Decoding the Gurus

Matt and Chris introduce themselves and the overall concept for the podcast then take a deep dive into an infamous episode of Eric Weinstein's podcast 'The Portal', featuring his brother Bret Weinstein (Episode 19). They cast a critical eye over Eric and Bret's claims that they are fighting back against the 'Distributed Idea Suppression Complex' and alerting the world to one of the greatest untold scientific scandals of the modern era.

Sam Harris is the subject today and a man who needs no introduction. Although he's come up and he's come on, we've never actually (technically) decoded him. There is no Gurometer score! A glaring omission and one that needs correcting. It would have been easy for us to cherry-pick Sam being extremely good on conspiracy theories, or extremely controversial on politics, but we felt that neither would be fair. So we opted for a general and broad-ranging recent interview he did with Chris Williamson. Love him or loathe him, it's a representative piece of Sam Harris content, and therefore good material for us.

Sam talks about leaving Twitter, and how transformative that was for his life, then gets into his favourite topic: Buddhism, consciousness, and living in the moment. That's the kind of spiritual kumbaya topics that Sam reports causing him little pain online but Chris and Matt- the soulless physicalists and p-zombies that they are- seek to destroy even that refuge. On the other hand, they find themselves determined by the very forces of the universe to nod their meat puppet heads in furious agreement as Sam discusses the problems with free speech absolutism and reactionary conspiracism.

That's just a taste of what's to come in this extra-ordinarily long episode to finish off the year. What's the DTG take? You'll have to listen to find out all the details, but we do think there is some selective interpretation of religions at hand and some gut reactions to wokeness that leads to some significant blindspots.

So is Sam Harris an enlightened genius, a neo-conservative warmonger, a manipulative secular guru? Or is he, in the immortal words of Gag Halfrunt, Zaphod Beeblebrox's head specialist, "just zis guy, you know?".

Sam was DTG's white whale of 2023, but we'll let you be the judge as to whether or not we harpooned him, or whether he's swimming off contentedly, unscathed, into the open ocean.

Links

• Sam Harris - Take Back Control Of Your Mind (4K) | Modern Wisdom 661
• DTG Special Episode: Sam Harris & Meditation is all you need
• DTG Special: Interview with Sam Harris on Gurus, Tribalism & the Culture War
• DTG Special Episode: Interview with Evan Thompson on Buddhist Exceptionalism
• DTG Interview with Worobey, Andersen & Holmes: The Lab Leak
• Making Sense 311: Did SARS-CoV-2 Escape from a Lab? A Conversation with Matt Ridley and Alina Chan

Joe Rogan is a world famous podcaster, a martial artist, a stand-up comedian, a MMA commentator, co-founder of the Onnit supplement company, the ex-host of Fear Factor, a long term friend of Alex Jones, and recently a major outlet for promoting 'alternative' Covid facts.

And yet despite all these 'achievements' and his recent multi million dollar deal with Spotify many argue that a large part of Joe's appeal is that he is just a 'regular Joe'. Joe himself has said he's just a 'f**king moron' and that people should not take his opinion seriously... but does he mean it?

Join Matt & Chris as they break out their dusty gym bags and enter the house of pain that is long form podcasting to try and imbibe the full Joe Rogan Experience. To aid in this glorious quest, the guys sought out the most testosterone laced JRE episode they could find and inevitable landed on a recent episode with ex-navy seal & motivational author, Jocko Willink. This is a man who everyday posts black and white photographs of his wristwatch at 4.30am with captions like 'Ready. Set. GET SOME' & 'Default: AGGRESSIVE'.

If you think this means the episode will be covering the sexually arousing nature of armoured cars, the beauty of handcrafted knives, and how to revive the American manufacturing industry... you would be right. But that's not all.

You will also discover surprising non-partisan 'facts' like how Tulsi Gabbad is the centrist messiah, George Soros is responsible for recent US crime waves, Nancy Pelosi is an assassin, and the Hunter Biden laptop story is the biggest story of the modern era. Oh and, of course, that Covid vaccines are dangerous and effective alternative treatments are being hushed up.

Wait... what?

So rev your engines, sharpen your handcrafted knives, and get ready to smash headfirst through brick walls of ignorance and faux expertise in this testosterone soaked episode as Matt & Chris refuse to acquiesce to the 'burden of civility'.

P.S. Did Matt mention that he had to listen to 6hrs this week?!?

Links

• The JRE 1740: Jocko Willink
• The JRE 1492: Jocko Willink
• The JRE 1742: Peter McCullough
• Andrea With The Bangs Interview with Chris & Matt
• Kurzgesagt- We Lied to You... And We'll Do it Again!
• TIm Nguen's 'A Response to Economics as Gauge Theory'
• Thi Nguyen's 'Twitter: The Intimacy Machine' at the Raven
• Sam Harris & Nicholas Christakis 'Waking up #270 - What have we learned from the Pandemic?'
• ZDoggMD 'Joe Rogan's Interview With Dr. Peter McCullough | A Doctor Explains'

Rutger Bregman is a Dutch Historian who wants to tell the world that humans are actually fundamentally kind, hunter gatherer societies contain important wisdom about how to live well, and that collectively we need to cooperate to do something about climate change and economic inequality. So, obviously there was no way Chris and Matt could let these dangerous ideas go unchallenged!

Join them this week as they delve into one of Rutger's talks and address Noble Savage myths and other age old debates including whether human nature is fundamentally brutish & cruel or compassionate & kind, whether war is ancient or a recent product of societies, whether civilisation was a good idea or the worst one ever, and perhaps most importantly whether Matt could defeat a chimpanzee in one on one combat when armed with two swords.

Links

• The Futures interview with Rutger examined in the episode (with transcript)
• Research Article that raises doubt about the domestication hypothesis especially in regards to silver foxes
• An old blog post by Chris that discusses the debates over the topic of ancient war

OK, so we're finally getting around to taking a chunk out of the prodigious, prolific, and venerable Noam Chomsky. Linguist, cognitive scientist, media theorist, political activist and cultural commentator, Chomsky is a doyen of the Real LeftTM. By which we mean, of course, those who formulated their political opinions in their undergraduate years and have seen no reason to move on since then. Yes, he looks a bit like Treebeard these days but he's still putting most of us to shame with his productivity. And given the sheer quantity of his output, across his 90 decades, it might be fair to say this is more of a nibble of his material.

A bit of a left-wing ideologue perhaps, but seriously - what a guy. This is someone who made Richard Nixon's List of Enemies, debated Michel Foucault, had a huge impact on several academic disciplines, and campaigned against the war in Vietnam & the Indonesian occupation of East Timor. Blithe stereotypes of Chomsky will sometimes crash against uncomfortable facts, including that he has been a staunch defender of free speech, even for Holocaust deniers...

A full decoding of his output would likely require a dedicated podcast series, so that's not what you're gonna get here. Rather we apply our lazer-like focus and blatantly ignore most of his output to examine four interviews on linguistics, politics, and the war in Ukraine. There is some enthusiastic nodding but also a fair amount of exasperated head shaking and sighs. But what did you expect from two milquetoast liberals?

Also featuring: a discussion of the depraved sycophancy of the guru-sphere and the immunity to cringe superpower as embodied by Brian Keating, Peter Boghossian, and Bret Weinstein mega-fans.

Enjoy!

Links

• Trust Science, Not Scientists | Peter Boghossian & Brian Keating
• A new Epistemic courage/humility matrix
• George Monbiot's Correspondence with Noam Chomsky on Denialism
• Piers Morgan Uncensored (2023): Piers Morgan vs Noam Chomsky | The Full Interview
• Politics Joe (2023): Noam Chomsky on Keir Starmer's attack on the Labour left, the war on unions and the future of AI
• Upon Reflections (1989): The Concept of Language (Noam Chomsky)
• Jones (2020): Academic article on Chomsky's views on Genocide
• Daily Beast (2017): How the West Missed the Horrors of Cambodia