He's not a drooling imbecile or anything, but in our younger days I had the impression that he was a pretty smart guy. MENSA adjacent or pretty close. As we have aged, that impression has slowly eroded. I reckon, if you gave him a few months, he could do pretty good on a math test, but he's very gullible and easily convinced of things that are not very convincing. He was showing me these ghost hunter videos on youtube. They were all either very obviously deliberately manufactured or literally nothing being interpreted as something by the maker of the video. I'm not talking about whether ghosts are real or not, these videos were simply not very good evidence of spooks and specters. hokum and old-fashioned Pareidolia (or technical malfunctions in the case of thsoe dumb "motion detection" vidoes with the computerized stick figures trying to track human movement or whatever, which is very very obviously the computer trying to interpret a lack of actual input (or possible also deliberate fabrication by the creator of the videos)).

One time, we were talking about professional strongman, Brian Shaw, and my friend was convinced that this massive slab of beef was not using PEDs. I want you to go look up a picture of this Shaw fella so you can get an idea of the kind naivete we're talking about here. The man likey injects gorilla cum directly into his dick-vein. he looks like he's made out of cinder blocks and beef wellington. There is 0% chance that Brian Shaw could pass a legit randomized drug test. The piss would be fizzing in the cup. It would likely moo at the test administrator. But it was months before my buddy would admit that this 400+ lb monster wasn't eating tiger testicles for lunch.

My adult friend, who owns a house and is married, thought a professional athlete in the 21st century was not using performance-enhancing drugs.

Most recently he's really into this dude called GaryVee which, until very recently, I had never heard of of, but I guess he's some kinda Ty Lope-style bizdef marketeer douchebag crossed with a Tony Robbins self-help new-thought douchebag. You probably don't live under a rock like I do, but the big thing is he was riding the NFT train *hard* and he got all these bigtime youtube doucebags like Senior Bestia to push these really godawful NFT "collectibles" to their audience of mostly tweens who haven't developed a bullshit detector yet. real scumbag shit. (GaryVee is also on some kinda "hard work pays off 100% I guarentee it" nonsense. The guy's dad owned a million-dollar liquor store tho, so GravyBoat never had to start down in the mud with the actual plebs, even if DaddyVee himself started pretty low as a poor soviet-bloc immigrant in the 80s or whenever [but even that is not the entire story since he was using a government program for resettling eastern european jews in the US...you know, the social safety net that this shithole country used to have, before it was turned into a shithole country by a certain political party]). Not only does my friend gobble the GaryVee nutsack, but he's trying to defend the MrBeast fiasco of this piece of human garbage marketing literal actual vaporware to children.

This last one is really making me question my friendship because I don't know that I want to be associated with someone who reads that story and doesn't immediately want this asshole to be turned into a man-skin rug and hung over the busiest freeway in America during rush hour. It makes me want to not be friends with the person I've been friends with since Bill Clinton was in the white house.