Supplementary Material 34: Giants, Grifters, and Google Eyed Loons
We drown in waves of ideological fluidity as the gurusphere continues to crash all around us.Supplementary Material 3400:00 Introduction01:26 Irish Stew and Dog Exercise Report03:45 A new 276 IQ Genius11:47 Fresh and Fit Antisemitism16:51 Are things getting dumber?21:22 Asmongold on the Epstein Files24:53 Epstein Conspiratorial Discourse helps Ghislaine Maxwell29:00 Vinay Prasad resigns from his MAGA position31:17 Eric Weinstein is the Architect of the Great Reset!32:37 Google Eyed Loons vs. Willing Apparatchik36:40 The Young Turks are joined by... Scott Adams38:51 Ana Kasparian sits down with Tucker Carlson44:46 Jimmy the Giant enters the arena46:11 Jimmy the Giant meets Konstantin Kisin57:12 Debating the Middle Class YouTube Grifters01:06:15 The Gurusphere Grift01:08:16 Jimmy the Giant reflects on his performance01:11:16 Discourse standards for Research01:15:05 Jimmy defends his criticisms01:22:27 Jimmy the Giant deletes his videos and apologises to Konstantin01:28:04 The Call to Action to support the Grand Mission01:32:32 Separating Issues from Support of Influencers01:37:13 Jimmy the Giant explains how the Elites created Wokeness01:47:16 Woke Wars and Psyops01:49:33 The Right Wing Media Outrage Ecosystem01:55:26 False Consciousness and the Billionaires02:02:47 AI limitations and Hallucinations02:07:08 Post Hoc-Reasoning in AI and People02:14:22 OutroThe full episode is available for Patreon subscribers (2hrs 16 mins).Join us at: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingTheGurusSourcesYounghoon Kim: World’s Highest IQ Score (276) Scientifically Documented in New Academic PreprintFresh and Fit idiots being giggly anti-semitic and praising HitlerJoanne Freeman: The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil WarGhislaine Maxwell moved to Federal prison camp in TexasComment on the move from Prison ConsultantPoor Vinay Prasad – The Disgraceful Campaign Against a Top FDA OfficialEric responds to accusations that he is the mastermind behind the Great ReplacementTYT’s The Conversation: Scott Adams Reflects on Life after his Terminal Cancer DiagnosisAna Kasparian on the Tucker Carlson showClips from now deleted Triggernometry video: He Called me a Grifter… it didn’t go so well<a href="https://x.com/KonstantinKisin/status/1950086996845568460" rel="noopener noreferrer"
Hello and welcome to the Coding the Guru's supplementary material with me, the hungry of anthropologist Christopher Kabner, with him, the psychologist, Matthew Brown.
G'day, Matt.
How are you doing?
G'day, good day.
G'day, good day.
I'm okay.
It's the afternoon for both of us.
I gave my presentation to give a talk to the Ministry of Health in New Zealand via the internet earlier on my report.
Well, well received.
So happy with that.
Did you get a standing ovation?
No, but they all smiled and nodded a lot.
Did they stand up and wave their hands like shape their hands?
That's the thing some people do.
They didn't do jazz hands.
No, no.
But there was consensus in the room.
I feel like, you know, just out there and being the change in the world I want to see.
That's what's what I'm doing, I think.
A lot of murmuring.
Oh, blood a good presentation there.
Fantabulous.
I like the image of like a Victorian parlor where all the people were puffing on their pipes.
I was like, by jove, is that right?
No, no, no.
It was your very typical Zoom call or Team score.
Half of them are at home working from home, like me, cash.
Other people are in their cubicles.
That's all it was.
Not an old gentleman's club, I'm afraid.
Well, I saw on the Patreon, Matt, in your foodie corner, that you had Irish Drew at the weekend in homage to me and my ancestry.
And I was very touched.
I exactly once a week to celebrate your Irish connection.
Our ancestry, Chris, our ancestry.
Our ancestry.
Oh, yeah, that's right.
Stolen Valor.
Forgot about that.
Notice I never claimed to be Australian.
You see, you slipped up by using the word ancestry.
See, you were born in Ireland.
True.
True.
My Irish ancestry is just as real as yours.
I'll get the goddamn birth certificates.
They can be forged, Matt.
They can be forged.
You know, we haven't done in a while, Matt, as well, our middle-aged man exercising up there.
Is that because you haven't been exercising?
I've been exercising in my own way, in my own way.
Yeah, well, you know, we got the dogs.
We've got the dogs.
Yeah, yeah.
And, you know, they're elderly dogs.
But one of them, she's still got, she's still spry.
She's vivacious.
So the male dog, Bobo, he just likes a very short walk.
He goes to the beach.
He does a poo.
We pick up the poo, put it in the doggy bit and poop, you know, the bag and all that.
And then he's ready to go home.
That's it.
But me and Jazz, we walk all the way down to Mondrapo along the beach.
And it's like a five-kilometer, six-film walk.
And I'll do it every day.
I'm now really, I'm addicted to it.
So that's my exercise.
Old people's exercise.
Just going for a long walk.
And I listened to a book with my pods.
I'm happy.
Jazz is happy.
And that's exactly what I'm going to do the minute I finish speaking to you.
I'm going to go on that.
Wow.
Well, I hope you're listening to the book that we are supposed to listen to for supplementary material, The Genius Math by Helen Lewis.
But if not, Matt, that's all right, because I know you will get there.
I know it's there.
I know you're on top of these things.
Don't worry.
Like, it's about intelligence and the social perception of intelligence.
I already know about all that stuff, Chris.
I'm a psychologist.
You're already a genius.
I know.
Yeah.
And actually, actually, you know what I came across, speaking of geniuses, came across just someone has written an article and they've basically on why they personally have an IQ of 273.
No. 276.
I tell a lie.
276.
It's really good.
So it's an absolute crank.
Someone, Jung-hoon Kim.
Oh, I know him.
United Sigma Intelligence Association.
So you know this guy.
I mean, I know of him because people were posting him around.
He's basically like Chris Langan.
He's also one of those, but he's a South Korean version.
But again, MAGA.
So these high IQ individuals, Matt, they're all somehow, you know, supporters of Donald Trump, the super high IQ, self-declared super high IQ individuals.
No, it's a, it's a good idea.
So you're right.
I immediately thought of Chris Langen.
And I actually read the article and it really is.
It's called the psychometric validation of an extreme IQ score, the case of Jung-hun Kim's IQ 276, right?
And obviously he hasn't published it anywhere.
This has been uploaded to some pre-print server or whatever.
So I read it and he actually does a better job of pseudo-profound bullshit than Chris.
Yeah, because he mentions genuine psychometric terms and, you know, like at a sentence level, it at least makes sense.
There's none of his crazy, crazy shit.
But obviously, the substance of it is absolutely meaningless.
One of the things he does, so 273, that is 12 standard deviations above 100.
So, you know, standard IQ, it's a normed score, right?
So the population mean is 100, standard deviation is 15.
So 12 standard deviations above 100.
The probability of that is 2.3 times 10 to the power of minus 32.
Okay.
I calculated it.
And so apart from anything else, just apart from anything else, the probability of anyone on earth in a population of 8 billion having an IQ of 273 is effectively zero.
Now, Kim, in his defense, he defines IQ to have a standard deviation of 24 for some reason.
So his IQ is based on a standard deviation of 24.
So, you know, this is just one of the many things he's rolled into it.
But of course, that obviously contradicts the entire point of an IQ score, which is meant to be comparable to other IQ scores.
Like if you make up like a calculation method that is completely unique to yourself, then obviously you can't compare the number that you get at the other end.
So that's a couple of pretty elementary mistakes from someone with an IQ.
I think his IQ of 273 has been conclusively disproved just purely from those two mistakes.
Well, well, that's, you know, maybe him and Chris Langen could get together and try and work this one out.
They could have a psychometric dick measuring contest with each other.
I mean, he's more ambitious than Chris Lang because Chris Langen doesn't claim 273.
You got to respect, got to respect the game.
273, that's a big number.
Yeah, I do think the rule typically holds that anybody mentioning their IQ online in a positive light and not just making a joke or something is almost invariably somebody with questionable intelligence.
Regardless of their IQ scores, it's almost always a concerning sign when people are talking about their IQ and putting it into their profile or whatever.
So be careful out there.
Like Matt just now, he might be a high queue individual, but he muted his microphone and hasn't put the unmute button.
So look, lots of smart people do that accidentally.
Yeah, so yeah, I'd say that's very diagnostic.
It's very diagnostic.
Anytime you mention your IQ or other people's IQ, it's not a good sign.
It's not a good indicator of IIQ.
It's not a good indicator of them being a decent person.
It's a bad indicator all around.
It is.
It's not good.
It's not good all around.
Well, I think these people have got it all wrong.
Like they're all, you know, people that brag about having high IQ, like whatever it is they've accomplished in life, like wherever it is they are and everything, it doesn't do them a service because this Kim guy, you know, unless he's like discovered a new kind of science and is kind of really accomplishing Einsteinian things on the regular,
then it's kind of embarrassing that he's got an IQ of 273 because he's clearly not doing anything with it.
I think it's better to have, you know, whatever it is you've accomplished, whatever it is you've got to brag about, you should be bragging.
Say, look, I did all of this.
I did it with an IQ of 93.
How about that?
You know, doing one with the little.
Yeah, self-deprecating.
That's the way to go.
But that is not the guru playbook, Matt.
They haven't worked out.
The only time I've seen this is like, you know, Eric claiming that he isn't that good at the guitar.
Well, but no, that's not the claim.
The claim is that he hasn't learned the guitar.
He hasn't spent time learning and he's just, you know, picked it up by himself.
But yeah, I was about to say he's downplaying his ability, but it's not, it's not really.
He just wants to downplay the amount of practice that he's put in.
Well, you know, like psychologists like me and also my mate who I work with, we have to do them.
We have to learn how to give them.
We have to learn how to, and we get them administered to us just for other students, basically, or master students who are in training.
And sometimes they tell us what we get.
And we actually prepared us to cringe, but actually not really.
We did compare what we got because the interesting thing, they get it all wrong.
They don't understand what these things are for.
First of all, they're to diagnose problems mainly.
And the other more arguable use for them is that they're multi-dimensional and they can be useful for diagnosing what your deficiencies are.
And I compared, like, I think both of us scored in the sub-normal range on a couple of sub-scales.
And you won't be surprised at all to know what they are, Chris.
There were ones involving like short-term memory and manipulating things in short-term memory, which, and I was like, oh, yeah, that totally makes sense.
And I've got a bunch of coping strategies.
They sometimes work and they often don't, as you know.
But, you know, it's helpful.
It's helpful.
Yeah, I get that.
You know, we all compensate for our deficiencies in different ways, Matt.
And that's it.
You learn your coping strategies and you persevere, right?
That's the way to do it.
But if you have 273 IQ, maybe you've got too many things spinning at once.
That's like, that's the problem.
You can't focus down on things.
You've got too many big ideas.
That's why in general, these high IQ people are so impressive in what they achieve.
Well, high IQ or not, Matt, there are other people in the internet doing things.
We can't stop them.
You know, they will not be stopped.
They'll continue to do things.
And boy, do I have some people doing and saying some things for you?
That's very general.
You should record that.
You could use that as an introductory clip for anything.
That's going to be my lead-in from now on.
Just anytime I'm off sick, I'll just work that out.
But, okay, Matt, do you know Fresh and Fit?
Have you ever heard of Fresh and Fit?
No.
This could go in a segment called Streamers Being Wankers, right?
It would be an eternal segment, which we would have content for endlessly.
But this one did hit me as a clip on social media.
And I was like, God damn, this is pretty bad.
So Fresh and Fit is a popular red-pilled manosphere podcast, right?
It's one of these ones of the format men sit around with young women and they talk about dating and these kind of things.
They also talk about other topics.
So you're going to hear Myron Geins, who's one of the hosts, and then you're going to hear a female participant offer some thought on pressing issues of our time.
So let's have a listen to this.
What do you guys think about Hitler?
What if the Jewish did something to the Germans that made them act a certain way, but nobody wants to talk about it?
Like the Jews don't want to take accountability.
Oh, that's yes.
I'm with you on that one.
Okay.
That's why that was up to something.
So the Germans wanted to take them out.
Like, it had to be something.
Like, Germans wanted to take them out.
All of them.
They damn nearby.
They started it.
So I guess I'm like, yeah, talk shit about them.
The Holocaust was the only way he can take out a huge population, like a huge amount of Jews all in one setting.
But I already know what's going on.
Like, I'm not dumb.
Like, I know, like, the Jews did something.
That's why they sent up here.
They're trying to take back.
Like, they're trying to take back and get repercussions, especially from America, like from Americans.
So they're taking over the government and stuff like that.
I'm telling you, how do we take them down?
How do we take them down?
Yeah.
I mean, I had to say Hitler, he had the plan, but his plan was just too like very like gruesome.
You have to do what he had to do.
He was trying to save the world.
I mean, Jews, Jews are the reason why the healthcare system and everything around us in the government is collapsing because they're sitting up here stealing away from the American people.
Okay.
Who is this streamer?
Who is it?
So the woman you heard talking now is just a guest on Fresh and Fit.
That's just like one of their audience members who is taking part in the discussion.
But it's Fresh and Fit is the name of the show that she's on.
And that guy That is the host is a raging anti-Semite, right?
Like, yes, he's critical of Israel in this war, but it's as you hear, right?
It's also a little bit beyond that.
Yeah.
And Matt, like, I know these are like, this is kind of stupid anti-Semitism, right?
Like, but the fact is that this is just going out, you know, to like an audience of people.
Like this level of anti-Semitism, it used to be something that you see in like these internet corners that people didn't admit to watching or, you know, was kind of shameful.
And now this is pretty much.
And also all the people talking there, they're all African Americans, right?
So that's also a feature of that.
It's not like old white supremacist type people.
It's kind of a newer demographic, shall we say.
Yeah, well, I don't like that.
I don't know what else.
So this Fresh and Fit, like it's, it's just popular.
It's a popular streamer.
Like, yeah, yeah, it's popular, popular amongst like, you know, Manosphere, red pills type people, but it's, it would be one of the big ones.
And like Myron Geins would be invited on shows like Pierce Morgan and stuff to talk about things, even with those views.
Yeah, that's like not, I know, I know this is a rather horrific thing to listen to, but it's just the level of like open anti-Semitism that people are freely expressing, you know, those Jews.
Hitler had to do something about them.
And like, I've been to Auschwitz, I took a bunch of students over there on a school trip.
And just, you know, looking at all the shoes from the kids that were killed in the gas chambers, you know, like all of the little things around, I mean, you know, adults being killed as well.
I'm not saying that's fine, but just the amount of children that were like systematically slaughtered.
And these absolute fucking doe heads are just giggling away about it and saying, I'm not uneducated right there saying repercussions when they mean reparations as well.
Like I, I, whatever.
I just.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, I know.
Is it, it's just everything getting dumber?
Is that it?
Like, I don't know.
Like, I don't know.
I've seen a bunch of content like that.
You know, not necessarily that extreme, but you know, there's a theme to it.
And it's one of the things that's just super clear is that no one involved has ever read a book.
You know, like, like, I don't know.
I'm getting, I've got to become one of those old men that just still go to hell in a handbasket.
People don't read enough books that it's, I don't know.
But maybe it's not that.
It's more like the internet.
Like standards have slipped, right?
Standards have slipped.
You're trying to not be an old man who says standards have slipped.
Like, like, like the tenor of discourse, you know, political discourse in the United States, thanks to Trump.
Yeah.
Standards have slipped.
The White House account tweets things that were never tweeted before.
And, you know, you have, I guess, mainstream, somewhat respectable people doing and saying things which are on this spectrum of just really dumb and bad and stupid and coarse.
And I don't know.
It seems like it seems like the internet has had an effect in terms of making this kind of stuff more accessible because it's ironic, it's edgy, it's whatever, it gets clicks.
You know, do they really mean it?
I don't know.
They're just talking.
You know what I mean?
Like internet culture is contributing to this.
Yeah, I agree.
Though I do always, whenever we're talking about standards slipping and stuff, I always want to make a shout out to there's a book by Joanne Freeman that I read, a historian who wrote about the field of blood, violence in Congress and the road to the civil war.
And it's like, you know, if you thought that standards are bad now, when you hear what was going on in the U.S. Congress prior to the civil war.
I know, I know.
Someone got hit on the head with a cane.
Oh, no.
I mean, it's way worse than that.
Someone else got shot.
Someone shot, you know.
Yeah.
It's just, it's a level of rhetoric then was also like, but there was, you know, overt racism and it was perfectly normal.
So I take the point.
I agree with it that there's now this being pumped out to millions of people and it's easily accessible.
But I just mean like there's plenty of times in history, including like the 1940s, where the discourse was just as bad, if not worse, right, than now.
But I'm not saying quite that.
Like, I don't think, you know, society is more violent today than it was.
It definitely isn't.
I don't think that, you know, people have got worse opinions today than the olden days because that's not true either, right?
You know, they had slavery in the United States, for instance.
Racism was sexism or stuff was totally normal.
So that's not the case either.
No, it's more just like the dumbing down of everything.
Public discourse feels like it's dumbed down in my lifetime.
Mind you.
Okay.
I'll undercut myself here.
I will harken back to when I was much younger.
I haven't watched free-to-air television for decades, I don't think.
But when I did watch free-to-wear television.
I don't even know what that is.
Or television.
Or free-to-air.
Free-to-air.
Oh, just.
It means like non-non-cable.
Just broadcast TV.
That's a term you.
I just call that TV, Matt.
Okay.
Is it non-cable, non-cable news, right?
I didn't even, I didn't even know what cable was.
That was an American thing.
We had Sky.
You didn't have cables.
We had cables.
String.
You had little pieces of string.
And I remember the normal news.
So not the ABC, not the, not SPS.
So those are the government channels and they tended to be of a higher standard.
But nobody watched them.
Like everybody watched Channel 7 channel on Channel 10.
And my God, even as a kid, I knew it was stupid.
Like reporters talking with deadly earnestness about someone who's baked a cake and it was in the shape of a Jesus or something.
What?
Well, that I know.
Like, I got to see if you're from old man, I just don't you be just watching all media and said it was all bad back.
You know what?
What I like to do is sit down with a glass of whiskey and open a good, dusty tone.
That is how I like to spend it in the day.
You may laugh, but this is my life, Chris.
Well, the next clip I have, I feel is going to undercut my point that support yours about the level of discourse.
So we've never covered this guy before.
Another streamer, but a streamer, I believe that is the most popular in the world at the minute in terms of like politics streaming.
So you haven't heard his teaches.
And this is about him talking about the Epstein files and possible revelations, right?
And, you know, maybe this will restore your fear in modern society.
My dream scenario.
Trump makes mandatory attendance, every member of the Senate and Congress.
He has her testify In front of all of them.
And before she starts, he locks the doors.
And as she reads out the names, the police come in and they escort every person out of the room as she reads their names.
Totally like Saddam Hussein style.
Yep, the Saddam strat.
That's right.
That would be fucking insane.
And hey, that would be crazy content, right?
Insane content.
That really does support my point, Chris.
So the person he's talking about there is Ghislian Maxwell.
But I'd like to see Gillian, if she give her testimony, right?
And that's Asmund Gold, Matt.
That's Asmund Gold, the Roach King there.
So he's imagining this fantasy world where Donald Trump is kind of revealing all the secrets of the elite.
The paedophiles are all being called out and they're being immediately Saddam Hussein style, Matt.
You know, Saddam Hussein style.
That would be, that would be keynote.
That would be so fire.
And what content?
Imagine streaming reactions to that.
Like.
Oh.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, that does go to my point.
Most popular streamer in the world, hey, most popular political streamer.
Yeah.
Well, well, look, though, the thing is, the issue here for me, apart from how stupid the opinion there is, though, but like in recent weeks, what's been coming out, and to be fair, Asmund Gould has like mentioned this in his coverage of the topic and whatnot, but like it isn't that other people are all going to be, you know, found out to have connections with Epstein.
What keeps coming out is that Trump himself has various connections, right?
So it'll be his name that is read out.
So what would he do with the man locking the doors?
Actually, Chris, Chris, no, that would be great content because let's imagine it was all staged like the way he describes it.
Trump is presiding over it because Lane, what's the name?
Gillian.
Gillian, Gillian.
Gillian is up there.
She's on the stage.
Gillian.
Okay, whatever.
People should just have names that are spelt the way they sound.
That's what I strongly believe.
Like Kavanaugh.
Everything else is covered.
Everything else is pretentious.
Okay.
Now, so everyone's there.
All of the representatives are there sweating, you know, because their connections, they're going to be found out.
They're going to be found out.
Trump's presiding over it, gloating.
And she reads out Trump's name.
And the police come in and drag him away.
He's like, we're not.
No, no.
Well, that's great content, Chris.
What great content.
Well, sadly, for the content kings, what I predicted to come to pass, Matt, was that Gillian Maxwell would use this new round of attention that the Epstein controversy is ginning up to try and get herself some sort of deal, right, to lessen her sentence.
So what's happened?
Well, it's unclear.
She went and talked to Trump administrative officials behind closed doors for two days.
And then she was transferred to minimum security prison.
Something which is not supposed to happen for sex offenders.
Now, to be clear, though, Matt, there hasn't been like reasons directly explained, but it is possible, as some people have described, that by her testifying that she was going to provide all these names and whatnot, and she's already a sex offender for underage girls, right, in a prison, that this likely isn't going to endear yourself to the other people in the prison.
So there may have been credible threats to her life or whatever, right, at our current circumstance.
But my concern about a lot of all this attention was that what seems likely to me to happen is that she will provide some indemnifying information that lets, you know, Trump and co appear like, oh, we weren't really involved.
But actually, it's Bill Clinton and, you know, all the liberal documents.
Like, it doesn't have to be anything definite.
It could just be a bit vague, but it would still work.
Yeah, no, that's the first thought that occurred to me.
Like, let's assume the default, that the default reality is true, right?
That it was mainly just the guy.
Her and Jeffrey Epstein.
Yeah, Jeff Stevens.
Well, it was her as well.
Yeah, that's her as well.
And but, but maybe no other important and powerful people are implicated, right?
Let's assume that's the case.
Well, no, but there are other the baseline case is that there are other people involved, but they've also Prince Andrew and so on.
So there's a couple other people that I know.
I know.
I know there's a couple of other people.
That's right.
The French guy.
I know.
All right.
Yes.
Yeah.
Okay.
Other people that we don't know about that all the theories are swirling around about.
Okay.
If you were her, then it's like you've suddenly been handed a gift because you've suddenly got a huge amount of bargaining power to cut a deal.
Like you say, you know, you can cut a deal, make a statement, and it'll put some things to rest, maybe put attention in another direction.
It doesn't have to be anything specific.
It could just, but it could work very well.
And, you know, Trump has pardoned heaps of people.
You know, him or someone else would very happily make that deal, I think.
So.
Yeah.
And again, this is another example of like, you know, I've seen commentary around it as well, Matt, where there are people that are highlighting her as a guilty party.
But, you know, one of the talking points of what's going around is like, who she imprisoned for trafficking the girls too.
She's convicted for trafficking to no one.
Like, but she was convicted for trafficking to Jeffrey Epstein, right?
That's, that's the person.
But so there are many people in the conspiracy web who are kind of like, you know, she's not important because who is she beyond the madame for Jeffrey?
What's really important is this network behind it, right?
The connections to intelligence.
That's the more important conspiracy.
So some of them will care if she gets, you know, pardoned or some sort of deal to reduce her sentence or whatever the case would be.
But most of them could be easily bought off.
And this is what I also said, that people talking as if this will absolutely take Trump down.
It's very easy for conspiracy theorists to be co-opted into narratives as long as you give them the right targets.
Like Alex Jones is a conspiracy theorist, right?
But he's not interested in Russian connections to the Trump administration or anything like that.
It's only a specific type of conspiracy that he's interested in because he's a extreme right-wing figure, right?
So yeah, that's all true.
Joy, joy.
Speaking of stuff swirling around the White House, did you see about how Vinay Prasad?
Oh, yes, I did want to mention that.
Yeah, it couldn't happen to be a nicer guy.
Vinay Prasad got, well, he resigned, but I believe it was due to like a pressure campaign launched against them.
And basically, he was claimed by the MAGA conspiratorial wing to be like a left-wing anti-Trump insider that was going to work against the reforms necessary.
And given Vinay's whole essence, his whole being throughout the pandemic was to promote himself to get into that reactionary anti-vaccine Barry Weiss space.
And he finally, Matt, after months, he was out of position in the regime.
And for him to be undone by conspiracy theorists, Chef's case.
I hate them too.
No, no, they're awful.
It was Laura Luma.
Is it her?
She took him down.
I know.
And that's what that's what makes it just so amazing.
Because I think in many ways, Vinay Prussad is doing what a character like Eric Weinstein sort of always intended to do, which is to basically be the very reasonable sounding guy who says and does exactly what the powerful people want.
And he gets a seat at the table.
He gets to come in and he gets the positions and the rewards.
And Vinay Proustadt is like, you know, these people are like apparatchiks, ambitious apparatchiks, right?
Who will absolutely say and do anything in order to advance themselves?
That's how I personally viewed Vinay Prusad and his anti-vax stuff.
Like Eric Weinstein, he would talk in double talk.
Like he's not a true believer like Brett Weinstein or RFK.
He's someone who was ambitious, right?
Yeah, yeah.
I think it's mostly about like him promoting himself.
And I think he got sold on his own narratives in general, right?
So like, you know, it's that eternal paradox of how much are they a true believer versus how much are they pandering?
And they come to believe it.
He cares.
Yeah.
It's in both.
But Matt, speaking, you raised the specter of old Eric.
And I just have to say today, in fact, he's currently also facing this that, you know, Eric wrote an article a good long time ago and migration for the benefit of all towards a new paradigm for economic immigration.
This was in, I think, 2002 was when it was published.
Anyway, you know, like 20 years ago or whatever.
But the conspiratorial right have come across it.
And even though Eric, as he's appearing to point out now on Twitter, has been accused of being xenophobic, right?
Because like, you know, he was opposed to H-1B visas and all this kind of thing.
So I believe Eric describes himself as like a xenophilic anti-immigration something or other.
Like he, he has a very bespoke position on it, right?
You wouldn't understand that.
But anyway, he was facing somebody saying Eric Weinstein is the mastermind of mass migration on behalf of the UN.
They're flagging him as responsible for the drift reset.
And he's currently on Twitter battling it out saying you're falling for the Wall Street Journal's trope, but it couldn't happen to a nicer guy, right?
No, it could not.
And Chris, you might think this is a long bow to draw, but that dynamic where in a movement like MAGA, it is this like crazy, ideologically driven thing.
And you have this mixture of ambitious apparatchiks like Vinay Prasad and Eric Weinstein.
And then you have the absolute goggle-eyed fanatic loons, right?
However radical the movement is, they are beyond the pale.
So Marjorie Taylor Green and Laura Luma are in that category, right?
Yeah, but even they can be not pure enough for some other like maniacs.
Sure, sure.
There's a long tail on that spectrum.
But it does remind me of what happens in authoritarian regimes, right?
Because you have similar types of dynamics.
You have a similar mix of, what's the word, very mercenary, very cynical type people who sort of don't believe in anything and are on ball with it.
Apparatchiks, basically.
And then you have this sort of revolutionary fervor and complete maniacs, right?
And because of the internal logic of the movement is so mental, they can sometimes take each other down.
It reminds me of the Cultural Revolution in China, actually.
Again, long bow to draw, I know, but I just, I think the general theme is that, yeah, you have, you have that conflict.
Isn't that a bit like Anne Applebaum's topic where she's talked about the intellectuals who, you know, they actually can be opposed to the regime, right?
And like the kind of people that would be potential targets for the regime or who have written stuff critically, but they all come to be co-opted.
And those people can, in some cases, become the most stalwart defenders, right?
So she's talking about, you know, other dynamics, but I think that speaks to that fluid thing where you have the true believers, you have the people that are like mercenary, but then they themselves might end up like actually being, you know, the most severe ideologues.
Well, I see it more as like you have these cynical opportunists like Applebaum talks about, right, that insinuate themselves into these regimes because they're just attracted to self-advancement and power, right?
Yeah, being at the top and they have no principles and will happily go along with stuff.
But the problem is the thing that they're insinuating themselves into is a fundamentally pretty insane movement.
And there are conspiratorial or just demented ultra-ideological fanatics who are continually like, they're on the lookout for people that don't smell right, don't seem to be fully committed.
And yeah, Viv Column, that kind of stuff.
So that can be their undoing.
So, yeah, I don't know.
It's just a pattern.
I mean, I think the phenomena differs from time to time and situation to situation.
But I guess the takeaway is if you have so little principles and you're willing to eject yourself into a movement that is fundamentally broken in terms of its internal logic and coherence and ethical kind of principles, then anything goes.
So you're playing with fire all the time.
Even, you know, Donald Trump at times has fallen afoul of his own movement, right?
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, he currently is with the Epstein.
Yeah, that's a good example.
Yeah.
And he fell into it too with not hitting the right note on vaccines because it failed.
Initially, yeah, just because at the time he'd failed to judge how far gone the fire that he'd set had burned, you know?
So yes, this is what happens when you play with crazy.
So the theme of the supplementary materials might be the inanity of the online discourse here and the fluidity of the various commentators and pundits that, you know, orbit around power centers, especially political power centers.
But speaking of that, you know, the Young Turks, right?
A kind of progressive leftist outlet, also notably the outlet that provided us with Dave Rubin originally, right?
They do have this problem that the people tend to splinter off and end up denouncing them, right?
As well, there's more than Dave Rubin.
And sometimes they splinter into like the farler left And sometimes to the Dave Rubin right.
Now, they also, both of them, Chen Cougar and Anna Kasparian, have been on something of a right-wing arc, or at the very least, you could say it, that they are making efforts to appeal to the MAGA right to say, you know, we understand your frustration with the Democrats.
We share them, blah, blah, blah.
But I saw two signals of this recently, Matt, how bad it's gotten out there.
And one was just two days ago, the Young Turks, the conversation.
Scott Adams reflects on life after his terminal cancer diagnosis.
And this is the Young Turks hosting Scott Adams for friendly chats.
And a lot of the comments under it are, you know, absolutely love Scott Adams and his intellect.
Love his show.
I'm glad he'll be with us for a bit longer.
Hope he cured comes through.
Thank you for the interview.
Scott Adams was 100% right with his earlier statements.
There's no point in trying to help people who hit you.
Absolutely loving the young Turks.
It's reaching out to the opposite side much more.
It really shows we are all human, but with different life experiences and in turn, different thoughts and beliefs.
So I just want to say here, Matt, that, you know, if you were reaching out, you don't have to reach out to Scott Adams as a representative of the right.
Like, yeah, oh, I'm sorry, Scott Adams has got cancer as well.
It doesn't make him any less of an appalling person and like an absolute sneak politically, right?
He's been continuing on this.
So the fact that the young Turks are like, let's reach out to Scott Adams.
Let's have a nice chat with him and sit down.
It speaks to their trajectory.
And I'm just going to play a clip of Anna Kasparian, who recently appeared with Tucker Carlson.
So here's her talking with Tucker.
Your producers had been reaching out, trying to get me to talk to you for at least a year and a half.
And my feelings toward coming on your show went from I would never in a million years to kind of giving myself the opportunity to listen to your podcast to figure out who you really are.
Because of course, I had very strong thoughts about who you are.
Really?
Yeah, but I realized that it was based on clips that I would watch of you that had gone viral and they had gone viral because they were offensive or you had said something that was viral like syphilis is viral.
I mean, pretty much.
I mean, you should think of it that way, because it was mostly painting you in a very negative light.
And to be sure, you and I have some pretty deep disagreements, but I think that some of what you've been talking about lately like hits at the heart of what I care most about.
And that's the importance of this country representing the American people, the importance of the United States being a sovereign country that has politicians and a government that prioritizes the American people as opposed to a foreign government.
And speaking out the way you've been speaking out about some of these issues takes a lot of courage because it goes against the grain and it goes against, I mean, decades of propaganda and conditioning in American media.
It's the Jews again, Matt.
It's the Jews.
It's the fucking Jews.
Like, I swear to God.
So, yeah, I mean, like, I've been saying a lot, but I don't think people appreciate how the horseshoe is real.
And the distance between populist, supposedly left-wing stuff and populist, supposedly right-wing stuff is, you know, it's just not a big jump for them.
Not a big jump at all.
And yeah, the Young Turks haven't been good for a long time, I don't think.
And I've never, I guess I've never really liked that brand of commentary, but they're just going all in really now, aren't they?
Reaching out to Tucker Carlson and we've got so much in common.
So we basically nationalism, right?
Popular nationalism, sovereignty.
Yeah, populism.
That's it.
And, you know, in this case, it links to condemnation of Israel, right, for the way that they're waging the war.
But like, Matt, I'm perfectly happy to condemn like Israel's destructive, anti-humanitarian behavior in Gaza, the very well-documented abuses that are occurring there.
And that a lot of people are commenting on.
It's never made me be like, well, actually, Tucker Carlson, he's been a great voice on this.
And he's definitely somebody that we need to listen to.
You know, what people want to highlight there is like him going at Ted Cruz and saying, you know, you get money, right, Senator?
Like, why are you cooing up to Israel?
But that's the anti-Semitic right.
Like the reason he's doing that is because of that long-standing thing on the right towards like the Jews controlling everything.
Tucker Carlson does not have a concern for human rights abuses in other countries, international sorts of things.
That's not his motivation here.
Yeah.
So like we say, just, you know, it looks like these young Turks is a very good engine for producing like thunderheads, thunderheads that eventually come out to find that, you know, the populist right, they're actually not that bad after all.
Maybe they misjudged them from just clips.
So like the final part of that horseshoe evolution for the current host will be when Anna Kasparian goes on Dave Rubin and they come together and recognize that actually, you know, they largely agree and Anna was wrong about Dave.
And I think that will happen.
And of course, they'll do the usual thing that our gurus always do, which is they avoid the topics that are tricky and like the crazy nonsense, really far-right nonsense that Tucker Carlson constantly spews.
I bet that wasn't brought up in that interview with Anna, was it?
Rather, it was a focus on the stuff that brings them together.
Yeah.
What was the list of things that she really admired about him?
There was a concern for national sovereignty.
Yeah, his willingness to speak out against the mainstream narratives.
Yeah, that's right.
The conspiratorial stuff, right?
Because we've all been mind controlled by the mainstream media.
Yeah, you know, like, yeah, and the Jews.
But, you know, that's because it's kind of vague gestural stuff.
But that's the stuff that's so easily like, you and I get a lot of stick for criticizing certain, we mainly criticize figures on the right, but we occasionally criticize figures on the left when they are obviously doing lazy, dunderheaded populism.
And one reason why is exactly this.
It's because this is such a small step from a fictitious claim that the billionaire fat cats are eating our children to the Jews are eating our children or they're they're making it and rigging society.
It's a big conspiracy and that's why we can't get a job to immigrants are taking their jobs and they're rigging society to replace us all through like, you know, one of them might be left coded and the other one might be right-coded, but they're fundamentally the most important characteristic is that they're stupid and they're not true.
And it's very easy once they get peeled into that kind of thinking.
Like if you think that horseshoe is so different, you think it's okay to be on the on the far left end of it and you think it's terrible to be on the far right and part of it then?
Be aware that it's a very short jump for people to hop over from one to the other.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, actually, that's a nice segue, Matt, to some of the last tips I have for you this week.
It concerns a fellow called Jimmy the Giant.
Okay, this is another YouTuber.
I'm sorry.
I'm sorry.
It's another person.
And it's a person making currently kind of YouTube essays on various topics.
I think he probably came to attention in the culture war space mostly when about nine months ago, he did a video called How I Escaped the Alt-Right Pipeline.
The thumbnail is him with Nigel Farage and Jordan Peterson behind him laughing and he's looking, you know, confused at the front, right?
So he did a video talking about how he basically accepted a lot of the populist right-wing conspiratorial stuff that was going around.
But then he'd come to question it.
And now he's doing things like appearing on Gary's economics channel.
You might have heard of that, talking about immigration, the out-right, the left, and young man.
Gary meets Jimmy the Giant, and actually being accused in some respects of now completely switching to the opposite side, leaning into farther left political online stuff, kind of breadthru-type analysis, right?
So this is Jimmy the Giant.
Now, one of the things that happened with Jimmy the Giant recently is that he went on trigonometry to have a debate with Constantine Kissen.
And this is because he made a video called The Rise of the Middle Class Grifter, which had Constantine prominently play a feature thumbnail.
Yeah, featured in the thumbnail.
I proved so far.
Yes, so do I. He was right.
But however, he went on trigonometry to debate it with Constantine.
It didn't go that well for him.
And so maybe the first thing to do is just let you hear the context of that discussion because I think it shows like, you know, stuff about Constantine and also some of the way that Jimmy the Giant approached it.
By the way, real name, not Jimmy.
Kieran Owen is his real name.
So this is Constantine, what I would describe as setting the trap in this discussion.
So this is at the beginning of that podcast, okay?
I was going to say welcome to trigonometry, but it's just me this time.
And the reason it's just me is you made a video called The Rise of the Middle Class Grifter, in which I feature quite prominently.
Yeah, I can't remember which face you were.
You weren't the front.
That was my face.
No, Douglas was the front.
Right.
And then I was, I think, I'm to the left of Douglas, which is accurate.
So I wanted to have you on to talk about it because you said some things in that that I wanted to explore.
But first, most people watching this from our audience won't be familiar with you.
So tell me a little bit about you.
You're on YouTube.
You're called Jimmy the Giant.
You've got you're approaching 700,000 subscribers, which is great.
So tell me about how that channel came about, what you've been doing.
Yeah, it was kind of like firstly, thank you for having me on.
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