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0:00
Hey everyone, so I frequently get requests as to what to debunk next, and a lot of you linked me to an interview with a guy named Chris Langan. I had never heard of him. Maybe you have, maybe you haven’t. But I gave it a peek and felt like I had a few things to say, so let’s get started. Before watching the video, I looked around the internet and found that Chris is consistently referred to as “the smartest man in America”, or sometimes even the world, due to an alleged
0:24
IQ of 195, as stated in this article in Esquire. Then I found some other interviews. Here’s a good introduction as to what this guy is all about. If we can base insight to god on binary logic, we’ve got it made. We don’t need faith anymore. It’s extraneous, irrelevant. I’m closer to absolute truth than any man has been before me. Do I think that makes me better than everybody else? No. I still work in a bar.
1:15
That’s right, everyone. Strap in for some forced intellectualization of blind faith that constitutes nothing more than pander to the working class. This is for people who think Good Will Hunting was a documentary, fantasize about themselves as the struggling genius who was overlooked by the establishment in their ivory tower, and are easily lulled even deeper into that fantasy by the emotional musical
1:36
score. Let’s check out another snippet or two. My IQ would be somewhere between 190 and 210. 210 seems very, very, very high. It does seem that way, doesn’t it? Albert Einstein was estimated at between 180 and 190. Charles Darwin was way down there in the toilet at 135. Are you a genius? Well you’re kinda putting me on the spot, aren’t you? You’re forcing me to either say no, in which case, you know, it’s all hype,
2:20
or you’re forcing me to say yes. I’ll say probably yes I am a genius, by most of the criteria, the definitive criteria of genius, I think you’d have to consider me a genius, yeah. Apart from demanding that we take his word for it about his IQ, notice the subtle as a bag of hammers jab at Darwin, which will make sense later. The main takeaway is that Chris insists he’s a genius because trust me bro. Is there anything we can do to independently verify
2:46
that he’s really so smart? In that Esquire article he is compared by IQ to figures like Da Vinci and Descartes. I don’t know what those guys sounded like when they went on podcasts, but they did a lot of stuff that we can point to. Da Vinci obviously painted some incredible works of art, but he also designed many churches and other buildings, invented many things like mechanical devices, hydraulic machines, and more. He even came up with designs for things
3:12
that would be invented later, like parachutes, bicycles, helicopters, and airplanes. He also advanced the fields of anatomy, zoology, botany, geology, optics, and many others, most of which admittedly were in their infancy, making it easier to contribute, but still. The dude was a genius. How about Descartes? He was a philosopher, so he said a bunch of smart stuff like “I think therefore I am”, but he was also a scientist and mathematician. He developed analytic geometry and
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the Cartesian coordinate system, which we still use today, along with the notation he created, and he provided the basis for the calculus that Newton and Leibniz would later develop. He was a genius too. What has the illustrious Chris Langan done? Most people would say absolutely nothing. He just talks. But Chris, of course, would claim that he has done something remarkable. He has a theory of everything! And it’s called CTMU: the Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe. Wow,
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that sounds neat! What’s it all about? Cognitive-theoretic model of the universe. The CTMU. It shows that we’re all a part of the same universal self. All men are related in ways they can’t necessarily discern on this plane of reality. We’re all the same.
4:31
We all share a basic fundamental identity with each other. Which means that we should all be trying to help each other and cooperate with each other to make this a better place to live. Wow, what an amazing revolutionary theory! He has absolutely broken all current paradigms of science with this breakthrough insight, which can be summarized as “let’s all work together and get along”. How did he do it! So essentially, Chris has done absolutely
5:02
nothing of even remote significance in any area of human inquiry, but he’s a supergenius anyway because he says so. Got it. With that context taken care of, let’s get to the video that everyone linked me to. It’s titled “Chris Langan - The Interview THEY Didn’t Want You To See”, which has already gotten over five million views in just a few weeks. Now who could “they” be? Well the person conducting the interview is Michael Knowles from the Daily Wire,
5:29
which is a conservative propaganda mill, in case you didn’t know. That means the Daily Wire filmed this interview and didn’t release it. Rather curious, I gave it a quick google to see as to why that would be the case. All I could find was a Reddit page with no answers, and a blog post from Chris himself where he sounds perplexed, but then arrives at some conspiratorial conclusions. At any rate, he somehow got the rights to the interview and published it on his own channel,
5:52
and that’s what we’ll be checking out. But very quickly before doing that, we can already say a lot just from reading the description. It says that Chris is joining the show to discuss his theory of everything. God, psychedelic drugs, and aliens. His “theory of everything” is him musing on random topics like a college freshman who got high at a party for the first time. This demonstrates that the smartest man in the world does not know what a theory
6:20
of everything is. He also does not know what a theory is. Let’s define these two terms right now, so that it will be very clear to you during the video that he has no idea what he’s talking about. First up, a theory. A theory is a scientific construct that correlates large amounts of data and explains them simply and coherently. Theories must be testable, they must be falsifiable, and are typically based on quantitative data. If it doesn’t make predictions that can be tested,
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it’s not a theory. So contrary to popular belief, baseless speculation and mental masturbation do not qualify as theories. Then, a theory of everything also has a very specific meaning. It does not mean “whoa think about it bro, this totally explains everything in the universe, bro”. It is a term that stems from theoretical physics and the attempt to find a quantum field theory that applies to all the fundamental forces. In the earliest epochs of the universe,
7:14
it is understood that all the forces were unified, then through symmetry breaking events they rapidly split up and became the four fundamental forces we know today, those being gravity, the strong and weak nuclear forces, and electromagnetism. Electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force were successfully unified in the electroweak theory, which predicted particles that were subsequently confirmed in high-energy particle accelerator experiments. Such efforts have also been quite
7:39
successful in combining the electroweak with the strong nuclear force to yield a grand unified theory. This is the current forefront of the standard model of particle physics, and many of its predictions have been vindicated, though there is still more work to be done. The last step after that would be to unify such a model with the last remaining force, gravity, which is currently described by Einstein’s general relativity. A quantum field theory that unifies
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all four forces, should it be possible, would be a theory of everything, as it would be a single theory, and by theory we are talking about a rigorous mathematical model, that describes all four fundamental forces. That’s what “theory of everything” means, and that’s the only thing it means. Chris is therefore even worse off than the charlatan Eric Weinstein, who at least typed up a bunch of advanced math to pretend he has a theory of everything. Chris doesn’t know how to do that,
8:31
and probably can’t do much math beyond algebra, which is why when describing his non-theory, he just spews word salad instead of referencing math. Ok, let’s get into this ridiculous interview. Welcome to my extremely ethereal and trippy new set. I feel as though I am floating in a cloud here in this all-white venue, and perhaps that is fitting. All-white and Daily Wire, that definitely is quite fitting.
8:58
Chris has one of, if not the highest IQ ever recorded. Somehwere between 190-195 and 210. You’d think that if every single interview with this guy is going to center around this singular statistic, that we’d have seen some physical evidence of this test result at some point. No? Just me? Ok, continue. And Chris is not here by way of some fancy distinguished professorship and such and such brand name university, nor did Chris just get off
9:29
of his private yacht out of the south of France, and come here to leave his billion dollar company, Chris came here from a farm in Missouri after a career as a bouncer at bars around New York. That’s right, he’s not one of those educated jerks, or one of those rich jerks, he’s uneducated and poor, just like you! That means you can trust him, and blindly believe everything he says. So let’s meet him! Why is the smartest man in the world,
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why is he not just buying and selling all of us all the time, why is he living on a farm in the middle of Missouri? Well that’s a good question. I was never actually interested in money. When I was a kid we, my brothers and I, my family, we were not exactly the richest folks in town. We seldom had enough money to buy food or clothes. So I sort of immersed myself in books and reading, and decided that what I wanted to do was pursue knowledge.
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Now as far as the making money is concerned, one thing that I found out is that there are certain ingredients, certain advantages that you need in order to become rich. Of course it helps to be born with money. That’s the easiest way. And it helps to have a lot of connections, ok? The right kind of connections. And it helps not to alienate the people who have all the money, because then they’ll exclude you and cancel you.
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You know, that’s what they do. That’s what cancel culture is. Basically people are being frozen out of the economy. And I found myself getting frozen out of the economy that way from an early age. I
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tried to go to college, but ran into a couple of problems. Personnel problems on the faculties of the colleges in question. And that stopped me, basically when you get, you can’t get a college education, you are cancelled economically. We can give him the born poor part. That’s an obstacle, no doubt. But Chris wants us to believe that he, now a senior citizen, despite being the smartest person in the world, hasn’t figured out how to make a decent salary
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his entire life, because the mean university people and the mean money people excluded and cancelled him the whole way? That’s a pretty big pill to swallow. Has he never heard of financial aid? Every single university in the country just couldn’t handle his unparalleled brilliance? Even Will Hunting the janitor, once he showed them he can do math, they set him up with a nice cozy job and treated him like an equal. Didn’t Chris ever find any math problems on some blackboard that
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he could solve and get something going that way? Also, this statement that not getting a college education cancels you economically is ridiculous. There are many billionaires without college degrees. Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, hell, Richard Branson didn’t even finish high school. Aren’t you smarter than all those guys, Chris? So what’s your problem? You’re obviously, you’ve got a higher IQ than anybody in the room. You’re obviously extremely
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smart, you’re extremely self-educated. So you get into college, it should be a total breeze for you. It was a total breeze for me. Too much of a breeze for me. So much of a breeze, in fact, that it swept you right out of those halls and you’ve never done anything since. Awesome. You know you ask the wrong kinds of questions at people who are full of themselves and think they have all the answers. You know like calculus
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class, why don’t you explain exactly what an infinitesimal interval is, and how you can traverse from one end to the other. And they’ll look at you as though you’ve got two heads. I ask that all the time. I ask my waiters. I guarantee you that any calculus teacher can easily answer that question, and they don’t fail you out of college for asking questions. You just can’t pass a calculus exam, and were probably never enrolled in any calculus course in the
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first place, even though it’s intermediate math that is commonly taught in high school. Why are you taking this particular approach to it? And he looks at me and he says, you know, Asperger’s victim, right? He looks at me, looks down at his thing, and says “well, you know, some people just don’t have the mental firepower to be mathematicians”. Well what was I supposed to do? Hit the guy? I wanted to hit him. You were supposed to take the tests and pass the
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class, which should have been easy for you if you already understood calculus better than him. You could have also hit him, but that wouldn’t have helped much. Despite this long story which I only gave you the end of, and which is undoubtedly fabricated, real students sometimes have real teachers which aren’t that great. They still study and pass the class. You could have too. So you leave college, presumably you’re
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much more intelligent than anyone you’re going to meet on the faculty or in the students. Presumably, or fictionally? So you leave college, what is it about being a bar bouncer. What is it about that physical activity. Because presumably, even without a college degree, you could’ve done some middling paper-pushing job, and it probably wouldn’t have been very lucrative or fulfilling for you, but presumably you could have done
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something like that instead of a tough physical potentially dangerous job like being a bouncer. Could have, but there are certain problems that I can’t… for example when I was in New York, I got a job in a grommet factory. It was Stimpson grommets, they had Grumman aircraft there, they got military defense contracts, I think they were working on F-16s at one point. And then there was Stimpson grommets which produced these aircraft rivets for these airplanes. And
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I had this machine and man, the sound, the noise from this machine. Wham! Wham! Wham! No hearing protection, no nothing was issued to anybody. I started like losing my hearing and so forth. And I figured well I can’t stand this anymore. I gotta get out of here. So I was about to leave, but I had a girlfriend and she said no, I want you to stay. So I figured ok, let me see if I can get another kind of job. So I took the civil service exam and was offered a job by the IRS. And that
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of course was a moral dilemma. A fate worse than hell! Exactly! How awful do I wanna be as a person? Do you notice how his stories never make any sense? Mikey asked why he became a bouncer instead of something more lucrative that he wouldn’t enjoy. We get a story about a factory job that he didn’t enjoy. Then an offer to work for the IRS, which he pretends is the devil. Guys, any democratic nation collects taxes,
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many at much higher rates than America, and there has to be a department to oversee that process. Anyway, we thought we were going to get a story about how he didn’t want some fancy job that he hated because he preferred to do this or that other thing, but he’s just telling us about crappy jobs that he hated. Couldn’t he have used his big brain to do one that made him some money? That’s when I started doing the bar bouncing thing. But I wasn’t making that much money.
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I was working for 40 dollars a night, I’d come out of there bloody, shirts ripped off my back. I couldn’t even pay for the shirts, you know, with what I was making. So I figured ok, what I’ll do is I’ll take the civil service exam again. Now this is, I don’t want to sound insensitive, but at that point in New York there was a protocol whereby you take the civil service exam and if you are a minority, if you are non-white, you get 30 extra points.
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There’s nothing insensitive, this is just a fact. It’s a fact of our law. They’ve been doing it for a long time, it’s called afffirmative action of course. When that happens and I’m applying to be, say a police officer, right? And all of these other guys, these non-white guys are looking also to be police officers, you learn that there’s a line of three thousand guys in front of you. Ah, that’s why Chris is here at the Daily Wire!
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Or one of the reasons at least. Those filthy minorities and their affirmative action DEI bullshit! That and immigrants. That’s what’s ruining this country, am I right? But Chris, since you’re the smartest person in human history, shouldn’t you still have outperformed them even with their 30 handout points? You know white police officers in New York, but almost all those guys are connected. They’ve got some kind of uncle or acquaintance or somebody
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who’s on the police force that will put in a good word for them. I didn’t have anybody like that. And merit made no difference whatsoever. This is not a meritocracy we live in. You can take any number of these tests and outscore everybody else, and get nothing and nowhere. Ah, of course. Top scores don’t matter if you’re not part of the inner-city white clique or a minority of some kind. It’s physically impossible for rural white people
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to become cops in the big city. Got it. So what did you end up doing? Just reading books? I’d go to library sales, and found a little bookstore that had some academic books in it, and just get whatever I could. And I always had to basically read whatever I found. I couldn’t afford to order a book. Even back then books were expensive. So I couldn’t go to a bookstore and pay full price for a book, so I was constantly buying used books, which were, when they were textbooks,
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they were used and therefore outmoded. The field advances, the book stays the same. That’s right. If you read a chemistry textbook from even two years ago, everything is completely different. The periodic table changes all the elements every couple years! Oh wait, no, that’s idiotic. Advancements at the frontier of any scientific field rarely change what’s in textbooks for undergraduates even one bit. He’s just admitting he’s never actually studied any science.
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And you know, working as a, punching cows, stacking hay, irrigating on this ranch. And I took two books with me. And one of them was a book by Albert Einstein on the theory of relativity and the other one was a book by Bertrand Russell. Ok? And I would read these books. I was living in a covered wagon, they call it a sheep wagong these days. But literally I’m not kidding, that’s what it was, kerosene lamp and a sheep wagon, out in the middle of a field.
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Reading Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein. Reading Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein, and it occurred to me, these two things really need to be put together. What an image! Reading a book on a wagon! Mike is tickled pink about it. Anyway, putting Einstein and Russell together. What does that mean? What about Bertrand Russell, and how do you shove that into physics equations? Wanna get a little more concrete? And then once I decided that I started putting them together.
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And then I found out about Kurt Gödel and the undecidability theorem, and yes, absolutely. Ok, so no explanation on that combo, and then Gödel too? Are you sure you aren’t just listing smart people from history and pretending to be as smart as them? You see because reality isn’t just geometric, which is what Einstein thought it was, nor is it just linguistic. It’s a blend of the two, right? Russell saw it as being
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linguistic. Einstein saw it as being geometric. So Russell pretended geometry didn’t exist and Einstein pretended language didn’t exist? What are you saying? Studying linguistics doesn’t mean you think nothing exists apart from linguistics. Start making sense. Ok so I decided that reality must be logico-geometric. Putting the two of them together. Then I realized well I’ve got to construct a theory in which reality
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is actually logico-geometric. And so that’s where the CTMU came from. And the CTMU is the cognitive theoretic model of the universe. The cognitive theoretic model of the universe. This is your theory of everything. My theory of everything and it’s all in the name. And there’s the big reveal. Einstein plus Russell equals Langan, who is clearly smarter than both of them put together. So let’s dig into this theory, shall we?
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If you take a good close look at that, you’ve got cognitive theory, and you know a theory is a kind of language, theoretic language, ok? And you’ve got cognitive theoretic model, you’ve got a model, and then you’ve got universe. You’ve got a languge, you’ve got a universe, and then the model is the mapping between them. CTMU says those are all the same thing. All those terms, all those properties are distributed everywhere over reality. Reality
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can have only one structure once you realize that and implement it in theoretical form. Yeah, it’s going to be this brand of word salad for the rest of the interview, folks. No, Chris, theories are not languages. They are models. Saying theories are languages and then listing models separately as though theories aren’t models only demonstrates that you don’t know what any of those words mean. Then saying that all of those plus the universe are the same thing definitely
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proves you don’t know what those words mean, since if they were the same thing, those different words wouldn’t exist. What properties are distributed everywhere? Properties of language? What properties of what language, and how are they distributed in deep space where nobody is using language? None of this means anything. You’re not just talking about this siloed aspect of thought. Philosophy over here. Language over here. Math over here.
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Physics over here. But you’re presenting something that is universal. Correct. Not really presenting so much as vaguely referencing and never actually describing. Physics has math in it. Wanna show us some math, big guy? If we’re talking about a theory of everything, the first question we have to establish: does god exist? Yes. Here’s the second reason Chris is here on the Daily Wire, to pander to their largely
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religious viewership. Again, we aren’t talking about a theory of everything. Neither of these morons know what that term means. Which is why Mikey has no clue that immediately bringing up the existence of god in what is supposed to be the domain of theoretical physics is an insanely stupid thing to do. But of course Chris fires back with an extremely confident yes. There definitely is a god. And if anyone would know, it would be the smartest man in the world, right?
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Identity has a, reality has an identity. Ok? The identity is that as which something exists. Ok? Matter of fact when you say the word reality you are naming an identity. You are identifying something, this. I’m smiling because your answer on this is so beautiful. It just reminds me of Moses at the burning bush. And Moses at the burning bush says who shall I tell all the people that you are, talking to god,
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and god says: tell them I am that I am. This is pathetic. Chris said absolutely nothing, he just said reality is a word, and Mikey dives into quoting fairy tales. Can we get a little more rigorous, fellas? That’s exactly right. That’s what the CTMU says. It just comes up with the mathematical structure that you need to build reality out of that. Which mathematical structure, Chris? You keep pretending that you can do math,
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but you haven’t shown anyone an ounce of math. Come on, buddy. One little equation. It doesn’t even have to be yours. Show us one of Einstein’s and tell us what it means. Pretty please? No? So you’ve come up with that identity and then you search it for its properties. Once you’ve built the preliminary framework then you start deducing the properties of this identity and you find out that those properties match those of god as described in most of the world’s major religions.
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What preliminary framework? Describe it. Which properties? List them. Actually say something. And sorry, god as described in the world’s major religions? Um, there’s a bunch of different ones, and they’re very not the same. Are you talking about Vishnu? Something tells me you’re not talking about Vishnu. What about Allah? No, not him either. I bet you’re talking about the god that white people like. If you mean just a general deity of some kind,
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you should stop pandering to religious people. Are its properties such that you can deny the existence of god, or are its properties such that god definitely has to exist? And the answer is: god exists. The properties of the central substance and central principle of reality, those properties are attributed to god. Including of course things like the three O’s, omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence. But then you’ve also got consciousness. God has to be sentient.
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Well that’s it, case closed! God exists because Chris says so. The words omnipotence and consciousness exist, therefore god exists. Even loser apologists like William Lane Craig seem like a genius compared to this clown. God himself is conscious and therefore personal? Yes. You can establish a personal relationship with god. We are images of god. You know what an image is. It’s basically the product of a mapping. God maps himself into each human
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being. Right? That’s a very personal thing that god is doing for us. Right? And I don’t understand how anybody can say that it’s any different. It’s pretty easy. I can just reject this utterly baseless assertion you’re making. You’ve offered no evidence whatsoever that a god exists. You just said random words. Ok well the simulation hypothesis is basically the idea that reality we see around us, physical reality, is simulated
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on some sort of automaton or a computer. Yeah some aliens somewhere they’ve fooled us. Right, exactly. Oh, eat a piece of licorice. Before one launches into the simulation, one needs a little sustenance. Sorry, I was going to comment on how Chris can’t pronounce automaton correctly, but then I got distracted by Mike eye-humping the shit out of Chris for way too long. This guy either has a low bar for intrigue or he’s sexually aroused.
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Because this part of the universe that we see around us cannot exist just by itself. Ok? There are certain things that it entails. And when you go into those entailments, that’s how you get to god. Cool, so what are the entailments? So far you’ve alluded to mathematical structures, preliminary frameworks, now some kind of entailments, are you gonna get around to actually presenting any of this stuff in a rigorous way?
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What do you mean? I hate to put it in… Well I mean here’s the display, you realize a display contains states. Ok, you see things, objects contain states. States are static. That’s why they’re called states. Ok, static. How do they change? Well they have to be processed. Something has to process. But the idea of being a state and being a process, those are two different things in the ordinary way of looking at it. It turns out you can’t
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properly describe reality and causation at all unless you put those things together somehow. And that’s what it takes god to do. God provides the processing functionality for your state. We are getting a master class in word salad, folks. He said the display contains states. Mike said yeah, no doy. Then Chris said the word static and pointed at the table. Then he moved on without clarifying what he meant by state. What is the state of the table? The positions
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and kinetic energies of all the atoms in the table? The position and momentum of the table as a whole? What are you talking about? And in order for this undefined state to change, there has to be processing? Of what? Processing means to perform a series of operations on something. Something has to perform operations on the table for it to do what? Continue existing? Change its state? From what to what? Mike is eager to appear intelligent so he just nods his head and
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prods Chris along, but Chris isn’t actually saying anything. He said the words state and process, didn’t clarify what he was referring to, and concluded god must exist. Why? For something to change state, like for something to move? God has to exist so that things can move? We can perfectly describe motion with the laws of physics, no god required. Anyone who has the foresight to begin prodding at this verbiage sees that it topples over like a house of cards
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immediately. It’s no better than the underpants gnomes in South Park who plan to profit from the underpants they collect even though the ever critical phase two is never defined. Just replace “collect underpants” with “list random terminology” and replace “profit” with “god exists”. I might not be sophisticated enough to parse all of the quibbles that there might be, but broadly speaking as a Christian,
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so much of what you’re saying resonates as obviously true for me. The idea that well I’m a member of the body of christ. The idea that god creates the world in this great act of love. So really you just nodded along with all this crap about states and processing, fixated on “god exists”, felt validated in your blind faith, and are now pretending this guy’s a genius because he told you what you wanted to hear. You need a certain kind of quantum. That quantum
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is called an identity operator. God is the identity. So obviously these little quanta, they have to be, they’re doing things, they’re processing, so we can call them operators, right? No, we can’t. An operator is a function. It’s a mathematical structure. It’s not a physical entity, like whatever quantum he’s making up. Photons, electrons, these are quanta. Functions are not quanta. They’re identity operators. The identity operator
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has, basically it takes input from the outside world, recognizes it or accepts it using syntax, processes it, and then returns it to the world as external state. That’s adorable speculation, got any evidence for the existence of this thing you made up? I ask because the evidence for the existence of photons and electrons is quite convincing. You know, since light and matter exist and we do lots of things with them based on our understanding
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of them. What are you working with here? So things come in, and they are processed, there’s throughput, you could call that the subjective or internal state of the identity operator, and then it’s returned to the external universe. But are you attributing now… What I’m saying is that’s consciousness. And I’m saying that consciousness exist in every part of the universe because those are the quanta. Oh these quanta you made up now are consciousness?
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That’s great, so you can find them in brains? Our brains produce consciousness, so they should be in there, right? But wait, consciousness is everywhere because the quanta are everywhere you say? Well then it should be even easier to demonstrate their existence. What are these things? What are their properties? You know how we can list the physical properties of any quantum? Like their mass, charge, spin, all kinds of stuff. And we can verify
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those properties empirically. Did you wanna get around to doing that soon? Probably not. Can you put that into more basic terms, what you’ve just said? What was it you need to understand about this? What are you actually… Why are these two concepts you’re describing, why are they not reconcilable? These… what is the problem with these… I explained that to you already, alright… Chris shows signs of agitation when Mike asks him to generally clarify what he just said,
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because that would entail Chris remembering exactly what he said. He doesn’t. Frauds like this just go into a flow state and rattle off random terminology. It’s what Terrence Howard does too, that’s why he’s always contradicting himself, because he’s really bad at it. Chris is pretty good at it, but it’s hard to duplicate, so he says “I already explained it", and then launches into another tirade that’s more or less unrelated to what he said previously.
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So the real manifold of classical physics is a paradoxical construct. So that’s why those two things, that’s why, that doesn’t work with quantum field theory and the idea that things are, ya know, quantum fluctuations and fields, as a matter of fact, that particular concept, of the real manifold, that doesn’t work for anything at all. He’s just listing random physics terminology. Quantum fluctuations or quantum fields, Chris? If you knew what those things were,
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you wouldn’t list them in a sentence that way as though they were the same thing. Saying the word manifold over and over again doesn’t help. Discussion of well this caused this, and I’m going to describe a totally deterministic system and so as a result of this causing this causing this causing this, you don’t have free will. And you’re saying cause is actually more complicated than just cause. That’s correct. In other words talking about
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free will in those terms is ???. It means nothing. You can’t get anywhere with it. This is a key tactic for frauds like this, when being interviewed by someone who wants their gibberish to be meaningful. Any time the interviewer tries to summarize something that was said, it doesn’t matter what they say or how they say it, they’re absolutely correct. Cause is more complicated than just cause! Of course, Michael. You’re so adept. You’re really understanding this
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super complicated theory from the smartest person alive because you’re so smart. This gets them to continue the interview in the most charitable way imaginable, never pushing back on anything or requesting too much clarification, so that they can continue to be viewed as intelligent by the other person and the viewers. So now we’re at metacausation, so what does metacausation… Causation works from past to
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future. Metacausation works from past to future and from future to past in a closed loop. Notice how Chris interrupts because he doesn’t want to be asked a coherent question. All he needs is a keyword from which he can launch into word salad of his choosing. In this case he settled on some gibberish about causation from future to past. Mikey caught it and has a question. I get past to future. This seems pretty simple. I pick up the glass of water,
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I put it over here, and now I remember two seconds ago the water was over here and then I caused it to go over there. So how do you cause something to go from the future to the past?
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It can’t go anywhere unless there’s some place for it to go. That’s all I’m saying. This is…
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Finish up that licorice, Chris. Take some time to think. You were asked how you can cause something to go from the future to the past, a thing you said that can happen. He can’t answer, since that’s impossible, so he says something totally unrelated, that something can’t move unless it has a place to go. Yes, Chris. Thank you for that pointless tangent. Things can move from one place to another while moving forward in time. The question was about moving backwards
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in time. Are you sure you have nothing here? So when you take that glass and you move it from there to there, you think that there’s a point right there where you’re gonna move that glass. That’s false. Ok? The point to which you are going to move that glass is actually in the future. When you pick up that glass it’s still in, you understand what I’m saying? Yes, ok. That makes sense. And then ok, getting back to god.
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Well that was an easy getaway, wasn’t it Chris? You said something idiotic about time and space, pretending that the point where he would move the glass to doesn’t exist just because the time at which it would get there will be later. Mike nodded his head like a dunce, and then changed the subject for you. And we can see the manipulation in action, too. Chris condescendingly asks if Mike understands what he’s saying, and even though he’s saying nothing, Mike says yes of course,
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because he’s chasing that high of being told he was correct a little earlier. He won’t admit that he’s not following something Chris is saying for the rest of the interview because of it. I’m not gonna ask you if I’m gonna go to heaven or hell, but will I go to either heaven or hell? You will persist after you die. Ok? Where you go depends on who Michael Knowles really is. I’m not gonna ask you about A, but what about A? That was weird. And Chris,
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ever so cognizant of the audience he’s presumably talking to, says oh yes, you’d better be a good boy if you wanna go to heaven. Unfortunately, if Mikey’s god actually existed, he probably wouldn’t be fond of him devoting his life to a deceptive propaganda mill. If you displease god, that’s exactly what’s going to happen to you. God is going to cut you off and he’s going to say: I can’t see him anymore. He’s going to turn away from you and then you won’t
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be able to reunite, salvation will be impossible for you because salvation means that god is got to pull you back into himself. God doesn’t wanna see you anymore, he doesn’t even know you exist. He knows your physical body is there, but he’s not interested anymore, because you hate him, you deny his existence, you offend him, so he’s not going to look at you. Right? I will never stop being amused by how petty and infantile the Christian god is to people like
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this. “Like, whatever, I made you, gave you no evidence whatsoever that I exist, and you won’t even love me and worship me? Do you know how much that hurts my feelings? I know I’m infinite and perfect but I can still have my feelings hurt you know.” I’m sorry, but anyone who believes in this paltry kind of god is an intellectual toddler. Are angels and demons real? Yes. Yes. I think so too. Is there a fear that if you take some of these drugs you might be letting in the wrong guys?
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That’s a problem, isn’t it. And that’s a problem that I think a lot of people have encountered. For context they’re talking about psychedelics. I’m gonna go ahead and assume that neither of these guys have done any psychedelics, at least definitely not Mikey, and it’s adorable to hear him proclaim that demons are his excuse for not having the mental fortitude. Anyway, I’d ask for evidence of demons existing, but this hasn’t been a very evidence-heavy conversation
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thus far, so maybe I’ll keep it to myself. Well god has a boundary too. He’s got a very tight boundary. He’s a perfect, he is perfect. He can’t take anything resembling imperfection. He can’t take it into himself because that would be a contradiction. That’s funny, you called god omnipotent earlier. Now you’re talking about something he can’t do. Do we need to go over the definition of omnipotent, Chris?
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Are you saying that he sort of, the devil sort of lacks substance, that’s why he needs the humans? I’m saying that the devil lacks coherence. Coherence is what brings everything into superposition with itself. It allows something to, and this is gonna sound a little bit paradoxical, it allows something to communicate non-locally with itself. All of its possible states are in superposition. They exist all at once. And this is… pretty much inescapable.
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The word salad shooter malfunctions every once in a while, and Chris made it 45 minutes before his first mishap. Not bad. It’s tough to keep the stream of bullshit going. Luckily he had the cigar in his hand so he could pretend to be doing something while deciding to stop talking. At any rate, what he said was meaningless. He was talking about superposition while gesturing inwards in a way that would indicate the opposite of superposition. Superposition
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is diffuse, a system existing in many states at once. When the wavefunction collapses the system will exhibit a particular state, like what his hands are indicating by crushing inwards to what would be fewer states or a singular state. In the end all he did was vaguely summarize the concept of superposition, take a puff, say it’s inescapable, and then stop talking as though he actually explained anything about the devil. These things were actually funded, they’re more
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or less invented by the central bank, you know who funded, originally was paying Marx and Engels and before that Moses Hess, and other people to come up with… it’s a strategy for world domination. It has been for the last 200 years. What has changed? Reason number three Chris is here at the Daily Wire. Marxism bad because central banks something something. Those Marxists are trying to take over the world! Honest decent capitalists would never do such a thing. They
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just wanna give you affordable electronics! Gotta stick to that boogeyman narrative. Were you a Trump supporter? You don’t need to say… As a matter of fact back when people were saying, Trump can’t read. Look at the way he hesitates. He’s got trouble with the teleprompter, the guy can’t read. I actually stood up and said no. I’ve met Donald Trump and I think his IQ is probably equal to that of the average Harvard professor. Just recently heard that Saudi Arabia
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and Russia will reepeetoo ahhhh. Bing bing! Bong bong bing bing bing. Yeah he’s a regular Noam Chomsky. Good call, Chris. Basically he is competent, he’s a good businessman, and therefore could be good for the country and I wanted people to understand that. If you needed one sentence to prove that Chris is not very bright, this would probably be it. Because what he said resonates with what is in the
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minds of a lot of American citizens. We wanna have our own country. We want America to have first. We don’t want our borders to be open. We don’t want millions of third world migrants coming here every year and displacing us from our own territory. Yeah he got elected by fearmongering about immigrants, just like every other demagogue before him. Great work, Chris. And the first time around, ya know, they weren’t prepared. So they couldn’t
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do anything about it. The second time around… Are you suggesting Chris that there were some questions about the 2020 presidential election? Anybody who doesn’t understand that that election was, shall we say, not quite up to snuff, is some kind of moron.
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I take it back, this would be the sentence to demonstrate that Chris is actually dumber than rocks. Do tell us about how the election was rigged by dirty democrats just because mail in ballots were included, Chris. Enlighten us. Oh wait, you have some wisdom to share about COVID. Awesome. Are you anti-vaccine generally? I take it you’re anti COVID… Well I bought into the COVID thing at first, and I went out and bought Gina and I, I bought gas masks for us. And
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those M100 masks. And I advised people what to do so as not to get infected with the deadly COVID, and then I noticed that it wasn’t really killing, I live in northern Missouri. Nobody up there was wearing masks, nobody up there, I mean, and nobody was dying of COVID-19. So there’s gotta be something a little bit off about this. And so I kinda started getting away from it. And then I noticed that it was being used as a pretext for something called the great reset.
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Yeah, nobody in Missouri died of COVID. Except the 20,000 people in Missouri who died of COVID. But please tell us some bullshit about the great reset. And there have been white papers written in the past about using just this methodology to get
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everybody behind the globalist agenda. Operation Warp Speed was part of that. Operation Warp Speed accelerated the development of COVID vaccines because there was a terrible global pandemic, and it was implemented by your favorite orange maniac Donald Trump. Are you saying your idiot hero is part of the “globalist agenda”, Chris? Does Trump bear some responsibility for… He definitely bears responsibility,
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my question is, does he really know what’s going on or has he surrounded himself with people that are misleading himself about what’s going? I would like to believe that Donald Trump has been misled. I thought Trump was smarter than all the Harvard professors, Chris. So which is it, is he a supergenius like you, or is he a bumbling idiot being manipulated by everyone around him? Pick a lane. Do you believe in aliens?
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Well I will say this, the intelligence community, large sectors of it believe in aliens. Really? Yes. Oh absolutely. I mean they’re constantly discussing these things. Yes. And if you look at the global elite, and you wonder well I don’t wanna blame the world banksters for this, you know that’s a conspiracy theory. Then who is pulling all those strings? Could there be another kind of entity, aliens, demons, whatever. Could there be something that’s pulling their strings,
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that the global banksters know about and they’re taking orders from, but they’re being totally concealed and hidden from the public. This is a viable hypothesis. And it’s one that the intelligence communities don’t reject. Which is kind of neither here nor there because the intelligence communities themselves could be run by aliens for all we know. Yeah, the globalist bankers are being controlled by aliens, according to the CIA. You don’t sound
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crazy at all, Chris. If there’s anything that a hyperintelligent civilization from another system would want to do when it comes here, it would be to manipulate our finances and screw hardworking Americans out of their 401(k)s. Aliens are mischievous and petty like that. They also love subtly working through the CIA to enact imperialist foreign policy and oust foreign leaders to serve a Western agenda because they don’t have the power to just
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come down here and enslave us all with rayguns. You’re making a lot of sense. People are gonna be laughing when you say that. That there are aliens… Well let ‘em laugh, but they won’t be able to come up with any supporting argument against what I’m saying. It just, they don’t know enough. Chrissypoo, have you heard of this thing called the burden of proof? It’s not “the CIA is run by aliens” and I’m right unless you prove me wrong.
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You can’t just make up whatever bullshit you want and tell other people it’s true until they can prove otherwise. If you really believe that, then I would say your IQ is about 115 at best, and I’m right until you show us some official document that says otherwise. Ok, big guy? It's funny that you mention angels and demons, er aliens and demons in the same breath. Because I don’t particularly believe in aliens. I mean what do I know, there are a lot of things I
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don’t know about. But I certainly believe that demons exist. I’m pretty confident that demons exist. I’m less confident that aliens exist. Life elsewhere in the universe? Impossible! Baseless supernatural superstitions? Let’s go! Mike is so proud to be so, so stupid. Has written ghost stories and things, and at dinner parties he’ll say hey, just ask a random person, have you ever seen a ghost? And he says a lot of the time
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people will say yes. And throughout history people have reported having seen a ghost. That’s correct. And he says too many people are saying they’ve seen a ghost for there not to be ghosts or something like a ghost. That’s correct. That’s absolutely correct. Yep, if a bunch of people say something, it must be true! That’s how logic works. Actually, Mikey, the fact that nobody has ever substantiated
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the existence of ghosts in any empirical manner whatsoever means a lot more than whatever volume of anecdotal evidence you want to reference here. They’re there. I mean if you’re not a very observant person you’ll never see anything like that. If your mind is completely closed and you just screen all that stuff out, you’ll never see anything like that. But if you’re an open-minded person and you’re observant, you will see things like that eventually.
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Right, if you want to believe those things exist, you’ll eventually trick yourself into believing that you saw them. Finally, the guy is saying something sensible. But no, he ruins it by making up a story about seeing a UFO. And I was there and suddenly I look up,
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I say suddenly it was just in the sky, I became aware that it was up there and I looked up, there’s this huge spheroidal elliptical, not perfect spheroid, like a saucer that was turned partially on its side, and I thought well that must be one of those lenticular clouds that I’ve heard of. So I looked at it and I wonder how this evolves in time. Totally changeless. I actually took sticks and I tried to use parallax to figure out what is this thing,
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why isn’t it changing, why isn’t it moving, why is it completely featureless and metallic looking. You tried to use parallax to do what? Because that’s a method to figure out how far away something is. So how would that help you to figure out what it is and why it’s metallic looking? And how did you use sticks to do that, Chris? Do you just not know what parallax means? Do you think that if you use some smart words people will believe your dumb UFO story?
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There are people in the CIA who actually claim to have been abducted. I’m not gonna tell you who they are. But they’re there. And we’re not talking about small individuals. We’re not talking about low-ranking individuals. We’re talking about high-ranking individuals. These are people not just that you read a book about, you’re saying these are people you’ve talked to? People that I was, people that… there was one of
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them in particular that I was actually, somebody that I knew was trying to arrange an introduction to this person. And I said well, ok so he’s in the CIA. Is he gonna tell me the truth? I’m not in the CIA. Is he gonna tell me the truth about anything? No actually what he wants to talk about is abductions, because he and his wife were actually abducted by aliens and he wants to talk to you
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about it. And I said well is he gonna tell me the truth about anything. Well, I don’t know. And I said then I don’t wanna talk to him. I don’t wanna talk to him at all. There has to be some kind of understanding that I’m not gonna get lied to otherwise I’m wasting my time, ‘cause I’ll never know whether he’s lying or telling the truth. So if somebody isn’t going to commit up front to telling me the truth, I don’t have time for it. If he were a really smart liar he would’ve just
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said I will tell you the truth and lied even if he wanted to. I suppose so. That’s what they do in the CIA. That’s sort of the job, right? If you’re a spy. That’s correct and you lie your ass off. At every available opportunity about everything. I’m curious as to whether he had this lie ready to go or if he made it up on the spot. It sounds like the latter, because he made up this bullshit about top CIA officials being abducted and he can’t tell
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you who they are, implying that he knows them. Mikey calls his bluff, so Chris backpedals. Now it’s not someone he knows, but someone he was supposed to meet. But he didn’t meet him, because he wanted the truth. Mikey says he could have just lied and said it was the truth. Chris says duh, CIA agents are always lying literally all the time, in which case he would never have asked if he was going to tell the truth, since he had already decided they’re always lying. Do you
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see how nothing he says is even remotely logically consistent when you actually scrutinize it? He’s just talking out of his ass at all times. And then when you go all the way back to and so and so is really just answering to the devil, now you’ve got me again, because I read that in my bible. I know that that’s true. I know that he’s the prince of this world. Well yes, and by the way there are accounts from biblical times and pre-biblical times
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that involve UFOs, things in the sky that show up during critical battles for example and turn the tide. This goes all the way back to the Vedic religion, pre-Hindu religion. There are all kinds of people who reported these things. And they end up in various religious scriptures including Christian scriptures as well. Yeah the devil obviously exists and controls everything because Mikey’s book of stories says so, and then Chris doubles down with a
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little Ancient Aliens twist. Are we gonna get some Billy Carson style Anunnaki bullshit too? It strikes me tat there’s really something to that, Roger Scruton the late conservative philosopher, he said that the job of the conservative intellectual is to articulate things that the common man knows intuitively. That’s right. In other words, conservative so-called intellectuals take the delusions and prejudices
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of idiots and artificially intellectualize them in order to validate and manipulate those people. The Daily Wire, everyone! You don’t have the key to the clubhouse you’re not getting in. They won’t even talk to you. No academic will take me on, will actually start arguing, even in his own field at this point. Because they know they’re going to lose. And they will. Any academic, any time. I think most bright undergrads could mop the
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floor with you, Chris. I could too. But do keep puffing your chest out like this, it’s adorable. Higher education cartel as there can be. Indoctrination mills. You have to look at the entire educational system as being one great big indoctrination factory. And the people that work in it, those faculty members, they’re chosen, they’re selected as indoctrinators of the youth. And they peddle Marxism, but… Yeah, nothing but Marxism! When
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I was getting my chemistry degree, every day it was nothing but Marxism. Marxist nucleophiles and electrophiles. The proletariat acids and those dirty bourgeoisie bases. In the lab they would just talk about division of labor, we never even got a chance to run a single reaction! You guys clearly know exactly what happens in college. Of course in reality, neither of these asshats could define Marxism or communism or socialism or capitalism if their lives depended on it.
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I don’t like drag queen story hour but we need to tolerate it, it’s one of the blessings of liberty. If we don’t tolerate drag queen story hour, yes. Blessing of liberty?
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Look it’s in the preamble to the constitution. I think James Madison’s rolling over in his grave at the very thought of that. Constitution mentions trannies, does it? Not in my last read through. I was raised in an environment where we were basically taught to be tolerant of people, of their foibles, and if they wanted to be a little bit deviant, a little bit of deviation is good. You can’t just be locked into one rigid way of
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looking at things. So I developed tolerance. But now they’ve become militant. They’ve become rabid, they’re shoving it down children’s throats, and it’s just not good for society. It violates the biological imperative of survival. To become totally sexual, there’s a reason that men and women exist, and they mate and create children, it’s for the survival of the human race. Reason number four that Chris is here at the Daily Wire. Man plus woman make baby and that’s the best
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thing, and anything that deviates from that is evil! Gay marriage bad! Drag queen reads a story is bad! The pedos and the groomers are taking over society and they must be stopped! I knew this jerkoff was just another bigot. Tolerance my ass, Chris. If everyone has to tolerate your bloated bloviations, then you can deal with a drag queen reading a book once in a while. But when they go out and they have gay day parades, when they’re cavorting nude and
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they’re going into children’s restrooms and so forth, that’s where we have to draw the line. Children’s restrooms? What is a children’s restroom? Pride parades don’t take place on an elementary school campus you alarmist prick. Are there thinkers alive today who you think are worth reading? People always say what’s the reading list, what should I read, what should I listen to, are there philosophers or popular writers.
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There are no academic philosophers that are worthy, as far as I’m concerned, of attention. It’s not because all of them are stupid or anything like that. It’s because they bought into the party, they’re academics. They cannot violate the academic communistic atheistic narrative and get away with it. If you’re in that system then obviously you’re playing along with it. Yep, everyone who is affiliated with any university in the entire world is both a communist
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and atheist. You’re not allowed to work at a university if you aren’t both of those things. Not even religious universities. It’s a paradox, I know. Hey Chris, stop making excuses for being too dumb and lazy to read what philosophers have to say. You could actually learn something for once. Are there non-academic writers, thinkers, philosophers, who you would recommend people read? I’m sure they’re out there. I haven’t encountered any.
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Oh wow, so even all the people who aren’t at the evil universities, none of them are worth reading either? So all the smart people are indoctrinated, and all the non-indoctrinated people are stupid? That’s quite a pickle. Are you sure it’s just that you don’t know how to read? I wanna know who, beyond his own writing, who the smartest man in the world wants me to read. Who would you recommend? Well I would say that you should go back and
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definitely read Plato and Aristotle and Socrates. Yeah, it would be great if more people would read Socrates. The problem is that he never wrote anything down, you moron. So after telling us that nobody alive today is worth reading, his first examples of super important people from history that we should all read includes one who never wrote anything. This is how you know Chris is completely full of shit. He never read any Socrates because that’s not
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a thing that exists, which means he never read any Aristotle or Plato either. Those are just smart people from history that he thinks will make him seem smart by association. Have you ever heard of Plato, Aristotle, Socrates? Yes. Morons. Those, that takes us up through some of the medieval Christian philosophers, Anselm, Aquinas, Augustine. And beyond that, then it starts getting dicey. Yeah, once we get past Aquinas and philosophy started to decouple from blind faith in the
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Christian god, it got “dicey”, says Chris. We can’t have people exercising logic and critical thinking skills, now can we? By the way these new atheists I mean they’re really, they’re adamant. You’re talking about Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett. I’m talking about Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, you know, Chris Hitchens. I mean, guys of this nature. You’re a little outdated with your references, Chris. The four horsemen you speak of got
1:00:14
together in 2007 and Hitchens died in 2011. New Atheism isn’t even really a term people throw around much anymore, except for fearmongering twats like you two who recoil at the thought of rationality and who would like to end the separation of church and state. But you didn’t just say he doesn’t believe in god, you said he hates god. Hates god. Dawkins obviously hates god. Why is there evil in the world, that’s what it comes down to. No, sweetie. Dawkins doesn’t hate
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god any more than he hates the Loch Ness monster. You god botherers are incapable of comprehending the idea that other people genuinely do not believe in your magic sky daddy. Do you think that our discussion our understanding of god must be
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active and participatory rather than merely… Absolutely and furthermore it must be rational as well as faith-based. Rational and faith-based is an oxymoron. Faith is specifically a suspension of reason. It is the belief in that which you have no logical reason to believe. If you had rationality behind the position, it would no longer require faith. You sure are dumb for a genius, Chris. Mongo only pawn in game of life.
1:01:25
People always ask you this. Why aren’t you a billionaire. Why aren’t I a billionaire? I’ve seen people… Because billionaires hate my guts. I don’t go along with the… look, they have to give you the opportunity to make money. You need to have connections. In order to make money you have to make friends with people who have a lot of it. Come on you boners! What about all that boostrap talk? In 50 years of adult life
1:01:51
you couldn’t figure out how to rub two nickels together without a billionaire giving you a ride? Seriously? If you can’t become a billionaire without help from billionaires, how do billionaires exist? And aren’t any of them self-made? Because yes some sure are. I know you’re obsessed with “meaning” and not money, but couldn’t you have started your own construction business? Or a bouncer training school? Write a fucking book? There’s nothing
1:02:17
you could do to make a measly six figures while keeping your integrity in check? Are you really that devoid of creativity, Chris? It sounds like a whole lot of excuses to me. A lot of these rich people are into something called transhumanism. They don’t think they’re going to have to leave so there’s no problem with not being able to take it with you. Do you think there’s any relation between the transhumanist movement
1:02:40
and the transgender movement? The idea that we’re just gonna escape our bodies?
1:02:48
I do. The idea I think is that you can throw off all constraint. You can throw off the constraints of reality including the constraint of gender. Transhumanism, transgender, holy smokes they’re related, am I right? It’s a called a prefix you idiots. It means “on the other side of”. Transhumanism, to the other side of the man/machine divide. Transgender, when one’s gender identity is on the other side of or not aligned with that person’s sex. I’m
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pretty sure Chris said he taught himself Latin when he was 12, so this is pretty embarrassing. What should I do in my own life even beyond any political questions? Search for god. Ask god to establish a personal relationship with you. It’s available, you’re attached to god by your soul. There’s this soul that attaches you to god. You can receive the will of god into yourself. Yeah, I did that and nobody answered. I guess
1:03:50
he’s not taking calls. Funny how the smartest man in the world, when asked for life advice, offers something so trite as to be indistinguishable from any run-of-the-mill preacher in any sleepy town in America, huh? You’d think he’d having something special, but nope. Do bidding of magic sky daddy. And that concludes the interview. As we can all now hopefully see, at best we can say that Chris is a narcissist of middling intellect who has genuinely convinced himself that he’s
1:04:19
a genius by adopting a sophomoric contrarian attitude to everything he knows nothing about, blended with sheeplike religious subservience. And at worst we can say that Chris is nothing more than another installment in a series of internet pseudo-intellectuals that fit a particular archetype which has become a proven business model in the past few years. His religious and philosophical rhetoric is the same as that of Jordan Peterson but even less convincing. His
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scientific rhetoric is the same as that of Eric Weinstein but even less convincing. He’s just another self-aggrandizing asshat who uses language that exemplifies what dumb people think smart people sound like, and not all that effectively if we’re being honest. The particular twist he employs is that he wears his salt-of-the-earth brand on his sleeve. Just a working class man that happens to be smarter than all those fancy city folk with their computers and their cappuccinos.
1:05:13
Now to be clear, I’m not mocking the working class. Some people live in the city, some people live on a farm. Some people ride skateboards, some people ride horses. Some people work in a laboratory, some people work construction. It doesn’t matter. And there are plenty of highly intelligent people that are either constrained to the working class because of socioeconomic injustice, or because they genuinely prefer that lifestyle. The point is that there is an element
1:05:37
of manipulation involved with Chris obsessively referring to himself in this manner. It may be closer to the truth than when golden billionaire Donald Trump does it, but it reeks of demagoguery regardless. It’s a façade. The intention is to seem relatable, establish an emotional connection, and garner the trust of a certain type of viewer so that they will be receptive to the dazzling
1:05:58
rhetoric. As I’ve said before, it’s just another instance of portraying oneself as the strong alpha male who should lead the tribe, such that others will relinquish their critical thinking skills and let him do the thinking for all of them. Our culture at this moment in history has demonstrated time and time again that it will seek out and adore these figures, so this is just the trend we are seeing right now. There are figures who employ this playbook, and there are
1:06:23
outlets who platform and cater to those figures, a symbiosis for profit on both sides. Since it’s been proven to work so well, every few months some new pseudointellectual jackass goes on every podcast designed for dumb people to think they’re smart, proclaim to be a supergenius with all the answers, millions of people fall for it, and they all cash in. If I didn’t have a moral backbone,
1:06:46
I probably would do it too. What could be easier? All you have to do is confidently use words that most people don’t understand, and if anyone proclaims that the emperor has no clothes on, just say some vague anti-establishment bullshit about how they’re indoctrinated, can’t see outside the box, and aren’t ready to receive the new super awesome paradigm-shifting knowledge. It’s a foolproof way to con a bunch of fools. And you can see the parade of fools lapping
1:07:12
up his rubbish all over the comments section. How can anyone be so suggestible? How can someone get through to these people? To any of them I would say, can you acknowledge that you only think he’s intelligent because you don’t understand what he’s saying? Do you know who else says things you don’t understand. Any scientist. Not just any scientist, any graduate student. And I’m not saying that to be condescending, anyone who is an expert in anything can speak in a way that
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most other people won’t understand. That’s the nature of specialized knowledge. Take any current scientific publication in the entire world at random. If you don’t work in that field, or if you haven’t at least studied that subject in college to some extent, you absolutely will not understand it, nor should you be surprised about it. Here’s one now. Wow, who wrote this! It’s super complicated! They must be the smartest person alive. Should we worship them? Should we send
1:08:09
them on Joe Rogan and Lex Fridman and the thousand other wannabe clones trying to cash in? Look at this one! This guy is even smarter than the other one, I don’t understand a word of this! Which podcast should they go on? This is what irks me. You could take any scientist in the entire world, put them in front of Joe Rogan, have them explain their research, and it should get the same effect. But it won’t. Do you know why? Because any typical scientist would not present
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themselves as a genius that everyone has to listen to, nor would they inject their research with any more relevance or profundity than it deserves. Now some definitely would, of course. There are arrogant scientists. I’m talking about the average scientist. They don’t use manipulative rhetoric, so people would not latch on to them irrationally, which is why such people don’t get invited on those podcasts, because those podcasts are in the business of sensationalism, not knowledge.
1:09:05
These people have absolutely nothing to offer society beyond smoke and mirrors. Just listen. If I had some complex stuff in memory and a bar fight happened, and I had to go indulge in some physical violence, usually my memory was erased when I got done with the fight, I mean it would be gone irretrievable. One time I was thinking about artificial intelligence, then that evolved into a whole new way of looking at neural networks. Suddenly this horrible fight erupted,
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I set the page down and I mopped up the fight. I came back over and my piece of paper was gone. I tried and tried and tried to find that piece of paper. Nobody could tell me where it was and I couldn’t remember what the hell I’d written on it. That’s right, Chris was going to revolutionize neural networks, but gosh gee whiz he couldn’t remember what he wrote down! Kind of like Eric Weinstein and his SHIAB operator that he wrote in his notes in college but whoopsie,
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he can’t remember what it was now. It’s always the same. These people have absolutely nothing to point to in order to demonstrate their alleged brilliance. Nothing. They don’t invent anything. They don’t build anything. They don’t do anything. All they do is tell stories and TALK. Everybody says Eric Weinstein is a genius. Does anyone know why? What, is there anything they’ve done? No, truly. Cause all they do is talk. Is there anything
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they’ve built? Is there one appliance they have anything to do with? Have they come up with something even like the rotato which peels and slices a potato. Is there one thing any of them has done except whack off Elon Musk and talk? This rant from comedian Tim Dillon perfectly encapsulates what I’m saying here, and he happens to be saying it about Eric Weinstein, but he could be talking about any of these jerks, since they’re all from the same mold. Remember how this
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conversation was supposed to be about CTMU, the incredible theory of everything? They talked about it for like ten minutes, and Chris didn’t present anything. It was just sound bites. These types of figures are geniuses in their own mind and their own word alone. I just can’t understand how people can’t see right through them. But then again, I’m not susceptible to bullshit rhetoric like this.
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Colleges and universities purport to be harnessing intelligence for the good of mankind. They’re a breeding house for parrots. People are allowed to make little tentative moves forward but they’re not really allowed to do anything too radical. Always, always, always it’s this anti-academia bullshit. Not allowed to do anything radical? Says who? Who is stopping anyone? Someone goes to college to get educated and then goes into the private sector and starts their own business
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developing some incredible new technology, who is stopping them? Where is this shadow academia Gestapo forcing people to use their knowledge in only certain establishment-approved ways? Who is preventing people from taking their actual legitimate knowledge and developing actual lucrative applications that will matter in society, and why would any capitalistic enterprise be trying to squash that? We have to have a philosophical framework,
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an actual ethical structure that we can look at and say well this is without a doubt the right way of thinking. Within that framework we derive an advanced ethics. An ethic that can be taught without fear in elementary school, grade school, secondary school, and in our colleges and universities. We have to look for possible alternative sources of leadership. I don’t see anybody on the top of the heap now who is capable of doing this. They’ve all
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been co-opted by the system. They have too much to lose by deviating from what is now a barren path.
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It’s going to take somebody else. Somebody coming in from outside. Somebody rising to the top from the bottom, shall we say. That’s right, once again, the establishment is failing! It’s a sinking ship! And yet somehow they have too much to lose by deviating, which isn’t even logically consistent. This is Wal Thornhill and the electric universe. This is James Tour and origin of life research. This is Eric Weinstein and theoretical physics.
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Countless examples, always the same intent, a devaluing of everything established to promote something that is invalid at face value. It’s about tearing down existing human knowledge to put it on even footing with their complete ignorance. Chris, EVERYBODY rises to the top from the bottom. No one is born an accomplished scientist or philosopher. They learn and work and become that person. And there are no shortcuts, despite what any internet guru will promise.
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Could it be you? Who knows. It could be you. It could be… ME? REALLY? Wow, thank you internet guru! I will follow you and subscribe to your newsletter! What will be our first order of business? Oh well one of the first things I would do is I would institute something like the Manhattan project for a safe long lasting means of birth control. Simply implant that in all children at age 10. That would solve our population problem
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right off the bat. It would also allow us to perform a benign version of eugenics. Or I should probably say anti-disgenics. Either we have to do it through genetic engineering, or we have to let only the fit breed. We like to think that it is our right to breed as incontinently as we want to, have as many kids with whomever we want to. Future generations of mankind are being saddled with the results of what we do. Yeah, you heard right. He is a proponent of
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eugenics. Doesn’t seem so harmless anymore, now does it? Nevertheless, getting away from Chris for a moment, let’s examine how this specific brand of rhetoric is used on a broader stage. People who are disgruntled due to economic disparity will fall for demagogues. Hitler rose out of the great depression, Trump came to power in the wake of the 2008 recession. This playbook is centered around
1:15:16
an attempt to take civil unrest due to economic issues and use it to manufacture political power. Most people know they’re getting screwed but they have no idea how or what to do about it, so they listen to the loud man who pretends to have answers to precisely these questions. But these answers are always a distraction from the real issues. It’s never their own greed or the institutions they serve, but rather immigrants, or woke Marxists suppressing free speech. It’s
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whatever boogeyman they can conjure to distract the masses from the economic issues that are truly to blame. They will manufacture some kind of grand ideological battle when it’s really just deregulation implemented by most of the presidents of the past 50 years, in both parties, from Reagan to Clinton and all the rest. The current epistemological breakdown we are experiencing in this post-truth era is a problem that can’t possibly be overstated. People have no
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idea who to trust, and they are making the wrong decisions in enormous numbers. I promise I’ll keep it short this time, since it always comes back to this, but if we don’t figure out how to help people feel motivated and inspired to gather basic knowledge for themselves, so they can avoid falling for these kinds of internet gurus, and if we don’t try and steer the media landscape towards highlighting actual educated and knowledgeable people, we are absolutely doomed as a species.
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Because when the shit really hits the fan, and we are faced with a real existential problem, it’s not gonna be some jerk like Chris Langan who gets us out of it, I can promise you that. So that’s it for Chris Langan, another in a long line of pseudo-intellectual clones we absolutely don’t need and who hopefully will fade into obscurity very quickly. But the factory is cranking these guys out faster than sweat shops can make new iPhones,
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so I’ll see you next time for whichever fraud I have to cover next. Until then.
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