 I'm so mad right now. I am just so mad because I read this athletic article on skip Bayless and Stephen A Smith ESPN's first take skip and Stephen a embrace debate played the hits and change TV. Yeah. That's all well and good. But this article was concretizing and enacting racist tropes. It's just I'm so mad right now. All right. So this article says that Skip Bayless wakes at dawn to run for an hour and memorizes a daily packet of notes to prepare for debates. Right. Typical white stereotypical you know attitudes that you should prepare for debates and you should have like facts and logic man. I mean this is just enacting whiteness. Then the other is co Stephen a Smith was a magnetic former newsman who hated jogging spent his nights in noisy arenas and sometimes rolled into the pre-dawn show with ministers fair. So this is so racist is claiming that the back guy the black guy doesn't do the homework doesn't do the hard work. But the white guy is somehow meticulous and a better teammate. But the black guy is more colorful. He's got you know the more magnetic personality. It's so concerning these kind of racist tropes. The duo of Skip Bayless and Stephen a Smith the TV equivalent of baking soda and vinegar lasted fewer than four years yet it changed the face of ESPN. The most powerful entity in sports media led to a host of imitators spied countless arguments about the role of TV and cable news itself. There was a big lottery article about Skip Bayless's Fox show. Is it undefeated in the New York Times. I've had talked about you know what a great example of been talking to each other. So a ESPN ABC studied their morning show very carefully and they found out that in virtually every instance whenever a spike in a ratings occurred there was one reason Skip Bayless. All right the white guy. This is so racist. They're saying that the white guy isn't Skip Bayless was responsible for every spike in ratings. I mean think about all the black labor that made this white guy you know his success possible. Do you think he could have done that alone if there weren't black people building bridges. There weren't black people building planes. There weren't black people building highways. There weren't black people who 200 years ago were forced to pick cotton and work as slaves. You think any skip Bayless's success would have been possible without the fair dinkum labor of black people. And yet this bloody athletic article is just so racist. Man this is upsetting. And that more racist stereotypes here. Skip Bayless was the kind of guy who bought a Camaro for the horsepower that said he only accelerated to the speed limit. So here is the white guy. He's presented as being law abiding. He's presented as being pro social. He's presented as taking into consideration the effectiveness actions on other people. I mean this is just white supremacism. I mean what kind of person buys a Camaro for the horsepower but only accelerates to the speed limit. People think they possess white bodies. That's who. People who insist on enacting enacting whiteness. Skip is a church mouse. That's his personality. So law abiding upstanding moral bloke. Right. The white guy. That's how he's presented. Man. So racist. There's not a single person that prepares more for their job than skip Bayless. So it's a long time first take producer. Again more racism saying that the white guy is more dedicated more meticulous. There's more work is more pro social. More of a team player. Says that skip Bayless formed arguments to force people whether out of agreement or anger to react. So there's a skip Bayless who thinks he inhabits a white body getting out there enacting whiteness and forcing everyone else to respond to his arguments just because their frame is such a compelling coherence logically and emotionally demanding manner. But just because skip Bayless is so good at his job. Right. He's going to get the he's going to get the credit here just because the ratings always spike when skip Bayless is on. Man. You didn't know the sports journalists could be gurus. Wow. Do I have a show for you mate. The show needed to center on skip Bayless. Yeah. The white guy. Now when in the focus groups ever talked about skip Bayless's debate partners on the show again just totally devaluing the work of black people when the numbers revealed around 50 percent of the first take audience was black and they are tuning in to check out. Right. Skip Bayless. The white guy who prepares who does his homework. Who obeys the law. He's like tries to be a moral and upstanding citizen. Doesn't that just make you sick. So skip Bayless being a professional journalist for 40 years. He was profiled in the Washington Post back in 2013 knows how to write profiles one night. He thought about what makes skip Bayless an interesting subject for a profile. He scribbled down nine bullet points and here they are. Number one. The number one thing you should know about me. I've always tried to put God first in my life. I often fail because I'm too proud and stubborn when I was a little kid going to a Methodist church and vision one day I would become a minister but I never pursued that. Now if I have any regret I wasn't doing this job. I would be an orthopedic surgeon because I like to help people. I mean look just showing the white guy working hard wanting to help people being a moral upstanding citizen not trying to come across as pious because I'm not as bigger than most people know about me. Yeah that seems pretty fair. I'm true about skip Bayless and I'm presenting and decoding skip Bayless because precisely because he's not a guru. All right. Skip Bayless does not pretend to have a galaxy brain. He speaks in a very plain direct easy to understand manner about topics that he knows something about or at least he understands the emotional quality of the topics that he knows something about. I mean Mark Cuban took him down trying to show that skip Bayless didn't didn't know what what his own defense was. So let's see if we find that Mark Cuban destroys skip Bayless. Oh what's your mind. You may have more than one issue but what's your biggest issue with skip. It's not just skip it's sports writers sports media in general where everything's generalities right excruciating pressure. What the hell is that right. You know need leader pressure that meaning what skip meaning that you personally watched up close and personal what LeBron went through last year against your Dallas Mavericks. Was it not the biggest collapse of a superstar. OK this is from 2011 June 22nd 2012 that we've ever witnessed on a finals or championship stage. No. I mean first of all it's a team game right. You guys like to talk in complete generalities where no one can question you right. You don't ever use facts you don't ever use substance you don't ever use facts. No. That's all I use on this show what excruciating pressure undeniable this you know it's just all generalities there's never been a star under more pressure going into a finals a championship series or game than LeBron James was under after nine years and three league MVPs. Well first of all you have the presumption that people care what you say they don't that when the guys go out there when guys you know I'm talking about media in general when guys get ready to play and they're in the locker room they're not thinking OK well what's written what's going to be written what's being said right. I mean they're getting prepared and if you've got a good coach and you've got a good culture then guys are ready to play no matter what like you guys were just talking about you know Miami wanted them wanted it more or less like that is just such a horse you know what right. There's no such thing as it's not that Oklahoma City don't want it more. I think Miami was better prepared to play the game than Oklahoma City in terms of of adjustments and changes. Now if you want to start to talk about double teams and how they were used whether or not they should have played zone what defensive structure was in place. That's a valid conversation but just saying they wanted it more that's ridiculous. OK. When you get to when you're Kevin Durant and you're Derek Fisher and you're Russell Westbrook etc. And you're at that that closeout game. There's nobody that wants it more. It's just a question of who executes better. And then you decide why. Who played harder in the last games. Miami. I think. Well I'm a huge Skip Bayless fan but I think Mark Cuban is making great points. Making great points there. So I was up at 3 a.m. reading a book beer babes and balls masculinity and sports talk radio. This book came out in 2007. It's by a practicing psychotherapist a feminist. Someone very much pro gay says I view masculinity as a social construction that assumes different forms and different historical moments and context. Yeah. I think that's true. But it also has an enormous genetic component. Men are genetically more aggressive and assertive than women. Men more naturally inclined towards hierarchy towards developing legal systems. OK. More from the book men can pay a cost in the form of poor health shallow and narrow relationships for conformity with the narrow definitions of masculinity that promise to bring them status and privilege. Yeah. They can also pay an enormous price for way too broad definitions of masculinity like way too many possibilities. Right. I talked in an earlier stream this morning about healthy masculinity. So it should mean a substantial period of your time of your spare time should be spent just with blokes or with your family. Right. Because men are genetically wired to try to have sex with as many women as possible. We need a civilization that disciplines male sexuality and male violence. So discouraging gratuitous violence and discouraging gratuitous sex. So give men a family to saddle them down with obligations. Put the male sexual genie in the marital heterosexual marital bottle as Dennis Prager puts it and give you know give men men only spaces. Right. That's going to be healthier for them so that they don't just want to at least spill their seed everywhere. A Martian arriving on planet Earth not knowing what masculinity was would quickly form the opinion that it is highly damaging and damage with very few if redeeming features. Yeah. I severely dealt that. Right. Everything constructed in our society. Every every building every transportation system. Almost all major systems of thought. Almost all cutting edge developments in technology were accomplished by men. So yeah we've had a social element in constructing masculinity. That's true. You had the late 19th century American male image was a rugged individualist to escape civilizing constraints went to work in exclusively male preserves went to war with other men went west to find a fortune. But it is well against the perils of nature. Yeah. That's what one expression of masculinity is the US became increasingly urban and mobile. Those masculine options were no longer available. Men were forced to look elsewhere to reclaim their lost identities. And one of the ways that they reclaim their lost identities now is by turning into sports talk radio. It's actually an all bloke's medium. Right. So when you're under assault by feminism by the left by the decrease in freedom of association the substantial reduction in private property in ever encroaching government civil rights industrial complex litigating and investigating more and more of life. You're looking for a safe space. Right. So where can blokes go to just be with blokes. Right. What are some spaces where you can actively exclude women. You know exclude people who aren't like you. Right. So let's be honest the major sports are overwhelmingly conducted by heterosexuals and are funded and attracted attractive to heterosexuals. So sports talk radio is not usually a super gay place. Now this book says mediated sports tax reproduce the idea that traditional masculinity and heterosexuality at natural and universal rather than socially constructed. Well I would say that the genetic component here is larger. I just don't think that on average gay men are as excited about sports and participate in sports as intensely particularly violent sports as heterosexual men. And I don't think that is 100 percent socially constructed. Sports talk is one of the only remaining spaces where men of all social classes and all ethnic groups can directly discuss such values as discipline, skill, courage, competition, loyalty, fairness, teamwork, hierarchy and achievement. So sports and sports fandom and sports talk radio are sites of male bonding. One of the few such places left in our society. Right. And sports talk is a form of civic discourse that teaches us how to create healthy community for people who frequently lead isolated lonely lives. There's a major sporting event the most socially in that person can get out there and socialize, go to a bar and form a common cause and form bonds with other people. So in 2001 an addict of sports talk Alan Eisenstock wrote a book called sports talk masculinist celebration of the significance of sports radio. Referred to sports talk shows is a nonstop fraternity party a sports bar on the radio, which men and interact with other men free from the century of feminism and political correctness. So sports talk radio is basically a dominately heterosexual male only space reminiscent of the rise of fraternities and the Boy Scouts around the turn of the 20th century. Talk radio taps into a sense of public life. Right. It's some way of connecting our individual life with a wider community. It reduces anxiety by encouraging forms of identification. Right. It helps us overcome the isolation exhaustion that comes from overworking. It fills in the increasing gap people feel between themselves politicians and our leading institutions. It's a novel brash and aggressive way of creating a group identity in near liberal America in talk radio in the American dream we get 700 hours of talk radio we find callers deeply worried about emasculation. So the natural order of things has been reversed with the civil rights industrial complex. So the crime blacks rich corporations of women all seem to have the upper hand talk radio becomes a battleground which to reclaim hegemonic masculinity and rid the syspace of soft-spoken new age guys. Now even though the callers lack the power to ward off the verbal put downs of the host they keep coming back for more sports talk radio even more than political talk radio is about the only arena left for white men who have been wounded by the assaults of all our major institutions wounded by the indignities of feminism affirmative action the civil rights industrial complex and all these other minority groups they're increasing rights which comes at the stability and cohesion and social trust of the majority. So sports talk shows are a venue for the embattled white male seeking a recreation seeking an identity seeking community. So one learner sports station says the fan you make no pretensions what we're doing here this is a guy's radio station we are aiming at the men's bracket which is the hardest to reach the author says people in sports talk radio are wary of academics they believe the scholars read too much into the messages in the media. They think that what they do is normal and ordinary they take for granted what they do and say at work. And the author of this book says he was driving on the freeway notice a billboard that said I'm strong and getty listen to them before we fire that that is a great billboard right so I'm strong and getty are continue to be syndicated local Sacramento talk show hosts of a popular following they frequently mention on their show their fear of being five saying something offensive or defying the station manager. And so this billboard is reflective of the volatility of the radio industry. So everyone gets fired in radio. I remember some joke I heard when I worked in radio about a man confesses look by you know my mother's a kleptomaniac my my dad's a murderer my younger brothers a homosexual all my cousins are in prison. How do I tell my girlfriend that I work in radio. Yeah tremendous job turnover in radio. Incredibly intense right. Here's a good quote we're all just renting our time in radio our jobs are never safe. Ratings are a constant source of tension you can never stop thinking about it. And the business of talk radio is to sell your stuff. Right. So you can call advertising a necessary evil but in the final analysis when you look at sports or radius of business it's all about selling goods and services. So the advertisers are our number one priority says one station manager. Without them we can't give out listeners the sports stuff they want. But it is hard to always be pushing new products like the latest gadget or mail enhancement pills. I got into this business because I love sports and call in programming not to push products. And many sports talk stations are just publicity machines for particular teams. So in Sacramento K. H. T. K. the sports talk station has a contract with the NBA Sacramento Kings where their game the K. H. T. K. sports talk hosts are employed by the Sacramento Kings to do play by play pre game or post game commentary. So the K. H. T. K. hosts essentially operate as cogs in an expensive promotional and media machine that makes as Kings announces players media outlets and advertise all to capitalize and profit from the success of the only big name sports team in town. Not supposed to be a bad mouth. The people in the sports franchise who pay you have to kiss ass. The advertisers the Kings the corporate sponsors all the time. There's very little journalistic freedom. Let's get back here Mark Cuban. Ripping Skip Bayless. Me did every game LeBron played harder than Kevin Durant did for straight game. That is the most ridiculous thing any sports writer has ever said. Now if you think when Kevin Durant walked off the court he thought yeah I didn't play quite hard enough right. Now you can say like he wasn't put it that he wasn't put in a position to succeed. You could say that they didn't write the run the right place. They didn't get the ball to him on the block enough. And if you were smart you'd come out and you'd have substance. You say you know what this is how many plays they ran to him on the block. Here's how Miami defended it. Now you can also argue that the pot Pat Riley way is always the same way all the time. Miami played it the same way all the time. And then we can have a discussion discussion about adjustments like last year. Do we play harder than the heat. Is that what you think it was. No I don't. I think LeBron disappeared and shrank in crunch time of the fourth quarter. And I can just show you the numbers of what he didn't do in every way. So we get no credit for not putting him in a position to succeed. Right. We played the he put himself in all he did to stand out on the perimeter. Now how do you think we defended that. Why do you think he was standing out there. You didn't have to defend it. Oh right. So no matter what we did he was just going to stand there and do nothing. Well I. And is 40 saying the sports talk radio is healthier than political talk radio. No but it is more masculine. I. I frankly don't listen to much sports talk radio almost nothing. I don't know how sports journalists can be gurus. I guess my point is to contrast him with gurus because probably his flaws and lack of understanding and lack of command of facts. Right. He is not claiming a galaxy brain. He's not claiming revolutionary theories. He's not some out of control narcissist. He's not pushing victimization. And you know well with me and by true social prestige has been denied me. He kind of conducts himself the opposite of of a guru. Oops. Let me play more here from Mark Cuban. That's all I saw. That was that was a lot of exactly. Right. Chinskip. That's all you saw. Save the day. That's you're exactly right. That's all you saw. You didn't look. Right. I mean and that's a complete insult to us to say you know what the adjustments that we made. What did you do to force him out there. We we had different. We had like six seven different types of matchups in our zone. Right. And we played man to man and we had a variety of different switches. Right. So we knew that 90 percent of his shots were going to come from the left hand side. Right. We knew that if you gave him room from the left he was going to drive. Now we didn't have the athletes in Oklahoma City. So we had to plan differently. So we need to make sure that we pushed them out away and then we gave him different looks every time you had the ball because just making him force just forcing him to make a decision. Right. To think about what he had to do taking the time to read are we in his own. What type of zone we in. How are we matching up. What type of rotations are we in. Making him think made them pass the ball around the perimeter which gave us a chance to adjust. Right. Now they're smarter. They're better team this year. They deserve the win this year. But you know that's the way we played it. And so it wasn't just LeBron. LeBron actually played it right more often than not. He made the right pass to the right guy who didn't make the right play. And that's exactly what we wanted. We wanted to get the ball out of their hands and into the hands of somebody else. We wanted him to play Michael Jordan and make somebody play Steve Kerr. Now last night Mike Miller. They had several Steve Kerr. Okay back to this academic book on sports talk radio talks about the tension between journalistic independence and the necessity to maximize. Advertising revenues. Most of the products advertised on sports radio automobile. Automobiles beer gadgets melt enhancement pills. Reflective of the Lattish masculinity sports station ads such as sports talk radio is just beer babes and brats gives the impression the staff are not really working. It's just one big frat party. Yet everyone I interviewed talked about long hours fatigue and work stress. So how do we get these discourses of hedonism in the face of increased corporate pressures and work strain. Perhaps the emphasis on pleasure seeking is assembled to mask increasingly bureaucratic and rational features of the modern workplace. Stories of sports radio is one big Lattish celebration obscure the fact the sports radio staff are all involved in rational bureaucratic work organizations feature of many men's work experience in today's hyper capitalist culture and this type of bureaucracy are almost always feature HR departments run by left wing women and no more male behavior is an anathema in the modern bureaucratized corporate culture back to Mark Cuban. It has had everybody stepping up and they deserve every bit you know so but you're not you're talking generalities and I'm not you are you spewed out some generality about I'll show you don't care. OK let me tell you that for a fact and Stephen I can validate this LeBron James listen to what I said for about what eight years because that's all I heard he said I was his Howard Cosell and this year for the first time to his credit he tuned out all the noise that's all we saw in the finals was he's reading the hunger hunger games trilogy before the games he's meditating on the bench before the games he tuned out this is a skip Bayless special LeBron lost last year because he was paying attention to skip Bayless LeBron won this year because he wasn't but he just said OK did he not just say that OK here's what he didn't do here's what he didn't do against you guys OK he let you off the hook because he didn't do what we saw him do for four straight games he didn't drive through your zone and slash it up and dish he didn't post OK some pretty good stuff there from Mark Cuban right looking at this north western website skip Bayless how sports media's most hated man so popular and it says five steps to a skip Bayless hot take one moderator asked provocative question audience knows will get skip riled up so when I interviewed Lowell Cone who's got a PhD in English very very smart man said skip Bayless is better than anyone he knows putting putting his finger on the pulse of what's going on with sports fans so example is LeBron James the best player of this generation debate opponent makes a rational point skip then reframes the question LeBron may be the best player born on the last Sunday of the week in December but is he better than Michael Jordan then skip unleashes completely anecdotal argument that is impossible to prove is false then he gets thousands of retweets and comments calling him an idiot rinses and repeats tomorrow and undisputed I explained to Shannon why Tim Tebow is the answer to the Patriots QB problems so what makes him so popular lots of columns of hot tanks lots of athletes of hot tanks skip is eloquent is a strong TV personality that is not enough so to find out the answer this author went on a 12 hour skippathon content binge so our one starting from his archives at the LA Times it seems he's always had the click bait gene the first article had the title is Rose cheating on him or Jill which is in reference to safeties getting a step on QBs without them noting he describes a race horse as a dark chocolate beauty in ESPN sports nation chat from 2009 he explains the origin of his LeBron James hate the LeBron never ever seen a player with zero rings he more pressure on himself by acting more brazenly cocky about how he's going to win this championship your dance drink blowouts you flex snap pictures before games as if you're going to have the ring ceremony before Sunday's game one versus the pistons you have now hit one walkoff jumper in six NBA seasons Jordan did that every week so now it's time to start showing us what you've got no more excuses back it up and you will be king and then there is a 2006 video that begins to explain how skip Bayless became so popular I've been reading him since about 1980 81 82 Allen Iverson will turn out to be nothing but fools gold in the Rocky Mountains you know this and I know this because all he wants to do is chuck it up he's on his best behavior now 13 assists very impressive George Carlson mad scientist heaven because he gets to show his coaching peers he can so for me listening to skip is like the good part of getting you know into porn right it's just so exciting it's not the icky after but when you're initially tuning into porn and the colors seem more vivid and your blood's flowing and you feel stronger and you know you're getting revenge on all the women who have humiliated you and you're having like a soaring time after the drudgery of your days that's kind of what it's like to get a little skip Bayless can win with two of these little guys in the back court in Boykins but in the end you know on January 22 when the other superstar comes back all those assists will start turning into shots and then okay so Allen Iverson can't get over some comments that skip Bayless has made fast forward a few years skip repeatedly because Chris Bosch Bosch spies for playing soft with the Miami Heat Chris Bosch is so annoyed he comes under fast first take like an adult explain he takes pride in his family name and resorting to name calling isn't real analysis it's a cheap shot skip looks him in the eyes takes a deep breath goes on a tirade about how he's a soft player and he won't stop unless Bosch plays tougher Bosch admits the skip motivates him so that's our first hint right skip is popular because he gets infused with pro athletes and they go on the show like Richard Sherman did to confront him for his ridiculous claims doesn't start with athletes Mavericks and Mark Cuban wearing a Smurfs shirt when I first taken a nine-liter skip not knowing the basics of how his own defense work so skip is not a sports expert Mark Cuban exposes that his arguments are anecdotal an opinion space with cherry picked states stats but wait learn about double elevator screens horns offensive set and the intricacies of various offenses and defenses when you can argue about Jordan versus LeBron so skip fits into a particular landscape right YouTube commentator David Ferguson says a lot of people can't stand skip I love the guy he is the face and the voice for the not so public opinion what a lot of people don't understand that his job isn't to be likeable his job is to entertain so the money in entertainment and talk radios entertainment is in being interesting not in being right so skip owns debate he was deep in an ice bath where a man half his age made us all laugh to take focus off the fact the old man straight out took his man card and slapped him with it okay skip Bayless worked his way up from the average newspaper reported to be one of the three faces of sports he still has that three hours of sleep run two miles at 2am work ethic guys much younger than him couldn't possibly compete with skips one of those guys that is so hated when his time on earth is up people appreciate him in his absence without him Shannon and Stephen a and these sports shows would be as entertaining as the today's show so the line between love and hate is extremely thin and the skip Bayless has tremendous entertainment value his Twitter bio says maybe not what you want to hear but what you need to hear okay so let's get some context comparing him with secular gurus this is from the academic podcast decoding the gurus that appeals to conspiratorial mindset to this literature on this where you know it's a way for them to feel special and to feel better about their own lives yeah and so you mentioned the tendency to encourage cultish dynamics and this is not just a perjury of we when we are referencing this we're talking about the fact that the gurus often establishes very strong binary in group and out group categories right and usually it's their followers and supporters are the good moral wise people and they're out group are malicious bad view of critics who just want to tear everyone down and so this this serves as along with a host of other and behavioral patterns to emotionally manipulate followers in order to so I don't think you know skip is trying to establish parasocial relationship with his followers but he is I guess mostly manipulating people with just very honed performances that just high octane and kind of exciting and compelling to view and I saw skip on Beverly Drive on Monday and I'm kicking myself but I didn't go up to him and telling him about the time I ran into Tom Landry when I was covering the 49ers and the Cowboys and I walked up to Tom Landry the first time I seen him in person Tom Landry was talking about how he hadn't talked to Skip Bayless in several years and this and that about Skip Bayless so 1985 December 22nd 1985 first time we meet Tom Landry he's talking about Skip Bayless and skip skip says God's his number one priority at life so what does that actually mean like what does skip sacrifice for God like what does he not do because God's his number one priority right how does making God his number one priority how does that manifest in his life I'd be curious to get them to protect the guru or sometimes the launch attacks of people that might be criticizing the guru but in many respects it's things like power social relationships are kind of unavoidable when consuming someone's content or you know with the internet the way it is but there are people that cultivate and make use of those relationships to a greater and lesser extent and gurus really strongly cultivate them by using like excessive flattery offering often referencing like how the followers are like close friends to them and this kind of thing and then similarly presenting themselves as wounded and vulnerable and in need of protection it's kind of an interest and skip Bayless doesn't do that as in paradox because you have them as the all conquering polymorphic genius but they're also you know in need of protection and constantly under attack and the guru figure who does this most often recently Jordan Peterson used to be the master of it but I would point out Lex Friedman as somebody who's engaged in it and I just have a reference it's not the one that he did today but he said he posted this on his reddit I'll have several different difficult conversations this year and next I'll get attacked from all sides I now understand that this is the way for anyone who seeks to empathize and understand in the divided world I hope you So anyone who works as hard as skip Bayless does so driven to command an audience right there people like me people like skip who's obviously far more successful than me we're obviously coming from a broken place skip Bayless says both my parents were alcoholics I come from a broken home my mother forced me to take speech lessons from age eight to twelve and turned out to be great for him and he talks about his job it's not a job it's my life it's highest priority right I still leap out of bed every day to do my job I wear on people because of my strength my weakness is my intensity I bring it every day I bring every last ounce that I have alcohol was rampant through my whole extended family then skip was influenced by his high school journalism teacher Elizabeth Burdette she made skip feel like Hemingway so he's had a passion for books, movies, theater and several cable TV series rival his passion for sports nothing gives him more satisfaction than writing something that he likes loves fast cars but he doesn't drive them above the speed limit you know my heart and will still support me I'll need it yeah it's funny it's funny you started him because I was about to mention Lex because he was on my mind too I mean people often cite Lex's that he's just all about love and he's just trying to increase the amount of love and understanding in the world but he also like ruthlessly cuts off giving occasion with anyone who is not expressing a hundred percent love back at him unless my unless of famous of course yeah so you know destiny or those kind of people that he'll tolerate a level of disagreement but if they're not a figure with a high enough profile if they're a normal person on Reddit, they're gone so yeah, I mean people cite Lex's kind of kumbaya love love is the answer thing as an example of how he's really a good guy not all that bad but to be honest I've always seen these elements of selfishness in it it's it's particularly in Lex's case it's particularly clumsy it's not even it's not even it's at the surface but it's it's very effective like you know the amount of people that kind of criticize Lex and kind of see through it just look at the comments that he hasn't blocked it's loads of people saying we love you Lex we know that you're what's in your heart we need people like you in the world and so on and like the the thing which he tweeted out today said I will speak with everyone and I will get attacked, derided and slandered for it but I believe in the power of long form empathetic conversation to help discover our common humanity including the good and the evil we are all capable of I know I'm under qualified and underscaled for these conversations so I'll often fall short as I do in all aspects of my life but I'll work hard to improve and we'll never ever give in to cynicism right and it's a it's a beautiful encapsulation but this is in reference to Lex conducting fawning interviews with no pushback with Benjamin Net and Yahoo most recently and a host of controversial figures where he gives very mild pushback or I think his strongest is probably with Kanye West who was spiting overt anti-Semitism but even in that conversation the main thing that Lex focused on was when Kanye said he didn't trust Lex that's the thing which he found most hurtful and returned to at the end of the conversation so it's just but it's that wounded bird pose of I'm doing good and I'm gonna be attacked like Jesus it's almost sounds like Jesus and it's there's no mention of accurate criticism right at the bit at the end you might say that well he's admitting he's at fault but notice that he he didn't at the beginning say you know I'll be legitimately critiqued for making mistakes or being too soft no he said I'll be attacked derided and slandered so yeah yeah yeah yeah okay that's good that's called these dynamics encouraging them okay well we haven't done we haven't done so you're a profound bullshit one of my favorite domains of the grammar of Chris yeah I don't have my notes here what have you got well so this this is usually paired with a tendency to make use of neologisms not always okay neologism like coining you know fancy acronyms so what's the guru from the perspective of decoding the gurus alright someone who produces something that sounds profound but isn't right it's keep careless it's not pushing no pseudo profundity right just very plain spoken bad dink of bloke galaxy brainless people who present ideas that are just too profound for the average mind to comprehend right that's not skip Bayless he's not claiming galaxy brainless courtishness right where people who like me are good people and people who don't like me are bad people skip Bayless doesn't do that he's not building a court he has no interest in building a court entire establishment the orthodoxy the establishment mainstream media the expert consensus are always wrong maybe a tiny little bit of a mild mild amount of this so maybe a two out of five in this area for for skip grievance mongering pretty mild feeling excluded and disregarded and disrespected narratives of grievance very mild with with skip Bayless self aggrandizement and narcissism it's impossible to do a job like skip Bayless does without having a sense of grandiosity and inflated idea of one's self-importance but he seems to be quite functional Cassandra complex they gurus love to talk about how the end of the world is at hand skip does not do this revolutionary theories he doesn't claim to have revolutionary theories pseudo profound BS right I don't think skip does this either is but you know inventing your own terminology is something that gurus like to do and pseudo profound bullshit is it sounds pretty order for two days but it is also a term from the psychology literature and it refers to yes this is Chris Kavanaugh is a professor at Oxford University he lives in Japan he is Irish and his co-host in the decoding the gurus podcast is Matthew Brown said the University of Central Queensland he's a fair dinkum Australian psychologist so Christopher Kavanaugh is an anthropologist Matt Brown his co-host is a psychologist so Chris has his gain turned up much higher than Matt Brown language that appears profound but once you kind of like look consider it critically it's saying something very mundane or something which looks deep but is actually quite shallow and I think that an aspect of it can be where you're referencing technical terminology that sounds very complicated you're making reference to these abstract or obscure theories often referencing the particular names which most people wouldn't know of the relevant theorists as well but you're not doing so actually the kind of explain the theory and elucidate some point that you really need to reference the theory no the reason for signaling it or for referencing it is to reflect back on how much you know and how great your technical expertise is that it's almost hard for you to sink down the normal level to communicate with people because you're just bustling with so many high level concepts right did I miss anything with that Matt? what else would you put in the pseudoprofined bucket and you better unmute yourself like just with silence you know I think that's right look it's different from the other domains we talked about because pseudoprofabilition is really about the sort of language like the sort of syntactic structure as you said the buzzwords the jargon that people are using and you know stringing together words and sentences that give the appearance of saying something profound and meaningful but actually I'm not really saying anything much at all an example could and Skip Bayless does not do this at all be as beings of light we are local and non-local time-bound and timeless actuality and possibility I mean you know that sounds kind of okay if you don't analyze it carefully but if you think about it it doesn't really mean anything Deepak Chopra is the ultimate coin of pseudoprofound bullshit he said things like imagination is inside exponential space-time events that I think is referencing some sort of physics type stuff there but he's connecting it to imagination it makes no sense so yeah I mean the what else to say about well I'd I like that like I love the term originally is kind of associated with Deepak Chopra and the the kind of quantum Wu proponents and you do find that amongst the secular gurus on occasion I think there are varieties a little bit different because it will often be referencing like evolutionary theorists or psychologists or they've seen in just the way that they respond to certain ideas like I have a transcript on front of me where it says Jordan Peterson was talking to Bret Weinstein about the possibility that hospitals are net negative like they they harm more people than they can heal because of things like superbugs and you know medical mistreatments and so on and Jordan says now that's just a guess and it could easily be wrong but it also could not be wrong and Bret Weinstein kicks a pause then says the fact that it's even plausible is a stunning fact and then they ramble on night that to me is kind of taking the language of recognizing profundity but what you've just issued for is uninformed bullshit but if somebody reacts as if it's a deep profundity it creates the impression that something important was being transmitted and the sense makers are often extremely guilty of this Yeah, the sense makers Yeah, let's go listen to the sense making episode you'll hear so many examples of it I for a bit of fun once Chris I like asked GPT for to look at a few of Eric Weinstein's tweets and tell me whether or not they were see the profound bullshit or not and well he could say whether was right or wrong but he had the same assessment that I did on every one of them what if the tweets I gave it was this one Eric Weinstein tweeted when you first realized that in the summer of 69 Brian Adams was not yet 10 years old you were supposed to extrapolate that the world pretty routinely speaks in coded messages Wow like you know just just just just mull over that for a little while and see whether or not yeah you think that's bullshit I'd also add to it Matt that part of the reason that the gurus are so competent in this area is that they tend to have very high levels of verbal fluency they're able to speak in an auto didactic kind of way just stream of consciousness often without the usual verbal texts that inhabit normal mortal speech and that content is liberally peppered with you know obscure references technical jargon and so on but it it's their their fluency and they're often their use of metaphor or metaphorical language that that that also marks them out and we so early this morning I read another book called yappy days behind the scenes with newses schmoozes boozes and losers I see booked by talk radio producer Bernadette Duncan she's married to the wife of talkers magazine publisher and editor Michael Harrison and she discusses what makes some people you know on air big time celebrities and it's being indispensable but for advertisers for an audience right that the sense that that the performer is indispensable that people have to listen to him have to get his hot take and 9 11 was an interesting day because Howard Stern was was on the air when the Twin Towers were hit and his producer said something listeners would never hear on news stations anywhere else on radio shortly after the attack he said it's a terrorist attack isn't it so Howard Stern crew connected the dots moved the story forward basically 100% correctly now the news reporters up and down the dial was straight jacketed mostly repeating and repeating only that which they knew could be verified and one of Howard Stern's cohorts asking it why doesn't the news just call it like it is and Gary the producer piped up well they're a legitimate news organization they're not allowed to say what we are thinking but that's a big difference between talk radio and the news and people are doing the news and not supposed to say what they're thinking people in talk radio get to say what they're thinking and sometimes what people are thinking is more true than the news the talk radio is a place where people can discuss the messy and ugly parts of life speaking from a less tailored part of the brain so radio people are notorious for poor spelling unkempt hair and wardrobe and call us no they can anonymously say the sorts of stuff normally shared with a friend over the bathroom stall she also worked for Lou Dobbs and he said that he insisted on a script writer and she was struck silent Lou Dobbs wanted someone who'd write out his monologues transitions and even his interview segments a script writer for a radio talk show spontaneity is the very essence of talk radio spontaneity is the heart of the beauty of talk radio if you script a talk radio show you lose the genre it becomes something else since when is a talk show scripted radio the naked human voice is the great exposure you can't act your way into these thrills and revelry it builds from within it goes deeper than words it brings out the things that make us human you can't read your way through the thrill for winning home run you must feel your way or there's a disconnect the same principle applies in talk radio for the natural flow of conversation he often see in the content that in lots of occasions the gurus just replace argument with a metaphor they just say it's like and they give a metaphor and they describe the metaphor in great depth but they haven't actually demonstrated that the argument is valid they've just kind of talked about things in a metaphorical plane then they move on to the next topic and yeah that is it's not exactly what the pseudo profound bullshit concept captures but it's definitely in a related family I think I know what you mean and I think it is helpful to have a bit of a broader more inclusive sort of approach with the pseudo profound bullshit thing because like I said it has got a lot to do with that facility with language they are well educated people very equations and there are like all of us use the form of language as kind of an indicator you know as a kind of a and it you know it's not just functional yeah that's right it's a performative as well and so you know if you do things like you know reference technical scientific terms if you're using if you're mentioning equations if you're using this kind of academic in language then all of that stuff is taking as signifiers that that's something meaningful as being said now I'll give you another example of all of these things in another Eric Weinstein three quits this tweet said one disinformation plus the plus symbol informed consent equals disinformed consent to malinformation leading to non-consent leads to malinformed refusal to consent three malinformation and disinformation were defined by deviation from a state narrative based on questionable objective science right now that's that's a word salad on one level but he is using what seems superficially to be very precise language right he's he's using a form of expression which seems like it's like like grounded in in in something it's just if you try to pass out what's been said it even means very little or he's just repeating standard that's very important yeah I was in a fancy way I was going to say that I can parse that and like I can follow that because I'm very familiar with the issues that the conspiracy affairs have with those terms and I can I can I can pass it to Chris but I think my point there is that the like it's saying something that's straightforward quite straightforward in a very complicated way in in a way that I guess encourages people to think well this is profound this is saying something true yeah and Skip Skip Bayless doesn't play that game another part of the grometer number nine conspiracy mongering to gain real insights real special knowledge that nobody else can see that is very hard work for normal people in a lifetime of study and research and he provides a few scant original intellectual contributions that's not nearly enough for a guru Guru needs a steady supply of fresh original content to supply to their followers and to justify their status be a guru they must set themselves up not only as uniquely insightful but above and apart from all orthodoxies including established political and ideological groups thus they are encouraged to go beyond standard heterodoxy contrarianism and skepticism into the realm of conspiratorial ideation so I think skip is only relatively mild to moderate in doing this this is because the expert consensus though naturally not infallible but by definition tends to supply the most reasonable and evidence-based view based on current information so the guru is in the position of needing to provide a strongly contrasting perspective to the expert consensus and the only way to supply that is to have something that backs up your bold claims in a compelling way this leads inexorably down the path of conspiracy mongering right where you come to alternative views of events that authoritative sources cannot or won't tell you about and conspiracy theories require a suppressive network to explain away the lack of evidence and support and why nobody is willing to accept the guru