SPENCER: Chris, welcome to the Clearer Thinking Podcast.

CHRISTOPHER: Thank you for having me. Hello, Spencer.

SPENCER: Are we living in an era of secular gurus?

CHRISTOPHER: Unfortunately, I think the answer is yes. It does seem that way.

SPENCER: What is a secular guru?

CHRISTOPHER: Well, I think the term guru means a whole bunch of different things. A secular guru, as the term suggests, is a subset of guru-type people who are appealing more to secular sources of knowledge like history, psychology, or science, as opposed to esoteric and mystical sources, which is the traditional association with gurus and the Sanskrit meaning of the term. So yes, they're figures that fall close to the kind of stereotypical guru archetype, but making less appeal to supernatural and esoteric sources of knowledge. That's what I would say a secular guru is.

SPENCER: And what is guru about? So how would you define a guru, this bigger category?

CHRISTOPHER: The bigger category of guru in the original usage in Sanskrit, where the term comes from, it refers to people with specialist knowledge in an esoteric field or some specific area. Somebody who is trained and has mastered a kind of skill, like the way that in modern usage, people might refer to a stats guru or this kind of thing. However, the more common usage now in contemporary society refers to these charismatic figures who are offering, often very broad insights, sometimes entire worldviews across a wide range of topics. And they are often giving people an entire system about how to live your life and where to get information from. There's a cluster of traits that, if a guru archetype, is often presented as providing profound wisdom because of their unique characteristics and insights.

SPENCER: And how did you get into the guru business? You started this podcast decoding the gurus, and you've been analyzing many different gurus in society. What motivated you to do that in the first place?

CHRISTOPHER: I had an interest for quite a while in skepticism, the kind of old school skeptical communities in the UK and James Randi.

SPENCER: Debunking psychics and that kind of thing.

CHRISTOPHER: All that kind of thing. And also, in the UK, there was a trial of a science writer, Simon Singh, by the British Chiropractic Association, for example. When I was at university, I attended the trial. I was interested in that area, and that naturally leads to more familiarity with conspiracy communities and faith healers and gurus. They are an ever-present feature in those areas. As time went on, I noticed around the time when people were writing profiles of the intellectual dark web, like Bari Weiss in The New York Times and so on, a more modern category of high-profile figures who were not in that particular community, not typically in your faith healing, alternative medicine, Deepak Chopra type area, but were actually more connected to my academic field. They were talking about psychology, they were talking about economics and history, Jordan Peterson type people, and they were having a large profile, large impact on the discourse. To me, a lot of what they were doing seemed very familiar to stuff I was familiar with from looking at conspiracy communities and other kinds of charismatic figures in those traditional skeptic areas. I started looking into those people, and I had always consumed a lot of podcasts and had a thing for listening to people I didn't agree with, including alternative medicine or psychic proponents. It naturally followed that I would look at this new brand of gurus that were coming out and consume their content. I also had some sympathy for the arguments they might be making about groupthink and some of the issues in academia. It wasn't just a reactive dismissal that there was no reason to critique anything — that mainstream science never gets anything wrong. It was more interesting to me because they often had their points buried in criticisms where there were legitimate issues raised.

SPENCER: Do you think that secular gurus are fundamentally a new phenomenon, or can we see traces of this in history?

CHRISTOPHER: I think gurus are a recurrent cultural phenomenon across human societies. You go back in history, any period, and you will find these charismatic figures offering special insights that are often presented as being suppressed by mainstream institutions. They're revolutionary ideas, and they're often tied to a community that is very invested in the charismatic leader and their unique insights. You can see this in religious movements as well. In the contemporary period, the increase in communication technology and social media has allowed another lineage of gurus to emerge. Gurus are consistent; this is related to personality types and the things that people find appealing to a certain extent in human cognition and societies. Whenever there are environments, like widespread distrust of authorities or rising populism, it creates fertile ground where more gurus will flourish. There will always be gurus, and now is a period where the platforms are helping them reach larger audiences. It's not that they are a new phenomenon that has only cropped up in the past 20 or 30 years.

SPENCER: Do you think that the way that media used to be more gated, where there were only a few TV stations, and you sort of had to go through the mainstream system, blocked many gurus? Now, because you can go directly to the people, it's easier for them to reach much bigger audiences?

CHRISTOPHER: Yeah, I think that's definitely part of it, that some of the friction has been removed from accessing quite niche communities and people that you otherwise wouldn't encounter. Cult leaders, for example, used to have the issue that their reach was limited to the people who attended their seminars or consumed their material, or for the more committed, went and stayed on their compound. But with the internet now, you can reach a wide array of people much more easily. The other side of that is that it also means that people can flip between people, leave communities, and they aren't so often physically located beside the people they follow. So there's kind of a friction also removed there for people who want to shift between different communities. The only other thing that I would say is that it's kind of for good and for ill, because you can make these doom narratives about social media, online connection, and the growth of AI. But I would say, as Jonathan Haidt tends to do, that they also allow people to access a whole bunch of science, information, and niche communities that they couldn't in the places where they are located. So it's not just that mainstream media gatekeeping has fallen away for large portions of the population; it also means that you get good information that you wouldn't have previously gotten from mainstream sources. You can spend five hours watching a YouTube video on mentalist techniques, which probably wouldn't appear on any mainstream channel. So, yeah, I think it's part of it, but it's not just a tale of woe. I think that mainstream media gatekeeping has fallen by the wayside a little.

SPENCER: It's strange. In certain ways, we're at the best time ever in history for learning, and in other ways, the worst time for learning, where you can get so easily sucked into these black holes of misinformation, where you're learning a lot of stuff that's not true, instead of being directed to sources where you're actually learning really good information.

CHRISTOPHER: Yeah, and I think the reality is that now, if you want to take really in-depth courses in statistics, law, economics, or any subject, you can access them for free online. But the reality is, most people aren't doing that; they might watch some YouTube videos or listen to podcasts. There is the danger that people assume that if you listen to a lot of podcasts, you've essentially replaced a university education. In most cases, you haven't, because the actual work that is important for a university degree is the kind of consistent, boring part, not the part where you're sitting having your mind blown by TED Talk-style ideas. It's instead sitting down, working on data sets, getting things wrong consistently, and then having to learn Excel formulas and look at distributions. I think that's the bit that people don't like doing. The danger is that you can give yourself the illusion of expertise more easily. There are a lot of people offering that appealing package where they say your university education or these gatekept knowledge are useless; it's just an exploitation system. "Follow me, join my Patreon, or buy my course, and I will give you the equivalent of a university education, or Peterson Academy." There are things that are branded explicitly as replacing university-level education. They could, to be clear, apply themselves in the same way that they might if they were taking a course where they have to attend lectures multiple times a week, but most people won't do that.

SPENCER: Something that gives me a bit of hope are YouTube channels like Nutrition Made Simple with Gil Carvalho. I don't know if you know that one, but basically, he reads a whole bunch of papers about nutrition, and he presents the results, and he really tries to stick to the evidence. He has built a really successful YouTube channel with over 300,000 subscribers. That's amazing. But at the same time, it does seem that if you're willing to speculate wildly, say outrageous things, or say exaggerated things, you have a competitive advantage in the social media landscape.

CHRISTOPHER: Yeah. And I also think a danger is that Andrew Huberman is incredibly successful, right, but reliably over-represents the level of evidence on various topics. We've done various critical examinations of his content and his ability to assess papers. In my personal assessment of his abilities, it is very low, and yet he is regarded by many people as adopting a very science-based approach and synthesizing a wide array of knowledge. He has experts on giving his audience the impression that they are learning what is the best science in this field from a responsible synthesizer. I think that's difficult for a layperson to tell the difference between somebody who is synthesizing information accurately and giving an appropriate level of confidence in a given topic versus someone who is good at giving the impression of doing that but is actually providing low-quality, sensationalized information. It can even be that there is a mixture. Jordan Peterson often did this, where there are things he talks about that are completely mainstream, well-supported, and valid findings from psychology, psychiatry, or comparative religion, but then it would be combined with this highly speculative, idiosyncratic, revolutionary interpretation of it. The two things were kind of presented side by side. I think that can be more harmful because people are seeing the information that is valid or they can look into and be like, "Oh yeah, there are a bunch of studies that show that is the case," but that gives them undue confidence in the rhetorical spin or the other information where he has interpreted it to support a particular conclusion that might not be as well supported as the actual evidence. I don't think there's any problem with anybody consuming any content if they consume it appropriately and critically. But the reality is that most people aren't consuming content that critically. They're consuming it for entertainment.

SPENCER: Almost anything can attach the word science or the veneer of science. You've got Christian Science. That's not very scientific, and you've got Scientology. There's a big difference between attaching the idea of science and actually doing science. To use Jordan Peterson as an example, I've watched some of his lectures on personality, and I think the ones I saw were really solid. I was like, "Yeah, that's actually a good representation of a lot of personality research," but as you say, the average listener can't tell the difference between that and when he's going on more speculative, more wild tangents.

CHRISTOPHER: One of the things that we've noticed is that we've covered a lot of Jordan Peterson's material, and obviously, his earlier stuff is less polemical and less politicized than the more recent work. Now he's out with toxic mold attacking him. Even when you go back and look at his earlier stuff, when you're familiar with his bigger meta-narrative, he links many concepts in psychology to his interpretation of the Bible and what the Bible is about, along with this kind of evolutionary framework that he adds over biblical interpretations. You can have these lectures where he's talking about personality, and he might be discussing Big Five and OCEAN personality types and so on. But then you'll hear references to Jungian archetypes and reference to biblical stories and how they instantiate this vertical orientation in society. It's just offhand. But when you know the grander metaphysics of his approach, you realize that he is always inserting that into his material, and he has been for a long time, though he did it less in his earlier material. You can ignore that and say, "Oh, he just likes the Bible," but actually, it's very important to his interpretation of psychology. A lot of the views he has about the Bible and what Jesus represents are not standard psychology.

SPENCER: Is there something inherently harmful about gurus? Can you have good gurus?

CHRISTOPHER: I think, in terms of the definition of stats guru or nutrition guru, yes, that can obviously just be somebody who has expertise in a particular topic and has made it their focus, and they're good at communicating it. But when it comes to the way that we use it, in terms of modern secular gurus, the traits that we identify that are recurrent in that set include things like narcissism, conspiracy mongering, revolutionary theories, promoting yourself as a polymathic galaxy brain figure with expertise across a whole range of different disciplines, and excessive profiteering. So if you're referring to our concept of charismatic secular gurus, I think it would be hard to define the features of it and be a good guru. But you can certainly do aspects like good science communicators, good YouTubers, good public communicators who inevitably make use of a similar set of skills to try and communicate information. But I think the whole package that makes someone a charismatic guru outside of the definition around stats guru or whatever is a toxic package. So while some individual characteristics can be non-harmful, I think if they're all together, like if you're engaging in pseudo-profundity and grievance mongering and conspiracy theorizing, I don't think you're likely to be giving good information.

SPENCER: So it seems like it hinges partly on the definition, but you can imagine a person who's very charismatic. They have a lot of interesting speculative ideas, but they can flag them as speculative musings, where you could say, "Oh yeah, they have a big audience. People are interested in what they have to say. Maybe some of their ideas are right, but they're kind of a bit out there." You could see that actually being a positive force, as long as they didn't bring in some of these more negative characteristics. Or do you disagree with that?

CHRISTOPHER: No, I think it comes down to there are polymaths, and there are people who have revolutionary theories on various topics, and there are people who have insights, or at least people who produce self-help information that others find valuable. That exists. But I think the issue often comes, and there was a book that came out recently by the journalist Helen Lewis called The Genius Myth. In it, she was talking about different types of geniuses, but it relates to what we cover with the guru thing. Often individuals who are regarded as geniuses, like Elon Musk or Steve Jobs, or any figure from history, like Leonardo da Vinci, when they become categorized as geniuses, and I think guru can be similar to that category, people attach a level of respect to their ideas across fields. It may be that they were Nobel Prize-winning biochemists, but their new ideas about homeopathic DNA being transmitted across radio waves are not worthy of respect. But it doesn't invalidate that they previously had insights or that they have relevant expertise. So I think there is a danger that when people gain a level of authority and social prestige, it extends across domains. People also desire that those who have been elevated in status and attention because of some expertise will opine on other things. It's kind of like a feedback mechanism, where people are asking them for their opinions about politics and other topics when they might have been an expert in economics, and they end up feeling that they have to give some take. I think the important distinguishing feature between experts who are responsible, or even if they are polymathic, is that they qualify their level of confidence and also that they're not usually offering this all-encompassing worldview and system to understand everything. They might have speculative theories about physics or chemistry or AI, but they don't tend to connect it with politics and finance and history. When that happens, I think that's where the warning bells should start ringing.

SPENCER: Linus Pauling is an interesting example. He actually won two Nobel Prizes, talking about an incredible person, and then later in his life, he seems to have gone totally bonkers with regard to vitamin C, where he started believing it could kind of cure almost anything. He spent a lot of time promoting vitamin C, and I think basically the evidence ended up showing that he was totally wrong about that.

CHRISTOPHER: Yeah, that's a good example. That is very similar to the example I was invoking now, Luc Montagnier, who was a French virologist, who did a whole bunch of obviously very important work in virology, but then later was advocating for long-distance homeopathic remedies that can transform your DNA, via plain science. There is that issue, I think, that when people have a lot of success or are regarded as insightful geniuses or gurus, they themselves come to believe the myth. There is — I think, a limitation that people have. Just in general, counting myself in this category of people — a tendency to essentialize. Somebody had a great insight in this topic and was a fantastic scientist, and then later they become involved in pseudoscience or extremist politics or whatever. It seems as well that doesn't fit because they were a critical thinker and they looked rationally at the evidence. But actually, there isn't any contradiction there. Because, of course, somebody can do good science, and if they stop following the scientific method and start believing low-quality evidence, then they'll come up with conclusions that aren't accurate. I think it's the limitation of our intuitive social psychology that we essentialize people into this kind of person when everybody is capable of being a hypocrite or just changing over our lifetimes.

SPENCER: I find it interesting how people can really separate domains of their life. You can have scientists that are extremely scientific in their scientific work, but the moment they get home, they don't act scientifically or think scientifically at all. I think that's kind of jarring for us, to imagine people can be so different in different contexts.

CHRISTOPHER: Yeah, one thing you see now with social media is that there often is unfiltered access to people that previously you probably would have just consumed for occasional media interviews or reports. Elon Musk's Twitter feed, being publicly available, is the best illustration of the kind of best way to deflate the myth of him as a great thinker, because clearly, if you're following his social media and the quality of evidence that he regards as convincing, he's not a good critical thinker, whatever you think of his achievements. If it was just through books and autobiographies, I think you wouldn't be aware of that. Even in lesser cases, there are plenty of people who appear to have issues when interacting on social media; their personality type does not respond well to critical comments. I do think that it's just an aspect of people's personalities that you could be a very good scientist or a very good researcher who doesn't deal well with criticism from strangers, and social media will supply you with strong access to criticism from strangers. It doesn't mean that your research isn't good, but you might come across as an unhinged lunatic online. In general, in my experience, the way people behave online is often fairly reflective of offline characteristics as well. I know it's not always the case; people are braver online, but I think there are often a lot of through lines there.

SPENCER: Why do you think this topic is important? What kind of effects on society do you think it's having that we have all these secular gurus going about and getting millions of followers?

CHRISTOPHER: Most of them are not good. I think it's important because they're so prominent in the discourse. I preferred when it was a lot more niche, when Alex Jones, RFK Jr., or whatever were topics known to people but were kind of fringe areas where they weren't running the health service in the US or advising the president or the president coming onto their podcast. Part of the issue is that, for better or worse, a lot of the charismatic guru types are now very influential in the discourse, attract a lot of attention, have genuine political power, and also a lot of followers online. Being aware of what they are doing, the rhetorical techniques they're using, and the narrative mechanisms they use to promote certain messages or manipulate people is useful. However, the overall effect in the long term — I'm not sure, because part of the issue is that, as with all generations — when new technology comes, people are less familiar with the ways it works and how to manage it. The more people grow up as digital natives or social media natives, it could also be the case that people become more immune to these kinds of characters. Since my generation, at least, was there for the shift into the online world and social media, it might be that the societal immune system hasn't built up enough yet, but that's probably a positive reading, because it might be that this is the new default now.

SPENCER: You can see it going either way. It might be harder to build up your critical thinking skills in a world where everything you watch is a guru.

CHRISTOPHER: Yeah, yeah. So which way it goes is unclear. But I do feel that the online environment is something that you can't put back in the box. So for better or worse, people are going to have to deal with people that can apply these kinds of techniques. And I do think it is true that when the mask is removed a little bit, once you start to notice the common motifs and the kind of rhetoric that they use, for instance, portraying themselves as renegades outside the establishment, and that the establishment and all institutions are lying — that any attack on them is an attempt to silence their heterodox thought, or this kind of thing. Once you see the grammar that is there, I think it does become easier to notice when people are hitting those notes. And I feel like your classic cult leader, a lot of people know, even though people might be more susceptible to that than they imagined. But I feel that more people are aware of multi-level marketing techniques and cult leaders and so on. So this contemporary crop of gurus, I think it might be the same case where people do become more aware over time of how to avoid falling for the appealing rhetoric. But on the other hand, you have the fact that they are using techniques that are just, in general, very appealing to human psychology, probably universally. So maybe we can never avoid that being something which appeals to a lot of people, because there's a reason that they have such large audiences and are so successful.

SPENCER: With classic cult leaders, I would say the main harm is that they start to extract resources from their followers. Whether it's labor, money, sex, all kinds of things, to the great detriment of people that follow them. With most online gurus, I don't think most do that. Maybe some do that. Maybe they get people to buy courses and things like that, but also, they often spread a lot of misinformation. Would you say the misinformation is the biggest negative effect from these secular gurus that you track?

CHRISTOPHER: Partly, yes. The fact that they promote anti-vaccine narratives, the fact that they promote conspiracy theories. These are not good things. And by and large, among the contemporary crop, there's a significant lean towards the kind of MAGA Trump side of things. So if you see that as a negative impact on society, which I do, and I think is definitely the case for science research, then that's bad. But in terms of what you're saying about extracting labor and material resources, yes, people have Patreons and all that kind of thing. But that's just the nature of online ecosystems in 2026. There are more predatory versions of it, where people are extracting more resources, Andrew Tate and so on. But I think what they're actually taking from people is time and attention, and it's an opportunity cost, in a way, because they will often produce voluminous amounts of material, like multiple hours each day on given topics, or have such a huge corpus of material, hundreds and hundreds of hours of material and ecosystems. Often online communities and so on, where you can go and spend your time. Insofar as that is a recreational activity, people spend lots of time consuming Warhammer lore videos, and do what you want with your free time. It's down to each person. But where people think that they're actually learning about physics or economics or history, and instead, they're getting these kinds of pseudo versions, which often have the effect of providing inaccurate information, and information that denigrates reliable sources and gives you more psychological satisfaction. It will often present you as someone who is willing to look at things more critically. You're not a sheep. You're not just following what the institutions and mainstream media say — you're willing to look deeper at a topic, and so you get this psychological satisfaction from engaging with the content. And then the content itself is actually giving you a system which mostly revolves around that guru's world and interpretive framework, and you can spend years, maybe decades, in some cases, just spinning around the fantasies of this charismatic leader. And that, to me, is bad. Everybody's free to choose what they want to do with their own free time. But I think that, as a society, the more that people are doing that, the worse it is, because the other thing that they do is promote distrust in institutions and authorities. This is part of the reason that when populist political movements become dominant, gurus flourish because they are saying that everybody is lying to you, and we need somebody who can see through the corruption and restore society to the way it's supposed to be.

SPENCER: It reminds me a bit of companies that sell junk food but pretend it's healthy. Some people would say selling junk food is always bad, but I think if you're selling junk food and everyone knows it's junk food, that's probably acceptable, according to most people. But if you brand it as healthy and it's actually junk, then you're really screwing people over.

CHRISTOPHER: Yeah, I saw this video. I think I might have referenced that earlier, but there was a recent video that came out that was like a five-hour breakdown of mentalist techniques, particularly the performance of, I think his name is Oz.

SPENCER: I watched that as well.

CHRISTOPHER: The distinction that was made that I think is relevant to a lot of the gurus we're talking about, and also mentalists, is that when people are upfront about what they're providing, in essence, with mentalists, this is a magic trick that is going to be packaged as psychological manipulation or whatever the case, but everybody knows that, there isn't really that much harm. The harm comes when people go away with the mistaken view that you can read a person's pain code from looking at their facial fluctuations or that kind of thing, and they take that into their life. That kind of thing happens. I think the same thing is true with the gurus. If you're consuming their content and taking it with a pinch of salt, thinking a lot of, "Well, it is just speculative ideas and big thinking between these larger-than-life personalities," there's not much cost to that. But there are people who are not just taking it as that; they're making life choices and significant investments in time and energy into these so-called truths that the gurus are offering. I think that's the issue. In most cases, when we're covering people, we're not saying nobody should listen to this or that you should ban this person from the internet. In general, I'm pretty permissive about things being there, but the message is more that you have to be consuming it critically. That applies to everything you're consuming, including mainstream institutions and traditional media sources as well. It's not just with gurus, but with gurus, you have to be especially careful because they're more masterful at manipulating and appealing to the feeling that you're an intellectual renegade, which is just an appealing thing for people.

SPENCER: One time, I went to a magic show that was in the form of a séance. The idea is you were all seated around a table, and strange things would happen. The lights would turn off, and you would feel someone tapping your shoulder, and the table would move, all this kind of stuff. At the end of it, someone goes up to the magician. "Oh my God, that's so amazing that you can talk to spirits that have passed." And he's like, "No, no, I can't. This is just a magic trick." And she's like, "No, no, I saw you do it." He's like, "No, I really can't." She really wanted to believe that he actually had this power, even though he was insisting that he didn't. This ties into something that is maybe a bit different than misinformation. It's almost like epistemic confusion, where if you dive into these things, you can end up with strange mental models about the way the world works. It could affect you in all kinds of unusual ways, depending on how you make decisions in your life, what treatments you decide to take, and so on, which feels different to me than just having certain facts that are not correct.

CHRISTOPHER: Yeah, I would agree. In some cases, if you end up with an alternative model of evolution, like a theory that the standard Darwinian or Neo-Darwinian framework is wrong and this guru's bespoke alternative model is correct, is that going to have much impact on your life? Probably not, but it's rarely so cordoned off because often that also ties into, like, anti-vaccine sentiment, promotion of supplements, or advocacy for alternative cancer treatments and so on. It is rarely the case, and this happens with conspiracy theories as well, that people simply hold a conspiracy theory and don't connect it to anything else. Instead, if you adopt a conspiratorial worldview, it tends to be that you will buy into more conspiracies over time, and that your conspiratorial ideation, once it becomes a common mode of thinking, leads to a lot of erroneous conclusions and outcomes. If it is the case that somebody has something they think is true about a specialized area of knowledge, some historical event or whatever, it doesn't really impact anything else. You can say, "Well, it would be better if they knew things accurately," but it's not that much of a big impact. I think the danger is that rarely does that happen. It's kind of an epistemic standard. When you have bad epistemic standards, or epistemic standards that are being exploited, it often results in wider consequences, even if the consequence is just that you end up believing and doing a bunch of stuff that is based on very flimsy foundations.

SPENCER: Something I sometimes think about is, can Oprah Winfrey get good healthcare? At first, the answer is yes, of course. She's incredibly wealthy. She can hire anyone in the world she wants. But then you look at how many times she's been tricked by essentially hucksters selling complete nonsense, and you're like, "Actually, maybe she can't. Maybe she is so susceptible to these hucksters that even though she has unlimited money, she's going to have a high probability of ending up with totally fake healthcare." Now, I'm not sure that that's actually true, and maybe she does have really good doctors, but your epistemic standards can have a huge effect on your real-world consequences.

CHRISTOPHER: Yeah, I'm not entirely sure of this narrative, so your listeners can correct me if I'm wrong. I believe Steve Jobs, for example, originally pursued alternative treatments for his cancer diagnosis, and had he pursued conventional treatments early enough, it's likely that he would have had a better outcome. In that case, it's not a lack of resources. It's not that he's not a smart man. It's not that he doesn't have access to the best doctors if he wants them, and so on. I think that is a danger that people often come to believe that they are very smart in particular areas, therefore they can work out what medicine is best. The reality is, you can be a very smart person, but if you don't have expertise in a given area, you're generally better off going with the consensus approach, especially when it comes to medicine. If you have experienced a situation where there was a consensus in a field and you find out that it was wrong, like you looked into the replication crisis and understand that there were all these thousands of studies published that were bad, or you read about figures in history where some doctor has an alternative theory for how something is working, and they self-treat and prove themselves correct, you have this notion that the system can be wrong. There are demonstrated examples where mainstream establishments were wrong, and consensus was wrong. Therefore, the correct thing is to be very skeptical about consensus positions in science. But that's kind of wrong because those examples are often the exception, and the reason we know about them is that they're so exceptional. If it's something like the replication crisis, of course, it wasn't the exception, and that's the problem. The solution is more robust empirical methodological standards, not these alternative systems which have even less robust methodologies and standards. That is an issue where you can point to examples where there have been mistakes, or people have been overly confident, or some virologist stated something that was too strong, and then you draw unwarranted conclusions about the trustworthiness of the scientific enterprise overall.

SPENCER: It seems that often when the scientific enterprise fails and the consensus is not a good consensus, it's actually because the scientific enterprise is deviating too much from actual science. It's failing to do the thing that we call science; it's just calling itself science. You could see this in psychology, where there were so few replications happening, and when they did happen, people generally wouldn't speak up about them when they failed to replicate because it wasn't in their interest. And then you're like, "What are the basic principles of science?" You have to repeat the experiments of other people. You can't just trust them to do them right; that's a fundamental core aspect of science. So, the solution is to push back towards science, not abandon science, from my point of view.

CHRISTOPHER: Yeah, exactly right. And I think one of the telling features that we see in what we call the guru sphere, when we're looking at these modern online gurus, is essentially none of them have any interest. I've never seen an episode where they've discussed the reforms to science, the Open Science movement, the different types of pre-registration, registered reports, and so on. If they were what they sell themselves as, people that are focused on reforming standards and getting better findings that are less ideologically compromised, this should be exactly the kind of thing that they're into. But they display no interest in that area, except to cite the replication crisis as a means to undermine all scientific authority. So that, to me, kind of gives the game away, that the presentation is, "We care about scientific standards and finding out the real truth and so on." But the reality is, no, you don't have interest in that, and what you have an interest in is promoting, most of them have revolutionary theories where they view that they have developed a new theory of quantum physics or evolutionary theory that will revolutionize the discipline, but it's being suppressed by the distributed idea suppression complex or the gated institutional narrative. These are terms that Eric Weinstein uses, but they're older ones, and in those cases, they haven't produced any body of research or evidence that should cause people to take their models seriously. So even though mainstream science has all these flaws and issues, and it is, as you say, important that we emphasize the kind of standards in science that make science work, we know what they are, but they are not doing that and wanting to piggyback on the fact that science gets things wrong or there are legitimate criticisms. To me, it can be made of the peer review system and so on. And, yeah, that's part of the issue that we highlight where you can raise legitimate criticisms, you can have issues with the peer review process, lots of legitimate criticisms to raise, or publication bias, the journal system, all reasonable, but those legitimate criticisms do not validate the alternative theories put forward by the gurus, but they act as if that is what happened. So you get reasonable criticisms in some cases of mainstream institutions, but then you get the kind of assumption floated in that, well, because we are criticizing them, our model is better, and in most cases, it's not. It's more biased and has less evidence for it.

SPENCER: I wonder if you disagree with me on this point, but I do sometimes blame institutions for driving people into the arms of people who are less reliable than those institutions when they act in a way that seems like they're willing to deceive the public. There were a few examples of this. For instance, with COVID, some of the initial discussions around masks, I think, genuinely were misinformation, where they told people not to buy masks because they didn't work. Another example is with the lab leak hypothesis. I think some scientists early on came out too hard against it, harder than was actually justified by the evidence at the time, claiming, "No, there's no way it's a lab leak," when, actually, at the time, we didn't know; it could have been a lab leak. I think these kinds of things, when an ordinary person hears them and eventually says, "Well, that was misleading," I think it's easy to come to the conclusion, "Oh, okay, I can't trust this institution, or I can't trust this perspective." What do you think about that?

CHRISTOPHER: Well, I definitely think it's the case that individual scientists and institutions, representatives from institutions can overstate evidence or be too strong in dismissing things, misrepresenting that there's a consensus around an issue where there isn't. That definitely occurs, and whenever that occurs in public and then later there is a shift, or a perceived shift, it can undermine confidence. But one of the issues I have there is that on those occasions, take the issue with masking. I was in Japan; masking was the norm here. In many countries as well, there were recommendations to mask.

SPENCER: It is normal to wear masks when you're sick and things like that, right?

CHRISTOPHER: Oh, yes, granted, that's true. But in other countries, there were other health organizations that recommended masking, ones that didn't, and so on. In the US, there was also conflicting information because there was Fauci in an interview saying, "We don't think the current information that we have warrants that people need to be masking," but you have people that I heard on This Week in Virology and so on, saying different things. Or you had other institutions giving different information, and then what happens is that people focus on a single sound bite from an interview. When you go and watch the entire interview, there are qualifications that might change as we review the information, or whatever the case might be. I think one issue is that people overly personify science to an individual, be it Greta Thunberg or Anthony Fauci, and they also focus on specific sound bites instead of long-form interviews or the general view in science among scientists at that time. When it comes to things like the lab leak, similarly, most of what I think people are referring to, there is actually the discourse and the narrative, articles in Vox or The New York Times where a reporter links it to racist attitudes against Chinese people or whatever the case might be. But actually, in the scientific literature, you have people who go and do investigations and publish about the possibility. Even the much-maligned proximal origins paper, for example, was researchers looking at the evidence, reporting what they take the evidence for the likelihood of a virus being manufactured to be and offering their conclusions. Other researchers go and do detailed investigations into the likelihood, is there evidence for a lab leak, and so on. The presentation is in the discourse that scientists dismissed it outright, and they weren't willing to even examine the possibility. But when you look at what's in the scientific literature, you find the opposite, that people are taking the possibility seriously. They're investigating it using a whole bunch of different methods, and you might have editorials or opinion pieces or letters to a journal where a group of scientists express strong support for their Chinese colleagues and dismiss the criticisms as conspiracy theories, for example. But that is a letter in a journal. It is not the opinion of all scientists across all fields. The best example I can think of is Michael Worobey, a virologist that we interviewed. He was on a joint letter with Alina Chan and others calling for more robust investigations into the lab leak possibility and kind of criticizing people for being too dismissive. He went on to do a bunch of investigations himself and published papers on it, and he found a whole bunch of evidence that led him to conclude that actually, the evidence very strongly favored a zoonotic origin. He published the papers, he revised his stance, and he said, "Actually, maybe I was a bit too hasty in what I said about my colleagues and so on." But he then became a vilified figure in the discourse world of lab leaks as somebody who was always against the possibility and didn't even consider it. If you look at his track record, he did, and he moved his view after looking at the evidence. I know that's a specific example, but I think that's much more common, and what people are often commenting and reacting to is the shifts in the discourse, as opposed to the actual scientific consensus or the view of scientists. I don't think that's people's individual fault because people aren't reading research papers in general, and they're relying on the media to report things. I do think this is why the general public has a notion that the evidence for lab leak has completely ping-ponged back and forth, and probably it's 50/50, or somewhere like that, but the actual evidence in the scientific literature has just consistently continued to cumulatively build up on the side of it being a zoonotic origin. There's a disconnect there from the discourse and the scientific evidence. I completely take the point that individual researchers and institutions can speak too confidently and too dismissively. There's currently another discourse around affirmative gender treatment or whatever the affirmative care approach in debates around trans health care, and the American general consensus around psychiatry and psychology organizations is different from the consensus of institutions in Europe, which are more mixed to negative on the evidence of efficacy, or they're at least saying that the evidence is lower quality. Depending on the institution, they might have very strong statements about the evidence. I take the point that it is hard for lay people or just general, even experts in other fields, to properly contextualize the discourse around scientific topics. I don't think it's always the fault of the scientists. I think it can also be journalism and just the way that we approach science reporting. Sorry, that was a long-winded answer, but it's something I thought a lot about.

SPENCER: It seems to me there are a few different ideas here that are important to distinguish. One is that science will always be changing its mind as evidence comes out. In a new pandemic, there's going to be limited information. There might be certain conclusions you come to initially that you aren't that confident in, but it's the best guess, and then you're going to change your mind. That just has to happen. Any science is going to do that; it's just baked in, and that has to be tolerable if we're going to tolerate science. It's also true that scientists often disagree with each other. Usually, there will be tons that they do agree with each other on, but there will always be this edge of stuff where there's disagreement, and it could be a very substantive disagreement about important topics. Again, that's just part of science. I also think you make an interesting point that often the spokesperson, or whoever people are hearing about science from, doesn't necessarily represent the on-the-ground scientists or the actual views of most scientists. It's being channeled through the media or maybe through some spokesperson. I do think that there's one thing that is a bit different than what you're describing, which is that I think there have been some scientists who actually deceptively spread misinformation to the population about the nature of the science, and I think that when people learn about it, it makes them not trust science, and unfortunately, that person poisons the well. I do think that this happened with masks. I believe there were statements made by scientists that they knew masks were likely to be effective, but they claimed they were not effective because they were worried about people rushing out to buy them when they were really needed for healthcare workers. That's an example where I think it was actually deceptive.

CHRISTOPHER: Yeah, I do think there are occasions where that can be the case, and I also think that it's kind of the nature of media and also science communication and public health that there will be figures who became the personification of the institution. It works both ways; that person will often be too strongly focused on and then become the subject of most conspiracy theories around the topic. But also, there might be other experts who have a dissenting point of view or think that something is overstated, but they don't get as much attention because they are not the single figure. There's always this trade-off with public health measures that the argument that we have to make a single, unified message without caveats because if you don't, people will react that, "Oh, it doesn't sound like they know what they're talking about." The message isn't simple. In general, one of the lessons from the pandemic is that people do seem to respond better to people being willing to acknowledge uncertainty and so on. That's just my own perspective; it looks like being clearer and more willing to state that is better. One of the solutions, though, is that you can look around. Americans are connected to the internet. They can look at what other countries are doing and say about it. It's a problem that there is this tendency to personify things. At the minute with Jeffrey Epstein, for example, because he's got all this attention, people are now reading into the massive amount of emails that were released and connecting him with almost everything that has happened in the past 20 years. Monetization, QAnon, Reddit /r/.

SPENCER: It's a conspiracy theorist's wet dream.

CHRISTOPHER: Yeah. And with Fauci, the same thing happened. Everything related to health, virology, and so on, all has to tie back to him. Because he's a high-profile figure connected to various grant-giving organizations, you can almost always find a way to trace it back to some involvement of Fauci in a particular issue. But it's the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon thing where most people that have achieved, or in the case of Jeffrey Epstein, they're huge networkers. That's what they are. So, of course, they have their fingers in lots of pies. I'm not saying none of the connections point to any nefarious goings-on. But I do think that there's this issue we need to address. The way social cognition works, we focus on individuals when there are institutions with thousands of people, and we understand the institution through the person, the personality, when it would be better if we realized there's a lot of people in the world, and it's unlikely this single individual is the sole spoke through which all things travel. I think that's just a tendency that humans have; we focus on individuals. We're not very good at dealing with massive institutions with thousands of people and disagreement. Sound bites and individuals, short interviews, that's much more gripping for our memory and attention than depersonalized literature and institutional disagreement.

SPENCER: What do you think the right update about society and conspiracies is about Jeffrey Epstein? Clearly he was doing some sinister stuff, and clearly he was connected to a huge number of people, and there's a lot of emails from powerful people seeming to be really friendly with him. So, what do you think the takeaway should be?

CHRISTOPHER: Yeah, well, we've covered recently a couple of potential gurus who have focused on that topic because it's the in-topic now, in the discourse, and also in conspiracy communities and so on. From the research that I've done, you should take it for what it's worth. As far as I've seen, there is evidence of clear conspiracies with Jeffrey Epstein, and the most well-documented ones are that he was a well-connected serial predator who arranged this genuinely very unusual pyramid scheme of sexual exploitation, where he was recruiting young women or underage girls and then...

SPENCER: Often quite impoverished young women too, right?

CHRISTOPHER: Yeah, vulnerable people, people with psychological issues, or traumatic personal lives and so on. And then there was a system which has been documented quite well in court cases and by victim testimonies about how it operated, where the girls would start off with massages, and then it would evolve into more intimate, sexual abuse, and then they would get out of that role by bringing in other friends or other girls, connections.

SPENCER: And he would pay them, but they would then pull their friends in.

CHRISTOPHER: Exactly. So it's a pyramid scheme of sexual abuse. And on the level of Jimmy Savile or Johnny Kitagawa in Japan, where it really is a very unusual level of sexual exploitation. So that is the thing that is very well documented and is shown in the emails; you can see messages being arranged, Ghislaine Maxwell being involved with helping to find girls, and all those kinds of things. That's all there. And I think that is a genuine conspiracy, including that he was given a very lenient sentence the first time that he was prosecuted.

SPENCER: That seems really sketchy. That he didn't get a harsher sentence.

CHRISTOPHER: Yes, and it seems to be the most plausible thing is that, because he was wealthy and he had connections, that he got a very light slap on the wrist. What the emails also reveal is that a lot of people don't really care if you've been convicted for sexual crimes. It's presented that a lot of people view it as overblown, or a witch hunt, or so on. The other conspiracies range from the plausible but not well supported to the absolutely lurid and outlandish — cannibal parties on islands and disposing of bodies and waste chutes and all this kind of thing do not have the same level of evidence. Jeffrey Epstein, by the accounts and reports, was a very well-connected and quite successful con man, in essence. He was a financier, but the way that he made his money originally seems to have involved confidence tricks and so on. He broke out in influencing connections. He was connected with people in Hollywood, the tech industries, finance, and politics. The emails are a treasure trove for the elite, but what they tend to show is mundane, you can call it evil, if you like, but it's more like a kind of mundane criminality and sycophancy and expanding social networks. What it doesn't show is this coordinated criminal genius. People trace back to the fact that he had a meeting with the guy moot from 4chan, and this was shortly before Slashdot was opened again after being offline. They say those two things happened together. Therefore, Jeffrey Epstein created Slashdot, and then on Slashdot, QAnon comes out of there. QAnon is about sex trafficking, a pedophile elite cult. That was actually to throw people off the scent. He was talking to Steve Bannon behind the scenes about supporting right-wing leaders and populist movements. You draw this web where he is a person responsible for the modern internet, including things like monetization and games. People have linked him to Bobby Kotick at Blizzard Activision. He was involved with the monetization in games because of these conversations he had with Bobby Kotick, the Activision Blizzard CEO. But then you also have that he was a spy, gathering intelligence on individuals for Mossad, the CIA, or the FBI. It varies depending on who you ask. But the emails don't actually show good evidence for that. That's much more of a stretch. I think that's more appealing because the narrative that this guy was a sexual predator, a well-connected sexual predator who was very wealthy and that various elites treated well, and that he was having conversations with people who also shared loose morals, and that in some cases were also abusing underage girls or at least young women. That is not really big enough for his role in the discourse. Now he has to be that. That's just the mainstream interpretation. The reality is that he was an intelligence asset for Israel gathering this information, involved in the creation of QAnon, and involved with all of these different aspects of modern culture. It is conspiratorial ideation in the same way that conspiracy theories function, where they're collecting disparate parts of information, reading into coincidental timings, and ignoring that the emails do not provide the kind of evidence you would expect if somebody was an intelligence asset. They instead show a sexual predator who liked to have a wide network and was funding things and connecting with other men who shared similar proclivities, but was not the kind of source of all evil online. As someone interested in conspiracies, it is an interesting topic because there are real, genuine conspiracies, but the ones that are best supported are kind of the ones that people are least interested in, even though they detail very lurid crimes, but they're not at the level of a cannibal elite controlling the entire world.

SPENCER: It seems to me one of the more plausible theories is that he was providing underage, trafficked women to many powerful people. Do you think that we have evidence to support that? Obviously, it's known that he was doing it for himself, but a lot of people think we knew he was throwing these crazy parties, he was talking about young women. Everyone kind of knew he was into young women. He was buddy-buddy with a lot of these powerful people. Could he have been trafficking for these powerful people?

CHRISTOPHER: Yeah, I think there are specific examples that are well known, like Prince Andrew, where it seems like he was involved, at least very involved, might not be doing it justice, with introducing him to Virginia Giuffre, I think it was the girl on that occasion. There are other cases. There's a French person who also killed themselves when they were awaiting trial for similar charges as Jeffrey Epstein. There were other individuals involved. Yes, he did seem to take pride in arranging parties for people and so on. The primary thing that emerges in the trials he was involved in, the testimonies of victims, and in the emails, is that his primary concern was his sexual pleasure, his sexual gratification. That's what he and Ghislaine Maxwell were primarily about, and that's what they were convicted for, or Ghislaine Maxwell was convicted for. It's what Jeffrey Epstein would have been convicted for. There is another criminality. I have no doubt that many of the other people, not least just from the attitudes they express in the emails, were engaged in at the very least fairly immoral behavior, like cheating and focusing on picking up young women based on their status and all this kind of stuff. But what you don't see is the evidence for a kind of organized criminal network of trafficking. The The New York Times reporters digging into the files say the same thing most people do, which is why there aren't all these prosecutions from the material that's been released. There's lots of criminality going on. There's lots of immoral behavior. No doubt Jeffrey Epstein was involved with introducing people to girls, supplying girls to select associates and so on, but I think the primary thing is that it's like Jimmy Savile or any of these other serial predators, that their primary concern was sexual gratification for themselves at the expense of the girls. It's important not to lose sight of that in favor of the geopolitical conspiracies because they are less well supported, even if you think I'm wrong and there's evidence supporting them. The amount of evidence for the actual exploitation that he and Ghislaine Maxwell engaged in is so much stronger, and that is a real, documented conspiracy. There are other people involved. There are other people who probably should be charged and so on. But it isn't in the realm of a network of hundreds of people across different countries trafficking people from different countries to rich people because if it was, there would be more court cases and prosecutions.

SPENCER: What about the theory that he was blackmailing powerful people? I think there are at least a few pieces of evidence. I don't know how strong they are. One is that multiple people who were in his home reported that he had video cameras rolling all over the place. Two, we know he threw parties with young women a lot. And three, there's a mystery of how, exactly, it's clear he was a scammer of sorts, but it's not exactly clear what kind of scams he was doing, because he did amass an incredible fortune. The last piece of evidence that I'm aware of is this bizarre email that he sent to himself about Bill Gates that almost looks like a form of blackmail. It's sort of sent to himself with really nasty stuff about Bill Gates and things that Bill Gates did to his wife and so on.

CHRISTOPHER: The possibility of him slipping anti-STD medication, right?

SPENCER: Exactly, that he might have had a venereal disease and that he was going to give Bill Gates' wife a treatment for it, secretly.

CHRISTOPHER: Yes, that's the one. I know he made a draft of that, and didn't send it, but on that issue, would Jeffrey Epstein blackmail people and use leverage against them? From everything that I know about him, I don't see any reason why he wouldn't. But I also think the examples in the emails that have been released are quite limited and don't show this kind of widespread network of that behavior being the main thing he was doing. His videoing of his residence seemed to be mostly either for his own gratification or as potential defense. If evidence emerged that he was doing that, and a lot of victims came out and showed their emails where he had done that, or they had recordings of him threatening them, then I would say, yes, that completely fits with my mental image of him. But I think that's the issue; that other side of evidence is somewhat lacking. There might be specific cases where there is blackmail involved, but in most cases, it seems to be more about people's self-interest and their own sexual gratification causing them to interact. Or the possibility that he would give them financial advice or access to properties that they could stay at. That seems to be what people are mostly talking about in the emails we have now. Maybe there's a whole separate section of emails and evidence that hasn't been released that shows the blackmailing operations, but with the Les Wexner connection as well, I think you have a potentially stronger set of evidence. Les Wexner sort of inexplicably gave him control over a large portion of his finances.

SPENCER: He gave them power of attorney, which is such a strange thing to do, where you kind of sign over the ability to make financial transactions on your behalf. Usually, it only happens if someone's mentally incapacitated, right?

CHRISTOPHER: Yeah. From what I've seen, that is definitely unusual, very strange to occur, and whether that was achieved through blackmail, sexual blackmail, or confidence trickster type stuff, because Jeffrey Epstein's history involves him pretending to have degrees from institutions he didn't, and so on. It seems like from the beginning, he was a charismatic con man that successfully managed to get himself into brokerages for the connections, and then he gets attached to a very wealthy individual who gives him access to resources. Then he uses that to create his own vast network and financial empire and influence network. The thing that I see more in the emails, where there's much more of it, is him offering people to meet Woody Allen. "Do you want to come over and have a discussion about blah, blah, blah? Woody Allen's going to be there." Or "I can introduce you to this person." I think the mundane version where people are sycophants that hang about with wealthy, famous people, being around young, attractive girls and feeling that they are powerful, likely explains a lot of what's going on. But that's not a very satisfying story. The fact that he died, by all accounts, committed suicide, is just an unsatisfying end to the story. People didn't get the big, high-profile trial; they just got a suicide. What always happens there is, "Well, it can't have been a suicide. It has to be more than that; it has to be a targeted killing." Then, looking into the emails and crafting this kind of really demonic figure that is the center of the modern world in a bad way, I think that is tied into the fact that he was a really bad guy doing lots of really bad stuff. People want there to be consequences. Also, as we were talking about personifying things, people tend to imagine that individual has to be central to other bad things that are going on. The reality is that he was a very bad guy, but he was not responsible for every bad thing that has happened in the past 20 or 40 years.

SPENCER: The other major conspiratorial aspect of this that we didn't talk about is the way the Trump administration acted around releasing the files and how they seemed to resist it so hard. One thing that makes me concerned about trying to generalize from the information we have is, as I understand it, they still didn't release something like half the files. If you had to guess, you'd probably guess that those would be the more sensitive files that they didn't release. What do we make of that? Is it just embarrassing for a lot of powerful people to be around this extremely sketchy guy, especially if they're kissing up to him and trying to hang around him? Or could it be that there actually is much worse stuff, and we're just literally looking at a really selection bias-oriented set of files?

CHRISTOPHER: It is possible that the really worst stuff is all currently locked away. There's always this possibility. When you don't have a complete release of all information, you likely never will in most cases. The amount of evidence collected from investigations can't all be released for various reasons. The way the Trump administration has done it, with removing the names of people and leaving the names of victims, just clearly shows that the Trump administration is very incompetent. We have to factor that in. But it definitely does seem that there are vested interests, not least of all Donald Trump, who are implicated by the material and don't want it released, at least not without redaction. There are plenty of reasons that people should be suspicious about what is being released. The only thing I would say is that there are plenty of people who are actually pushing for releases or prosecutions, like the prosecutors, the investigators, the police, and the victims involved. Their testimonies paint a very terrible picture, but it's a pretty consistent picture of criminality and abuse, and it aligns with the evidence that we've had released from the emails today. There are crimes, sexual crimes, serial predation, and influence being pushed around people that claimed they had no interactions with Jeffrey Epstein, instead of revealing they have thousands of emails and a close friendship, or whatever the case may be. There is absolutely legitimate reason not to trust the Trump administration, not to believe all the people saying there's nothing to see here, and that everything they did was completely above board. We can't start with the baseline assumption that until proven innocent, we accept the most fluid version. We have to go by the available evidence, and if it later emerges that there are forced releases and it turns out there was much worse information that has been covered up, validating all the claims about blackmail networks and connections to intelligence agencies, then you should revise your assessment. But prior to that, I think the reasonable position is to consider it plausible, but remain skeptical about it. I see a little too much of people applying the same kind of rules that in all our conspiracy theories they would be wary of. If it was a 9/11 topic, people would say, "Well, there's much they haven't released, and there could be much more evidence in that material that wasn't released that shows it actually was not the al-Qaeda terrorists that were responsible for it." It could be, but there's a whole bunch of evidence that does exist, which suggests it was them. I agree that we should, in this case, acknowledge that there's still emerging information. There's still stuff being dumped constantly, but it's kind of like a super stimulus for conspiracy hypothesizing. There was a huge dump of material involving high-profile individuals and elites. It's linked to politics and famous people, and it's just a huge amount of information. It's inevitable that this would become a massive draw for investigative journalists responsible for critical examinations, and also lurid conspiracy theorizing. It's something that we keep seeing coming up in all the material we cover now because it is such a super stimulus, and he was such a bad guy.

SPENCER: Did digging into it change your view of human nature at all? Were you surprised at how many people there were who seemed to know what a sketchy dude he was and yet sucked up to him, or really wanted to go to his parties, et cetera? Now, of course, there are going to be innocent victims there who met the guy, had no idea who he was, were unlucky enough to be in a photograph with him, or something. Obviously, they're innocent victims, but in the emails, you can see people really seem to know what he's about and seem to just not care.

CHRISTOPHER: Yeah. So this is something that I find interesting. I may be more cynical in general because there's almost nothing that is surprising to me, because that's my model of how people behave. I think part of it is because I've spent so much time looking at the kind of gurus and the people that follow them, and the level of sycophancy is genuinely hard to overstate in public. So in private, people like that would be completely aligned with my expectations. Also, because I'm originally from Northern Ireland and I grew up during the troubles, my view of the police and state forces is not that they're infallible or always have the best interests of the public or all communities involved at heart. Yes, collusion is possible. Politicians lie, rich individuals exploit people, and are, in some cases, engaged in sexual abuse and so on. All of that is completely in my model of how institutions, powerful networks, and well-connected individuals behave. The bits that caught me off guard with Epstein were the kind of pyramid scheme level of the sexual abuse. When I watched documentaries or read investigative journalism about that, the level and sheer amount of people involved is shocking. In that case, it's a level of depravity that is genuinely hard to overstate. I can see why people would extrapolate from those sociopathic tendencies, which may well have been there, and very little concern for victims. The aspect with people wanting to talk to him is the bit that I don't get. "Why would anybody want to talk to this wealthy, well-connected millionaire who was known for throwing around grants to scientists and organizations?" I'm like, "What do you mean? Of course, people wanted to talk to him because he gave people money. He was well-connected. By all accounts, he was a charismatic individual, at least interpersonally for some segment of the people that interacted with him." I do think there's this issue that people imagine that those who carry out very vile acts or depraved sexual behavior would be like monsters, that they wouldn't be popular, they wouldn't have friendships with intellectuals or this kind of thing. My model of people is that they do. There are serial killers living in the basement with huge red warning flags going off, but there are also people who are charismatic and capable of being effective in the world but are engaged in sexual depravity and abuse. That's the thing. I don't know if I have a particularly cynical view of elites.

SPENCER: Or they could do [laughs].

CHRISTOPHER: Yeah, but that is the only thing I'll say. Sometimes the pushback is that my stance on it is naive or viewing the world too positively, but I kind of think it's the other way around. I don't have a rose-tinted view of most billionaires or elites that I wouldn't expect them to behave.

SPENCER: You would think that evil is usually boring, not exciting?

CHRISTOPHER: Exactly. And when Elon Musk's emails came out during discovery, whenever he was being forced to purchase Twitter, there could be a great use of that power there. The emails were the same. They were full of people with the most cringy, sycophantic messages, "You have my back, Elon, you're the greatest hero," and all this kind of thing. Or Marc Andreessen, just very recently, for example, doing that interview about introspection being a modern invention and a terrible thing. I don't think the very rich and powerful elites are automatically evil geniuses or good geniuses. They're just people. People are a mixture of good and bad and sometimes terrible.

**SPENCER:**We didn't discuss what makes these gurus so appealing. What do you think it is about them that draws people in, that gets people watching hour after hour after hour of their endless monologues?

CHRISTOPHER: Well, there are a bunch of things that I think are appealing. One is that they're often very loquacious and charismatic individuals. They're good speakers. They're good at telling stories. They're good at weaving narratives. They're the kind of person that could talk on stage for an hour to an audience with no break, referencing a wide range of subjects, historical examples, obscure scholarship, and so on. So there's that enjoyment of the kind of intellectual pageantry that you're engaged in. Then there's also the idea that the institutions and establishment are lying to you, that they're not giving you the true information, but you are someone willing to look beyond the obvious, to consider things critically from an alternative, heterodox point of view. By being willing to do that, you're kind of demonstrating your intellectual quality. On top of that, they often present themselves as being targeted or suppressed, or that the mainstream is lying about them because they're challenging orthodoxies. In doing so, that's why they're being attacked as fringe figures, because what they're willing to provide is actually very valuable. If it wasn't, why would the matrix and the institutions all be trying to stop you from hearing what they're talking about? So I think you have that, and most of them also tend to appeal to things that people like, which include conspiracy theories and corrupt institutions, anti-establishment narratives. It's packaged in such a way that it's appealing. They are often charismatic, and people present themselves as being motivated by the most morally pure things, and that they are sharing information. They often engage in fairly standard rhetorical cult tactics, presenting their listeners and followers as family members that they care about. Jordan Peterson often breaks down crying because of how much he cares about young men or the people in his audience that are being maligned. There's emotional manipulation, but I think the more appealing thing in the people that we look at tends to be the intellectual flattery combined with appealing narratives. In a way, it's intellectual junk food masquerading as a high-quality meal. It's pseudo-profound nonsense and decorative scholarship that gives the impression that this is a very intellectually robust exercise, but in actuality, it's usually just hitting all the buttons that make a narrative appealing and very often tied to a particular political ideology as well. So yes, that tends to be part of it.

SPENCER: I get the sense that some of these folks give the impression that you're right on the verge of understanding something really deep and important. If you just watch another three hours, maybe it will finally click and you'll understand this theory of everything.

CHRISTOPHER: Oh yeah, exactly that. Actually, there's a thing that happens in the content, two techniques that work very well. One is that whenever people are talking about technical topics, they'll often use insider terminology. If you're not familiar, it can be hard to follow. In some cases, experts do that just because they forget that people don't know the terminology, but you can also do that as a kind of signal. If you think of Star Trek techno-babble, where you're not really saying anything, but it sounds very smart because there are a lot of terms, gurus often are not saying things that are untrue in the Star Trek kind of way. It's more that they are making references designed to give the impression of profundity, depth, and wide reading, but they're there in a decorative format; they don't actually add anything to the argument. They're just there to present an intellectual depth that the material doesn't justify. The other thing they do is suggest that if you didn't understand this conversation, if it went over your head, you will benefit from rewatching, taking notes, and coming back to it three or four different times, trying to follow along, or that you don't understand because you haven't consumed the other hundreds of hours that would help you contextualize what it is. I feel like people are more understanding when Scientologists or other cult leaders do this, where you have to learn the system. It's very Baroque, and there's a lot of study required and a lot of material; they see the warning lights. But when it's a secular guru lecture, it just seems more like your professor saying, "Oh, you don't understand this concept yet because you haven't done the required reading, so you need to go away and do that." So, I think there are a lot of things where the notion is that if you don't understand how profound this is, that's on you. If you acknowledge that there is profundity, it kind of shows that you are a deep thinker who gets it. There's a kind of bi-directional self-serving motivation to present the material you consumed as profound.

SPENCER: It seems to me that one thing that harmful gurus typically have in common is that they're spreading misinformation. You could think about there being different motivations for this, and as I thought about this a bunch, I ended up thinking that there might be four quite different motivations for spreading misinformation. You can have a very sociopathic orientation where you're just trying to manipulate the audience; you're lying on purpose because you want them to buy your course or something like that. You can have a more narcissistic orientation where you just believe that you're superior and your ideas are groundbreaking, but it's really a self-delusion. You can also have a more apophenic or maybe borderline schizophrenic kind of orientation, where you just see false positives in places and genuinely believe them, but you're just making connections. You're not able to tell that they're false connections. I think there may also be a fourth motivation where sometimes, when people experience really bad trauma, like when one group caused a lot of harm to them, they can have very distorted beliefs about that group. It's sort of like a fear response. It seems to me these are very different motivations for spreading misinformation. I'm curious what you think of that breakdown and whether you think most secular gurus have a certain motivation for why they're spreading misinformation.

CHRISTOPHER: Yeah, I read your post about that and the different categories you covered, and it was interesting because a lot of it does gel with things we've identified, recurrent patterns we've observed in the figures we cover. I agree that there's a wide constellation of different characters. Some of them have cancellation experiences; some do not. We try to make distinctions between people doing similar things or in a particular category and some which are not. I don't want to say there is a single guru type that applies across all categories, but I would say that some of the things you identified, like narcissism, tend to be fairly universal across the different categories. Individuals express that in different ways. For example, if you're a left-wing type guru, the kind of bombastic right-wing style MAGA narcissism is often not seen as appealing. Instead, what you get there is a kind of inverse self-deprecation.

SPENCER: "I am so humble..."

CHRISTOPHER: Yeah. It's very familiar to me in Japan, where self-aggrandizement is achieved through self-deprecation. You achieve higher levels of social self-aggrandizement by saying that you are not at all unique or special. It's interesting, but the same thing goes for over-indexing on patterns that are not there. I think conspiratorial ideation is baked into it. Some people do that more than others. There are gurus that we've covered who actually don't really engage in much conspiratorial ideation, but in other ways, they fit the archetype. I think the four things that you identified are all important features, and they can be stressed more or less in certain gurus, but a lot of them cross-cut the categories and the purely sociopathic one. The people who intentionally lie, and they know they're lying; they don't believe what they're selling. Let's say we just get access to their emails, and we can see they're saying, "My followers are a bunch of sheep, and I'm just peddling this bullshit to get money." I actually think that exists, but it is much rarer than people who genuinely believe in what they're selling. Or maybe there's a mixture. They don't fully believe it, but over time, they come to find what they're saying compelling. So yeah, I definitely think that motivation can be there, but often people are motivated by a bunch of things. In most cases, I think the people that we cover seem genuinely to believe in what they're advocating, but it's something we are always going back and forth on because if you find out, for example, that someone's getting paid by Russia to promote a particular narrative for this tenant media organization or whatever, then what made them do it? Did Russia pay them because they liked the narrative that they were already promoting? It's kind of like that.

SPENCER: You hear about things like Tucker Carlson, where text messages came out where he basically said something like he hates Trump. It was just so strange for someone who's been promoting him. You wonder what level of strategy he's operating under.

CHRISTOPHER: Yeah, Tucker is a great example because, from those emails, it seems that he is happy to knowingly lie. He will do that, and he will promote narratives knowing that they're false. On the other hand, Tucker's consistent output is one of someone who is conspiracy-prone, like a religious-style thinker. It seems that now he's out of mainstream media. He's not with Fox News anymore, and he has his own editorial control over his content. What did he do? He became more conspiratorial. Interviewing the gay prostitute who alleges that they slept with Obama, talking to people about UFOs actually being constructed from the Bible, and all this kind of thing. I don't put it past him that it's all cynical and he doesn't believe any of it, but he certainly seems to want to promote and put out into the discourse. It doesn't really matter what his personal motive is, except to the degree to which you want to say that he's a knowing idiot or a strategic idiot in what he's promoting around claiming that he was attacked by a demon because he woke up with claw marks after sleeping with his dogs.

SPENCER: Did he say that?

CHRISTOPHER: Oh yes, yes, he did. He said he slept...

SPENCER: I have another hypothesis where that came from.

CHRISTOPHER: Yeah, and it's consistent. That's the thing. Alex Jones is another example where, through his court case, there are clear instances where he's lying, unknowingly lying about what he's promoting and selling, but he also has multiple decades as a credulous conspiracy theorist. Does he believe in what he's selling? Probably not in every circumstance, but he clearly is a conspiratorial person. So yeah, that's one of the things that we often wrestle with when people ask us if we think they actually believe what they're saying. It's sometimes impossible to know, but it doesn't ultimately matter because they're promoting it in their content.

SPENCER: Even the most griftier grifters who are just trying to manipulate people, my guess is they probably still believe a lot of what they say. Even if they're strategically putting in lies, it's just extremely cognitively demanding to do that at all times.

CHRISTOPHER: So in that case, I don't think that Epstein or many other villains throughout history saw themselves as evil villains. When you hear Jeffrey Epstein justifying what he did with the guards, he viewed it as a reasonable exchange; everybody knows what they're doing, and everybody's on board with it. He's not an unhandsome man and so on. I think we often imagine that evil people, like Jimmy Savile, perceive themselves as this evil person deceiving people. But I think people are very good at justifying their own behaviors. Even if they're engaged in acts that they know are violating people and are abusive and harmful, they will often have a self-narrative that justifies why that occurred. Maybe they had some trauma in their previous life. Maybe they also give to charity, or whatever the case might be. I think people are very good at justifying whatever they do or believe if they're sufficiently motivated.

SPENCER: It's funny how villains in cartoons and movies often represent villains as people who want to create suffering or chaos or harm for its own sake, and yet that's so rare — I'm not saying it never exists in humans — but most evil people are not like that, actually.

CHRISTOPHER: Yeah. This is one of the things that comes up in, again, this is actually something that gurus trade in. For example, when you had Darryl Cooper talking about the truth they won't let you talk about World War Two, that Churchill was not a saintly individual, or that Hitler and the Nazis were actually people. The German people were not just evil monsters. There are portrayals where people are presented in media as cartoonishly evil, but I think most people that are familiar with history understand that even the worst dictators and the most brutal, totalitarian, repressive leaders often had interpersonal relationships, people they cared for, family members they were kind to, or whatever. For some people, that creates this kind of fracture that doesn't fit the image, but I think that is the default. Even all these monsters, Kim Jong Un and so on, that are out there killing people and engaging in depraved acts, they also have to eat, have dinner, sleep, and have soldiers that protect them. It's not surprising that there will be normal behaviors. Of course, there are counterexamples where there are just people in history, Caligula and so on, that seem to be unbelievably depraved and enabled by the systems around them. That happens, true, but I agree with you that I think that is more rare than the version where people engage in very evil actions and then in other aspects of their life, they're a seemingly normal person, or they've justified those evil actions as necessary due to the harms the Jews are doing to society, or whatever the case might be.

SPENCER: A lot of people struggle when someone's been nice to them to view them as really bad, even as evidence comes out that this seems to be a recurring pattern.

CHRISTOPHER: Yes, I've had interactions with Sam Harris, for example, where we've discussed this at some length. I've accused him of falling prey to this. This is something that we see a lot, where people prioritize interpersonal reactions, where they had a positive experience, as meaning that the person cannot have a negative impact on the discourse or is not a bad person overall, and in most cases, it's completely irrelevant. Because having a positive interpersonal interaction with someone is a very low bar. On most occasions, you could probably have very nice interpersonal interactions with severely racist or sadistic murderers if you were just having dinner. There does seem to be this over-indexing on personal experience, and I think that while that is more pronounced in certain people, I do think that is just a bias that humans have because of social cognition and us being social primates. We're looking for telltale signs that people are bad actors, and if they've treated us fairly and kindly, we would find it hard to believe that they're beating their wife or that they're raping underage kids or this kind of thing. But obviously that occurs, because there are so many examples in history where people say, "My next-door neighbor seemed like such a nice guy and they were a pedophile or a murderer," or whatever the case might be. So yeah, we shouldn't rely on the heuristic of having a nice conversation or interaction with people, because that is such a low bar.

SPENCER: Yeah, Chris. I mean, you seem like such a nice guy, but you're out there giving these blistering critiques of these gurus all the time.

CHRISTOPHER: There's quite a lot of people that disagree with that assessment. But it applies just as much to having positive interactions with me, as many people will attest to online. But I do think that, in my defense, one of the things that I like to emphasize with the podcast and all the stuff that we do is that when you put content out, and you're a popular figure, and you're getting thousands of listeners and so on, it is often treated as it's rude, almost, for you to critically evaluate the material or push back and show where people are engaging in rhetoric and that kind of thing. But surely, the material is out there. So people often welcome positive commentary and are very, very active to negative commentary. But I kind of feel like it's fair game when it's out in the discourse and ecosystem, as a self-serving justification, I admit. But the same thing applies to me. People are welcome to disagree or criticize what I put out or what other people have put out. And in academia, that's kind of expected as well. I do think that's one of the good things about academia, is you're supposed to accept that your work will be criticized and scrutinized.

SPENCER: Do you think it's mainly just fair game if it's punching up? If you were to go pile on someone with a hundred followers, do you think that would be sort of inappropriate and more on the rude spectrum? Or if it's someone with a million followers, it's like, "Yeah, of course they should be criticizable."

CHRISTOPHER: I think you have to be more careful in those circumstances. In our case, we started off as a very small podcast, and we were always smaller than the people that we were covering. By the nature of online gurus, generally speaking, if we are aware of them, it's because they've achieved a relatively high profile. So it wasn't much of a concern because we're not even really going to make any dent in their overall income or following. They are much, much bigger than us or our podcast reach. But it is the case that there are people we've covered that are less well-known, and as our podcast has grown, we might have a stronger impact on them. So I do think there is an ethic there. If you're covering someone who is not a high-profile individual, and you're going to badly criticize them and potentially draw attention from the people that listen to our podcast or a large subreddit, you have to be responsible in the way that you cover and what you are indicating is okay for your audience to do. So I am wary of that, but by and large, it doesn't apply because of the relative imbalance; people are way larger and have a much bigger impact on the discourse than we do. But I do think you have to be mindful of it, even where somebody is engaged in exploitation. They are still people. So you have to factor in what impact your coverage can have on them. I think it does function as somewhat of a shield that if you're covering someone who's trying to set up a small online cult, it's not often the most sympathetic character on the other side. But, by and large, we don't encourage people in our audience to attack the people that we cover. Criticizing the material, all that kind of thing, that's fine, but not to go after them personally or to look up private information about them. You can't control that entirely. We have a subreddit; I think we're at 70 or 80,000 people. In fairness, most of the people on the subreddit don't know there's a podcast, so we are difficult to move as a big target. But it is the case that if we cover someone, obviously it draws more attention to their material from a critical perspective.

SPENCER: The last thing I wanted to ask you about, before I let you go, is you're criticizing people a lot, and I imagine you must get pretty serious blowback. A lot of the people you criticize have huge numbers of very serious fans. What's that like? Are you just a person of low Big Five agreeableness who just doesn't care, and it doesn't bother you?

CHRISTOPHER: Yeah. So definitely my personality is compatible with that. Like many rationalist, skeptic-type people, I enjoy debating things and arguing online, and always have. So that aspect of it is not much of a concern. However, it is also the case that, as you mentioned, plenty of the people we cover have very committed fan bases who can react extremely negatively to critical coverage. The impact that it could have on you becoming a target for those communities is something that can have a bigger impact than you might want. In my experience, in most cases, the people that we are covering do their best to ignore that we have produced critical coverage of them because it is actually strategically much better for them not to draw attention to the existence of it. They have already built up many layers of rhetorical lines of defense against criticism, so their fans are often unlikely to lend much credence to the criticism, even if they come across it. But I do think we have a thing where we allow people the right to respond. Anyone that we cover, if they want, they don't have to. There's no obligation. They have the right to come on and argue about the way that we covered them or the way that we presented things. It's only ever happened on a couple of occasions, but we do try to do that.

SPENCER: Sam Harris and Destiny did it, right?

CHRISTOPHER: Sam Harris, Destiny, Jimmy Dore, Robert Wright, and Chris Williamson are, I think, the main people that have done that. And that's out of hundreds of episodes, so it is definitely not a common thing. One thing that sometimes people present about that is, "Oh, you want them to come on, you want to criticize people and then leech off their fame." But in actual reality, most occasions, depending on the person that we've covered, I would actually prefer not to engage in a long discussion with them. Someone like Scott Adams, I find him a very unpleasant person, but I would do it if he had asked to do it. So yes, there is that aspect. One of the things that also comes up is, "Aren't you just gurus, or what makes you different from the people that you're criticizing?" I think there are very obvious answers to that. If you go through the traits that we're talking about or the recommendations that we have for how to find good information, it's not "consume more of our content." It's more "go to relevant experts" or "consume content critically," consume what you want, and so on. But I do think inevitably, when you're producing a podcast critiquing people, it's perfectly reasonable for people to have criticisms of you and your approach. What's good for the goose is good for the gander, so people can disagree with the way that we've assessed people or that we've covered people, and I think that's fine. In most cases, I would also say that the only other point is because of the format of our show, where we cover people but we're moving on each week. We sometimes might do multiple episodes covering the same person, and with Dr. K, we had a total of nine hours on his content. But by and large, we are moving on next week to look at someone else. The fan communities tend to get bored. If they don't like how we covered Hasan Piker or they don't like how we covered Noam Chomsky or whoever the case is, the next week we're talking about Scott Adams or somebody else, or Naval Ravikant. They're not interested in that person, so they kind of get bored and move on. If we were only covering Alex Jones or Joe Rogan or whatever, I think it would be more of a thing where we would end up in online feuds. But in most cases, people just don't care about the other person that we're covering, so they lose interest.

SPENCER: Chris, thanks so much for coming on the Clearer Thinking Podcast.

CHRISTOPHER: Oh, it was a pleasure. Thanks for inviting me.