's not fair.
When they do a dive on a scientific topic, it often ends up...
Like this.
It depends on the person.
That's not fair.
Some of them do a good job.
Everyone, stick to your art galleries.
Stick to your book signings.
You know, just make your comments on literature and art.
Stay away from the real world.
It's not for you.
Yeah, sorry.
Sorry.
That was too broad.
That was unfair.
I did get back, my Archive Humanities brothers and sisters.
I'm sorry for besmirching you.
But you understand why I'm a little bit frustrated from this material.
And if you thought it was just...
Just related to autism because of this guest and that's very specific and we're picking a bit too much.
Let's go to a completely different topic.
Oh, what could that be?
I don't know.
We got to read the real Dr. Fauci to find out.
I'm sure he gets into all those numbers.
I mean, I'm about a ton.
Yeah, of course.
But he bought like a lot of stock and then like...
After selling it, he came out and said, like, the vaccine is not that effective and stuff like that.
Mm-hmm.
And we were all, I mean, I regret getting it.
Did you get the vaccine?
No, I didn't get it.
Good for you.
Oh, thank you.
I mean, I don't feel any different.
Good for you, Matt.
Yep.
So, Fauci, what a bastard, eh, Chris?
Didn't get the vaccine.
Good.
Lucky you.
Smart decision.
That comes towards the end of the podcast.
Let's jump back in time to them introducing this topic.
And there's a bit of a connection to the previous topic, but I'm sorry.
Leaf and science, right?
And I think the way they get you there is when you start really digging into that kind of stuff, it is not only officially, but socially.
Censured because you are made to feel like a weird tinfoil hat conspiracy theorist and therefore lame and uncool and socially unacceptable.
Nobody wants that.
That's how liberals will view you, yeah.
And that's been isolating.
We spoke about this before, actually.
I have.
Me and you, I think you asked me about working in the entertainment industry.
And when they were rolling out the COVID vaccines, there was a totally homogenous culture where all of my colleagues were just being like, which vaccine are you going to get?
And like, why haven't you done it yet?
And you're like...
Sweating because you don't want to get into it.
And I don't even know the facts.
I just have doubts.
Any natural misgiving that you may have is billed as a nefarious dogma.
Like merely for asking questions.
But as you mentioned, the autistic have a powerful upper hand in grappling with these issues because they're...
Less socially conformist.
Mm-hmm.
And they can know so many facts.
Mm-hmm.
There you go, Chris.
All of those squares out there, all conformists, they're all getting the vaccine and they're asking, why aren't you vaccinated?
It's like, oh my God.
Yeah, so cringe.
And Tao Lin correctly notes that in liberal circles being anti-vaccine.
It's seen as a negative thing.
It's not so negative and conservative.
In fact, it's not edgy or unusual.
It's mainstream.
In some respects, it's necessary.
If they want to do a podcast about how good Faichi is, that would be edgy for their audience.
I think that's an interesting aspect to them.
This is where, when you get so edgy and so ironic and so sophisticated...
In scare quotes.
At some point, that takes you to this horseshoe part of the political spectrum where you can do sort of...
Right-wingy, conspiratorial, anti-authoritarian stuff, but it's all done in a very artsy, Manhattan, liberal arts graduate kind of way.
This is an interesting example of a broader thing that we've seen a lot.
Yeah, though, I guess the point I would make here is that when you hear the references that they make, they'll talk in some of the other clips about Glenn Greenwald, Joe Rogan.
It's not a...
Random assortment dispersed across the political spectrum.
It's all from a very predictable right-wing grifto-sphere.
I can play one clip that kind of highlights the kind of thing I'm talking about.
So listen to this.
One thing that is interesting is that Trump has tweeted like 30 times about the connection between vaccines and autism.
Which just made me trust and admire him a lot.
Uh-huh.
Like, why would you say something that's going to alienate, like, almost everyone?
Right.
And keep saying it.
And just from my research on it, it seems true.
Well, what did you find through your research about vaccines?
Have you read The Real Dr. Fauci by RFK Jr.?
No.
It seems amazing.
It seems very well researched and very thin margins.
It's like jam-packed with information.
It's amazing he can write books like that.
Well, that's why I also kind of trust RFK Jr. is because he's been a very vocal vaccine truther for a long time, which has certainly done him no favors.
Yeah, that's why you can trust RFK Jr. because he's been such a vocal anti-vaccine.
Advocate.
Yeah, and he wrote a book with thin margins.
It's packed with facts.
It's connected to this dark enlightenment.
Sort of thing as well, isn't it?
Like, it's this, like, a very sophisticated take on the reactionary vibe, right?
Very sophisticated?
Well, you know, I'm using the heavy scare quotes to describe it.
Okay.
Yeah, heavy, heavy scare quotes.
But, like, some of those names on that list we were talking about before.
Elizabeth Brunig, Tulsi Gabbard, Glenn Greenwald, Steve Bannon.
Start off Zizek, he's a bit of an exception, but also Alex Jones, Curtis Yavin.
Like, these are the former guests on the...
So as you say, I'm agreeing with you.
It is a new kind of postmodern way to be right-wing reactionary.
But it's also super ironic and sophisticated in scare quotes.
And you can hear the vibe-based nature for it in a whole bunch of things.
And I think it's Anna talking about Candace Owens.
But just listen to the way she assesses her.
I had this thought with Candace Owens, who a lot of people don't like.
I'm not like a huge Candace Owens stan or anything like that.
But one of the redeeming qualities that she has is that in spite of being a right-wing ideologue, she never really seems angry or bitter, even though she plays that part.
She seems, on the whole, a pretty cheerful person.
She feels very polished.
Yeah.
Polished and cheerful, yeah.
That's why, you know, she's good.
Isn't that nice?
That's sort of a reflection like...
Who gives a...
You know, that's the mistake that so many people make is like they assume people that are ideologues or conspiracy theorists have to be like horrific people to be around.
Yeah, like they've got to have bad BO, they've got to be hairy.
Yeah.
What does it matter that she's cheerfully an ideologue?
Who cares?
That's right.
She was loudly demanding that the US Marine Corps invade Australia.
It doesn't really matter if she...
Her nails are done really well and she wears snappy outfits.
She's insane!
Come on!
Yeah.
To give some credence to your approach though, Matt, you do hear Dasha talk about her previous politics, right?
So listen to this.
So when you started, you were a Bernie Sanders supporter?
I was a Bernie crat, yeah.
What were you?
Like a nothing burger.
I mean, I was always low-key...
I don't want to say...
I'm not a conservative in any shape or form.
But I've always been kind of low-key right-wing because my mom is very liberal in a way that doesn't map onto the normal American coordinates.
And my dad was always very right-wing in his own special way.
And I never really felt the urge to rebel against him.
My parents are kind of libtards.
They're Gen Xers.
And I was pretty apolitical.
I really was not interested in politics.
And then I liked Bernie Sanders and I was really poor.
And so whatever, democratic socialism seemed intriguing to me because I was like, oh, I could have a safety net.
My life could be less precarious.
What is that to say about it, Chris?
I mean, you describe it as vapid.
A while ago.
And is there anything more to say about it apart from that?
The point here is that people have drawn this parallel before to say that Bernie supporters, some of them, went on to support figures like Trump.
And how?
How could they jump from a democratic socialist candidate to a right-wing populist?
And this is how.
This is how you do it.
You go on vibes on like being counterculture and Anna's point there that, you know, she's conservative, but she's not like a normal conservative.
She's like a special category and Dash is like, you know, not a standard, just liberal person.
Her thing was...
Being much more nonchalant, but they both want to say we're not just the standard.
No, no, of course.
I get it in the sense of figuring out where they are in terms of what they're reacting against and what they feel is hip and cool and whatever.
And it says in what's written about it that they're reacting against things like the Me Too movement or woke consumerism where you're ethical this and that or call out culture or cancel culture or whatever.
and I can see how they can look at their parents or Gen X's and normies and go, well, that stuff is not cool.
And they're having their own reaction against,
I have two clips that speak to that.
So one is just like a straight up standard thing which comes up in all this is the denial that you are conservative.
Trigonometry, Dean of Rubin until very late in his trajectory, and Tim Pool, all of them not conservatives, they're not conservatives, regardless of how many conservative points they reuse.
I wanted to ask you, too, how you changed away from being a liberal, each of you.
Getting older and making more money.
For me.
Nothing will make you conservative, like...
Having something to lose.
Yeah, I think.
But I still am.
I mean, I wouldn't say I'm not a liberal.
Yeah, I don't.
On one hand, I don't think I was ever a liberal.
But on the other hand, I still am a liberal in many ways.
Yeah, that makes sense.
That's what I would say about myself, too.
Sorry, Tao Lin.
If you're a big political hard-on for Trump and RFK Jr., maybe you're not actually as liberal as you imagine yourself to be.
It's clear that conservative is still uncool, right?
There's still an uncool association.
So I'm not a conservative.
I'm not on the hip.
Right?
And then when it comes to that point about what you were saying about the potential association, negative connotations with it, just listen to this.
Yeah, how do you identify politically?
I don't think I've ever identified with any party.
Yeah.
For sure.
And also I think it's very hard to be an artist and be a conservative.
Hmm.
Really?
Like a true conservative.
Not like a right-wing person, but an actual kind of old classic style conservative.
Interesting.
The point is that conservatism, classic conservatism, old style, you can't even be an artist and be a conservative, right?
Yeah.
They recognize a tension there, so they have to be not that.
I guess my point is, Chris, is they are not that.
Like, I think they're accurately describing themselves, right?
Like, I think that the political landscape in the USA particularly, but other places as well to some degree, is changing, where those old-school conservatives are still around, you know, the religious ones, the ones that believe in traditional family values, people, they don't talk like this.
But then there's, there is a new kind of, just like there's probably a new kind of ways of being a progressive from the olden days, there are new ways of being whatever they are.
It's kind of reactionary, it's kind of conservative, but it's also like into this sort of natural health and getting away from the modern world, you know, not believing in anything the authorities say, you know, Anthony Fauci has got to be lying about things.
But that's all conspiracy, right?
Yeah, that's what I'm saying.
I think it's slightly different from the stodgy old conservative.
Oh yeah, it is, but it doesn't seem to me like unclear about where the political lean of it is.
I get that it's perfectly understandable to me that given the heuristics that they're applying, this like kind of very vibe-based reasoning, that they could fall into a left-wing populist, right, if it was the right one.
But the current position and where they've been since they've emerged on the scene is very firmly ensconced in the kind of reactionary right dark enlightenment.
Like there's no real mystery about Kurdish Yarvin, whether he's right or left, right?
He is a reactionary right-wing person and people that they like, the things that they promote, they're not that at all surprising.
It's Trump.
It's RFK Jr. It's Candace Owens.
It's not left-wing bone for words or that kind of person.
No, no, I'm agreeing with you.
I'm just saying that the political landscape is evolving.
So these terms left and right, reactionary or progressive or whatever, they are relative terms that describe the current landscape.
And it just doesn't mean the same thing whether you're talking about the left or the right as it did 50 years ago or even 30 years ago.
Two clips on this, then we'll get back to the vaccine.
I know you're itching, but yeah.
So, on the vibiest politic, how is this?
Seeing, like, that clip of Bernie Sanders that was circulating on the internet, like, a week ago of him addressing, like, the Israel-Palestine conflict.
Like, he is, like, at the end of the day, kind of no frills and plain spoken, and that's his appeal.
Like, he's, to me, is not a loathsome character, even though he's...
I feel betrayed by him.
Sure, yeah.
And that made me maybe sort of reactionary, or at least...
I only became political because of Bernie Sanders, because I liked him.
And then I became disillusioned.
It's sort of classic.
Yeah, and there isn't any, and now I don't really believe in leftism, so-called, as a project at all.
It is a very superficial approach to politics, right?
It's the same as, like, you're going to interview Alex Jones, but you don't do any research into why he's criticized.
It's just he's controversial and are people saying things that aren't fair and this kind of thing, right?
And it's edgy to talk to him because he's edgy.
But that personal...
Expression there of, you know, I bought into Bernie Sanders and then I felt betrayed by him.
So now I became kind of reactionary.
It's just like, yeah, that sounds like when you go on vibes, that's what you do.
Yeah, there is a deep mystery here.
And she's diagnosing it quite accurately.
Kudos there.
Yeah.
It is surprising to me that this is such a popular podcast.
They make something like $25,000 a month.
I don't know.
Probably more.
Who knows?
A lot.
I think that's just from the Patreon subscriptions or something.
So I don't know what their raw numbers are, but it's incredibly popular.
So yeah, but there's a lot of people out there, Chris, who feel like they're getting something from it.
And I don't think that they're gun-toting...
Christian people from the Midwest.
I think that they're people who like to think of themselves as hip and sophisticated.
Disenchanted with the liberal orthodoxy in New York or Manhattan.
I can see why amongst that crowd it would be appealing, but it's just...
It is what it is, but okay, so the last, just the last, the hammer of this deal on the coffin, they're quite clear about the way that they approach politics.
Were you ever a Bernie bro?
No.
Good for you.
You just didn't...
I didn't pay attention that much to politics.
Don't.
I feel honestly, that's also partly, I feel not just disillusioned, but like I got scammed into even caring about a political project.
Like that was...
I was emotionally manipulated into aligning myself politically with some candidate.
And now I'm like, why did I even...
What a worthless...
Besides it's like sociological and kind of like psychosocial insights, I feel like politics is just useless.
That world-weary...
Detached and so alienated from everything.
And yeah, just too cool for school.
I get the appeal amongst a certain kind of listener.
I can't say I approve, though.
The basic message there of sympathy for, you know...
Being turned off by politics or whatever.
It's very common, right?
I think myself and you might even suffer from various levels of that sentiment as well.
But it's not, I don't know, just I cared about something and it was...
Yeah, and I was disappointed, so I'm over that now.
It is all very self-indulgent and it really doesn't have a great deal to do with...
I mean, they have terrible opinions about vaccines, for instance, but they're all just a reflection of them wearing their opinions on their sleeve like little badges of honor, you know, being a black sheep and rebelling against those tongue-clicking,
finger-wagging normies.
It really functions as a personal brand in a hip and cool social environment more than anything else, so I get it.
I just...
Yeah, there's just not much to it.
But Matt, just to give an example of it being applied to an unrelated topic, here's vibe-based chat around veganism.
That's for sure.
I feel like veganism is bad for fertility.
Def, absolutely.
I don't think we're meant to be vegans, as much as I'm not a fan of current...
Forms of meat consumption and production.
I'm like an animal rights truther.
Yeah, me too.
I feel like most people who are into meat or ancestral diets care a lot and were vegetarian or vegan before.
Were you ever vegetarian and vegan?
And how'd that go for you?
That created a lot of eczema and IBS.
Yeah, I feel like two years after, or years after becoming a vegetarian is when I started getting eczema and an autoimmune disorder, back pain.
It's getting pushed so much now with the climate change.
Of course.
Vegetarian and veganism.
That reminds me of, what's the name of Jordan Peterson's daughter?
Michaela.
Michaela.
That's like a conversation you could hear on Michaela's podcast.
Like, you could imagine a version of that where it's...
We all should be vegans.
Or you can imagine a version of it, which is we should all eat meat because I heard that you're going to have a low fertility if you don't.
You know, like it's just, as you said, vibe-based, random, vapid musings.
Yeah, and I have not heard death as a shortened version of definitely before.
Oh, haven't you?
You haven't heard of most death?
Oh, I have heard that, but I've never heard death.
Death by itself.
Have you heard of totes?
Totes, of course I'm hard of totes.
I don't know about different cultures.
I didn't know if that was a local thing.
Just like all of that.
Yeah, I think, you know, veganism is bad for fertility.
Yeah, totally.
Fair to say it's not your thing.
It's not my thing either.
Yeah, but that talk around food, that actually will come up again.
Yeah.
But one other thing to say, and this is where it's got the link to Peterson and stuff like that, is that there is a consistent theme there.
Like, it is a bit random in a way, but there are themes there as well.
And they keep, you know, the natural is good, right?
The natural, whatever our ancestors were doing, whatever the Native Americans were doing, that's kind of the key, right?
Yeah.
So back to vaccines, Matt.
Back to vaccines.
Well, what's your take on vaccines?
Because you also mentioned how, like...
I don't remember when, in like 1940 or 1950, there were like three pediatric vaccines that children in America got, and now they're 38, which seems alarming.
And we're like one of the more unhealthy countries, and we're at the forefront of handing out pediatric vaccines, whereas some countries you mentioned that are considered healthier, like Israel, Japan, Sweden, Iceland, are fairly low.
Yeah.
On the childhood vaccinations.
Mm-hmm.
People don't talk about this that much.
The U.S. has three times the amount of mandatory vaccines than the average developed country in Europe and Asia.
Mm-hmm.
And when I was...
In 1983, when I was born, that meant I got like 10 vaccines.
Right.
So...
In the U.S., it's a way bigger problem than other countries, and the autism rates are higher.
Is the U.S. the country with the highest childhood autism rates?
I don't know.
There might be some small countries somewhere, but probably near the top.
And also, are vaccines the whole story?
Because presumably the healthier countries that regulate the vaccines...
Are also regulating other aspects of public health more than we do in the United States.
That's it.
Right.
So I suspect you, like me, fact-checked this one, Chris.
Before you leap into a debunking, I just want us to acknowledge that at the very beginning, there was an astonishing piece of reasoning, which was that America is one of the unhealthiest countries and also gets a lot of vaccines.
Yeah.
Interesting to see.
The comparison to countries like Japan, especially given later that we're going to be told that East Asian society...
It's autistic.
And if you listen on, he'll go on about Tiki Komori and stuff, but none of it is consistent, right?
That doesn't matter.
So what was your fact checking about childhood vaccinations?
America doesn't get a vastly higher number of vaccines than other developed countries.
That's the first thing I remember.
America gives most of the same vaccines that are in the rest of the developed world, but they...
Separate them out into separate vaccinations, right?
In some countries, they're kind of lumped together, like the MMR vaccine or I had the BCG in the UK.
But the coverage is basically the same.
And also, there's still no association with any vaccines and autism.
It doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter.
It's just that autism is a disorder that's often detected in childhood.
And you get vaccines in childhood.
So that's the association.
All the claims have been debunked and the studies are extremely flawed that have claimed to show relationship.
Yeah, so it's kind of impressive that bit of reasoning because it was like bad reasoning layered on inaccurate factual assumptions, right?
Where even if the...
Factual statements they made were correct, then their logic still wouldn't follow, right?
A totally spurious association between these things.
But the facts aren't even right.
So, you know, I think you were building up a bit of a case there that Talon in particular, but the hosts as well, just have a terrible approach.
Yeah, their epistemics are broken.
Completely broken.
They're pure vibe-based, and maybe they're good for understanding some avant-garde drama show.
We'll have to take that on faith, right?
We can't assist that.
They definitely don't work well with science.
And I've got two more clips to highlight this in all their beauty.
So here's a discussion about, you know, so we've established that vaccines are a big problem.
How big of a problem?
Well, how big of a problem are vaccines?
Because, for instance, I have a reputation for being, like, a rabid anti-vaxxer, and I'm really not.
Like, I got my kid all the normal, like, standard pediatric vaccines.
For, like, practical reasons, because they can't continue on in school if they don't have them.
And you're literally just shut out from society.
And have to become, like, a trad-cath homesteader homeschooler if you want to, like...
You have to live in an aboriginal tribe.
Like a thatch hut.
Well, the more I look into it, the worse it seems.
And I stopped myself from looking into it too much.
Like, I've got this really thick book, Dissolving Illusions, that talks about how sanitation and other things like that were what lowered the infectious disease rates, not vaccines.
But I haven't read it.
But it just...
I don't know how bad it is.
It could be way worse than what I already think.
Yeah, well, he doesn't know.
Totally ignorant.
Hasn't even read.
But the book is fake, Matt.
It's fake.
It's really fake.
So, you know, it's not like you can make a fake book with wrong information in that.
I think it's kind of funny because they're not even hiding, like, how little effort.
They've put into figuring out the truth here.
Because that would be uncool, right?
To do a lot of, you know, nerdy research and stuff.
He presents himself as having done a lot of reflection and research onto this topic.
And they're kind of like, you know, deferring to him as the expert here.
And I also, I meant to say, but the whole framing about this, the introduction was like, what's your take on vaccines?
Right?
You have to have a take.
On vaccines, right?
This isn't edgy.
This is exactly standard, Borg standard for their particular ecosystem.
To not have a take on vaccines would be the edgy thing.
To just be like, I don't know, you know.
Yeah, my doctor said I should get it, so I got it.
Yeah.
That would be edgy and like ahead of the curve, but that's not the game here.
The next clip, I know we've already demonstrated the level of reasoning that's applied, but it can't be stressed enough.
Here's Tao Lin talking about vaccines and how many he would give his children and whatnot.
If I had a kid, I feel like I'd be fine with them getting like 10 vaccines.
Right.
Just because it's like, and I just make them healthy in other ways and they should be fine.
But I wouldn't let them get like 30 vaccines.
But do you believe that there is a definite connection between autism and vaccines?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Because I feel like I can picture a glyphosate molecule like being breathed in or eaten or injected and it going into the stomach and...
Binding with aluminum molecules and going into the blood and going into the brain.
And then in the brain, the glyphosate and the aluminum separates.
And they're both toxic.
I didn't just make this up.
It's this MIT researcher Stephanie Seneff.
She's researched this a lot.
So glyphosate is in vaccines.
this nonprofit organization, Moms Across America, found out when they sent vaccines to a lab.
And Stephanie Seneff and another researcher confirmed this and published
And it's in vaccines because vaccines contain soy sucrose, egg protein, and a lot of other things that are contaminated with glyphosate.
So he's a bog-standard anti-vaxxer whose brain has been contaminated by brain worms.
It all started with Andrew Wegfield and it's never gone away.
There's been one born every minute ever since.
The glyphosate thing was so absurd, Chris.
Do you know about that?
I think I know the details behind it.
Let me see if I get this straight.
So glyphosate, Roundup, I've got some in the shed.
I use it all the time, right?
It's a standard thing you spray to kill weeds and things like that.
And the idea is because some ingredients from vaccines are made from non-organic crops, there's some organic ingredients that's probably distilled out of a corn husk or something like that.
It's been distilled a thousand times.
But because it came from a farm that might have used glyphosate, At some point, then theoretically, there could be some infinitesimal trace amount of glyphosate in the vaccine.
So there you go.
That's it.
That's it.
Antivax claims that glyphosate is like, you know, it's a new bimerosal, basically.
But it's even worse than bimerosal because at least that was used as a preservative in vaccines.
But in this case, they're saying, you know, it's an unacknowledged toxic ingredient that is causing all of these problems.
And Anna goes on to talk about it.
And I'll just play it because I can't do it.
Just this.
So it's not just how Lynn that reasons like this, you know, like, here's a bit about yes anding that.
That's contaminated with glyphosate because the cows and pigs get fed.
Yeah, and they're like factory farmed animals, I'm assuming.
Yes.
Today on Twitter, there was like a factory farming discourse.
Awful video.
That was picked up by Glenn Greenwald, of course, like an awful video, yeah, like of a pig in like a tiny container.
It's like humanoid eye.
Bearing the pain of the world.
And there has been some research.
I mean, glyphosate is the compound that's found in Roundup.
Yeah.
In what?
In Roundup.
What's that?
It's like a big chemical pesticide that was used after DDT.
Is that what it's called?
Was banned?
Tao talks about this in his essay.
And that's been attributed to
the rates of all sorts of diseases like diabetes, Alzheimer's, etc.
I've talked about this before.
Eli's dad, my baby daddy, his father died at age 49 of a now curable cancer, non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.
He was spraying on his property and it was a totally avoidable, preventable thing that...
There was a class action lawsuit that a bunch of families were involved in.
Yeah, so we should ban vibe-based reasoning, right, Chris?
But just to spell it out in case anyone missed it, there may well, right?
There is demonstrable dangers of, if you're out there...
Spraying away glyphosate.
Yes, and there has been lawsuits.
Has been lawsuits, getting covered in clouds of the stuff, you're inhaling it, like asbestos or something like that, right?
It's going to be bad for you.
I have lots of warnings and things on the labels now.
But what they're referring to in terms of the link to vaccines, she cites this as a part of the reasoning for why it's plausible, is that...
The idea goes is that if there are pigs or something out there and they're grazing in a paddock that might at some point have been treated with Roundup, then at some point the pig could ingest some little bit of it and then the extract that they get from the animal, which then might go into the vaccines,
is going to have these trace amounts.
It's a completely different thing to...
Inhaling clouds of it when you're spraying.
Are you saying they're conspiratorial in nature and very loose with how they're applying standards of evidence?
Yes.
That wouldn't apply.
But a lot of the time I'm thinking about the truth about 9-11 or something.
Because there's this idea that things are so complicated that there's no truth.
And I feel like that stops people from investigating things.
Mm-hmm.
I think that's another classic scapegoat, like, saying autism is purely genetic.
I think it's meant to, like, cast out and silence you from asking questions.
That's a very Pomo idea.
With that I sort of do subscribe to a bit.
Mm-hmm.
But it's also very autistic to believe in a kind of noble truth.
Well, when you really roll up your sleeves and start digging in the details, the bigger picture loses its shape and you start to panic.
What is that expression?
The forest for the trees or whatever?
Yeah, the forest through the trees.
Wouldn't it be amazing, Chris, if the very thing that all of these environmental contaminants caused, autism, actually turned out to be the superpower That enabled us to sift through all of this complex, confusing information to find the truth about what happened.
That would be a turn up for the books, wouldn't it?
You just get there though, Matt.
Like 9 /11 truth stuff.
Just to highlight, conspiracies flow together.
They're rarely isolated, right?
So Taolin's bad epistemics about vaccines, autism, everything applies also to 9 /11 and no pushback from our intrepid hosts.
Instead, they talk about how the concept of Truth has been attacked by postmodernists, which Dasha is kind of in board with in some way, but actually autistic people, they are focused on like the whole thing.
It's so flimsy and ironically, their neck of the woods.
Their contrarian right is absolutely soaked in postmodernism.
They're like Jordan Peterson or Tucker Carlson.
Nothing is true.
Everything is a conspiracy.
It's such a weird melange of things.
I get what you're saying, Chris.
And it's just occurred to me that, although we talked about this before the episode, that in virtually all ways, they are very unlike.
The gurus that we cover.
I'm sure they'll score very low on our gurometer.
But they do have that one aspect that is super in common with them, which is that they have that kind of hipster, contrarian, black sheep type of thing, which gives them the kind of insight that leads them.
Funnily enough, straight to, you know, your standard reactionary conspiratorial bullshit.
So in that respect, I think their self-image and the image that they project for the audience, and who would also probably be the similar, is quite similar to Brett and Heather Haying, right?
They're also into...
Natural health.
They also believe we should go back and get back in a more authentic relationship with nature and that vaccines are killing us.
And they also would not describe themselves as right-wing reactionaries, right?
They describe themselves as liberals, but a special hip kind of liberal that is actually against everything that leftists today fall.
So in that sense, that sort of hipster politics.
I think they're on the money.
Yeah, and I feel this is a little unfair, Matt, but to give you some flashbacks to those meat-based conversations or any number of the things that we've talked about, I'll just play you a couple of clips that surround hang-ups about diets.
And that's probably why an Aboriginal society is in addition to, because the real sort of point of the essay is how you...
We're able to remedy some of the symptoms through returning to an ancestral diet.
Just taking all kinds of health measures.
All kinds of health measures, Matt.
An ancestral diet can cure autism, right?
Where have we heard this inflammation, you know, eating a meat diet is the cure of all ills.
Not against vaccines in general, just a maximum of 10 or so.
The rest you can take care of.
By eating lots of leafy greens.
But Ma, have you, you know, there's debates on these kind of things around what food is good.
Like, what about fish oils?
Good, bad?
There's sort of a beef between them and the repeat people specifically having to do with fish oil.
Because repeaters say that the fish oil is rancid.
And when I heard that, I was like, it felt true?
Like, I was like...
Of course.
Why wouldn't it be rancid?
I know.
It was horrible for me.
It sucks when you're like doing something that you think is healthy.
I used to eat kale all the time and I was like dying and every day I'd force myself to like choke down a bunch of kale when I lived in LA because I thought I was like gotta eat the right things for my body and now I'm finding out if I was eating totally the wrong things but I have a kind of quirky idea about nutrition.
Which is that I eat McDonald's a lot.
And I think that McDonald's is actually healthy for me.
I'm not saying, you know, people should be eating McDonald's.
But because it makes me happy to eat it like a child, it reduces stress, which reduces inflammation, which, like, if I feel good when I'm eating it, it can't be that bad for me.
Yeah, I can see that helping a lot.
Irony or not?
Are they joking?
Are they not?
It doesn't really matter at some point, does it?
This is becoming a very common diagnostic thing, though.
Mental issues around food, right?
You remember Huberman and Adia talking about stuffing their face with donuts on their cheat days and eating 20 pizzas or whatever?
It does come up a lot.
That's right.
I'm not saying it's good advice for everybody, but it works for me.
Yeah, and inflammation.
There's so many of these things that I just...
The type of focus for modern humanity is on a very specific set of chronic, you know, problems.
They're worried about vaccines, but they seem to have a lot of health problems themselves, so here's a bit more.
Okay, McDonald's is not the healthiest thing, but it's actually healthier than a lot of the supposedly healthy foods you're ingesting because it does have, like, a lot of animal fats.
Proteins and stuff.
It's food.
It's definitely edible.
Yeah.
I used to eat a lot of almonds and turmeric and spinach and a lot of things that I found out last year contain a lot of plant anti-nutrients.
What is that?
Defense chemicals?
There are these chemicals plants make so that animals don't eat them.
And that a lot of these are harmful, like oxalates.
And I feel like that was giving me headaches a lot.
And eczema.
I used to have eczema.
My crotch would be itchy.
A lot.
Because of the food I ate.
For sure.
The skin issues are...
I have suffered from acne.
I've had...
I don't know if it was eczema, but not for a long time.
Scintillating insights about the properties of food.
And definitely, very clearly, science-based.
You know, aren't the plants, Matt?
They got these chemicals to stop the animals.
Yeah, anti-nutrients.
That's all bullshit, by the way.
You've been scratching your crotch.
Well, I have, but that's not a reason.
No, yeah, that's all bullshit.
I fact-checked that one.
Oh, God.
I mean...
Yeah.
You know, the natural health and the obsessive concern with diet and also these chronic diseases.
I mean, who hasn't got exeter from time to time these days?
Or inflammation or whatever.
There is like the modern humanity because we eliminated these terrible things like polio.
Because we're generally not starving, we're not dealing with the kinds of health issues, like genuinely serious health issues that we dealt with a couple hundred years ago.
Infectious diseases.
Yeah.
There's a thing in psychology which is like a universal human constant, which we just...
We adjust our range of concerns to suit whatever level we're at.
And it is so clearly what's going on here.
And I'm not talking about them specifically.
I'm talking about the whole zeitgeist at the moment.
There's more about fish oil, but I'm going to spare you.
There's three more clips specifically about fish oil and whether it makes Taolin gassy or that kind of thing.
But there was some discussion around raw milk.
That was particularly notable, so here's Sasha introducing that.
I had a kind of spurgy ex-boyfriend who recommended it to me, and this was around the time that, like, the raw milk...
I used to really try to drink raw milk and, like, I really was trying to kind of eat in this right-wing health way.
But it really just stressed me out and didn't make...
I didn't...
I was taking tons of supplements.
Now I basically don't take any.
And eat McDonald's and take benzos.
So the link there, Matt, to the autism and the Spurgy Asperger's ex-boyfriend who recommended it.
And just to make that image complete about consuming raw milk, that's a kind of lefty thing or like, you know, health and wellness issue.
But just look at this image.
Oh, my God.
I got to go because raw milk is actually legal in New York.
Yeah, so it's actually stressful to procure the raw milk.
I'm committing a felony by meeting up with these Amish people who are dealing me this milk.
These Amish girls who could go to federal prison for giving me this milk that I don't even like.
And then I'd be like chugging the milk.
Makes me feel fucking sick.
There is this obsessive concern with diet.
But doing insane, dangerous shit, like, you know, worried about vaccines, like chugging raw milk that makes you feel sick.
Like, then you have to get bootlegged from average people.
Yeah, but it requires so much effort, too.
Like, people don't have something better to do with their time, except to go on an odyssey to obtain.
Raw milk.
Which they now recognize as, like, not helpful.
It does have some parallels with, you know, Addy and Huberman and their intermittent fasting or injecting themselves with something which they then come to decide is, like, not...
I mean, I know people are annoyed at me pointing that out, but I do think there is some parallels here.
Admittedly, Addy is a lot less vibe-based.
Yes, to his credit.
Yeah, yeah, it's like this is the...
Weird neurotic things that they do to cope with what they see as this horrible artificial world full of contaminants and vaccines and stuff.
Yeah.
Well, I'll get out of the food space, Matt.
I'll move us on.
We're rounding the corner.
So here's another clip for you.
I gave him $20,000 once and I made him write out a plan like, if this doesn't work, you're going to do this plan.
And it was all like, you can't take out any more loans.
You have to...
Do your normal business stuff.
He has lasers, and he's like an inventor.
But after I gave him the $20,000, we went to the bank together to wire it, and the bank was telling us this seems like a scam.
And my dad was just like, no, no, no, it's not.
My own son is scamming me.
And then after...
After that, he figured out, just the scammers said, like, the scammers actually sent him, like, a bank account that was fake from HSBC.
And they just kept leading him on.
And he, like, every time there would be some new fee or something.
That was five months ago when he stayed with me.
And he's staying with me again in, like, a month.
The only thing I could think of is to try to give him psychedelics.
So this is Tao Lin describing his dad and his penchant for falling victims for scams.
It's quite a lengthy segment.
So one part, he just goes into great detail.
He wants their advice on, you know, what's it mean that his dad just falls for scams?
And there is like a confessional aspect to this discussion, right?
Which is surprisingly open, but I can't...
Tell if this is the vibe in general, like oversharing or it's Tao Lin's style of delivery.
So here's a bit more.
The richer you get, the more money you need.
My dad never learned that.
He just keeps getting pleasure out of it.
And he just has no spiritual aspect.
Hobbies or interests or friends?
Well, I was going to ask you.
That was my next question.
If he has hobbies?
If he has hobbies or friends.
No.
Does he gamble?
He used to.
Yeah.
Oh, no.
My mom told me that recently he started gambling with some people on whether the deal he's working on is a scam or not.
Yeah, so my recollection, Chris, is that the point of this story, which I talk about for a while, is just that his dad's a real doober.
Like, he's pretty disappointing or stupid or something.
So yeah, I think the appeal is that it's oversharing, right?
You listen to someone talking about a close family member.
Yeah.
Yeah, and so it feels more intimate, right?
Chris, I'll tell you what it reminds me of.
The vibe is very much the young people in American Beauty.
The movie?
For instance, the daughter will just talk about her dad like that, and that's one of the appealing aspects of the movie, right?
Same sort of world-weary, exasperated, droll style as well.
I feel like it's a bit of a shtick.
Well, for me, I didn't care.
No, whatever.
That in itself wasn't interesting.
What interested me was shortly after describing what Arub, his dad, was, he described this incident.
I got scammed recently.
My Facebook fan page got stolen.
Oh, what?
Someone emailed me asking if I wanted to do a podcast for $2,000.
Well, you know that's a scam.
I should have known.
It was us.
But it was sponsored by Nike.
It just made sense.
It was done by some celebrity Tony something.
Some guy with like 190 Instagram followers.
And then I...
Got on a phone call with them because they were going to show me how to do Facebook Live or something.
And somehow they took a screenshot of my screen.
I showed them my screen and they got my URL.
And they just used that to take my account.
That's so smart.
I do admire the scammer.
I know that's a humorous story, right?
But immediately after talking about how susceptible...
His dad doesn't have the ability.
He describes what is an obvious scam.
Somebody with a couple of hundred followers on Instagram offering you thousands to go on the podcast and they want to hop on a call and get you to share your...
I feel like he's in a glass house flinging rocks around.
Yeah, but I think that's kind of the point.
It's kind of the same thing, you know what I mean?
He's kind of putting himself down when he puts his father down in a way.
But this is the point for me, Matt, that there's an obvious parallel there, but this is after a little gap.
And none of them at any point, Rhea is like, oh, this is a bit like your dad, isn't it?
So I feel like it's just the compartmentalization thing where, you know, okay, we talked about that.
Now I'll tell this funny story because he doesn't, you know, like the bit there would be, I guess this.
Acorn doesn't fall far from the tree or something, right?
But you're saying this was all knowing they were making that.
No, no.
I don't think they were linking the things together.
I think these are just random, self-deprecating, mumblecore-type anecdotes.
Not much in it.
I don't want to spend too much time with Tao Lin, but just to mention, Matt, here's his approach to getting information.
I feel like when I'm looking for truth, I just find, like, details.
Like, tons of details, and some are more credible than others, and I'm always just building and changing my model of everything.
And it's always changing, depending on, like, what I just read, because I'll forget, like, a lot of stuff.
So my view on things is just always changing.
But, Dasha, you mentioned being alone and getting into esoteric stuff, isolating you.
I feel like that's isolated me.
Like, just learning about, say, vaccines.
Just finding out vaccines aren't as good as everyone thinks.
Just isolating.
Of course.
Amen, brother.
Yeah, because vaccines really depend on a kind of social consensus, right?
So I guess it goes to your point.
Earlier, Chris, that their epistemics, their ability to figure out what's what is terrible.
But it also, in the way he describes the way he goes about his research, like occurring all the little details and whatever, like obviously it does sound like most of the people who do their own research on the internet.
Yeah.
But as well as that, it's also self-deprecatory, right?
Yeah, because he forgets.
So it's very much, and the style, the persona, is very anti-guru.
In some ways.
Yeah, well, okay, yes.
In terms of, like, confident delivery and all that kind of stuff, it's more conspiracy theorist-style reasoning.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I mean, they get to the same place.
They've got the same conspiracy theories, the same anti-vax type stuff.
But it's just very different from a Weinstein and a Jordan Peterson who would never admit that they ever forgot anything.
Yeah, and in terms of further evidence about bad epistemic habits or sources of information, here's Tao Lin discussing the kinds of things he listens to to get him inspired.
Oh yeah, I want to ask you about the mandalas.
What's that all about?
It's just...
It was a good way to do something...
It's meditative?
Do something without having to be on drugs.
I started after my pharmaceutical drug addiction.
I was in my room a lot and just drawing and listening to Joe Rogan a lot.
Cool.
If you went on Joe Rogan, would that be your favorite podcast?
Maybe.
Yeah, I think it would be.
Fair.
Are you a Joe Rogan fan?
Big time, yeah.
I love Joe Rogan.
Are you a Tucker fan?
I like them, yeah.
I've seen some things, yeah.
Yeah, I like them.
I think this is part of why some people might have questions about the depth of talents.
Insights, like, yeah, I'm making mandalas because it's something to do, and I listen to a lot of Rogan, so, yeah.
I do think this, Matt, is perhaps, you know, what a lot of critics of modern art think is actually under the hood.
Yeah, he's probably not representing the art scene.
Avant-garde artists, or is he?
This is the question.
Is he not representing where they are?
That esoteric point, so apparently he makes mandala-type stuff, artwork, but that reminds me, Matt, that there was a segment on reincarnation, the esoteric reincarnation.
So let me just get that clip for you.
Do you believe in reincarnation?
Reincarnation?
Yeah, or past lives or whatever you would...
I don't know, but I'm interested in it.
Do you?
I don't know.
Not...
I mean, I'm open to it conceptually, but I'm a Catholic, so I believe in the eternal afterlife.
I can see...
I mean, I believe in reincarnation in, like, a purely technical sense in that I believe that...
There are certain types that repeat themselves throughout time in history.
Getting a bit Jonathan Pajot at the end.
I wanted to play that because conceptually being open to reincarnation, but then, you know, being like, but, you know, I'm a trad cat, right?
So like heaven or hell.
So what is that?
How much of a trad-calf are you?
This reincarnation in the conception of traditional Catholicism, it wasn't considered compatible in my Catholic upbringing.
That's very much a dorm room type conversation, isn't it?
It is, but these people are much too old to be in a dorm room.
But I guess maybe you're underestimating, Chris, a lot of normal people just talk like this.
They do, but the contradictions, that's what gets me, Matt, the contradictions.
So you believe in, after you die, what happens?
You go to heaven or hell.
And then, but I don't know, I'm open to different metaphysical kind of, but maybe something happens after that, but that basically the point of life is to achieve salvation, to become a saint.
And the greatest tragedy is yet to perish.
Burn in hell.
I mean, you could also think, like, reincarnation works on, like, a technical, functional level if you think of, like, what having kids is, which is, like, reincarnating.
Not even yourself.
Like, you can't even think of yourself because you're someone else's kid.
Like, you're constantly reincarnating and remixing some type of lineage.
Dorm room conversation pretty much sums it up.
That is about as insightful as various conversations I had at university.
But yeah, my reincarnation, you know, I feel the trad coughing is a little bit of a pose.
It feels like the metaphysical commitments are not taken that seriously.
I feel like everything is a pose here.
Like literally everything.
I wouldn't read too much into anything, really.
It's all just stuff that sounds good at the time.
Does it sound good?
No, it doesn't sound good.
Straight thoughts wander in, your mouth moves, then they wander out again.
That's pretty much it.
I'm not liking us right now, Chris.
We sound so disdainful, so snobbish, snow, whatever.
But you know, what can you do?
You put this content in front of me.
I don't know that there's a way to engage with this that isn't disdainful, but snobbish is the wrong word, because it's not like this is the people.
This is not what the people do.
Your average joes aren't doing this.
This is what, like, hipster people in Manhattan do at their avant-garde art festivals.
Yeah.
Except, of course, they've got the alt-right pilled thing going on as well.
That's the one thing about it that's interesting.
Combining the hipster, artsy-fartsy Manhattan vibe with that.
So it's a curious little thing.
You know, you can hear the talking points that you tend to hear in, you know, trad-con spaces as well.
But is it ironic?
Who can tell, Matt?
And then there's birth control that gets rid of it all.
Well, yeah.
Which is awful.
What's your take on birth control?
Net negative or net positive?
Net neutral?
That's an option too.
I know it's really unhealthy.
Super unhealthy.
I read this book called The Garden of Fertility that talks about how bad they are and she promotes Just being aware of your cycle and knowing when you can get pregnant or not.
And she talks about how...
Certain...
Christian groups, I think, teach this.
It is increasingly interesting, really, isn't it?
Because it is this interesting blend of that trad-conservative sort of instincts with, you know, new-agey, spiritual, alternative health thing, plus this sort of affected, world-weary, hipster, sophisticate.
It's a wild combination.
It really speaks to, like, is this a different world these days in 2023 going on 24?
The cross-pollination aspects.
Yeah, I've got another clip which kind of highlights all these things interacting, the trad con with the noble savage kind of presentation and the other ways of knowing, I'll tell perspectives.
Just listen to this.
She cooked a lot of meat and, like, Taiwanese, Chinese stuff.
Really healthy for me.
I'm grateful for that.
Were you breastfed?
Were you breastfed?
No.
Another interesting factor.
I wasn't breastfed either.
That's a big factor, I feel like.
I was, but only for six months.
Which they tell you is enough, but I don't think so.
I think the longer you can go.
Preferably until the child is seven to ten years old.
Yeah, there's...
Eskimos breastfeed for up to, like, six years.
And Aboriginal groups all breastfeed for, like, at least two years.
Right.
I think, like, two is probably, like, the sweet spot.
I think once the child can talk to you, it's definitely time to stop.
That's, no, Matt, that's not culturally relative enough, but it's just an interesting mixture of perspectives because there is the standard liberal...
Fondness for traditional societies and concerns about artificial toxins and the environment pollutants and all that.
But mixed in with, like, the kind of tradcon stuff, like, knowing how many months you were best fed.
Like, why do they all know that?
I've never...
I haven't had that conversation with my mother either.
Yeah, but they act like, of course, everyone knows that, right?
Like, everybody's had that conversation.
It's so funny.
No, but it's true.
Like, the natural health.
Obviously, breastfeeding is a hugely big thing in that area too.
So there's some consistent themes.
We can say that.
There was one clip that I forgot to play that relates to this thing we're talking about and connects in a previous one that I feel we shouldn't miss out on.
So we heard about, you know, the raw milk.
They ask your peers to get raw milk from Amish people, right?
But Tao Lin has his own milk routine that he follows.
Now I drink muscle milk because it's sweet.
Wait, aren't dairy products inflammatory?
If they're pasteurized, I feel like.
Okay, but not if they're unpasteurized, then they're good.
They should be.
I have to let my raw milk ferment for like 24 hours.
What does that mean?
You just leave it out in the sun?
Yeah, in the kitchen.
I just leave it there.
And then you drink it.
If I drink it, just...
Without doing that I get really gassy and sometimes diarrhea.
Their life sounds so horrific to me.
Having the meetings with...
Amish people to chug raw milk that makes you want to puke or, in Thailand's case, leaving raw milk out on the counter for one day before you scrunch it down because otherwise you're getting diarrhea all the time.
And like, Jesus Christ, no wonder they have the attitude that they do because to live like this sounds like hell.
It's like, like hell.
But how much of it is real?
That's the bit I can't.
Can't figure out.
Is it authentic?
To what degree is it?
Yeah, how much of it is opposed?
This is probably a legitimate point to reuse.
And by even asking the question, Matt, you're showing, you know, that you're...
Deeply unhip.
You don't get it.
You don't really get, like, what it's about and all that kind of shit.
And just to come towards the finishing line, so like all these kind of podcasts, they need to emphasize that they are not belonging to any...
Traditional political camp.
Yeah, how do you identify politically?
I don't think I've ever identified with any party.
Yeah.
For sure.
And also, I think it's very hard to be an artist and be a conservative.
Hmm.
Really?
Like a true conservative.
Not like a right-wing person, but an actual kind of old Classic style conservative.
Interesting.
The problem isn't so much that it's, like, reactionary or right-wing, but that it's very, like, literal and canned, and they see, like, degeneracy and immorality everywhere, and it's very hard to make art from that place because you have to be kind of, like, morally agnostic in order to be creative.
Or not even, but you can't, like, shoehorn your morality into your work.
And that way it's hard to have any strong ideology.
For me, I feel like I don't really have politics.
I just don't want to be hindered creatively.
And that's sort of the driving, you know, animus behind how I orient myself in the world.
If you're not with me, you're against me.
I don't like feeling lied to or manipulated.
My position is not like a liberal or a conservative one.
It's like the position that I feel personally is on the side of truth or my truth or whatever.
Yeah, that makes sense.
But that's like I think most people who have or try to have like a mind of their own.
Do you have a strong feeling about the truth?
Yeah, I'm just for it.
Looking for the truth.
There's a component of that that I'm sympathetic with, which is that...
It's okay not to be super political or to feel a strong affiliation with any particular ideology or political party.
That part's fine.
And I kind of agree that if you're driven by moral or ideological commitments, I don't think it's hard to be an artist in that respect.
Is it our artists' fame for not having strong political stances or injecting their politics into their art?
That's not my experience.
Some of them do.
Yeah, some of them.
Bob Dylan, famously apolitical.
He's a folk singer, Chris.
He's not an artist.
I'm thinking Jackson Pollock or something.
Well, you and your expressionists slashing pants on the floor and stuff, right?
It doesn't mean socialism is good.
It just means...
It's a picture.
Did Van Gogh have an ideology?
But yeah, I get the argument, but I just think there's a lot of artists in the world.
Sure, but there's just an intrinsic dichotomy between conservatism, like she said, conservatism and creativity.
I get that, but I just think a lot of artists are highly ideological.
People, because they're passionate about whatever the hell they're into.
And sometimes that's some art style and sometimes it's some message that they want to convey with their art, right?
Don't get me wrong.
I didn't like most of what they said.
But, you know, it was kind of authentic, I think.
Like she said, she doesn't like being lied to.
What they believe in is just finding out the truth for yourself.
I mean, they are kind of authentically voicing their conspiratorial, self-centered sort of point of view in terms of, you know, get out of my way.
I'm just against any politics that stops me from doing what I want.
Yeah, what are you rebelling against?
What you got, man?
But the issue for me in this case, and with a lot of the people that take this sort of stances, they seem completely unaware or at least a very substantially downplay the obvious skew in the content.
Yes, there's a melange of different influences, but like...
The references are all in one direction, right?
Glenn Greenwald is good.
Joe Rogan is good.
RFK Jr. is good.
Trump is unfairly maligned.
Tucker Carlson is good.
Tucker Carlson is good.
Biden is bad.
Yeah, I get that.
So in that sense, it's very much like our classic gurus, Brett and Eric Weinstein, who do the same kind of extreme sympathy to all of those reactionary figures, but they're not conservatives themselves.
They're just...
Right thinking, independent.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's it.
And just to take that point home.
I don't think we've ever been like primarily a political podcast.
Cultural commentary.
Yeah.
But I think, yeah, we had an audience initially that was like, there was just a lot of that energy and fervor.
Cultural commentary is probably right, but I wouldn't dispute that.
But I think there just is a significant skew injected and it's really obvious.
I mean, this is a random episode and like we just talked about, all the references that you can pick up clearly highlight the kind of ecosystem and sources that they're relying on and the anti-vax stuff.
Yeah, this is what postmodern conservatism looks like, right?
Good way to present it.
Postmodern conservatism.
Well, that's it, Matt.
There's endless steps that could go on.
Yeah, please stop.
Please stop.
To go first, I'll just see it rather straightforwardly.
I don't think they really fit.
The secular guru can play it very well at all.
As we've discussed, they're doing a lot of stuff that I think is bad.
They've got bad epistemics.
They're conspiracy-prone.
They don't acknowledge their obvious political skew.
And they wrap themselves in a cushion or an armor of irony that allows them to kind of dance away from any statements that they make.
And the whole thing is stating you that if you criticize them or you take them seriously, you're just demonstrating how uncool you are because you don't get like how none of it really matters, man.
And some people might like that.
I can kind of see why they would appeal to certain people fed up with...
Liberal orthodoxies and the left progressive spaces they go in.
But from my perspective, it's just like boring conspiracy standard stuff with like an extra veneer of irony.
But it isn't really...
Secular guru stuff, because a lot of what they're saying is kind of tongue-in-cheek and self-disparaging and, you know, recognizing how fickle they are and how prone to change.
And that's not really what the secular gurus do.
So really, this is just like cultural commentary and path-arsed political commentary that attracts an audience.
So they won't score high on the grometer, I would estimate.
So, you know, not good, don't like them.
But not secular gurus, really.
No.
No, there's that self-deprecatory style and very low-key downplaying where, you know, you can still say stuff, but you go, I'm just a dummy.
I don't really know.
But I really think, you know, the world's going to end in a few days.
Yeah, so it's like Rogan's style a bit, but yeah, they're not really gurus.
It's just a really interesting little peek into a microcosm of what we said, postmodern conservatism, what it looks like.
And it can be a little bit surprising to people if you still have these sort of old-fashioned notions of what a right-winger looks like and what a left-winger looks like.
I read something, a bit of research apparently, Chris, this is a bit of a sidetrack about, you know, bubbles and things, you know, people have heard about information bubbles on the internet and this article was sort of debunking that idea a little bit and said one of the things that the internet does is bring you into contact with a huge diversity of opinions,
most of which are going to be incredibly unappealing to you.
So in your normal day-to-day life, we tend to assort with people who have pretty much the same assumptions and are working from the same place.
And there's so much aggravation on a platform like Twitter because everyone is bumping up against people from vastly different backgrounds and sort of worldviews.
And this little example of us bumping into their little world is, I think, a good example of that where, you know, it's just incredibly tedious and distasteful to me.
But as you said, they're not really gurus except for the...
Conspiracy adult stuff.
Yeah.
And being anti-establishment and maybe a bit of pseudo-profound bullshit, which is kind of, I think that's obligatory on the Lower East Side.
I don't know.
Yeah, the thing is, I keep coming back to this point you made, that if these were 20-somethings in a dorm, if Joe Rogan was a 20-something college student, I'd find it annoying, but I'd also be like, yeah, but, you know...
And if Elon Musk was a nine-year-old boy, then I'd be far more...
Yeah, it's pseudo-philosophical profundity is an occupational hazard at certain stages of life, but they're not.
They're almost the same age as...
You and me.
And they're much more successful, like they're richer, all of that stuff.
It's not like we're punching down in any way, shape or form, right?
Their audience wouldn't like us.
Elar.
This is what you said about, like, two ecosystems that, you know, are just not made to...
Oil and water, Chris.
Oil and water.
Oil and water.
Yeah, because it's not just that they're ironic-pilled sardonic delivery.
They're also conspiracy theorists.
They clearly don't understand anything about science or that kind of thing.
So their approach is just all arts and humanities postmodern style.
And that doesn't gel.
Yeah.
Amazingly low.
Critical literacy when it comes to consuming information on the internet.
So yeah, America, do better with your education.
Yeah, and notice we didn't spend very much time on the vocal fry, okay?
So just bear that in mind.
I said I wasn't going to talk about it, and I didn't.
And the use of the edgy words and stuff, that's as exciting as when teenagers do it.
Congratulations.
Well, Chris, I could have a go at them for sort of...
Of lilting up at the end of sentences, but unfortunately, I can't.
You can't.
You cannot.
Not in this podcast.
Australians do that.
It's like you were taking a dig at me.
No, no, Australians.
That's an urban Irish person.
Didn't you know that?
That's an Australian thing.
No, it's an urban Irish thing, Matt.
How dare you?
We do it.
We did it first.
It's our thing, man.
Yeah, you're wrong.
You're wrong, but...
It's all right.
So that's them.
We are hopefully next time going to look at some people that are more applicable to the guru template.
But, you know, it's useful sometimes to get comparisons from people that don't particularly well fit.
So this is a good illustration of that point, that people can be bad without being secular gurus.
All right.
So a humble suggestion for the next episode, Chris, we should cover someone who either, it's your choice, either a bona fide...
100% fits the guru more perfectly, or pretty well.
Or someone who's just really great, who we find fascinating and interesting.
One or the other, but not another person who's both terrible and not a guru.
Alright, I'll see what I can do.
So, Matt, we have a review of reviews to do, and Patreon shoutouts, and then we're done.
We're already here.
We're kicking this caboose down the road.
So, I do have a...
That's the title of their review.
I didn't say that.
And Madam S, they wrote, The only problem is that the length of the podcast
can cause a listener to keep working or working out past the optimal healthy time.
A listener may feel dehydrate or pull so many weeds that they end up with joint or nerve pain.
A listener may end up enjoying a long walk and be so distracted they end up miles from home and need to call a taxi to return home.
Chris and Matt have wonderfully eccentric accents and they share just enough personal information.
To make them relatable, unlike the obnoxiously self-centered gurus they cover.
So, see, that man, we've got just the right parasocial balance.
Dial it in.
That's right.
We don't let out.
That's right.
You'll hear no complaining about our mothers or our fathers.
But how long did Jim Miller breastfeed you?
You should ask her.
One, I don't know.
Two, if I did.
That's not a fit topic of conversation for people talking about it.
Yes, Dakota and the Gurus, the podcast that acknowledges that some household chores take longer than two hours.
That's right.
That was a five-star review, Matt.
I have another five-star review, but I thought this one was a nice negging one.
It's by Our Town, and it's Synthwave?
And it says, one host trashes RoboCup, the other one was on the Synthwave podcast.
Embarrassing time.
Embarrassing time.
Yeah, that's really good, but five stars.
I like that.
You know, we do Trash Robot Cup almost every episode, despite having watched it recently and realizing it's actually really good.
But you know what happened?
Because you found out because I was tweeting to you.
I was listening to you.
Oh my god, this is so embarrassing.
You shouldn't admit this, but I do think you need to.
I was getting messages from Matt that he felt inspired from one chat to watch Robocop.
And he was like, you know, it's good.
Like, I don't remember it being like this.
I was particularly impressed by the special effects, Chris.
I know.
And I thought it was made in the 1980s or something.
Correct.
And then you mentioned to me about Samuel Jackson's performance.
And Matt, Samuel Jackson wasn't in the...
Robocop from the 80s.
He was in the remake from a couple of years ago.
So you watched the reboot version with modern special effects.
I thought that was from the 80s.
And that is not even a very good film.
So that's the other point that you...
I thought they digitally remastered it or something.
Yeah, my God.
So that was incredible.
So you still haven't watched the old one.
That's the thing.
That was pretty special.
We'll have to rewatch the old ones.
What was my take on that?
I can't remember.
You liked it.
You thought it lost its way at the end, but it was, you know, generally good.
It was okay.
It did tweak.
In my defense, I was drunk at the time.
That's standard.
You're drunk right now.
And speaking of drunkards, Matt, we need to shout out the patrons who pay for the podcast.
This is the only thing that can explain that action.
So I feel they do deserve thanks, and I've got a bunch of them to thank.
So, without further ado, conspiracy hypothesizers.
Ryan, Cosmograph, Peter Risholm, Charlotte Goodhall, Adam Scherr, Kitty Gilbert, XI, Tristan Flock, Miklos Somos, Jim Murray, Marcus, Max Mullitz, Liren
Shapiro, Aaron Holder, Lappin, Jenica, Thomas McKenzie, Nathan Smith, Kylie Hudson, Sasha Hamilton, Zach Oliver, Fia Tyner, and Richard Hardy.
and I am scared.
That's them.
Thank you guys.
Thank you.
No advertisers, just Patreons.
Yeah, just the real people.
I feel like there was a conference that none of us were invited to that came to some very strong conclusions, and they've all circulated this list of correct answers.
I wasn't at this conference.
This kind of shit makes me think, man.
It's almost like someone is being paid.
Like, when you hear these George Soros stories, he's trying to destroy the country from within.
We are not going to advance conspiracy theories.
We will advance conspiracy hypotheses.
Hey, one little episode-related comment, Chris.
I mean, listening to Rogan there reminded me that, you know, that's what, like, someone who's really conspiratorial sounds like.
Like, they're very passionate about it.
It's a big deal for Rogan.
With the people that we covered on Red Scare, they're much more casual about it.
I think they're much more, like, your typical consumer of...
It's more a pose as opposed to their lifestyle, right?
Like, the conspiracist pose.
Yeah.
And, like, I'm not saying they're not conspiratorial.
They are.
It's just, I don't think it plays a huge role for them.
Does anything play a huge role?
I don't know.
I don't know what's going on.
Like, their level of enthusiasm, I think, in general, is not high.
Yeah.
Right?
That would be against the point.
That's true.
So those people, Martin, those revolutionary geniuses, the ones who get access to the Decoding Academia series, where we keep our real insights behind the $5 payroll.
So that's there.
And we have a bunch of...
I will mention,
for example, Hamburg, Lou, and Elgin Street.
The lovely Elgin Street from the Falling Night podcast.
Lovely, lovely.
Good old Elgin.
A lot of male names there, I think.
Have we ever done a gender breakdown of our listenership?
I know we have some women because I've met them.
Nah, it's about 50-50.
Yes, call it 50-50.
Sorry, 50-50.
I don't know.
Actually, I haven't seen.
We don't have any metrics that tell us that.
No, no.
That's it.
Just revolutionary geniuses, Matt.
That's why.
That's the important social signifier.
That's the important identity category that they are in.
And we thank you for it.
I'm usually running, I don't know, 70 or 90 distinct paradigms simultaneously all the time.
And the idea is not to try to collapse them down to a single master paradigm.
I'm someone who's a true polymath.
I'm all over the place.
But my main claim to fame, if you'd like, in academia is that I founded the field of evolutionary consumption.
Now, that's just a guess, and it could easily be wrong.
But it also could not be wrong.
The fact that it's even plausible is stunning.
Happy every time.
Yeah, the old classic.
Now, Galaxy Brain Gurus, as usual, I don't have a huge haul of them.
Maybe we're not selling the one-on-one FaceTime that that brings hard enough.
People do not value that enough.
Yeah, they don't, seemingly.
Or we've reached the ceiling levels.
But nonetheless, there are some.
So Steve presents Pelsky.
We thank you, Steve.
You are a prince amongst men.
And Gen B, that's the two I'm going to shout out.
There are two special little diamonds in the rough there.
Yep.
And yeah, for anyone who is at that, you know, at that...
Vaunted tier.
Come along to the monthly catch-ups.
You can ask us questions.
We talk about stuff.
There's no weird parasocial stuff going on behind the scenes.
But, you know, you might have specific topics, specific questions you want to talk about.
So it's good fun.
You want to know how many months Matt was breastfed for it?
That's the place.
That's where you get the good content.
So you get that info.
I'll also just throw into the Paramount.
I may as well put them in there because they're around.
M-E-M.
Logan M. And Amanda Kutsuras, those also would be galaxy brain gurus.
Fantastic.
Just adding them into the power.
We tried to warn people.
Yeah.
Like what was coming, how it was going to come in, the fact that it was everywhere and in everything.
Considering me tribal just doesn't make any sense.
I have no tribe.
I'm in exile.
Think again, sunshine.
Yeah.
Well, well, there they all are.
Thank you, everyone.
This is a bit of a long one, but you know, we'll edit it down.
It'll be tight.
There'll be no unnecessary repeated points.
None of that.
It'll be a tight episode for you.
And we thank Andy Last for his editing efforts.
Any problem with anything we say, pick it up with.
Andy, that's the person to blame.
Be sure to delete all of Chris's vocal fry, Andy.
That's the most important job for you.
Get rid of it.
Yeah, that's right.
And to everyone else, have a great day.
Just enjoy yourself.
Just get out there.
Have a blessed day.
Don't wallow in ironic depression or chug raw milk.
Don't chug raw milk.
Just drink normal milk.
It's all right.
Yeah, get your vaccinations, whatever the doctor...
Don't think about it too much.
You don't need to do your own research about it.
No, you clearly don't.
Not like this.
Save those precious neurons for something more useful, like creating avant-garde art.
Yeah, that's it.
Well, on that important note for civilization, I bid you see you, Matt.
Yeah. Yeah.
Okay. All right.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. you you you
I've wondered if he's been mind controlled in some way with just having voices implanted in his head saying like the deal was real.
Just based on my research, it seems like that happens.
The mind control.
Voice implantation.
It's called voice to skull technology.
Like they've had it for like 30 years or something.
