Supplementary Material 31: Aquatic Nightmares, Strategic Obliviousness, & Race Realists
We venture into the darker corners of the gurusphere and marvel at some very, very brave individuals, their valiant efforts to play devil's advocate, and some world-class discourse surfing skills. Join us, won't you?Supplementary Material 31: Aquatic Nightmares, Strategic Obliviousness, & Race Realists00:00 Introduction & Ol Squeaky Cameo02:57 Matt's Aquarium Trauma & Stress Dreams09:45 RFK Jr's war on science continues11:17 Robert Malone & other 'Covid Contrarians' rewarded under Trump14:35 The LA Protests, Riots, and Anti-Immigrant Narratives20:12 Flint Dibble calls out Joe Rogan25:24 Joe Rogan is a polemical ideologue and anti-vaccine advocate27:34 Cassandra Kavanagh?32:37 If Books Could Kill on Lab Leak35:10 Popular Perceptions of the Covid Pandemic vs Reality38:38 Debating COVID-19 Measures38:59 Clarifying the Role of Sam's Manager42:56 Discussing Trump, Musk, and DOGE's Political Impact47:12 The Meaning Crisis and the Comfort of Religion50:35 The Effects of Social Media53:15 Matt and Chris Friendly Shadowboxing56:19 The horror of directly stating your opinions58:14 Sam Harris' Preparation for Conversations01:05:02 Strategic Obliviousness01:12:26 A little bit of TRT Discourse01:16:17 Lex's Insufferable Tweet: Celebrating Humanity and Responding to Critics01:18:46 The Bravery of the All In Podcast Besties01:20:33 Elon Musk and Donald Trump: A Complex Relationship01:23:42 Mike from PA and Dunking Safely Online01:26:10 Scientific Racism and Controversial Podcasts01:34:02 Paul Bloom and Subjective Redlines01:41:10 The Neo-Nazi Smoke in the Race Realism World01:48:36 Daniël Lakens on Bryan Johnson on Mortality Salience01:50:16 Matt's Foodie Corner01:52:21 OutroThe full episode is available for Patreon subscribers (1hr 54 mins).Join us at: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingTheGurusSourcesBBC- RFK Jr appoints new US vaccine advisers after sacking committeeFlint Dibble’s New Video: Joe Rogan's Cult of Fake ArchaeologyLex Fridman’s Insufferable TweetSam Harris EPISODE 419 "More From Sam": Elon vs. Trump, Religion, Jordan Peterson, & Rapid Fire QuestionsThe All In Besties being cowardsThe Guardian: Harvard author Steven Pinker appears on podcast linked to scientific racismSteven Pinker on AporiaHope Not Hate’s investigation into Aporia and related race science networksIf Books Could Kill: The Lab Leak Goes Mainstream<a...
Hello and welcome to Decoding the Guru's Supplementary Material, an offshoot for the million Decoding the Guru's Decoding episodes with me, cognitive anthropologist Christopher Kavanagh, with him, psychologist Matthew Bryan.
Good morning, Matt.
You have a new haircut, I see.
It's not that new.
Do you know what's different?
Can you spot what's different about me?
Why does my hair look different, maybe better?
Why do I look different?
You styled it in a particular way?
No, you're missing it.
Look, I'm not wearing the big wrap-around cans.
I'm wearing the little iPods, so my hair can be natural and normal.
How about that?
Well, that's very good, but as you wiggled around there, I noticed old Squeaky announced this present.
So, uh...
Bye-bye, Squeaky.
Off you go.
You'll be back soon, mate.
You'll be back soon.
I'm already missing him.
This chair is not as comfortable.
I just want you to know that.
I don't feel comfortable.
It doesn't feel right.
And it still squeaks.
It creaks.
Well, you don't have to try and make it creak.
It's not a challenge.
How do I?
How do I, bud?
I feel like Patrick Stewart.
How do I not creak my chair?
What I do is I just sit on the chair and I don't move.
I have to move.
I have to move.
I don't know why.
I know I'm a fidgety person.
I don't like that about myself, but I seem to have nervous energy that needs to press itself.
I see.
So it's the AirPods.
That's it.
Now I can just see more.
More hair.
That's right.
It is unrestrained.
It is letting my freak flag fly.
Dare I say it's McConaughey-esque?
Dare I say that?
Really?
Really?
Oh, well, that's better than Weinstein.
The ones you don't want that go into the hair jams are like, give me the Weinstein.
Give me the Weinstein.
I'll take the Weinstein, please.
Again, another Weinstein.
Everyone wants the Weinstein.
Well, it's usually pinker.
Pinker-esque is how my hair is usually described.
Actually, Pinker is going to come up on this episode.
Easy now.
Foreshadowing.
You go.
I was just going to complain about my sleeping.
That's alright.
It's supplementary material.
I take melatonin now.
I take melatonin every night.
I think I heard something that is bad for you.
Just like vaping is bad for you.
Everything's bad for you.
I don't want to know about it.
Nobody bloody comment and say, Matt, you shouldn't be taking melatonin because it, I don't know, raises your cholesterol or something.
I don't want to know.
I'm taking it.
You can tell me.
Email me.
Yeah, email Chris.
Tell him.
He'll decide whether or not to pass the information along.
So it works, right?
I do sleep all in all for eight hours, but I wake up during the night.
With intense dreams, people who take melatonin will know this.
And the thing that some people know about me is that I have an aquarium now, but it's an easy, low-maintenance, freshwater aquarium.
I used to have a coral reef saltwater aquarium.
And it had the, you know, finding Nemo fish in it.
It had a big blue tang.
It had a clownfish.
It had a whole bunch of corals.
And I was successful in this endeavor, right?
Everything prospered.
There were no terrible things died.
But eventually I had to give it up because just the stress, Chris, like I was freaked out all the time.
I was always feeling guilty about not changing the water enough or not testing the water enough.
And, you know, always worrying about it.
So I had to give it up.
But the stress streams never stopped.
So for 10 years, my go-to stroke stream is nothing to do with work, nothing to do with family, nothing to do with finances, nothing to do with gurus, usually, thank fucking God.
But it's the fish, Chris.
And last night, and I always dream that there's fish out of the aquarium.
And as you know, the fish shouldn't be out of the aquarium.
And they're often floating around in the air.
And I'm like, that's not right.
They shouldn't be there.
they need to be in the aquarium.
This time, There were five fish that were meant to be in the aquarium, but they weren't there.
I knew that they'd sort of swam out of the aquarium and just sort of swam through the air and got themselves into some nook or cranny.
I couldn't find them.
Eventually, I found them in the fridge and they were somewhat frozen, but it had a happy ending, Chris.
I scooped up the half frozen fish and I put them back in the aquarium and they started swimming happily and it turned out they were fine.
But that was stressful and it worked me out.
So this is what I have to deal with.
You were sanctically damaged by the tropical fish care.
I was.
That's it.
Oh, Chris, I got to tell you, the most stressful thing that happened with that aquarium, the most stressful thing that happened is for a while there I didn't have a lid on it.
It had an open top, right?
Which looks cool, but it's not good because sometimes nervous fish leap out.
And in fact, this incident prompted me to get a top for it.
And my...
It was a healthy size, like the size of my palm, like that big.
It leaped out of the aquarium and then went down the back.
So the little nook between the aquarium and the back of the wall.
You know, furniture always has these little nooks.
And it hit the back wall, fell down the back of the thing.
So it was stuck there.
Like behind this aquarium.
You cannot move an aquarium.
It's not physically possible.
It weighs like a ton.
And I went, oh my God.
This is the kind of thing that causes the stress dreams, right?
I mean, oh my God.
So I raced around, tried to reach my hand in there.
My hand was too big, Chris.
I imagine so.
The space in the back of the thing.
I've got big manly hands.
And I can't just, you can't just get a broom and like scrape it out.
It's going to hurt the fish, right?
And it was deep in there.
And, you know, there's a lot of dust and dust bunnies.
Crapping in there and so on.
Very bad.
So I was freaking out.
My little son, Jack, was maybe six or seven years old then.
He was very young.
and I just grabbed the poor kid and said, Jack Get the You need to get the That's right.
That's right.
I said, you need to get the fish.
And look, to his credit, the little champion, he got there.
He went, yes, okay.
And he very seriously went straight to the thing, knelt down.
Got his tiny little hand, tiny little thin arm, reached back in there, picked up the fish, took it out, handed it to me.
Perfectly executed.
Was it okay?
Was it dead?
It was perfectly fine.
I put it back in the aquarium.
It was a bit of dust on it that it sort of came off and it was perfectly fine.
So it had a happy ending.
But that's the kind of incident what causes the dreams.
That's what created the psychic damage originally, these kind of wounds that were there.
They're like, you know, big glass tropical ecosystems.
And then the format for the videos is like, there's a set formula and it works very well, which is, you know, it's very high production, dramatic camera angles.
And it's like this guy narrating over a scene.
I introduced a green predator into this environment.
And what happened?
Destroyed my mind.
You know, it goes on like that.
But it's a very popular channel.
6.6 million.
I think I've seen it.
He makes like mega vivariums right there.
Pretty impressive.
They aren't, yes.
And he's not in Canada anymore.
So my son was sometimes watching it.
So you could have been him, Matt.
And I bet he has a stressful time.
He clearly wants to cause havoc to his ecosystems.
Well, he does as well.
That's right.
I introduced an exotic predator into this ecosystem.
Let's see what happens.
I would never do that.
I would never introduce an exotic predator into my little crimes.
But, you know, other people, Chris, you know, other people have traumatic...
Everyone's processing trauma.
That's right.
It's a journey.
Some people have traumatic childhoods.
Some people have to deal with wars.
Yep.
Deprivation of various kinds.
Abuse.
I had to deal with an aquarium.
Fish.
And yet my struggle is real.
Responsibilities.
Yes, that's right.
We acknowledge your suffering, Matt.
Hopefully you'll recover from it.
But yeah, it's good to know that you've sought out pharmacological solutions which are helping you.
You know, you're just one or two doses away from becoming a Peter Adia Herberman optimizer stock.
Bro, so this is just the first step, Matt.
That's it.
Well, well, Matt.
Gurus.
You know them?
Oh, yes.
Do we have to talk about them, Chris?
Do we have to?
Yeah.
Well, they've been doing things, Matt.
They never stop.
They never just take a week off.
They should, but they don't.
And one thing that has just happened today, which I noticed.
About a week ago or a couple of days ago, RFK Jr. dismissed the CDC's vaccine panel of experts, right?
That's right.
I forgot for a moment that the gurus are actually running America at the moment.
Yeah.
Well, speaking of which, Matt, so he dismissed all the people on the panel, right?
No need.
These aren't useful.
Goodbye.
He has now announced his new panel.
Okay, so as you might imagine, Matt, it's just a kind of clown car of cranks, anti-vaccine people, so on, including Robert Malone.
Oh, my God.
Robert Malone.
Now, partly responsible for the immunization practices in the U.S., so it's an advisory committee.
For immunization practices.
That's what has done.
Absolutely shameful.
Absolutely shameful.
So the point is they're all rewarded, right?
Like Martin Kulldorff is on it as well.
All of the people that were the COVID contrarian set and were complaining throughout the pandemic that they weren't getting enough attention.
They all went on Rogan.
They all went on the Free Press, on various conservative celebrities.
They're now all being given positions of authority and power, rewarded for their service.
Because you also have Vinay Prasad, right?
He's there.
I mean, not on this panel, but he's being hired.
Is Jay Bhattacharya in that administration somewhere?
Yeah, Jay Bhattacharya is the head of the National Institute of Health, NIH.
Like, also someone that never had a position like that.
You know, no experience.
Was just an academic lecturer and now is the head of that organization.
Appeared on Huberman recently to talk about all of his reforms and whatnot.
But, you know, the Trump administration is very hostile.
It forbids people to talk about things like climate change.
It's gutting those who would advocate for vaccines and whatnot.
So it's a regime that does a lot of things, but one of the things that it does is attack science and promote pseudoscientists to position of power.
Yeah, to a degree that has, I think, never happened before.
I can't think of a situation in a modern society.
Democracy with things I've got to that state.
I don't know.
The thing that it reminds me of was in South Africa, I think it might have been the late 2000s or early 2010s, but there was a health minister who was a HIV /AIDS denialist and basically instigated policies that meant South Africa wouldn't be supplying or promoting the standard.
Medical treatments for HIV.
And this led to a huge death toll.
It was eventually rescinded and the policies were reversed.
But as you said, South Africa does not have the same level of medical infrastructure that the US has or scientific kind of research infrastructure.
So this is quite...
But I wonder the level of impact it's going to have that basically have a bunch of like anti-vaccine pseudoscientists running the research and health agencies.
It's not going to be good.
It's not going to be good.
But how much damage can they do within four years?
Fingers crossed.
Yeah.
Even assuming they don't come back.
Yeah.
Well, that's depressing.
Why did you tell me this?
Yeah, it's just not good at the moment.
I made the mistake of looking at Twitter when I woke up this morning and I saw it was the For You tab, so it was some right-wing propagandist showing clips supposedly from Los Angeles, the riots, and of course they're –
Could well have been from a completely different time.
I like this level of research about this.
I saw a video.
I don't know if it's real.
It could be from a different event.
Whether or not that particular clip is true or not, I'm sure they are finding more than enough material to justify all of their presumptions that America benefits from coming down hard on these illegals, coming down hard on activists.
Liberals just want to destroy America.
They're feeling very confirmed in their make America great again point of view at the moment.
Yeah.
So you saw that and it sounded like you were going to say, "and"?
Well, there was another...
I'm feeling like fucking Jimmy.
I'm not commenting on the reality.
I'm commenting on the discourse, right?
It doesn't matter, right?
It's the vibes.
And they had another video, which was like showing this, their ideal of this perfect America, right?
And it was like a, A right-wing reactionary type, right?
So basically, all the women are beautiful.
They're all wearing sweaters and stuff.
And traditional.
Traditional looking, but wearing sweaters with shirts with like American flags sort of embroidered into it and stuff.
There's a little bunting and stuff like that.
It's like a weird sort of throwback between the 50s and America.
I almost believe that it has to be AI generated because I don't know where they found this clip.
But it sort of reminded me of like a Starship Troopers.
Pseudo-fascist kind of vision of the perfect America.
Anyway, the point of this story is it's a glimpse into the minds of the zeitgeist in America at the moment and it immediately depressed me.
And then you called me up and then I became depressed.
This is on top of the fish stream.
I see.
Well, the world is going to hell.
And yes, there are terrible things happening.
In the US and the discourse around it is depressing as well.
Legitimate protests against the Trump regime, along with rioting, along with people opportunistically responding to it for whatever variety of politics they want to promote.
But that's what you're going to get for the foreseeable future, but especially during Trump's administration.
This is just going to be a consistent And I'm not saying, therefore, people shouldn't respond to it.
I just mean, like, buckle up.
Because this isn't the last time it's going to happen.
No, I mean, this kind of unrest, this kind of writing is not, you know, it happens in America from time to time.
It is not unheard of.
But certainly, you know, Trump's policy on just rounding up random people, ICE operating like some sort of Gestapo running around.
I mean, it's a pretty good reason.
To protest, right?
Oh, yeah, yeah.
And it's going to engender the kind of strong reaction that you see.
But it does feel like the discourse is, you know, returning to the 2020 mass protests and the different ways they're free and that kind of thing.
But in this case, the point that I would want to emphasize as well is like Trump in his first administration, you know, he didn't.
But here he's, you know, sending in the National Guard to stay uninvited.
So like he's definitely become emboldened.
It's the kind of thing that fascists tend to do.
And so people are legitimately noting this as like a very concerning.
And it is, but that's what's going to continue happening with the Trump administration.
Yeah, it's incredibly divisive.
I guess my little story with that little bit of propaganda that I saw there, which is, I think, representative of how the discourse tends to react, is that the reactionary conservatives see it as a complete validation and justification of everything they already believe.
And obviously, everyone else sees it I'm trying to think for what it is.
So anyway, I guess I'm just saying this sort of surveillance protest, it is incited by Trump and then lots of things happen in these protests, many of them not good.
National Guard comes in, then you have tear gas and rubber bullets.
Australian journalist was shot deliberately by the little clip went viral.
But the outcome, the upshot of it all is just increased polarisation and radicalisation, I think, of everyone concerned.
Yeah, thanks.
Thank you.
I blame Donald Trump.
I blame him for bloody everything.
I do think that's not an illegitimate conclusion to take from that kind of thing.
Well, another thing, Matt, you know, the news never re-ends what it pours.
So, Flint Dibble produced a new video.
Where he talked about it when he was interviewed by me a couple of weeks back, where he said he's going to, you know, drop some information.
And he released a video called Joe Rogan's Cult of Fate Archaeology.
And in it, he's calling out with a very detailed breakdown and lots of supporting evidence for the way that Joe Rogan approaches, you know, the Graham Hancock archaeology, alternative archaeology.
And how he isn't like an open-minded seeker.
He's a polemical advocate and he's targeted Flint ever since he appeared on the show, had his detractors on and all those kinds of things.
But he explicitly shows how Rogan's rhetoric is constantly presenting himself one way and doing the opposite.
And one of the things that he mentions is Rogan has been talking about how Flint is like a weak looking.
He's the kind of person that makes you react negatively just to seeing him.
The Flint-Dibble approach.
That guy embodies what you don't like about academia.
You see him physically, he embodies it.
It's like, that's what it is.
It's these weak men.
These weird, kind of bitchy, weak men.
And Flint revealed that he is currently undergoing treatment for stage 4 cancer diagnosis.
Hey there, Joe.
I just found out yesterday that you ridiculed my appearance in front of millions of people on your podcast.
Here I am.
I have had it for the last, what, six hours in the hospital to consider this while I get treated for my stage 4 cancer with an infusion.
You know that I've been fighting cancer for the last four years.
You've mentioned it to millions of people on your podcast.
Joe Rogan, you're a coward who calls a cancer fighter weak.
Look, man.
Only a few weeks after finishing up a year on chemo, I showed up at your studio for an open debate with Graham Hancock that was broadcast to millions of people.
Right.
So Rogan talking about how weak he looks and, you know, how feeble and whatnot, like that's a pretty fucking strong rejoinder to that.
And the fact that Rogan is calling that out as the thing to focus on is something that, you know, deserves a response to.
It's especially disrespectful whenever somebody is undergoing treatment for cancer.
Yeah, it is disrespectful.
And I remember Joe Rogan probably many times has these little diatribes where he talks.
At length on just how, you know, progressives and liberals are nasty, you know, that is mean.
They make it personal.
You know, he's got a whole list of things that are purportedly contrasting, right, with good, honest folk like himself and everyone on his side of things, including Graham Hancock.
And it's just, hypocrisy is just so strong, but he doesn't seem to notice it.
No, this was like the same thing when him and Chris Williamson were complaining about people bonding over outgroup hatred.
So many people's morality stands on the shoulders of somebody that's fallen behind, right?
It's, look at how much, look at how bad that person is.
You don't need to look at me.
And I think that if people start pointing at outgroups and they bind their group together over the mutual hatred of an outgroup, that's usually an indication, I'm like, As they immediately went on to bond over their shared dislike of the mainstream media and liberals and Fauci and all that kind of stuff.
So in this case, Flint undergoing chemotherapy and being targeted, as we talked about in the previous weeks, by de-dunking the Dan Richards guy, Graham Hancock's orbiters, but also Rogan's consistently bringing him up.
We had a debate recently with Graham Hancock and Flint Dibble.
Flint Dibble made note of this.
Flint Dibble?
What kind of name is that?
He's an archaeologist.
People like Flint just out and out lie.
This is another lie that Flint Dibble told.
Oh, this is Flint Dibble.
He's just, you know...
Oh, you mean like Flint Dibble?
We had this guy Flint Dibble on.
Well, the problem was he wasn't being honest.
Flint was not being honest.
a lot of these appearances like flint dibble and zahi their credibility erodes publicly i mean in front of everyone's eyes right and he And of course, he hasn't since then.
So it's just more in the vein of Joe Rogan is not what he presents himself as being.
He is an ideologue.
He is polemical.
And in the same respect, Ma, he just...
An anti-vaccine advocate has went on and they've talked about hospitals deliberately euthanizing COVID patients, you know, the dangers of vaccines, all the usual stuff.
So now Rogan is just a very, very large, very mainstream Outlet for anti-vaccine advocacy.
That's what he is.
And not just anti-vax stuff, but that kind of paranoid, anti-institutional conspiracy theories, right?
Like, oh, the hospitals are deliberately, you know, killing people.
You know, they don't care about making you better.
They'll stick a needle into you and kill you as soon as look at you.
Like fostering that kind of madness amongst people.
It's incredibly dangerous and unhealthy.
Yes, well, I'm just going to quote from some guy, C. Kavanaugh on Twitter, saying in, when is this?
Looks to be back in September 2021.
Joe Rogan's an anti-vax reactionary now, on top of being a conspiracy theorist.
The massive dose of American exceptionalism in this propaganda is also a nice addition.
This guy sucks, right?
So I'm just saying, Matt, this isn't new.
Some people have...
And also back from 2021.
First, Kavanaugh, this guy again.
See, Kavanaugh.
If you can't recognize where Rogan is currently on vaccines and has been for a long time, then you aren't looking properly.
Joe has had pro-vaccine people on and spent the entire time berating them about how wrong they are.
He is an anti-vaccine guy.
It is surely clear to people now, but it's been the case for multiple years.
And before that, he was, you know, Very open to that line of dialogue anyway.
Well, you're almost like a Cassandra, Chris.
You know, you see things before other people do, and they don't listen.
But you know, you saw what was coming.
That's not the message.
The message is, like with Cassandra, the powers of foresight are incredible.
They have ways of seeing things that other people can't see.
My message is this is...
It's incredibly obvious.
It was incredibly obvious back then.
It doesn't require any powers of insight.
That's right.
Anyone who had taken the trouble to just look at the content, it was plain to see.
Now, I know.
I know.
Or just listen to it.
Just listen.
The constant thing with people like Rogan is that people will say he has a lot of different perspectives and he doesn't adhere to any particular point of view.
And the more that you get the conversation with people, the more they say, well, no, I haven't listened to any of his content recently, but, you know, I did listen a couple of years ago.
I heard an episode here and there.
And yet they're very strongly asserting their interpretation without any effort to look into his content.
You'll remember, Matt, that this scrappy podcast, Decoding the Gurus, did a critical evaluation when he issued an apology.
I'm putting air quotes, apology video, right?
About promoting COVID misinformation.
We pointed out it wasn't, it was like the tone of an apology.
But in that video, we were still promoting all the same narratives, all the same like kind of justifications.
And he got loads of credit for that video.
That's right.
He did.
And I remember our prediction was that this didn't need anything and that he would continue doing exactly what he was doing.
Yeah, we were right.
Yeah, it reminds me of, I saw an article headline that came out in some magazine about Elon Musk and his latest thing with Trump.
And the headline was along the lines of, he's totally lost it.
Elon's totally lost it.
Like, this is the incident.
That is like, oh my God, what happened to Elon?
He's totally lost.
Like, no.
Like, the only surprising thing about his issues with Donald Trump is that it didn't happen a year ago because that is totally in line with his personality.
That's exactly what you'd expect.
And it was pretty obvious to us when we covered Elon Musk, what was it, a couple of years ago?
Yeah.
And again, not through any great powers of insight.
We weren't.
Going through any tea leaves, it was very obvious when you looked at his behaviour, what he wrote and what he said.
And who he said.
Yeah.
Yeah, and who he said.
And I remember just at the time, for a long time, everyone just thought, you guys are just haters.
You're so cynical.
What about SpaceX?
It's a really great company.
Yeah.
Anyway.
Yeah, well.
Speaking about that ability to just do research into topics and to notice patterns.
So I do want to give credit.
So this video with Flint, it's great.
It's great because it's very well researched.
It has clips from Graham Hancock from 20 years ago in Radio Collins.
It's kind of highlighting his narrative.
In the late 90s, he claimed some blurry photos were evidence of monuments from an advanced civilization on Mars that was destroyed in an ancient apocalyptic cosmic impact.
And it's a very important point that the face structure, whatever it is, whether it's a hill or whether it's actually some kind of face, is set in a context, and that context is very large, surrounded by a lot of other structures, or by a bombardment of asteroids, or I believe more likely fragments of a giant comet.
And, And this is why the monuments on Mars, in inverted commas, of course, the supposed, the alleged monuments on Mars, are so interesting to me.
Because taken in context with the cataclysmic history of the planet, with, again, disputed evidence of primitive microbial life on the planet, which under any normal evolutionary laws one would expect eventually to have developed into higher life forms.
But to me, this raises a whole other issue over the story of life on Mars and the story of what happened to Mars and the story of what happened to Earth.
And it's also showing Joe Rogan across appearances and...
So that's a very researched piece and nicely put together.
And I encourage people who haven't watched it to look at it and not just around the framing of him being cruel to Flint, but it just shows the way Rogan operates.
In the same respect, Michael Hobbs, a journalist that we have talked about covering and to I think he would also acknowledge himself in some ways to be like an activist journalist.
But he has a podcast, If Books Could Kill, where him and his co-host critically evaluate, you know, various pop science books and other political issues.
But they did a bonus episode on the lab link.
And it's about an hour long, maybe an hour and a half.
In any case, it covers basically the entire history of the discourse around the lab link from the start of the pandemic to the present.
And it talks about the evidence and the scientific response and the media response and the conservative media response.
It's very well researched.
It's the best.
Presentation I've heard of that whole situation.
And it just so happens that it echoes very clearly things that we said on the podcast many times about, like, it's surprising the level of discourse around this when the scientific evidence has continued to firm up in regards, like, the weight of evidence supports a zoonotic natural origin.
And that's what the majority of relevant scientists believe for that reason.
And yet the public discourse has largely shifted to, well, we now know that the lab leak has been vindicated.
This is an example where, you know, journalists failed and there was censorship and this whole thing.
And Hobbes and his co-host do a good job of demonstrating how that is mostly a post-hoc invention of conservative media and also lab leak activists, the conspiracy theorists.
So I really...
So people should go check that out too.
Yeah.
Yep.
Post the link.
I'll check it out even.
It sounds interesting.
Yeah.
The public opinion, public discourse and things, it often just diverges from reality.
You understand the causes.
You understand why.
But it's still annoying.
I feel like the public perceptions of the COVID epidemic and the response to it, overall, has just been retconned into oblivion.
Oh, yeah.
I don't think it's just paranoid conspiracy theorists who have a distorted view of it.
I think collectively, most people have a distorted view of it.
You're absolutely right.
The story of the pandemic is that scientists developed a novel vaccine with unprecedented speed.
It required international cooperation.
There was a mass rollout campaign, and a global pandemic was largely stopped in its tracks by a successful public health campaign.
That is not the message, even that you hear in kind of liberal.
Outlets about what happened with the pandemic.
But that is what the statistics show.
As the vaccine campaign rolled across countries, the number of deaths and serious illness dramatically reduced as it was rolled out and more members of the population took it.
And so it is imperfect, yes, but a very successful global anti-vaccination campaign that largely defined a global pandemic.
That's the truth of what happened.
But in the alternative media...
The vaccines didn't do what they were promised to do and that the public health measures were just all ill-advised and non-effective.
We didn't need to do them.
And yeah, that's the general gist of the kind of takeaway about the pandemic.
A lot of focus on mistakes were made and they haven't been Acknowledged enough and that the vaccines were oversold in various ways.
But the evidence absolutely does not support those narratives.
Even in the case where there are public health measures where, you know, things were done that didn't necessarily have the effects that they were desired or were not as efficacious as imagined.
Like, in the middle of a pandemic, there are steps that are taken that might be overly cautious but reasonable.
And there's lots of countries, notably Matt, Japan and Australia, where public health measures were instigated and largely adhered to with little complaint or social fury.
and things went back to normal as vaccines and treatments became more readily available as we understood more things about the virus.
Whereas like North America, it just seems that was like like a social...
Yeah, well, the thing that annoys me is that countries like Australia, and in a different way, but similar, Japan as well, had a more, what's the word, hawkish, sort of restrictive approach, right?
More towards zero COVID than towards let it rip, than the United States, right?
For understandable reasons, right?
The United States is a different culture, more libertarian, less liking that kind of thing, so fine, all right?
But the statistics show that a lot more people Per capita died in the United States.
As a result, yes.
As a result, right?
And, okay, well, you know, it's all swings and roundabouts.
Yeah, trade-offs.
You could say trade-offs, fine.
But then the takeaway in the US is that, you know what I mean?
We should have been more.
Liberal.
We should have been more, you know, all the restrictions are all a bad idea.
Shouldn't have worn masks.
Shouldn't have done social distancing.
Should never have closed any schools.
You know what I mean?
That's your takeaway.
I know.
Anyway, whatever.
I know.
I know.
Well, so that's been occurring.
Now, in the last supplementary material, you might remember me having a little bit of a go at Sam's manager, Sam Harris's manager, right?
You remember he was kind of both sides in.
The stuff around the Biden cover-up, his health, and maybe Trump's lies are more right in the open, that this is better.
And I think I titled the segments of it like Sam Harris's manager sucks.
Something like that.
So there's been another AMA with Sam, and it speaks to some of the themes we talk about.
But the first thing is his manager wants to clear up for people like me.
Who might have got the wrong end of the stick.
So listen to this.
Well, just a quick housekeeping before we do.
I need to clarify some things.
This isn't for you.
This is for the audience.
Many in the audience have already picked up on this.
But again, just to clarify, the goal of this series is more from Sam on current events more often.
My job here is to draw more energy out of Sam to surface his ideas in a format that's a little looser than the podcast.
So the tone will be more casual.
If the pacing is faster, that's all intentional.
I'll sometimes play devil's advocate and even exaggerate positions, whatever it takes to keep things moving.
None of this is about me, so don't get caught up on what you think my positions actually are.
This is your response to some hate mail?
This is just to clarify.
I think a lot of people, most people got it, but some people were confused.
And one of the reasons why we didn't bring on another academic or intellectual is that they would show up with their own agenda, and that's not what we wanted here.
We wanted to really push you around.
And so this will feel different from the polished conversations and essays that the audience is used to.
Okay.
So, you know, we just got it wrong, Matt.
Or at least I just got it wrong.
It's, you know, he's just asking questions.
He's not actually presenting his opinions, right?
he's only kind of playing devil's advocate as a standard to get some, the flesh ideas more.
So it might've sounded like he was very strongly emotionally reacting to the And downplaying the lies of the Trump administration.
I said this last time, there's something more off-putting and gross to me about lying and in secrecy than there is out in the open.
And I know that's probably more of an emotional thought than irrational.
But it's not all out in the open.
There's a lot out in the open, and you have to imagine that that's the tip of the iceberg of corruption, right?
To grade Trump on a curve so fully that the visibility of his sins are exculpatory, right, is just pure delusion, right?
You have no idea what you don't know about what he's into.
And we already know he lies more than any other person that can be named anywhere in public life.
So the idea that he's not covering anything up just doesn't fly.
I don't know why, and we'll have to understand this or get some psychologist or sociologist or someone to explain this, but it just feels like when he says he's got a building that's 20 stories tall and it's only 10, I just don't really care.
Or some of the other lies, they just feel, of course it's corrupt to be both the policymaker and the dealmaker.
He deports someone to a torture room in El Salvador.
And then laughs about it at the Oval Office and says he can't get him back.
Right?
I'm not defending that.
That's a lie.
But that was all, you know, to draw out more of Sam's opinion.
He has no agenda.
He has no positions.
He's just there as a facilitator.
Got that?
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Yep.
Okay.
So that will help frame what's going on in some of these other clips.
So this is a little bit of talking about And how we get to the point where we all just vomit in unison, I don't know.
But I mean, we have to get there.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, is it possible that we needed a Trump or a Musk type or both of them in Doge to begin to pop the hood?
No.
To realize how bad Trump and Musk and Doge are?
No, no, no, no.
To realize, to start taking the debt seriously.
I mean, do you really think if Kamala Harris was elected, we'd be doing that?
Do you think there'd be an abundance movement without Trump?
I mean, is there some credit that goes there?
I mean, it's an interesting question.
Basically, you're saying that any kind of pendulum swing back to sanity can be credited to just how bad things have gotten.
There you go, Matt.
That's an example, right, of just...
So, like, he suggested there, like, would there be even talk about reducing the deficit?
You know, if it had been Kamala Harris, come on.
Right.
So, but, of course, Trump is increasing the deficit.
Well, yeah, yeah.
But, you know, Matt, the fact that we're even talking.
We're talking about it more.
Okay, that would never have happened before.
Okay.
And the abundance thing, that's Ezra Klein, right?
He coined that with his book.
Am I wrong?
Yeah, yeah, that's Ezra Klein.
But he's responding, Matt, to the fact that the Democrats, you know, they don't, they're too obsessed with regulation, environmental protection stuff.
So that's happening.
So Ezra Klein was emboldened by the Trump presidency to push this.
Okay, right.
I think the argument is like, he's trying to present an alternative path, right?
Whereas if Kamala Harris had won, the Democrats might not have needed an alternative path forward.
But again, you know, look, let's...
You're an advocate.
Yep, I get it.
It's not like that's his position.
That's not his position.
Sam is going to have another conversation with Jordan Peterson and they're talking about how do you approach that or this kind of thing.
This is his manager talking about Jordan Peterson.
I know you're going on Jordan Peterson's podcast soon so I don't want to talk about him for a moment.
He's been credited for bringing so many people back to Christianity 2.0, more of the, I guess, live and let live Christians versus the 1980s, or I guess the 1480s for that matter.
I think there are a number of reasons why Jordan has been so effective.
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