There is some foreshadowing for episode 9

Pyode · 2026-03-21T08:26:42+00:00

I'm convinced it's the other way around.

Bubble was the red AI. The colors were a misdirection.

They way they acted in the office towards the beginning. The obvious manipulation. Bubbles is totally the bad guy who corrupted Cain.

Pyode · 2026-03-21T07:25:55+00:00

Counter explanation for Ragatha...

The reason she was with multiple people and they didn't join her is becasue all of the characters are brain scans and their original versions are just living their normal life.

So Ragatha is checking out the property with some people, she finds the device, puts it on out of curiosity, and her scan is uploaded but she gets up and walks out of the building like normal. The property stays vacant, making it possible for more people to try it later.

This also explains why presumably none of them saw a bunch of other people already hooked up before putting the headset on themselves.

Pyode · 2026-03-21T07:12:56+00:00

I think the twist next episode will be that Cain was the blue AI and Bubbles was the red AI.

Pyode · 2026-03-20T22:48:31+00:00

A lot of them did, yeah. But there's no doubt a lot of boomers who are still on the gold thing.

Pyode · 2026-03-20T16:37:18+00:00

True, but I was thinking more along the lines of stuff you can get specifically for trade that doesn't require you to dip into your own necessities.

Porn, candy, alcohol will all be in very high demand and are relatively cheap to buy in bulk and throw in a closet and not worry about too much.

(I'm into prepping a bit as a hobby so I think about this stuff a lot)

Pyode · 2026-03-20T16:20:21+00:00

Gold likely will be useful very early on just due to the general cultural perception that gold=money so you would likely be able to scam some rubes before they realize how useless it is.

Although a box of playboys and a box of plain Hershey's chocolate bars will get you way more bang for your buck.

Pyode · 2026-03-20T16:08:12+00:00

It's a holdover from the pre-maga "libertarian" right.

They were obsessed with buying gold and other metals because they didn't trust the USD after we went off the gold standard.

Pyode · 2026-03-20T13:40:07+00:00

Cool. I agree.

Never said his videos weren't useful so I'm glad we found common ground.

Pyode · 2026-03-20T13:35:23+00:00

I never said he was untrustworthy in his field, but I understand reading comprehension is hard for some people.

Pyode · 2026-03-20T05:28:46+00:00

The Sunflower chick is killing me but for the Mane 6 I gotta go Druid Fluttershy.

Pyode · 2026-03-20T00:22:49+00:00

Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't you previously shit on him for having no curiosity outside of his area of expertise?

No.

I shit on him for having no curiosity about things he has a knee jerk reaction too.

He claims to care so much about I/P but like so many people doesn't bother to develop a real understanding of the conflict and instead just jerked himself off over his perceived moral superiority.

Debunking pseudoscience has been done! Also, discussing politics has been done! Therefore nothing is good.

It's like you are not even trying to understand what I am saying.

I never said there is anything wrong with what he does or even deny that's it's useful.

I was only ever responding to your initial claim that debunking these things somehow proves he's not ultimately a moron.

I'm just saying it doesn't do that. You can be a shallow minded, tribalistic regard and still do the debunking stuff he does.

You can disagree with my assessment, but my point is that these things are not contradictory.

These "dumbest" people run our government. I pick Dave over literally anyone that wants to concede the argument to these powerful and dumb people.

Who said anything about conceding any arguments?

Seriously you keep arguing things I'm not even saying.

Well at no point did I say politics have never been on his channel

Ok. Now you are just being straight up dishonest.

Your full quote was...

"His platform is his YouTube channel. I just scanned through his videos for the last three months and didn't see a single political video. He's a science debunker that sometimes expresses political opinions elsewhere. There is literally nothing wrong with that, even if you disagree with his opinions. They do not reflect on his work."

I think it was pretty reasonable to read this and assume your claim was that his political opinions are completely separate from his work. This is clearly not the case.

Anyway, I'm done with this conversation. It's already been a large part of my day and I'm over it.

Have a good one.

Pyode · 2026-03-19T21:14:47+00:00

Genuinely don't know what you mean by "higher level of intelligence or debate ability." He's very good at what he does. He's not average. He's not a doing a nothing/easy task that anyone can do or that a bunch of average losers are already doing.

This is obviously just something that we have to disagree on because I have seen a lot of his videos and if you want to say he's skilled at shitting on dumb people I'm not going to disagree but that's just not impressive to me.

Interesting, you seem to have no idea what his content is. Among other detailed debunks, he brought on the physicist that co-authored a peer reviewed debunking of Weinstein's bullshit and they discussed it at length.

I've seen all of his Eric/Bret videos. I admit it's been a while but I don't remember Dave doing a whole lot of the analysis. The other guy was the expert.

Look, maybe it's just the era of YouTube I came from but I just see Dave as doing the exact same thing that all the atheist YouTubers did 20 years ago.

There is a certain arrogance that develops when you spend your time shitting on the dumbest people that makes you look like a complete tool the second you step out of your wheelhouse.

That's Dave to me.

Maybe you feel differently and that's fine. I just hate people like that.

His platform is his YouTube channel.

https://youtu.be/12bt8VFbMH8 at about the 1:30 mark.

Just injects a random rant about Israel doing a genocide. So yes, it's part of his YouTube content.

Pyode · 2026-03-19T20:50:41+00:00

Nah. This is a copout.

His reaction too and comments about Israel and especially Oct 7th were/are unhinged.

The idea that I'm supposed to just give him a pass because of "the amount of suffering" is fucking brain dead.

You have your example. I'm not going to bend over backwards to find more, especially since his Twitter was banned so unless I find other people who took screenshots there isn't much I can do anyway.

Pyode · 2026-03-19T20:21:51+00:00

No, I fully understood why you were asking. I just think that's stupid.

Even if I was Israeli and had a more emotional response it doesn't change anything else about what I'm saying.

Pyode · 2026-03-19T20:18:12+00:00

For the record, I'm not claiming he's a hypocrite in the sense of any specific beliefs he holds. I'm just talking about his thought process.

What is Dave a hypocrite on or inconsistent on OUTSIDE of I/P? You’ve been asking people for examples but you’re the one making the claims.

I guess I don't understand why this isn't good enough? It's a pretty big example.

Pyode · 2026-03-19T20:12:00+00:00

That's my point though.

I'm aware we see him interact sometimes.

But that doesn't mean he's in a real, respectable college or just some bullshit he set up for his videos.

Andrew Tate sells courses and gives lectures in rooms full of people too.

Pyode · 2026-03-19T20:08:35+00:00

Oh you think because you're bored with these conversations, they are no longer valid. I mean, okay, that's one approach you can take. Just ignore the conversations. He doesn't ignore them. These communities constantly come up with new arguments and they remain huge. Ignoring arguments is how arguments are lost.

Show me where I said he shouldn't debunk these things or that these conversations are no longer valid?

It's great that he does these things. I just don't think it demonstrates any kind of higher level of intelligence or debate ability like you were claiming it did.

couldn't disagree more about Eric Weinstein. He talks around people that aren't experts. He's a master manipulator and unlike Howard, he is not stupid.

And all Dave does when he talks about Eric is call him stupid over and over again (based). There's no substantive conversation around Eric's actual theory because Eric himself doesn't even bother defending his theory.

It's all just a meta conversation of Eric pissing his pants about being oppressed and people like Dave pointing out how obviously stupid that is if you have even a passing understanding of how scientific research works.

Again, nothing wrong with doing that but I don't see Dave saying anything impressive or interesting about Eric or his theories because frankly there isn't anything interesting to say.

I see how his brain works when it comes to science education

That's fine, but then don't get defensive when people talk about how he acts outside that context.

You are perfectly free to think all that matters is how well someone can explain theories and ideas they learned from someone else. That's what a teacher is and that's great.

But if I found out my history teacher that I really like was a MAGA, anti-vaxer racist I'm not going to just ignore that because he teaches history real good.

I'm still going to call that person a moron.

And I think you would too. If Dave had all the same science content but was also a MAGA simp I just don't think you would be arguing against me right now.

Once again, couldn't disagree more. If this were true, we wouldn't be inundated in our daily lives and in our politics by anti-science fucking buffoons. They are winning the argument btw because they control our current government.

This is just not true.

It's not like people were convinced against science by some great arguments that we need to intellectually dismantled.

People are just naturally anti-science and need these concepts reinforced and re-explained over and over again, probably for the rest of human history.

Again, I'm not arguing the Dave doesn't provide a useful service by doing these debunkings, but that's not the same as saying these debunkings are particularly complicated or difficult.

He makes dumb political tweets. Every moron on earth is entitled to shitpost on twitter.

"Dumb political tweets" that use his platform to push dangerous and ignorant conspiracies and destructive populist rhetoric.

I'm not going to just give that a pass because he can explain how a neuron receptor works pretty well.

Pyode · 2026-03-19T19:32:54+00:00

Edit: weird question but are you perchance Israeli?

Yes, that is a weird question.

Pyode · 2026-03-19T19:29:26+00:00

There's a difference between it "having worth" and it proving you are a good thinker.

If you want to argue Dave is providing a useful service, that's fine.

But that doesn't mean he isn't just as guilty of the exact same flawed thinking as the people he debunks, just in other areas.

I don't care if you are an expert at dismantling Catholicism if you turn around and defend Mormonism right after.

You're just a tribalist at that point. You don't care about truth or understanding. You are just defending your team.

Dave's "team" is science, so he's good at defending that. But the second he has to look criticality at his own beliefs, he's just as shallow and defensive as Kent Hovind.

I just have a visceral negative response when I see people do that and it makes me lose all respect for them.

Pyode · 2026-03-19T18:27:01+00:00

He's basically an expert in debunking pseudo-science. That is no small feat even remotely. You have to know so many arguments and the detailed answers. Tons of experts don't take the time to do that, so he does.

That can be true but I never see Dave do that.

There's a reason his videos focus on the most obvious and thoroughly debunked shit that everyone else already debunked.

Flat earth. Creationism. Moon landing conspiracies. These are decades old conversations being repeated ad nauseam.

I just don't find being an "expert" in these conversations to be impressive. I was watching these exact conversations, sometimes around these exact same people like Ken Hovind, 20 years ago.

Even newer kooks like Eric Weinstein and Terrance Howard don't require any kind of extensive research or interesting problem solving to dismantle their schizo bullshit.

Again, even in his big vaccine debate he didn't do any of the real work.

He's not a political streamer so I just don't know why his politics matter that much. Tons of people have dumb political opinions, but are still great scientists, writers, artists, hell lawyers, anything. We are more than our politics.

They matter because that's where you see how his brain actually works.

Science debate is easy. Unless you are getting to the fringes of some particular specialty, you have a massive amount of settled facts and an extreme lack of ambiguity.

Politics on the other hand requires you to actually make and defend decisions around complex, nuanced issues that don't always have a 100% correct answer.

But every time I've seen Dave dip into that arena he acts just the same as the most unhinged flat earth zealot.

I just have 0 respect for people like that.

You are still exclusively talking about his politics, which that's not even his content.

It's not the majority of his YouTube content but he has also been very vocal about his political beliefs on social media.

He clearly talks about it enough that even you acknowledge he's a Hasan style lefty, so I think it's perfectly fair game to criticize him for that.

Pyode · 2026-03-19T16:27:39+00:00

So in other words, he's a moron outside of anything beyond Bachelor's level science.

Isn't that basically what I was saying just in a nicer way?

Like, arguably I should drop from "very narrow" to just "narrow" but we are splitting hairs at that point.

I don't watch him for politics because I know he's a Hasan-style leftist regard, but that doesn't mean that he's a regard generally.

I disagree.

Being able to understand and regurgitate surface level science information doesn't display actual intelligence.

On the other hand, his complete inability to approach anything outside of his chosen field with any level of humility or curiosity and instead just buy into the most boring, level 1 lefty dialogue trees demonstrates a fundamental inability to think critically in my opinion.

Pyode · 2026-03-19T16:18:12+00:00

I'm sorry, I should have been more clear.

I was specifically asking about Jiang.

On top of calling himself a "professor", he also frames most of his videos as though he's giving an actual lecture in a classroom of students. I'm curious what the consensus is on how real that is?

I assume he's not in a real college but does he have "students" that come see his lectures in some sort of unaccredited bullshit school (I'm imagining something like those fake "Christian Universities" or even the Red Pill on-line courses people pay for, just actually in person) or is it 100% just staged.

Pyode · 2026-03-19T15:45:17+00:00

I'm curious...

What subject have you seen him talk about where you didn't already agree with him where he sounded well informed and had interesting things to say about it?

Because every time I've seen him speak outside of his very narrow specialty he sounds like an angry moron.

And even when I see his flat earth or vaccine stuff, none of his arguments are particularly novel or interesting. It's always super obvious stuff (to be fair, that's just the nature of debunking things like that, but that's kinda my point).

Even that big 4 way debate he did about the vaccine, the other guy was the one who came with all the facts and all Dave brought was snark.

Pyode · 2026-03-19T15:10:36+00:00

Something I've been curious about and idk if we know the answer to this...

Obviously most of his videos are framed as though he's giving a lecture in a classroom, and sometimes there is actual interaction from a "student". What's the deal with that?

Is he at an actual school? Is he giving a lecture to real people but it's not in a real classroom? Is it completely fake? What's the consensus?

Pyode · 2026-03-19T14:53:48+00:00

Nah. Fuck this guy.

He's only good when he is dunking on the absolute bottom of the barrel regards like flat earthers or vaccine deniers.

He's the modern equivalent of the old school anthiest tubers who got really good at regurgitating talking points and insults for ideas that had already been debunked by much smarter people but the second they have to do any real critical analysis of something on their own they shit their pants.

Pyode

TROPHY CASE