Cognitive Dissonance - Episode 547: Aaron Rabinowitz & V4C 2019 Part 9
Episode Date: October 26, 2020Thank you to Aaron Rabinowitz from @ for joining us. Â Make sure to follow and listen to their show. Â As always thanks to everyone who donated to Vulgarity for Charity last year. If you haven't alr...eady make sure to go follow our friends at Â
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The explicit tag is there for a reason. recording live ish from glory hole studios in chicago kind of this is cognitive dissonance every episode we
blast anyone who gets in our way we bring critical thinking skepticism and irreverence
to any topic that makes the news makes it big or makes us mad it's skeptical it's political and there is no welcome matt this is episode 545
nope of cognitive distance nope nope it is not that's an absurd thing to say who would
ian just just just fill in just fill in an episode just go ahead and numerically designated
as sequentially following the prior episode fix it in of itissonance. It's 48, I think,
but I don't know.
Fucking really?
I'm that far off?
Yeah, dude, you're pretty far off.
I don't know.
I think it's 48.
I think so.
Fuck me, Ronnie.
That's what happens
when we take a break.
I can't...
Ian will fix it.
Don't worry.
Ian will fix it in post.
It's good.
Ian will fix it in post.
It'll fix it.
All this will go away.
Nobody would ever
keep this in here.
Shame me.
We're good.
It's episode 547.
We are joined tonight
by Aaron. Should I use your last name,
Aaron Rabinowitz, or should I not use your last name,
Aaron Rabinowitz? Yeah, no, we've given up on that
long ago. Am I using it? Okay.
Alright. So we are joined by Aaron
Rabinowitz from Embrace the Void
and Philosophers in Space. He's come
down from the heights
of space to join us.
I appreciate that.
How is everything up there, Aaron?
Good?
Yeah, I got a special ivory tower built up there,
space ivory tower.
It's real nice.
It's comfy.
You know, we saw your article in The Skeptic
about Monster Island,
and we really wanted to talk to you about this
because we spend our time around really toxic people,
but we never communicate with them.
And so we really were curious about this.
Are you talking about me again?
Because my ears are burning.
I am.
And so I was curious,
can you first off explain what Monster Island is
to the people who don't know?
And then we'll go from there.
I think we're going to talk about your findings though,
because that's where we want to start.
And then we'll go backwards from there.
Yeah.
And I want to start by strictly saying
findings in the loosest sense of the word.
Oh no, this is a scientific study.
I'm expecting.
I'm expecting the paper soon.
There should be rigor involved.
I don't want to call for many IRBs.
So if you don't mind, let's keep this informal.
Philosophy is one of the hard sciences.
Yes.
So what is the Monster Island experiment?
Monster Island was something we started during the 2016 election.
So 10 or 20,000 years ago.
And it was a project to...
Basically, it originally starts because I was,
like many people in 2016,
having a lot of really heated debates on my Facebook wall.
And it was involving some far-right individuals,
and it was spilling all over all of my friends' walls,
and I was getting messages,
can you please, please do something about this?
So we put together Monster Island as a private free-for-all debate group where the goal, my personal goal, was to test a hypothesis that I feel like is still dominant for reasons that are unclear to me that if you have just enough free speech and open
debate and you make it as free and as unmoderated as possible then like the kingdom of heaven will
dawn and everyone will understand all the true right beliefs and that'll be amazing um and so
wait a minute hold on i gotta slow you down like he's channeling peter bagation here that was going
to happen who are you channeling?
This is James Lindsay.
Am I talking to James Lindsay right now?
Is that who I'm talking to?
Exactly.
Unbelievable.
I'm testing the hypothesis
of certain free speech individuals.
I personally did not necessarily
expect it to go that way.
I certainly expected it to go,
roughly speaking,
the way that all human beings do. But I think it's important to recognize that part of not science, part of
mad science is testing claims that we all know are probably true, but you got to get the fake
data for it in order to back it up. And so like, you know, that's why every month I touch the
burner on my stove just to check if it's still going to hurt.
I do.
Just because you don't know.
You know, it could change.
I zip my nut back into my zipper every single day.
One day, it's going to be like throwing up an apple
and it's going to float.
You know, it's just not going to hurt.
It's going to be amazing.
I just, you know, social problems are slightly more complicated
than your dick arrangement. I'm not saying your dick arrangement isn't complicated. I just, you know, social problems are slightly more complicated than your dick arrangement.
I'm not saying your dick arrangement isn't
complicated. I'm just saying.
Especially with all the hair. It's very
complicated. I'll be perfectly frank.
Aaron, did you name
it from the beginning, Monster
Island? Oh, yeah. I mean, I'm a
classic horror movie. I'm just saying
that does set the fucking tone
a little bit. Well, I mean, that's an interesting point.
I think everyone's going to behave really well over at Monster Island.
Well, so, it's actually, it was a bit of reverse psychology was the idea that if everybody comes into it saying, oh, everyone here is a bunch of monsters and such.
such. And the idea is to still be able to manage to have some sort of debate while acknowledging that everyone here is going to say any horrible thing that they genuinely believe. That, I mean,
that in theory is what the like free speech folks are really saying people should do. That people
should just get out in the open with their Holocaust denial and their white supremacy and
shit like that. And then they'll get laughed off the stage and then everything will be great. And it's just, obviously that doesn't work. But I do think it was an interesting activity to see if on a
small scale, we could have a space that was unmoderated and still managed to allow for some
cross-pollination of ideas. And I will say it wasn't a total bloodbath as far as how things
went. Like it wasn't, you know, in the article, I play up a little bit the dark side of it, and there was plenty of dark side to it. But there was also some, like, positive experiences that people had with regard to Monster Island. And many of them, in a very amusingly cathartic way, came forward after the article and talked about, here are the ways that my experiences with Monster Island helped me grow and such.
article and talked about here are the ways that my experiences with monster island helped me grow and such so let me let me ask you a couple it's just who did you invite how do you get because
i didn't get an invitation to monster i don't want to put that out there for the audience
aaron specifically i think did not invite me to monster i wrote out there a couple of times
if i know that you'd be there i would have invited y'all you know so it started out with literally
like the five or ten people including me me, a couple of serious liberals.
Sorry, I shouldn't say liberals.
A couple of far left Marxist types.
They would be mad if I called them simply liberals.
Right.
Far left Marxist types and one moderate conservative who's like my friend, the white rhino.
And then a couple of far right, you know,
ranging from, I'm not a white nationalist.
I just have these feelings too.
I'm very definitely a white nationalist
and I want you to think of me in that way explicitly.
So we had the whole spectrum of the right going on there.
Nice.
Yeah.
And then, you know, from there we tried to grow the group.
Ted Cruz and Jeff Sessions, both of them, right? um yeah and then you know from there we tried to grow the group ted cruz and jeff sessions
both of them right ted cruz the wishy-washy one but jeff sessions he knows what's up okay i get
it i get it i know where you're coming from yeah exactly i gotta ask i'm gonna interrupt really
quickly though were you friends like outside of any of electronic space with any of these people
um no i actually came to know these folks through like friend-to-friend kind of situation.
Okay, all right. I just wanted to check because that may
come into play later on. Okay, please continue.
Yeah, I was going to. Thank you. These are exclusively
online connections. These are some serious cross-examination
questions. I feel like I'm going to get a ball
and drop 20 of this whole thing.
I mean, I think
we all know how this
ends and we all understand
I think when you said,
you know, what's going to happen before it even happens. I also pretty much knew that none of
these people were your friends. I pretty much, I mean, I think before I even asked the question,
I pretty much had an idea that none of these people were going to be your friends because
I don't think it's a place where you can interact with your friends.
friends because I don't think it's a place where you can interact with your friends.
Now, let me say, I did have a couple of real life friends who then at some point joined the group and were to some extent involved, I would say. People from my philosophy world, for the most
part, folks who like debates, right? But what I thought you meant mostly like the far right folks.
And on that front, those were all, you know, I didn't know any of these right wingers.
You didn't invite your far right friends.
Yeah, I don't have any of those, unfortunately.
When did you stop beating your wife, Aaron?
So anyway, continue. I'm sorry I interrupted. Please continue.
so anyway continue I'm sorry I interrupted
please continue
so here you are
you've got a
basically a free speech
wasteland
that's open to you
it can be built however people
see fit and they do what
they just shit in the desert
is that what happened
it was just a utopia
it was a hate filled utopia so i would say yes
there were certainly i think there were actual debates that happened and it wasn't like it
immediately went from zero to garbage i do think there were like distinct phases of like descent
uh into the inferno here um but like yeah i think that the the folks we
initially started out with were a little more committed to the idea and then as we face
difficulties expanding the group especially on the right wing side the people who ended up filling in
that space were they were not sending their best and that was difficult but I do
I would say that there were some good
discussions until people showed up
whose main goal was just to meme
bomb every conversation as much
as they could and like
because we didn't have rules
about deleting or blocking
there was nothing I mean like we got to a point
where some folks were blocking each other
and that was eventually just accepted,
but the moderators weren't allowed to block
or be blocked by anyone
because they needed to be able to like
do their moderating job.
And so I had to filter through
just so much really terrible spam
and eventually I just got sick of it
and left the island.
Hold on, I want to read one of your rules because
this is one that really touched my heart.
I just want to read it aloud.
You, of course, mentioned doxing
earlier, blocking admins, explicit threats
of violence, blah, blah, blah. But this one is
my favorite. Taking photos
from people's personal profiles and
photoshopping them into sex acts with
military dictators.
That is oddly specific. What's so specific?
That's oddly specific.
You know, they tell you in writing class that specifics are what matter.
You got to get the details in there.
It's got to feel real.
So would it be safe to say that it was entirely fine to take someone's picture and photoshop
them into sex acts with
all other people other than
military dictators?
No, not necessarily. It wasn't like it was
you know, I would say
that I was putting a finesse on the broader
rule of don't take other
people's material from their
homepages and photoshop
it in inappropriate ways.
That was just the
particular case that brought
about the rule involved julie or no involved um uh what is his name asad in russia and
someone's wife and some compromising positions oh jesus christ yeah cry like what i what amuses
the hell out of me when i read that article is like, it's unfettered free speech
and very quickly was like,
it's slightly fettered free speech.
It's getting more fettered
by the moment.
Like by the second.
Let's fetter the fuck out
of that free speech.
Can somebody get more fetters?
We need more fetters.
We're going to run it out of them.
Yeah.
It was really interesting though.
I mean,
like we all know
where it's going to go,
but it's interesting to watch the, like,
like, the dam break
and see which direction the water goes
and, like, which villages are taken out in the process.
Like, I didn't know immediately
that the first rule was going to have to be
no deleting things.
The people were just going to start deleting stuff
and making, like, threads incoherent
so they could look like they were smarter than they actually were. Like, that wouldn't have been my guess about what the first rule was going to start deleting stuff and making threads incoherent so they could look like they were smarter
than they actually were.
That wouldn't have been my guess
about what the first rule was going to be.
So that's an interesting bit of fact.
Admittedly, I do that with our show every week.
That's the editing process.
And I'll tell you right now,
it works.
It works in 30 seconds.
It works.
So I just want to say so.
Yeah.
You have an outsourced out
that someone else comes in
and fluffs it in for you
at this point?
All right.
So,
so it's,
there were some rules.
There were a handful of rules
that you had to establish
because you had moderators.
So the moderators
didn't just sit on their hands.
Like the moderators
had to moderate.
Well,
it was originally,
it was just me.
And then,
we got to a point
where we elected a high council
because there was too much complaining
and I didn't want to deal with it.
And I was testing a secondary,
like we've killed our major objective
at this point, right?
We've murdered unfettered free speech.
So now we're finding out like,
is there any kind of fettered speech
that will allow for engagement with these individuals?
We've moved to secondary targets, right?
What's the, okay.
Yeah.
What's the title of a high councilman on Monster Island?
Is there a specific title or is it just high councilman?
Is that?
Wait, is the main guy like Dr. Moreau?
Like.
Okay.
I'm sorry for that.
So you kept, you did, you did have a moderator group though.
So, and I, and in the article you say that you tried to lean it right because the most of the people on the right were actually upset because they kept on saying that this was a left leaning group, no matter what you did.
Right.
So we, we deliberately tilted it right.
what you did. Right. So we, we deliberately tilted it right. Um, the one of the, like the far right guy who I'd been arguing with on my wall originally became one of those members, one of those
individuals and the moderate right unicorn became the other one. Um, and then eventually we added a,
uh, a lefty trans individual when I stepped back. Uh, I think, yes, I believe she's trans. Um, and so, yeah,
that was, uh, not helpful at all. Didn't really do much of anything. Um, it took the efforts off
of my shoulders. I didn't have to deal with nearly as much bullshit as a result. I were still a bunch
of bullshit, but like, you know, it made that other people had to deal with it. And then I had
to read their chat about the other chat and then, you know, make my own particular comments on it.
But like, it didn't in any way assuage the right-wingers
to feel like they were properly represented.
And much like our current federal government,
I think no amount of tilting it to the right
is going to give them the feeling
that they are sufficiently represented.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay, so, you know, what's interesting about this is that
in the world outside of Monster Island,
there is a group of people
that are conservative
or claim to be classical liberals,
whatever the fuck that means,
which really just means,
I'm a conservative, give me your money.
But those people...
Libertarian, I think, is the correct term.
Libertarians are... Get the fuck out is the correct term. Libertarians are...
Get the fuck out of here with that.
Libertarians are basically...
They're like liberals with a fascist fetish.
Like there's a fascist kink there that they just can't get rid of.
They're like closet fascists.
Anyway, so this is...
I will probably lose all of your audience by saying I know some good libertarians,
but I mostly, for the most part, agree with you.
But I'm just going to say, I'm just going to put that out there because, you know, libertarians are
folks who I like to dunk on like everyone. And I have also talked to some libertarians who I think
are more reasonable and interesting in their perspectives. They are just not the dominant
position that we know of with regard to libertarianism. So you get libertarians, you get conservatives mostly saying,
look, I think that free speech should be unfettered.
I think that this should be something
that we should strive for.
We should always try to have conversations.
Let's get it into the marketplace of ideas.
Let's see what happens.
These are common phrases that you hear all the time,
unmoderated free speech.
But from what it sounds like, when I read the article,
and I'm interested to hear if this is true,
it sounds like the conservatives tried to break it.
It sounds like they came in trying to ruin it.
Isn't this the thing that they jerk off to at night?
Why try to wreck it?
I don't even understand what's happening.
Yeah, well, I think the problem is
there are certainly
probably some conservatives who genuinely
value the free marketplace of ideas
and genuinely think it'll bring about the right
kinds of outcomes or something.
But I think there's a large contingent
that is just really into trolling
the libs at this point, and that
they want an unfettered marketplace
so that there are the least amount of restrictions for trolling the libs at this point and that they want an unfettered marketplace so that there are the least amount of restrictions for trolling the libs and so like there was there were some people
who like genuinely just wanted to like break the island just to prove that they could burn anything
down if they had if they put enough time into it um but i think there are also just people who just
like want to torture other people and feel like that can be a space in which they can do so and
so people and like to be, the liberals tortured them back,
the lefties tortured them back.
So it's just like, it is a mutual circle jerk of torturing each other,
but it is certainly a torturous process in that kind of way.
Now, you know, this like marketplace of ideas thing,
the argument that I hear most often,
and this comes back to the sort of high council problem, which is the complaint is always, well, if you're going to have moderators,
who's going to be moderating and who gets to make the final decision and what are the rules? And
then you immediately start hating the rules and claiming that they are being implemented in unfair
ways. And so, you know, you end up with our president complaining that Facebook and Twitter
aren't treating him well enough or something like that, right? So, like, it does scale up, I think, to a very current, very serious
problem of, you know, this is actually something we see a lot in ethics, broadly speaking. I, at
least, you know, once a talk about ethics, we'll have somebody ask, well, who gets to decide what's
ethical and what isn't ethical? And that's just a problem. It's just, and the answer is we do as
best we can as a group, like, and moderation,
I think generally has to be done
on that group level in that kind of way.
And it's just, we don't have a solution right now
for these incredibly large scale platforms
that aren't effectively group moderated
in a useful way like this.
You know, I want to ask you just a question.
I will get mildly philosophical in doing so. A
couple of questions. So the marketplace of ideas, it just struck me like in a marketplace, in an
actual marketplace, one of the ideas is that economic forces drive out the bad and they
enhance the good, right? That's, I mean, I'm oversimplifying, but not too much.
enhance the good, right?
That's, I mean, I'm oversimplifying,
but not too much.
But it strikes me that like,
that's exactly the wrong analogy for speech,
particularly speech on online platforms where speech is cost-free and voluminous
and nobody has to purchase it, right?
So there is no economic factor and you can take money out of it and talk about economics
in all kinds of different ways.
But like, there are no economic factors, which actually would create the same kind of market
dynamic that would push bad speech away.
Instead, you just get all of the speech you get.
There's no sieve.
There's no funnel. It all just
is shit into the same pile. And there's no reason for that to reduce down and distill its way down
into the better. So I would say, and I'm not saying they successfully do it, but I would say
one way to understand how places like Twitter and Facebook work when they're
not just sucking up your data for ad revenue is they are trying to construct a system that does
function more like a market by like, for example, using upvotes or something, right? The idea is
the market will respond to good ideas by upvoting them and, you know, liking them and retweeting
them and sharing them and people will build their platforms. And again, right, it doesn't work for a lot of reasons
perfectly, but like neither does an actual market either, right? The hypothetical, like the
theoretical version you just described is not like the thing that actually exists out in the world
in either case. But I do think they are at least attempting to create a kind of space where it isn't just like
absolute garbage. Because at the end of the day, if it's just 100% absolute garbage,
they lose people because people get bored of that site. You know, some amount of people get
bored of that site. Whereas I think if they can manage to figure out some way to improve the
quality of their content without pissing off
too many of their users, they can try to find a space where they hold people in much more.
But, you know, like push a little bit on a couple of things. I was actually speaking like outside
of like the administrative nature of like Facebook and Twitter and they're sort of top down. But
I'm talking about from the bottom up, there's, you know, there's not like Monster Island and being the
example, like there's no force within Monster Island to have a real marketplace of ideas that
distills out the shit and, you know, eventually ends up with a higher quality discourse.
I also think there's an important distinction between, and that is
the distinction between good versus
controversial.
Controversial gets upvoted
and people
talk back, right? And so
we've seen that that's what's
actually engaging. Absolutely.
That's what people like.
So it seems like one of the driving
forces from the top down, algorithmically, is to drive controversial content rather than to drive quality content.
But two points there.
The one about bottom up, the other one about top down.
No, I think those are both good points.
And I think you're right that, you know, I do think there are attempts to try to drive some amount of quality,
but I do think you're also totally right that at the end of the day, controversial material
drives more attention than anything else. And controversial material is not making a distinction
between good and bad controversial material, productive and unproductive. And this is why,
like, at the end of the day, I'm fully okay with Alex Jones being
banned from Twitter and think that, you know, like, he is a kind of reductio ad absurdum of
the absolutist view that, you know, we should be allowing everybody on all of these platforms to
do whatever they want and let, you know, let the internet sort it out. So, yeah, I agree with you.
Because it just doesn't sort it out.
Right, because it doesn't. You're right.
Yeah, you're totally right.
Like, it seems like one of the problems is that there's no cost.
On an individual basis, as a user, there's no cost to me.
Like, and I'm going to say that in a lot of different ways.
There's no cost to engage a platform.
And there's no cost if I'm horrible on it.
And there's no cost if I'm horrible on it. And there's no cost. One of the notes that I had written for the conversation was like,
we have relatively unfettered, unmoderated free speech in the real world.
And it goes typically fairly civilly, typically.
It goes better than it does on the internet, right?
I think that that's a, I don't want to say it goes typically civilly,
but it goes better than it does on the internet, right? I think that that's a, I don't want to say it goes typically civilly, but it goes better than it does on the internet.
Like I haven't gotten to a screaming match
with anybody in a long time in the real world,
but it's real easy to get called every name in the book
in 20 minutes on the internet
if you just want to go,
and everybody's had that experience.
And it strikes me that like in the real world,
there's costs, right?
We face social costs.
And there's also like payment costs, like actual dollar and cents costs to engage in a lot of different kinds of speech-related activities.
It's kind of this one wild west world where there's no cost.
So it's like it's unfettered free speech but it's also like um consequence free in
a lot of ways and cost free and i think it's interesting you could type all night i think
it's interesting to watch especially leftists in particular try to push back on that problem to try
to create genuine costs on the internet through things like, you know, not doxing necessarily, but like trying
to get people fired from their jobs if they are showing up at white nationalist rallies or making
a bunch of white nationalist claims on the internet, right? Tucker's writer getting fired for
his extracurricular racist activities, for example. So I do think there are more costs on the internet
than there were when I was growing up, for example. Like it's,
it is more of, and you see it also as well in like boycott campaigns that attempt to,
you know, control the behavior of corporations by extracting a cost from them,
using the internet as a way to scale up those boycotts. And I think at least that has been
effective enough that you have conservatives complaining about woke culture, you know, going after corporations all of the time.
And obviously, like, it's a stupid cat and mouse game where the corporations do things to try to adjust without actually.
And I'm like, I'm not saying anything actually fixes any of these problems.
I totally agree with you that the reason the internet acts the way it does is because degrees of anonymity, even if you can't have perfect anonymity, do make it much easier to act immorally and not face any repercussions. So the costs are like mob justice related, you know, like and that's vigilantism like extended and that's vigilantism extended.
And that's problematic.
Yeah, so this is a complicated question.
Who decides what's right and wrong?
That's tough.
Yeah, well, I'm sympathetic to this.
And so, for example, I'm not a huge fan of attempts that I'm aware of to try to get certain professors fired for arguing for controversial positions. At the same time, there was one
professor, for example, who expressed some just really explicitly racist and misogynistic positions
and is a tenured professor, and they didn't fire him. They put a bunch of rules in place where he's
not in charge of grading anymore, so he, like impact his students with his racism and such like that. And I'm, that is to some extent, maybe a better compromise, but I think it,
you know, it still puts students in a very awkward position who are taking that particular class.
And then I think, you know, the same sort of trade-offs exist on the internet as well,
when we're trying to address how to approach, you know, do you let the person on?
Do you put a tag next to their comments saying this is fake news?
Like, what is the right way to improve the situation?
I know you sort of maybe lean in some ways
towards we should all just get off of these sites,
but I think that that tends to be a bit of a non-starter.
And so I'm interested in anything
that looks like genuine attempts
to try to improve the quality of these situations because I don't think they're going anywhere. Yeah so I'm interested in anything that looks like genuine attempts to try to improve
the quality of these situations because I don't think they're going anywhere.
I'll agree. I think that it is a non-starter to suggest that people are going to stop
engaging in discourse online. And I just don't think that the real market forces from the top
down are going to fix it. So what's interesting to me is that we have to fix it from the bottom up,
but the bottom up is where the problem lies.
Yeah.
And so I don't know, I just don't know, like, how do we,
and I'm curious what your thoughts are in terms of your optimism
or lack thereof to finding real solutions toward having spaces online that are effective spaces
for people to go to that are safe that you would want your kids to be on so like and i know like
oh won't someone think of the children as like boring but i also i happen to have a bunch of
kids just a whole shit ton of them you're saying you've gotten boring is what you're telling me
terrified of them going online yeah i am fucking boring but like
i'm scared of the idea that kids going online at all right because you know it it takes about
three clicks to enter some of the most toxic place i mean just horrifying mean-spirited
evil shit is just a handful of curious kid clicks away and so that so it's one thing to talk about
how a bunch of consenting adults
and the ideas that they're going to be exposed to,
but we're also raising
every subsequent generation forever
with access in their hand
without parental supervision most of the time
because kids take their phone, leave the house
to some of the most toxic, evil shit out there.
So how do you fix that
when the market forces
are working against you as an individual
or against us as a society?
And you have five minutes to answer this
and we're going to hold you to it.
You have to fix it in five minutes.
So go, fix it.
I'm just curious if you think it can be fixed.
Well, I guess, you know,
I'm not optimistic about much of anything these days.
I'll be right honest with you about all of that.
Like, just for starters,
don't put me in the optimist camp.
I'm only optimist proportional
maybe to some other individuals.
But like, I fall back on my community organizing stuff
when I think about the answers to these kinds of questions
in the sense that like,
you know, I don't expect Facebook to solve the problem for me,
nor do I expect human nature
to radically change in some way
to solve the problem for me.
What I can do is create a space
like our Philosophers in Space
Facebook group.
I imagine you guys have
a Cognizant Facebook group
and, you know, work with moderators
or do various...
There are ways that you can set up a community that
I think can be very healthy and safe
and constructive. I would be very comfortable, for
example, having children
in... I'm not going to invite them in because I don't
want to get in trouble, but if
they freely wanted to show up in our...
I'm going to the house, kids!
I would not be at all concerned
that they would see something in the Philosophers in Space Facebook group that I would feel uncomfortable justifying to anyone's parents.
If you're allowing your kid to be...
And I think there is a reality that kids are going to face some risk with having access to being online.
I faced risks with having access to being online when I was growing up. I think the internet is a really valuable tool for young people, but can also
present a variety of risks. And I just, given that it seems to me to be fundamental infrastructure
of the universe now, I think the way that we do this is give them spaces online where we have good
reason to think they will be, you know, at fairly low risk.
It's going to take at least 10 or 20 clicks to get them to the white nationalists and hope that those spaces will, you know, be of interest to them.
And then, you know, push as hard as we can to get places like YouTube to take down, you know, white nationalist propaganda.
And like that, that's the best that I think
that we're going to make of this.
What is it about,
I'm curious your thoughts as a philosopher too,
what is it about the internet?
Is it exposing who we really are?
Or is it,
because I don't think that it is,
or is it amplifying within us something
particularly egregious that is not necessarily,
I think that would not necessarily amplify otherwise.
So like it's kind of the road rage problem.
Like if I'm standing in a line, nobody cuts in line.
Everybody's polite.
Somebody bumps into somebody, excuse me, no problem.
That's how lines typically work when we're physically present next to each other.
Put everybody in a car and somebody cuts you off and everybody's flipping everybody off because
they're surrounded by an anonymity cage. Put people on the internet, we move one step further
and the behavior gets worse. What's your thought on, is it revealing of the truth of how people
really think and feel?
Or is it actually driving some of that accelerated behavior?
So I'm with, I guess, cribbing from Aristotle here in that I think human beings are neither like good or bad in essence.
They have the capacity for both and are made good or bad by habit and experience and their
actions and choices in their lives.
And so I think, you know, the internet, so I'm sympathetic to the situationalist kinds of
concerns that if human beings are put in the right kinds of environments, they turn into
monsters very quickly. That was part of the joke for me about calling it Monster Island is that it does, you know, we do see in places like Abu Ghraib
Prison, in places like, you know, there's a lot of issues with it, but people will point to things
like the Stanford Prison Experiment or the Milgram Experiments as situations that suggest that
our morality as human beings is tied to certain social cues.
And if you take away those social cues, you can really easily turn people to doing very unethical things that they wouldn't do otherwise.
So there's certainly, I think, a reasonable idea that the Internet is one of those kinds of spaces and so is making it easier for people to slide in that direction. Then on the flip side, I think, you know,
the internet also has shown how people can become incredibly interconnected and how human beings are
natural community builders and they come together and they, you know, huddle against the darkness
and try to help each other in any small ways that they can. So I think, you know,
the saying is just a tool idea is not perfect because tools do have different features and
natures to them. And so like certain tools are more deadly, certain tools are more dangerous.
And I think the internet is a very, very powerful tool that is able to help people do a bunch of
horrible things and also a bunch of great things. I mean, I think, you know, look at podcasts, look at y'all's podcasts, right? How
much, how many people will be listening to your podcast if there wasn't this infrastructure for
sharing it out there and forming communities around it? Yeah, I think it's interesting because
I think one of the things that we tend to do when we think about the badness of the internet is we
try to think about the societal concerns of it. But when we think about the goodness of the internet, we think about the
individual benefits that it gives us. And so those two things are hard to weigh because when you look
at the societal harms that it causes, we see massive division in the way in which people are
interacting nowadays, way more than I think when I was growing up. It certainly feels more divided
than it ever has been. And so there's a feeling like that is a huge negative, but then you think about
all those wonderful places on the internet, like for instance, Reddit, buy me a pizza,
where people are hungry and they ask someone to buy them a pizza and someone goes to their
credit card and buys some random dude a pizza who's hungry for the evening. That's a bit of joy
on the internet
that is just not available if it doesn't exist.
Hell, modest needs doesn't exist if there's no internet
and modest needs has changed lives after life after life.
So I see where I think we always get caught up.
I wanna ask though, and I do wanna shift a little bit
because I wanna ask,
we never really got to the end of the story. What is the negative outcomes of this? And if there's
any positive outcomes, feel free to say them. I know there aren't, but go ahead and go ahead and
say a positive outcome if you want. But I really want to talk about some of these negative outcomes
and I'd like you to get to that part of the story. So any negative, so you just ended it and that was it? That was the end of the story,
Aaron? Is that it? Or is, and we all forgot about it? Is that, is that it?
It was all a dream.
All right. I will say the many of the people who met each other on Monster Island are still
friends and happily interact on Facebook, not including a guy named Ryan Balk, who was one of
the, I really want you to understand that I am absolutely a white nationalist. I am not playing
around with the idea. I'm not, yeah, no, we're not, we're not pretending here. I believe that
people need to get out in the streets and race war. And he did indeed get out in the streets and race for her as far as I can tell. He was in Kenosha during that shooting.
He joined up with Kyle's militia group prior to the shooting.
He was promoting himself as the tactical advisor of that militia group and that they were in communication with each other.
of that militia group and that they were in communication with each other.
There's some people, it's not clear,
it may be possible that Kyle,
that this is the person that Kyle called
immediately after the shooting possibly.
Anyway, there's a case going on right now
against them, a civil case
for essentially promoting violence online
that led to actual violence in the real world.
So yeah, in a group of probably 300
people on Facebook, I directly and consistently for several years interacted with somebody
who then went out and helped facilitate the murder of two protesters in Kenosha.
So that was part of the story
where we decided
we're going to close this group down now.
Yeah, wow.
That is, and you know,
the thing is that it's impossible to know,
but if you see the way
people can tune each other up online,
you know, sometimes you can see
that that sort of happens
in other places too.
I mean, I know that the insole boards
are where people go to get tuned up by other guys
that are also very frustrated and very upset
and very misogynistic,
and they get tuned up by each other,
and there's nobody there.
There's no baffle.
There's nothing to stop it.
There's nothing.
There's no counteract.
And so is it, the difference here though,
is that you guys supposedly had baffles installed.
I mean, the leftists in this group
and the liberals in this group,
they're the baffles to this bad idea, alt-right stuff.
Did they, clearly they must not have had any effect then,
right?
I mean, if we think about it in that sense,
whether you're in a group of people
that's all you're the people that are thinking,
are in sort of lockstep in that idiot circle
that's in lockstep or that idiot circle
that's not in lockstep, it doesn't matter.
It sounds like you could still get tuned up
and hurt somebody.
Yeah, and I'll go you one worse.
It's possible that, you know, being made fun of and, you know, like, oh, if you really believe this, then actually do it by a bunch of lefties in that group, I don't know, could have further encouraged him to do that.
Like, I'm not saying that's actually what happened.
We don't know that's actually what happened. you carry around right that like you know is is this um constantly taunting and you know fuck
around and find out attitude go you know gonna push someone to like actually do the thing um
i do i do mostly for the most part think that like he showed up to that group you know like
looking to escalate over the course of his life and was probably headed on that trajectory anyway
i think that he was involved in much much worse worse groups than our group. But like, I, you know, that is, that is something
to think about. You know, it's funny though, because like, and, and again, I'm, I recognize
that my biases are showing, but like, it does seem very much the case that like we stay,
we stay in places of conflict much longer online than we do in person. And like the ability and
desire to double down because we don't have any of those social handcuffs that you have when you're
in person. You just, you know, I think like, just like arguing online seems particularly tailor-made
not to change your mind, but to entrench you more deeply into your own belief
set. And I think there's been some studies that have demonstrated that that actually is fairly
true. So I wonder if like, because, you know, like when thinking about like when you're having
an in-person conflict, those tend to be relatively short lived when you're in a real heated argument with somebody, like a heated moment.
But people will stay in conflict online for weeks or days or months online. And if we continue,
and if you double down and entrench because Aaron's making fun of me and I'm not going to
be made fun of and I can keep coming back to that conflict and coming back to that conflict,
that strikes me as like psychologically
disadvantageous for our wellbeing, right? Yeah. Like, I don't know that, but it, it, it just,
it just seems intuitively true. No, I totally agree. And I think this is an addictive substance
and like the jokes in the, the article about this being an addictive substance that would suck
people in and, you know, you get into these like cycles of rage and and stuff is is 100 genuine and like i vividly remember the day where i was
you know heatedly involved with this particular person on monster island who was my least favorite
human being in the universe who was like someone i ended up blocking and i'm much happier because
i have blocked them out of all of my social media. And I was like, you know, deeply involved with arguing with this incredibly toxic person.
I'm like, why the fuck am I doing this?
Like, why am I engaging with this incredibly toxic person and including this in my life?
And it was like, you know, it was sort of like a snap moment where you're just like,
I'm just, I'm done with this.
I've hit my point.
I've hit bottom and I'm out.
So like, there are ways to do it better. And like this was not this was the goal of this project was not to do it better. The goal of this project was to see if this could work out in these with these certain kinds of constraints put on it. It was not a heavily moderated that use interesting rules. And one
of the rules that I've seen that's apparently effective is if you're going to try to change
somebody's mind, don't go more than four or five comments. That the back and forth shouldn't be
longer than like four or five exchange. Because what they find is like the odds of you changing
your mind after four or five comments just plummet. And that's just a reality of the situation.
So if you create a space where people can have fruitful or meaningful exchanges in that short kind of way, there is a little bit more mind changing that I think you can actually do online.
Now, I've seen on your Twitter account, you've shared another site that does do debate.
That's sort of a more academic debate.
Is that, can you talk about that for a second?
You've shared it a couple of times, so I'm curious about it.
Yes, LetterWiki is the site.
And I really like the guys who set it up.
And I think it is a genuine attempt to create, again, a creative kind of community and space that pulls against the
natural instincts of the internet by encouraging these long form, very, you know, like very trad
kind of letter writing behavior, which really actually I've found to be actually quite
satisfying to engage in like, you know, super traditional, dear sir, right? And layout,
you know, I was so good to hear from you.
I really appreciate your thoughts
and back and forth kind of stuff.
It's a fun place for me as an academic
to kind of like test drive ideas
in a low stakes environment
where I can feel like I can get some feedback
and I can, but it's a little bit more permanent
than like a Twitter debate. Because like I can, but it's a little bit more permanent than like a Twitter debate because
like I can then, you know, I've had a couple of letter wikis about things like, is social justice
a religion? And so whenever, you know, once a week when somebody says, what are your views on social
justice being a religion? I can just say, here's this letter wiki that's like my back and forth
take on this. And I thought, I think that's a really valuable space. And they're doing a lot of work to try to
not have
comment sections,
have subscriptions to people, but not
have liking.
The kinds of mechanisms that
feed the reward mechanism
part of our brain, but don't actually
encourage very positive, constructive
discourse.
Wow, that's really interesting.
I want to ask, so we, I think that the, and I said it earlier,
and I think it's true that the sort of right-leaning people
are the ones who really want the sort of unmitigated area
where they can have any kind of free speech that they want.
But we've seen time and time again that whenever they have these places they have to install rules
it's very similar to when when they have guns and they talk about how great guns are and how
awesome guns are but so please don't bring them to my uh to my speech or please please don't bring
them to the national convention please don't bring them it's very similar in the same sense is that
they're all for unmoderated guns, except for when they're around me.
And they're also the same way around speech.
Did anybody, have you heard of anybody taking this and using this model anywhere else,
especially on the right and saying, you know what,
let's see if we can do an unmoderated free speech that is,
that we can maybe see if we can get it to work other than 8chan?
Yeah, I was going to say 8chan.
That was really where I was going.
8kun, I think, right, is the new one.
Wait, now what?
Yeah, it's not 8chan anymore.
It's gone.
Even more esoteric.
You can't see it.
So, I mean, I think like
the Heterodox Academy would claim that they are,
I mean, they probably wouldn't admit
that they are a conservative operation, but I would place them as a kind of conservative operation that has attempted to
put forward a front of substantial discourse between disagreeing views. I don't know of,
I don't know of anyone who is really genuinely actually committing to letting everyone have,
I mean, like, what is that one, A gab or something that is just like a white, the white nationalist alternative to Facebook or whatever.
Yeah. Or Twitter or whatever. And they also have a white nationalist version of
YouTube too, or whatever, where they just can post whatever they want or yeah. So.
Yeah. But your general point stands that at the end of the day, everybody wants something
excluded from their group. And I think the narrative has
gotten very silly because, you know, liberals and lefties are more willing to say, here are the
people that I want excluded from my group. I want the white nationalists out, you know, I want the
transphobes out and such. Whereas I think the right is in this place now where they like to
pretend that they are the people, they have taken the mantle of free speech away from the left who have become overtaken by the social justice warriors and so are no longer committed to their liberal values.
And they like to play this narrative, you know, like right up until the moment where you try to have a functional debate with them and then it all collapses.
So I got one more direction to take this.
I'm curious too.
And it may go nowhere,
but to what extent, if any,
is this desire for unfettered free speech
a gendered desire?
Is this a primarily male-driven desire?
Because when I look at 4chan, 8chan like that's dudes man that's not all
but it's i mean if you were to if you were to fucking take a poll it's not 51 like it is the
general population of women right it's it's heavily male i would agree in much the same way that I would agree that like atheism and skepticism face
the same, you know, gender problem. And I think we want, we don't want to say it's an essential
feature of men or women that these are true, right? I think it's more that various kinds of
social conditioning encourage, you know, rambunctious over-the-top debate,
and like encourage men to sort of get into these debate fights in a way where I think women are
more discouraged from doing so. And I also think that like these spaces become incredibly,
incredibly toxic. And I think reasonably, I would say,
women are generally less interested
in being in those incredibly toxic spaces.
Whereas I think, you know-
They're not safe.
Yeah, they're not safe.
And that like, there isn't a pleasure derived
from, you know, getting in there and mixing it up.
And it's not true 100%.
There were women on Monster Island
and they would get in and they would mixing it up. And it's not true 100%. There were women on Monster Island and they would get in
and they would mix it up too.
But it was very much predominantly men.
And I think it's because
we need to work on better.
It's because we need to work on
better encouraging women
to express themselves
and creating spaces for them
to express themselves,
including in sort of very rough and tumble kind of debate, because I think there can be value to
full-on contact sparring as well as, you know, very light sparring. And I think, but I also
think that like part of this is, it's valuable to recognize there's a corrective and move away from
is it's valuable to recognize there's a corrective and move away from debate as the truest, highest form of engagement towards collaborative discussion, which you could say was traditionally
classified as more of a feminine approach rather than the male, you know, combative debate style
approach. And again, these are culturally reified assumptions, not actual features of the genders themselves. And so,
you know, I think it's a bit of both in the sense that we want to make more space for women to be
allowed to express themselves in the full range of debate and discourse styles, while also
encouraging men to find ways to be more collaborative in their engagement with others,
especially ones who substantially disagree with them.
And that's like, that's even like already assuming that we're dealing with people who
are acting in good faith.
There's no, I'm not, I'm not suggesting that you're going to walk over and do this with
the Ryan Balks of the world.
The solution to them is stay the fuck away from them.
Yeah.
Cause it just, you know, like I'm just, I've seen that
clarion call for
free speech
and it's male voices that are
screaming for it, you know, and then they
devolve into the monster island problem
more often than not, not
exclusively. So I'm talking about
preponderance, not exclusivity.
So, and then they
devolve into these spaces, which are genuinely unsafe
spaces. And as men, we don't have to deal with our safety in the same way that women have to
contend with our safety and to bleed over from the virtual world into the real world and how that
might compromise our physical safety. So it strikes, it strikes me as like such a fucking privileged place to even go to. It's a male, it's a
specifically male privileged space to be like, yeah, I'd like to go and have this unfettered
free speech zone where like, you know, because I don't have to deal with my safety in the same way.
If I get doxxed, it's not the same thing as if my wife gets doxxed.
Because somebody's not probably going to drive to my house.
The likelihood of my physical safety being in actual jeopardy is just statistically vastly lower than her physical safety.
And it occurs to me too, one of the reasons why these spaces might also exist is there's a pushback when someone points out privilege to someone else, they want to create a space where that they can gain that privilege back.
And so they want to, they want to be in a space where they, they aren't questioned as much. They
aren't, you know, that, and they can, they can push back more in that space than they can in
the real world. And so that might be the, one of the reasons why those monsters are even created.
Yeah. And so I do agree with you about the about the danger thing. I think that's important. So
in on the Monster Island list of rules, we had no threats of physical violence. And that one,
that one came about specifically because someone was threatening me with physical violence.
It was the person who I realized that later on was so toxic that I just wanted to leave
Monster Island and block this person and be done with all of it.
They were, you know, genuinely threatening to drive up and engage in physical violence with me.
Now, like, was I super concerned that this person was going to do this thing?
No.
And would I have been more concerned if I was a woman?
Absolutely.
Was I a little bit concerned?
Yeah, a little bit. Because, you know, again, you don't know which person is Ryan Balk.
Like, you don't know which one of them is the one who's like actually going to end up in the street.
So, like, I do think that you're right, though. I think that these are places of privilege.
And this is a really hard thing for me as a white male philosopher.
Like it costs me very little
to do my job as a philosopher
where I'm willing to throw down and debate.
It pays very little too.
Right, right, right.
It's, you know.
Sorry, I had to.
I had to because you're.
Oh no, I mean, it's fair.
That's why I started a cult.
I like, that's where all the money is.
So yeah, I think, you know, I think me as a
philosopher, I really do love debating and I have frequently gotten feedback from folks on the left
that like, I'm a little too gung-ho to be willing to debate anything, including things that they
really feel like are not the things that should be debated. So I had a debate
with a guy over, you know, whether Jews
actually have higher IQs or not
because that's a common
race myth that
gets brought up by... If you won the debate,
do you prove it right if you win the debate?
Yeah, oh yeah, obviously. I questioned
because of my superior Jewish IQ.
That's not even a question. I just wanted to check.
Yeah, okay, makes sense. Of course. I felt like it's question. I just wanted to check. Yeah, okay. It makes sense. Of course.
I felt like it's false.
I just,
I had to prove him wrong
even though it's not false, right?
That's amazing.
Yeah.
So good.
You're making an assumption
with Mr. Rabinowitz there, Cecil.
So good.
So good.
To be fair,
I'm only half Jewish.
So it's really,
my IQ maxes out at like 125 or so.
So you have a couple podcasts.
Tell our listeners about your podcast.
Sure.
I have Embrace the Void,
which is a podcast,
which is the huddling together podcast.
It's the come together and cope with living in the worst possible timeline by
talking about philosophy and any other weird things that come along.
It's mostly like a guest show.
And I have just really wonderful folks come on and talk about their,
their various and sundry interests.
And then of course,
as y'all are probably,
y'all have both been on now at this point,
right?
Philosophers in Space with Thomas Smith, where we take a piece of science fiction and a piece of philosophy and run at each other real fast and try to get them to fuse together into something that's compelling to everyone involved.
And it's aable of the Talents,
which if folks are not familiar,
highly recommend reading that disturbing piece
of time travel that predicted this year.
I love Octavia Butler.
Oh, do I?
I'll look into it.
I'll look into it.
That sounds great.
It's dark.
I gotta say, it's a great show.
It's really fun to listen to.
So check out Philosophers in Space.
I wanna say too, also,
I graduated with my undergrad in philosophy. I knew a lot of philosophers in college. You are
the nicest, coolest philosopher I've ever met in my entire life. I hated all of them. They were
all assholes. You're the nicest guy. You're so nice and comparison. I don't know how philosophy
created you, but I just wanted to say I appreciate that. And I'm sure other people who
interact with you do too, because most of them are dicks. I just wanted to say that.
I mean, the secret is, is that I'm really the deadest eyed sociopath of all of them. And this
is just really, really good acting. Aaron, it was great having you on. Thank you so much for
joining us and telling us about your awful creation. I hope you feel ashamed. I feel
thank you so much for joining us and telling us about your awful creation.
I hope you feel ashamed.
I feel nothing but guilt.
Thanks for being on the show.
100% Jew guilt all the time. so because of such an amazing outpour to support we are back for another round of vulgarity for charity and welcome back to cognitive dissonance heath noah and their unicorn with sleep apnea
carl just eli pretending to be someone from New York.
Yeah, most of Eli's characters wouldn't let Eli into their park.
Right?
I wish he really was the flying unicorn pug thing.
That would make the way he drags his ass across my carpet so much less disturbing.
All right. So the first one goes to Noah. the way he drags his ass across my carpet so much less disturbing. Alright,
so the first one goes to Noah.
Meow would like you to roast Chuck, the guy
who stalked their wife.
Oh my god, this guy sounds like
some kind of nightmarish amalgamation
of all the people from
Tiger King.
Each of them donated their worst
trait to some Frankensteinian
monstrosity of limp dick desperation.
And Chuck, I guess I know how you get there.
You're so useless.
You're so shitty that the only way you can experience what it is to know power is to scare somebody.
But there's no reason to take it out on Meow's wife.
With teeth like yours, I'm sure smiling at children will get you your fix.
Tom,
how about a heartfelt roast
of the human spine for Jeff?
Yeah.
I got this one.
I know there's no God, no intelligent designer
grand fucking plan
because for some fucking
reason running right down the middle
of us is a weak fuck
piece of shit we call our spine oh hey
let's take this thing that definitely absolutely did not evolve to be upright put a bunch of shitty
gelatinous shock absorbers in it and then run all of the nerves of the entire body right down the
center of that oh and if those shock absorbers ever get a little fucked up, they'll never heal
or regrow. No. Instead,
they just smoosh out the
sides and then press directly
on your nerves.
We are basically walking
toothaches. That is what we are.
Oh, what's that?
You got a problem with your back? Oh, here's
the solution. We can cut shit
out of it and make it weaker,
or we can just glue it together so it never moves again.
Those are our solutions because there is no solution.
Because the spine is a fucking piece of garbage,
and whoever designed this deserves the worst possible punishment.
To have one of their own.
To have a spine.
All right, Cecil, you're up next.
Lisa wants a roast of Donnie Trump Jr.'s book, Triggered.
Shouldn't your CV include a single book you read cover to cover before you write one?
I mean, it feels like a prerequisite.
Also, isn't it a little strange that you wrote an entire book on the pistol grip you use
when you grab your daddy's cock.
I mean, the reason why you're so triggered is
that you're one of those aliens
from heavy metal that sucks up cocaine
like an overclocked Dyson.
I don't know if you remember those guys.
Okay, Eli.
Gavin would like you to insult their co-worker
Todd. Oh, this is so good.
So, Gavin sent us a picture of the
exact moment Todd's
adorable one-year-old
realized that half of her DNA was
Todd's and she is
mortified.
I can't believe it. I mean, he looks
like a reboot of The Shield set in an
Aunt Annie's pretzel starring Michael
Too Many Chicklets from The Vending Machine.
So, I get it, little girl.
I get it.
She looks like the shield.
Nice.
Another coworker.
This time, Heath, Harvey wants you to roast Kevin.
Okay.
Yeah.
Kevin, you're really fucking up the amazing, normally bald with a beard look.
You're fucking it up for everybody.
And by the way, if you're trying to sell your house, do not show up at the closing. That black mold on your face is going to be a deal breaker.
It's going to fall right through.
Your head is going to get condemned by the housing department.
It's not good.
But as long as you're stuck with that thing,
maybe try a comb up and over to cover the entire upper face.
I don't know.
All right, yet another day at the office.
A lot of mold in your face. Tom, Laura wants you to take it to their coworker't know. All right, yet another day at the office. You have a lot of mold in your face, but.
Tom, Laura wants you to take it to their coworker, Jacob.
All right, well, Jacob is a well, actually guy.
Like, he's one of those guys that suffers from correctile dysfunction, right?
But like worse, he's a bad tipper.
It's 2020.
How the fuck are you a bad tipper i mean all the rest of your bio that's
awful but being a bad tipper you're an under 10 percent bad tipper fuck you come the fuck on
jacob that is part of the cost of going out when you don't tip people notice everyone notices the
staff that you just shit on they notice because you just fucked them. And any woman
you're with, she notices and she's
not going to fuck you. But I will.
Fuck you, Jacob.
Fuck you now. Fuck you forever, you cheap
ass piece of shit. If you
cannot afford just the tip,
you can't go out. Stay home,
you rotten fucking animal.
You just see a guy like Jacob
standing next to Lou Gehrig going,
but you're not the luckiest man.
You're not.
Not to leave you out of this hot
coworker on coworker action, Noah,
Leslie wants to hear you rip into
Carolyn. Oh, this
demonic scut
is the principal at the school where
Leslie works and won't let her
tell her gay and trans students about programs
like the Trevor Project or it gets better because
that would encourage
their deviant lifestyle.
What the fuck?
Yeah, Carolyn thinks suicide is better
than gay and enforces
that. Oh, God. Fuck.
And she looks like if there was a reverse Halloween
for skeletons and one of them decided
to go as Karen.
Heath, It looks like if there was a reverse Halloween for skeletons and one of them decided to go as Karen.
Heath, dealer's choice, my man.
Okay.
Kate wants to hear you be mean to anything you want,
but it has to be a concept.
Go for it.
Fantastic, Kate.
Good stuff.
So, fuck postmodernist art.
How dare you? If I had to guess, this is what I would have guessed you were going to go for.
Yeah.
And you know what?
Fuck Eli for saying how dare you.
And fuck post-modernism in general.
Art or not.
You're bringing nothing to the table.
You're improving nothing
about our understanding
of empirical reality.
Congrats on taking cocaine
for the first time
and staying up late
during college that one time.
Amazing.
You're doing God's work.
Is this art? No! Fuck you!
It's not. It's not. If it's in the eye of the beholder, let's keep in
mind that most people wouldn't put that shit
on the fridge if their five-year-old made it.
The beholders have spoken.
You just suck at art.
Get good. I hate you.
Make something I want to look at.
I'll make you go on that tour of that museum again.
I'll make you go on that tour again, Heath.
I went into the fucking art museum one time
and there's fucking literally
a fucking pile of candy wrappers in the corner
and they called that art.
And I was like,
or maybe it wasn't.
Maybe it was just a mistake.
Get the fuck out of here.
All right, Eli, speaking of concepts,
how about a roast of murder hobos,
this time for Nick?
Oh, murder hobos.
They're the corner trappers of Dungeons & Dragons.
They're the aim bots of tabletop role-playing,
and the only thing more enjoyable than their crusade
to kill every shopkeeper and NPC you present them with
is killing every character they create
with the level 20 guard I just made up
who just rolled another critical success.
Another critical success, yeah.
They take their guards super seriously here
in Fuck Youville.
All right, folks, we're starting our first
This round is friends and family discounts,
so roast them and let us know
what they would get a discount for.
I'm going to go first.
Lee wants a group rate for Savannah,
Stephanie, and themselves.
I think you'd get a discount rate
for an eyeglass company
that sells frames from this century.
Like, genetics are amazing, though.
Like, not only do you all hold your head up
in the exact same lean on your hand position,
you all also look like
1980s lesbians.
So,
that's kind of amazing.
Noah,
this one is
X family,
but it still counts.
Roast Corey for M.
Jesus,
so why do you keep
giving me such horrible
fucking people?
This is the third
antagonist
from a Lifetime movie
that you've given me
in a row.
All right.
So, first of all, Corey,
you're a miserable piece of shit
and you deserve to have some kind of
flesh-eating fungal infection
not yet known to science.
Like, I want you to be sick in a way
that we have to name after you afterwards.
And you get a discount for 50% off the stick
I want to break off in your ass.
I'm sorry, dude,
but you just keep giving me such assholes.
Hey, have you ever considered that maybe you're just getting ass. I'm sorry, but you just keep giving me such assholes. Hey, have you ever considered
that maybe you're just getting assholes because the
fucking, the pond is full of
assholes? No, let's just consider that.
It could be. Tom, I know you love
roasting family, so this time it's Mark
for Michael. Alright, well, let's see.
Mark would definitely get
a discount for the Rudy Tutti
Fresh and Fruity, or
alternately, a nice moons over my hammy.
For sure. Or
a subscription to TVGuy.
Paper version.
Do you need a discount to fall asleep in your
chair after Wheel of Fortune?
You can do that for free.
Still lots of savings here, Mark. Maybe you should
squirrel some of that away and buy a Sharpie
and color in some fucking hair, you
prematurely elderly cue ball.
His entire
appearance looks like he's just trying to make it
easier on some future cartoonist.
He looks like a die
hard Farside fan.
Okay, Eli.
How about Carl
the asshole for Kevin?
Okay, again, Noah, I empathize
here because I got like a fucking movie villain.
And so I'm hoping Carl is going to get a discount
at the prison canteen
because of how badly a beating he takes on a daily basis.
I mean, that's my wish for him.
And hey, if my wish doesn't come true,
I would personally like to offer him
a 100% discount from Eli's house of Nooses. Eli's House of
Nooses, Carl.
Come on down. Keith, this one is
for Dennis. He wants a roast of his friend
Ryan. They're both wearing Philadelphia
Eagle jerseys in this picture, but you're not
supposed to roast the Eagles.
And that's going to be tough. Okay. What discount
does Ryan get? Alright, well, the photo we got
shows Ryan at a soup
kitchen for Eagles fans.
So,
he's already getting
a discount on that meal.
And,
I'm sure a discount
on season tickets
because of,
you know,
how the economy works.
I'm thinking he could use
a discount at Funko Pops
where he can buy
an exact scale model
of himself
and his head-to-body ratio.
All right. Next up, Jonathan for Brandon.
Oh, Brandon gets a sweet 80% discount
on facts required before drawing a conclusion.
Or maybe he gets a bulk discount
on pushpins, yarn, and cranial foil.
All right, now two pretty similar ones.
First one goes to Eli.
Ed, but his first name is actually Fuckin? Fuckwin? All right, now two pretty similar ones. First one goes to Eli.
Ed, but his first name is actually Fuckin', Fuckwin?
Fuckin'. For Brian.
Fuckin' looks like he gets a wholesale subscription
to Fucking Other People's Wives magazine.
This dude's been caught in between more sheets than bedbugs,
which is weird because he's not good looking,
but you can just you can just tell
he's fucking other people's wives
right
he looks like if Bob Marley
fucked Bob Ross
and for reasons I can't explain
I still want to have sex with him
in a Staples bathroom
it's confusing
it's confusing
it's upsetting
I'm going to close out this
friends and family edition
with Furcon for Kanan
hey Furcon
how about a Pandora subscription
so you don't have to listen
to Passion Fruit by Drake
for hours a day
for eight straight months?
You shouldn't be
a biophysics PhD.
You should get into car repair
if you like auto-tune that much.
I'm not going to keep going here
because you look like
you crushed my head
with your biceps.
So we're going to move on here.
That was Heath and Wright
just then. Heath and Wright just then.
Heath and Wright.
Right on that spightening round. Let's have Tom
get us back into the swing of things by taking
a swing at Roger and Jen Finger
for Ollie. I don't even know where to begin
fingering these two.
I mean, that's actually not usually hard to figure out.
It's just that I'm looking at my hands
and trying to decide which finger I'd rather boil
or chop off than touch the finger family.
Or their horrible fucking pet tarantula.
Oh, my God.
What?
That is not a pet.
That is a pest.
You missed an essential letter.
Jesus, the thing is what monsters have nightmares of, you sick fucks.
Who thinks, oh, you know what I need in my life?
More spiders.
No one says that because spiders
are a horror and tarantulas
are the king of horrible shit.
Hey, you know what there are? There's
dogs and there's cats. They can
love you and they can be loved. You can have
them as pets and still
you picked a spider the size of
a goddamn hubcap. did you pick something that cannot
love you because you know you are inherently unlovable you weird sick fucks or did you choose
a spider as a pet because you like want to show off how wacky and non-traditional you are because
that's working traditionally i am not repulsed beyond my ability
for empathy
just by hearing
about someone's fucking...
So congratulations
on making me yearn
for the day
that your spider kills you
and legs its eggs
in your fucking skulls,
you weirdos.
Lost a big chunk
of our audience just now, Tom.
We definitely have
spider weirdos.
I'm just saying.
Noah, how about a roast
of a whole school district,
Knox County School District, for David?
Oh, still a villain in a Lifetime movie,
but fine. Okay.
So as you recall,
back in the days of yore when we were
taking these donations, Knox County
School District was in the process of making
it legal for students to opt out of classes like
music and art so that they could go to churches instead so david asked us to roast the entire school board
as well as the staff at the church of uh sturchy hills which is like 26 people but okay i'll try
man hey the entire school board of knox county school district and staff of the church at
sturchy hills great job lobbying Trump to end racial sensitivity training.
Jesus, you look like an ad for a loosen the
fuck up program called White Watchers.
This one is for Terry, who doesn't like
how everyone is always bad-mouthing the
Mercator projection.
Yeah, right. No, totally. Fuck all
those people. Africa should be
14 times too small.
It's this PC bullshit and be 14 times too small.
It's this PC bullshit and it's gone too far.
It's about ethics in angle relationships for ocean navigators.
That's what's important.
Now, in fairness to Terry, I will actually roast an anti-mercator advocate.
He looks exactly like me. He's me.
And he ate scotch over the sink
for breakfast today.
There you go.
Clean.
Breakfast champions.
All right, Cecil.
How about you roast people
who monopolize
gym equipment
for Ryan?
I realize,
your lordship bro
Dudenstein,
that we are all here
because of your whim.
But you do not need to stake out the squat rack like
you're claiming territories for your fiefdom.
And you don't
need 21 different
dumbbells scattered around you like a medieval
ruler getting buried with your favorite
servant.
Other people work out
here too, your highness, and no one wants to see
a fucking selfie of you
lifting things.
Your fucking weekly battle
with gravity
doesn't need to be documented
through tapestries.
No one fucking cares, man.
Jesus, move it along.
Okay, Eli,
Emma wants private sperm donors
for Ruth.
How about you take a whack
at this one?
All right, hey,
weird, rapey,
so-called sperm donors.
Nobody wants your dick, man.
Especially not lesbians, but like nobody wants your dick.
Do you like offer to help people move and then just take what you want from the boxes marked kitchen?
No.
Then stop offering your dick like it's a free undercarriage treatment at a used car lot, you creepy fucko.
Now, I will say this.
Upside to being this late on these roasts,
we now know that Ruth did get pregnant
and has just given birth to their baby.
So congratulations to Ruth.
And the little one.
See?
We're terrible at this.
All worthwhile.
Yeah.
If Noah had listened, i said we shouldn't have
taken this many roasts but he insisted he insisted everybody i tell him here is one time that i think
we all wanted yeah you drew the big straw this time people who tried to be part of the citation
need a show in new york city for michael oh my God. Yes. And gladly.
Hey, you know what people love?
They love when they don't get to see or hear the performance they sought out and paid for,
but rather instead the random drunken mutterings of a crowd of people.
So funny.
They aren't being paid to be on stage.
Yeah, no, that's, that's definitely the best part of any show.
Like imagine how
great it would have been to have the memory
of that time that Nirvana played at the
Metro in Chicago, and you were there
and it was so cool to listen to that guy
next to you shout, Freebird, all night
instead of the actual show.
Oh, what's that?
No, that's not
the memory you would want? Oh,
that's funny, unlike's not the memory you would want? Oh, that's funny. Unlike the
fucking crowd. I guess
what I'm saying is your job
is to laugh and buy Heath
scotch. Know your fucking role.
Absolutely. I liked
it. You should shout more. No.
No.
Heath, you're up next.
Jawbreaker 6 wants a roast
of disgraced Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher.
Wow, okay.
Yeah, that's the guy who stabbed a sedated 17-year-old prisoner to death
and then took a picture holding the severed head by the hair
and sent it around to his friends like he just won a fucking bowling trophy.
Nice.
Seems to imply beheading in there at some point too.
I don't know. Best case scenario,
Gallagher has a beheading guy
as an accomplice. Best case.
This actually went to
trial and the only conviction
was for the
lackluster artistic presentation
of the photograph, according to the
US government.
So, Eddie Gallagher,
you're bad at your job.
Learn a little mise-en-scene. Do better photography. Jesus Christ. And I definitely would not want any of his coworkers. He's still in the Navy. That's what's happened now. I would
not want any of those coworkers to send me a trophy photo after they, you know, most dangerous gamed Eddie Gallagher.
That would be illegal, assuming the photo wasn't very tasteful.
According to the military, it doesn't sound like it'd be illegal at all.
How about we give the next one, which is about reading and math,
to the least qualified person on the panel, Eli.
Roast everyone who hasn't read Zero Sum Game for Neoni.
All right.
I actually now really want to read this book because it seems awesome.
It's got a protagonist with Robert Downey Jr. Sherlock powers, a bad guy with purple David Tennant powers, and what's not to like about that?
But no, you haven't read it, have you?
Instead, you just scroll through the news for the 800th time.
He's still alive. He's still alive.
He's still alive.
Someone will text you when he's dead.
It's $9 on Kindle, people.
$9.
Come on.
All right, Noah, use your epic rage to rip into Boaty McBoatface for Roxanne.
Oh, I was so worried about this because for a second I thought I was going to have to
find a way to make fun of the single greatest
boat name ever ignored by a
purported democracy.
But no, no, that's the name of her cat.
And yes,
her cat has a tiny little Hitler mustache
just to make it easier on me. So listen up, Nazi
cat. Nobody's buying
this. I'm just a big fan of
precision marching bullshit, okay?
We're not feline people on both sides.
And it's still anti-Semitic if you're comparing the rats to Jews.
It doesn't matter which direction you go.
Okay, we're ready for the next...
This round is politicians.
How about you guys tell me what it is you would donate to their campaign?
Thanks to Richard Douglas, Michael Shara, Ashley, Eric, Vincent, Brendan, and Eric.
First up, Beto or Beto.
Beto.
Okay.
Beto, I am going to donate to you a platform.
Okay, Beto, I am going to donate to you a platform.
You're going to need one both to stand on if you want to be noticed and also to run on because I can't remember anything about anything you said anymore.
Your entire claim to fame was that you almost
but didn't quite beat Ted Cruz in a personality contest.
Yes.
I'm going to do Rick Perry.
Doesn't the scarecrow get a diploma at the end?
I don't.
Maybe one that has something to do with energy
other than like fucking lion tamer
or whatever you graduated in.
But I would definitely withhold that donation
until he ran a very public sham investigation
on the Bidens.
Definitely.
Don't worry.
Don't worry.
Representative Tom McClintock.
Oh, yeah.
A fucking global warming, denialist congressman from Northern California.
That is about to get COVID.
Yeah.
Who has come out against who has come out against
and this is true, animal rights.
What's against those?
I think I would
donate a picture
of the air in his
district.
And if they let me get close enough, I'd donate a boot
as well.
So I'd donate a boot.
Alright, I'm going to do
Aram Emanuel,
Chicago's ex-mayor.
I'd give him
shoe lifts
made from
compressed school vouchers.
I think that would be good.
Either that
or a better handhold
on Obama's coattails.
I think that would work, too.
West Virginia Governor
Jim Justice.
Okay.
I was going to donate
chins,
but he is good there.
He is good.
Also can't do money
because he's literally
the richest person in his state,
which, let me just say,
always what you want
in a public servant.
However, based on how
their COVID coding program is going,
I'm going to donate
some orange markers
because apparently
they were out of those
until last week.
So they just didn't bother coding in all the sick people as a result.
Yeah.
Get around to it.
Nice.
All right.
Tim, I'm in.
Fuck this guy.
Tim, I'm going to donate to you a suit.
Wear it to your funeral after you kill yourself.
All right.
Tough but fair.
All right.
Last one. Matt, Jesus Christ. All right. Tough but fair. Tough but fair. Last one.
Matt Gaetz.
Okay.
I donate a designated driver.
Too late.
Okay.
Now, shifting gears, but not moving too far away, let's shift to a couple of people on
the periphery of politics.
Eli, roast conservative Charlie Kirk of Toilet Paper USA.
Oh, thank you, Cecil.
Charlie Kirk looks like the
Lemonhead mascot got radicalized
by having to share a shelf with sugar babies.
I don't even know what that means.
I don't even know what that means.
What the fuck?
What is that? that's so good
he looks like he went to an all boys will be boys
school
but best of all
Charlie Kirk will have at least
another half century of life
to see how wrong he is
and how much everyone hates him
it's gonna be pretty great
and Heath you did so well on that last one how will we get some more how wrong he is and how much everyone hates him. It's going to be pretty great. Yeah. And he,
he did so well on that last one.
Uh,
how will we get some more,
uh,
Matt Gates love,
uh,
this time for paints,
a coal of voters who elected him.
Oh,
okay.
Yeah.
You live in Pensacola,
Florida.
That's where you live.
Southern Alabama was like,
gross,
gross.
No,
thank you.
Go ahead and gerrymander. You write the fuck back into Florida, Southern Alabama was like, gross, gross, no thank you. No, thank you.
And we're going to go ahead and gerrymander you right the fuck back into Florida, even though that makes no sense
on the map.
You people should leave. It's embarrassing.
Your state bird is a Chick-fil-A sandwich.
You roast yourself every day by not
moving.
State bird is a Chick-fil-A sandwich. day by not moving. Last one's the night
here. One for each of us. Noah, Bryce
would like you to roast Apostle Boyd K.
Packer.
Y'all know Bryce, right?
I swear, when he chants this little
Aria Stark list before bed every night,
it's got to sound so aggressively Caucasian, right?
He's always hating on some Boyd or some Hiram or an Orson or something.
But yes, Apostle Boyd Kay Packer looks exactly like you pictured him looking
when I said that name.
He's old.
He's a fat white guy with peculiarly weird low
earlobes and a face that looks like
front butt. He's also a
fucking boss level sexist, but
in both directions somehow.
He hates women's rights and
he's obsessed with little boys' testicles.
So he's like the personified essence
of Mormonism.
Okay, this is a little bit
of a shift for you, Tom,
instead of just raising a person.
This is a church,
St. Francis Cabrini Church in Allen Park, Michigan.
Yeah.
Look, I wasn't raised Catholic.
I didn't grow up any of that like crazy Catholic guilt,
but I mean,
just the fact that there's a specific kind of a thing
called Catholic guilt kind of says everything, doesn't it?
I mean, like guilt is shitty enough, right?
But like when you have to qualify it as especially its own kind of shitty thing,
that makes you the shitty thing expert now.
I have no idea how an organization can saddle people with so much guilt while simultaneously running the world's largest child sexual abuse network in the world.
And yet they still manage it.
But here's your out.
Look, when your dad says, I'm not mad, I'm just disappointed.
He lays out a guilt trip that works because you don't want to disappoint your dad.
But the Catholic Church?
Yeah, I'm pretty okay disappointing a
bunch of gilded old kiddie dinners in fact like i prefer if they're disappointed in me
so fuck saint francis cabrini fuck all the saint and sinner sanctimonious nonsense it's all made
up it's meant to take your money and distract you from the horrors of the world's largest pedo ring. Amen, brother.
All right, Eli, why don't you finish up with a Dolan H. Oaks for Jeff?
Ah, another Mormon.
Yes, Dolan looks like he lost the audition for Sam the Eagle
because he spent his callback explaining which of the Muppets have souls
and which of them were dyed their color for their wickedness
by South American Jesus.
All right.
Last one.
Last one for you,
Heath.
Lee wants you to roast the president of their local coin club.
Give us that hotline coin drama,
Heath.
I think Cecil just did it for me.
Apparently, Tom has a giant collection of golden coins
because he thinks the apocalypse is coming
and the money system is going to collapse.
So there's going to be like drought and starvation,
but he's going to be rich after haggling with warlords
about how this weedy penny
is actually way more valuable than it's worth.
Why do people think that's going to happen?
Why would you want gold in this huge
meltdown?
There's a handful of loose gold. Can I get some water
and food? No, you can't.
I'm keeping all my water and food. What the fuck am I going to do with gold?
Maybe you want really good headphones
that sound extra good.
And I'm going to finish this one out
with a roast for Eric of Chick-fil-A.
That closed on Sunday shit
is a fucking ploy to create false scarcity,
not to be wholesome.
And I know that they said twice
that they stopped giving to anti-LGBT charities.
They made a big public display about it,
but they still fucking donated to them. And then when they were caught,
they're like, oh no,
I'm sorry, I didn't mean it.
So pardon me if I don't think a fucking
chicken sandwich is a good trade for
conversion. If you want
to go to the annual, I was a
Nazi last year, but now I'm not because
you caught me pancake breakfast.
No one's
going to fucking stop you, man.
But they should sure as shit fucking judge you for it.
Amen, sir.
All right, gents.
Thank you so much for joining us this time.
Anytime, sir.
So we want to thank our patrons.
Of course, we want to thank all our patrons. We want to thank all our patrons we want to thank
our newest patrons which are just a ton of them because we missed a couple of weeks
hail satan fuck i did that wrong terrible terrible so cheesy uh martin austin selene
jeffrey matthew sawyer nathan john i should be able to run over as many kids as I want.
Okay.
This is creepy.
All right.
Banana and Orange were convicted,
but their case is on appeal.
Dun, dun, dun.
Shane, Noctefla, Root Creeper.
I don't know how to say that.
Eli is my best friend.
God damn it, he made me say it.
Emeritus,
Danielle, T-Row,
Mark, reformed baby hater.
I'm not a reformed baby. I still hate babies.
John, and the
people who upped their pledges. No
job, no money, but I still support the
show. The rest of
you have to. And Eric,
thank you so much for your generous donations. We
really do truly appreciate
all of your donations to Glory Hole Studios.
You guys are the reason that Ian
is our employee because without you, we would
not have an employee to help us with
the streams and with doing stuff. And if you guys
haven't caught the streams yet, we are having a lot of fun
on these streams. They're great. And in fact, this
week, we covered a lot of the
news that we missed over the last couple weeks.
So if you're interested in us covering news that we missed because we were doing deep dives,
you check the stream out this week at YouTube or Twitch or wherever it is.
Facebook has it.
Go check it out.
It's like 50 minutes of us talking about news that we missed and penis pumps.
How can you go wrong with that?
Penis pumps should never fail you.
Head over to the stream.
Right?
Yeah, head over to the stream.
Hang it out.
Trump should never fail you.
Head over to the stream.
Right?
Yeah, head over to the stream.
Hang it out.
We got a message from John who just became a patron
after a long time of being unemployed
and he just wanted to send us a message.
And we want to thank you so much
for joining up and being a patron, John.
Very nice of you.
We got a ton of messages
about our forensics episode.
Tons of people had no idea about such.
There were people sending us messages
saying they were mad about it. They were super mad. They never had no idea about such. There were people sending us messages saying they
were mad about it. They were super mad. They never had no idea that something like this was even
happening. One person on Twitter sent us a message and said that they were mad. And I thought that
they were talking about a report. And so I responded with, well, if we got anything wrong,
let me know. And they said, no, no, I'm mad about what you're talking about. And I said, yeah,
I get it. So it's easy to get mad about it. Something that Tom and I didn't know about. I know we got a couple of messages from people who essentially
said, Hey, look, this is, this has been out for 10 years. And Tom and I both agree that it has
been out for a long time, but we had no idea how deep it ran because we're not in that industry.
And so we thought it would be interesting for you guys. And it seems like it was a lot of people
really responded to this and let us know how much and how shocked they were.
We got a message about judges from Jeff and how judges look at some type of disorders from
children and treat it as child abuse, Tom. This is distressing. This is actually a scholarly paper
talking about metabolic bone disease in infants causing unexplained fractures.
That being an explanation rather than the explanation being child abuse.
And I actually just listened to an interesting podcast the other day about shaken baby syndrome.
And it's very similar in that stories are being told.
A courtroom is a storytelling time.
And stories are being told and people are going to jail, not based off of good
scientific evidence, but based on what people already believe or think they know about behavior
and other people and what seems most likely. It's really distressing how little of this comes back
to evidence and how little of this comes back to science. People are still going to jail.
I know that we got emails from people saying, oh, this has been out for 10 years.
Yeah.
But, you know, people are still going to jail.
Not everybody knows.
Right.
So many lawyers don't know.
So many judges don't know.
And so many jurors don't know.
Yep.
Yep.
Got a message from Dean and Dean said that their roommate surprised them with an early
birthday gift in the form of a Cogdiss mug and shirt.
That's very sweet.
You can get your own
Cogdiss mugs and shirts,
by the way,
to surprise your roommates
or your loved ones
or yourself.
You probably can't
surprise yourself
to any much.
You can go to
DissonancePod.com
and there's a link
to our merch right there.
Our merch is pretty great
and the stuff we make
is pretty quality.
It's made here,
right here in Chicago
by people who
make it by hand. So if you want to order merch from us, you can go to dissonancepod.com. And there's
a couple of different types of shirts there for your buying pleasure. We also got a couple of
messages about fingerprints. We didn't realize how widespread it was, especially in Europe.
We realized that this episode specifically was a, the forensics episode was specifically a very American centric episode. And so what's interesting is that a bunch of
people said, Hey, just so you know, in other countries, they, they, they fingerprint people
quite a bit. And so I guess there's not as many miracle people over there that would be upset by
that. So it was funny. Cecil, as an aside, when we were on vacation in Belize, one of the things that we learned was that Belize still,
it's so poor and they have such a small amount of infrastructure
that their police still don't have access to fingerprinting kits.
Wow.
They just don't even have that yet.
Wow.
Basically, if something bad happens, you're like,
okay, raise your hand if you did it.
No.
All right. Nobody? no takers all right
yeah okay yeah jay sends in a message and he says just so you know i wanted to let you guys know and
this is something that tom and i had talked about i think off air but we never said on air and this
was when you when trump was sick and people were saying i wish he were dead or he wish i wish he
would die jay points out that wishing in someone's
direction does not make it so
and literally has no effect on the
outcome of anything. And so
the idea that people are upset that someone is
wishing about something is stupid and
I have to hard agree with that.
Wishing doesn't make anything happen because
I wished real hard and he's
still alive.
Yeah.
If wishing made things so, the world we live in, I don't know I wished real hard and he's still alive.
If wishing made things so,
the world we live in,
I don't know if it'd be better or worse,
but it would be a lot different.
It'd be a lot different, that's for sure.
We got a message.
This is from Jeff.
He wanted us to say,
he wanted us to give a shout out to Sarah Rose and we want to give a shout out to her.
We know that you're going through a tough time,
a difficult time with some surgery.
And so we wanted to send you a message and say, we hope you get through it. We hope you feel better and
we hope you heal very, very quickly, Sarah Rose. Get on the mend as quick as you can. Both Tom and
I know how bad it is to have a back issue. And so best of luck to you. Yep. Yep. Feel better.
Got a message. This is from Dustin.
And Dustin said,
hey, I was listening to Tom talking about something
a couple months ago,
talking about how you should only be proud of things
that you've actually accomplished
rather than things that are sort of given to you.
And they said, well, one sticking point is,
how does this relate to black pride or gay pride?
And I want to say, how does this relate?
Is that the reason why people say black pride or gay pride, and we all agree that those are things that they did not choose.
The reason why people are proud of it is not for the thing itself, but for the struggle that they have to go through in order to live their everyday life.
And so that's, they're not proud of, they're proud of who they are because of their hardship.
Yeah, I think it's a shorthand.
It's just, it's a shorthand for everything
that goes along with being part of that group
and still having to live within,
as a minority, as a disenfranchised person
within a society that doesn't value and treat you well.
So we want to thank, of course,
we want to thank Aaron Rubinowitz
from Embrace the Void podcast
and Philosophers in Space
for joining us to talk about
his project, Monster Island.
Really funny guy.
I hope to have him on again.
You know, it's so rare
we get a chance to talk to him,
but every time I do,
I really enjoy it.
He's a very smart man
and very fun to talk to.
So I hope we get a chance
to do that soon.
Make another Monster Island,
Aaron, and come back.
Great conversation. Yeah, really was. And I hope we get a chance to do that soon. Make another Monster Island, Aaron, and come back. Great conversation. Yeah, it really was.
And I also, of course, want to thank
Eli, Noah, and Heath
for coming on to do their
The Vulgarity for Charity.
We want to thank them, of course. You can check out
all their shows. They did The Scathing Atheist,
Godawful Movies,
Skeptocrat, D&D Minus,
and, of course, Citation Needed with us.
You can check out all their shows online
and they do the quality work.
Good guys and very funny guys.
So check out their stuff.
That is going to wrap it up for this week.
Be sure to join us next week for our live stream
and be sure to tune in.
Election night.
Put it aside, guys.
Election night coverage.
We're going to be going live,
covering the election for several hours.
Tom's going to be in studio. We're going to have dinner together. We're going to hang out. It's going to
be super amazing. You're going to want to hang out with us. First time reunited. It feels so good.
It's going to be amazing. But here's the deal. We're also going to have other guests on. Right
now in the queue, we have Heath Enright, who's going to join us for a couple hours. We're going
to have Dan and Jordan from Knowledge Fight. They're going to be joining us. We're looking
to get a couple other people to join us that evening via Skype to chit-chat with us throughout the night.
So you're not going to want to miss it.
Make us your election night coverage.
Come join us.
We'll be on all the different streaming platforms.
We'll be streaming live, and we're going to be interacting with chat the whole night.
So come check us out and hang out with us.
And check out our regular live streams Thursday night, 9 p.m. Central.
That's going to wrap it up for this week.
We're going to leave you like we always do with the Skeptic's Creed.
Credulity is not a virtue.
It's fortune cookie cutter, mommy issue, hypno-Babylon bullshit.
Couched in scientician, double bubble, toil and trouble, pseudo-quasi-alternative,
acupunctuating,urized stereogram pyramidal
free energy
healing
water
downward spiral
brain dead
pan
sales pitch
late night
info
docutainment
Leo Pisces
cancer cures
detox
reflex
foot massage
death in towers
tarot cards
psychic healing
crystal balls
Bigfoot
Yeti
aliens
churches
mosques
and synagogues, temples, dragons,
giant worms, Atlantis, dolphins, truthers, birthers, witches, wizards, vaccine nuts,
shaman healers, evangelists, conspiracy, doublespeak, stigmata, nonsense.
Expose your sides.
Thrust your hands.
Bloody.
Evidential. Conclusive. Thrust your hands. Bloody. Evidential.
Conclusive.
Doubt even this.
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