Chris Langan: The Smartest Person in the World with a 200 IQ!
In this episode, Matt finally gets his revenge on Chris by dragging him deep into the eccentric world of Chris Langan—the self-proclaimed possessor of a 200 IQ and creator of The Cognitive Theoretic Model of the Universe, yet another grand unifying theory of everything. Langan presents himself as an intellectual titan, offering mathematical, social, religious, and philosophical insights so profound that mere mortals can barely grasp them.Prepare to have the mysteries of the universe, God, anti-God, angels, and demons unveiled. Consciousness, determinism, and free will? All finally explained. But that’s not all—somehow, it all connects to globalist plots, election conspiracies, vaccines, UFOs, and, of course, the devil pulling the strings.Join us for conservative pundit Michael Knowles’ therapy session with one of his idols-a man who reassures him that he is a very smart boy and that his fundamentalist Christian beliefs are, in fact, completely correct.If you thought Eric Weinstein was something, imagine him cranked up to 12. That’s Chris Langan...Also... get ready for Matt's double down on his Aussie food takes.LinksCTMU Radio: Chris Langan - The Interview THEY Didn't Want You To SeeMalcolm Gladwell interview discussing Chris LanganGood Reddit post on the problems of the MEGA IQ test
And welcome to Decoding the Gurus, the podcast for an anthropologist and a psychologist to listen to the greatest minds the world has to offer.
And as always, we try to understand what they're talking about.
I'm Matt Brown.
I'm the professor from sun-drenched Queensland in Australia.
With me is Chris Kavanagh, the anthropologist, well-known pale northerner type person, you know, currently wearing a skivvy or a jumper or something in cold, cold Japan.
Hello, Chris.
Hello.
I am the North man.
I represent the North and it is cold in Japan today.
It's windy, which reminds me of Belfast, which is another windy place.
I've been hardened by the elements into the creature that you see before you.
And I will say, Matt, just a note, it was very, very windy in Tokyo.
A couple of days ago, to the extent that my car was blown sideways when driving by a gust of wind, as never happened in my life.
Literally, the car was moved.
So, that was quite shocking, to be honest.
No, you don't want that.
Cars just should never go sideways.
The last time I was in a car that went sideways, we were driving through a blizzard somewhere in the Midwest of the United States on ice.
That gave me the heebie-jeebies.
Did not enjoy that.
Would not recommend.
Did not spark joy.
Well, that's all right.
But good that you're back in sunny Australia where you don't have to worry about that kind of thing.
It's incredibly sunny.
I went swimming this morning, had to get my wife to spread sunscreen on my back because if I don't, I'll die from skin cancer.
This is one of the many things that can kill you in Australia.
Essential and pragmatic.
Sensual.
Yeah, it wasn't that sensual.
Sadly, on a Tuesday morning, my wife of 20 years, not so much.
But that's okay.
We can't have everything, can we, now, Chris?
Now, so, you know, I was bashing Australian food culture a little bit last time, and you said that some people had responded.
To my thoughtful commentary.
That's right.
There was fury.
Fire and fury in the comment section.
Just some people said, you know, Matt, come on.
They shared some pictures of threads of food and said, what are you talking about, Matt?
What are you talking about?
There's plenty of good food culture in Australia.
You can get nice Thai food, Vietnamese.
There's lots of food in these fair lands.
And I think you detected, you know, with the sharp-minded, acute person you are, you detected the logical flaw in their argument there, showing photographs of delicious Thai and Asian food.
I don't know if it was Asian, but it certainly didn't look authentically Australian.
So, yes, there is slightly an issue there.
It would be kind of like defending Britain's food culture by...
Displaying a fantastic sushi restaurant, which is like stolen valor.
Stolen valor, I feel.
Of course, there are high-end restaurants everywhere.
But is that your food culture?
It's a globalist world, Matt.
It's a globalist world.
Well, we're not going to litigate it again.
I set out to annoy people, and I succeeded.
I do it in my personal life, and I got to do it here as well.
But, you know, the thing is, Chris, is that, yes, you can get some adequate...
Adequate.
Thai food, Chinese food, et cetera, in Australia.
But the point is, is that not only is it much, much worse than the food that you would get in the originating country, it's even worse than the exported food that you would find in a place like the United States.
Like, if you go to a Thai restaurant in the United States, a median Thai restaurant in the United States, it will be way better than the median Thai restaurant in Australia because Australians...
We have a pernicious effect on food.
We demand that you take your fantastic food from your country and you dumb it down and make it bland and creamy and sugary and boring and then we'll eat it.
We force them to do it, Chris.
I've seen it happen.
I've seen it happen time and time again.
Well, Matt is doubling down on his Australian hate.
This is now Australian.
Hate podcasts.
But it's nagging.
It's nagging, right?
It's done with affection.
That's right.
Don't send me a public sticker with an Australian flag and a love it or leave it thing.
I don't need to see it.
I did see somebody sent in a picture that they had actually bought the Tim Tams that you recommended, the flavor.
Oh!
The caramel ones, the salted caramel ones.
Okay, well, did they give their...
They didn't report the...
Outcome of that, just that they had bought it.
So maybe they haven't eaten it yet.
We need an update.
If you have updates, please provide them.
Yeah.
Oh, just last little bit of personal news from me.
You think this is a supplementary material thing about?
I'll keep it brief.
I'll keep it brief.
I've been finally ejected from my office on campus.
It's been taken away from me.
So I started off with a nice office and then was shifted to a less nice office.
And basically, as I worked myself up the academic totem pole, I don't know what's going on, but everything's opposite world because my offices keep getting worse and then I would increasingly tend to work from home because my office was so bad.
But then the facilities people, there's always a scramble for office space.
They would notice that I wasn't using my office and then they would shift me to a worse office.
So it got to the point where me and another professor, We're sharing what is basically a broom cupboard filled with rubbish.
That's our nominal office, which we don't use.
And now that, even that, has been taken away from us.
Wow.
I feel like that character in Office Space.
You have to take my stapler next.
You're constantly getting moved to smaller offices.
Well, yeah, that is...
Look what they have taken from you, Matt.
This is what they've taken from us.
Do you know the best office I ever had in my entire career was as a PhD student at Griffith University, Mount Gravatt Campus.
I had a corner office.
It was a brand new building.
It was very spacious.
It was floor-to-ceiling glass windows looking out over the hill over this beautiful bushland like four stories up.
It was serene and it was perfectly quiet and air conditioning and it was wonderful.
It's been downhill ever since.
I have the nicest office I'll ever have now.
I know this.
This is my office.
It's big enough.
It has two tables in it.
It has a pull-up exercise section.
It has a big window.
It's on the eighth floor overlooking.
And I've got three monitors.
It's beautiful.
This is my kingdom.
And it's much nicer than all the offices I saw in Oxford.
And it's because this university is new.
This campus is, like, new, right?
And I know if I get, like, a permanent position somewhere else, they're going to put me...
In a dark room somewhere.
And it's going to be smaller.
So this is as good as it gets for me.
And yeah, I'm happy with that, Matt.
So there we go.
All right.
Well, good.
And your office has got room for all your little trinkets and all the aggy things.
And that's what they're called.
That's right.
It does.
Plasticky things that range behind you.
Yeah, I have the usual, you know, bookcase full of books that academics like to have that emanates education.
Yeah, I know.
And when people come and visit you, do you just sort of look up to it?
I just leave through them when they come in.
Oh, sorry, I'll put this back, yeah.
I thought you could be more blunt, but you know I've read all those.
Yeah, I'm looking over now and I just noticed Tintin and Tibet is up there.
I read that one three times.
It is.
That was when I tried to get my son into Tintin.
Didn't take.
Anyway, that's enough.
Is that done?
That's off my chest, Chris.
That's done.
That was efficient.
That was eight minutes.
Eight minutes.
That's fine.
Yeah.
Well, after editing, we'll see.
It is.
But, you know, look, the thing is, Matt, I know why.
You're reflecting.
I know why you're afraid of what we're about to do.
It's because you've got a lot of apologizing to do.
You've got a lot of things to answer for, young man.
Now, Matt, just to set the scene, we've covered a lot of right-wing, reactionary, the guru's fear tilts rightward.
We know this.
And it's always the same.
They're always talking about COVID.
They're always talking about Fauci.
They're always talking about the Hunter Biden laptop.
It gets...
Tiring.
It's annoying.
We did Curtis Jarvin and Peter Thiel bloviating arseholes, referencing philosophy and metaphysics and religion, but all just to support their stupid reactionary political take, right?
Now, Matt suggested, well, why don't we take a break from those kind of figures?
Why don't we cover a kind of crank physics guy?
There's a guy, Chris Langan, who claims to have a 200 IQ.
He's got some videos.
Why don't we watch one of them?
You know, give us a break from that ecosystem.
And I thought, yeah, okay, that'll be interesting.
A bit different, something a bit different.
So we set him up so that we could have a break from that world, Matt.
Do you have anything you'd like to say before we start this decoding of him?
If you're waiting for an apology, Chris, no, I will not give one.
Mara, did you know that I listened to, like, four hours of Joe Rogan in one stretch, and that was entirely your fault?
I do remember that.
It was six hours, and it was Joe Rogan and Jack O 'Rourke you watched.
A three-hour episode and then you watched the wrong three-hour episode and had to watch another one.
So six hours of charcoal and chill.
I've got a lot of grudges against you, Chris.
So I'm just starting to get some payback.
So I hope you enjoyed yourself listening to the material and clipping it.
I really didn't.
And we'll go on a journey.
There's so many reasons I didn't enjoy this.
They're all different.
And it's a two-hour interview that he did with Michael Knowles.
For The Daily Wire.
But then there's a little bit of controversy because it wasn't released on The Daily Wire.
And somehow he got the right to publish it.
And it's on YouTube.
And it's kind of like the lost episode of Chris Langan Insights.
And it is titled, Chris Langan, The Interview They Didn't Want You To See.
They didn't want to listen to, they being Chris Cavanaugh.
Yeah, this is it.
Chris Langan, or Christopher Michael Langan, if you like, his fame, just to set the scene, is that he's supposed to be a big IQ man.
That is, like if you're on Wikipedia, it says known for high IQ, right?
And he was actually in the Guinness Book of Records.
In the past, under a pseudonym, what was his pseudonym?
Eric Hart, for having a high IQ.
Now, the Guinness Book of World Records doesn't do that anymore, because it's noted that it's actually very dubious.
Another person that was in the Guinness Book of Records is Keith Rainier of Nixxiom, Cultvium, another high IQ individual.
How can you be famous by having a high IQ?
Well, the general thing is that you tell people that you have a high IQ and people treat you like you have a high IQ.
You might imagine that this is based on a test and that is sort of true.
There is a specific test that he references.
However, it is a test that is highly criticized for being unreliable.
It's also one...
That you self-administer without a time limit.
And you're only supposed to take it once, and he has taken it multiple times.
So even if you take that being a high IQ person means that you are worthy to listen to, Chris Langham's qualification as actually having a high IQ isn't really strongly demonstrated.
It's a claim.
But he doesn't actually have, you know, like all these IQ tests that he can whip out showing, oh, under controlled conditions, I scored, you know, 180 on these Mensa-approved tests or whatever.
He doesn't have that.
He just has like a kind of, trust me, bro, right?
I'm a 180 IQ.
So the premise that he should be someone that we heed because he has a high IQ is questionable.
Even that single claim to fame, that he is a high IQ person because of his scoring test, like signifying this, is questionable.
So I just want to put that out, Matt, that we are covering him because he's been interviewed as a high IQ person, but there's very little evidence that he actually is a high IQ person.
Well, let people listen to Chris and, you know, people can make up their own mind, Chris.
No, but this is, look, I'm going to, I'm going to, but this is one of the things where, you know, I was listening to it, and yes, I was getting annoyed or whatever, and I was like, right, but where does he come from?
Where is the whole concept that he is the supreme high IQ guy from?
And when you dig down into it, it's like a deck of cards, right?
It's just, there isn't the thing which should be there, which like, because I could imagine there being some super high IQ person.
Who is a conspiracy theorist, spoiler, and is into a whole bunch of silly theories and these kind of things.
I can imagine that could happen.
You could be a very smart person and end up in all these cul-de-sacs, like the Nobel Prize winners who go on to endorse pseudoscience and all this kind of thing.
But I'm saying, in his case, he doesn't even have the evidence for the IQ.
But anyway, I'm just saying.
And also, as somebody who deserves a kick of the arse for...
Adding their own stamp to his legend is Malcolm Gladwell, the little science popularizing pop science writer.
He wrote a book called Outliers: The Story of Success.
And in it, he used Chris Langan as an illustrative example of somebody who has a high IQ but didn't succeed.
As we'll go on to see, like, you know, they didn't then up in a high paying job or a high ranking scientist.
And he uses it to show, you know, to illustrate that it's also down to circumstances and cultural capital and all those kind of things.
But that rests on the premise that he had the high IQ to begin.
So Malcolm Gladwell, as people looked into it, you know, basically didn't do.
Very much fact-checking.
It's just a good example, so he uses it.
Malcolm Gladwell helped to support the myth that Chris Langan is a super high IQ person because he's featured in his book.
Yeah, Malcolm Gladwell's approach to narrative, big idea storytelling in his books is a whole topic in and of itself.
We should cover him.
Yeah, we should.
Yeah, look, that's right.
Look, your point is well taken.
IQ is somewhat dubious in the big bad world outside of...
In the way it's used, not as a specific measure.
Exactly, in the way it's used.
I know, I know.
And especially in terms of what it means when you start talking about 140, 150 above, right?
Oh, yeah.
It starts to become difficult to be very clear about what that means.
But, you know, even if there was...
It was totally legitimate.
There were no issues there.
As you said, Chris Langham doesn't even have the evidence that he's even being scored as that by an IQ test.
So, okay, that's something to file away in your back pocket as we go ahead and listen to this.
Yeah, so there's a thing called the mega test that he did.
That is like where it's claimed to be, but the mega test is highly criticized, right?
So, anyway, look it up at your own peril.
But this interview, now, That was my introduction of Chris Langan.
Let's hear Michael Knowles.
And Michael Knowles is a conservative pundit, right?
He's kind of in the Dave Rubin mold or Ben Shapiro mold.
A conservative partisan activist and like pundit.
But here's him introducing Chris Langan at the start of the interview.
I'm so excited that my first guest is Christopher Langan, the smartest man in the world.
I do not say that as a subjective statement or to flatter Chris.
I mean that in as technical a way as possible.
Chris has one of, if not the highest IQ ever recorded, somewhere between 190, 195 and 210.
And Chris is not here by way of some fancy distinguished professorship at such and such brand name university, nor did Chris just get off of his private yacht out of the south of France and come here to leave
his billion dollar company.
Chris came here from a farm in Missouri after a career as a bouncer at bars around New York.
Chris, thank you very much for that.
Thank you for inviting me, Michael.
So, contrary to my claims, it's not a subjective assessment.
It's an objective fact that he is one of the smartest people in the world.
There you go.
There you go.
Yeah, I mean, probably the most interesting part of the story of Chris Langan is how he is treated totally uncritically.
By so many interviewers in the online media world.
But we can return to that later on.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, and we'll see why Michael Knowles in particular might be taken with Chris Langan's thought as we go on.
But one other aspect that might explain some of his fairly sycophantic approach to Chris Langan is this little tidbit, which is also from the start.
Thank you for inviting me, Michael.
I first stumbled onto you when I was 18 years old, freshman in college, and listen, I barely got out of high school math.
I barely got out of calculus.
I barely got out of high school myself.
That's a good point.
But I said, this guy, he's saying things that are really, really interesting, and so I want to learn more.
I've wanted to talk to you ever since then.
I know that before we get into...
Metaphysics, the existence of God, free will, politics, culture, and everything in between.
Before we get into those, they are going to come up.
But Matt, so I thought, you know, actually I pinged this the second time I was listening to this, that Michael Knowles came across him like when he was a teenager and was kind of, you know, interested in him.
So I think this speaks a little bit to why this feels like a fanboy.
You know, interviewing like a rock star in a way.
We'll see as it goes on, but like it's very much Michael Knowles learning from the master, right?
So, yeah, I think the fact that he, you know, came across his story when he was in his teens and has come to somewhat idolize him might explain some of the clips that we will hear as this decoding goes on.
Yeah, yeah, incredibly.
Incredibly revealing about Knowles there.
The other thing you notice about Chris Langan right off the bat is his voice.
He's got a very smooth, luxuriant, deep, authoritative voice.
Would you agree?
Oh, I didn't.
Yeah, I guess so.
I would have called it kind of jocular in a way.
But he definitely is speaking with authority.
Gravitas.
Yeah, that's his approach.
But like you heard in the narrative there, it's also very much presenting he's the salt of the earth, man of the people.
You know, he gets down and works with his hands.
He's been a pointser.
We'll get into his remarkable life story.
But yeah, so he is a good speaker.
I will say that in terms of like delivery.
Yeah.
Now, let's get into his backstory a little bit, Matt.
Oh, well, actually, just before we get to that, so there is an issue which is raised, which I think would be an understandable objection, which is, like, if this guy, Chris Langan, is such a genius, right, he's a super genius, and he's one of the smartest people on the planet, why does it seem that he's been so unsuccessful?
Why is he, you know, not rich or, like, an influential scientist, right?
This is the initial objection that you have to address, and so they cover this, like...
I know people are going to be asking, why is the smartest man in the world?
Why is he not just buying and selling all of us all the time?
Why is he living on a farm in the middle of Missouri?
Well, that's a good question, and it's that I was never actually interested in money.
When I was a kid, my brothers and I, my family, we were not exactly the richest folks in town.
Clothes.
And so I sort of immersed myself in books and reading and decided that what I wanted to do was pursue knowledge.
It costs you nothing to pursue knowledge, really, provided you can sustain yourself while you're in pursuit of it.
So that's what I did.
I simply focused myself on I want to know the truth about reality.
I want to know, you know, what kind of world it is that I'm living in.
And that's what I went for.
Fair, fair.
I mean...
Noble motivations.
I think so.
I think so.
There are higher things in life than grabbing after money.
So what's wrong with that?
Nothing.
Nothing wrong, though.
So he didn't have enough money for food or clothes.
That's a remarkable poverty-stricken childhood.
That's really quite serious.
You don't have enough money for food each week.
But, you know, he had higher...
Motivations.
And as you mentioned, you don't need money, you know, to pursue knowledge.
You can just find ways to access it and whatnot.
But okay, so there we go.
That explains that.
And there is one point to make here that like the opposite disconnect where people assume if you're rich and successful, you are intelligent.
That is something that we've encountered quite a lot, right?
Like with Peter Thiel or Elon Musk.
So yeah, you could very well be a very smart person.
And just not particularly rich or not be pursuing money.
That's entirely reasonable.
So no issue there with that point.
Exactly.
That's right.
The premise of Noel's question there, this is a thing that needs to be addressed.
Yeah, I think it really reveals something that really grinds my gears, which is the popular understanding of IQ.
Not IQ, just intelligence generally.
People really do equate it with worldly success.
Such that someone who is successful...
Rich, famous, powerful, whatever, must be, by definition, smart.
It's annoying to me.
But anyway, let's move on.
It is annoying.
Okay, but let's hear a bit more then about the backstory, how he grew up and whatnot.
Of course, it helps to be born with money.
That's the easiest way.
And it helps to have a lot of connections.
The right kind of connections.
And it helps not to alienate the people who have all the money, because then they'll exclude you and cancel you.
That's what they do.
That's what cancel culture is.
Basically, people are being frozen out of the economy.
And I found myself getting frozen out of the economy that way from an early age.
I tried to go to college, but ran into a couple of problems.
Personnel problems on the faculties of the colleges in question.
And that stopped me.
Basically, when you can't get a college education, you are cancelled economically.
Presumably, though, you show up to college even though you've got a tough upbringing and not any real advantages in terms of family or society.
You've got a higher IQ than anybody in the room.
You're obviously extremely smart.
You're extremely self-educated.
So you get into college.
It should be a total breeze for you.
It was a total breeze for me.
Too much of a breeze for me.
You know, you ask the wrong kinds of questions of people who are full of themselves and think they have all the answers.
You know, like, you know, in a calculus class, you know, say, well, you know, why don't you explain exactly what an infinitesimal interval is and how you can traverse from one end to the other.
And, you know, they'll look at you as though you've got two heads.
I ask that all the time.
I ask my waiters.
Yeah.
Well, I got a very poor reaction out of that.
Well, so familiar story, Matt.
I was thinking that.
A familiar story.
The grievance backstory.
Yeah.
You know, the troubles, troubles with the authority figures, troubles with professors, being too smart, basically, too much of an out-there thinker, being cancelled, essentially, at an early stage.
You know, Brett Weinstein could definitely identify with this.
Well, this is almost exactly like Alec Weinstein in terms of the narrative, right?
And also that thing that it's all about connections, Matt, right?
There's something going on behind the scenes.
The people that are succeeding in education, it's because of all their connections and back dealings and going along with the system or whatever.
And it's just hard for these renegades.
And Michael Knowles' approach as well, where he's like, you've got a higher IQ, so you come.
So this should all be...
Easy.
And I'm just like, do they understand how things work?
Because like, say you are really smart, right?
And you come to study medicine.
It doesn't mean you therefore know medicine, right?
Like you're not inbuilt with the knowledge of medicine.
You would still have to study for many years to understand medicine and how it works.
But he's kind of like, you walk into the room.
You're the king dick, right?
You can spot what all of them can't.
And they don't recognize that.
That's not how it works.
And actually, people having too high of an opinion of themselves is often an obstacle.
To, like, learning things.
Of course.
I like the way it's sort of accepting the...
We can't help but sort of accept the premise that Chris Lennon is incredibly smart as a tournament IQ.
But putting that aside, yeah, I mean, obviously success in education or any endeavor is not just a function of some sort of innate abstract reasoning ability.
It's, you know, your personality and your ability to sort of buckle down and focus.
Is a huge part of it.
And also the socialization, being able to get along with other people, which you usually need to do to one degree or another in order to progress, is another one.
There are probably dozens more.
So it's quite possible that maybe it wasn't nefarious, conspiratorial, old boys networks and cancel culture keeping poor old Chris Langen down.
We'll hear more about that.
But just one thing, Matt, you're the maths guy, okay, in this duo.
Relative to you, yes.
It's a high bar, granted, I know.
But, you know, the thing that he mentioned about calculus class was like, why don't you explain how you can traverse an infinitesimal interval?
Isn't that just the thing, like, you can always divide a space in half and half and half, right?
And so you should never, you know, it's like a famous paradox.
Like, the fact I know that from Paradox, it feels like that is perhaps not a super high-level thing.
Yeah, I noticed that too.
I mean, like him hassling his professor about infinitesimals, you know, the basic theorems of calculus, which is that you can do that and sort of go from discrete intervals, measurable intervals to an infinitely smaller.
I don't think that's the gotcha.
That sounds more like a crank.
Like, you know, that guy who was on...
I forget the name of the guy, the really crazy one.
It was recently in the news.
But, you know, with him asking the difficult questions, they can't explain.
Terrence Howard.
Terrence Howard, yeah.
It sounded a bit Terrence Howard-y, but...
We're going to get into more Terence Hardy territory later, so don't worry.
But, yeah, sticking with the story.
So you know said grievances, Matt.
There was a running with a particular maths teacher that rubbed him the wrong way.
So let's hear a bit about that.
Now, finally, I was having a hard time with this.
There were certain things that I didn't quite understand how he was, why he was doing them the way he was.
I kept on trying to track him down to his office.
He was never in his office.
I would wait in the hall for, you know, hours and hours for this guy.
I never showed up.
Finally, I caught him in his office.
And I said, hi, Professor Leisnering, can I come in?
Well, I'm really kind of busy right now.
Well, I just wanted to ask you one question.
You know, why do you do this?
Why are you taking a set theoretic approach to the calculus like this?
You know, I mean, they don't seem to be compatible.
You know, on the one hand, you know, the calculus deals with change, whereas sets are static things.
Why are you taking this particular approach to it?
And he looks at me, and he's, you know, Asperger's victim, right?
And he looks at me, looks down at his thing, and says, well, you know, some people just don't have the mental firepower to be mathematicians.
Well, what was I supposed to do?
Hit the guy?
I wanted to hit him.
Right, right, but he says something that's sort of pathetic, almost, to say.
It is pathetic, but it basically told me a lot about how he sees the world, how he sees other people.
I don't want to take a course from a guy like that.
Yeah.
You know?
And it offended me, because I was, you know, I'd been a poor kid.
I just came off a ranch.
I'd been working all summer punching cows, you know?
That sounds like it could happen to you.
Like a student tracks you down.
He's never in his office.
Don't never catch me.
Don't never catch me, Chris.
Why are you teaching your psychometrics course with frequentist statistics when you could be applying a Bayesian model?
Would you like to justify it?
And heartily, Professor Brian, let's fucking say.
Some of us cannot be statisticians.
Some of us are just cow-punchers.
So, like, one, this is his telling of this, right, with, like, a cartoonishly dismissive professor.
But secondly, it's another one of these things about him, you know, chasing down someone and, you know, posing the difficult questions, Marty, you're not supposed to ask.
And then...
Being treated, like, dismissed unfairly.
So another tale of grievance to add to the list.
Indeed, indeed.
Yeah, I mean, I don't know if you remember, Chris, but did you, when you were in undergrad and stuff, did you have, if you were in a big class like me, maybe there were a couple of students that were a bit odd that would kind of put their hand up and kind of derail lectures and things.
Yes, yes.
They like that.
Yeah, and they definitely disappeared after a year or two, right?
Yeah, yeah.
I can't help but suspect he was one of them.
Yeah, so he, you know, in his telling, this is like, you know, a teacher dismissing him because of his, like, background or whatever.
But I'm not sure I totally buy that.
And there's a little bit of follow-up on this, so let me just play this little bit more in this story.
You know, I'm used to, you know, being around a bunch of, you know, hayseeds, cowboys, you know, punching cows, you know, going to the, you know, bar at night or whatever, drinking beer.
And it was nothing like that.
These kids were sitting around smoking pot, you know, doing drugs, you know, psychedelics.
Now, just to clarify, when he says not everyone has the power to be a mathematician, was this an admission of his own failure to explain his process?
He's calling you stupid.
Yes.
He was claiming that I didn't have the intellectual firepower to be a mathematician, or at least that's the way I interpreted it.
Because I was used to being slighted in that way.
I kind of grew up in a rough and tumble.
If people feel intellectually threatened by you, you get a lot of this kind of thing out of them.
So I assumed that that's what was happening, and I've never seen, never heard anything after that that would lead me to believe anything different.
The issue for me there, Matt, is that, you know, Michael Knowles just offers, like, well, hold on, just to clarify.
So, like, he was saying this, and he's like, yeah, well, I interpret it as a slight, right?
Like, and then he says, you know, I didn't hear anything afterwards that would lead me, like, where would you hear afterwards?
Like, is the teacher going to contact you to say you misinterpreted this statement?
So it just strikes me that, like...
You know, Chris Langham says, you know, I was used to being slighted and I interpreted that as, you know, an insult of my intelligence.
So who knows if he's reporting the event accurately?
Who knows if he interpreted accurately?
But for him, it's like it's a part of his narrative.
And this is what happens with the guru figures we cover all the time.
They remember these events.
From their education, from their childhood.
And it's always that they are being not recognized appropriately.
And the sudden authorities are too close-minded and don't appreciate their genius.
Yeah, I'm reminded of Eric Weinstein's anecdote, which was really pivotal in his personal story.
Do you remember, Chris, where some people were having a meeting?
A faculty meeting, he wasn't told about it or something like that.
Yeah, things like that.
And the grievance about being slighted is really features heavily.
So, you know, look, there's two readings of this.
One is Chris Wangham's version, which he's a genius.
The professors were teaching basic calculus wrong.
He spotted that and asked the penetrating questions, which they were unable to process.
And were dismissive of him.
Or alternatively, maybe he had a bit of a chip on his shoulder and was maybe that kind of sort that doesn't fit in, doesn't socialize well, doesn't play nicely with others.
Now, if this was the only evidence to go, we could say, well, it's hard to say, which is more accurate.
But let's continue on and see if the scales tilt in Euler's favor, in favor of Euler's interpretation.
Now, we're still in the backstory, Matt, right?
But this is a good clip highlighting the level of rigor with which Michael Knowles approaches, you know, the kind of questioning.
The story and presenting things and more details about Chris Langan's kind of hard-knock, rough-and-tumble lifestyle.
So you leave college.
Presumably, you're much more intelligent than anyone that you're going to meet on the faculty or in the students.
So you leave college.
What is it about being a bar bouncer?
What is it about that physical activity?
Because presumably...
Even without a college degree, you could have done some middling, paper-pushing job, and it probably wouldn't have been very lucrative or fulfilling for you, but presumably you could have done something like that instead of a tough, physical, potentially dangerous job like being a bouncer.
Could have, but there are certain problems.
For example, when I was in New York, I got a job in a grommet factory.
Okay, it was Stimson Grommets.
You know, you had Grumman aircraft there.
They got military defense contracts.
I think they were working on F-16s at one point.
And then there was Stimson Grommets, which produced these aircraft rivets for these airplanes.
And I had this machine, and man, the sound, the noise from this machine, wham, wham, wham.
No hearing protection, no nothing was issued to anybody.
And I started losing my hearing.
And so forth.
And I figured, well, I can't stand this anymore.
I've got to get out of here.
So I was about to leave, but I had a girlfriend, and she said, no, I want you to stay.
So I figured, okay, let me see if I can get another kind of job.
So I went and took the civil service exam and was offered a job by the IRS.
And that, of course, was a moral dilemma.
That's a fate worse than hell.
Exactly how awful do I want to be as a person, you know?
And I decided that I needed to go home anyway.
So I went back to Montana at that point.
Right.
Okay.
So he worked at a grommet factory.
Yep.
And then he applied for the civil service and got into the IRS, but decided that was morally corrupt.
So he went back to Montana.
But this was a question about like, you know, it's just like his stories, Matt.
This speaks to me about the way he kind of rambles through things.
So like he...
Went to work at a grommet factory.
Why?
Precisely.
Like, that isn't clear.
But then the machine was too noisy.
So he left that and then...
Then left the IRS because the IRS...
No, he didn't get in.
He was authored a position by the IRS.
Oh, they turned it down.
I see.
So why did he apply?
Presumably his test score was so high that he was headhunted by the IRS, and then he had to go back to Montana.
But the question was about why be a bar bouncer instead of, you know, like get a middle management type job, given that you're the cleverest person and you could easily get any of those jobs.
Like, why did you want to be a bouncer?
So did that answer the question?
Yeah, it's a weird conversation they're having because they're starting with the premise that he's the most intelligent man in the world and then they're having to really get into the weeds into his rather checkered, sort of go nowhere, shiftless career because that's a problem that they need to kind of explain.
And it gets explained through a variety of ways.
Machines being too noisy, the IRS being too not morally.
Correct enough.
Yeah, you know, nefarious people at universities and stuff.
You're treating him badly because he's too smart.
Exactly.
Well, so now, so he went back to Montana, but what happens next, Matt?
We're going to get to be in the vine, sir, so here we return to this.
But basically, then what I found out, well, I went back to New York when I was in my late 20s.
That's when I started doing the bar bouncing thing, right?
And I wasn't making that much money.
I was working for $40 a night, coming out of there bloody, you know, with shirts ripped off my back.
I couldn't even pay for the shirts, you know, that I was making.
So I figured, okay, what I'll do is I'll take the civil service exam again.
Now, this is, I don't want to sound insensitive, but at that point in New York, there was a...
A protocol whereby you take the civil service exam, and if you are a minority, if you are non-white, you get 30 extra points.
There's nothing insensitive.
This is just a fact.
I mean, it's a fact of our law.
It's just a fact.
They've been doing it for a long time.
It's called affirmative action, of course.
Matt, so, first of all, this sounds like somebody kind of describing the...
Like, a Hollywood movie of being a bouncer, right?
Like, you're fighting every single night so your shirt is torn and bloody.
You can't even afford the money to, like, buy the new shirts, right, each day.
So, like, that doesn't sound particularly accurate.
You know, like, bouncing is a tough, rough-and-tumble job, but you're not...
Ending every shift soaked in the blood of your enemies, unless you're Conan the Barbarian.
No, not usually.
Maybe it was a really rough bar, Chris.
Really rough.
Well, maybe, but he then goes back to the civil service, right?
And now, I did a little bit of, like, independent fact checking here, Matt, right?
So he's saying he did that in his late 20s.
He was born in 1952.
So this is the 70s or 80s, right?
Somewhere around there.
And then he's saying there was affirmative action in the 70s and 80s that meant that, like, so now he doesn't state it, right?
But he couldn't get the job because, you know, these other ethnic minorities are getting 30 points added to their exams.
So, like, in the 70s and 80s, this was, you know, DEI was gone crazy.
Well, I don't think, I very much doubt DEI had gone.
Super strong there.
But perhaps, Chris, there was.
I vaguely recall there were certain initiatives, especially the police force, because the police force in certain areas in the US was overwhelmingly white, they might have had some programs to kind of try to enrol some non-white people.
It's possible.
It's funny you mention the police force, because that's what happens next, Matt.
And there's more problems with the police force.
And when that happens, you know, and I'm applying to be, say, a police officer, right?
And all of these other guys, these non-white guys, are looking also to be police officers.
You learn that there's a line of 3,000 guys in front of you.
So then you give up your idea of being a police officer and you give up your idea of ever succeeding, getting a job on the basis of a civil service exam.
Now, they do have, you know, white police officers in New York, but almost all those guys are connected.
They've got some kind of uncle or acquaintance or somebody who's on the police force that will put in a good word for them.
I didn't have anybody like that.
And merit made no difference whatsoever.
This is not a meritocracy we live in.
You can take any number of these tests and outscore everybody else and get nothing and nowhere.
And it's especially true of civil service.
It's true in a lot of fields in the economy, but especially in civil service, that has been a pronounced issue for a long time.
Okay, there you go.
Another reason why the poor guy just can't catch a break.
It's another, well, you need, so you need insider.
Like, contacts in order to, you know, get a...
I can't remember if it was college or high school, but you need, like, insider contacts so you can't do it.
The IRS, it's affirmative action.
The police in New York in the 80s, affirmative action gone mad, right?
Same problem, really, there.
It's a lot of, you know, it's all connections.
You know, you said before this clip that there was affirmative action to try and address.
But I believe, like I can see on the New York Times from 1992, survey places New York police last in hiring black officers.
So I don't think the key is that it was impossible.
For white police officers to get jobs in the 80s and 90s.
I'm sure you're correct, Chris.
And I'm sure of the millions of public servants working in the United States, I'm sure the majority of them did not get their position through some all-boys network either.
So it does feel like he's protesting too much.
It does seem like he's over-explaining this, but that's okay.
Almost as if he has a litany of grievances, as if he's mongering them.
You might say a personal tale of woe, right?
But in this dark environment, Matt, where affirmative action is, you know, stopping him at every affirmative action and arrogant professors, they're all there dismissing him.
He is getting intellectual stimulus and he's kind of enriching himself.
So listen to this.
Presumably during all this time, though, you're not just saying, as many people do when they leave college, whether they graduate or not, they say, okay, well, that's it.
I'm never reading a book again.
I'm done with all that book learning.
Something tells me that's not your mindset, even as you're doing these physical jobs.
It certainly wasn't.
I would go to library sales and found a little bookstore that had some academic books in it and just get whatever I could.
I always had to...
I had to basically read whatever I found.
I couldn't afford to order a book.
Even back then, books were expensive.
So I couldn't go to a bookstore and pay full price for a book.
So I was constantly buying used books, which were, when they were textbooks, they were used and therefore outmoded.
The field advances.
The book stays the same.
But nevertheless, it's got some of the stuff that I need in it.
Then I can absorb that.
So that's what I did.
My own ideas, trying to apply what I read in these books.
Was there any field that attracted you in particular?
I mentioned that I don't have anything past high school math, and even that I was pretty sketchy on.
Math, physics, philosophy, theology?
Well, now, when I was 14, I was working on a ranch in Wilsell, Montana, which is just across the bridges from Bozeman.
I don't know if you're familiar with Bozeman, but anyway, I was a...
You know, working as a punching cow, stacking hay, irrigating on this ranch.
And I took two books with me.
And one of them was a book by Albert Einstein on the theory of relativity.
And the other one was a book by Bertrand Russell.
Okay?
And I would read these books.
It's a great image, isn't it?
The lone genius.
Goodwill hunting.
Yeah.
It's almost like a movie.
Yeah.
Chris, what does punching cows mean?
I assume it doesn't mean...
Yeah, it's not punching.
It's, you know, no country for old man.
The cow killing, like, bull come to the head.
Oh, right.
So worse than a punch, basically.
Yeah, yeah, for the cow, yes.
Yeah, so you have here...
Like, this might come across as academic snobbery, but nonetheless, I think it should be obvious.
Like, if you ask me to name, you know, some smart thinkers, right?
Like, first of all, he asked, what fields are you interested in?
He doesn't answer that, right?
Like, he says, well, I was, when I was 14, I was reading Einstein.
I'm Bertrand Russell, right?
And it's a bit like, you know, name some rock stars that you're like, oh, I really like, you know, I'm really into rock.
I love all kinds of rock.
Well, could you name two rocks?
Well, I like, yeah, yeah, like Michael Jackson and DCAC.
Like, it's just, it's two intellectual figures, right?
And also his approach there where he's talking about books.
Books being expensive.
Okay, let's grant that books are expensive.
I don't know how expensive all books are, but he's getting secondhand books.
But he mentions he couldn't get the most up-to-date textbooks where the real knowledge is.
So he's working for these, you know, the kind of older textbooks, but he's still able to make it work because, you know, he's just so smart.
I'm like, that's not how this works.
It's not like...
You know, the newest edition of the textbook, that's what you need.
It's got the best science in it.
Yeah, it's a very...
Yeah, no, it is an odd thing to say.
Yeah, so the picture he's painting, you know, from one point of view, I mean, the impression that he would like to give is the goodwill hunting, you know, man of the earth, salt of the earth kind of guy, brilliant, too brilliant for society.
Unrecognized, manly, but out there living the life of the mind while doing the manual jobs.
He's also describing the lifestyle of a crank.
I mean, I get sent material by cranks, Chris.
I've reached a level of...
Me too!
Yeah, many people do.
Many academics do.
They send you their stuff.
And yeah, there's a pattern.
There's a pattern that is there, and I guess we'll just leave it there for now.
Well, yeah, it is easy to detect.
Now, I've just got two more clips, Matt, that relate to this kind of, like, you know, approach to education, backstory, tale of grievance.
I mean, it will come through in all the clips, but these are from later in the conversation where they've got on to the topic of education in general, right?
Not just as it relates to Chris Langan.
So you'll hear...
Some familiar motifs come through in these clips, so listen to this one.
So, we would agree with that.
We're pretty anti-Marxist, yes.
I'm very anti-Marxist.
It's a terrible philosophy.
I mean, it's as full of holes as you can imagine.
Even though all the geniuses at Princeton or whatever, you know, there's all these Marxists.
Look, that's a closed, that's a club, you know.
If you don't have the key to the clubhouse, you're not getting in, okay?
They won't even talk to you.
No academic will take me on, will actually start arguing, even in his own field at this point, because they know they're going to lose.
And they will.
Any academic, any time.
Big words.
Big talk from a big man.
Bunch of Marxists.
I like how Knowles is looking to lead him towards a bit of, you know, left-wing bashing there.
But actually, Chris is more focused on those damn academics.
It's just a club.
You know, it's just an old boys' day look.
Yeah, they won't let me in.
I'm smarter than all of them.
They won't let me in, but I'm smarter than all of them.
I can beat them.
Scared to talk to me.
Scared to talk to me.
Yeah, I mean, you don't have to lead Chris Langham quite far in order to get him into an anti-Marxist reactionary right-wing rant.
But nonetheless, his grievances are more powerful than that topic.
So, you know, Michael Knowles, as you would expect, says it's all...
Marxist indoctrination systems.
You know, Matt, you and I are academics, not particularly big Marxists, but I guess we're just outliers.
You know, we're not...
Yeah, we're surviving.
We're surviving somehow.
They keep trying to recruit me and I keep saying like, no, look, I don't want your Leninist pamphlet, okay?
I'm busy.
I'm busy investing my stocks and shares.
But like, so last step here on education.
You know, Matt...
All in all, you're just another fucking brick in the wall.
But now, yes, I mean, I'm as anti-higher education cartel as there can be.
They're indoctrination bills.
You have to look at the entire educational system as being one great big indoctrination factory.
And the people that work in it, those faculty members, they're chosen, they're selected as indoctrinators of the youth.
Yes, and they peddle Marxism, but I like what you just said.
I mean, you boiled it down even more simply.
You know, a lot of politics comes down to, you know, well, you're a socialist.
I'm anti-socialist.
Well, yeah, I'm very anti-socialist.
And, well, you're a capitalist, or this or that.
But you seem to be raising some problems with capitalism.
Man cannot serve two masters.
Well, there's two kinds of capitalism.
So, yeah, we'll get to the theories about capitalism and whatnot, but you know what?
Just to point out, right?
Education.
It's not education.
It's indoctrination and the Marxism.
It's a boys' club.
No academics will debate him.
He's got a tale of woe.
Not recognized since he was a childhood.
Not recognized in his childhood.
You know, victimized by big-shot professors thinking they were smarter than them.
Very familiar themes in the guru sphere, I have to say.
Yes, it is all very familiar.
You know, name-dropping the sort of conventionally perceived as, you know, like intellectual material.
Very Lex Friedman in that respect.
So far, he's fitting a pattern pretty nicely.
I feel like we are not shooting fish in a barrel, shooting a fish in a barrel.
You and I...
There's just one, two shotguns.
Yeah, well...
Yeah, there is this.
But so far, I was quite content with this content, right?
Like, I mean, I'm not enjoying it, but this is something sort of, you know, it's familiar themes, but it's what you promised me, a physics crank, you know, with a teal of grievance.
This is what I was looking for.
And yes, maybe a good time to move on to his cognitive theoretic model of the universe.
Ooh, yeah.
Let's hear a bit about this.
Strap yourself in.
Reading Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein, and it occurred to me, these two things really need to be put together.
And then, you know, once I decided that, I started putting them together.
And then I found out about Kurt Goodell and the undecidability theorem.
And yes, absolutely.
Okay, you see, because reality isn't just geometric, which is what Einstein...
Thought it was.
Nor is it just linguistic.
It's a blend of the two.
Right?
Russell saw it as being linguistic.
Einstein saw it as being geometric.
Okay?
So I decided that reality must be logico-geometric.
Putting the two of them together.
And, of course, then I realized, well, I've got to put together a theory, construct a theory, in which reality is actually logico-geometric.
And so that's where the CTMU came from.
And the CTMU is the cognitive theoretic model of the universe.
Cognitive theoretic model of the universe.
This is your theory of everything.
My theory of everything, and it's all in the name.
If you take a good close look at that, you've got cognitive theory, and of course you know a theory is a kind of language, theoretic language, okay?
And then you've got cognitive theoretic model, you've got a model, and then you've got universe.
You've got a language, you've got a universe, and then the model is the mapping between them.
CTMU says those are all the same thing.
All of those terms, all of those properties are distributed everywhere over reality.
Reality can have only one structure once you realize that and you implement it in theoretical form.
Wow!
That's some big ideas right there.
Now, Bertrand Russell, he thinks the universe is all...
He thinks the universe is all words.
It's all linguistic.
It's all words.
But he's wrong.
It's not just words.
There's also geometry, mathematics.
Einstein.
Einstein and relativity.
All of that stuff.
Einstein.
Well done, Einstein.
But nobody thought to put those two things together.
Well, apart from...
Did Eric Weinstein...
I mean, he has geometric unity.
Well, yeah.
But Eric Weinstein, to his credit, I think.
Has not attempted to...
I don't know.
Add linguistics?
Add linguistics.
I don't think so.
I hope not.
I love the way people like Chris Langham, who in this way is heaping the sense makers, right?
You have a word, you have cognitive, you have theory.
There's a theory.
This means an idea.
You have a model.
He's just describing each individual word.
And then at the end he says, And they're all the same.
Anyway, it all means the exact same.
So you didn't need all those words.
They're all the same anyway.
You just need the one word.
All is one.
One is all.
Some beautiful did.
I just got to say for the record, because it's probably hurting some people's brains, Bertrand Russell does not think that the universe is made of words.
He didn't think that.
Did he not?
Of course he didn't.
But the name dropping, Chris, like these are all, these are all like...
Good ale, Matt.
Godel, that's right.
These are all pop.
Not that they're not incredibly important figures, right?
But they are figures whose names and ideas have penetrated the public consciousness.
And he just has picked them up and is dropping names.
I love it.
I'm surprised Nietzsche didn't get a mention, but maybe he does in some other content.
So part of the things that we say about the Guru's Firma is the Gurus say their things.
And then it's the reaction that cues the audience about how seriously to take it, right?
So let's hear Michael Knowles' response.
And also this highlights some of the dynamic in the interaction.
So listen to this.
So then the question I asked you is kind of a stupid question.
I said, which field was it that attracted you?
And your answer is yes.
Well, I would have to say it would have to be logic and language and then physics and mathematics.
Okay, so those are the fields.
And that's what I thought I was conveying.
Yes.
Apparently I need to spell it out.
You do!
But this is so important, that you're not just talking about this siloed aspect of thought, or this philosophy over here, language over here, math over here, physics over here, but you're presenting something that is universal.
Correct.
Correct.
Absolute and universal.
Revolutionary theories, Chris.
Especially ones that bind together so many disparate things.
A galaxy of ideas, you could say.
Yeah, yeah.
If only some thinkers had noticed this tendency amongst people, you know, guru figures, to do this.
So, yes.
Did you catch that little slapdown as well?
No, what was it?
Oh, when Michael Knoll said, you know, You know, I said these fields and you said, oh, everything.
And he laughs and he says, well, you know, I thought I spelled it out, but obviously I need to say it more directly.
And Michael was like, yes, please.
Yes, please.
He's got to take it down a level, right?
He's getting too heavy.
He forgot he's not dealing with someone with 190 IQ.
It must be hard in his defense.
Having a 200 IQ must be hard.
Just talking to other people.
Yeah, normal people.
Michael Knowles is smart, obviously.
Quite a penetrating mind, but not up to the same level.
Chris Langham does explain what IQ is about.
In case we didn't give a good accounting of it, he does explain what it means to be high IQ.
So for those of us who have an IQ that's a little bit lower than yours, I'll admit it.
With no false modesty and no undue confidence.
Well, IQ is not the last word on intelligence by any means.
IQ is where you focus.
You can focus, marshal all your intellectual energy, and focus it very tightly on one item that you've been presented with.
Okay?
There's test-contained items, and you're focusing on each one of those items.
You're not seeing anything else.
Okay?
And that's what IQ is.
In addition to that depth and that focus, there is also aperture.
Think of the mind as a kind of camera.
What a lot of high IQ people have a lot of difficulty doing is widening their mental aperture.
You've got to be flexible.
You've got to be able to widen and narrow that aperture at will as you're doing the depth perception too.
So you've got the focus, depth of focus, the magnification, as it were, plus the aperture.
And most people, you know, most high IQ people, they have the magnification, but they don't have the aperture.
I'm guessing that Chris has both the length and the girth with Chris in terms of his perceptions.
You mean me?
Yeah, Chris, me, yeah.
No, yeah, yeah.
It often goes unsteady, but you have to understand that the gurus are saying...
Except for me.
I am the genius that combines these two elements.
The Alpha and the Omega.
That's right.
They don't need to say it.
They just say the trouble with other people.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Is IQ, as he described, IQ as a measure of ability to focus on a single thing at a time in great depth?
Is that?
The definition of IQ intelligence?
Well, a charitable, overly charitable reading of what he said could be that someone's performance on an IQ test could be influenced not only by innate abilities, but also their ability to sit down and focus and pay attention.
That is insanely charitable.
That's not what he's saying.
He's saying that.
He's wrong, bud.
He's wrong.
You know, like, ability to focus attention, it's not intelligence, nor is it IQ.
Yes, it is a feature that would help you, like, the ability to mentally concentrate on individual things.
But, like, the ability to see patterns, the ability to analogize across situations and whatnot, like, attentional focus is not the same.
It's always just wrong.
I know.
But his one thing is IQ, Matt.
I know.
For someone who not only has an IQ of 200, but is also really interested in IQ and knows a lot about it, I think he's a bit confused about IQ versus intelligence.
He doesn't seem to know what it is.
The one thing that he should know, let's set aside his grand theory of everything, but that is the one thing that you would imagine he would have done his homework on.
And no.
No.
But, you know, if you were taking it, Matt, that this is just a theory, you know, it's just physics.
It's just, well, you know, it's physics, it's linguistics, it's combining a lot of things, yes.
But does it really get at the big questions, the existential, spiritual, some would say, issues?
Wow.
So then from the perspective, simultaneously, I suppose, both of depth and breadth here, If we're talking about a theory of everything, the first question we have to establish, does God exist?
Yes.
Simple as that.
The reality has an identity.
The identity is that as which something exists.
As a matter of fact, when you say the word reality, you're naming an identity.
You're identifying something, this.
I'm smiling because your answer on this is so beautiful.
Of Moses at the burning bush.
And Moses at the burning bush says, who shall I tell the people that you are talking to God?
And God says, tell them, I am that I am.
That's right.
I am identity itself.
I'm being himself.
That's exactly right.
And that's what the CTMU says.
It just comes up with the mathematical structure that you need to build a reality out of that.
You see?
You see, Matt?
Not sure I do, Chris.
Not sure I do.
I mean, those are some wonderful deepities.
I mean, this is champagne gurometry right here.
I mean, it is on one level kind of, you know, basic stuff, shooting fish in a barrel.
But, you know, here's a tour de force in terms of covering all of the features that we generally look for.
And right there is some Deepak Chopra.
Deepities, right?
Reality has an identity.
God is real.
Yada, yada, yada.
Yeah, and also the confidence with which he just leaps from supposition to supposition.
You know, this is something that we've commented on repeatedly.
And, you know, you can see, like, the Pajot and Peterson aspect of it, where...
You know, reality has identity.
Your ability to construct identity is naming something.
Naming something is existence, existences.
So, yes, of course God exists.
And you're like, what?
That doesn't...
And, you know, sometimes godless materialists that we are, we point to issues with certain kinds of religious thinking.
And I will say Michael Knowles here is demonstrating clearly the issue that I take with the kind of sense-making...
Overly metaphoric-laden religious approach to things.
Because he's like, oh, that sounds like something that's mentioned in the Bible.
And that's fucking beautiful, right?
God is what I am.
Popeye said that, too.
I am what I am.
So, like, it really is theory of everything is also...
Invoking the spirit of Popeye.
Or it could be that Popeye is just a manifestation of the absolute.
Who can say?
Yeah.
Well, I mean, I did do a little bit of background reading to check out Chris Langham's CTMU theory.
And the first thing I was like, Chris, what's so depressing is that the internet is full of medium articles and various blog posts and stuff like that of people just giving a very uncritical.
appreciation of it.
Saying, "Oh, you know, it's all very interesting and I think he's looking at this, that and the other." But it's not as rigorous as the Hindu metaphysics,
which provides a different thing.
It's supposedly a theory of physics, Chris.
I went and found the PDFs that my self-published.
God bless you, Matt.
God bless you.
Because obviously the system won't let in publish them.
Just like Eric.
Like a mathematical theory of physics and the universe, which is how he presented it, they are striking in containing no maths whatsoever.
The one actual equation I could find it, Chris, I kid you not, is one plus one.
Does it equal two?
Please God, say it equal two.
I think it's more complicated than that, but anyway.
Wow.
Terence Howard and him should collaborate.
They should get together.
Yeah, I didn't get the impression that there's a rigorous level of mathematics behind this thought.
To Eric's credit, amongst the cranks, he actually can write mathematical equations and whatnot.
So his crankery is of a higher order.
Oh, yeah.
He's different.
He's not like these cranks.
Well, I mean...
He can wait in a question.
That's right.
He's unusual.
I mean, the rest of them don't bother.
Like, they actually don't know any physics at all.
Chris Langham does not know any physics or any maths.
He doesn't understand anything that he's reading.
He's simply...
What?
He's simply jamming all these words together.
Cartesian dualism, the self and the other, and the...
Black holes and consciousness and introspection and law without order and order from disorder.
It's different in that sense.
Now, it's interesting you mention that, Matt, because I'm not a maths guy.
I'm a many different things guy, but I'm not a maths guy.
Not by nature.
You know, I fancy myself a competent user of statistics that are commonly used in social sciences, but that is not a statistician, nor is it a maths guy, right?
But a thing I do know about is Buddhism and, you know, the associated religions, and he makes reference to them.
And he said a couple of things, so let's see how he does.
You see, once you've built the preliminary framework, then you start deducing the properties of this identity, and you find out that those properties match those of God as described in most of the world's major religions.
Just the theistic religions?
I'm thinking Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, or are you talking also of, say...
Buddhism, Taoism, Hinduism, Vedism.
Of course, Hinduism and Vedism, they have a God.
Taoism, you know, their central principle is the way.
Or the Tao, okay?
And they don't see Tao as God.
And then in Buddhism, of course, you've got, you know, they are trying basically to achieve sunyata, or emptiness, right?
Which is, most Buddhists, a lot of Buddhists don't even understand what that's supposed to mean.
But once again, there's no God there.
You can kind of read God implicitly.
Some Buddhists, I've talked to Buddhists, who actually think that there is a God in Buddhism of a sort.
You know, that concept of pure consciousness is what it is.
Okay?
And if you ask them, well, whose consciousness are you talking about?
They will point at themselves and say, my consciousness.
In a way, they're, you know, they kind of attribute the existence of everything to themselves.
Okay?
I've known a lot of people in Hollywood and Washington, D.C. who do the same thing, actually.
Well, that's right.
That's why Buddhism is very fashionable among some of those people.
That's a good point.
Yeah.
Getting in a couple of jabs with the elites there.
Of course.
Yeah, you need that.
Yeah.
And he is right.
He's right about a particular...
He got that right.
I have my issues with the trendiness of Buddhism in Hollywood.
But...
So he says words, Matt, you know, and he doesn't get them entirely wrong.
Shunyata.
He's talking about emptiness, right?
A particular term from Buddhism.
And he mentions the Tao being the...
Organizing principle of Taoism and whatnot.
But this very much reminds me of, I've mentioned it before, but there's a play by Sean O 'Casey called Juno and the Peacock.
And there's a character in it called Charles Bentham, who is a schoolteacher pretending to be this, like, educated man of letters.
And he's referencing the insights of the Hindus and, you know, all this.
Kind of thing.
And this is very much the vibe I get here.
It's like somebody who's read Wikipedia entry or whatever of Buddhism and is, you know, saying, oh, it's, you know, the Vedas.
Of course, they're very interested in it.
You know, you mentioned the Hindus have a god.
A god?
The Hindus have a god?
They've got a whole fucking pantheon of them.
Some would say the defining characteristic of that particular strand of religiosity.
But so, also.
This arrogance that, you know, the Buddhists, some of the Buddhists have understood this, but they haven't properly grasped it.
So it's not just that he's understood physics better than everyone else.
He also understands, like, all religions better than everyone in the relevant religions.
They've all kind of got it wrong, right?
And you also, I like Michael Knowles, you know, saying, is it just the theistic religions?
Or, you know, like, are you...
You know, he's kind of saying, right, but it's God.
But, you know, it's the God that I like, right?
That's the kind of God that you mean.
And Chris Langham, as we'll see, he does go back to, yeah, it basically is a fiestic God.
But he wants to say, you know, he's not constrained by, you know, any specific religious set, right?
Like, he incorporates them all.
Yeah, he does.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
Got to get the religion in there.
Hey, Chris, I'm derailing us a little bit.
But before we move on, I'm going to close this PDF, but I just...
I can't close it without sharing one thing with you.
Like, there's so much in there, and it's all nonsense.
But there's just one little bit that just picked up random, I think, illustrates why this is crankery.
There's a diagram in there, and the entire content of the diagram is three words.
Mind, separation, and reality.
Mind is on the left.
There's a line between mind and reality.
Separation in the middle.
So that's it.
That's the diagram.
So, the first red flag, like, when you're just, like, glancing over something and trying to just get a sense of whether or not it's quackery or not, it's just the communication.
Like, you don't need a diagram to introduce those words and those things.
Matt, Matt, these are heavy.
Like, yeah, there is something to that.
Like, because I often recommend to students the first thing you should look at is the figures in a paper because they help you identify key...
Measures and this kind of thing.
But sometimes the figures are bullshit, right?
Like, are just uninformative.
But they shouldn't be, right?
But like, if you were reading a paper and you came across the chaos dragon, you should be like, wait a second.
What's the chaos dragon?
He's he when he's at home?
Exactly.
I mean, this dragon that I'm looking at makes the chaos diagram look pretty sophisticated.
But I'll just read you very briefly the text that helps explain this diagram.
Okay, yeah, please.
Diagram nine.
It's the ninth diagram.
The first data just is bad.
Maybe you need a D-L-E to contextualize this one, but go ahead.
M equals R, mind equals reality principle.
In the above syndicionic diagram...
Mind is juxtaposed with reality in a space bounded by a box.
It is.
Actually, there's a box around those things.
Is there more?
Yes.
There's so much more.
I'm not going to read it all because it goes on for so many pages.
The line separating mind and reality represents the supposed difference between them, while the interior of the box represents their comparability or, in scare quotes, relatedness.
Or more technically, they're uniform differentiating syntax or unisect.
It goes on about the extensionality of the line, blah-de-blah.
But in case that was confusing to you, in case that sounded like...
Oh, I got the box.
I got it was inside a box.
There's a line inside the box as well as the words.
Yep.
He's painting you a picture.
You might say he's just reiterating what was in that diagram.
But in case that's confusing...
The M equals R principle is merely a logical version of what empiricist philosophers long ago pointed out.
We experience reality in the form of perceptions and sense data from which the existence and independence of mind and objective external reality are induced, since any proof to the contrary would necessarily be cognitive, as are all proofs.
Since the content of cognition is cognitive by an embedment, no such proof can exist.
Such a proof would undermine its own medium and thereby cancel itself.
How about that, Chris?
There you go.
Yeah, so because you interpret things through brilliance and all humans do, there is only consciousness, right?
It's Dr. K. It's Dr. K. It's pretty nice.
I mean, I took the time to read that out just because it's a nice illustration of you've got deepities.
They're layered on top of just utter pseudo-profound.
Technobabble.
Technobabble, pseudo-profound bullshit.
Yeah, and describing a box.
Right?
In big words.
A picture inside a box.
But yeah, well, that's something.
We're going to come back to stuff like that, Matt.
So don't worry.
It's coming up.
But one of the issues there, you know, like with the previous clip where he started talking about the nature of God and he referenced, you know, Buddhism and whatnot.
That's not the God that Michael...
You know, Michael Knowles is not a Buddhist.
Like, he doesn't like pantheistic religion.
He's a...
Christian, like Jordan Peterson and whatnot as well.
It's, what do you call those?
Abrahamic religion, which, you know, it's got to be doing the heavy lifting.
So don't worry, we get clarification on that point.
Are its properties such that you can deny the existence of God, or are its properties such that God definitely has to exist?
And the answer is, God exists.
The properties of the central substance and central principle of reality, those properties are attributed to God.
Including, of course, things like, you have the three O's, omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence, but then you've also got consciousness.
God has to be sentient.
So we're not just defining God out of existence.
Sometimes you'll hear people say, God exists, but they'll give God such a weak and shallow definition that the God that they're describing has no foundation.
No relation to the God that we conceive of.
You're saying, no, this God is...
God himself is conscious and therefore personal?
Yes.
You can establish a personal relationship with God.
We're images of God.
You know what an image is?
It's basically the product of a mapping.
God maps himself into each human being.
Right?
That's a very personal thing that God is doing for us.
Right?
And I don't understand how anybody can say that it's any different.
Yeah, so it's not physics.
It's not just physics.
It's not just mathematics.
It's not just philosophy.
It's also theology.
And what I learned from reading this PDF, Chris, is actually it has big implications for evolution.
It's actually a new theory of evolution as well.
He actually talked about, like he's also a recent eugenics guy, but he...
He wants humans to stop evolving in the wrong way.
That's what his program...
Again, big IQ ideas here, but this is a big IQ idea.
So that might sound like a rather silly thing as a goal that somebody understands evolution or whatever, but no, there we go.
And I also want to note here that Michael Knowles seems to actually care what Chris Langham...
He's like, but it is a personal God, right?
You know, it's a God.
It's not just...
And he's like, yeah, no, don't worry.
It's, you know, it's...
Oh, my God, yes.
It's like that.
He seems to really want Chris Langham.
Confirm.
Confirm the things that he...
Yeah.
I mean, the interaction between them is really...
It's a beautiful illustration of how people, like the interviewer there, they're basically just boring, conservative reactionary type people who believe in God.
Oh, yes.
We're going to get to that.
Don't worry.
And this pseudo-profound guru bullshit, it's like a cognitive fog that can...
Provide them with the grounds to reassure them that all the things that they already believe are very much correct.
Yes, quite right.
Now, this next exchange highlights this dynamic very well.
You're going to hear Chris Langham go on a big thing, and then you'll hear Michael Knowles' reaction.
And I want you to pay special attention to what Michael Knowles says after this impressive...
Elucidation of his theory.
But it's a little bit more complex than that.
Because this part of the universe that we see around us cannot exist just by itself.
Okay?
There are certain things that it entails.
And when you go into those entailments, that's how you get to God.
That's how you get to the identity of reality.
Okay?
And now to get back to the reality of self-simulation, or at least that's what I call it, self-simulation.
But to get back to the simulation hypothesis, That we're living in the display of that simulation.
In addition to the display, there is also a processing aspect.
Okay?
And God captures both of those things.
He captures both the display and the processor.
What do you mean?
I hate to put it in the...
Well, I mean, okay, here's the display.
You realize the display contains states.
Yep.
Okay, you see things, the objects contains states.
States are static.
That's why they're called states in the case, static.
How do they change?
Well, they have to be processed.
Something has to be processed.
And in the calculus, for example, those are tiny little infinitesimal intervals.
But they're not actually contained in the states themselves.
They have a neighborhood, a little tangent space or what have you, where you can sort of draw little vectors that suggest that some kind of processing is going on.
But the idea of being a state and being a process, those are two different things.
In the ordinary way of looking at it.
It turns out that you can't properly describe reality and causation at all unless you put those things together somehow.
And that's what it takes God to do.
God provides the processing functionality for your state.
You have an internal state, an external state.
You're a material human being.
To explain how that is changing through time, and maintaining its coherence through time, even as it changes, that's what you need God for.
Yeah, I certainly agree with that entirely.
And so, I might not be sophisticated enough to parse all of the quibbles that there might be, but broadly speaking as a Christian, so much of what you're saying resonates as obviously true for me.
Of course it does.
I have no idea what the fuck you just said, but if it means that God is real and Christians are right.
I like it.
I like what I'm hearing.
It's a lot of big words and fundamentally you're saying I'm right?
That's what I do?
Chris is saying that You know, he's referring to physical laws, I think, right?
He's saying you basically need God.
Physical laws describe dynamics generally, right?
And God made the physical laws because you need a God to make those.
I mean, he's saying that, but he's also trying to make reference to simulation theory, right?
Yeah, it's all mixed in.
A display in a processor, right?
He's just reffing.
On words.
You just say words, but it's what they all do, the sound speakers.
They just, like, they go on these beautiful walks down their mind palace, and it doesn't mean anything.
I mean, not to be mean and just keep calling in the crank videos, but this is how crankish thinking operates, right?
Like, they're curious.
They're interested.
You know, they read about interesting things.
They read about Godel's incompleteness theorem.
They read about the simulation.
Hypothesis.
They have a basic understanding of physics.
And then they meld it all together and try to relate it to their convictions about religion and what does it mean for philosophy and politics.
Yeah.
Well, we've resolved God and reality, Matt.
We've got another thing that we need to get clear now.
So, Michael, this is the format that it's now going to take, right?
So, God...
The nature of the universe resolved.
Okay, so next topic we need consciousness.
And you're supposed to love God back.
Right, and this ties into something like the Trinity, right?
The idea that God is three persons in one divine unity.
So all of this is making a lot of sense to me.
So now how do I make sense of consciousness?
Well, ordinarily, you know what quantization is?
You know, I know the word.
Well, you decide what the ultimate irreducible objects are.
Those are the quanta in terms of which you reason.
It turns out that in order to quantize that theory that I was talking about, that theory of identity where you've got the display and you've got the processor, and it's handling both, it turns out that in order to handle both of those things, you need a certain kind of quantum.
That quantum is called an identity operator.
God is the identity.
So, obviously, these little quanta, they have to be, they're doing things, they're processing, so we can call them operators, right?
They are identity operators.
Okay?
The identity operator has, basically, it takes input from the outside world, recognizes it, or accepts it using syntax, processes it, and then returns it to the world as external state.
Okay, so things come in, then they're processed, right?
There's throughput, which is, you could call that the subjective or internal state of the identity operator, and then it's returned to the external universe.
This is physics, ladies and gentlemen.
This is how it works.
Yeah, so this is good.
I mean, like, you know, mainstream physics has been struggling a little bit with quantum mechanics, reconciling quantum mechanics.
They're very small, very tiny.
Reconciling that with macro scale physics.
But he's been dealing with the same problem with the CTMU theory, but he sorted it out.
And I think it's because God is the operator that does the syntax or something or other between the states and the processes.
Well, I think you're getting a bit confused.
Look, let me help you out.
There's a bit of some things about consciousness you haven't got.
Like, you know, he can explain a bit more.
And I'm saying that consciousness exists in every part of the universe because those are the quantum.
No, that's what I'm asking.
Are you telling me that this table is conscious?
In that sense, yes.
Generically conscious.
But it's relying on our consciousness to do it.
We have, there's levels of quantum, okay?
These are tertiary quantum.
They're all put together using physical localistic forces, right?
But those are underdeterminative.
They don't fully determine what happens.
Why?
The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, for example, it tells you that, you know, the quantum rules, they're probabilistic.
They don't actually determine events, okay?
So what determines events?
We do.
We don't know how we do it, but we do it.
When everybody's will is put together.
We're all creating the best possible universe we can for ourselves.
And God is what harmonizes all of our different perspectives and makes things happen for all of us at the same time.
And if we were doing things correctly, this would be the best of all possible worlds.
Sadly, however, we oftentimes make mistakes.
And that's what we have to get out of doing, but we can't get out of doing it until we understand what reality is, what we are, and what the relationship between those two things is.
Well, that's beautiful, Chris.
I'd forgotten this bit.
You got it, Nye?
I got it.
You know, I mean, you listen to him and you sort of, you can't help but reverse engineer.
Like, what is the pop science stuff that he read, that he's heard, that he's then folded into this thing?
And with this time, the thing that he came across was the, like, it's a particular, it's an incorrect interpretation, I think, of the Copenhagen.
Which is that, you know what I mean?
All the quantum states of whatever resolve when it's perceived by a conscious person, right?
And that is sort of a popular version of it, which my understanding is that is completely wrong.
It's not actually the right way to think about it at all.
But that's what he's heard about.
And he's folded that into, yep, okay, so the table can't exist by itself.
We need to perceive it in order to bring it into reality.
But then God is going to be...
Harmonizing all of our perceptions.
So it sort of just blends beautifully into that sort of cosmic, you know, harmonize our energies, bring God into it.
It has echoes of Dr. K. So, you know, but Matt, we've covered God.
We've covered consciousness.
Okay, free will.
That's another form.
Can he resolve the issue of like, do people present free will?
Let's see.
I'm guessing yes, but let's find out.
So then it would seem to me we have to tackle the question, do we really do much of anything at all in the sense, do we have free will?
Yes, we do.
I'm glad to hear it.
I always thought we did.
Well, yes, we have to have free will.
I was discussing with you earlier the idea of a fixed array.
All right, now, modern physics, no.
Basically, what you've got is you've got a bunch of quantum fields in superposition, and then those fields consist of little fluctuations, little quantum fluctuations, right?
Where is the fixed array?
We were talking about a manifold, right, with a bunch of zero-dimensional points, okay?
Those two things are not compatible, okay?
Quantum field theory and that fixed array manifold where you can parameterize all of the causal functions using the manifold, that doesn't work.
Okay?
Those two things don't fit together.
Well, good to know, Matt.
We have free will.
Okay?
Yeah, because you can't parameterize the, whatchamacallits.
Stands to reason.
Stands to reason.
But I also like that Michael Knowles was like, oh, great.
Yeah, because, you know.
I always thought so.
Yeah, it's so great to have it technically confirmed.
It's quite telling.
Oh, and you also get here, I can't forget this, that we get another slapdown moment in this discussion about free will, so I'll just play the little segment that you get slapdown number two.
You explained to me, when we were speaking about this earlier, you put this into even more layman's terms, and I've somehow, it has already flown out of my head.
Can you put that into more basic terms, what you've just said?
But what was it you need to understand about this?
Why are these two concepts you're describing, why are they not reconcilable?
What is the problem with these?
I explained that to you already.
It consists of zero-dimensional points, limit points, or cuts.
I told you what a dedican cut was, right?
These limit points have zero extent.
They're exact locations, and that's a cut.
You've got something on one side of the point, and then you've got something on the other side of the point.
Yeah, those little sub-downs.
Here, he's reminding me very much of Eric.
He takes those little opportunities to just remind the people that he's talking to that he's the boss, he knows more than you, and you're tiring him.
With your obtuseness.
Yeah.
And there's, you know, like Eric is not so graceless as this.
I mean, we heard in the Mick West interview, he can be graceless, right?
You know, I don't appreciate the feeling I have of my body, but he doesn't usually say, you know, well, I already explained this.
To you, but I guess, okay, let me dumb it down a little bit more.
But yeah, that kind of, okay, let me try to put it on your level.
And we just have to reiterate that the words, Chris, that you're correctly guessing are just meaningless things that are dropped in there.
He referred to a dedekind cut.
Right.
As one of the things that it all connects to the other words that he's putting together.
These are incredibly technical, incredibly specialized mathematical words that apply only in a very specific context and are absolutely meaningless when applied to God, religion, consciousness.
Whatever.
And it just has to be borne in mind that the words, the technical words that he's smattering in there, dropping in there, which people may not recognize, have no meaning in this context.
Well, so we've heard echoes of Dr. K. We've heard echoes of Eric Weinstein.
We've heard echoes of Brett Weinstein.
Let's see if you can pick up which guru we're going to hear echoes here.
And again, talking about free will and whatnot, but let's see, Matt, do you notice any echoes of other gurus we've covered?
Because when we're talking about free will, often the conversation, especially these days, becomes this sort of shallow discussion of, well, this caused this.
And I'm going to describe a totally deterministic system, and so as a result of this causing this, causing this, causing this, you don't have free will.
And you're saying cause is actually more complicated than just cause.
That's correct.
In other words, talking about free will in those terms is osios.
It means nothing.
You can't get anywhere with it.
Reality is actually generative.
It's not a fixed manifold.
Everything is being created all the time.
Not just our states.
Our states are being recreated.
Right?
You know, I can cross my legs.
I can uncross my legs.
That's the changing state.
But the medium around us is changing.
When I look at you, I'm seeing Michael Knowles, okay?
I'm seeing you sitting there.
But that means that I'm seeing your boundary.
I'm seeing what distinguishes you from the external environment, right?
There's a medium around you.
So I have to be regenerating that at the same time as I'm regenerating your state in my head, okay?
When I say regenerating, the reason I'm doing that, I could also say I'm recognizing Michael Knowles, I'm recognizing your state right now, but I'm also recognizing the state of the medium around you because otherwise I wouldn't be able to distinguish you from the medium and you wouldn't exist at all.
Right, right.
Well, it's sort of like a little baby, right?
It has trouble recognizing the limits of things and recognizing what some individual object might be from, you know, the glass on the table.
They have trouble distinguishing those things.
Precisely.
Yep.
So you hear the Jordan Peterson Pajoyan, you know, your cognitive processing, being able to detect objects from the environment or agents from the environment, that that speaks to this structure inherent to the way that we perceive things.
So cognition itself is...
In pursuit of truth.
And truth is the value of the universe, which is the Logos, which is God.
We need a name for that, this sort of semantic hopping.
Leapfrogging.
Well, now, Matt, you've had God covered.
You've had consciousness.
You've had free will.
You've had cognitive processing.
It's all been...
I have a folder which is called religious stuff.
You might have thought that we've heard some religious stuff already.
No, that was all science.
That was all science.
But what about some of the big religious questions of our time?
What about this one, Matt?
So they have that kind of explanatory closure going right there.
So speaking of this non-terminal domain, in a really basic question, I'm not going to ask you if I'm going to go to heaven or hell, but will I go to either heaven or hell?
You will persist after you die.
Okay?
Where you go depends on who Michael Knowles really is.
And you would know that better than anybody.
Yeah, I hope I know that better than...
But you're telling me I'm going somewhere.
Yes.
You're confident of that.
I don't just evaporate.
I don't just turn into oblivion.
Well, you can.
If you displease God, that's exactly what's going to happen to you.
God is going to cut you off and he's going to say, I can't see him anymore.
He's going to turn away from you and then you won't be able to reunite.
Salvation will be impossible for you because salvation means that God has got to pull you back into himself.
Right.
But God doesn't want to see you anymore.
Well, that would be bad.
Yeah, well, it's good.
He's able to reassure Knowles about the afterlife.
As well as free will.
God, he's so needy.
Communism is bad, right?
You've got a 200 IQ.
It is bad, though, isn't it?
Oh, yes.
Oh, yes.
I definitely don't.
Oh, great.
I knew it.
And God's real, right?
Oh, yes.
Yes.
Yeah, and when I die, I'm going somewhere, right?
I'm not going to evaporate and not exist, right?
As long as God doesn't turn his face from you, you'll be fine.
Oh, great.
Yeah.
Thank God.
Yeah.
So, there's that.
Now, A little bit more out of the theology side.
We need to get out of this dense science into, you know, the kind of real tapestry of the universe.
Well, you try to create your own world for yourself, but if you're a bad person and you're an evil person, what kind of world is that going to be?
It's going to be an evil world, and that's what we call hell.
This is what John Milton says in the mouth of Satan.
He says, the mind is its own place, and it can make a hell of heaven or heaven a hell.
Now you got it.
It reminds me of Dante also, this idea of God turning away.
The very deepest part of hell is Satan frozen in a lake of ice of his own making, of his own making because of the flapping of his own wings, because he's apart from the warmth of God.
Precisely.
Okay.
That's the way it has to work.
So, we've gotten through death, judgment, heaven, and hell, free will, and God.
Not completely.
There's a lot more to be said.
Well, and we still have some time.
I mean, fortunately, on my usual show, there is about 30 seconds to come to any conclusion about anything.
And thankfully, I am not bringing Chris Lang into Nashville to talk for 10 minutes.
This is going to be a much longer discussion.
He's telling the truth, Matt.
It is much longer.
It feels even longer than it is, too.
But you get that part of, you know, okay, so evil.
But then you get the religious riffing, right?
You know, John Milton, didn't he say people can make, like, heaven and hell in their own minds?
And Dante, there's a thing Dante wrote about, like, the devil flapping his...
Like, this is...
I'm sorry to say it, but this is part of why...
Religious people, I feel, are a little bit more open to this kind of reasoning because, you know, this way of approaching things is like highly symbolic, poetic, spiritual, mythical, right?
Yeah, based on semantic associations, ideally between, you know, stuff, atoms that you've read from distinguished historical figures and you sort of match them together.
It's a very...
Yeah, it's a type of thinking about things, which is, yeah, it ends up in Chris Langan's world.
Look, Matt, we are also deep in the shit, okay?
We've been deep in Chris Langan's brain space.
We've been getting heady ideas blasted at us, one after another, and we've got a little way to go before we get to the end of this rollercoaster.
We need to take a break.
We need to reset our minds, give ourselves a break.
Fortunately...
Right about now in their conversation, they decide to take a break.
And, you know, on these talk shows, conservatives like to play classical music, right?
We've noticed this motif.
But they took it a step further this time.
It's not just classical music, Matt.
Let's enjoy their break.
So, for this discussion, would you like a cigar?
Sure.
I haven't smoked a cigar in a long time.
Oh, excellent.
You know, the body is a temple.
The temple needs incense.
Back in the day, I used to enjoy a cigar, but now and then.
Good cigar.
I'm glad you liked it.
This is one of my favorite cigars that's come out.
You know, if you were on the Joe Rogan show, they would offer you something a little stronger, but we're going to keep it to tobacco on this show, I think.
I'm glad we got a reference to Joe Rogan in there.
We almost made it through.
Yeah, these guys are not pots-making guys.
But yeah, puffing on cigars, listening to classical music.
No better way to wind down after some...
Grappling with some of these pretty heavy-duty concepts.
Do these guys actually like cigars, Matt?
Or do they just like the idea that they like cigars?
This is the thing I'm often confused about because, like, it seems to be so fucking performative.
You know, they're complaining about people doing land acknowledgments and whatnot, which, fair enough, fair enough, right?
But what is this?
What is this?
Like, you know, oh, let's...
Let's stop and pop on our cigars.
And Rogan does that as well, you know, regularly while opining on the health issues of the day, right?
And how dangerous vaccines are while he's sucking away in his stogie.
I'd say, Chris, that not only do they probably not really like cigars, and I reckon some people do, but I reckon it is performative.
I don't think they really like classical music either.
Because the classical music they always play is that generic elevator music.
It all sounds like a variation of the Four Seasons.
People that are into classical music tend to listen to other stuff.
That's all I'm saying.
Anyway.
I know.
I know.
You know, there was recently a clip which was very...
Telling of this whole thing where there was a conservative commentator, Andrew Wilson, and he was on with Destiny on Piers Morgan's show.
And he was talking about, you know, the kind of toxins in the paper straws.
You know, they might actually be more harmful than the plastic straws, you know, drinking.
Through paper straws.
And then he picked up a cigarette.
You're worried about the toxins in straws, paper straws, as you inhale, you know, like a known carcinogen.
I haven't heard that idea about toxins in paper straws.
But what a perfect idea that is, because on one hand, it appeals to their crunchy paleo health obsession where everything's got toxins.
And at the same time, it's digging environmentalism and a relatively silly kind of thing, I think, for environmentalism of paper straws.
But yeah, just perfect.
Just perfect.
So there you go, Matt.
You had a little bit of a break.
We were up in the heady space and we've seen echoes of various gurus.
I wonder if there's any motif that comes across here that sounds familiar.
Once again, what is reality?
Is reality just stuff out there?
No.
Reality has a mental aspect, right?
And once you admit that basically everything has a mental aspect, then of course what's going on in your mind is real.
It takes on a kind of reality.
It's not the same as physical reality.
It is nevertheless real.
Are angels and demons real?
Yes.
Yes.
I think so, too.
Is there a fear that if you take some of these drugs, you might be letting in the wrong guys?
That's a problem, isn't it?
And that's a problem that I think a lot of people have encountered.
You have to be a certain kind of person to be able to handle these drugs and not be sucked under by them.
Because once your mind is messed with in that way, something else is weakened.
You're not exactly in control anymore.
Something else can come in and grab it.
And if you open up that gap that I was talking about, what can come into that gap might not be good for you.
God is real.
Angels are real.
Demons are real.
Is the devil real?
Oh, yes.
Angels are real.
God is real.
Don't take drugs or you'll let the demons in.
Well, some people might.
Some, they have to leave a little gap because Joe Rogan takes drugs.
Oh, yeah.
He's got the mental fortitude, I think.
Yeah, he could wrestle.
He could make a demon submit, right?
Like if he encountered it in his dream space.
He could.
He could.
Okay.
Very good.
I like the religion stuff.
These guys, I mean, Nulls is just so reassured.
This is also reassuring.
I know.
I'm Peugeot.
Peugeot is who I'm hearing echoes of here.
I also heard Dr. K. Dr. K at the start, the mind is everything, you know, Deepak Chopra.
But then, just straight up Peugeot.
Are angels and demons real?
Yep.
Thank God.
Jesus Christ.
You can hear the thing which, you know, you could see this as a cynical...
Like, exploitation.
But I feel like Michael Knowles is getting genuine, like, reassurance from the just clear statements.
Yep.
And he's like, oh, right, yeah.
It's true.
It's all true.
It's all true.
Yeah.
No, no, I feel like, I don't know, there's something a little bit disarming about this because they are both, in their own ways, quite genuine, I think.
Chris Langen.
Yeah.
Chris Langen.
He definitely thinks he's the smartest man in the world, and he's got big ideas, and he's got all the answers, and he's happy to share them, and the other guy wants them.
He wants them.
Well, Matt, we recently were forced to listen to people waffle about the Antichrist, and you did it again.
You bastard.
God needs an antithesis in order to be properly defined.
What is that antithesis?
Anti-God, or Satan.
So it definitely exists.
Now, Satan isn't coherent.
Because, you know, he basically hates existence.
Nevertheless, he gains coherence through human beings, through secondary tellers, as they're called in the CTMU.
In other words, Satan can nucleate power structures, for example, things like corporations and governments, where you've got people in there that can be acquired as resources, and there's a kind of skeleton, you know, a corporate organization, a governmental organization that's holding them together,
holding them in place, that can be exploited by Satan.
So you're not describing Manichaeism.
You're not saying there's God and then the opposite of God and there's some maybe equivalence between the two.
You're saying that obviously there is an antithesis.
Christ has an antichrist, but that it's incoherent.
Are you saying that the devil sort of lacks substance or that's why he needs the humans?
I'm saying the devil lacks coherence.
Coherence is what brings everything into superposition.
Right, with itself.
In other words...
I appreciate the sort of profound bullshit.
I love when you're talking about the devil and how he needs superposition.
No, he lacks substance, Matt, but it's not...
No, not substance.
Coherence.
Coherence, as opposed to incoherence and superpositions.
He talks about the devil entering organizations, you know, like the government.
Like the government, corporations, and all that stuff.
But it doesn't penetrate them.
It doesn't infiltrate them.
It nucleates them.
Oh, yeah.
Nucleate power structures.
Oh, dear.
So what this, Chris, reminds me of is like sort of good old-fashioned Alex Jones style, like that paranoid conspiratorial variety of fundamentalism.
Oh, yeah.
That's kind of what is appealing to you here.
Yeah, though I hear also very strong echoes, probably because we just listened to it recently, of Peter Thiel, right?
Like, the Antichrist is coming and it could look like corporations, right?
And world governments and this kind of thing.
But, you know, in case the Peter Thiel shadow wasn't clear enough, then this happened.
I'm reminded of a writer, René Girard, who has this idea, had this idea.
That the devil, being who he is, is a kind of contradiction of being.
And it seems to me what Gerard says is something similar to what you're saying, which is that he requires us to kind of do his dirty work.
That is correct.
Yeah.
We give existence to the devil, to Satan.
Now, you have to make a distinction, however, between Satan and Lucifer, for example.
Now, Lucifer is an angel.
Okay, that's what he's supposed to do.
He's a fallen angel.
Right.
But nevertheless, an angel, right?
The angel of light, okay?
The morning star, whatever you want to call him, okay?
Very important distinction there, Chris.
Our sense makers love the distinctions.
Very important.
Yes, Satan and Lucifer.
Not a theologically correct distinction, but nonetheless.
Oh, well, I love the reference to René Girard.
It's great to have these connections being made.
They are things.
They do not work for us.
It is fish in a barrel, but it's just that thing that René Girard had this idea of God being like this, or the devil being like that.
Isn't that what you're saying?
Yeah, yeah.
Is this something?
Can we work with this?
Can we work with this?
It's like, yes, we can.
Yeah, it is striking that the CTMU, this amazing physics theory, Theory of evolution, theory of consciousness, theory of everything, also just happens to really buttress all of these fundamentalist,
conspiratorial, Christian beliefs.
That's a nice fit.
It's a nice fit, isn't it?
It's quite surprising.
Yeah, but I guess not, given that it's all true.
Yeah.
And, you know, Matt, you pointed out Lucifer and Satan not being the same, and I was saying that's not theologically correct.
Well, to be fair, that's because I'm interpreting things through the Bible, right, and, like, the kind of history of Christianity.
But if you approach the ideas on a first principles kind of way, you can see through these false distinctions.
If Christ were here and I could hear his exact words, I could perfectly interpret them.
Right, okay.
But it's very hard to do that, you know, 2,000 years after the fact, right, with all the different translations and interpretations that the Bible has undergone, okay?
So what I like to do is I like to approach it from first principles and look at it logically, right, rationally, and what does logic tell us, if anything, okay?
First principle thinker, like Brett Weinstein.
It's always best to approach things rationally and logically.
Yeah, we've seen so much evidence of that.
Because you wouldn't want to just have blind faith.
You wouldn't want to be some kind of religious fundamentalist who just believes this stuff, even if it doesn't really make sense.
You want to be approaching it from first principles.
Yeah, that's right.
And this might be a bit unfair, Matt.
I do remember Sam Harris saying that he understands Jesus better than the...
Well, and likewise, Jordan Peterson does get himself into trouble with the more orthodox members of the flock there because, you know, gurus being gurus, they have to put their bespoke unique interpretation of things.
They're not content to just live within the boundaries of the orthodoxy.
That includes religion.
And plus, Jesus, the Buddha, whatever they are.
Always saying what the person interprets.
What they want to say is what they actually meant.
That's the thing.
You mentioned Alex Jones.
I think that was a bit unfair.
Alex Jones is always writing about globalists and politicians being puppets and that kind of thing.
There's so many technological advancements that now the technology of surveillance and coercion are such, and these people are so rich.
You know, they're like black holes gravitating all the money to themselves, that they're unstoppable, okay?
And because they're unstoppable, because they actually run everything, okay, we are endangered by them now.
It sounds to me like you're saying we don't live in Schoolhouse Rock, I'm a Bill up on Capitol Hill.
We're not living in the republic that a lot of us say that we're living in.
That's correct.
Basically, the world is globalistic now.
It's run by globalists.
That's their goal.
I mean, that's what global means.
We're going global.
It's oligarchic.
And it would therefore be oligarchic.
That's absolutely correct.
Oligarchic, because very few of them actually exist.
And this is beyond a U.S. senator.
This is beyond the structures.
Those are puppets.
It's fairly common knowledge now, I suppose, that I regard most politicians as being one step removed from prostitutes.
That's been true for the two oldest professions.
There are a few exceptions, but let me tell you, they're on the run.
Yeah.
So it's a very serious situation.
Yeah, it's a swamp.
They're all corrupt.
It's all been run by globalists and so on.
Michael F. Fallon and his man.
James Lindsay?
James Lindsay.
That kind of thing.
Sorry to just be name dropping all these things, but there's nothing.
I mean, I like that Chris Langan wraps in everything into the one neat package.
Everything.
Yeah.
He wraps them all in.
This is true.
So he started off kind of crank.
Physics stuff.
And he got into religious fundamentalism in essence, right?
And now he's getting into anti-globalist conspiracy theory shit, right?
And just to make that more clear...
When you or I, or Donald Trump for that matter, use the word globalism, what the...
Liberal establishment says, either they'll say globalism is good and we should have more of it, or they'll say, that's a crazy conspiracy theory, there's no such thing as globalism.
What?
I could point to a lot of international organizations that increasingly try to take power away from national government.
What are intelligence agencies?
What are trade secrets?
What's intellectual property?
They're all conspiracies.
People trying to get ahead by lying, by omission.
Or relying directly to other people.
The competition, right?
That's what it is.
You can't get away from conspiracy.
It's how the world works.
As a matter of fact, it's game theoretically rational.
So you're saying not conspiracy theory.
You're saying just flat-out conspiracy.
That's what makes the world go around, I'm afraid.
But, of course, the elite themselves realize this.
They know that that's how the world works.
They just want to distract you.
I liked how...
I mean, this is a minor point, Chris, in the great scheme of things.
Okay, yeah, yeah.
But he equated the intelligence agencies and things like intellectual property.
That's globalism.
Yeah, they're all conspiracies.
Yeah, anyway, I didn't follow that bit.
But anyway, conspiratorial ideation, conspiracism, that's conspiracy.
As he describes it, that's what makes the world go around, right?
This is the master key.
So, everyone, nobody actually needs to listen to us score this guy on the garometer.
We could get him to score himself.
He would go up five.
Yeah, this is just being sensible.
And, you know, so this ties into the WEF, the George Soros, all of these people get mentioned.
But there was one surprising person that gets folded into this, Matt, which I...
Usually he's excluded from these conspiracies.
So just listen to this.
That is a form of conspiracy.
Young global leaders.
I mean, everybody's a young global leader, right?
I mean, Trudeau, Macron, Merkel, Putin.
For the Putin deals, you're not very much surprised me, but Klaus Schwab is on record.
He's on video, in fact.
You know, claiming that Vlad Putin is one of his young global leaders.
Wow.
That is unusual.
I don't think he's got the memo about the new rights opinion of Putin, but yeah.
And actually, the funny thing there is Michael Knowles.
Well, actually, I'm just going to play it, Mike, because the level of hypocrisy of these guys is, sometimes it gets to me, okay?
And so they're complaining about the WEF World Young Leaders Program or whatever, but Michael Knowles has a revelation about that.
You know, it's funny you mention that the young wing of the World Economic Forum, when I was a freshman in college, you get all of these opportunities for internships and fellowships, and you try to get a grant, and so you apply to these things.
I don't know anything about any of these groups.
And so I said, I'm a politically-minded young man, very conservative, so it made me very different than my classmates.
And one of the opportunities that came across was the World Economic Forum.
Global Changemakers Fellowship.
You were invited to be a part of this?
No, I applied.
You actually applied?
I applied.
Shame on you.
I didn't know what it was.
So I said, what's the experience?
I said, well, I'm very involved in this conservative group and this right-wing group.
It's a good way to get ahead.
I've got to give you that.
But I'll tell you, I thought I had a good resume.
It wasn't like my classmates, which they had all their liberal groups, so I said, I'm a conservative, but you probably want some conservatives here, right?
So I apply, and you know, you're going to be shocked to hear this, Chris.
I didn't hear back.
They didn't take...
Yeah, I'm absolutely flabbergasted.
And my liberal classmates, who I felt had a weaker application, but they were all part of the liberal groups, they did get it.
I guess it makes sense now that I know what the world is.
Oh, there you go.
He's got his own little...
He's also...
Tale of grievance.
Yeah.
But he applied for it, Matt.
Have you applied for a World Economic Forum global change grant?
I didn't.
No.
You didn't, right?
No.
It's all these puckers.
Yeah, they're so disgruntled when they don't get...
It does remind me of Eric Lundgren who was always doing things like pressuring the journal editor or whatever to accept his thing and try to exert influence and all of these back channels and stuff like that.
I've never...
Most people have never done that stuff.
And then they view the world as, oh, everyone does that.
And I've been unfairly treated by that.
It's like, no, not everyone does that.
Actually, the world doesn't run like that.
But sort of these narcissistic, manipulative types, they just assume that the world operates like that, don't they?
They're always...
They are...
You know, part of that, the kind of class that sees themselves as, like, they deserve this Global Change Leader grant or whatever.
And, like, you know, this is the same kind of drive that makes them become these talking head pundits, right?
Like, working for Turning Point USA.
Yeah, and I don't think there's, I mean, to be clear, I don't think there's anything wrong with applying for scholarships at WFO or anywhere, right?
That's fine.
But it's more that entitlement of, well, because they didn't get it.
That was clearly a plot that was hashed against being discriminated against.
And they're railing against the same system that they quite happily live in.
There's all sorts of conservative think tanks and money moving around supporting people of that mindset.
And they don't have a problem taking that money.
They don't see that as the hand of the devil infiltrating society.
No, it's almost like there's some motivated reasoning at play.
But the other thing was that Chris Langen can't get on his high horse because he applied for a job at the IRS.
Come on.
No, but he turned it down because of the morals.
It's the second time he couldn't get through because of the affirmative action.
But yeah, this is...
This is like talk radio chat, right?
Like, you know, you're just going through all of the standard things.
And, like, just to illustrate again, Matt, another example.
I guess it makes sense now that I know what the world is going for.
What is socialism?
I mean, what is communism, right?
These things were actually funded.
They're more or less invented by the central bank.
You know who funded, you know, originally was paying Marx and Engels and before that Moses Hess and other people to come up with, you know.
It's a strategy for world domination.
It has been for the last 200 years.
What has changed?
Indeed, indeed, what has changed.
Sorry, what was he saying there?
Who was funding Marx and Engels?
Was it the World Bank?
I don't think the World Bank was around then.
It must have been someone else.
The central government.
Central government.
Oh.
Central government.
Government, yeah.
It was probably the League of Nations or whoever the precursor.
Maybe they got their own version of the young global leader scholarship program.
League of Nationists, yeah.
Strategy of world domination, communist, neo-Marxist, where have we heard this before?
Yeah, sounds very familiar.
Almost no need to comment.
But, you know, he's not stereotypical.
Look, man, he's not a partisan, right?
He's just a pretty smart guy.
He's got big ideas.
Yes, okay, so a couple of things happen to sound similar to what we always hear in the polemical right-wing guru sphere.
But, I mean, he's not going to just come out and call Trump a genius.
So when someone like Trump comes along...
And he says, I'm not going to fight this political battle along exactly left-right lines or Republican-Democrat, but I'm saying I'm going to stand for the American nation and nationalism generally against globalism.
But he managed to get through.
He did get elected.
Yes, he did.
Were you a Trump supporter?
You don't need to say if you want to.
As a matter of fact, back when people were saying, Trump can't read.
Look, look at the way he hesitates.
You know, he can't, he's got trouble with the teleprompter.
The guy can't read.
I actually stood up and I said no.
I said, I've met Donald Trump and I think his IQ is probably equal to that of the average Harvard professor.
Really?
Yeah, oh yeah.
I actually stood up for, of course, I never got anything out of it, but I thought I was doing, you know, telling people that, you know, basically he is competent, he's a good businessman, you know, and therefore could be good for the country, and I wanted people to understand that.
I thought Harvard professors were a bunch of communist fakes and phonies.
I didn't think they were a high IQ.
Are you pointing out an inconsistency?
It is.
By the way, was there just an offhand grievance?
Like, I heard a very quick grievance where I defended Trump.
I said I never got anything for it, but I didn't.
Yeah, no thank you, Linda.
No payoff.
Yeah, where's the phone calls, right?
Nobody in the phone is not calling.
He could commiserate with Eric.
Yeah, not getting the phone calls.
He'd been doing the work, but not recognized, even by the genius, Trump.
No.
Smart as a Harvard person.
They're dum-dums, as we know, as you said.
But he had this lovely tone of voice there.
I actually think he's as smart as a Harvard person.
I don't know.
I can't do it.
Michael Knowles responded, really?
Would you go so far?
As smart as that.
I mean, what okay would that be?
I don't think it's 200.
I don't think they're thinking that's 200, but I'm thinking 100.
40, 150 maybe?
150, probably, yeah, yeah.
He's good for the country, you know.
So, well, okay, so he is a Trump supporter, right?
He's a Trump supporter.
Fine, you know, there's a lot of people that are Trump supporters.
But he's not going to endorse the election conspiracies.
He wouldn't be that polemical and partisan, right?
Well, he was a little bit of a wild card.
Trump is not as easily controlled as some of them are.
So he stood up there and he spoke his mind.
He's got good instincts in that respect because what he said resonates with what is in the minds of a lot of American citizens.
We want to have our own country.
We want America to have for us.
We don't want our borders to be open.
We don't want millions of third world migrants coming here every year and displacing us from our own territory.
I mean, and Trump actually did a good job of enunciating that.
That's how he got elected.
Okay?
And the first time around...
You know, they weren't prepared.
So they couldn't do anything about it the second time around.
Are you suggesting, Chris, that there were some questions about the 2020 presidential election?
Anyone who doesn't understand that that election was, shall we say, not quite up to snuff, is some kind of moron.
Because I was told by all the fact-checkers and all those social media censors that if I raised any question, I said, you know, it seems like they kind of violated the law in Pennsylvania.
And it seems like, actually, they kind of extended the voting periods.
They said, that's crazy.
You're a conspiracy theorist.
How dare you?
Well, that's exactly what they do.
You've violated groupthink, so you're out.
Your opinion means nothing.
Yeah, this is all totally normal, Chris.
People that are inventing new theories of physics.
They're going to meld it with the religion.
They're going to meld it with all the big ideas.
And they're going to move on to conspiracies about world governments and political MAGA stuff.
That's how I get my physics.
Is that how you get your physics?
Or do you get it from other sources?
I think this is what Michael...
Shermer would refer to as responsible conspiracy theorizing, right?
This is, you know, there's just a lot of conspiracies around, Matt.
A lot of them are true.
These are the reasonable approaches that people have, right?
And now, this might be a bit mean, Matt, pointing out a slight inconsistency in the political logic.
You know, a bit unfair because Chris Langham, you know, he's a smart guy about physics, God, the universe, Cazaldi, but he's never claimed to be like, you know, A politics guy.
He's not a polemical politics person.
You might have got confused because he's infused almost every point that he's made, like tied it back to those talking points.
But he was a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat, like his family.
And then they abandoned the working class map.
And they focused on another group of people.
And this is why he can't support them.
Okay, so let's just hear, you know, what the pivot was that took him off the Democratic register.
So, yeah, we were Democrats, and I thought, okay, yeah, the working man, the people that actually hold this country together, that keep everything moving, you know, those are the ones that we should really care about.
And, you know, if we're not careful, the rich will walk all over them.
So they need, you know, somebody to defend them and to take care of them.
And, you know, I'm one of those people.
I wasn't rich.
My family had no money at all.
So naturally, I gravitated to that.
Then the Democratic Party changed.
No longer was it about the working man.
Suddenly it was full of these billionaire techies that have never done an honest day's labor in their entire miserable lives.
But again, I realized, wait a minute, things have changed here.
There is no more Democratic Party of the kind that I used to know about, that I used to belong to.
And that's when I became a conservative.
And a conservative in a stronger sense than most people who call themselves conservatives today.
Because they're really just cuckolded by the liberals.
They're afraid to say boo to them.
Yeah.
It's getting much more red meat as we get to the end here, Chris.
And there's also a tone of venom.
When they get onto topics like the election being stolen or the Liberal Party not caring about...
You know, good owners, working folk anymore.
And it's on to this diversity, equity, inclusion stuff now.
Like, the emotions come through a little bit.
And, you know, his hatred of techies and rich people, I guess that doesn't extend to...
And oligarchs, which they both agree are terrible.
That doesn't extend, does it, to another group of people that are running America at the moment, does it?
I guess not.
I have a funny feeling he wouldn't have this issue with Elon Musk and Doge and whatnot.
I suspect if you heard Chris Langham talking now, he'll be okay with those particular billionaire techies.
I think he might let us in on Elon Musk's IQ.
He'd probably mention that.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, God.
Well, I'm sure it's up there.
Not as high as his, but I think he'd give him like 170, even 180.
Yeah.
And you know what?
This is the kind of person that Joe Rogan would say, he's not left or right.
He can't be constrained by, you know, your binary.
And there is clear echoes of Alex Jones here because he's very clear.
He's not a Republican, you know, like the conservative party kind of person.
He's a true conservative.
We're not accusing them of literal cuckold.
No, they might be.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I'm not in the bedroom.
But basically they are letting the other party wear the pants.
Yeah.
And they're putting on their little panties.
Yeah.
And doing whatever they're told.
That's what I'm saying.
Yeah.
That's the modern rhino, the modern Republican.
You know what I mean?
That's what most of them are.
And believe you me, most of them wouldn't do a damn thing for anybody else.
Right.
They're basically into their own thing, their own self-interest, and they just never take any risks on behalf of the American people anymore.
And that offends me.
Because we're paying them and they've promised to represent our interests and they're not doing it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So now, if there was a mystery, we now know where Chris Langan stands politically.
I mean, it's a nice encapsulation, isn't it, of the contemporary trends in not just American politics, but elsewhere too, where this is what we mean or what people mean when they talk about right-wing populism.
Yeah, it is that.
Nationalism, it is targeted at, you know, people who think of themselves as battlers or working class or whatever, and who are absolutely, like, so they don't have the kind of connection to big business and trade and that sort of economic stuff.
They're not necessarily against foreign interventions and things.
So they are different from the old Republican Party.
So, you know, I think he's accurately reflecting what that movement is about.
Yeah, like, basically just talking about virtuorism, right?
Like, Alex Jones-style Republicans are, you know, not the real Republicans.
They need to be more anti-communist.
They need to be more anti-immigrant.
And that's the thing where Joe Rogan is like, Alex Jones was a critic of the Conservative Party.
Yes, he was a critic because he said they weren't right-wing enough, right?
Like, the Republican did name only.
So he wasn't saying, like, in his description, the Republican Party is cuckolded because it panders to the left too much.
Yeah, yeah.
The modern Conservative Party.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
No, that's right.
Oh, no, but back in the day, there would have been people who thought a bit like that, you know, conservative sort of social values, but they thought of themselves as working class, so they voted Democrat.
The Democrats tended to have that constituency, and that's a constituency that has moved not just mainstream Republican, but actually gone all the way over to Trumpism.
To Trumpism, yeah.
Yeah, so anti-immigrant sentiment, just to complete the bingo card, you get that.
Yeah.
If you were an immigrant and you wanted to come here, you had to show that you had something to offer yourself, okay?
You had to, you know, learn English.
You had to go through Ellis Island or wherever.
You had to learn English.
You had to learn about the Constitution.
You had to buy in to our politicals.
But now it seems you're incentivized to hate America, to hate Western civilization.
That's right.
And now who would be doing that?
Any real American?
Not that I know of.
It's a contradiction in terms.
So what's the endgame here?
The endgame is world domination.
They're going global.
He really talks like a 200 IQ guy, doesn't he?
He's talking about wearing the pants, wearing the panties.
Very happy with this little...
They're going global.
It's globalism.
It could be Alex Jones.
The endgame, world domination did seem to take Michael Knowles even.
You know, he's on board with all of this, but just sometimes he's surprised.
So what's the endgame of immigration to the US?
World domination.
Oh, right!
Right, yeah.
That makes sense, I guess.
Sorry, Matt, I forgot.
Anti-immigration, we couldn't complete the bingo card if we didn't have anti-vaccine sentiment.
That is modern right-wing sentiment.
You mentioned...
Everyone getting stuck with the Fauci ouchie for the last two years.
And, you know, it's so extremely effective that we all need to take 55 years just to marvel at the perfection and efficacy of it.
Are you anti-vaccine generally?
I take it you're anti-COVID.
Well, I bought into the COVID thing at first.
And, you know, I went out and bought, you know.
Gina and I bought, you know, gas masks for us.
And, you know, those N100 masks.
And, you know, I advised people what to do so as not to get infected with the deadly COVID.
And then I noticed that, you know, it wasn't really...
You know, I live in northern Missouri.
Nobody up there was wearing masks.
Nobody up there...
I mean, and nobody was dying of COVID-19.
So I realized, well, there's got to be something a little bit...
Off about this, right?
And so I, you know, kind of like started getting away from it.
And then I noticed that, you know, this, well, then I noticed that it was being used as a pretext for something called the great reset.
Very smart guy.
Very smart guy, Chris Langan.
He, uh, yeah, he's 190 to 200 IQ.
Yep.
Uh, yeah, no, that's.
Bingo!
Yeah, bingo.
Yeah, so it's, you know, COVID, it didn't actually kill people.
He noticed people weren't dying.
The fact that people did die, right?
Professor D responded to this and checked the amount of deaths in his particular area that he referenced, right, saying, you know, nobody died there.
And indeed, many people did die there, right?
But like in conservative world now, it's been completely proven that like...
COVID was a nothing burger.
We didn't kill anyone.
The vaccines don't do anything.
And now we have an anti-vaxxer at the head of the American Health Services.
So, great job, Conservatives.
Yeah, really knocked it out of the park there.
Yeah, okay.
All right.
I'm glad we're near the end of this.
We're getting there.
We're getting there.
But, you know, Matt, you thought we'd reached the apotheosis of stupidity, right?
You made me listen to this.
And at this point, I was like, we've done it all.
We've done COVID.
We've done election denial.
I didn't realize how good I had it when we were doing technobabble theory of everything at the start.
Let's talk about your unified theory of physics again, please.
Let's go back before the cigar, please.
The technobabble has been missing this past while.
Little did I know, Matt, that he wasn't quite finished.
He wasn't at the end of where he was going to reach.
So we reach now the apex of this conversation, where perhaps all conservative conversations in the guru sphere are eventually going to lead.
So the globalists are controlling the puppet politicians, Matt.
Who's controlling the globalists?
It's the devil.
Since we're already in it, there are going to be people out there who say, this guy is talking about every conspiracy theory I ever heard in the whole book.
Since we're already in it, to take a slightly different tack, but still within the realm of what Wikipedia is going to call it conspiracy theories, do you believe in aliens?
Well, I will say this.
The intelligence community, large sectors of it, believe in aliens.
Really?
Yes.
Oh, absolutely.
It's a big...
I mean, they're constantly discussing these things.
Yes.
And if you look at the global elite, you know, and you wonder, well, I don't want to blame the world banksters for this.
You know, that's a conspiracy theory.
Then who is pulling all those strings?
Okay?
Could there be another kind of entity?
You know?
Aliens, demons, whatever.
Could there be something that's pulling their strings that the global banksters know about?
And they're taking orders from, but they're being totally concealed and hidden from the public.
This is a viable hypothesis.
And it's one that the intelligence communities don't reject.
It's a viable hypothesis, Chris.
Just a hypothesis.
But a viable one.
Could be aliens, could be demons.
It's something.
Why would the globalist communists want to be What drives them to want to take over the world and force all these immigrants to come to the United States, even though they know it's undermining the country?
Could it be demons?
I mean, what else could it be?
Michael Knowles, he's on board with angels and demons, but aliens might be a little step too far, so he's got to pump the brakes.
He's a skeptical guy, right?
He says, well, hold on.
They're ignorant.
It's funny that you mention aliens and demons in the same breath, because I don't particularly believe in aliens.
I mean, what do I know?
There are a lot of things I don't know about.
But I certainly believe that demons exist.
Because I'm pretty confident that demons exist.
I'm less confident that aliens exist.
Well, but the thing is, a lot of people are reporting that they're seeing these UFOs.
The tic-tac.
Other strange alien-suggestive phenomena.
So something like, they call it the tic-tac, of these weird UFOs that seem to violate the laws of physics.
Correct.
Basically, they look like little blobs of light or spheres that can commit these maneuvers.
That are totally against the laws of physics as we understand them.
They look like they have mass, but somehow they're not subject to inertia.
They can turn on a dime on a right angle and continue at the same speed.
They can accelerate at tremendous g-forces.
How can that happen?
Do you have any theory?
Well, yes I do.
But it's an involved, you know, it's fairly involved.
Basically, when you reduce the world to telesis, you understand that the reality consists of a merging of mind and matter.
It's an interplay, you know, of the two.
I think I see where he's going there.
Yeah, yeah.
And Michael Noll's not completely on board with aliens.
You know, demons, fine.
But aliens, not completely convinced.
Then you get, well, but lots of people, lots of people have reported seeing UFOs, right?
I mean, 180 IQ.
Many people have reported UFOs.
What are you going to do about that?
And, you know, remember, like, Eric, when he was talking about alien ships, he was talking, you know, geometric unity might be the way to...
Explain faster and light travel.
It's funny how all of their grand unifying theories enable alien spaceships to travel, right?
Not to mention demons.
I mean, in the case of Chris Langan.
Yes.
In case this guy is sounding like a complete and utter crank, it's important to remember that he's done the rounds.
He has been on a number of extremely influential...
YouTube channels.
Ones with many millions of subscribers.
And including Kurt Jomangos.
A very critical thinker there.
Yeah, and Kurt Jomangos had other big hitters on, like Stephen Wolfram.
And Eric Weinstein.
Eric Weinstein as well.
So he's up there in that company, in terms of his influence.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, Matt, do you remember there's a certain very bad wizard?
Who had some ideas about there was an issue.
Ghosts might be real because many people report seeing them and, you know, the things are sort of similar.
I don't know why I mentioned that, but let's just hear Chris Langham talking about UFOs.
And that is what I think is happening here.
I think that we've got, actually, there's something to it.
The number of people that report UFO incidents is simply too large.
People aren't, you know, they're not all liars.
They don't run around risking their reputations by saying, okay, I'm going to make a nut out of myself and say, you know, these UFOs exist.
But couldn't they just be nuts?
Well, I suppose they could.
But you're saying there should be too many.
I'm saying it's very improbable that they are.
I mean, because not that many people are that nutty.
Yeah, that's an old point of view I've heard before.
Yes, maybe that's not fair to Tamla, right?
He's talking about UFOs and like he's doing that silly binary of saying either they're all liars and then seeing or they're telling the truth and like there's actually a middle point which is people believe they've seen things or they've interpreted various experiences or they're not remembering things accurately,
right?
It doesn't have to be liars or absolute truth, but that's the way you get that binary.
But, you know, if you think I'm drawing an unfair parallel, you know, it's not ghosts, right?
Ghosts are a different phenomenon.
It's a better argument when it's applied to ghosts.
Well, you know, my friend Andrew Klavan, who you met earlier, he has this party trick, which is he's a mystery writer, and he has written ghost stories and things, and at dinner parties he'll say, hey, just ask a random person, he'll say, hey, have you ever seen a ghost?
And he says a lot of the time, people will say yes.
And throughout history, people report having seen a ghost.
That is correct.
And he says, you know, too many people are saying they've seen a ghost for there not to be ghosts.
Or something like a ghost.
That's correct.
That is absolutely correct.
Have you ever seen a ghost?
I've seen things that look like ghosts.
I have.
I've seen things that look like UFOs, too.
They're there.
I know you want to respond to the last comment, but I just want to say that argument that Michael Knowles presented is almost precisely the argument that Tumblr presented to argue for ghosts.
So I'm just pointing out the level of quality of that argument is at the level of Michael Knowles.
Okay?
People can draw their own conclusions about the validity of that.
Or Chris Langen.
Or Chris Langen.
Yes.
Now...
The last comment.
Poor Tamla.
No, no, I'll leave the last comment.
Poor Tamla.
Oh, what?
You're not going to think he's seen ghosts, but not just ghosts.
He's seen UFOs too.
This is not conservative bingo, Matt.
This is crank bingo.
Have you been abducted?
I've seen ghosts, I've seen the aliens, I've seen the conspiracies.
Yeah, it's all going on.
Poor Tamla, just so you know, if you ever make a bad argument to Chris.
He will never forget.
He will never let it go.
And he will ruin you.
I hope he was being an academic edge lord.
I hope he was indulging as, you know, the philosopher's indulgence or whatever.
Lord experiments?
I don't know.
Yeah, whatever they like to do.
They like to take edgy positions.
I'm just saying.
Michael Knowles, same argument, exact same.
Draw your own conclusions, okay?
Yeah, that's right.
We don't think being edgy is cool here at Decoding the Guru.
It's not cool.
That's right.
That's B-square.
Square have four edges.
Now, Matt, the final frontier.
Of Crank Bingo is UFOs and seeing them and being abducted and so on.
But there's another very final angle that you can look at that through, and it is this one.
Now, beyond finance or beyond these NGOs, you mentioned the intelligence agencies.
Something that occurs to me is if I were working at an intelligence agency, they never invited me.
Never got that invite on ZipRecruiter.
Perhaps you should consider yourself lucky.
I think I do.
I certainly do.
But if I were at an intelligence agency, and I heard there was a guy with the highest IQ ever recorded who was contradicting the liberal establishment agenda, I'd probably have a file on that guy.
Have you had any run-ins with the...
Some interest has been shown.
It was oblique.
Let's just put it this way.
I managed to meet a couple, three people that are involved in that line of work when there was no actual reason that that should have happened.
In other words, but they're very cagey about it.
If they want to recruit you, they'll probably do it obliquely.
If you don't apply to actually join an intelligence service but they're interested in you, they will try to get you involved with someone who they control.
And then he will then...
Vector you around and put you in touch with the right people.
But you've got to accept the agenda sight unseen before that happens.
Right?
That's kind of interesting because Chris, Mr. Shepard, the question there.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
He was supposed to be targeted.
Targeted.
That's right.
Because back at CIA HQ, right, with the war room.
That's right.
There's a guy with a 200 IQ walking around.
And he's got it in for the Liberal establishment.
What the hell are we going to do?
We need a team on this guy.
But no, Chris took it in terms of why haven't they recruited me yet?
And, you know, they've shown some interest.
They've put out some feelers.
Look, they could probably tell those three people that he was speaking to, they definitely probably were looking to recruit him, sanding him out.
But what they realised is that he's just too much of a free thinker.
They wouldn't be able to control him.
So they just had to let the opportunity go, I think.
Yeah, yeah.
He returns to this issue about being potentially recruited by the CIA later.
These people, not just that you've read a book about it, you're saying these people you've talked to.
People that I was...
There was one of them in particular that I was actually...
Somebody that I knew was trying to arrange.
An introduction to this person.
And I said, well, you know, he's, okay, so he's in the, you know, CIA.
Is he going to tell me the truth?
You know, I'm not in the CIA.
Is he going to tell me the truth about anything?
Well, no.
Actually, what he wants to talk about is abductions because, you know, he and his wife were actually abducted by aliens and he wants to talk to you about it.
And I said, well, is he going to tell me the truth about anything?
Well, I don't know.
I said, then I don't want to talk to him.
Okay, I don't want to talk to him at all.
There has to be some kind of understanding that I'm not going to get lied to, otherwise I'm wasting my time, because I'll never know whether he's lying or telling the truth.
So if somebody isn't going to commit up front to telling me the truth, I don't have time for him.
If he were a really smart liar, he would have just said, I will tell you the truth, and lied even if he wanted to.
I suppose so.
I mean, that's what they do in the CIA.
Right.
It's sort of the job, right?
If you're a spy.
That's correct.
And you lie your ass off at every available opportunity about everything.
Right.
Right.
Okay?
They don't all do that.
I think there are a couple of people that I sort of trust when they talk about certain subjects.
Certain subjects.
I like how Chris just, when he was told that, oh, maybe they'd be lying to you when they said that, when they promised to tell you the truth, he was like, oh, yeah.
I couldn't do that.
His story is incoherent, but it's like, it doesn't, it totally makes sense because he was, like, the start of this was saying that he knows about, like, people being abducted in the CIA and then Michael knows, like, you know about them?
You've talked to them?
And he's like, yeah, I was, actually, I was supposed to meet some...
People.
So, like, now he doesn't know them, right?
Now it's a meeting that was going to happen.
And they were going to spill the beans about abductions.
Like a guy.
A guy told him about a guy.
He says that he works for the thing.
He wants to talk to him about aliens.
And then he didn't end up meeting him.
But that's...
And he says, is he going to tell me the truth?
And the guy said...
I don't know.
Yeah, I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't want to talk to you about that.
But then he's like, what Chris Knowles says, but, you know, it could have just...
One, like, that guy's not talking, right?
He's talking to the second party who might introduce him.
But Michael Knowles is saying, well, but, you know, if they were smart, that guy could just lie to you and said, like, you know, he would tell you the truth.
But then he's like, yeah, and they always lie.
Like, the CIA, they lie all the time.
But they didn't lie.
To you, right?
Because they refuse to accept your, you know, they're going to tell the truth because presumably they're just artists.
Like the whole thing doesn't make sense.
And his original thing was he spoke to someone who told them the stuff about alien abductions.
But their story is that he didn't end up meeting them because he knew they would be not telling them the truth.
Do you remember, Chris, that Eric also?
How to contact?
Yes.
And Epstein tried to recruit him and threw him off by, like, sitting on an American flag on his table or something.
I mean, what's funny about these people is they have such a cartoonish version of reality.
And that extends from physics all the way to how international affairs and institutions work and everything.
It's even Captain-ish when applied to spooks, to spies.
I used to have a cousin who worked for the Australian spy agency.
So he was a bonafide spy.
I could talk about him now.
He's passed away, so I could speak freely.
But he was an actual field agent.
He did one of them all work.
He infiltrated bikey gangs.
He infiltrated extremist groups, religious extremist groups, and things like that.
And so, you know, he did proper spy stuff, undercover stuff.
But that's kind of what it is.
Like, it's not like you go into the war room, you know, the Doctor Strangelove thing, and you're in the secret corridors, and it's like, what are we going to do about the aliens and stuff like that?
It's kind of, yes, it is spy stuff, but it's kind of run-of-the-mill analysing signals, you know?
Like, it's pretty gritty stuff, you know what I mean?
hang around with a bunch of bogans who ride motorcycles that are selling methamphetamine and talking shit with them on a Saturday night like but their image of it you can tell like you
Yeah, it's the X-Files.
Yeah, it's the X-Files.
It is the X-Files, yes.
Just to make it absolutely clear that it is the X-Files.
Oh, and also your point that it might be the aliens are actually the devil, right?
This might also be the case.
Let's get round the corner, Matt.
Second last clip.
Aliens, devils, ghosts.
I feel like we've reached the terminus of this particular line of inquiry.
Now I see the director of the CIA.
Who's giving that guy his orders?
It ain't the president.
You know, I mean, suddenly you're in a void.
Who's running things?
As far as most of these guys are concerned, it could be the devil himself.
That's running things.
They just don't know.
You know, it's so amazing that you say that because it takes it full circle to the point that when I hear, okay, this so-and-so is actually really beholden to so-and-so, and this person is actually beholden to this person, and I know that that's a fact because you can just see it in politics.
You can kind of go to an org chart and kind of point to it, right?
But then eventually saying, so-and-so, in a really powerful position, they're actually responsible to so-and-so and accountable to, and you think, okay, at a certain point you think, I don't know, I have no way of verifying this, this could be it.
And then when you go all the way back to, and so-and-so is really just answering to the devil, now you've got me again.
Because I read that in my Bible.
I know that that's true.
I know that, you know, he's the prince of this world.
Yes, and they've been, by the way, I mean, there are accounts from biblical times and pre-biblical times that involve UFOs, things in the sky, that show up during critical battles, for example, and turn the tide.
Right?
200 IQ, folks.
200 IQ.
This is the smartest man in the world, on the planet.
That's Tucker Carlson.
That's Tucker Carlson at the end.
You know, the UFOs, they come and turn the tide of historical battles.
But also, I just love how transparent Michael Knowles is.
I'm all in on conspiracies.
I can just look at the org charts, and I see, you know, George Soros is the head, but who's the head of him?
And sometimes I think, like, you know, are we, like, is this really accurate?
And then you say, well, it's the devil, and I'm in.
I'm like, all right.
All right, it's sold.
Sold.
Yeah, of course.
I was getting, you know, I have my questions, but when you said it's the devil, I can open the Bible.
It says...
Devil is there doing bad shit.
I know that's true.
It's so transparent.
Look, guys, this is a pro tip for all of these weirdo fucking paleo god influences.
Playing the classical music doesn't help.
You can play as much classical music as you want.
It doesn't make it sound any less bad shit.
Maybe it does.
Well, I blame you, Matt, for this.
And, you know, the very last clip, you know, we've been poking fun.
We are these people that they keep saying, you know, they're going to call us conspiracy theorists because we're talking about UFOs and aliens and demons and, you know, alternative theories.
So unfair.
And I like this justification that Michael Knowles comes up with just to, you know, head that off at the pass.
So he invokes a meme that you've probably seen online.
Matt, showing a normal distribution of IQs now.
Let him take it away.
No, there's a great meme that I'm really taken with.
It actually has to do with IQ, which is a nice coincidence.
But I love this meme because it's got the really stupid guy at the one end of the bell curve, and he's sort of drooling, and he says, duh, all the bad stuff is because of the devil.
And then you get up on the bell curve into, I don't know, say IQ of 120 or 130.
And it's the really smart guy, the egghead with the glasses.
That's just the start of the danger zone.
The danger zone.
When you're just smart enough, but not smart.
And those guys, they say, no, actually, the devil doesn't exist.
And actually, we're all just sort of bags of chemicals.
And no, this is all, it's all rationally explainable.
And blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And then you get up to the guy at the really high end of the IQ curve in this meme.
And he says, no, actually, the bad stuff's just from the devil.
He agrees with the guy at the other end of the bed.
But it strikes me that there's really something to that.
Roger Scruton, a late conservative philosopher, he said that the job of the conservative intellectual is to articulate things that the common man knows intuitively.
I like that, yeah.
It may sound like we're idiotic, credulous conspiracy theorists.
Some of this might have sounded pretty stupid.
Might not have sounded like it was coming from a 200 IQ guy, but trust me, trust me.
You're probably at like a midwit.
You're probably one of those people in the centre to whom you just don't grok it.
Actually, I didn't like it, but that was revealing that quote from Scruton.
The job of the conservative intellectual is to make the intuitive gut feeling of the working man or whatever justify it.
That's something.
I know.
I know, that is something.
Intuitions are all correct, I guess.
That's the way it works.
My thoughts here, Matt, are I can be summed up in two words.
Fuck you!
Fuck you, Matt!
You made me listen to him.
I thought you were going to say that to Chris when I was like, me!
No, you!
I don't believe in ghosts.
I don't believe in the devil.
Why would I?
You tricked me.
Now, I saw Michael Knowles, right?
So that gave me concern.
But it was also the episode they didn't want you to see, which means they didn't release it, right?
So maybe he listened and was like, oh, this guy is actually a fraud, right?
Like, I can't release it.
That's what I thought.
Like, maybe I didn't go in pre-prepared.
Instead...
I was initially treated to technobabble, as promised, and like physics crankery, and was like, okay, I see, you know, a lot of echoes and stuff that we hear, things that are familiar, but this is an interesting twist.
But by the end, no, we were back just in the exact same right-wing reactionary, like they hit everything, as we said, anti-vaccine, anti-immigration, the election conspiracies, the CIA is actually controlled by alien demons.
Peugeot, Peterson.
It's all the same.
And the amount which resonates across the people who are more respectable in this space, like Peter Thiel or Jordan Peterson, you can hear the echoes.
And also, obviously, it goes without saying, the massive, massive streak of grievance mongering, which unites everything together.
So this guy is like Eric Weinstein turned up to...
12 or 13, but he's kind of like everything.
He's interesting because of how much he is just amplifying all of the things that we've seen and like lots of other gurus.
So in that sense, it was interesting.
But still, screw you for making me listen to him.
It was your turn to be punished.
Yeah, yeah, that's true.
That's right.
Look, I was in two minds about recommending this guy because on one hand, as everyone heard, it's...
It's pretty basic stuff.
It's on the surface.
There's not much to decode here, right?
But in a way, that's what's useful about him, I think, as an item in our collection.
Because like you said, Chris, he covers all the bases.
He covers all the bases.
He dings every one of the things that we talk about.
And he's not subtle about it, like some of our gurus can be to some degree.
But I think some people who listen to the show might not see the thing.
That we're talking about in one of the other characters.
But I think when you have a really blatant example like this, then you can go, well, that actually, like you pointed out, that is like someone else.
Even a friend of ours, like Tamla.
When someone else does it who is otherwise less...
You can spot the thing much more easily.
So I think he's a useful item for a thing.
I think we couldn't not cover him because he is such a perfect specimen.
There's not much nuance there.
There's not much challenge for seasoned decoders like us.
Sorry about that.
That's right.
There we go.
It was interesting, in a way, how much he managed to fit in.
He basically missed nothing.
You can almost have to respect someone who can start with his bespoke nonsense theory of physics and end up with the devil.
And demons are causing everything.
While hitting anti-vax, you know, global communism and everything else along the way.
Yeah, you have to, you know, there's something.
You got to respect it.
You got to respect that.
That's something.
The hustle.
The hustle.
Yeah.
Now, Matt, look, we're done.
The coding mischief managed, okay?
Chris Langham banished to the Nella realm.
We're not doing review of reviews today because I don't have them handy, but we're going to give the patrons A shout-out.
Okay.
And there's big movements in shout-out technology whereby I can now access lists in a kind of slightly better way.
So this is going to go better than it usually does.
Okay.
Less hesitating and pondering.
And people who haven't been shouted out will feel more secure that their term is definitely coming.
Their shout-out's coming.
Yeah.
And now there's some people who...
I haven't shouted it out, and it reminded me of that, but I don't know what tier they're in.
So I'm going to shout them out as Galaxy Brain.
They're going to be peppered in.
So if you're not a Galaxy Brain, you get a Galaxy Brain shout out.
Congratulations.
But I will first start.
Let he who is last be first in the kingdom of heaven.
That is decoding the gurus.
Conspiracy Hypothesizers map.
I have a few.
They are Luke Ryan.
Sattvis, I Smoke Toads, Trip Soverland, Shannon Waters, Blake Gaskell, I Echo, Joshua, Curtis Jackson, Justin Reed, Alison O 'Brien, Emmanuel Lemur, Richard,
Will, Sabra Edredes, Melinda, Zoe H. Ronesville, Seth Cohen, Rynas Avanas, Jake Biller, David Heider, Lulu Fink, Citizen Ritson, Mark Reeve, Drake Ferge, Lucie Vega...
Corey, Spoon, Caroline, Trap in there, and Chris Melody.
Well done, Chris.
Wow, very smooth.
No hesitations.
Thank you, everyone.
I appreciate your support.
Thank you all.
I feel like there was a conference that none of us were invited to that came to some very strong conclusions, and they've all circulated this list of correct answers.
I wasn't at this conference.
This kind of shit makes me think, man.
It's almost like someone is being paid.
Like, when you hear these George Soros stories, he's trying to destroy the country from within.
We are not going to advance conspiracy theories.
We will advance conspiracy hypotheses.
Yep, yep, it's a hypothesis.
We heard that.
We heard that from Chris Langen.
You've got to consider it.
You've got to take it seriously as a hypothesis.
Mm-hmm.
Now, Matt.
Revolutionary geniuses.
Okay?
Revolutionary thinkers, if you like.
Whatever you want to call them.
Normally, I have to look around to get them.
But this time, thank you to Spicy, Georg Kaelbar, Kyle Ceruvri, Yumpy Dumpy Doo, Standardly, Henson Sturgill, Ben, Ian Martinez, Aaron Garza, Vesco, David Clark, Jack
Hellsdowne,
Douglas Oretzky, John O, Escape Verbosity, Stephen John, General Pattern, Stan Bjorgen, Zach, Jarno Vitarnin, Finlay Balfour, Paul Blazer, Simon Pope, Graham, Rob Hammond, Thomas Farrington,
Simona, Patrick Papso, Cronus Was Right, Cautious Disalute, Joshua Klaus, 12 Jazz Barker, Children McNuggets, and John.
Okay, well, this doesn't apply to John, but how do the rest of them, how do they come up with these handles?
Like Yampy Dampy Doo, Children Nuggets.
Like, such creativity.
I know.
I literally don't know how to do that.
I always have the most boring handles.
My name's in, like, role-playing games.
Whenever I have to make a name, it's always like Kavarnas, Kavango.
So Kavanaugh.
So Chris danders a lot.
Yeah, exactly, exactly.
But those people, Mark, revolutionary geniuses.
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.
Now, Chris, you had this at the beginning of those couple of questions, but the self-aggrandizement, the way it gets injected into how gurus talk, you know, they all do it.
They do it in different ways, sometimes subtly, sometimes not so subtly.
Like, just telling everyone that you've got a 200 IQ.
And talking about it all the time.
That's got to be one of the most basic bitch ways to do it, I really think.
Yeah, but they all do it.
It is true.
It is true that they all do it.
But now, usually, we've got some trouble when we try to find the galaxy brain guru people because they're a rare breed.
They're hard to spot out there.
But not today.
Should be more of them.
Oh, well, don't worry.
I've got a bounty.
So, and as I said, I'm going to pepper in the people who I'm not sure, who I, you know, requested shout-out, but I'm not sure.
So if you get upgraded, you get upgraded, okay?
That's the way it goes.
So we have Martin McCauley, Tom Marchbank, Chris Melody, Leanne Gidang, Foggers, Jeff Hackert, Nick Unkle, Full Metal T-Shirt, Robbie Lylebert,
Jub Jub.
W.J. White, Briley Hull, Jacob Folkman, Spaza, Hugh Dogg, Hobgoblin O 'Brien, Isaac Pengliss, Andrew, Brian Hurst, Parminder Singh, Matt Armstrong, Tory Jansen, Bill, Zachary Koenig, Dan the Benevolent Patron,
Kara Robertson, Nobody, Rafindi Vineyards, and Tony Martin.
That is a lot.
Thank you, everyone.
Thank you.
And can I just throw in?
Can I just throw in, Matt?
Would you allow me to throw in?
By all means, yes.
Joanna Scanlon, who kindly manages the Instagram account for us.
She does great work.
You follow?
I do follow.
They're browsing Instagram.
I only use it for family stuff, so it's mainly just my brother's bloody street photography and the occasional...
I think from my parents.
And then along comes a Decoding the Gurus thing.
And I get Peter Thiel's face in my feed.
Yeah, and she takes screenshots and stuff.
So, Joanna, thank you very much.
It doesn't get said enough.
And we're saying it now.
And the last person, I'm a bit reticent to praise them in case their head gets too big.
Andy Last, the editor.
Editor Andy, the man of a thousand thumbnails.
Where would we be with item?
We wouldn't have a YouTube channel.
So, good job, Andy.
You are an honorary Galaxy Brain Guru.
We love you.
We appreciate you.
We're not going to pet you any more than we already do.
That's it.
That's it.
Look, since it's the season for shoutouts, let's shoutout BadStats because BadStats always stealing his content.
Dan Gilbert, he does God's work there on Twitter.
He finds the absolute worst stuff and provides it to us all.
Great dad too.
He has a great dad.
He has a great dad.
Very respectable dad.
Nice dad.
Lawyer dad.
Yeah.
Okay, before his head gets too big, Matt, I'm going to play the clip.
But also, subscribe to his YouTube channel.
Good music there.
Okay?
Yeah.
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.
Jordan Peterson putting Sam Harris in this place there.
Yeah.
Yep.
Someone has to.
Someone has to.
I know.
It's not us anymore.
We've done our time in the trenches, okay?
Have those two had a debate?
Have those two done their thing?
Yeah, yeah.
They got hung up on the definition of truth for like two hours.
So not as fun as Godzilla versus Mothra then?
No.
It would be interesting to see Jordan Peterson interact with Chris Langham.
Actually, that wouldn't be interesting.
That would just be yes-handing each other.
Well, there we go, Matt.
Guru's decoded.
Episode complete.
Yep.
And now we rest.
We go back to the coffins into the darkness until we re-emerge with the next guru on the stage, who I believe is probably Naomi Klein.
Naomi Klein.
Yeah, mixing it up.
If she turns out to be a right-wing reaction, I'm going to live it.
That's right.
It's like everyone.
It's like the meme with the unveiling from the Scooby-Doo.
Yeah, another conspiratorial religious fundamentalist right winger.
Not Naomi Klein.
Not Naomi Klein.
No, no, she shouldn't.
She shouldn't.
Let's hope she's, you know, unique in her own ways.
And just remember, okay, folks out there who are like, what?
Naomi Klein?
I like her books.
I like, you know, whatever.
How very dare you?
Oh, dear.
Gosh, gosh.
Sorry.
All right.
No idols.
We're not here for idolatry.
No one is safe.
And it's fine to look at people on who you agree with.
Okay?
Yeah.
Come on.
We could cover anyone.
We could cover you.
We could cover your mother.
We could cover me.
We could cover Mark.
We could cover you.
We could cover...
Not my mother, though.
Well, we could.
We could, though, Mark.
In principle, we could.
In principle.
Yeah, that's the way it works.
Yeah, so just go back and listen to the episodes where we covered the people that me and Matt actually liked and looked at them critically.
