Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything - Bad Recommendations

Episode Date: April 3, 2019

John Herrman EXPOSES the truth about YouTube’s paranoid style. ToE’s Andrew Callaway DESTROYS Jordan Peterson. (Must listen!!!)

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Episodes every other week at neverpo.st and wherever you find pods. This installment is called Bad Recommendations. On Facebook, you can maybe convince yourself that you have a sense of where things are going because Mark Zuckerberg said this thing one day and then this other thing the other day. But Facebook should be understood as this completely disorienting and confusing big cloud that we all wander through all the time. And YouTube really feels that way. And that's why people on YouTube are legitimately sort of unsettled by the place where they exist, because there is no one to point to. John Herman writes about media, technology, and the internet

for the New York Times. He might be my favorite critical voice when it comes to making sense of the big tech platforms. But one platform, he admitted to me, is almost impossible to make sense of. Google's video platform, YouTube. You know they want to make money, but that's all you know. You don't know what they want from it in the long term you don't know how it fits into their vision for the company you don't know how it fits into their vision for the world you don't know what they think it's for it wasn't some like glorious democratic project to arrive at this solution for how we're going to run our you know attention economy it just happened

this way and it's not becoming more transparent. Like, it's important to their business that no one knows how this works. They need to hide that information from the advertisers that pay them, from the creators that make stuff for them, who they fear would manipulate any structure that they were actually aware of. It's totally crazy making. Okay, it might be impossible to unequivocally say what YouTube wants or what YouTube is for, but we can run experiments to better comprehend the nuts and bolts of how the platform works.

It's hard to sit back and just look at the whole YouTube, but you can understand what YouTube incentivizes by just sort of plugging a subject into it. Today we're going to learn how to sew on a button. Today I'm going to be showing you guys one simple way to build muscle twice as fast. So today I'm going to show you how to make the most perfect soft-boiled and hard-boiled eggs. It's a place where you can like go and search how to do all sorts of things and if it's relatively easy to put on video you'll probably find someone at least attempting to share that you take both strands of the shoelaces and you do a once crossover that becomes a really strange tendency when you're talking about like politics

or ideas you know a guy sitting in front of his camera explaining how something works in 12 minutes is a really great way to learn how to, like, lace up a bike wheel. It's not maybe the ideal format for asking what classical liberalism is. Increasing numbers of people in the public sphere are calling themselves classical liberals. What is a classical liberal? It sounds like someone who's a liberal, but perhaps a bit fancier. Maybe sporting a top hat, a twirly mustache, and a monocle. It's a place that does incentivize the kind of explainer, or just the person giving it to you straight, or whatever.

That works there, regardless of what you're talking about, more or less. What it produces, in some cases, is what you would hope it would produce. In other cases cases it produces something really fucked up liberalism has failed to deliver on its promise and instead created a system where different factions now compete for soft power by pitting different groups of people against one another while securing power for themselves one of the easiest ways to show up in recommendations around a particular video is to respond to it.

And how do you respond to common search queries about politics? You declare them to be, you know, wrong. The Founding Fathers were wrong. John Locke was wrong. Hobbes was wrong. Berkeley was wrong. Hume was wrong. Adam Smith was wrong.

You never search for a subject, or you never end up in a subject area even and find a whole bunch of healthy actual discussion or debate about something. You find people zeroing in on what YouTube wants and making it making something closer and closer to it. I won't fucking tolerate

liberals. I will not. That's just point blank. Liberals believe that good is evil and evil is good. The liberal movement embraces the irrationality of its entailed outworkings. The obnoxious, odious, and self-righteous social justice wars. The utter hysteria and frenzy and derangement that we see coming from these corners of our society are but the final gasps of a dying belief system. You don't need to spend that much time on YouTube to see that the platform prioritizes videos that are engaging. And by engaging, I don't mean celebrity cast or Hollywood budget. All you

really need are a few conspiracy theories, some controversy, hateful rhetoric, and a camera. Man talking to camera is one of YouTube's most engaging formats. There are 50 versions of person talking to camera that work well on YouTube in service of different things, but certainly the person giving you the real truth about something staring into the camera is a whole category. That real truth might be about something really low stakes. It might be about everything. at my channel and be like, you know what, we're going to make it rain on you. YouTube pays its users to make engaging videos. I'm very happy that I don't have to worry about paying rent. Some YouTubers make a living. You guys may or may not notice that I am in a new bedroom.

Some YouTubers have even gotten rich. Today I'm going to be talking about how you can get paid doing YouTube videos and stuff like that and just this process that you have to go through. But again, the processes behind these economics are opaque. They are YouTube's trade secrets. What John Herman's helped me finally understand is that YouTube's paranoid style is not just the views of some of the right-wingers on the platform, it's the economic uncertainty of the platform itself.

Even the most optimistic pro-YouTube engaged people, they still eventually end up talking to their fans about the economics of YouTube, about how they don't know what's going on. You see charts, they say, well, you know, I quit my job at this point in 2016 and the line was supposed to go this way But it dropped here and I'm not sure what happened So, you know, I haven't made a video in a while I just want to give you guys an update about what's going on here And like every youtuber has a strain of this in their presence and then there of course youtubers who talk about this all the time

Maybe they're like guru types who are trying to help other youtubers or make money off other youtubers Maybe they're people who want to add an edge to what they're already doing and point out that, yes, they live in this place that might be persecuting them. And who knows? It might be persecuting them. Hey everybody, it's Brad with the Big Family Homestead. And in this video, we're talking about some stuff that's going on behind the scenes with YouTube. We found that a significant portion of your channel is not in line with our YouTube partner program policies.

This is video number two covering the demonetization of this channel. My YouTube channel, the very YouTube channel you are watching right now has been demonetized. Every single video I have ever uploaded has been demonetized. You're saying that if you don't speak what I want you to speak, then I'm going to withhold Every single video I have ever uploaded has been demonetised. You're saying that if you don't speak what I want you to speak, then I'm going to withhold from you monetary gains. But YouTube's a private company, they can do what they like. Bullshit!

Google's a monopoly. There's no competition to YouTube. Lots of people have been demonetized, so there's this constant war in some sense that's going on. Now, YouTube claims that they're doing that to protect their advertisers, but when it's tangled up with the desire to censor and the desire to make the world a nicer place, let's say, whatever that might mean, then it becomes a big problem. That last voice you heard is Jordan Peterson,

a central figure of what has come to be known as free speech YouTube. Jordan Peterson's also pretty central to this miniseries that we're doing here, Failure. TOE's Andrew Calloway has spent a lot of time with Jordan Peterson, and he has something very important to tell you. For the first time in my entire adult life, the conservatives actually have something to sell young people, right? They can sell them responsibility.

It's like, well, why? Because that's where life has meaning with responsibility. The first time I watched a Jordan Peterson video was before the intellectual dark web, before his best-selling book 12 Rules for Life, before his videos turned him into a multi-millionaire, back when he was just a psychology professor posting lectures on YouTube. And my friend Mark sent me some links. It's like Homer Simpson said to Bart, he said to Bart, you tried and you failed, and then you tried and you failed again. What did you learn? And Homer says to Bart,

the conclusion is never try. Mark told me Jordan Peterson was really helping with his depression, but these videos were just not connecting with me. At was really helping with his depression, but these videos were just not connecting with me. At first it just felt like standard issues self-help stuff, but then I clicked on another one. You know I think the idea of white privilege is absolutely reprehensible. As he veered into politics I started to get kind of grossed out. What's happening in the political correct world is destroying the universities, and it's invading the rest of our society.

And the idea that there's something good behind it, that's a dangerous idea. I mean, I wouldn't be surprised by my MAGA-loving cousin sending me this, but I was shocked that my good friend Mark was. The SJW phenomenon is associated, at least in part, with the rise of women to political power. Mark was one of my best friends. I've known him since I was 12. He had to understand that going after social justice warriors and man-hating feminists is just not my thing. And I didn't understand how it would become his thing.

I mean, I thought we were both into Occupy Wall Street and supporting Bernie and socialism, but suddenly he was sending me stuff like this. Marxist ideology is very good at addling the weak minds of idiot intellectuals. So I responded to this one in kind. I sent him an article about how Jordan Peterson's ideas about Marxism being stupid are themselves stupid. But he took it really personally. He was super pissed off. And it made me wonder, why was Mark being so defensive?

Is this Jordan Peterson guy, like, some kind of cult leader? I stopped arguing with him. I just watched in horror as he posted Jordan Peterson-fueled rants on Facebook. After years of traveling together, working jobs, talking on the phone for sometimes four or five hours a week, we were not connecting anymore. I just didn't know how to respond when he said he was tired of feeling guilty for being white and being unfairly judged to be a predator just for being a man.

We didn't speak for a few months. Robbed by the social justice warriors online. And then I got a call. My friend Mark had a psychotic break. The newspaper described it as a bloody rampage. He attacked a woman and was killed by the police. There was no suicide note, no manifesto. I was shocked. I was devastated. None of it made any sense. Except that I couldn't stop thinking I'd lost my friend to Jordan Peterson.

I know it seems crazy blaming a YouTube celebrity for what Mark did. It's just like blaming violent movies, video games, or death metal. And I know that there are millions of Jordan Peterson fans not going on rampages. But I know one who did. So when a few weeks ago another friend called me and mentioned that her teenage son was getting into Jordan Peterson. I sprung into action. I immediately went to the place that would help me explain.

Jordan Peterson is seriously a red alarm dangerous thing for your son to be getting into. It's the same place I go whenever I need to learn how to do something. YouTube. A lot of leftists who have responded to Peterson haven't really engaged with his ideas very much. He's often caricatured, avoided, or talked past. This is the YouTube star Contrapoints, real name Natalie Wynn. Her whole channel is dedicated to debunking and responding to a lot of the right-wing

bullshit that's huge on YouTube right now. And she has the best Jordan Peterson explainer out there. I'm starting to think we may need to take this guy seriously. He's got a lot of fans on YouTube, and I hope you guys are here because I want to talk. Her videos are next level. She spends a lot of time talking to the camera, but there's also like some serious filmmaking going on with the sets, lighting, costumes. I mean, this is really special.

Like right now, she's getting in the bath to have a conversation with a cardboard cutout of Jordan Peterson. And I love that she calls him Daddy. It's just perfect. I mean, sometimes boys just need a daddy, and sometimes girls do, too. But she's not just funny. She's also a great debunker. Hence the name, ContraPoints. She goes point by point explaining why Jordan Peterson's assertions about Marxism, postmodernism, and a whole host of other topics are wrong. Really helpful stuff if you're trying to debate one of his fans.

I wish this video had been out when Mark was around. Maybe this could have created some common ground between us. He would have really liked how weird she is. I make YouTube videos because i enjoy mood lighting and set design so what do you people want from me what i really love about this video though is that she has a super clear explanation of what makes jordan peterson so dangerous all this life coaching is basically just a trojan horse for a reactionary political agenda peterson advocates an ethics of self-help,

not merely as a guide to private life, but as a replacement for progressive politics. This is 100% how he got to Mark. Jordan Peterson may seem innocent from the outside, but it gets really dark inside his Trojan horse. Biological differences between men and women express themselves in temperament and in occupational choice. Enforce monogamous relationships at multiple levels of the sociological hierarchy. You do it culturally, you do it in expectation, you do it legally.

There are strictures put in place to punish deviation from it. So I don't see any regulating force for that terrible femininity and it seems to me to be invading the culture and undermining the masculine power of the culture in a way that's, I think, fatal. It's crazy and it's dangerous. It's dangerous. There's actually a whole bunch of YouTubers trying to warn us about what's going on inside Jordan Peterson's Trojan horse. I've been collecting the best videos, like this one by a guy named Peter Coffin, who breaks down the bait and switch really well. You will find platitudes that tell you that all you have to do is get yourself together, young man. And then off

to side, there are these little needling implications that women may actually kind of be the problem. What he's talking about are the implications that Peterson himself makes. But when these videos are on YouTube, there's also literally these things off to the side. YouTube's recommended videos. This is the real danger. Here, let me show you what I mean. Clean up your room. That's a good start. Organize your local landscape. So okay, I'm here on YouTube and I'm watching a Jordan Peterson video. I think this may have been one that Mark sent me back in the day. It's an innocent one. It's just called Jordan Peterson Clean Up Your Room.

Now, I'm gonna go to the sidebar over here and I'll click on another Jordan Peterson video recommended by YouTube. It's called Female Hypergamy and its Effect on Human Evolution. Human females engage in hypergamy and hypergamy is women mate across and up dominance hierarchies.

Men mate across and down. In case you're not in the men's rights movement, you may have missed this term, hypergamy. They're just saying women are gold diggers. And the sidebar, YouTube is recommending a whole bunch of videos about it. I'll click on the rational male. Hypergamy is unique to the female. Hypergamy is defined by two things. It's defined by alpha fucks and beta bucks. Now, this idea that alphas fuck women

while betas simply spend money on them, this is a rabbit hole Mark definitely went down. One time he told me he was going nofap, no longer masturbating, so he could be more horny and hence extra aggressive with girls at the bar he wanted to be an alpha you need to up the alpha you don't need to worry about so much oh i gotta i'm gonna hold her hand and make sure that she's safe and secure from here youtube is recommending exposing women's hypergamy the red pill women don't care about us it's not just your girl or your wife it's

all women out there it's just in their nature to uh not care about us they don't care about us it's not just your girl or your wife it's all women out there it's just in their nature to not care about us they don't care about us guys I don't know how else to put it we are the expendable gender can you imagine being a 13 year old boy and you're struggling with girls so you look to YouTube for help and you're told step one clean up clean up your room. Step two, be an alpha. Step three, they're all sluts. My mama's a slut. Your mama's a slut. If you're watching this and you got a girlfriend and she's not by you right now, she's probably fucking. Just accept it. They're all sluts. All of them. YouTube's chief product officer recently acknowledged these so-called rabbit holes exist,

but he insisted that they are insignificant. Well, what is significant is recommended videos make up 70% of the time people spend on YouTube. So just in case you're still not ready to say this is dangerous, I'm gonna do it again. This time let's start with the video Jordan Peterson destroys Islam in 15 seconds. There's no distinction between church and state in Islam. And then I'll click on Ben Shapiro, the myth of the tiny radical Muslim minority. Unfortunately it's a myth that's going to get a lot of civilized people killed. And from here I'm getting the truth about Islamophobia. Manufactured fears about Islamophobia have been weaponized to characterize all criticism of Islam as racist.

And I'm here right now looking at that video and what YouTube is recommending to me is called Some Honesty About Christchurch, the New Zealand Mosque Shooting. Will I shed a tear for the victims? No, the victims weren't of my people. This nationalist YouTuber blamed the terrorist attack on the political correctness of liberal politicians. They lecture you on what you can and can't say, and how and what you should feel when the destructive consequences of their decisions emerge. They'll blame everyone but themselves, and they'll continue putting everyone in our countries in danger. Next up is False Flag. New Zealand mosque shooting. Exposed. Must watch. But I'm not

gonna watch that. I don't think anyone should be watching any of these. But that's not what YouTube thinks. In fact, they recommended it to me. Yeah, well, kindness is the excuse that social justice warriors use when they want to exercise control over what other people think and say. Jordan Peterson has a tantrum whenever anyone tries to connect him to these extremists with their hateful video. On the day of retribution, I will slaughter every single spoiled, stuck-up, blonde, slut I see inside there. But on YouTube, the connection is plain as day.

You all rejected me and looked down upon me as an inferior man. Our culture, for example, is a tyrannical patriarchy. I am the true alpha male. After all this YouTube research, I was feeling pretty good about convincing my friend and her son Jordan Peterson is dangerous but just as I was logging off I clicked on one more video it starts with Jordan Peterson reading a letter from a fan our daughter entered her life at 24 due to depression if someone is determined to end their life how can one change their mind oh well first of all that's I'm very sorry about that.

That's a terrible thing. Look, I had this friend, her... Sorry. There's been a lot of depression in our family, so it's a question that cuts close to the bone. You can listen to people. You can desperately encourage them to seek the help they need. It's worth having a war with someone if they're in dire straits and they won't do everything they can to get better. You can be there for them. You can listen. You can watch. You can intervene. You can try to understand. You can hold them accountable. You can do all of those things.

But you can't rescue everyone. And so sometimes a catastrophe occurs. People get sick and they die. I can't really explain why, but for some reason, this video helped me realize that this whole time I've been wanting to blame Jordan Peterson for Mark dying. What I was really doing was blaming myself. Why couldn't I have argued with him better? Why couldn't I have kept him from going down that road? Maybe if I had been a little more patient. Maybe if I hadn't been so judgmental Maybe if I'd been a better friend I could have helped Maybe he would still be alive

Look, you're blaming yourself for your granddaughter's suicide It's like, are you blaming your husband? Are you sitting him down and telling him what a useless bastard he was as a grandfather for your granddaughter's suicide. It's like, are you blaming your husband? Are you sitting him down and telling him what a useless bastard he was as a grandfather because his granddaughter committed suicide and how he failed completely? She said, no, I'd never do that. So I said, well,

don't do it to yourself. It's been a pretty rough six months for me. And this video, it's actually the first thing that's made me feel any better since Mark died. My family,

my friends, even my actual therapist, none of them have helped nearly as much as this Jordan fucking Peterson video. I see now why Mark was so defensive about Jordan Peterson. He gave Mark validation, absolved him of the patriarchy's sins, and made him feel less guilty. I think of Mark like a child soldier who pledges allegiance to the warlord that saved his life. And Dr. Peterson admits there are plenty of marks coming to him. It's like I was depressed. I was addicted to drugs. My relationships weren't working out.

I was hopeless. I didn't have any goal. And I just want to thank you for helping me. Dr. Peterson says around three-fourths of the letters he gets are from fans experiencing deep suffering, psychiatric disorders, and mental illness. I understand now how he's become the YouTube therapist for so many people who are searching for help. But on YouTube, they're not getting help. But on YouTube, they're not getting help. They're getting recommended to hell. You have been listening to Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything.

This installment is called Bad Recommendations. This episode was written and produced by me, Benjamin Walker, and Andrew Calloway. Special thanks to John Herman for dropping by to talk YouTube on the day before his vacation. The website for the show is theoryofeverythingpodcast.com. That's where you can find links and photos, all the internet stuff. The Theory of Everything is a proud founding member of Radiotopia, home to some of the world's best podcasts. Find them all at radiotopia.fm.