On April 17, researchers led by Nikku Madhusudhan at the University of Cambridge announced that they had detected dimethyl sulfide in the atmosphere of K2-18b, an exoplanet 120 light-years from Earth. On our planet, dimethyl sulfide is only produced by living organisms. It is emitted in large quantities by certain species of algae, and gives the ocean its special smell. The presence of this chemical on K2-18b might be the strongest evidence ever recorded for alien life.
Candace Owens is one of the most popular podcasters in America. On April 17, she also had an announcement to make. She did her own research on astronomy and concluded that the moon landing was “fake and gay.” She told her millions of followers: “You need to learn the history of NASA, of the Apollo programs, which were a cult and satanic….They just wanted people to believe in scientific advancement.” Owens has come to similarly unorthodox conclusions on many topics including WWII, the history of communism, and, of course, Jews and Israel.
Obviously, Candace Owens should have free speech to express her opinions. At the same time, a healthy society needs mechanisms to ensure that people like her don’t have an outsize cultural influence. When it comes to astronomy, for example, the voice of Madhusudhan, not Owens, is the one that should be amplified. In some ways it is. Madhusudhan is a professor at Cambridge, publishes his views in peer-reviewed astronomy journals, and gets covered in the New York Times. Twenty years ago, that’s all that would have mattered. But now, Owens, Joe Rogan, Bret Weinstein, or Russell Brand can go on Spotify, YouTube, or Twitter and reach a larger audience than the New York Times. They might even swing elections. Rogan & Co.’s support for Trump may have tipped the balance in his favor.
People who don’t trust “experts” now look to podcasters and other alt-media figures—many of whom (including Rogan and Brand) are comedians—to decide what to believe about everything from WWII to vaccines to Ukraine to tariffs. The result has been a proliferation of ignorance with disastrous consequences for our culture and public policy.
We did not evolve to be gullible. Nobody thoughtful is rotting their brain listening to Candace Owens, Joe Rogan, Bret Weinstein and Russell Brand. People who have lousy epistemics turn to people like Owens and Rogan to meet their needs for comfort. I’m unaware of any evidence that the podcast bros swung the election to Trump or created disasters for our culture and public policy. Where is the evidence that the podcast bros have proliferated ignorance? I’ve never met someone who was thoughtful prior to listening to these intellectual losers and then became an idiot. Only idiots listen to idiots.
Nathan Cofnas has a thesis that strikes me as true: “Blind obedience to credentialed authority (associated with the left) or trust in a “marketplace of ideas” that rewards brain-rotting infotainment (associated with the right) are both failed strategies.”
Sam Harris says: “When [Joe] brings someone on to just shoot the shit about how the Holocaust is not what you think it was, or maybe Churchill’s the bad guy in WWII, or he’s got Dave Smith being treated as an expert on Israel and Palestine, and the history of that conflict….[Smith is] a pure misinformation artist on top of many others….Our society is as politically shattered as it is in part because of how Joe has interacted with information….It’s…avoidable. He could actually take the responsibility that really is his to take at this point to get his facts straight.”
Where’s the evidence that these idiots talking to other idiots for an audience of idiots is shattering America?
Nathan writes: “[Douglas] Murray is the British face of Conservatism, Inc. He went to Oxford, writes books with footnotes, and hangs out with academics.”
May 25, 2023, Dennis Prager called Douglas Murray his “favorite English thinker.” I largely agree with Douglas Murray and Dennis Prager, but only a fool thinks of these guys as great thinkers. They’re great talkers, but will their long-form conversations from the Relief Factor Pain-Free studio save Western Civilization? Count me skeptical.
Reddit user Koreanoir posted a compelling critique of Murray’s 2022 book The War on the West:
The book reads like a disorganized, amphetamine-driven rampage through a big folder of bookmarked webpages labeled “Woke Stuff”. Murray’s approach is to breathlessly recount one anecdote after another, usually dedicating just a paragraph or two to each, and then sneer at the people in the center of it, all the while complaining that criticisms of “The West” lack sufficient nuance and balance…
Polemicists of a feather flock together.
On a Patreon video called “The Confluence of the Gurosphere” released June 16, 2023, Decoding the Gurus hosts Chris Kavanagh (anthropologist) talks to Matt Browne (psychologist) about “the…energies that cause the gurus to swirl together.”
Matt: “They become intertwined. They find each other and a network is formed. When we covered all of the gurus, we covered them as isolated gems interesting in their own right. But then after covering them, and having identified them as fitting our Gurometer, they then inevitably seemed to find each other even with gurus with no apparent connection.”
Chris: “Jonathan Pageau just had Jordan Hall on to discuss AI.”
“What connects them is the narcissism, the belief that they have all these revolutionary insights. Jordan Hall enjoys that he can switch paradigms. He can run 70 to 90 paradigms at one time. If you want to talk about it in that kind of language, I can talk about it in terms of resurrections and graveyards… Your religious paradigms are just ten of his seventy.”
Matt: “Jordan Peterson tells James Lindsay that you can’t have science without the Logos. It’s all based on Christianity.”
Chris: “One of [Jordan’s] big ideas is that science is fundamentally Christian. It relies on Christianity because Christianity has at its heart that there is a Truth in the universe and if you have that orientation, that allows you to investigate the natural world. And if you don’t have that, science can’t develop. Richard Dawkins and all of them don’t realize that at heart they are deeply religious people.”
“For James Lindsay, the feminist glaciology paper is central to his whole thing. It should be just a footnote, just an example that he sometimes returns to, but he now presents that as a turning point in his life. After reading it, he curled up in a ball unable to leave his room for three days because of the shock to the system that such a paper could be published in a prestigious scientific outlet. It’s a random geography journal, Progress in Human Geography. People like him and Jordan. They create this mythos around things that happen to them. I think they genuinely do experience weird manic moments, but the way that they retell it, it becomes part of this hero’s journey. It’s not — I heard a Jordan Peterson talk and it annoyed me. It’s — I heard a Jordan Peterson talk and it awakened a fire in me that I needed to reveal the charlatan world. I don’t think the authors of the feminist glaciology paper are still talking about it as much as James has. He endlessly talks about how he knows all these literatures but he constantly focuses on this single paper.”
Matt: “If he has such a comprehensive understanding of all of that literature, why doesn’t he cite some other examples? There are millions of papers out there. He should be citing hundreds of them.”
Chris: “It’s their susceptibility to narratives that are going to give them attention and make them feel that they are looking at things in a deeper way than normal people. That little hook – they are so easily led around by it.”
Matt: “In the last 20 years, we’ve seen the rise of the political dimension you could call anti-institutional. You have lefty stuff like Occupy Wall Street and Russell Brand.”
Chris: “Tim Pool.”
Matt: “Just being against the current thing. You can frame it as globalism and international capitalism. Or you could frame it as the New World Order and the WEF (World Economic Forum). There’s a right wing version or a left wing one.”
Chris: “And sometimes they cross over. Gavin McInnes started as one of the founders of Vice and then became the reactionary leader of the Proud Boys. That seems like a helluva journey. It’s about the institutions are shit, we’re part of the edgy counter-culture. It’s not inevitable that people who aren’t part of the establishment get sucked to the extremes, but there is a greater vulnerability for people who like to style themselves that way. Focusing on the corruption of establishments can make people susceptible to swallowing conspiracism.”
Matt: “I know several people in real life who are fans of Jordan Peterson. Fans of Trump. [Kinda] fans of Putin. They’re not right-wing Christians. They are lost boys. That’s the common denominator.”
Lost boys are a big part of the guru fan base.
Chris: “There is money sloshing around in the right-wing for promoting certain views. Peter Thiel hired Eric [Weinstein]. Provided money to [Eliezer] Yudkowsky [the guy who claims AI will kill us]. He also gave up on Eric eventually… The reason that Peter Thiel and Eric came together was that their worldviews aligned. Peter Thiel doesn’t care so long as someone is a wrecking force for institutions. These are narcissistic people who are led by praise and reward.”
Matt: “It’s easy for them to align with their personal interest. They’re labile. It’s like Trump. He’d say anything for a round of applause and a million dollars. They do have a reactionary, anti-institutional worldview. And they’re self-interested narcissists.”
Chris: “That grouping of people who come together for long-form podcasts to share anti-establishment positions and backpat each other and focus on what the progressive left is doing to destroy society. That grouping re-emerges and reformulates and you’ll see Douglas Murray cropping up across all of them.”
Matt: “Why do they all accept the UFO story at face value?”
Chris: “Their epistemics are broken. The smarter ones tap danced on the edge. They wanted to say look at the official narratives collapsing but they were quick to say, it could all be just because they know it could all blow up. I heard Sam Harris taking victory laps — look at all those credulous fools for talking about UFOs. You were talking for months. You believed that someone had contacted you to release sacred information about UFOs.”
“Jordan Peterson praises James Lindsay constantly and occasionally James reciprocates. It’s this constant feeding of the ego. So you were studying maths? Why did you choose the difficult area? They both talk about how they are so principled and that is why they needed to leave academia. They could have been extremely successful if academia had retained its principles and recognized genius, but the fact that they are so successful outside of academia, doesn’t that prove they were right and they are better than all those irrelevant academics. Use your brains guys. It just means that you are selling something that can get you attention. Don’t you know there are lots of people in the world selling rank partisan conspiracy content who aren’t deep thinkers but can make a lot of money?”
“Jordan thinks that because lots of people watch his content, that’s an indication that it is good and fundamentally correct. He gave the game away when he said that something had seven million views and seven million people agreed with me. He counted views as indicating agreement.”
Matt: “Truth is not a popularity contest. Making money selling something that is attractive doesn’t make you a more virtuous person. Their egos are hungry and they’ll take it as evidence.”
Matt: “The orthodox position is tedious. It’s a hard sell. Public health. Boring. It’s not going to grab you. If you are an online commentator, you’re going to feel an inexorable pull to stuff that will get the juices flowing.”
Chris: “We’ll lose the attention ecosphere by saying stuff that people will agree with. It isn’t interesting to say that UFOs aren’t real. You have to add the hook to make it more appealing. We get feedback that if we want to add more listeners, we should touch on this topic. That way lies hell. That mindset of always getting bigger audiences and always jumping on the new thing makes you susceptible to take-itis.”
Matt: “The vast majority of people who produce any content are susceptible because they’re obsessed with growing their audiences.”
Chris: “Rebecca Lewis did a report [in 2018] saying there is an alternative influencer network [Alternative Influence: Broadcasting the Reactionary Right on YouTube]. It drove them all mad…that Sam Harris was on the same map with Stefan Molyneux and Gavin McInnes. But she was right. There are network effects. You can hear Sam Harris talk about them and wrestle with it when he says, it is hard to criticize people I go to dinner with. You hear Konstantin [Kisin] say to Matt Goodwin, you and I are at all the same parties.”
Nathan Cofnas notes:
There’s a reason why people became tired of so-called experts. The “expert” class face planted about five times in a row….
Joe Rogan wouldn’t platform a rando with no serious training in martial arts to talk about MMA. If someone passed himself off as an MMA commentator, and his only credential was that he watched some old kung fu movies, Rogan would have no interest in hearing his opinion. But suppose the guy who learned kung fu from movies started fighting in the UFC, and beat the top Brazilian jiu-jitsu experts to win the Championship Belt? Rogan would definitely invite him onto his podcast! The podcast bros believe that they are in the position of that kung fu master outsider. You couldn’t persuade Rogan not to interview the self-taught UFC champion by insisting that we need to honor the expertise of jiu-jitsu black belts.
Rogan chooses guests for his show who are compelling to a 100 IQ audience. There’s no magic formula for getting on Rogan. It’s not easy being a prole whisperer.
Nathan writes:
At the height of our society’s “expert” worship, credentialed technocrats told a bunch of self-serving lies, imprisoned people in their apartments for two years, and then said that anyone who questioned them was a racist conspiracy theorist. Almost the entire academic and media establishment covered for them. On top of that, we are told that people with PhDs in how smells are racist are also “experts” before whom we must genuflect.
But the fact that some people with fancy credentials are corrupt, fallible, and/or frauds doesn’t mean that expertise isn’t real. Some people have knowledge and training that make their opinion more credible and worthy of attention than the opinion of a rando comedian with a microphone.
Overall, our public health leaders did a good job with Covid. They were right in their main points — socially distance before you can get the vaccine, wear a mask while indoors around other people, and then get the shot as advised by doctors once it is available.
Nathan writes:
But consumers of alt-media have largely given up on the notion of expertise, at least when it comes to politicized topics. When every credible economist on earth says that Trump’s tariffs are going to be a disaster, they say, “Nate Silver failed to predict the 2016 election, so maybe Oren Cass (a lawyer), Batya Ungar-Sargon (a Marxist English major), and Catturd are just as likely to be right about tariffs as people who know how to draw supply and demand curves (whatever those are).”
I don’t think consumers of alt-media have given up on expertise. They just have different experts.
If every credible economist said in 2016 that Trump’s tariffs were going to be a disaster, how did that prediction turn out? I don’t remember a disaster. Trump had a good economy prior to Covid.
If every credible economist said in 2025 that Trump’s tariffs are going to be a disaster, how’s that going? I don’t see a disaster. As of May 9, 2025, there is no empirical evidence that Trump’s tariff plans a disaster. The stock market, for example, is higher than it was before Liberation Day. The only way to declare Trump’s tariff plans a disaster is to speak from a position of faith unchained from reality.
I wonder if there are too many variables in foreign trade for any one academic discipline, including Economics, to be expert.
Nathan writes that “the virus posed almost no serious risk to otherwise healthy young people.”
Not true. Grok notes:
According to the CDC, approximately 2,000 Americans under age 18 died from COVID-19 from January 2020 through December 2024. This number is based on provisional data and may be subject to underreporting due to testing limitations and variations in death certification practices. For context, a 2023 study from the University of Oxford reported over 1,300 deaths among those aged 0–19 from 2021 to 2022, indicating that pediatric deaths were rare but significant enough to rank COVID-19 as a leading cause of death from infectious disease in this age group. Source Source
How many millions of American children have long negative health consequences from contracting Covid?
Grok says:
Approximately 2.2–9.1 million American children under 18 who contracted COVID-19 may have experienced negative long-term health effects, with a mid-range estimate of 4.35 million. Source Source
These millions of people do not strike me as insignificant. It is not true that covid “posed almost no serious risk to otherwise healthy young people.”
