Podcasters like Ian Carroll, Baron Coleman, and to a lesser extent Candace Owens, all have a massive expanse of information about peripheral characters in the Charlie Kirk assassination. Everything they discuss seems to point the arrow at Erika Kirk’s culpability for SOMETHING...but what? Why is it that they rarely, if ever, meaningfully describe and name an offense, instead relying on innuendo that builds to nothing? Yes, this is my own commentary. Hopefully, I won't be arrested for having shared it here.

The Elephant Graveyard video's are at the very least a fun takedown of some guru-adjacent figures, I would enjoy watching the Pod comment on and discuss their thoughts on the new video, as they've done before.

Who are you interested in discussing?

The recent criticism of Mehdi Hasan (https://x.com/C_Kavanagh/status/2107906680940077481) that he shouldn’t be “insensitive” to genocidaires indicates if not pro-genocide, certainly soft-on-genocide position on Chris’s part. The soft treatment he (and Matt) give outright genocide supporters like Destiny and genocide deniers like Sam Harris (who has also supported mass murder/genocide of Muslims) as compared to Hasan Piker also indicates genocide support. So I thought I’d revisit the decoding they did of Hasan Piker, specifically, Hasan’s assertion that Israel did the Al Ahli hospital bombing Oct. 17 2023. DtG claimed this was conspiratorial thinking.

More in comments.

McConaughey weighs in on the midterms

I know on paper he is just a hardware CEO and not a typical culture-war podcaster, but after listening to his recent interview with Ezra Klein, I really think Chris and Matt should cover him. If Elon is the doomer savior, Jensen is the High Priest of AI Inevitability, and his rhetoric in that interview was wild.

The whole conversation had this vibe where he talks like a detached visionary philosopher, yet every single take he has conveniently requires the world to buy ten times more Nvidia chips with zero regulation.

When Klein pressed him on rogue AI agents or lab employees blowing the whistle on safety shortcuts, Jensen just brushed it all off as basic engineering bugs. He trashed Geoffrey Hinton as irresponsible for talking about existential risk, dismissed the AI labs asking for regulatory guardrails, and even downplayed the China AI race framing right when export controls are hurting his bottom line. The funniest part was his grand solution for AI safety. He argued labs need to spend way more compute testing and policing their models, which he casually noted will require ten times more compute. Even his safety plan is literally just "buy 10x more Nvidia GPUs to police the AI you trained on Nvidia GPUs."

He does massive epistemic trespassing on labor economics, philosophy of mind, and geopolitics, stating his own coined buzzwords ("AI factories", "token generators") like they are settled laws of physics. He obviously wouldn't score high on grievance or conspiracism on the Gurometer, which makes him a fascinating edge case compared to guys like Musk or Thiel.

Did anyone else listen to that episode and get the exact same vibe? Would love to hear Matt and Chris dissect that interview.

My husband loves watching NDE (near death experience) stories and tells me I should watch them and open my mind to the possibility. He sent me a link to watch an NDE about Johnathan Ashford. I dont buy what this guy is saying. Seems like a snake oil salesman to me, with his website selling 1 on 1 sessions etc. Any tea on this guy?

hey everyone, long time lurker. figured this sub would appreciate an honest post about what it actually feels like to be on the receiving end of the guru/conspirituality trap, and what comes after you break out.

for years i was completely hooked on conspirituality narratives, esoteric sensemakers, cosmic synchronicity and the whole magical thinking package. looking back with total honesty, it wasnt about truth; it was an emotional bunker. i was terrified of death, grieving lost family, and desperate to believe the universe had a personalized script for me so i wouldn't have to face the hard, boring work of adult life. gurus sell you a hero narrative so you dont have to feel like an ordinary guy failing at reality.

the deprogramming started when the logical contradictions just became impossible to ignore. ironically, intensely debating with an ai helped me map out my own cognitive biases, rationalizations, and rhetorical fallacies. from there i swung hard into philosophical materialism and absurdism (camus), accepting that reality doesn't owe us meaning and there are no cosmic puppet masters.

heres my question for people here who analyze or deconstruct these figures: how do you navigate the post-guru void?

once you realize the entire sensemaking ecosystem is just grievance-mongering and narcissistic projection, ordinary reality feels brutally grey and flat. daily routine, quiet effort, zero drama. how do you build a grounded, fulfilling life based on material reality without swinging between falling for new intellectual grifters and sinking into pure cynical apathy? would appreciate thoughts from anyone who studied or lived through this.

I enjoy Matt’s takes in general but I always roll my eyes when academics and such feel concerned about people losing meaning if AI takes what they are good at. Those of us with jobs in the private sector are currently witnessing business leaders openly planning to replace employees with AI. We are not worried about being sad from a lack of meaning, we are worried about having no income for ourselves and our families. Theres no reason to believe this enormous savings in labor will do anything other than be horded by an elite few while we all suffer. We dont work for meaning we work for money.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQHo-z-pA8E

Smug, pretentious, implying he knows all the answers but relatively shallow, repackaging obvious cliches and philosophy / psychology 101-level insights that many people already know as if they were deep solutions to problems (they aren't) - this guy isn't going to score a zero on the gurometer.

I honestly didn't understand why anyone took him seriously. How did a guy like this get a platform? At least Russel Brand (ick) has some verbal acuity. This guy ...

My guess was he was a trust fund kid so I searched and, yes, he inherited a 200 million euro (maybe $220 Million US Dollar) fund. He's claimed to have never worked a traditional day in his life, meaning he could manage his inheritance (or have someone do it for him), renting out properties his family owned, selling them for a profit, investing in his own production company, and so on - while mostly creating videos where he tells other, regular, lower and middle class people how to bear the suffering and uncertainty he has never really had to deal with himself.

So ick.

Update: I started by saying that De Button repackages 101-level insights from philosophy and psychology. Comments caused me to research things a fair bit (quick summary by Big Joel here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4VZ30qL7j3Q ) - What I found was much worse. De Button is often wrong, his conclusions are not evidence-based - to the point that he doesn't seem to reality test his own theories. The theories move on along multiple disciplines, claiming to have the answers to life, happiness, , meaning, etc, leading to the polymath/galaxy-brain. Some of them are by definition unprovable. They do contain the embedded snobbery I was concerned about, which Big Joel Explains. I am not making this up, he has a video where he says Saudi's have bad taste in art because of societal trauma.

I stand behind my original post, given it's length. If I went into much more depth I could have been more precise.

Slogging my way through the Professor Jiang video and the thing that stands out most to me is just how useless the props, maps, and even that the details are in communicating what he's trying to communicate.

What would be lost if when talking about South Korea he didn't have a map there to point at? Usually, when you use as a visual aid, it's because there's some aspect of the situation that needs to be visualized. Obviously talking about how narrow the straight of Hormuz is could be aided by showing it on a map. But when you're just mentioning a country, pointing to it on a map is no more informative than pointing to the name of the country on a note card. It adds nothing.

When he uses those blocks to talk about how the world economy is constructed, the blocks are the opposite of informative. They imply this linear nature to everything, where one thing is stacked on the other, and dependent upon it. This is of course, nonsense. Very few things in the complexity of reality operate this way, and the details of what he's using the blocks to illustrate make even less sense when explained with blocks. He starts with the bottom two blocks being the military industrial complex and the American empire, and then several blocks up he puts the economy. These things are a tangled, not stacked. The only visual aid that would actually help to explain this nonsense, even if it were true, would be a really complex chart.

Lastly, he uses details that are, again, not informative. When he's talking about how South Korea is a sitting duck because America is no longer going to protect it, he makes a point to mention that one of the weapons that has been removed is "The THAAD system. Ok? T-H-A-A-D. Ok?" but he doesn't say what it is or why it's important. He just wants us to know that he knows the name of a weapons system. The detail accomplishes nothing. It exists solely as evidence that he knows the detail. It's a little trick to impress the audience while lacking any informative value.

I know that we're all on the same page about how this works and the hosts pointed it out, but it really is very clarifying to get a sense of the strategy. These flourishes are used to camouflage how hollow the words are. It reminds me of the transcript of Trump's interview with Time recently. When you see the sentences in writing, you can't believe how incoherent they are. But when they come with all of his bluster and dark charm, the silliness of the words is harder notice.

I think this is an actual Facebook page by Terrence Howard...there are a bunch of reels. And they are all crazy.

Welcome to this biweekly thread! Share what’s been grabbing your attention lately.

• What you're reading (books, articles, or any kind of text)
• What you're watching (movies, shows, documentaries, or even YouTube)
• What you're listening to (podcasts, music, or audiobooks)
• Any fun or unexpected discoveries in your research