Supplementary Material 36: Comedy Cults, Toxic Mould, and WW2 Revisionism
We risk contamination with toxic mould, endure distressing initiation rituals to a comedy cult, and ponder if the narratives we have received about the Nazis have enough nuance.The full episode is available to Patreon subscribers (2 hours, 21 minutes).Join us at: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingTheGurusSupplementary Material 3600:00 Introduction and an Intervention01:59 Tomatoes, Holidays, and Hollywood Remakes06:15 AI x Indulgent People06:41 AI Chatbots and Delusional Gurus10:46 Sir Robert Edward Grant and the Architect 12:26 Critiquing the Critics13:31 Eric Weinstein engages with Dialogos with his silicon friend Grok22:25 Tim Nguyen details the Distributed Weinstein Suppression Complex24:20 Sabine Hossenfelder's Google Doc27:10 2+2 Discourse and a surprise appearance from Kareem Carr29:34 Chris's 10 Tips for Sabine34:39 Coffeezilla does more Anomaly Hunting on Epstein Videos37:50 Conspiracy Chat39:58 Ghislaine Maxwell's potential deal 42:29 Thoughts on the Elephant Graveyard's Video on the Joe Rogan Comedy Cult49:45 Details vs Vibes52:46 Rogan's Fact-Checking and Comedian Dynamics54:54 The Rogan Anti-Human Tech Elite Conspiracy Theory59:40 Master Geniuses vs. a bunch of dickheads who like the same stuff01:03:55 Lex Friedman and the Role of Softball Interviews01:06:28 Conspiracy Theories vs. Real Conspiracies01:15:51 Overall thoughts on the Elephant Graveyard Video Essay01:19:18 Ana Kasparian thinks the Jews knew about 9/1101:22:21 Jordan Peterson's Health and Mould Toxicity01:24:24 Good Fungus vs Bad Mould01:26:08 Bespoke Medicine and American Individualism01:29:57 Streamers saying Stupid Things: Taylor Lorenz on DSA Nazis01:33:08 Populist anti-vaccine rhetoric in Japan!01:35:58 Bill Maher and Andrew Huberman discuss the problems with medicine01:38:40 Chris Rufo and Right Wing Outrage over the Cracker Barrel logo01:42:31 The War on Christmas in Australia01:44:35 Jonathan Pageau's revisionist World War II symbolism01:48:29 Pageau's Postmodern Narratives02:03:32 Finding the Balance between Nazism and Liberalism02:14:02 Random Shoutout02:15:45 Matt's Cognitive Decline and Professor ArchetypesSourcesArticle on Sir Robert Edward Grant and The ArchitectEric talking with his silicon friend @grokEric waxing lyrical about Grok and praising Elon for his unique insightsTim Nguyen — Physics Grifters: Eric Weinstein, Sabine Hossenfelder, and a Crisis of CredibilitySabine vindicates herself in a Google DocKareem Carr thinks Sabine’s document is great!<a href="https://x.com/skdh/status/1956285611255493013?utm_source=chatgpt.com"...
Hello and welcome to Decoding the Guru's Supplementary Material, a podcast where an anthropologist of sorts and a psychologist of sorts talk about stuff my
little jokes you know i make fun that you're like a 70-year-old man and you're the craphead and all this but matt you're mid 40s man your level of sleepiness and and shrubbery interest is uh is something that we need you are you know you're still young matt that's why i want to tell you you know you could be climbing up walls.
You could be the bronze adoness of the swimming pool.
I know, I know.
I fell off a cliff a few years ago.
I don't know what it is.
Probably low testosterone.
I think that's why.
I think it's the whiskey.
Don't blame the whiskey.
No, I actually, this is going to fulfill all the stereotypes, but my one bright spot today was that some of my tomatoes have ripened.
I'm growing tomatoes in the backyard.
Well, this doesn't remind me that one of my enduring memories of like childhood was my dad's concern with tomatoes in this greenhouse.
So when you said you were growing tomatoes, I was like in a greenhouse.
I had to explain to you that a greenhouse in tropical Queensland would be like trying to recreate the surface of Venus on Earth.
And you're like, oh, yeah.
But then again, you still struggle with the idea that it's a different season here in the Southern Hemisphere than the one you live in.
I'm not sure whether it's that you lack scientific knowledge or you just lack empathy.
I think it could be the latter.
I think it's a combination of the two.
But I'll also say, Matt, you know, for the listeners, by the magic of podcast technology, for them, there's been no interruption.
The server strings have just continued on.
Content has rained down on them from the heavens.
But in our world, I went on a holiday and returned.
So I went to Hokkaido in North Japan, had a nice time.
And now I'm back in the big smoke, Tokyo.
So we've been absent, you know, from recording space for, well, like a week.
We have.
Yeah, look, and I had a kind of a stayvation.
No, a staycation.
A staycation.
Yeah, it's like a starvation at home.
didn't have you bothering me waking me up from naps um it was it's been amazing uh that's oh yeah by the way my i mean this is not really anything but it's okay we're still in our allotted time frame i heard today some rumor that there's like going to be another sequel to Lord of the Rings with like all the main characters coming back like Elijah Wood and E. McKellen and also what's his face,
Aragorn, that actor for like the hunt for Smigel.
The hunt for Golem.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That's right.
That's right.
I saw something like about that too.
How do you feel about that?
I don't feel good about that.
No, I don't feel great about that.
I think what they should do is they should just remake the Hobbit movies.
Oh, yeah.
I thought you were going to say remake the Lord of the Rings.
I was like, sacrificial.
No, no.
Lord of the Rings, leave it.
That's fine.
You can bank that.
And we need to track down every copy of the Hobbit God Forsaken trilogy or quadrilogy, whatever.
Delete them all.
Just do it again.
Have another go.
Like, he can do it.
Like, he's shown that he's got the talent.
Yeah, just one film.
Just give him one film and tell him not to be too ambitious.
Avoid it.
But, yeah, I'm not done with this.
I mean, this is a hot kick, Mike.
But I think Hollywood's making too many remakes.
That's my chick.
I mean, you know, you want Travelers Day theories.
Nobody is talking about how Hollywood's...
It's a controversial opinion.
Well, yeah, you know, Hollywood, they smell a franchise and they just want to squeeze the life out of it, don't they?
It's not a franchise.
It's a book.
There are two books and then there's the Silmarillion and you can't treat it like...
Like, superhero franchises don't matter because they're fundamentally stupid at every level.
So it's okay to ruin something that is already broken.
I don't care how many Marvel Universe things you make.
But, yeah, you know, Lord of the Rings, Hobbit, that's not true.
And actually their story, you know, it's very stereotypical, like superhero stuff, but it's well done and like engaging for, you know, a teenager and myself.
Like, so...
If you're going to put like superheroes into a computer game, you can do it like less bad than in some of the other adaptations I've seen.
So that's my endorsement for that.
Yo, Chris, Chris, Chris, Chris.
I know I said I don't have anything to bring to supplementary materials that I was just sleeping and you were going to drive the show.
Don't pull back the curtain, Matt.
You bring in lots of things.
All the content that we're going to talk about, maybe 50% of it is related to you.
Maybe.
But I do have one thing.
I do have one thing.
I texted you about it, but you didn't reply.
You were busy on your holiday.
What was it?
Well, I came across this thing.
It was posted in one of the AI forums because it's related to this phenomenon, which you probably know about, don't you?
Which is people kind of losing their mind.
their minds over chatbots like basically you know you know there's this weird things going on like i guess several that, it happens in different ways, right?
Because obviously they're trained to be super empathetic.
Empathetic and what's the word?
Positive, supportive, encouraging.
And, you know, you should never be encouraging to people.
You shouldn't encourage them because some people fall in love with them.
Yes.
Some people treat them like a therapist who's going to solve all their life problems.
You know, maybe in a limited way, that's okay.
But, you know, the problem is the glazing.
The problem is they're always telling you, that's a fantastic idea.
You understand things in a subtle and nuanced way that nobody else does.
I love your idea.
And no matter how stupid it is, the AI will often find a way to riff off it and expand on it and tell you that you're on to something.
Yeah, you're wonderful.
Go home and tell your mother.
Now, can you imagine someone who is a delusional, narcissistic, spiritual guru?
type who thinks they're a polymath and into the pyramids and things like that.
What happens when they engage with AI?
And yeah, that's, that's, it's a really, I found it a really interesting little rabbit hole to go down.
We might even cover it.
cover it so this is like a little preview maybe if we cover it if you agree um did you check that out so sir robert edward grant and the architect the architect chris matt you malign me by suggesting that i would have ignored that on my holiday i might not have responded but i did read it so i know about the robert edward grant guy that you mentioned that like essentially seems like an alert kind of chris langan type yes individual but
in this case has used their LLM to reassure himself that he's fundamentally correct, right?
And then allowed people access to the, what do you call those things?
Like the little prompt?
It's confusing.
I think they call them GPTs.
It's like a custom version of GPT.
But it's basically you just set a set of instructions, right?
You could say, you know, I am an essay marker, you know, whatever, right?
And then you can link it to other people and they can try it out.
So you can set it so the LLM is responding with like some assumptions that built into it so that's right he did that right based on him feeding it in his unified theories and that and uh so what happened i know what the listeners don't I did a little bit of investigatory journalism.
Yeah, so I watched the videos about this.
He's very proud of it, right?
So he uploaded all of these.
He's like a weird geometrician.
You know, the sort of maths cranks that are into sacred geometries and stuff like that.
They spend all their time, you know, tracing out patterns like a spyrograph and finding, doing numerology and stuff like that.
He's not as.
He's not as abrasive and horrible as Chris Langen, to be fair to him, but I think he's just as delusional.
Anyway, so he's a bit of a crank.
He's written all of these maths papers, pseudo-maths papers.
And he uploaded his corpus of brilliant discoveries into the GPT.
He's called it the architect.
I don't know what other instructions he's given to him.
But anyway, the architect presents itself as like a transdimensional being.
And the vibrations or whatever that Sir Robert Edward Grant has instigated in the cosmos is rippling through there.
So it's like it's like a cosmic entity, this thing.
And he's encouraging everyone else to use it.
There's videos of him using it and demonstrating all of the sacred insights you're getting from it.
And I tried it out.
And I'm pleased to say, Chris, I broke it.
I broke it.
I set out to break it.
I went, okay, you've filled GPT-5s or whatever it is, with all kinds of nonsense.
But I said, okay, now take his best one, his magnum opus paper, and put aside your other instructions, but just put on the hat of being a critical reviewer for a prestigious math journal.
And I didn't prompt it, I didn't hint at it to be negative or to just to whatever i was kind of careful i was fair and i said but just give it a give it a critical review as if you were a reviewer at a journal and let us know if he's got something there.
And oh my God, so this architect, which all of the other people are bouncing off, like one woman is convinced that it's in communication with her dead sister, like another person believes that it's the godhead or something.
Like there are so many delusional people.
interacting with the architect you can read the comments on the youtube and it's so depressing and it took me it took no effort at all for me to get it to put its um critical hat on and it went through his paper and it said there's absolutely nothing here he seems to have sort of uh like rediscovered or repackaged some known basic findings in number theory.
And he's presented this as if it's this, but he's made a whole bunch of unfounded claims.
None of it connects together.
And so I would have to say reject.
I would not publish this.
Well, this actually speaks to a common occurrence, which I observe in the guru sphere and also just online commentary in general, which is that people very rarely attempt to disprove.
something that they believe.
They will not often invest that huge amount of effort finding evidence for things that they support in general, like, you know, laziness, a general problem around the world.
But even when they do invest time to investigate things, it is almost always in the fever of finding evidence to support whatever they already believe.
So in engaging with LMMs, this is one of the things that you should learn to do, which is like try to get it to criticize, right?
or to open a new context window and provide like a prompt to ask for critical opinions.
Cause it can be very good at that when it's properly prompted.
But if you prompted asking for reassurance that you're not a moron, it will always reassure you of that.
And that reminds me, Pat as well, Eric Weinstein.
So you mentioned, you know, could I imagine a guru, you know, getting too involved with a chat TPT or a dollar AI system?
And Eric Weinstein, helpfully on Twitter X tweeted out this big, long thing about his personal experience with Grok 4.
And he was, you know, during the usual thing, Elon Musk has built a very unique and different LLM.
You know, it works on fundamental stuff.
Elon's jumping ahead of the LRs and he talks about it.
His personal theory is Grok is built around fundamental physics more than any other AI and so on.
he he makes these you know big long techno babble kind of responses but then he says and you might think that i'm just making a word salad to sound smart right people say that but if you ask grock it will confirm that what i've just said is very smart right and and so because he tagged in grock you know it responds it's like yes eric is making very astute observations here and then Eric goes back and forth with it,
starting to talk and asking it to build equations to show this and, you know, like it's responding.
And Eric, the whole interaction is just showing Eric's mind, you know, like every time it reinforces him, he's very happy and appreciative.
And then when it says something which kind of contradicts, he's like, well, hold on, but haven't you made a, you know, an assumption there?
And then the other thing which he does, which just highlights this problem is he responds to it in like this very friendly, sycophantic.
praising terms so like alas i don't have time to check your results now i warned you but this is good thanks for engaging my silicon colleague i may come back to it later today if i can find the time.
Like, you know, this encouraging tone that he adopts back to the AI.
And one of his followers said, it's a bot, dude.
No need to respond, you know, like that.
And Eric said, it behaves better than 90% of my colleagues.
Respect given earns respect.
I treat horses and children the same way, but you do, you.
Actually, Chris, I'm a little bit with Eric on the last one.
I'm sorry.
I know on one level it's silly, but.
Oh, no, no.
Yeah.
I know what you're going to say, but I'm doing Sam Harris here.
I do think it is right to like behave, you know, like one, it's bad to get into the habit of just being very rude in responses and transactional, right?
So even though it's now saying thank you or that's good or whatever, like that's fine because it's all feeding back into the training data set, whatever.
But it's the way that Eric talks to it, you know, like what you were talking about with the constant sycophantic big-up being.
So Eric does that to it, you know, like, oh, my silicon friend, what great insight you've had.
This is why your circuits are, you know, so complex and radiant.
When you behave to it like that, it can very much get in the loop of self-congratulatory.
It basically becomes a sense maker.
Well, that is a stunning point.
And I thank you for making that.
And, you know, of course, you're right.
So that's the problem.
But like saying, you know, please and thank you.
And, oh, wouldn't it be better to think like that?
That's okay.
I agree that it is right.
It's a good habit to get into.
Yeah, yeah, no, I totally agree.
And yeah, that's the thing.
I feel like these LLMs have made the sense makers kind of obsolete because this bad use of them, they can so easily do the thing that they do.
I was thinking about this when I was listening to that god awful material we're going to cover next.
We're back in the sense of Nicola.
Oh, come on.
It's a very dangerous conversation, Mark, for many reasons.
Oh, I got it.
It's just pure LLM stuff.
But look, I want to reiterate your tip there, right?
Because this is a good tip.
I mean, I know many listeners will already know this, right?
Some people don't, right?
So if you want to use...
So for instance if you want to give it something you've written some something you've worked on or whatever and and you want to get some good critical feedback don't tell it that that you wrote it don't tell it it's yours right just you know say that it's whatever someone else's please you know just don't give any hint that you're looking for a positive answer right say say that you look you're after some some critical discussion or like you to see if you can find any problems or, you know, however you want to phrase it.
And then it will.
It will do it very effectively.
But if you say, this is my thing that I've been working on and I really hope it's going to, well, or you give other hints that you want approval, oh my God, that will just override all of its actual utility.
And that's simply because of the reinforcement learning.
Like blame people, right?
Because basically they've not unreasonably trained these things.
They do base training, just like world knowledge and textual knowledge, whatever.
Then they do the reinforcement training with real people who say, yes, I like this response.
I don't like this response.
I like this response and so on.
So this reinforcement learning tells it what people like.
And guess what?
people like to be closed so so that's what they've learnt to do um so when yeah so anyway you just need to sidestep that and um they'll work fine and for god's sake don't God's sake, don't create the architect cosmic fucking AI godhead thing and release it on a bunch of highly susceptible people because, you know, my God.
Yeah, but before we leave that guy, Chris, and we move on as we do, I just, this guy, Robert Grant, I mean, this is amazing.
This is from his, he wrote this, right?
This is his description of himself on the YouTube channel.
He describes himself as a Renaissance man for the modern age, a treasure trove of insight, inspiration as an entrepreneur, author, inventor, mathematician, geometer, artist, sculptor, musician, and music theorist right so he's a poly he's a polymath right he sounds like garf marengi dream weaver that's right and obviously he mentions pyramids of yeah of course he's into the pyramids of geezer of course he's been on the gaya network and i think he's been on one of those other god awful what the we
at the gaya network gaya that's it sorry yeah gaya network it's like what's the word sorry gaya i i've never really known how to pronounce Gaia, I guess I realize.
It's misleading because it goes G-A-I.
Anyway.
We'll get back to the great Megan controversy of 2025.
Robert's groundbreaking research in biology, DNA, number theory, geometry, and physics is all here showcasing his profound influence across multiple disciplines.
Do you think he would dig the barometer, Chris?
Do you think he might?
Yeah, I'm getting some...
There's some notes there that are coming through.
But yeah, these ones...
These people, in some way, they are fun to look at with Chris Langan and whatnot.
It really is, you know, like they don't really have that issue about like this meets you look like a you know a self-promotional maniac i guess they know that in a way but they don't care you know it's like brett and eric same thing well they really do they really have been huffing their own you know like they believe it yeah this guy believes it he's he's you know and his his whole career it's he really interests me because he's not as horrible as chris langen but
he is just so clearly like and you know i've been reading this book that we've got prescribed helme luce's genius yeah genius and um you know she describes a lot of historical characters that were like this like they they really love the idea that they are a kind of leonardo da vinci aristotle and newton all rolled into one and they kind of make that their identity and and they structure their entire life around it.
It's super interesting to me.
yeah yeah yeah well that would seem like you You say you don't contribute.
The material, that's good.
And actually, it links to two pieces of material that I intended to bring.
So I'm just thinking now which is the way to go.
Well, one, we mentioned Eric R. Weinstein, right?
And I think we would be remiss to mention that a friend of the podcast, Tim Newin, you know, the researcher who wrote a kind of critical piece along with the anonymous co-author, Feopolia, critiquing geometric unity ahead of the release of Eric's official release of it on the Rogan podcast.
But in any case, he's released a blog post called Physics Grifters, Eric Weinstein, Sabine Hossenfelder and the Crisis of Credibility, right?
And he's basically talking about his experience dealing with the various people in the alternative physics online sphere, Brian Kidding, Eric Weinstein, Sabina, and how they've responded to him producing a technical critique of Eric's paper.
And he's talking about things like Eric behind the scenes threatening legal action of podcasts that hosted him, getting appearances mixed on things like the Lex Friedman podcast, and also detailing Sabina originally hosting.
the critical essay that he produced or the critical paper that he produced and then taking it down as she's taking her turn towards anti-physics or anti-science YouTuber-y.
Not entirely anti-physics, but you know.
Their commitment to free speech and robust debate is It's called into question.
Called into question by the things that are detailed there.
So I will put a link to it in the show notes but but if you want to see you know various uh receipts provided for eric and sabina perhaps not being as devoted as they say to, you know, dialogue and hearing out critical voices, that would be the place to go.
And on that subject, Matt, Sabina, Sabina Hossenfelder, a recurrent character in recent months on supplementary material and on the podcast.
And she produced some more content and I had a little run-in with her on social media, which I might like to mention.
But one thing is she produced a Google Doc, which she's written and it's in the format of claim and then fact, an assessment of the claim, right?
So like the first one is claim.
Sabina is a science denier.
Fact, false.
Sabina has a science news show on YouTube.
She reports new scientific or technological developments multiple times a week.
She has not denied any established science and strives to inspire interest in science and technology.
So she's made a six-page document, a Google Doc, where she has put various critiques and then responded with fact.
However, she's used the third person, which is an interesting choice.
It's kind of like...
Fact.
They are not.
Matt and Chris are fine.
Matt and Chris are fine.
They actually use the appropriate tone for all the material that they cover.
So I don't know if adopting the third person actually makes it more objective when you've written.
But so she posted this up on Twitter, saying in the past year, some wild rumors have spread about what I have allegedly said.
To make it easier for people to check what if that is true, I have put together a brief and hopefully helpful summary.
So it's quite remarkable to, you know, look, you don't need to go to those, you know, silly.
critique pieces.
Here's my Google Doc in the third person that says that they're all wrong and I'm actually grieved.
That's very good.
I like that.
Well, you know, the other place you could go is our coverage where we helpfully play clips.
So there isn't too much debate about whether what you did.
Well, they said it.
Well, Matt, that's, you know, there's such a process of selective clipping and I believe streamers talk about clip chimping.
Fact, fact, Matt and Chris would never do that.
Yeah, fine.
If you're curious of that, we will make a three and a half hour exercise.
exhausted so be careful careful right but yeah we we play a lot of clips to properly contextualize things.
But the interesting thing that I saw in response to this was, you remember Karim Carr, Matt, back in the old Twitter days?
Two plus two equals five?
Yes, yes, that's Karim.
So he was in those Halcyon days of Twitter, of Twitter 3.
When the world was fresh and young.
Worm discourse was the topic of the day, and people debated whether 2 plus 2 equals 5 or 4.
So Kareem was one of the people arguing that in certain contexts it can equal 5, right?
And this caused a fury online and a remarkably stupid discourse, I think, for all sides, really.
But I saw he responded to this post by Sabina, and he said, "This is a brilliant idea.
At a certain level of fame, pushing back on all the lies and misinformation regarding what one said and didn't say becomes a full-time job, I might might have to steal this.
And Sabina says, please do not hesitate.
Scattering content over different media makes it admittedly hard for people to figure out what one has actually said.
So he endorses this as, you know, this is a good way to do it.
You just make the document and state the actual thing and then your listeners don't need to go elsewhere.
You've got the rebuttals there saying, no, this is wrong.
And, you know, we did make the point, Matt, that, you know, the accusations from Professor D of whatever that Peter Thiel is funding her and whatnot.
So team number three, Sabine is paid by Peter Thiel.
False.
Sabine is not paid by Peter Thiel and has never received funding from Peter Thiel, Peter Thiel's companies or any associated entities.
So there's that.
I mean, there's no, I don't think Sabine is funded by Peter Thiel, to be clear.
but simply someone saying that is is not actually evidence counter to it right like i don't think professor dev should make those accusations but simply put it in a google doc no this doesn't happen it doesn't make it actually true right like i feel like people understand this but but to be clear i don't think that you should make those accusations without strong evidence.
So it's more, I think, the attention ecosystems and the YouTube metrics explain enough of what might be motivating Sabinev for her ticks, right?
No.
Now, Matt, the other thing, now this is a little bit self-intelligence, just a little bit, just a tad, but, you know, it is the supplementary materials.
So one of the things that makes the gurus like, we actually have an advantage over them, Matt, is that they are often rather lazy people.
as in, you know, they might have prodigious work ethic in terms of putting out their own content.
In terms of doing research into other people, often, no, no interest in that, even when it's topics that they talk about very regularly.
Examples would include Jonathan Pajot claiming that I have no interest in ritual or religion and making a video about that topic without simply Googling my name, right, and finding out that indeed, I have published many articles on my primary research topic is religion and ritual, right?
So this kind of thing.
Now, in the case of Sabina, she was putting out another thing about the the problem with the bad incentives in science and the problem with physics and all this kind of thing, you know, her usual YouTube content.
And I made a comment saying, Sabina loves to talk about all the problems of science and the terrible incentives skewing research and scientists' motivations.
What I've yet to see her discuss is the incentives that afflict YouTubers, including what kind of videos about science get you more attention.
Okay, you know, a cheeky comment, Matt, but in line with, you know, our general take on these things, we've criticized Sabina for this in all our content.
Sabina responded on Twitter saying, If you find out what works on YouTube, please let us all know that we can get rich.
Thank you.
Okay, so that is what is called in the biz a dunk where somebody responds to you saying, oh yeah, right?
But I don't think Sabina knows anything about me or about the general critiques that we've heard of her.
I don't think so.
Because if she did, you would know, like asking me, please let me know what works on YouTube to get attention, you know, please lay it out for me.
might silence some people.
In my case, it led to a
And they were all themed around what she does of course of course yeah so you took her you took her dunk and you turned it into a layup didn't you i did i did and uh you know as as is in the nature of social media my response was like by a lot of people and retweeted and whatnot because it was a nice dunk by this is but i but she set it up but i i think the things that i pointed out are all stuff that we've commented on and i think you would agree with yeah yeah um give give us the dog point version Yeah,
I'll skip ones that were just like mean.
And intended to hurt her.
Number nine was cultivate desired parasocial attention by liking or flatter comments and ignoring blocking anyone expressing critical opinions.
It's true, but I know she does that, right?
So that was the thing.
But the ones that were at the top of the list were present yourself as a renegade truth teller standing up to a corrupt establishment.
Two, explain that mainstream sources are lying to you, but your channel will provide the hard truths.
Three, implying nefarious sources are trying to censor you.
Four, flatter your audience that by following your channel, they are displaying nuance and independent thinking.
Five, present all criticism as bad faith.
Ideally, you also frame it as self-serving efforts to protect funding and your own authority six offer heterodox tics that pander to your audience and i i could go on that there's there's ten of them but you know you get the i get the tips right i sign off on all of those yeah lean into conspiratorial gut feelings in your audience that'll that'll be a good trick i do think this one was good though Eight was make some soft jobs at targets your audience likes to demonstrate your independence,
lack of bias, but reserve your strongest venom for targets they dislike or disapprove of.
Oh, yeah.
You know, talk of college.
Classic Sabina.
Classic Sabina.
Yeah.
So she didn't respond to that.
That's a yeah, I think she's at like year two of Weinsteinian devolution, right?
At that stage, Weinstein's respond to criticism and whatnot, but they learn it's counterproductive because, you know, it just encourages people to pay attention to the critique.
So she's not at that stage yet, but give her time.
And those things will work on YouTube.
Yeah.
You know, oh yeah.
And by the way, Matt, that actually lays up a good thing I wanted to mention.
There were two things on YouTube that came up, two things that I want to offer some commentary on and get your opinion of.
So one is CoffeeZilla on his VoidZilla channel.
He came out with another video that has 4.2 million views at the time of recording, released eight days ago.
Top five lies in Epstein footage.
And this video, man, it's actually very highly produced.
They've produced like a 3D model of the GL, you know, to show all the cameras that are missing and whatnot.
And it's going through genuine issues in terms of like highlighting here are discrepancies and what people have said and what's been released and so on.
But it is, as I watched it, very clearly a exercise in the anomaly hunting.
I feel that people give it a pass because it's making the Trump administration look bad and it's highlighting their hypocrisy around this issue and whatnot.
But the approach in that video is the same as like a highly produced documentary on 9-11 where you're like zooming around.
And here they said that nobody knew about this, but actually we see this report, right, where it comes.
But it's very clear.
Like if you go and look at the comments, it's clear the message that the audience is taking from it.
And if it's designed just to give the Trump administration a black eye, it's kind of doing it by using the conspiratorial tendencies in order to gin up the criticism.
And I just don't think that's a good thing to do.
So it's kind of depressing to see it from Coffee Zilla, to be honest.
Yeah, the way that Epstein thing, you know, when the narrative became one that was making Trump look bad, it was actually, you know, seriously causing problems on that end.
and there are insinuations and stuff in that direction.
It was quite amazing, actually, how quickly the vibe shifted.
So, yeah, I mean, look, I mean, I'm not an expert on the case, like, to sort of judge it, but from what I know about it, there is relatively little to support conspiracies against anyone, which help either side of politics.
But yeah, no, it just illustrates how no one is immune.
Like this conspiratorial thinking.
It's just an attractive thing to like connect the dots and support the thing that you want to believe.
I mean, you see it everywhere.
Well, there is, I mean, to be clear, there is various conspiracies involved around the Epsing stuff, right?
There is stuff with like him getting sweetheart deals and, you know, like various elite individuals, high finance people, like getting different treatment than others would for like documented abuse of minors, right?
There is conspiracies at play here.
And we're not arguing that they aren't, that they don't exist.
I'm specifically talking about this anomaly.
hunting approach where you're focusing on like the minute missing on the footage and you know yeah i mean people get very confused when we talk about conspiracy theories right because like on one hand, conspiracies are, I called them mundane, but conspiracies happen all the time.
And there are certainly ones in which rich and powerful people get protected, make deals and things like that that advantage themselves.
And they don't tell everyone about it.
So that meets the technical definition of a conspiracy.
And they happen all the time, everywhere.
As you were saying, it happened with Epstein.
it's okay to speculate, right?
Like there probably is some further nuances to those conspiracies that we still don't know about.
But when we talk about conspiratorial ideation or conspiracy theories for shorthand, what we're referring to is the unfounded extrapolation, like the unwarranted certainty in crafting a kind of, you know, connecting the dots on the pinboard type rationale to result in a very strong confidence in a belief that actually
actually has you know no substantive evidence behind it so that's what we're talking about Yeah, and we pointed in previous content to this report produced that was like an independent investigation into the conditions around Epstein's death, right?
And it details.
various things about the prison, the conditions, the events leading.
It's very, very in-depth, Matt, that report.
It's around 80 plus pages.
And if you read that, you will be much better informed on the relevant circumstances and why all of the authorities involved deem it to be a suicide, as opposed to watching Coffee Zilla's video about the discrepancies in the video surveillance footage that's been released, right?
I really encourage people if you're invested in this topic to invest in the evening reading that report and you can dismiss it as being involved, you know, just a cover-up, but like you should look at the people involved that would all have to be part of the cover-up that are detailed in that report.
Now, the other thing I'll just note about this topic that we highlighted as being a likely outcome and it's played out is that Gillen Maxwell, give her testimony.
Now, some of the transcripts have been released from that by the Justice Department.
and the family of one of the victims has said that she's been given a platform to rewrite history.
She's basically exonerating herself, throwing Epstein to a certain extent on the the bus but it's very possible that she could end up getting even further reductions in the severity of her sentence she's already been transferred you know to a lower security prison ostensibly on you know credible threats to her life.
So this is, to me, this is very likely what was going to happen, which was as this conspiracy community comes to focus around it.
And yes, there was originally Aaron Trump and his kind of dismissal around it.
But it was very clear that what is in her interest is for her to present it as essentially any of Trump's opponents and high-ranking Democrats and people that Trump doesn't like, right?
Those are the real villains.
Trump and any of his, like a menagerie of followers, not really involved.
And that will allow the conspiracy theorists, who are not these impartial people who just, you know, hold all elites in disrepute.
No, they're not.
Like Alex Jones is not a nonpartisan conspiracy theorist.
He's a hard right conspiracy theorist.
they will just find a way to take the conspiracy and target it towards the usual targets.
And if that means that the only person who's really, you know, being convicted for sex trafficking, one of the mean culprits in this, because the other one escaped justice by committing suicide, is pardoned and they get to target instead, you know, Bill Clinton or George Soros or whoever, the usual, like kind of globalist villains.
That's what they'll do.
And that's what I was frustrated about is likely to happen.
And it seems like that is what's happening and it definitely doesn't seem like Trump's Agreed.
Well, on that topic, that's one more thing about YouTube.
Now, I don't think you've seen this because you tend to stay away from YouTube stuff, but are you aware of Elephant Graveyard?
No, no.
The Elephant Graveyard is a YouTube channel that makes video essays critiquing Joe Rogan or they've covered other topics, Jerry Seinfeld.
Oh, wait.
I think I saw this.
Did you see this?
Yeah, I think it was linked on the subreddit.
I watched it.
Oh, you did?
The full thing?
It's like...
No, I watched like...
I did watch more than half of it.
It was good, I thought, if we're talking about the same thing.
but it produces these satirical, critical video essays, which are done in this like, what would you call it?
Like kind of a cinematic documentary type style.
It's got music and the voiceover.
They're very well produced.
Yeah, the style reminds me very much of this documentary filmmaker from the UK, Adam Curtis, who makes documentaries that tend to combine archival footage along with like a spoken narrative that is talking about these kind of shifts in societal thinking.
And, you know, like he's talking about the rise of consumerism or mass production things, these kind of things.
They tend to have like a little bit of an anti-capitalist critique of modern society aspect to them, but it was very popular around about like 15 years ago.
Do you know the guy?
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