Episode 243: Finding My Religion

I'm sorry I did that. I'm embarrassed that I did that. I did a bad thing. It but I'm a good person.

The great and boss has spoken. Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain. Who are you? Who are you? A very bad man. I'm a very good man. Good man. They think deep thoughts and with no more brains than you have. Pay no attention to that man. Anybody can have a brain. You're a very bad man.

I'm a very good man.

Just a very bad wizard.

Welcome to very bad wizards. I'm Tamela Summers from the University of Houston. Dave, we had Yoel inbar on for an opening segment, but we had to scrap it, so now we don't have any guests for this episode. How are we going to make up for the lost revenue?

What we do is I have a plan, don't worry.

Okay?

We mentioned Yoell once, we'll mention Paul Bloom maybe once or twice in a flattering light and then I'll just invoice them.

Yeah, I mean, we probably can't charge them the whole appearance fee.

It's not going to be the whole ten k or whatever.

Yeah, but I think that works. Everyone's a winner. They get really influencers talking positively about them.

You're, of course, referring to a conspiracy theory recently peddled on Reddit that Paul Bloom was paying to appear on our show, which, I get it. I get why you would think that somebody would pay the premium to be.

On Very Bad Wizards.

To be on Very Bad Wizards, but in this case, this is merely a conspiracy. I remember at some point realizing that in the music business, I don't know, at least for sure, in rap, you could just pay Snoop like, fifty k to be on your song. Here I thought it was something organic, like, oh, he must be really co signing this artist. Snoop has a price, of course.

It's like cameo, but to be on.

The song but to be on the it is there's an interesting topic there about authenticity where cameo, you just know, like there's like a little watermark on the bottom right, that says but right.

If you have Snoop on it, it's.

You know, I just thought there was integrity, I guess. I don't know.

He's saying, it's Snoop, not me. To be clear, we don't charge anybody for their appearance on Very Bad Wizards, but we also don't have very many people because it's a pain in the.

Ass, the number of sort of PR emails we get saying, like, whatever. Joe Schmo would love to be on your podcast to talk about his new book on gardening in the 21st century or something. I feel like I should just start an entirely new podcast that's solely for the purpose of charging these right.

And we'll just have them on, like oh, you said it'll be called, like, very Bad Interviews Wizards or something.

No, D, we don't put it on any major platforms. We just send them a link.

I want to hear about your amazing new book about how climate change would actually be addressed by strong AI and deep learning networks. Sounds really fascinating. I want to hear more about it. Tell me about your book. Yeah, meanwhile, I'm just, like, on the phone with the contractor. Yeah, I want you to touch my garage apartment.

They're very weird, these PR people. They don't even pretend that they've listened to an episode, which I just feel like maybe three minutes of research would let you know.

I mean, in their defense, it wouldn't matter, so why should they? It would be a waste of their time. It's not like it's like, oh, okay, well, no, it sounds like she listened to that last one. So let's have this random book author.

Yeah, no, it's true. I just want them to say something flattering to me.

So we should pour one out for an opening segment. That didn't happen. We were going to talk about a in fact, we did at some length talk about a paper that was published in Qualitative Research, and it was about a man who had figured out, like, a new ethnographic form of participation, which was to himself only masturbate to shota. Yeah, right. Which is apparently just Japanese boys, young boys, 17 and under, having sex, apparently.

Self published. Yeah, the it was a great segment. It was amazing. We laughed, we cried, we read portions of it.

But we're not releasing it. Why aren't we?

Because after we recorded, which was sort of like a couple of days after that had been posted by Neurosceptive and.

Literally everybody telling us on every possible form of media that we needed to talk about this, it was, like, written for our show.

Yeah, we read the paper, we discussed it. We even had thoughtful things to say about that were maybe about why it was well written and that we should at least I was like, well, he sounds just lonely, and I didn't want to be quick to judge.

It's also very funny, like, the paper itself, not intentionally, as it turns out, but very, very funny. The paper just the way if you can find a copy of it, I think it's been taken down. Right.

Tamla will send you his copy. There are all these puns, like hard copy. And then we came to find out, as many people did, that this is kind of dark, man. This guy has been involved in publishing. He had a zine back in the day that was sort of dedicated to stories about violent acts, real life stories about violent acts toward young boys. And it just became not funny, and it took on a new light. It was a judgment call, but I just didn't feel right saying some of the things that we well, because part.

Of it was very funny and we were making fun of it. But we were also and I think you and I, maybe more than you, L, were also trying both for comic purposes but then also for real reasons, to be more sympathetic to the methodology than most people would. Because there was something very special about the way this paper was written. It wasn't just another ridiculous social psych or evo psych kind of paper. It was weirder and as it turns out, more genuinely fucked up and disturbed. And then also learning that shota is illegal in a lot of countries, just not Japan and stuff like that. So we were making a lot of jokes about that. So anyway, we're not doing know if you as a listener want to start up some rabid, like release the Snyder Cut kind of community, that's your right in a free country to do that. You won't be hearing that on this episode.

We even had title can we say the title? Yes.

Shoot your shota. Also tolstoy that one.

That moment alone when we recorded was, by the way, yes, bad, bad guy.

It seems like it's a bad and it's so funny because all this happened like Neurosceptic did his Neurosceptic thing, which is some kind of gift from God. Neurosceptic exists to give the world happiness in us opening segments. And it was just him doing that. And then all of a sudden, the right wing conservatives because this guy's at a UK institution, we can attack non Stem fields now, because look at what they're doing.

Because look what they're doing. One part of the conversation that it's too bad we won't be able to publish is we all noted that it was kind of weird, at least the first few days, that the mockery, the criticism, the attention was about. This masturbation as method, and not about the fact that this guy was just openly admitting to collecting depictions, drawn depictions of sexual acts that would be illegal in most jurisdictions, as far as I know. And it was all about just like the the stupidity of, like, you know, non Stem social sciences and masturbation and whatever. And we're like, Wait, isn't this the worst part? This is the worst part. That apparently this guy has a stash of stuck together comics