Decoding the Gurus

We descend once more into the Gurusphere, encountering secret peasant archmages, decline narratives, Epstein emails, and endless moral panics.
The full episode is available to Patreon subscribers (1 hour, 37 minutes).
Join us at: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingTheGurus
00:00 SM 44 PF
00:23 Introduction
01:30 Konstantin Kisin: Not Left Or Right, Just Right
05:20 Boghossian is shocked by pessimistic French people
08:50 Konstantin and Warren Smith as relics of the anti-SJW era
12:45 A PSA! Hyper Capitalism Tier Update!
18:36 Matt's AV Setup
20:01 Recommendation: Successville (British version)
21:40 My peasant farmer dad is secretly an Archmage!
28:14 Scott Galloway talks with Gwyneth Paltrow
40:18 American Capitalist Culture and the Gurus
48:54 Bryan Johnson vs AG1
51:45 Bryan Johnson & Epstein Schmoozing
58:09 Bari Weiss's Peter Attia Woes
59:14 Epstein and QAnon Conspiracies
01:03:23 Overinterpreting Epstein emails
01:09:04 Shermer promotes Dave Rubin to hawk his book on Truth
01:10:37 Conspiracy Theory prevalence on left and riht
01:17:44 Jonathan Haidt and his anti-social media crusade
01:23:15 Plato on the Corruption of the Youth
01:24:30 The Eternal Appeal of Decline Narratives
01:26:22 They won't let you enjoy things anymore...
01:30:24 Matt's laissez-faire parenting tips
01:31:45 Life lessons from Lord of the Rings
01:34:17 The Witch King of Angmar defeated by a Woke White Women
Sources
Konstantin Kisin on not being left or right
Boghossian and Kisin bemoan civilisational decline narratives
The Guardian on Bari Weiss’s new CBS “Podcastistan” hires
Niall Ferguson on how Trump “won Davos”
The Guardian: Elon Musk had more extensive ties to Epstein than previously known
My Farmer Dad Is Secretly an Archmage – viral short-form fantasy drama
Behind the Scenes of My Farmer Dad Is Secretly an Archmage
Original Chinese version of

In a rare departure from our usual diet of online weirdos, this episode features an academic who is very much not a guru. We’re joined by Julia Rohrer, a psychologist at Leipzig University whose work straddles the disciplinary boundaries of open science, research transparency, and causal inference. Julia is also an editor at Psychological Science and has spent much of the last decade politely pointing out that psychologists often don’t quite know what they’re estimating, why, or under which assumptions.
We talk about the state of psychology after the replication crisis, whether open science reforms have genuinely improved research practice (or just added new boxes to tick), and why causal thinking is unavoidable even when researchers insist they are “only describing associations.” Julia explains why the standard dance of imply causality → deny causality → add boilerplate disclaimer is unhelpful, and argues instead for being explicit about the causal questions researchers actually care about and the assumptions required to answer them.
Along the way we discuss images of scientists in the public and amongst the gurus, how post-treatment bias sneaks into even well-intentioned experimental designs, why specifying the estimand matters more than running ever-fancier models, and how psychology’s current norms can potentially punish honesty about uncertainty. We also touch on her work on birth-order effects and offer some possible reasons for optimism.
With all the guru talk, people sometimes ask us to recommend things that we like, and Julia's work is one such example!
Links
Julia Rohrer’s website
The 100% CI blog
Rohrer, J. M. (2024). Causal inference for psychologists who think that causal inference is not for them. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 18(3), e12948.
Rohrer, J. M., Tierney, W., Uhlmann, E. L., DeBruine, L. M., Heyman, T., Jones, B., ... & Yarkoni, T. (2021). Putting the self in self-correction: Findings from the loss-of-confidence project. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 16(6), 1255-1269.
Rohrer, J. M., Egloff, B., & Schmukle, S. C. (2015). Examining the effects of birth order on personality. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 112(46), 14224-14229.
BEMC MAY 2024 - Julia Rohrer - "Causal confusions correlate with casual conclusions"
Dr. Tobias Dienlin - Less casual causal inference for experiments and longitudinal data: Research talk by Julia Rohrer

We crawl around the dark crevices of the internet so you don't have to. And what wonders we have to show you...
The full episode is available to Patreon subscribers (1 hour, 34 minutes).
Join us at: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingTheGurus
Supplementary Material 43
00:00 Introduction and Banter Allotment
01:23 The Hypocrisy of the Defenders of Western Civilisation
10:07 An Optimistic Take?
17:02 Scott Adams' Controversial Legacy
18:43 Scott Alexander's Rationalist Eulogy for Scott Adams
32:31 A Final Tribute to Scott Adams
33:43 Andrew Gold's Interview with a Racist
39:02 Fair Play for being a Racist
41:17 Comparing Follower Counts and Audience Makeup
44:40 Racism and Xenophobia Discussion
49:07 Securing the Future of Our People...
01:00:01 LawTubers and Grifting
01:00:48 Legal Mindset
01:06:02 Antifa Woke Women are Hunting Legal Mindset
01:07:41 A man of Christ
01:09:16 A Red-Blooded American
01:12:35 Woke White Women and Antifa Paranoia
01:13:55 Electro Gym Work and Pygmy Hippo Love
01:18:47 Antifa Paranoia
01:26:36 The True Masculine Renegade YouTuber
01:32:32 Concluding Thoughts and Farewell
Links
Peter Boghossian complaining about public attention to the Greenland situation
Mike Cernovich’s tribute: “Scott is loved because he’s devoted his life to service to humanity”
In full: Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s speech at the World Economic Forum (Davos)
Scott Alexander’s eulogy to Scott Adams
Coleman Hughes on Scott Adams at The Free Press
Andrew Gold – Heretics: “I Confront Britain’s Biggest Racist”
Liam Tufts: “Would You Let Your Kid Date a Black Person?” | Steve Laws sparks a heated debate
Legal Mindset: “Free Kaya, Punish Hasan” (Fast Facts)
Rob’s Media: Idiot Influencers – Legal Mindset (Go East channel background)

We return for Part 2 of our Scott Galloway deep dive, where the vibes remain strong, the confidence unwavering, and the relationship with empirical evidence increasingly… decorative.
Returning to our Modern Wisdom safari, we continue navigating the forbidden terrain of men, masculinity, and male suffering: a topic so dangerous that it requires constant ritual disclaimers, whispered caveats, and the occasional nervous glance around the bar to make sure we can take out the other men if necessary.
We cover Scott's outline of his masculine Third Way: rejecting both the Right’s “Bring Back the Fifties” masculinity and the Left’s “Men Are the Problem” framework, in favour of a solution that might be described as Stern Dad Who’s Also Nice About It. Prepare to thrill at proposals of mandatory national service, kindness as a masculine superpower, and the radical idea that young people might benefit from not being economically crushed.
Things get spicier when we’re told what women really want and learn about the adaptive skill check of the female orgasm. Chris Williamson unveils a prepared essay on What Men Want which proves to be a moving piece of therapeutic slam poetry that somehow manages to combine manosphere grievance mongering with woke therapy talk. We learn how what men really just want to be told is “you are enough" and should be kind for kindness sake, but also should optimise their friend group such that they can properly signal their high mate quality and train hard enough to take out all other males in the bar.
Finally, we hit peak Decoding Mode as Scott’s statistics begin to escalate: boys are ten times more likely to kill themselves, father absence turns sons into inmates, daughters into promiscuous approval-seekers, and nearly every claim is delivered with total confidence and minimal concern for effect sizes, confounds, or whether the study actually exists. Decorative scholarship is in full bloom.
We do our best as two hyper-masculine men to separate reasonable concerns about boys, mentorship, and social policy from hyperbolic factoids, pop-psych inflation, and the familiar habit of smuggling moral arguments in under the banner of “what the science says.”
Bring your hunting knife and stoic daily diary. Take your testosterone injection. And get ready for some man talk!
Links
Modern Wisdom: The War On Men Isn’t Helping Anyone - Scott Galloway
The Diary of a CEO: Scott Galloway: We’re Raising The Most Unhappy Generation In History! Hard Work Doesn't Build Wealth

Academic papers/Sources Referenced
Culpin, I., Heuvelman, H., Rai, D., Pearson, R. M., Joinson, C., Heron, J., … Kwong, A. S. F. (2022). Father absence and trajectories of offspring mental health across adolescence and young adulthood: Findings from a UK-birth cohort. Journal of Affective Disorders, 314, 150–159.
Dekker, M. C., Ferdinand, R. F., van Lang, N. D. J., Bongers, I. L., van der Ende, J., & Verhulst, F. C. (2007). Developmental trajectories of depressive symptoms from early childhood to late adolescence: Gender differences and adult outcome. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 48(7), 657–666.
Angelakis, I., Austin, J. L., & Gooding, P. (2020). Association of childhood maltreatment with suicide behaviors among young people: a systematic review and meta-analysis. JAMA network open, 3(8), e2012563-e2012563.
Zhang, L., Wang, P., Liu, L., Wu, X., & Wang, W. (2026). Different roles of child abuse and neglect on emerging adult's nonsuicidal self-injury and suicidal ideation: sex difference through emotion regulation. Current...

We dig deep into the online world to DO OUR OWN RESEARCH and return with horrors never dreamt of by man.
The full episode is available to Patreon subscribers (1 hour, 23 minutes).
Join us at: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingTheGurus
Supplementary Material 42
00:00 Introduction
11:13 Rogan and Shane Gillis on Nick Fuentes vs Piers Morgan
17:49 Jimmy Carr's Physics Insights
24:00 The comedian shuffle
25:12 Andrew Huberman teams up with Goop!
30:41 Huberman injects his dog with testosterone.
32:09 Bryan Johnson and the secret longevity of the penis
35:41 The Science Behind Huberman's Careful Product Endorsements
39:48 The Statistics of Home Alone
41:22 Bryan Johnson's Love Tweet
46:24 Bryan Johnson's horrible treatment of his ex-fiancée
51:30 Andrea Botez and Influencer Health Research
57:41 Bespoke Treatments with Medical AIs
01:04:28 Self-Research, Stock Picking, and Gambling
01:07:47 Health Systems and their imperfections
01:12:37 Doing Your Own Research...
01:17:38 Matt's Content Recommendations
01:20:45 Outro
Links
NYT – How Trump Fixed On a Maduro Loyalist as Venezuela’s New Leader
Triggernometry – “A Revolution is Coming!” – Jimmy Carr
GQ – How Andrew Huberman, Goop Kitchen Collaborator, Is Staying Healthy in 2026
Vanity Fair – Why Bryan Johnson, Dave Asprey, and the Other Longevity Bros Are Obsessed With Penises
Luis Batalha – Tweet on the “Home Alone” paper
Bryan Johnson – “Love” tweet
Andrea Botez – Hearing Loss Update...