ab-so-lute-ly fascinating podcast. I feel like a reporter after a very exciting football match and you want to ask the players and coach all sorts of things about the match: what about that situation? how did you feel when this happened? How did you come out of the defense here? How are you feeling now?

Stef is absolutely brilliant, he is significantly more sophisticated in his intellectual lines of defense than I gave him credit for. he creates the most amazing, complex stories that even are consistent and have so much truth in them and through his questioning you are led along, having to accept every step he talks about until you end up somewhere that feels eerie and untrue but that you seemed logically foced to accept. This is such an intellectually and emotionally confused and vulnerable state to be in.

The only weapons against this type of sophistry are to keep hammering on your original points and ask for these to be answered, to keep confronting him with the simple evidence, and not get caught up in his story and see where he does a big hocus pocus trick and skips steps while you are too busy following him in his story to notice.

Stef (also in this conversation) says that you should trust your gut, your instinct and feelings in a conversation - how are you feeling during it, e.g. about the other, what is his vibe? - and it would be so interesting to do a 'post-match-interview' with the guy in this podcast who is very intelligent, sincere and standup and who struggled, sometimes failed but often succeeded, to stick up for his points, sometimes getting led along too far missing skipped steps but even then always returning to the simple empirical evidence (his experience with his friend and his prior thoughts about it) and to the points he wants to make. How does he feel about Stef after the experience of this conversation with him? WHat did his gut tell him?

I may write a 'technical' analysis of the 'match' later cuz i find it so interesting to observe, a case-study in debating: with logic, emotional manipulation, storytelling, sophistry, dominance, defense... it has it all...

Thanks for the review. Today I had 7 FDR podcasts saved whose topics intrigued me, and this was one of them. I hadn't listened to any in a while - I was saving these in case I got in a mood to stomach Stef again. Today I started listening to 2 of them but within 5 minutes in each I already detected cynicism and sarcasm from Stef and so deleted them from my computer. Thanks to your review, I now know not to bother with 928! I got excited when I first started your review: "ab-so-lute-ly fascinating podcast" and "Stef is absolutely brilliant, he is significantly more sophisticated" got me thinking maybe something happened and this podcast might actually be a fair and reasonable debate about UPB. Then I continued "Stef is absolutely brilliant, he is significantly more sophisticated in his intellectual lines of defense..." etc., and I realized it's not just the same ol' Stef, but even worse. No thanks. I'd love to hear about UPB, not a discussion on real-time-relationships between Stef and someone he is manipulating.

What was it about?

It's called "Shooting Down UPB...(a listener conversation)," so judging by that and Conrad's description, I'd say it's about a listener having questions about UPB and Stef ignoring the questions and real-time-relationshipping the user (and apparently using a new arsenal of defense mechanisms) in order to not address any issues that may conflict with Stef's unchangable view on UPB. But that's just my guess

the most interesting part is not so much the discussion of UPB itself (there is not so much of that), but the guy talking about his thoughts and feelings on the book and how he showed it to this philosophy grad student friend of his who made some initial comments on it and would read it in its entirety a little later. Stef tries to force an interpretation of that event (the guy's talk with his friend) on the guy but the guy although sometimes wavering manages to stand strong and not get carried away in Stef's brilliant (I say this without sarcasm or anything) interpretation but instead keeps making the points that needed to be made.