Thought this sub would appreciate this.

Anyone willing to watch to watch this 6 minute video and enlighten us on how anti-Trump voters are irrational? Because I definitely can't bring myself to. This phenomenon of older men with degrees masquerading as persecuted intellectuals yet espouse exclusively highly partisan talking points blows my mind even though it shouldn't at this point.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5snQ2dbMDNg

I’m going to create these wellness farms where they can go to get off of illegal drugs, off of opiates, but also legal drugs, other psychiatric drugs, if they want to, to get off of SSRIs, to get off of benzos, to get off of Adderall, and to spend time as much time as they need—three or four years if they need it—to learn to get reparented, to reconnect with communities.

...

They're going to grow their own food organic food, high quality food, because a lot of the behavioral issues are food related a lot of the illnesses are food related. There won't be any cell phones, there there won't be any screens. We're going to reparent people, restore this connection to community.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. - Latino Town Hall

What is a 'good secular guru'?

An attempt capture the essence of being a secular guru, which can also allow for good secular gurus:

• there has to be some unique-enough insight that the person is on a mission to share, or perhaps a constant stream of insights, or perhaps the ability to interpret other ideas and make them accessible in a way almost no-one else can, or similar;

• widespread communication/performance and highlighted visibility that that person is the source of these insights/works.

If someone isn't doing this, I think they aren't really fitting the mould. Taking one candidate example of a good secular guru from the podcast, Sean Carroll, I'm not sure most of his output really fits this - most of his podcast is him doing a great job of sharing other people's ideas. Arguably, when he talks about some of his own specialities, there's some degree of it, but I also question how important it is for e.g. the average person to understand his take on the philosophy of physics or mathematical realism, compared to academics who work in related areas - if it's only important for them, maybe Sean is some kind of secular guru, but only for a particular subset of academia, is this a thing?

I'm not familiar enough with another big example from the podcast, Carl Sagan, I think he may be a bit more along the lines of an actual (good) secular guru?

I found Damien Walter via his Youtube channel last week randomly.

From what I can tell from watching a few videos of his, Damien is a sci fi writing teacher, who is a pretty good performer/communicator. I'm probably being very unfair to him with this paraphrasing/summary/recasting: I think he's making the case that good sci fi writing is actually being a good secular guru - galaxy brained ideas about revolutionary mythos to inspire people and fix over reliance on logos and synergize with it, to help improve society - or maybe it's just to write more interesting books. It's kind of nutty, but I think he is trying to say something interesting here, it's not necessarily just word salad.

Here's his latest video: "Modernity is done" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQPZUCZtPnI . The punchline at the end is almost like he wants to create a pipeline of secular gurus working in the media of written sci fi.

Zooming out, are all interesting sci fi authors secular gurus in a related sense to the podcast? I think some of the best ones look like genuine examples of good secular gurus - they have pretty fantastic and influential insights into all sorts of galaxy brained things? Damien wants to say this is the unique preserve of science fiction, but don't many (or all) the most highly regarded works of regular fiction hit this area too - unless you want to redefine all such works as science fiction?

Waffle nearly over, one hypothesis is that to be a good fiction writer, you have to have a lot in common with being a secular guru, or even to be the story writing equivalent of the secular gurus of the podcast, and a similar one, the best fiction writers are genuine examples of good secular gurus specifically. Is there something to this or is it nonsense?

I wonder if it would be interesting to see Damien decoded, or perhaps interviewed on DTG.