Supplementary Materials 8: Lab Leak Discourse, Toxic YouTube Dynamics, and the Metaphysics of Peppa Pig
We stare into the abyss and welcome darkness into our souls as we discuss:Feedback on the Žižek episodeMiddle Aged Men's Health UpdateAlina Chan and the newest round of Lab Leak DiscourseDiscourse Surfing PunditsAlex O'Connor cornering Jordan Peterson on the resurrectionThe philosophical and Marxist implications of Peppa PigPotential Alternatives to Hipster Christianity and New AtheismAndrew Gold's Heretics Channel and Toxic YouTube DynamicsEditorializing and Responsible CriticismBalaji Srinivasan's Waffling Defence of HubermanThe 'Elite Defector' PoseVerbal Fluency vs. SubstanceHeterodox and Anti-Vaxx Incentive StructuresJames Lindsay's most recent idiocyDesperate Call to ActionLinks Alina Chan's NYT Article on the Lab LeakOur episode addressing Alina and Matt Ridley's points with relevant expertsJordan Peterson's Podcast: Navigating Belief, Skepticism, and the Afterlife | Alex O'Connor @CosmicSkeptic | EP 451Andrew Gold - Heretics: EXPOSED: I Didn't Show THIS in Viral 'Woke' Debate with Eni Aluko (4K)Balaji's huge Twitter thread defending HubermanSummary of Huberman's Math MemeTop Earning Substacks The full episode is available for Patreon subscribers (1 hr 14 mins).Join us at: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingTheGurus
Hello and welcome to Decoding the Guru's supplementary materials with me, Chris Kavner, anthropologist of sorts, and him, Matt, microphone attacker and moonlighting psychologist.
You might not hear the sounds of the microphone banging, but if you don't, it's only because they've been removed in post.
So, yeah.
I'm going to try hard.
I'm going to do my best, Chris.
I'm going to leave it alone.
I'm going to leave it alone.
You're like the Zizek of microphone banging.
You know, Zizek is touching his nose and snuffling and what that, and you are molesting your microphone in between takes.
It's all sorted in post.
You guys think he's smooth?
Not naturally.
That's all.
I'm not.
I'm not.
I am a mobile person.
I do fidget.
I'm mercurial, Chris.
I'm mercurial.
How do you feel about the Zizek episode?
How was the feedback?
I haven't looked yet.
Zizek.
Zizek.
Reddit's become too big.
There's too many people on it.
There's too many posts.
I see 80 replies and it's too much for me.
So give me the distilled version.
Do people like it?
Do people agree?
Yeah, people like it.
Most people liked it.
The feedback was generally positive.
It wasn't one of the, you know, explosive.
Episodes.
Good.
But predictably, the arts and humanity philosopher types.
Oh, yes.
Of course, they would make these elementary errors in their analysis and whatnot.
So you guys should realize that you enjoy that.
We actually did you a service because you got to, you know, feel like, well, they would be that amateur.
Yeah, you can lord it over the knuckle-headed reductionists.
Like, oh, of course the shark isn't just a shark.
How naive you are.
Such silly fools.
Have you heard of him, Matt?
Heard of him?
I did like, there was some comment.
Somewhere, might have been on the YouTube about an unrelated thing, but it was just somebody saying, have these guys even heard of a book?
Have they ever read a book?
I was like, yes, yes.
I have actually covered course books before, so yeah, but you know, you can't please everyone on the internet.
That's what I've learned.
It's a prerequisite.
Before they make you a full professor, you've got to give a list of all the books you've read.
Yeah, John Peterson read 200 on climate change.
You've got to read at least three before they'll give you the bomb.
And you're not allowed to have that many pictures in them.
So that's the other...
No, no.
Picture books are just only worth half a mark.
Comics.
You need five comics if you're going to use comics.
These are the professor tests, the kind of stuff you can't learn until you're in academia.
But, you know, Matt, I'm going to do this for you because I know your spirit is flagging, your body is...
Falling into disrepair.
And I'm going to perk you up because I know that you like to talk about, you know, not the horrible things that have been happening online, but the positive aspects, the good things that you've been doing in your life to improve your existence.
And so I'm just going to ask for a little update.
We're not going to spend that much time on it, Matt, but, you know, we're middle-aged male podcasters, so, of course, the podcast has become like a fitness director.
People want to know, yes.
How is your fitness journey?
Have you been keeping up your morning jogs and that kind of thing?
You really teed me up there, didn't you, Chris?
This is a big invitation.
Yes, thank you for asking.
I'm really happy to report I've been jogging for the first time in my life.
Imagine someone that has never jogged since they were like...
19 years old.
I can imagine that kind of person.
They would look something like this if such a person existed.
Like this too.
And then at the age of approaching 50, they say, I'm going to jog now.
And let me tell you, it's a shock to the system.
Turns out you can't just jog.
The body...
The body rebels.
The body rebels.
What are you doing to me?
But you can work your way up to it in stages, and I've been doing that.
So, you know, at first mainly walking, a little bit of jogging, then stop when the pain hurts or you let your knees fall off or something.
They're gradually increasing the periods of time that you're jogging, and now, you know, I get two or three kilometers before I have to...
Start walking again.
That's very pleasant.
I live near the ocean.
I'm very lucky.
I send you pictures of the beach.
That's true.
It looks very nice.
It does look very nice.
Yeah, and my update, Matt, I've been cycling to and from work.
That's like 15 kilometers each way.
That's doing me good.
I'm seeing little areas in the countryside and whatnot.
And I took up bouldering.
There's a bouldering gem near my office.
I've been bouldering up and down walls like a graceful chimpanzee.
Like a goat.
Not exactly.
More like a lumbering sloth.
But anyway, very good exercise and I enjoy it.
So, you know, I get these kind of like obsessive things.
So I'm going quite a lot recently.
It's very convenient for my office.
So there we go.
In a couple of years, we'll expect bouldering championships and whatnot.
But for now, just getting up without falling off repeatedly, that's the goal.
Yeah.
You know, it doesn't look incredibly difficult from the videos you send me, but you do assure me that it...
It really hurts your eyes.
It is!
I make it look easy, Matt.
That's the trick.
That's the trick.
I think it's the camera.
The camera does things and doesn't look very tall and stuff.
But then I remembered that you got me into buying a pull-up bar and you do like a hundred or something.
I don't do a hundred.
Well, it's a lot.
It's a lot.
It's in the double digits anyway.
My maximum is 18. My maximum is 18, which is good.
Which is good, I think, for a 40-year-old.
But yeah.
And then I did three and then permanently injured myself.
Yeah.
But let's not focus on our failures, Matt.
So this is old man or middle-aged man health section.
We're doing all right.
We're doing okay.
All right?
Yeah.
Don't worry about us.
We're okay.
Don't worry about us.
Our heart is still beating.
Our bones are not broken.
We survive.
So while we...
Are in physical peak condition.
The discourse, Matt, is doing worse.
It's not keeping in tip-top shape.
It's getting funny.
Yeah, well, I guess it depends how this metaphor would continue because the discourse, I suppose, is relatively healthy in that everybody likes swimming and splashing around, surfing along the waves.
In particular, there is another round of lab-linked discourse.
Yay!
This particular one, brought on by Alina Chan, publishing an opinion piece in the New York Times, why the pandemic probably started in a lab in five key points.
And this was a very...
Highly produced article.
It's super long.
Has these interactive visualizations.
And released just before Fauci was being grilled on, you know, one of the never-ending panel Senate investigation committees in America.
So, New York Times adding to the discourse.
The actual article itself?
Nothing new.
Nothing new.
Written by somebody who has published books and for many years.
Spent advocating the Lab League without directly claiming that's what they're doing, but it's very obvious that's what they're doing.
If you're interested in arguments, we did a three-hour episode with relevant experts where we put these exact arguments and other ones that Alina Chan and Matt Ridley raised to Sam Harris and had experts respond.
And the fact that we did that, it must have been over a year ago, and yet...
This is breaking news and needs a big opinion piece in the New York Times.
That says something.
It says something about the sad state of affairs in our mainstream media.
Our main job is criticizing these alternative media sources.
We've been fairly labeled as mindless defenders of the...
But my God, standards really have slipped.
I kind of do blame the online discourse in a way because clearly those mainstream channels are like, you know, they're desperate for clicks and downloads and subscribers as well.
And I just feel like standards are slipping.
I mean, the New York Times is meant to be the best.
It's meant to be one of the best.
Like, remember when the UFO thing was a big deal?
The New York Times headline then was, no longer in the shadows.
Pentagon's UFO unit will make some findings public.
And there's this breathless thing, always implying that there's some exciting new UFO revelations.
Of course, there wasn't.
There was nothing.
But it's, you know, it's what people want.
It's an exciting story, just like the lab leak is an exciting story.
Bloody Matt Ridley slid into my mentions last night.
You know, asking whether I'd read his book.
And I was like, no, of course I haven't read your book.
I mean, I know what's in it because we listened to you speak to Sam Harris.
We dealt with all those things with actual experts, like you said.
But why would anyone read a book by someone who is a banker slash journalist, that's his background, has weird libertarian sympathies, has written other books saying that all the climate scientists are making stuff up.
And as you reminded me, Chris, as famously, Quite strongly implied that AIDS, I think.
Oh, he just considered the possibility that AIDS, HIV, there was an annuller origin possible.
Just consider, just asking questions.
Yeah, okay.
So yeah, in this alternative universe, all of the climatologists...
There's a shady conspiracy afoot.
They can't see what's obvious to Matt Ridley.
All the virologists, there's a shady conspiracy afoot.
They can't see what's obvious to Matt Ridley.
In this alternative universe, he's the person you should be going to to find out the lowdown on these very technical scientific subjects.
No, he is not.
No, he is not.
Yeah, and I've referred to this habit that people have of surfing the discourse.
Essentially, like when you hear anybody talk, about the lab, like, or really anything with COVID.
It is almost all just referencing a handful of headlines and the views of media pundits and presenting that as if it represents science, as if it represents a universal experience that everybody had,
that, you know, there was a headline in Sliet or whatever liberal And that headline, not even usually the articles, because when you dig into the articles, they tend to include qualifying information, but the headlines themselves or individual snippets,
which are endlessly repeated on right-wing media of a two-line answer from Fauci in some interview where he spent one hour, you know, going into detail about trade-offs and whatnot.
And then they say, nobody discussed.
There was never any reference about things like that.
So all that kind of thing happens.
And an example of this, usually the people that are doing this are people like Nate Silver, Matt Iglesias kind of people, right?
There's a whole host of them.
They often don't have relevant scientific training, so they treat science as if it's a similar sort of thing as...
opinion punditry.
Like that is the way that they react to it.
And an example is Nicholas Kristof, who is a journalist, I think also for the New York Times, a columnist, quite a venerable one.
And he wrote, quoting Alina Chan's
I don't know what caused COVID-19, but I do think Alina Chan makes a strong case for a lab leak in Wuhan.
In retrospect...
Many of us in the journalistic and public health worlds were too dismissive of that possibility when she and others were making the argument in 2020.
Now, Matt, that's so frustrating because maybe Nicholas Kristof was dismissive, but the public health and scientists actually did investigations into the possibility.
They actually wrote papers.
They actually examined.
The possibility in quite a lot of depth.
They did take it seriously.
The WHO sent an investigation.
There was multiple efforts and ongoing efforts to detect the origin.
And they gradually came to some very definitive conclusions.
And so there is a scientific reality there underneath the surface.
And on top of it is the discourse, including the mainstream and the alternative media, which is flip-flopping.
Between this shock, revelation, new thing, you know, this new...
Swing gun.
Yeah, swing gun.
And then they make out that it's all wrong and they backtrack it.
And then it all makes for copy, I guess.
But they make out that their discourse is the actual reality of the scientific investigations that have been going on.
And it just isn't.
Very frustrating.
And Alina's key arguments are there was a lab in Wuhan, the Diffuse project submission.
These are all things, again, that we talked about in depth with the people over a year ago.
So why this is being presented as breaking news is just that whole thing because of the way discourse works.
It was in the New York Times.
It doesn't matter that the arguments have already been addressed.
And many scientists, relevant experts, Link to threads highlighting that.
So, there we go.
There we go.
That's it.
Another round of lab link discourse.
And some people asked, you know, oh, what do you think about this new thing?
And nothing.
I already know that Lena Chan thinks the lab link is the most likely thing.
She wrote a book about it.
She creates conspiracy tweets constantly on Twitter.
There's nothing new for her to say that she thinks the evidence is leaning more...
Towards the lab lake.
So nothing changed.
Nothing changed.
Just the New York Times covered it.
That's what changed.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Which isn't information.
It isn't evidence.
It's just that you can point to a New York Times article.
Yeah.
All right.
Okay.
That's us being grumpy old science men.
Yes.
Well, so another...
We previously talked about Alex O 'Connor's interview with Jordan Peterson and, you know, the potential for the skewing perspective that becoming a bigger influencer-type pundit can bring,
right?
Because he was talking about taking a dialogue approach as opposed to a combative approach to entering into discussion.
And we previously talked about potential issues, the trade-offs that you make there.
In doing that, you know, being more indulgent and, yeah, avoiding certain kind of topics that might cause more controversy and whatnot.
But another aspect of that conversation, which I do think needs to be acknowledged, and which was productive in a way, is that Alex wanted to pin Jordan down a little bit on his stance about religion and Christianity,
and in particular, the resurrection.
And he really had to go to quite a lot of lengths to try and get Jordan to address the topic.
So I'm going to play an example of Jordan being his obfuscating self.
Now, there's a claim that is attributed to Christ that he is the embodiment or the incarnation, the fulfillment, let's say, of the prophet and the lost.
I think that's true.
Yeah.
What does that mean?
Well, you know, I think it's in the Gospel of John.
I think Gospel of John closes with a statement that something like, if all the books that were ever written were written about the Gospel accounts, that wouldn't be enough books to explain what had happened.
Yeah, if all the things that Jesus did.
Yeah, yeah.
And there's a truth in that.
The truth is that profound religious account is bottomless.
And the biblical representations are like that.
The amount of investigation they can bear.
Not least because the text itself is deeply cross-referenced, so there's an innumerable number of paths through it.
It's like a chessboard.
And so it's inexhaustible in its interpretive space.
That's true.
And that's a problem too, because it means it's also susceptible to multiple interpretations, including potentially competing interpretations.
Right.
So this is in relation to a question about whether he believes in...
Christ was directed from the dead.
And you do hear echoes of Zizek a little bit there, right?
That there's endless possible interpretations.
The interpretive space is endless for text.
Some people mentioned that in response to us commenting, you know, a shark, you can make endless.
And just to be clear, I agree.
Humans can do that.
They can waffle endlessly about almost anything.
You could write dissertations on the imagery in Peppa Pig if you wanted to.
Or Peppa Pig's metaphorical analogous structure to the Jataka Thales of Buddhism, right?
There you go.
Any aspiring humanities PhDs, Chris has got a topic for you.
If you're struggling for one, that'll work.
Yeah.
What exactly is the ontological status of the human queen in...
Peppa Pig, when everyone else in the show is an animal and the Queen is the only human.
Explain it, right?
Let's look at the ontological assumptions there.
Is there multiverses?
Has the Queen slipped into the Peppa Pig verse?
Is this a dystopian future for her?
These are all questions that one could ask, Matt.
One could ask these questions.
Yeah, you might well ask whether or not she, you know, whether it's a commentary on class struggle and power dynamics.
He's working all the time, but does he ever raise a physician and do people age?
It's almost a meta-commentary on the futility of work and the alienation from the mode of production.
But set that aside.
Set that aside.
So Peterson's right in that people really can interpret.
This is the beauty of our species and the horror.
We can go on such interpretive flights of fancy.
But he regards it.
As like a specific property of the biblical text.
Of the Bible.
Yes, yes, the biblical.
Not all texts, because that would be postmodernism and therefore bad.
But the biblical text, that's a special one.
That does permit a multiplicity of interacting fractal-like interpretations spawning off into infinity.
That's cool.
Yeah, and sometimes he will then follow that up by saying, but...
This doesn't mean that every interpretation is equal because of, you know, evolution and these kind of things.
So he tries to, you know, like make an appeal to some criteria, but it's very hand-wavy what he does, and it's essentially to say that his interpretation is better than the alternatives.
So there was loads of this.
There was 40 minutes of him constantly doing this over and over.
Alex did manage, through persistence and politeness, to set things up and then get to a question where he eventually got Peterson to admit something which he hasn't before, right?
So, first of all, here is the setup.
I think a lot of people interpret Paul, for example, the earliest New Testament source, as saying that if Jesus did not literally rise from the dead...
If there was not a man who stopped breathing and then started breathing again, then your faith is futile and you're still in your sins.
That is, Christianity is undermined.
Now, that means that...
And Paul doesn't say, sort of, believing that that's false is really bad.
He says, if you do not believe this proactively, then your faith is futile.
Yeah, that's the problem I have with that.
If you don't proactively believe that yourself, then I think when a Christian asks you, you know...
Do you believe in the resurrection of Jesus?
Are you a Christian?
I think you must be committed to saying no, at least under that interpretation of Paul.
And even if you're not sure, I mean, it's fine if I say to you, do you think that a man physically rose from the dead?
And you say something like, well, I don't know.
I mean, I wasn't there.
But I think it has a lot of mythological significance, or I think that maybe it happened in a different sense, or it happened in the sense that good fiction happens, you know, then fine.
But it needs to begin with that caveat of the simple sort of, historically speaking, I don't know.
And I know you don't like to pull out the historical Jesus from the mythological, but it's an important question to ask.
No, of course.
It's a very good objection.
Well, good job there, right?
Yeah, okay.
I didn't know this.
So, was it Paul said that you really, to be a Christian, you really do need to...
I don't know if it was Paul.
It could be a theologian or whoever's referencing.
But in any case, that is something that I would imagine that various Christian figures would say.
Yeah, of course.
And he does a good job by preempting that Jordan's going to say the historical and mythological can't be taken apart and all this.
So this was the setup, Matt, and this was the question.
That Peterson was caught with.
I was impressed by this.
When you say you believe the accounts, do you mean, and I hate to be sort of pedantic here, it seems pedantic, but do you mean you believe that these are things that happened such that if I...
That's a strange state.
I know you don't like that.
Let me put it this way.
If I went back in time with a Panasonic video camera and put that camera in front of the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea, would the little LCD screen show...
I would suspect yes.
So that to me seems like a belief in the historical event of the resurrection, or at least of Jesus leaving the tomb, which means that when somebody says, you know, do you believe that Jesus rose from the dead?
It doesn't seem clear to me why you're not able to just say, it would seem to me yes.
Because I have no idea what that means, and neither did the people who saw it.
You know, like, he then tried to walk it back, right?
He doesn't really know what it means.
But, like, Alex did.
I kind of appreciate it because, you know, he added the details.
So on the little camera screen, would a man appear on that image?
And that allowed Jordan to be, okay, with all of those things, like, yeah, probably.
Then he immediately tries to obfuscate.
But, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I mean, because if you'd use any other words, like, do you believe that he rose from the dead?
He'd go, well, that depends what you mean by believe, right?
But he can't go, that depends what you mean by an LCD camera.
It doesn't work as well.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, I mean, look, Jordan actually gets into more difficulty with the bonafide Christians than he does with...
Leftists and work people and academics and so on, doesn't he?
Yeah, he does.
I've seen so many articles written by pastors or reverends in some Christian bulletin or something like that having a go at Jordan Peterson because he's like a metaphorical, allegorical, metaphysical Christian rather than a proper one.
So he doesn't speak, at least if they feel that he doesn't speak for them.
Okay, I see.
Well, you can see potentially why, but I just find this.
People have been trying to pin Jordan Peterson on this point for years, right?
He's never directly answered the question.
And this is an answer.
Yes, he immediately walks it back.
It doesn't actually matter, right?
It doesn't really matter what Jordan Peterson specifically means, but it's just the fact that somebody got him to actually answer the question.
Yeah, that's impressive.
Alex deserves credit for that.
Good job, Alex.
That's maybe the flip side of being indulgent.
Because he was so considerate and polite and whatnot, that's what allowed Jordan to answer.
Was it worth it?
You know, there's a question there, but nonetheless, yeah.
I'm not sure it was worth it.
I, for one, do not care what Jordan feels about that event.
If you cared, this would be, you know, a clarification.
Like, he's admitted.
And it's absolutely fine.
You think Jesus rose from the dead?
Fine.
Welcome to the same realm as millions and billions of Christians around the world.
It doesn't make you special or it's not something, you know, mystical that nobody has ever heard of.
Yes, fine.
You have religious belief.
That's it.
You know, why did that take you so long?
They work out.
You know, fine.
And if you don't believe he rose from the dead, that's fine too.
You don't have to, right?
Like, it's not, shouldn't be this thing which requires thousands of hours of obfuscation to avoid.
But it is because Jordan Peterson is a tortured soul.
So, you know, everything has to be like that.
But there we go.
Yeah.
There you go.
Well, it makes sense to me.
I don't think he really does believe, not in the sense of one of those, like a serious...
Like born-again Christian.
I think he is a Jungian, Freudian, metaphysical, cultural Christian.
He loves all the trappings and he loves the sort of moral basis of it, but I don't think he does.
But he doesn't want to sort of own that position either because it's kind of a weak position to not be a proper Christian.
Yeah.
Now, almost all the people that I've seen waxing lyrical about the kind of Christian tradition and the importance to consider ritual and people really, they're missing these fundamental aspects in their life.
Almost all of them haven't grown up religious.
Like, if you were raised, like I was raised Catholic and went to Mass every week, there's no hidden secret world of, you know, oh, I've never considered.
I've met religious people my whole life.
People who believe in the Bible, people who don't, you know, they're all going to church.
They're all doing different things.
And there's people that are into Christian mystics or not, or, you know, they join priesthoods or they become monks or nuns, whatever the case might be.
And it isn't this...
Fantastical, you know, mystical realm of psychological interpretations and imagery.
It is just, there are people in the world that are religion, there are religious traditions, there's stuff in religious traditions that is boring as hell.
And a lot of it rests on...
Supernatural claims.
And have you feel about that?
And the theological claims?
It just, it isn't such a fantastical mystery that nobody's ever considered if you are somebody that has, like, been raised in a culture where religion exists.
So I think that part of it is an epiphenome of the people coming across this stuff later and regarding it as very esoteric and, you know, just like they never were aware.
Of the beauty of the Christian tradition.
And you're like, yeah, all right.
Well, that's the funny thing about Russell Brand with his publicizing his newfound appreciation for Christianity and his spiritual journey.
And it's this exotic thing that he's embarking on.
I don't think he'd ever actually go to church or do any of the boring things that run-of-the-mill Christians do.
But the journey he's on is so epic.
And I guess it's appealing to...
I think he is going to church, but it's just layered.
Well, I don't know.
At least he's making an initial effort, let's see, in one year's time.
But the whole point about it is, you know, my lack of faith in Christianity is all documented.
But, you know, one of the things I do recall is that you're not really supposed to publicize your great works and your, you know, spiritual achievements and whatnot because...
Those people have already received a reward on earth.
You know, the person who gives and doesn't make a show of it, that's supposed to be the thing.
But Russell Brand absolutely has made a show of his Christian conversion.
He doesn't have the right temperament for Christianity, I feel.
And, like, you know, last thing I'll say is, I've been to Barcelona, right, and seen the Sagrada Familia.
What a beautiful architectural wonder, the mind of Gaudi, who did that.
I love shrines and temples all around Japan.
And there are beautiful buildings, beautiful elements of culture that come from religious traditions and devotion and all that.
Do you like the sound of church bells, Chris?
I don't like them that much, to be honest.
I'm not a fan.
But the thing is, you know, culture, human culture is interesting and we can make profound and beautiful things.
But it also comes through literature.
It also comes from science and all these different things.
So marking out Christianity or religion as this fundamentally different thing that needs to be regarded as this beautiful pearl that nothing else can be compared to.
It's exceptionalist and exoticism and all that kind of thing.
It doesn't mean that you have to be this kind of hard-nosed.
Reductionist person saying, oh, I hate all church buildings.
We should pull those cathedrals and so on.
No, of course not.
The alternative doesn't have to be the indulgent waffles of Peterson and Brandt.
Surely, there's another path that we can all take.
I think we can all agree with you there.
That's it.
Well, Matt, another thing that happened.
Now, we often...
Talk about the toxic dynamics that you see on social media and you see as people's profile grow, as pundits, wannabe influencers.
We did an episode on trigonometry where they were reflecting on their growth.
And it is at the heart of a lot of the way that the gurus interact.
They're always, you know, the kids would say they're trying to gain clout or get controversy.
And this kind of thing.
They're very thirsty for it.
The gurus want attention and they can always find ways to get it.
And there's a channel on YouTube by a guy who has the usual tale of woe about the mainstream media field.
In his case, he believes he was held back because of the woke DEI agenda.
And he's a white male, right?
So he wasn't...
Part of the BBC's image, right?
So he had all these good documentary ideas and, you know, ability, a good presenter and all this, but he didn't fit the demographic characteristics.
He's got a grievance narrative, you might say.
You might say that, yes.
And his name is Andrew Gold.
He's also done some work on like Scientology and cults and that kind of thing.
But he created a channel called...
Heretics.
That was his rebranded...
Of course it's called Heretics.
There's only like six or so names for these things.
Dissidents.
I know.
Renegades.
Yeah.
Heretics it is.
And his channel is growing.
Like, he's growing up.
But he very much is following in the mold of trigonometry.
I think he references Chris Williamson, right?
As also somebody who wants to imitate.
And he recently...
Did an interview with a British soccer player, Eni Alukog.
And she is very much kind of social justice warrior type, woke advocate, DI advocate type person.
So he did an interview with her and she doesn't come across very well.
You know, she doesn't respond very well.
He raises like contradictory points in her perspective of things.
She calls him...
Racist at times where it says, you know, this is a racist perspective.
So it's a kind of woke, anti-woke stuff that the culture war eats up.
And as a result, it was quite popular on YouTube and, you know, the kind of anti-woke networks.
But then I saw that he posted another video afterward called Exposed.
I didn't show this in viral woke debate with Eni Aluku.
Yeah, so this is a follow up video that he did afterwards.
And the first thing he highlights, Matt, I'm going to comment on the dynamics because this video seemed to be to encapsulate all of the toxic elements that we talk about in a very short period.
The trailer alone has more than 2 million views on Twitter and opened this channel up to a whole new Audience, Eni's nemesis, Joey Barton, couldn't resist a pop.
So, the focus on views, right?
We hear this with Peterson, we hear it with Constantine.
Yeah, all of them, the constant referencing, this got X amount of views, and that indicates something profound.
Rather than that indicates that you're producing inflammatory.
Clickbait.
Yeah.
Yeah, and then...
So I thought it would be a good idea to have a deep dive into the most controversial and confusing moments.
I like Enia Luko, and I think she means well, but she is part of a woke cult that has infested and taken over the mainstream press.
Do not blame her, but blame her bosses, her peers, the people instilling authoritarian DEI and diversity quotas into our media without our permission.
I want to specifically look at Eni's arguments and the paradoxical hypocrisies in which they are dripping.
Some of these are extremely obvious.
You can watch the whole thing on Heretics, of course.
Yeah, so he's going to dissect some of the highlights from his own video.
He says he likes Eni, but I doubt she would appreciate it.
So what's going on here?
He's had a video.
It's a culture war, woke, anti-woke thing.
It went somewhat viral.
He's gotten very excited.
He's doing a follow-up and it's exposed.
You have to watch this to find out what really happened.
He's aiming for maximum clickbait.
He wants to min-max this.
Oh yeah, and I've got, yeah, exactly that.
So listen to this, Matt.
This is almost all of the YouTube tropes in condensed one-minute format.
And if you care about this kind of content, please just hit subscribe.
It makes all the difference.
And I'm fascinated to see how many people do subscribe just from watching this video.
But more importantly, more subscribers means I can get bigger and bolder guests and grow this channel into the stratosphere.
Now, the first thing to note is that although...
Socials from the video have gone viral.
It's been covered by no one in the mainstream media.
And yet, YouTubers have been covering it and racking up millions of views.
This video struck a chord.
There are things, of course, that go on off-screen too.
And if you stay till the end of the video, I can give you an insight into how things were off-screen, off-camera.
And I'll be brutally honest.
Did you detect anything there, Matt?
It's so good.
He hits everyone of the, like, really thirsty influencer techniques because, okay, first of all, if you care, if you care about our mission to expose what's going on, to defend the society,
to make things back the way they should be, then you will click like and subscribe.
Yeah, so nice call to action there.
And obviously there was a dig on the mainstream media because the mainstream media won't cover this, Chris.
Yeah, it went viral.
A YouTube video went viral about an anti-woke thing, but the mainstream, it wasn't on any of the news channels, right?
What are we going to do about this?
What are we going to do about this?
We need to make my video go more viral.
And stay to the end.
The stratosphere map.
To the moon.
I know.
I mean, this is, you know, guys, most people remember the Constance and Kissing thing where it's just the similar kind of obsession where they're very transparent, like they're not hiding really what's going on in their heads and you just know that it's going on 24-7.
How can I get more likes?
How can I get more subscriptions?
How can I get revenue up?
How can I get more clout?
How can I get more attention?
Like, that is the one and only overriding concern that they have.
But stay near me.
Stay to the end.
You've got to stay to the end because that's where the real secrets are going to be uncovered.
And I think, I mean, I'm not 100% sure of this, but I think the way YouTube, the algorithm works, or at least how they believe it works, is that if somebody watches your video for a bit, that's good.
If they click on it that they like, that's good.
But if you watch it to the end, then that's...
Extra super good, right?
It is.
YouTube tells you.
Yeah, YouTube.
It gives you feedback on videos how long the average person watched.
And I don't know what it does, but I think the general lore is people staying until the end of the video leads to it being higher ranked than the algorithm or whatever.
And I promise, Matt, that there will be some behind-the-scenes information divulge if you stay to the end.
I'll be brutally honest about what it is.
Information is at the end.
So to show the kind of thing that he did in the video, this is a clip of him commenting on the content.
So you'll hear a bit of the back and forth and then his editorializing on it.
You're right that it was sports, not just football.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure.
In the boardroom in sports, 17% are BAME as opposed to 18% of the general population.
So that surprised me.
To me, that seems pretty...
Pretty fair as well.
Yeah, I mean, I think with sport as well, you've got to talk about sort of cultural norms and cultural background, right?
So typically, you know, sports like tennis.
As you'll go on to see, this is one of the many times when any is unable to answer the question and goes off on a tangent about...
Again, this isn't her fault.
This is a cult-like ideology and she isn't used to facing a reasonable person outside of the cult.
She has nowhere else to turn or to go.
But let's look at the kind of cultish indoctrination they feed her.
Come on, it's not her fault.
She's a brilliant dead zombie.
She's been indoctrinated, yeah.
I mean, like you said at the beginning, you said she didn't perform particularly well.
I could easily believe that.
But he's doing her really dirty, isn't he?
I mean, he sounds quite polite and friendly in the interview.
And then this editorializing.
In the follow-up, that's not nice.
Look at her dodge the question.
And it isn't her fault.
She hasn't been taught how to think or interact with reasonable people.
She's never dealt with a reasonable person before.
So it's sad.
It is like Alan Partridge.
If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at patreon.com slash decodingthegurus.
Once you do...
You'll get access to full-length episodes of the Decoding the Gurus podcast, including bonus shows, gurometer episodes, and Decoding Academia.
The Decoding the Gurus podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support.
Subscribing will save the rainforest, bring about global peace, and save Western civilization.
And if you cannot afford $2, you can request a free membership, and we will honor zero of those requests.
