Supplementary Material 52: Under-Optimized Academics, Tired Economists, and Bailiwick Clarifications
2026-07-09 21:30:00 • 22:34
Hello and welcome to the Cooting the Girls supplementary
material with the devilishly handsome professor from Dynonder the silver fox of the podcast
Matthew Bryan and his co-host partner in crime me Chris Kavanaugh, not a Irish
gingerpan today. Hello, Matt. It's a good day. Good day. Good week. Happy Monday to you, sir.
How was your week last week? I didn't see you. I was off to a beautiful new show.
Just hanging out. Having a holiday and you're going to recover from your holiday by picking
another holiday. The last holiday. You need to take a dollar. The life of academics, people say
my 11 ivory towers. It's not all fun and games. Sometimes it's like days of work
in but during the whole day. Yeah, like today. I know, frantically dealing with all my students who
have missed me and will miss me in the coming week where I'm going to be off on Fraser Island.
Doing some walks. Walks in the first. Is Fraser Island a good thing? Is it a nice place?
It's a nice place. Yeah, it's a nice place. Yeah. Yeah. Just tired, Chris. Just so weary.
Sleepy all the time. I think I'm either low iron or low tea or both. Not sure what it is.
I'm not going to lie on Jesus. You need to. You're going to have to get a stuff like that.
The optimizers, they've got things that they could recommend. That's right. That's what it is.
I'm insufficiently optimized. I think they take it too far. I think they're overly optimized.
I, however, could be under optimized. That's the issue. I've came across as a fantastic article.
I'm going to recommend for people called. It's by someone I don't know them. I'm not
endorsing their broader eye photo. Okay. It's always a good newspaper to put in. By them.
On Substack, there's somebody called Elliot Peasley and they wrote a review of Chris Williams'
live tour. It's called Chris Williams is a sleeve. It's about a week of routine. It's quite
ashramic. Let me give you a piece of it. They're talking about coffee and he says,
no coffee for the first 90 minutes. Why not? You're adenous in the system that caffeine acts on it
isn't active for the first 90 minutes a day. So having a more mean coffee is literally pointless.
And this is the guy's response. Literally pointless, you say. Here's just one point,
Christopher Williams. And it's nice. It's nice to have a coffee in the morning. I like
disobeying my adenous in system and Corey Dunstair is a big hit at coffee and drinking it without
once looking at my stopwatch. My adenous in system is not the boss of me. The adenous in system
is my employee. He does not decide when I have a coffee. If he doesn't like it, he can quit.
Lamentally his pal doesn't agree with me. I destroy you in the afternoon. Correct. Oh, is that
it? Is that correct? I was wondering why every day after lunch I developed the symptoms of
leprosy. Why I suddenly come down with a bad case of bone failure and my brain fills with
malignant tumors that all play the kazoo and none of them very well. Sorry, Mr. AS.
Won't happen again. Also, who says correct as an answer in real life to an actual human being?
So it goes on. It goes on. Right? The part that follows it says, Christopher, he's detailing this
morning routine. And he says, I then have salt and water. And the guy wrote, he's a mollusk.
We're listening to your partner. I'm drinking electric ice from a weld.
I'm so shocked. It's pretty good. To Chris, I would say, credit in the comments after
that it's quite a long piece, you know, kind of brutally barking him. He wrote, always nice to
meet a fan at the bottom. That's a good response. That's fine. That's fine. But yeah, Chris is,
I mean, he's symptomatic. There is any of this broader trend where people are, I mean,
like, I stereotyped Californians, not all Californians, but in my mind, this all comes from California.
It's like, it's like, it's like a Eisen Garde from which the stuff spreads throughout
medical. It's a pure form. It's a pure form. It's like, yeah, it's a pure form. That's
the pure form of wellness is California. That's right. And like routines and an incredible number
of supplements and just just, yeah, like little rituals and little things you must do or can't do.
And in their defense, like, there was like my entire adult life, there has been this whole phenomena
of, I guess, lazy lifestyle articles, which is, you know, science is found. You know, remember,
you had to drink a glass of red wine, then you can't drink a glass wine or a kill you, then
you should eat chocolate, and you shouldn't eat chocolate. You know what I mean? There was this,
there's a whole category of lazy lifestyle articles that I think that has metamorphized into an
entire prescription for life based on whatever random thing people have read somewhere in the
academic literature. And actually, this goes towards another unpopular opinion I've got, Chris.
I think they, they should have never allowed anyone without a PNC to read any of the peer reviewed
research. They should not endorse, not endorse, kept it under lock-in key. It's done more harm than
good. No, it shouldn't be reading any of that stuff. Oh, dear. Whenever you get your pitchfork side
to come for out of touch elites, remember it's my, that is giving this day to play. I just want
to sign post this for the critics who you're inevitably bringing it up in the future. Matt said that,
okay, and I said, no, Matt, I just agree. So when you're attributing that that's somewhat on this
podcast, that was Matt, okay. All right, it just has done somehow the popular consciousness,
that's all, that's all I'm saying. Well, transparency, transparency, it's done more good than harm.
That's the way I, I don't think you have to necessarily have a PhD. I just think you have to
see, there should be some board, an international board where you have to be able to do one decent
literature review to show that you can critically evaluate the literature. And then you get access
to it. They can get access to all the other content. Here's a catch-tority-two with my plan,
because you need access to the literature in order to do the literature review. So it's
complicated. I haven't figured it all out yet. You haven't got all the details. Yeah,
no, but it's a working project. I get that. I just saw out of the corner of my eye and the
lower line from this piece out. I'm going to have to read you. I know people reading
stuff of an article is not that pleasant, but you've got to appreciate this. So he's got the
quote from Chris Williamsson. As soon as I'm up, I'm making a B-line for daylight. And the writer says,
what an abyss of a line. What a profoundly unremotive view of life. He doesn't
ambulate into the sunshine. He makes a B-line for daylight. Not when he's ready, but the second
he's up. The symbol with his eyes both open. Chris Williamsson navigates the most direct and
energy-efficient route to the few sky radiation to him. It's not the nourishing glow of a
paternal star. Something our ancestors danced and feasted in celebration of. They live just a
source of vitamin D, something that turns the ignition in his metabolic system. It doesn't even
exist until it makes contact with his boring face. It is a flash. It is a bit harsh.
It's a nice couple of lines. I recommend people take a look at that. And partly he's also covered
Stephen Bartlett in an article the previous week. Stephen Bartlett deserves to be covered by
a Serbian venegrine article like that. Yeah, that speaks to my soul. On that subject,
you know, I felt when we covered Eric Weinstein trying to convince people that he's more connected
to Jeffrey Epstein than they could possibly imagine. We'd hit Pete Eric. That's just an encapsulation
of how much he did's attention. That he's willing to demand the people. Even inventing
you know, Ludicrous Kim's that Epstein wanted him to be his number two and all this kind of thing.
I thought that was Pete Eric. And then I saw a poster review on Twitter. I think you've seen
this too, but I'm going to remind you of that. Yeah, you have to read it out for everybody.
Yeah, I'm not going to read the entire thing because it's long, right? But as well for everything
Eric produces. But here we go. The talk was about a mystery. It costs five to fifteen million
dollars to endow a chaired professorship. Say in demography, immigration, verology,
virus origins, public health, vaccine safety, nudge, nobilize, evolutionary theory, brackets,
gender and political science, brackets, color revolution, technology, near eastern studies,
brackets, Islamist colonial empire, economics, bracket, asset taxes, etc. Yet our anti-woke
billionaires have not figured out that they alone can reward the academics like Martin Kuldorf
or Jordan B. Peterson, Brett Weinstein, heller Hayne, Peter Bogosian, James Lindsay,
by reinserting them with no teaching duties and gorgeous housing, slash vacation homes,
and discretionary funds. Imagine 25 academics with giant travels reinserted back in the Oxford
Harvard Cambridge Princeton, present in every faculty meeting, empowered to blow up the woke mind
virus word breeds. Imagine if every university learned the lesson that heroic behavior was actually
admirable and rewarded. God, this is so dumb. Similar for journalists and editors at newspapers.
Yet something is wildly wrong with our billionaire slash trillionaire class. This is one of the most
effective ways to destroy the revolutionary mental illness by rewarding the academics who,
along with their families, paid with livelihoods, pensions, their names, academic access. So to translate
that, he is basically saying that all the rich people, people like say Peter Teele or Elon Musk and so on,
like they're always going on about all these things we need to do to reform academia to solve
the meaning crisis, whatever the case might be. But the answer is staring them in the face, and it's
if they just established in-died chairs in universities and give the academics that they hand
picked to occupy those chairs, massive indictments, big houses, unlimited funds, just say 15 to 25,
you could blow up the whole academic system with revolutionary thinkers, Peter Burgossi,
Jim Slandzi and stuff, install their mark and just imagine what is going to happen if you have
those guys in the department meetings at Harvard. What wonders?
It's quite a list of revolutionary thinkers he's got there. He doesn't put his own name in there,
I thought, which is admirable. Very rare. Very rare, very rare, he will often make these
kinds of statements and name everyone when he's clearly talking about himself, but he's naming
his brother, his sister in law. It's the small circle of people who are incredibly
eric adjacent, so the implication is clear, but the mind boggles Chris, what would happen if we
gave James Lindsay a massive fucking house? What a world we could be living in. I know. You talk
to me today. I'm watching Jim Slandzi blow-beating at some departmental meeting in Harvard. What
world-altering outcomes would come from that if James could go on about critical theory at
a department meeting? I mean, it's hard to find them. What kind of changes could come from that?
I can't even imagine. I'm imagining some sort of post-gear city utopia. That's what we now have.
Yeah, it's certainly not gay space communism or whatever, because he's not a big fan of communism.
No, something against those things. Yeah, something.
It speaks to this very childish perspective that Eric and his friends have, that academia is not
a massive worldwide network of hundreds of thousands of people working in disparate disciplines,
and largely the majority of work going undiscussed in tabloid newspapers or by Elon Musk. No,
they think it's like 20 people, and all they need to do is have the kind of right outlook,
and you'll get like warped technology and... That's what. It doesn't matter that they have...
It doesn't matter that they have no research track record. That's irrelevant. They just still deserve
the Professor of Real Endowment. Absolutely. It doesn't matter that their main job is just tweeting
or going on podcasts. That doesn't matter. That's who we need. That's who we need to...
At the very tip-it-top, $15 million endowments, no teaching, big houses, just clean slate,
totally free. I mean, I don't think they do anything as... Even if they have that, I don't think they...
Oh, they're doing something so mundane as research. Well, first of all, they don't know how.
They just haven't done it. That's a problem, first of all. They haven't done it.
They haven't done it. There's a couple of like...
Well, he mentioned Martin Kuldorf, who I believe is at least a medic.
Is he an antivacs type person? Yeah, well, he's a COVID-19 resident, shall we say, Martin?
Yeah. Yeah. But then what do you call that guy that fell out of fever that had a position?
Oh, not Pierre Corey. Not Pierre Corey, not Peter McCulloch, the yellow hanger wrong guy.
Oh, what was it? The Embarry Wies. Love them. Vine Prasad. Well, anyway.
Anyway, you get the idea, but that's interesting thing too. And it mirrors
Jordan Peterson's thing, which is what we need is more incredibly politically motivated
partisan people doing... Well, not research, because I don't think they're imagining they're
going to do research. They're just going to whatever give their opinions about things,
blovieate. That's what we need. Work is bad, because it's too... It's a typical political agenda.
What we need to do is inject in our anti-work agenda and do the same thing.
Well, I'm just realizing, no, haven't they already done this? Didn't they set up a bunch of anti-work
quasi-universities and Peterson Academy and stuff? So they literally have what they want,
which is these people giving the types of courses, which by and large are not research-based
courses at all. They're not empirical courses. They're just extended YouTube channels,
basically. And they have students taking them when it doesn't seem to be doing. And if they accept
generating another income stream for the relevant person, so when you look at the anti-work
universities and hyphen the representation of science or engineering or law or any of the
disciplines which they hold up as the desirable, better way that everybody should be focusing on.
But not at their university. They've got a lot of...
And you found these like the waizuru. That's right. Like the so-called uncontaminated disciplines.
I suppose in their mind all the disciplines that contaminated you're like, like an astronomy,
because some astronomy somewhere has written some sort of maybe work-dependent piece. Like,
that's it, astronomy is fallen. They probably feel the same way about mathematics. Well, we know what
Eric thinks about physics. So it's all corrupted, isn't it? So...
Yeah, yeah. But it's very true. You say, like, I don't think Jordan Peterson's university or any of
those anti-work things. Like, do they have like a proper mathematics department, for instance?
Would they have such a thing? I highly...
No, they definitely don't. They definitely don't.
They would not. At best they have a course on on maps and it's not the kind of course where you're
actually expected to do. Wow. I think... Okay, it's just talk. I'm like,
Bob, sort of this kind of thing. But also, this tweet from Eric was in relation to like
somebody asking of his speech at ARC, you know, the kind of like Jordan Peterson
ask conference that they set up for right-wing populists that they argue, I think, annually.
And I think it's the association for responsible citizenship or something like that, right?
Anyway, he gave a lecture there, the usual kind of stuff. And somebody who was saying,
there's going to be released publicly. And that's when Eric went off on this, you know, Tyread.
And at the end of it, he sees in Mark Andreessen, Elon Musk and Bill Lackman. So he's just like,
I think he's a bit salty, the Peter Teekels stuff, providing him with a stipend.
Yeah, that's right. I guess from his point of view,
he's obviously noticed that the Silicon Valley moguls are all very weird. And yeah, more than
anti-work, there's some sort of paleo con weirdos. So why aren't they giving mouthpieces like him
while money? That makes sense. And I understand why he's salty. They give him for like a decade,
at least Peter Teekel did. So, you know, like what happened? Well, that's Eric. He's gonna
Eric. You'll never stop American. And a, another similar figure that we've
covered and there's having a little moment in the sun is,
old Gary, Gary Stevenson. You know, Gary? I think one area in which you and Gary are
similar is that you're both very tired. Yes, we don't need long holidays. I sympathize with Gary
about that. Yeah, well, so Gary had a documentary come out on Channel 4. I have not watched it yet,
but it's around 90 minutes long and it's about, you know, his kind of campaign to get a wealth tax
introduced. And also, it does include voices from critics. And apparently, it's a Louis Ferruz
production company that were involved with it. But yeah, so there's a new
rind of media coverage of Gary coming on the back of that. And I'd also Gary has
provided a little video encouraging people to watch the documentary, which I have a couple of
clips of. But I did read the times I did go where they interviewed him and it was called Gary
Stevenson. I want a wealth tax on the super rich like me. And this this article, Ma, it's
quite something. There's there's a number of lines that, you know, just struck me. The headline
one that was getting repeated a rind was, this is called Trump Gary. I'll be totally honest with
you. I think I'm one of the best, if not the best, inequality economists in the world. So,
you know, there's been questions if Gary is an economist, but apparently he's not just
the economist. Much like we're trading, he's possibly the best economist in the world.
It's really that Gary's done that he's not the best at. That's the question. I don't think so.
It's funny he mentioned that because there we often mentioned that we're Gary's interview.
There's a couple of topics that are reliably going to come up and elite universities.
Yes. Yeah. Elite University and, uh, often surprisingly, his performance in,
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