Decoding the Gurus - Bret Weinstein & Jordan Peterson: Two gargantuan intellects stare into the abyss

Episode Date: June 4, 2021

The big dog of the Intellectual Dark Web, Jordan Peterson, is back! And this hero, this mythical archetype, is welcomed back from his long hiatus by DTG regular, Bret Weinstein . To his credit, Bret does the impossible and makes Jordan seem surprisingly humble and reflexive simply by virtue of comparison.The duo cover a lot of territory, ranging from hot takes about how hospitals probably kill more people than they save (Peterson), the evolutionary modules controlling rape and genocide (Weinstein), how religion contains the ultimate evolutionary cheatsheet to ascend the hierarchy (Peterson), and how they are both absolutely crucial for understanding everything wrong with what's going on these days (BOTH).So yes... Chris and Matt couldn't resist returning to this epic crossover of two guru favourites one last(?) time for a bit of decoding. There's a heaping of the usual trademark guru dynamics on display, as well as the obligatory ersatz academ-ese, mutual back-patting, and huge leaps of speculative reasoning. These guys ping-pong back and forth to build up a pretty impressive synthesis of latent religious symbols and Bret's bespoke alternative evolutionary theory of 'lineage selection'. You will come away with your brain a smouldering ruin after dealing with so many high level ideas... you have been warned!P.S. If you make it all the way to the end you'll get to hear Matt DESTROY a so-called philosopher's Low Quality Criticism with REASON and SCIENCE.LinksDarkhorse Podcast: Jordan Peterson is Back!Jordan B. Peterson Podcast S4E10: Minefields and the New Political Landscape | Bret WeinsteinCritical Article on Peterson that appeared in the Times that he complains aboutTWiV 760: SARS-CoV-2 origins with Peter Daszak, Thea Kølsen Fischer, Marion KoopmansTWiV 762: SARS-CoV-2 origins with Robert Garry Nice blog debunking the claims made in Wade's Medium piece on the Lab Leak Detailed Twitter thread by virologist Kristian Andersen discussing lab leak investigationsP.P.S. The Alternative Title: 'Lineage selection hierarchy heroes 2: Choose your guru!' suppressed by the Distributed Australian Dilettante or DAD.

Hello and welcome to Coding the Gurus, the podcast where an anthropologist and a psychologist listen to the greatest minds the world has to offer and try our very best to understand what they're talking about. I'm Matthew Brown and with me is Dr. Chris Kavanagh. This is an impromptu crazy wisdom. We don't know what's going to happen. Chris is going to surprise me. How are you, Chris?

Good afternoon, Professor Brown. And yes, may I just correct you that this is not impromptu. This is long overdue it's actually we we announced that we were going to do jordan and brett together and then we proceeded the slot in two episodes in front of them in the queue we had a nice crossover episode with aaron looking at michael o'fallon and then we had brett and heller sneak in ahead of jordan with the coronavirus vaccine skeptic hot take that was very rude of them to sneak in like that just to barge in push it they're obviously not english they don't it's yeah they don't they know about the secret value of lines and cues these these things that provide

meaning and purpose to the british and their culturally neighboring societies that cues how about australia do you believe in cues do we cue yeah we do cue we're pretty good at queuing um you queue for like shrimps and at thong shops no at thong shops it's just a like a crowd of people surging forward and grabbing them madly i got thely. I got the pink ones. I got the pink ones. Yeah.

So let's see if it plays out that way. But we're planning to get fairly quickly into the actual meat of the episode today, because it feels like with the previous Brett and Heller episode that we've built up the characters already and got a lot of that normal blah blah blah banter banter banter business out of the way and now we're just going to get into the meat just to you know the people want what they came what they pay for in some cases yes all right well let's get to it i don't know what it is yeah what do you say chris to people who accuse us of being an anti-weinstein hate cast that we have an unhealthy obsession i say welcome to the episode about brett and jordan yeah look we're going to get out of weinstein world after this episode and we're going to take a little holiday from the culture war into personal gurus and left wing gurus.

And the Weinsteins are always there orbiting in the guru sky, like the moon and Mars. And you can work out which is which yourself. And it's like, you know, you see a full moon one day and you're like, oh, look at that, a big full moon. But it's always there. It's always there. Yeah, we can always return to them whenever we feel. Yeah, I suspect they still will say stupid shit.

Well, I think so. But I suspect, like, we're probably going to be talking about something to do with lab leak hypotheses and so on and like that's bigger than no yeah i think this is a point that we should probably mention just quickly address the some of the feedback we got on the brett and heller episode we didn't get many people attempting to defend their take on ivermectin no no oh no or or defending their conspiracy theories about the virology community that much or uh defending their views that the vaccines are dangerous unsafe akin to akin to playing Russian roulette with a loaded revolver.

You did have the classic defense of that from vocal distance saying, yeah, he compared it to Russian roulette, but he wasn't being hyperbolic. And he didn't mean that it's- It was unsafe. He didn't mean to say that it was unsafe. Yeah. Someone said this on our Reddit too.

And I had to respond just pointing out that when you're making a comparison to a drug, to playing a game where if it goes wrong, you blow your fucking brains out. But it is indeed a rhetorical technique and an effective analogy in the sense of like an emotionally powerful imagery and brett completely understands that by drawing an analogy to russian roulette it makes the point more scary seem more threatening and and so on. And if you can't get that, like, God help you. No, it does. It definitely takes a spectacular degree of obtuseness to pretend not to get what is meant by that.

Yeah. Oh, sorry. But no, you brought up the lab leak, right? And that is the part that we got the various people commenting on the account and the Reddit. And it just so happened that the week we released this, the lab leak itself became a topic of conversation because there was some news report. I can't remember where it was. I think the Washington Post was talking about some unsourced government documents that suggested three employees at the Wuhan lab got ill. And this led

to various people crapping up and saying, you know, maybe we've been too quick to dismiss the lab leak. And it's now a whole thing online of people saying the journalists got this all wrong again. And they were too dismissive. they vilified anyone that brought it up and now we're we're having to reassess things yes so and so within that reconsideration some people have pointed fingers at us saying well you guys seem to have been very down on the lab leg what what do you think now hey go on your face and uh well what what do you think should we repent and retract all our criticisms of the people that are arguing the lab leak is 95% likely to have occurred or what do you think you know me better than that i will never repent

never surrender no of, of course. So this is a pretty obvious thing to say, but I guess it needs to be said that the first point is that, yes, some new information has come to light. Some people got sick at the centre. So that's adding. Possibly. Possibly, right.

So it's possibly adding a little bit of evidence on that side of the scales. But I think my impression is that it's still extremely unlikely that it was a lab leak, that little piece of extra information notwithstanding. So it's still unlikely as it stands today. And I don't think very much has actually changed. Having said that, even if there were some stunning new developments that came to light and we became 100% certain that, in fact, it was definitely a lab leak, and we knew that for certain, then it would still not have been a correct thing to say now or before that that probability was 95% because given the information we have at the moment, the probability is low.

So people expressing an extremely high degree of certainty of there being a lab leak and giving conspiratorial and other kinds of rationale that are inconsistent with what the experts are saying, then that's just a bad style of reasoning, regardless if on the off chance they turn out to eventually be correct. The obvious example for this is like Alex Jones claims everything is a false flag immediately when it happens, like especially if it is anything to do with the right wing being criticized, he will he will make that claim. Now, generally, things are not false flags. There could be some occasion where there's a bizarre circumstances, an event does turn out to have been faked or exaggerated in the media or whatever.

But that wouldn't mean that Alex Jones's approach to assessing the information is correct, or that indeed Alex Jones was right. It's more, you know, a broken clock can be right on occasions, and not for the reason that it's tracking time correctly. And in the case of the lab leak hypothesis, as I've pointed out unendingly here on Twitter, wherever I'm speaking, the general consensus of relevant researchers, which is what I'm basing my opinion on. I'm not a virologist,

so I didn't derive the information about the virus from my own investigations into the the information about the virus from my own investigations into the genetic nature of the virus. I'm relying on relevant experts and my ability to assess their consensus. And what I've assessed that as is that the vast majority of them consider a lab leak extremely unlikely, but they do not rule out entirely the possibility. And they usually state this when they're discussing it. Now, when they're discussing the lab leak, they often will be referring to the version of the lab leak, which is focused around gain of function, research, serial passage, or other manipulations of the virus in a lab setting. And that's the part that they're most critical of,

because they see various evidence from the genetic structure of the virus and attempts to reconstruct its evolutionary path and whatnot that make it very improbable in the majority of people's judgment that it comes from an artificial source and is the product of gain-of-function experiments. The other part where it is a virus that was collected, not altered at the lab, and due to contamination or travel of field workers or whatever, escaped from a member of the lab, transporting it out or some material or equipment or so on, that gets translated as

not as unlikely, but still unlikely, given the amount of potential transmission pathways that just come from nature and from being in a huge city in China, where there's millions of people doing millions of things, traveling all over from different places. So yes, there's the possibility, but it fundamentally hasn't changed in recent times. All that we've heard is that some in the intelligence community, particularly the US intelligence community, have increased their likelihood reading because of these unverified reports about workers getting sick at the institute. And that's okay. So that's something to factor in. But like one, until there's actual confirmation that the workers did get sick, it's just a report. Two, people get sick all the time. You know, in the flu season, people can get sick.

Three, this virus primarily gives people mild symptoms and is transmitted asymptomatically, right? So the notion that there were some sick workers at the virology institute, it is not the smoking gun it's portrayed as. Like people could have been infected at the virology institute, it is not the smoking gun it's portrayed at. Like people could have been infected at the virology institute and not have been noticed, right? Not got sick and it still be transmitted. So that's specific, like that's getting into the weeds on the point about the sick workers.

But I just want to point out that like there's lots of sources available. And in any field, you will have outliers who rate things higher than other people or there's some disagreement about the relative probabilities attached but i would recommend that anyone interested in this go and listen to the this week in virology podcast at the time we're recording, it's the most recent episode, but it includes an interview with three of the members of the World Health Organization investigation. And if you listen to that, you get the clear impression that these are not people trying to cover things up. These are people doing their best to uncover the origins of the virus. And yes, they're not able to do the kind of CSI detective work in the lab to rule out

the lab escape. But they are seriously investigating it. And if evidence comes to light that shows it's more likely, they explicitly state, you know, they're open. Please send it to them. They want to hear about it. But the thing which they are not is these cartoon villains trying to shush up the real outbreak reason just for geopolitical reasons. They're not that. And you can hear it. And they have all these really interesting lines of evidence to pursue, things that they want to do,

check blood banks in China, that they need China's cooperation to get access to. So they're understandably treading carefully to try and avoid China basically pulling all cooperation and not being able to explore the various lines that they want to. Now, I get that that's a political consideration, but it's just reality that if China thinks that people are just trying to vilify it and stuff, that there's a danger they won't get access to any of these resources, and we won't know it.

So, yeah, it's just not a simple issue, as people portray, but simply acknowledging that the likelihood against a lab leak is heavily skewed in the negative, but it still can't be ruled out. That's not a hot take. No. So most people seem to be getting their opinions on this issue from various journalists and news sources, if not simply social media. But it's actually quite easy to access the academic literature on this. And you can quite easily access what the genuine experts, the genuine professionals, the people that have decades, some cases experience of working with these viruses working in labs just like that lab doing genetic profiling and figuring out all the properties whether it's a mosaic virus

or has had recent recombination events or whatever and most of those technical details like you chris i i don't attempt to analyze the get into the weeds and analyze the little things myself because i know that i'm i'm not qualified i do not have the expertise in that area but it's very easy to access summary articles the commentary and the sort of high level review articles which do summarize the scientific consensus you can useolar. You can very easily see which articles have received a lot of citations and represent kind of the centroid of opinion. And I've got three articles in front of me here, which are quite detailed technical papers published in places like the Lancet or Nature. And yeah, they all say the same thing, which is, you know, human induced kind of origin

is not consistent with any of those analysis that they've done. Yeah. But I think people that take a different stance on this view that as there's been a false consensus created by these mainstream publications, and it was too hasty. And that's why we have this letter right from the relevant scholars in the field saying that we still need to investigate other possibilities. But the point I would respond to there is that letter itself indicates that its position is the same as the WHO's stated position, the same as the UN, the same, I'm sorry, the EU member states and the same as the US, like official stance. So you're referring to the statement in support of the scientists, public health professionals

and medical professionals of China combating COVID-19. Is that the one you're referring to? No, that's the original one that came out early in the pandemic and is regarded as having vilified those who would argue about the lab leak. The more recent one was a letter published, I think, Science Magazine, where Bloom, who is a respected researcher, is the lead author on it. And it basically just said, we need to continue investigating the origins of the virus, including checking if a lab leak is possible. And yeah, and the response on this week in virology and stuff to that sentiment has been to say, yeah, of course, because we all agree that that is necessary, that we should continue. So I think that one issue I take with

this, Matt, is that there's so many people now who are ascribing to this, you know, look at the way the media covered this in the past, and they point to article headlines that were critical or that referenced conspiracy theories, but they're not factoring in that there are conspiracy theories. There are people who are advocating versions where the virus has features which are impossible to explain through natural origin and this is what the researchers are usually responding to that's right there are conspiracy theories where falchi is in league with or is covering his butt because he personally... Okayed funding. You know, authorised okayed funding and so on.

Now, that is a conspiracy theory. Whether or not you think it's true or not, that is a conspiracy. Yeah. So, Chris, I think I just want to emphasise that that is different from saying that there is a small but real likelihood that despite the evidence otherwise, it could have been a result of a lab leak. No, exactly. That's not a conspiracy. That's acknowledging uncertainty. And that is something that I've seen consistently in the academic and scientific literature on this.

Even when they're essentially presenting the evidence against that, they are careful to mention that they do not have definitive proof one way or another at this point. And they specifically mentioned that alternative as a possibility. So, it seems like a Mott and Bailey type scenario because that is the reasonable version. Yeah. And that is the reasonable version is exactly the same as the orthodoxy or the scientific consensus. But that is then conflated with a broad spectrum of what are basically conspiracy theories. Yeah. And it has a very familiar pattern, right, which revolves around anomaly hunting and

internet sleuthing. So the dynamics in play look very familiar. Well, Chris, actually, in front of me, I have an article, which is called Disinformation, Misinformation and Mistrust in the Time of COVID Lessons Learned or Unlearned from AIDS Denialism. And it's quite interesting because it details a huge number of similarities in terms of the disinformation and conspiracy theories that were floating around with HIV. And at the time, it was a tremendously mysterious and frightening and difficult to deal with issue.

And there were conspiracy theories, so many kinds of conspiracy theories all over the world. Similarly, with the 9-11 terrorist attack, spawned a huge number of conspiracies. Climate change is another topic. attack spawned a huge number of conspiracies climate change is another topic so as you say it's impossible to ignore the context here which there absolutely are yeah conspiracy theories floating around and that they have quite a lot of popularity so it's quite reasonable for scientists to write an article condemning yeah those conspiracy theories about the wuhan virus and that is not to say that they are arguing that there is a zero percent probability that there could be a lab leak that's those are two separate things to my mind yeah and

the last point i'll make about this is just that while everybody is talking about acceptability to media narratives and how going along with the crowd is wrong, and look, we've seen now we can see through the people who dismissed the lab leak hypothesis. The irony for me is that this is very much a media created narrative that the lab leak has suddenly become much more likely. The researchers seem a little bamboozled by what's changed, apart from the ones who are in favor of a lab leak, but they're a small minority. So they're happy by this change. But like Nate Silver coming out and saying he put the possibility at somewhere around 50-50, or that's what he was seeing from relevant experts. And then I saw a bunch of

virologists responding saying, what are you talking about? Maybe you should sample from relevant experts. Nothing has fundamentally changed in recent times. And I'll just read this last little quote that this was Matt Ridley. I think it's a journalist. In March last year, it was widely agreed by everybody sensible, me included, that talk of the pandemic originating in a laboratory was pseudoscientific nonsense. Today, the mood has changed. And he links to a Spectator article. Eric Weinstein, quote, tweeted that and says, everybody sensible? No, and not by a long shot. You mean everyone tied the consensus, which is totally different. We have got to stop listening to everybody sensible.

And look, that perfectly encapsulates the mood that I'm seeing. And the lesson is wrong. No, we don't need to stop listening to sensible sources and people with relevant expertise. listening to sensible sources and people with relevant expertise. We should listen more closely to what they're saying and not just focus on the headline of some article, even it be one that the New York Times. And even when you read those articles in the body of the text, it will often say no expert was willing to completely rule out the possibility of a lab leak or something like that. But people just focus on the headline. So screw you all saying that you need to be skeptical

of media narratives and immediately buying into the trendy new media narrative. Yeah. Live up to your own principles. Okay. But the one thing we can agree on is that Brett Weinstein doesn't include himself in the set of reasonable eric oh it's eric this time i feel like you're doing it just to trigger me but hey yeah yeah okay

so i actually honestly thought it was brett he said that but he because he might well have said that yeah it's obviously it's uh yeah they're interchangeable in some respects so yeah look there's our view on the lab like mark it down write it in your calendar put it down stamp it and let's come back in a couple of years when we have transmission chains and investigations completed

everybody wants to find out what the origin is like not everybody I'm sure there's some people that don't care or whatever but i mean interested yeah i mean interested scientists want to know the transmission change well actually well that's something to be mentioned i mean first of all this underlying of that stuff is the assumption of that false consensus yeah of this stifling orthodoxy, whether the mechanisms of it are nefarious or whether it's just a kind of a groupthink or, you know, unwillingness to be

embarrassed or something like that. There's a very strong belief among many, many people that that is a real phenomenon. And I'm very suspicious. I mean, just from the impression I get from the kinds of nerds, frankly, who do this kind of work, they don't seem to be like that at all. They seem to be like uber nerds, very much interested in knowing where it came from, how it works, all of that technical stuff. And I don't have the slightest sense at all that there's some kind of stifling orthodoxy, let alone some kind of strong-arming happening to stifle heterodox views.

So, if you don't accept that, then what you are essentially doing is saying, I do not want to listen to the many, many people who have genuine expertise and have actually done the work to do things like sequence genomes and sample animals, etc., etc. I don't want to listen to them. I want to listen to armchair opinionators and podcasters. So that, to me, is a baffling decision for anybody to make. But the thing is, Matt, people will reference and say that there are experts,

there's like Richard Ebright and Alina Chan, who's not a virologist, but it has some relevant areas of expertise. There are experts that are more in favor of this and who have relevant expertise. And I might differ a little bit with you in that I do think there can be a pressure, even on the geeky types, to conform to a broad consensus. But I'm not saying that that would prevent them if the evidence went the other way to switch their views. I don't think

that at all. But what I do think is that that's also normal. If you're in a field, and there's a position which the majority of people consider to have low probability attached to it, and you assign to it a high probability, yes, people will look askew at your probability assignment, because it's out of step with what most others would consider the reasonable conclusion to reach but the opposite dynamic also occurs like i know with climate change and other controversial issues the black sheep scientists who who take a contrarian point of view seem to get media attention and invitations to speak and so on and generate this profile out of all proportion to their actual degree of, I guess, weight in the field.

No, 100%. I'm completely on board with that point because I can see that happening in the dynamics of the people that are promoting the lab being much more likely than people assigned. So it's 100% a dynamic at play as well. But essentially all I'm saying, and I think you probably would agree with this, that it isn't like if you take a position which is against a broad consensus that you don't feel some sense of pushback or concern about how you'll be viewed by colleagues or whatever. But that's what happens when you take a minority position. And if you're right in the end, if it turns out that your assignments were more correct, then history will record that the minority view was right and people were wrong to dismiss it. And that's the bet that

people like Brett are taking. But the issue there is they are not people in the field doing relevant work with relevant expertise. They're not drawing their conclusions based on their long careers in virology. So they're drawing the position based on their contrarian scientific hipsterish tendencies that's that's wrong to to credit that with foresight because that's the same as alex jones predicting everything is a false flag yeah that's right and i suppose the other thing you have to take into account is the well first of all the lack of skin in the game and that they don't have a reputation to lose really. And they've got everything to win in terms of making those long shot bets on contrarian positions. And we have seen that they have a tendency to take a lot of contrarian positions.

Like it's not like this is the only one. Yeah. Unity 2020. It's memory hold now. People don't remember, but Brett tried to have a campaign to select the president which was insanely stupid you know that's right and as as well as the contrarian position on the origins of the virus there's also contrarian positions on fluoridation of the water very very dangerous apparently evolutionary theory completely wrong actually it's got to be something more like his alternative theory drug testing safety oh god yeah you just keep going yes drug testing you know his experiments with telomeres prove that pretty much all the pharmaceuticals available at the moment have unrealized dangers and the entire field has missed that and even just with covid it's not just

the origins it's also the vaccines are unsafe that that an ivermectin is a fantastic alternative. You name it. Every contrarian position that is available to be taken, he will take them. So I fully suspect that sooner or later, he's going to get one of them right. You know, if you put enough bets, eventually get one, and you can bet that will be the only thing we ever hear about yeah it's a psychic it's the same psychic thing right what's what's that phenomenon called it's like where psychics do that sharpshooter fallacy

where you draw the target after you hit i think or at least that's close enough to it. Well, anyway, it's that thing where you only count the positives. You make a whole bunch of guesses. And I mean, it happens in the stock markets too. If you want to be, say, a fund manager or something like that, then you set up a whole bunch of different funds and nine out of 10 of them do really badly. One of them makes these fantastic 15% a year returns, and it really did.

And then you can go ahead and advertise that fund as proof of your amazing ability to predict the markets. Well, I know this is, we talked too long, but I just want to mention the scam that I really like. where it's an old fashioned like proper scam where you send out letters to a large selection of people about some tournament like the World Cup and you predict the match, right? And you send 50%, one team will win, 50%, the other team will win. And then you burn the people that go out and you keep doing it.

And you have to start with a really big sample, but by the end, you've got someone on the hook where you've got eight predictions in a row correct and they've only got the winning ones in the meal every time and then you say if you want another prediction send the money to such and such and that's it right because you don't see all of the other field predictions that are in the wake of that one success absolutely yeah that's a good one i like that scam yeah it'll it'll probably still work and you can adopt it for the internet age don't get any ideas listeners don't get any ideas don't do it yeah yeah okay so much after a very

short introduction segment that was the that was the introduction no i don't know maybe it'll be a separate thing it might be a separate thing but but no that's that's that's not the sound effect that anyone knows that that was the drum beat to introduce the long advertised episode on Jordan Peterson and Brett Weinstein's crossovers on their two podcast episodes, the Dark Horse podcast and the Jordan Peterson podcast. So we looked at both of them by accident. We've got a lot of clips, a lot of clips. And I also think it's probably good that we got out a little bit of the frustration with brett's covid takes and anti-vaccine stuff because these episodes don't

really focus on that in fact jordan admits that he doesn't, you know, he's been out of it. So he's not really sure what's going on. He's not following anything. So they don't spend much time on that, which is probably good because as a result, it gives them time to talk about many other things. Yes. There's a lot of stuff in there, but none of it is super topical and political. Well, most of it isn't anyway. So it'll be refreshing. It'll be good, at least slightly. Yeah.

And now you may remember this episode, Matt, or these crossovers got some attention because of a specific clip that was included in the Jordan Peterson episode, I believe it is. So I thought we could get that out at the front just to deal with the elephant in the room about the dangers of medicine. So let's listen to that clip. I suspect if you did the statistics properly, I suspect that medicine, independent of public health, kills more people than it saves. I suspect if you factor in phenomena like the development of superbugs in hospitals, for example, that overall the net consequence of hospitals is negative. Now, that's just a guess, and it could easily be wrong.

But it also could easily be wrong but it it also could not be wrong and that is a good example or that's where my thinking about what we don't know has taken me with regards to the critique of what we do the fact that it's even plausible is a stunning well you know medical error is the third leading cause of death. You know, and that doesn't take into account the generation of superbugs, for example. That was something. It's even plausible, Matt, that it's even plausible. It's stunning. I enjoyed that clip because it's, apart from what they're actually saying, they both use those trademark phraseology of which they're known so well for.

I don't know that that is true, but it could well not be true. And the disclaimer is right. So this is just a guess. It could be wrong. And that's what people grab onto when they want to defend these kind of clips. As long as there's a disclaimer somewhere in there, then people will say, look, he's just spitballing ideas. He acknowledged that he doesn't know. And isn't that epistemic humility?

But then they go on to talk as if their guess is true and build on it. Yeah, and it's stunning. It's stunning, Matt. This happens a lot in IDW content when there's crossovers that they editorialize how amazing each other's positions are, right? how amazing each other's positions are, right? So, Chris, have you ever considered that normal household toilets could be actually the most dangerous thing for human beings? It could be responsible for more deaths than lightning strikes, donkeys, cars.

I mean, I don't know if that's true, but if it was true, it would be absolutely stunning, wouldn't you say? It's stunning that it's even possible for you to suggest that it's stunning the fact that you could suggest that is breathtaking yeah you see the problem you see the problem? You see the problem? You see the problem? You can literally make anything sound like it's an electrifying point which needs to be taken seriously. And people have done the work, by the way. Like Michael Marsh has an article up rebutting,

like looking at the relevant statistics about hospital-caused deaths and so on, and basically saying, no, it doesn't hold up on quantitative grinds. But just generally, on common-sense grinds, it doesn't hold up, right? Because, okay, let's eliminate public health. That's a huge thing to eliminate, But fine, let's take it out. Now, are we really claiming that all of the hospitals all over the world, in the developing world and the highly developed countries,

all of their treatments for malaria, for infections, all of that, that on average, that is killing people more than it helps them if so why the fuck are we funding these death machines like in each country like no and and giving birth and so on and so forth right it's obviously wrong And it's obviously based on Jordan's personal unpleasant experience recently in hospitals, which I have to say, to some extent, is self-inflicted from traveling all over the world to get unusual treatments in Russian hospitals that will put you in medical comas. I'm not denying he's had a hard time of it, But it does sound like they don't factor in that maybe this is just like a wild claim based on a personally harrowing recent experience with hospitals.

Yeah, look, I think we could get hung up and overanalyze this one little segment. But perhaps the last thing to be said is, as you say they they have very little interest in actually checking whether any of their suppositions are plausible let alone actually backed up and as you say other people like michael actually it's you can't you can't do that you can't actually look into it and check to see whether you're talking utter bullshit or not but they're lazy chris they don't yeah bother and what they will do though matt is if there's an article that comes out saying super bugs maybe a potential threat they're thriving in hospitals they'll retweet that right and then that that's to say well look who's laughing now and yeah so it's an it is an intellectual laziness in a sense to not

follow up on these things and to come back and hold up your hand and say yeah that speculation i made last episode turns out that was absolutely wrong hospitals are good yes i mean so if you're not prepared to do that kind of work, then perhaps don't make the wild speculations. Because if they thought there was any chance that they were right about that, then that's obviously a big deal, right? If hospitals are killing more people than they save. And if they were the ones to bring this fact to people's attention, then they would be rightly lauded for that. The fact that they don't bother to even look into it when such degrees of prestige and recognition are there for the taking, Chris, by showing people this terrible truth, the fact that they don't bother indicates to me that they don't think it's true or more accurately they just don't have any interest in whether it's true or not so it's very much in the mold of donald trump has been described as a bullshitter so so bullshit is a technical term describing people who say things without intent

necessarily intending to deceive but rather just having a complete disregard for the truth so actual deception you you know what's true, you care about what's true, but you actually want to deceive people. Bullshitting is when you just really don't care. And I think, honestly, their behavior just again and again tends to illustrate that they fall into that category of bullshitters. Yeah, and I mean, we covered this last week,

but just to highlight why Brett might be receptive to that message that Jordan was offering. Here's one clip to cap this segment. The hell you've been through makes this point very clearly. But, you know, I'm constantly struck by the fact that our narrative about medicine proceeds from an entirely false premise, which is that we know a great deal about the body and have all of these useful interventions. What we have is a lot of interventions where sometimes we know what one of their effects is. We very rarely understand why the spectrum of collateral consequences are what they are. And all of these systems are linked together and nobody is tracking the long-term implications

of anything. So we have this sort of obsessive focus on the things that you can detect on very short timescales and almost a studied ignorance of what the same pharmaceuticals or procedures do to us long-term. Yeah. So I don't want to go back into this world, but I just want to say, what utter rubbish that people are not tracking long-term harms of pharmaceuticals or don't care about them. And that in general, we have no knowledge about the effects of drugs

over long terms. This is all just him linking these things back into his telomeres view. And we've heard the depths of this skepticism go to. over long terms. This is all just him linking these things back into his telomeres view. And we've heard the depths of this skepticism go to, but it shouldn't be any surprise when he has that kind of attitude that he ends up endorsing vaccine skepticism or ivermectin as a suitable treatment. It's just, yeah. You name it. If the take is cynical and if the take is one that says that all our systems are corrupt and that you can't trust anybody or anything and that we don't know anything, then that'll

be his take. And it's such a consistent pattern. So, yeah. Yeah. Okay. So, let's move to something. So, yeah. Yeah.

Okay. So let's move to something. It's not really more fun, but it is at least a different topic. So Jordan Peterson, as most people would know, has been through some trials and tribulations with his physical and mental health. with his physical and mental health. So in this interview and the recent interviews he's conducted, he's kind of returning to the fold and detailing how he's still ongoing with his struggles. You know, I get up. I can hardly stand up when I wake up in the morning.

I feel so bad. I can't believe I can be alive and feel that bad. I stumble downstairs and I'm in the I can be alive and feel that bad I stumble downstairs and I'm in the sauna for about an hour and a half and then I can stand up long enough to have a shower which I do for about 20 minutes and I scrub myself from top to bottom trying to wake up and then I can more or less get upstairs and I eat and then I go for a walk like 10 miles every day because I need to do that in order to deal with this, whatever it is that's plaguing me. And I can get myself to the point where by this time in the afternoon, I'm more or less functional. But then it repeats the next day.

And so. And it's so. My God, that's terrible. It is. It's terrible. It's so my God, that's terrible. It is. It's terrible. It's so terrible. It's so terrible that I can't think about it without it being traumatic. So I have a hard time figuring out where to place my mind because this has been happening. It's been happening every day, really, for two years. I think it's fair to say that every single day of the last two years has been worse than any day I had previous to that. And in some sense, like there's an obvious mythic guru arc in this. He's underwent this terrible trial and he's now coming back. And Brett draws that parallel explicitly. So this is at the very end, but I'll play this

clip first. Then we'll go into some of the clips where Jordan is detailing his suffering and his reaction to it, which I think is interesting, especially in light of our previous episode, where we focused on how central suffering and pain is to his philosophy. But here's Brett assigning him mythical hero status. The amount of effort it takes for you to get to the point where you can be productive in the day. The amount that is riding on your doing it. The number of people who are listening to you and who basically need your influence in their life. And, you know, in some sense, it, you know, it is, it's, it's a mythological story. And I know you will have spotted that a thousand times over, but just the Hercculean effort the tremendous amount that's riding on it and the

degree to which you're you're paying some uh inhuman price in order just to continue playing your role is profound and so the advice to the extent that i don't see how you can see that it shocks me that you say that i mean that isn't to say i you disagree no it seems like that from inside here i i that was pretty good though i didn't intend that but that's another it is absolutely shocking that you have that insight i that i completely agree with. It's unbelievable. I'm not laughing in a mean kind of way. It's just I genuinely find Jordan Peterson's mannerisms very, very funny. It's such a distinctive style. But, yeah, there's Brett doing some incredible pandering and hyperbole

style but yeah there's there's brett doing some incredible pandering and hyperbole in complimenting jordan peterson on how absolutely central and crucial he is to uh people and yeah i'm not quite sure how if you just look at his post-recovery output well you know he he is a self-help guru many people have claimed that his writing has turned their life around. So I get why you could see that welcoming him back, if you view him as having a very positive impact on many people's lives. But there is a certain elevation, like a narcissistic elevation of your personal struggle to the level of a mythical quest that you know is suffering beyond magnitude and i i don't want to too much hammer on that like i think it's quite clear his suffering is real and has produced real trauma so i don't want to make fun of the trials and tribulations that he's gone through, even if they are self-inflicted.

It's quite real. But it's just this casual elevation of everything. Like everything is on level 10. Everything is these huge issues and the culture is riding in it. And, you know, instead of personal tragedy for somebody who's a prolific writer. Yeah. Well, the thing, too, is that it's not an isolated occurrence. Like, if you think back to the episode between Douglas Murray and Eric this time, they followed the same pattern, the same mode, didn't they?

These conversations we're having right now are just crucial. Civilization is on the precipice. We are the thin line. If we go, if the podcast goes down, we all go down. Yeah. So, you know, it's hard for us not to take note of self-aggrandizement and narcissism are domains on the garometer. So yeah, look, we we don't want to we don't want to hit poor old jvp too hard but yeah we have to take note of it yeah so here's jordan displaying some reflexivity about the situation that he finds himself in which i i find refreshing i i really can't say you know um it's a it's a while ago now, so that's part of it. But so much has happened to me that's been so strange in the last four years that I have a very difficult time making any sense of it. I can't even really think about, especially the last two years, I can't really think about them in any consistent and comprehensive way. I mean, my family situation has been so catastrophic, and my illness, and my wife's illness, it's just been, although she recovered completely,

thank God, it's just been so utterly catastrophic that my thinking about it is unbelievably fragmented. And I'm struck dumb still, some degree by all of what emerged as a consequence of me making the first videos that I made. So to walk back slightly, some of what we said before, there's no doubt that Jordan Peterson does have a melodramatic, epic tone. he brings that to to just driving himself and so on but at times he can be quite i guess disarmingly frank and yeah open i think and and i i actually like on a sort of gut level i don't i don't mind him like i i can't like there's a part of me that kind of likes jordan peterson a bit and i don't like i i don't like brett not particularly didn't you say this podcast doesn't divide our personal likes and dislikes it's all about the arguments it is it is i'm just talking in terms of those gut reactions. I have to admit that's colored a fair bit by the reason anti-vax turn

that he's taken, and I don't like that, somebody being that irresponsible when literally people are dying out there. But, yeah, Jordan Peterson, yeah, I find him, yeah, a little bit disarming and attractive in situations like that yeah look i'm gonna say as well that i don't like jordan peterson's politics i understand a lot of the criticisms that are leveled at him and there's a lot of issues that are worthy to draw and i don't think they're they're marginal points like for personally, his willingness to appear with Stefan Molyneux repeatedly, for example. These aren't minor things, right?

But with that, I will say that I find him definitely a deeper character than people like Brett. And if you do extract the large political element from his work, that he sometimes has interesting points to make even when I think he's talking complete nonsense right like I just think there's more there with him than some of the other people

even though I do think he's a bullshitter and an ideologue in certain respects but I think we can see this contrast really nicely in the next clip when Brett is trying to tell Jordan that he must have foresaw what would happen when he made his stand about the speech laws in Canada and whatnot. So let's just listen to that. And I think the contrast comes out nicely. You felt obligated to stand up and say no, which resulted, as you know,

better than anyone in you being mocked for overreacting. And then here we are years later, and it turns out that you saw with absolute clarity what others couldn't even imagine. Yes, but I certainly didn't see what was going to happen to me. Right. With clarity, you know, so quite a strange route. It wasn't possible to see what would happen with specificity to you. But am I correct in seeing that you knew that something very dramatic was likely to come from your standing on principle and that that didn't provide any license to do anything but make that stand.

That was Brett trying to rescue the point that had been completely batted backwards, right, by Jordan. But you can hear the difference there, right? There is a level of self-doubt in Jordan that isn't present in Brett. No, no, there's also a degree of frankness. I think he does literally at that moment search his memory and think of what he's going to say based on what he can remember, sort of shooting from the hip in a sort of an open kind of way. So Brett was essentially setting him up to say, yes,

I knew that I would be setting myself up for this christ-like journey to suffer all the trials and tribulations but i had to do it to save and that's why brett was so surprised that he didn't take it right he didn't take the layup and i i won't there's a clip a bit later where they're still talking about what happened to him how it it came about. And again, the contrast is what I want to focus on. So here's Peterson again showing some awareness that he may have played a role in his own downfall. It wasn't easy to take me out, although I've been taken out a lot, like far more than I thought might be possible. I can't separate that exactly from intrinsic health problems, you know.

But I, despite my, you know, I don't have, it isn't obvious to me that I can go back to the university. I'm still employed there. I'm on leave. They would take me back. I don't know if I can do it. I don't have my clinical practice anymore which i really miss i love doing that and that was 20 hours a week you know i so that's a lot of time um i finished writing this book but i'm not writing right now and so a lot of i don't have

any pressing financial concerns and so that's that of course, that's a huge privilege, a huge benefit, and thank God for that. But despite me being distributed like that, I was still taken out pretty hard. I mean, the thing that strikes me about that is how different JVP is from people like Douglas Murray or Brett and Eric Weinstein when they speak publicly like this on a podcast. It feels to me that characters like that are just continually spinning a legend about themselves and really do focus on curating the little episodes and the the little things that happened into this self-aggrandizing narrative and look no doubt jbp has that in him as well but he does do that right but but not to the same extent and at times like that he's yeah i you know i think he is honestly telling people how he views his own life, the stuff that

didn't look good, the stuff that doesn't make him look good, the things that he's sad about, et cetera. And I guess when I was saying that he is a sympathetic character, that's what I'm referring to. I'm not referring to his political worldview or his anti-mystic pseudoscience nonsense. I just mean just basic stuff like that. mystic pseudoscience nonsense i just mean just basic stuff like that i think this is a part of his appeal that he is willing to express this kind of vulnerability in front of a audience and and and talk about issues but i mean still at the back of it there's the kind of conspiratorial

notion that people were like focused on taking him out and And, you know, this comes off the back of complaining about the way that he was treated in a recent interview. So he definitely has a persecution complex, but it's just that he can't compete with Brett. And here's the contrast about why Brett thinks maybe Jordan was taken out. So, yes, well, you know i i confess i have wondered while you were um incommunicado over the last year whether that was just um goliath's good fortune or if there might be something more to it because you were such a singular voice at the point that Tammy got sick. And then you did

that. Obviously it was a tremendous blow to those of us in intellectual dark web space in our ability to, uh, to fight and to hold the line. Um, but you clearly have been taken out in your words deliberately multiple times. And, you know, how it comes about, I don't know. It's amazing to me that it continues to happen. So that has a more conspiratorial, like Brett is careful in what he says, right? But if you parse it, he's saying

maybe there was some nefarious plan to take you out because you were a challenge to the powers that be. And like by how, by making him have a insane tearing schedule that led to him becoming addicted to anti-anxiety medication and, and so on and so forth. Or by like a BBC reporter giving him an unsympathetic interview. That's,

that's not taking, that's not taking somebody out. Yeah, no, it reminds me, it's been said by others, that some of these characters like James Lindsay and so on have really become what they describe as their nemesis, yeah? These activists who supposedly are creating this grand narrative about the world, that they are trying to change the world and are constantly under threat by these nebulous forces

like systematic racism and so on. That's people like Lindsay's view of this. So they've become what they beheld. And in Brett's framing there, he really is framing themselves as activists engaged in a struggle in a kind of a battle a battle and that they had lost jbp one of their champions if not the champion at that crucial time and the rest of them had to hold the line it's a very odd framing isn't it it's mythical as well or legendary the forces of good and evil but the uh but um

yeah jordan is more aware than brett is that he has some degree of responsibility for the situation that he finds himself in and he also i think recognizes his flaws a little bit better as this clip will indicate so far it doesn't seem to, but you know, there's always the possibility that it'll be the next one that'll work. And it's not like I have any shortage of things wrong with me. There are things wrong with me, you know, now whether they're ethical things or not, that's a whole different question, but like nobody has a, nobody has a, what?

No one has an untrammeled conscience that's for sure so and i'm not too worried about the economic attack i mean i'll just make my if it gets out of hand i'll just make all my finances public i mean i've never made any um apologies for being an evil capitalist so a quick question there for you chris what's he referring to with the economic attack? Yeah, so this is that there's some mumblings about an article forthcoming that will be talking about his finances and critical. So this is him saying, this is the latest attempt to take him out is this forthcoming article i don't know if it ever came out but that's what he's referring to so yeah so that also illustrates that he he isn't above seeing himself as the target of a large amount of campaigns but he does also attract critical

coverage and sometimes it is somewhat outsized i think to the level of his content but there are stuff to criticize as we've mentioned so yeah but i i think it is refreshing when somebody recognizes in this space at least in the guru space that they have issues and they're not perfect and it sounds like he's being sincere in that so yeah and we can cut him a little bit of slack, I suppose, because he's not the only one who catastrophizes a little bit and sees the personal attacks in a bit of an overblown way. Yeah. So an area that we should probably reference at the start or near the start

is this tendency, which has become more pronounced post-illness to become emotional during interviews and this content. So he was always a figure who had an element where he was on the verge of emotionality and talking about certain topics. And he was known for this, right? Like in his audio book for 12 Rules for Life, in several of the chapters, he's crying or on the verge of tears when discussing things. And you have to consider that he selected to keep that in, right? Not to reread it without. So I think emotional displays are part of his repertoire. But since he's came back post illness, it's almost a feature of every interview that he's done. It's getting better now a little bit.

There's interviews where it doesn't come up, but it felt like there was a degree of emotional instability that he couldn't really control his reaction. instability, that he couldn't really control his reaction. And I'm not like, I don't want this to be the case about picking on someone with a mental illness and emotional fragility. But I do want to just highlight it as perhaps it's worth considering when he's in this state, to what extent it's reasonable for people to be relying on his assessment of things to have like a balanced perspective on things. So let me play a clip and you can see what you think. One of the things that torments me constantly is, and I think it's really hurt me to discover this, and I think it's really hurt me to discover this, is I had no idea how deep the desperation was for people who lack encouragement. It's just because every time I talk about this, it makes me tear up because of what I've seen, I think. But all these people that I've met. Yeah. So that is, I guess, the topics that he tends to get

emotional about are issues like this, like feeling very moved by the degree to which people respond, for instance, to his encouraging self-help material. So, yeah, it is unusual. Like normally a psychologist, a clinical psychologist like Jordan is actually extremely detached. detached it's kind of counseling 101 not to be highly emotionally engaged with your clients or the people you're trying to help so yeah it's worthy of note i think it speaks to the inverse side of the parasocial relationship that you often see with gurus that like j Jordan is demonstrating like a deep emotional concern for his audience's well-being, right? And I think that's the flip side of, of course, there's parasocial exploitative versions of that relationship and Jordan's may fall into that category. But I think this is giving you an example of why people would feel that he genuinely cares about their plight.

Because I know that you can fake emotionality. You can train yourself to cry on command. But it doesn't feel like that when I hear that. It's very different from like Alex Jones performatively crying. It more feels that whatever you think of the reasons that he's getting emotional, and in some sense, it's very abstract, a lack of encouragement amongst young men. But it's clear that this registers emotionally for him. And I think that's why a lot of people respond to his content because they recognize that there is like a genuine commitment to the issues that

he claims to care about. Yeah, we've talked about something similar with Ty Nguyen in terms of that parasociality. And we've talked about the manipulative ways in which a guru can interact with their followers. But with Ty, we started considering the degree to which it's more of a dynamic that exists between the guru and the followers and they are moved or influenced or affected by that dynamic as much as their followers and i think jordan is in that category yeah i've just played one more clip to cap this and then we can move on to something slightly less depressing. To see the depth of hunger that people, you know, I was in such desperate straits, looking for some encouragement, unable to find it. And then, you know, I came across your

lectures, I thought, Jesus, it's pretty thin gruel to feed a starving population. I mean, I'm absolutely pleased beyond belief that people have found what I've done useful. But that doesn't decrease the impact of the realization of just how hurt, how much hurt there is. Yeah, so it's almost difficult to talk about this because I don't want to be overly dismissive of how Jordan's feeling. But one thought that did occur is that what seems like an overblown degree of emotional engagement with the impact and relationship he has with the people he's influenced, it almost, perhaps I'm being uncharitable, but it does seem a bit like the flip side of of narcissism so that's obviously one of

our domains and our garometer but when you genuinely do see yourself as having such an important and deep and profound influence on so many people, then if one is at least even just somewhat emotionally sensitive, then yeah, I suspect this is kind of the flip side of narcissism in a kind of a generous sense, just in the sense of really truly believing that you do have such a profound impact on people. Yeah. Well, like I said, to get out of the emotionally raw weeds, let me make a kind of random point, Matt, here, which follows up on our episode with Aaron, actually. So I just want to note the introduction music to Jordan's podcast and see if this rings any thematic bells for you.

Brett Weinstein is a theoretical evolutionary biologist, host of Dark Horse podcast and a former professor at Evergreen State College. And so on. You know, James Lindsay's new discourse also starts with this classical music intro. Hello, everyone. This is James Lindsay. hello everyone this is james lindsey you are listening to the new discourses podcast and it's just becoming a fairly standard feature amongst the people that we look at so at least brad starts with like a little jaunty melody he didn't go for the stereotypical classical music intro yeah so

these musical introductions are a little bit like the roman statue avatars you see on twitter it's like a total signal of something something something indeed and another thing which was quite entertaining about this episode was the the dynamic between Brett and Jordan because in a very real sense as we'll get into with some of their theories they're both riffing on each other's you know it's a competition so that's to some extent natural but there's this dynamic with gurus where they're trying to always offer like another hotter take or like yes and. It's about like listening to amateur improvisers where you shouldn't negate the last person. You should build on that.

And I've got a couple of clips that speak to that. So I'll play one now and let's hear that in action. But I want to go back a little bit. A lot of what you say resonates with me here i suspect the answer with respect to what animals do and don't do is um more nuanced than than you're thinking okay so you got it right but you need to just take it to the next level to to get it and here's another one i think this is jp doing the reverse okay so i'm gonna branch out two ways there are there i don't i there's no objections to the argument that you laid out come come into my mind and it's it's obviously

something you've thought about a lot and i can't spin up a hypothesis about lineage selection versus group selection sort of on the cuff i would say however that it isn't clear to me how that argument independent of its validity is related to my original proposition that um it's it's misleading in some sense to think of the genes more in charge than the consciousness. Yeah, that gets into the theoretical weeds. But the dynamic I wanted to highlight with that is the kind of complementary disagreement, right? Where the wrongness is first presaged with a ego-stroking claim about well that's a brilliant observation and it's fascinating that you have that but my point was perhaps

slightly different and i think offers a different take and like you see these in normal conversations but the level it gets to in this conversation i have some more clips after these it gets quite impressive how far they take it um but how is it going so far yeah like i see what i see what you're referring to for sure i'm sure there's a few other examples of this but and this is not probably the main thing we want to draw out of this but we could talk about what they're talking about right so the point that we will yeah so i should we let's not get ahead of our skis but the point that jordan's making there is that people are conscious people think right and people communicate and that that creates a kind of social environment in which sexual selection, therefore evolution,

takes place. So obviously, for instance, it's pretty much well accepted that the evolution of the capacity for language greatly increased the complexity of the social environment among primates as compared to, say i don't know dogs wolves and therefore it was a bit of an evolutionary likely an evolutionary arms race going on in terms of better communicators better social operators doing better and so on so that's the reasonable version but the way they talk about it is yeah they take something a relatively anodyne point, and they spin it off into some pretty wild directions. Yeah, we'll get to lineage selection and the rape and genocide cognitive toolkits that people possess. But like I said, the guru one-upmanship continues.

So here's another couple of clips of that dynamic in action. What practical difference do you think that makes in relationship to what are the implications of that view compared to the implications of group selection viewpoint? Well, they're subtly distinct, but I would argue in the end, decisive. I like that. What difference does it make? A subtle one. A subtle one, Jordan. And we'll get to the differences between lineage selection and group selection in a little bit. But here's an example of them riffing off each other,

the yes anding. Because you have to make snap emergency decisions that might not be in your best long-term interest, but the long-term interest speaks inside you agreed agreed but less less and less well as we have abandoned the mythology that used to undergird it so as we have become more secular why would you say that's very interesting thing to say why do you believe that well i that's uh Well, it's like jazz. It's guru jazz. This is, I think, the payoff at the end where this reaches the comparison that Jordan makes about this conversation.

God, you know, I feel like I'm caught in a modern incarnation of the arguments between Freud and Jung. Is that right? Yes, because... I'm not playing Freud's role, am I? Yes, I think you are. Oh, terrible. It's not an insult by any stretch of the imagination. But what I hear is genes as id. Well...

Let me just walk through the analogy and sure Brett didn't like being called Freud but just drawing the parallel like Matt you know this conversation it reminds me in a way of Einstein and if Einstein and Galileo met and they were sharing ideas it would be it would be a similar kind of thing, right? Of course, you're Galileo and this was, I'd be Einstein. Yeah, I'm okay with that. Yeah, a lot of the conversation is pretty meta, isn't it? Like it's reflecting on their own conversation and who they are and where they're coming from.

It reminds me a little bit of that other conversation between gurus we covered between Douglas Murray and it was Ericic wasn't it douglas murray and eric yes yes they were doing a lot of a lot of one-upmanship which is oh that's an interesting point but this is a much more interesting version of what you said yeah let me just there's uh we do get i i have it in a separate folder although i realized that there's, we do get, I have it in a separate folder, although I realized that there's some overlap. We do get the obligatory amount of back padding and like praising of each other as these figures

that are able to do the necessary work, talk about these difficult issues in a way that others can't. So let me play you a few examples of that. Exactly. We don't have the luxury. And it's not that everybody needs to look deeply into those dark places, but we need to agree that it has to be done, that people who are capable of figuring out what's there have to be licensed to do it. And we have to avoid demonizing them for thinking about it and discussing it. That's himself. That's himself, obviously. Yes. He's referring to himself there. Yeah. And well, it's a funny, funny question for you to pose to me because I have the feeling

that the answer will be entirely native to you. I literally don't believe I had any choice. People frequently ask me why I stood up. And my sense is, if I think through the alternative, I simply can't live with it. I can't sleep. Right. This is asking why, why Brett was able to stand up in the face of tyranny. And yeah, he wouldn't be able to deliver himself, Matt. He's built a different way. They can look into the abyss and come back with the answers for us. But normies like us, we're just wallowing around in the gutter and complaining about people like Brett and Jordan for doing the necessary mental work. Yes. Yes. It's a familiar, it's a familiar thread. And, and so in any case, I think the short answer is we look around the world and everybody makes arguments that sound as if they come from first principles, but most people do not arrive at conclusions from first principles.

If they extrapolate at all, they don't do it very well. And that results in a severe compartmentalization of thought. with changes that threaten a system on which we are dependent, most people don't recognize it. And if they do recognize it, they wouldn't know what to do about it. They struggle a bit, don't they? Because they have such different interests. Jordan's pretty frank in saying that he doesn't really understand Brett's ideas about lineage selection and evolution. And Brett doesn't really have any interest in the metaphysical Jungian stuff that floats Jordan's boat.

So they seem to struggle a little bit. I mean, I get why you would say that, but I think that there is a lot of them building off each other's theories in this when they start talking about trans issues there's like jordan takes a developmental angle brett takes an evolutionary cultural angle and they come and put it together and make like a bigger theory where they both had these holes in the theory previously. So I think there is elements of synergy. I mean, they certainly see themselves as having a very stimulating conversation, which is plugging in answers and insights for them that were heretofore lacking.

But I also agree with your point that in large part, like we see with Eric and Douglas, that they're just ping-ponging off each other into their particular areas of interest. And everyone does that to an extent, right? These are normal conversation dynamics, but with the gurus, they're always ramped up to 11. Yeah. The interesting thing about them is the degree of confidence with which they feel that they can improvise theories and hypotheses out of a conversation. is going to be a grand new synthesis, which provides something extra and above what the more pedestrian academic literature can provide. Yeah, I think that's the bit that makes it special. Yeah. So, there's a lot as well of describing each other as exceptional conservatives or liberals that occupy a space that few are willing to go to. So here's two examples of that. That's where I want to go. But what I'm discovering is that the bedrock of my

liberalism is nothing like the underpinnings of the so-called liberalism of most of the people on the left side of the political spectrum. My liberalism comes from a sense that, yes, compassion is a virtue, but that policy must be based on a dispassionate analysis of problems. So I did like that because Brett finally acknowledged that his liberalism is rather different from what most people consider liberalism. Like he tends to say that and argue that he's a he is a radical liberal. But I've met very few people who have said the problem with Brett Weinstein is how incredibly liberal he is and how radical liberal he is right um so you alluded to my political leanings and you and i both know what you mean by that i'm a liberal and i would actually i

describe myself sometimes as a reluctant radical maybe maybe that is the response amongst glenn beck or tucker carson to brett but it's definitely not amongst the left side of the political field. No, no. Here's another clip about the kind of political project that Brett and Jordan belong to. In other words, I think there's a new dialogue that has to happen. Those conservatives who understand the puzzle need to get together with those liberals who understand the puzzle and figure out what the new insights are, because we are somewhere so novel that if there's one thing we can say, it's that our system is unstable and it is putting us in great jeopardy, which means that even if

your impulses are conservative and you point out correctly that I have some conservative impulses even if your impulses are conservative um we aren't anywhere right we're uh we're on a precipice in a windstorm and at some level we have to make enough progress relative to the fundamental instability of the system sorry it cut off randomly but i think it doesn't matter. You know where it's going. It feels like you could have gone on for another 20 minutes. It's so vague, isn't it, Chris? Like it's just so nebulous. What is the puzzle? What are the insights?

Well, basically, they're complaining about political partisanship and the need for people to be willing to treat individuals that they don't agree with as not fundamentally evil, right? The liberal people should be able to acknowledge there are some benefits to conservative perspective and vice versa. And that kind of centrism reaching across the aisles, I think in general, that I would be on board with as something which is useful. But in this modern era, I think it's worth considering things like in the context of America, where they're both mainly focused on. One of the political parties is a personality cult

focused around a reactionary populist. So pretending that that isn't the reality isn't going to change it. because not even people who would have previously been considered moderates like just mainstream conservatives are being kicked out of the republican party for not getting on board with the doctrine about what happened on the 6th of january so yeah that like they act as if the polarization, that it's a circumstance which is just unfortunate and that it's really both sides are doing it equally and we need to get out of this immunization cycle. But I don't think they grapple fully with the reality of what is going on in American politics and the mainstreaming of the conspiratorial

right in the Republican Party. Even if you take issue with the social justice left and their role, Biden is the president. So I'm not making a case here for that we need left wing polarization. making a case here for that we need left-wing polarization i'm just saying the the reality is that it it isn't a situation and where both political parties are equally extreme and the candidates that they field and whatnot yeah i know what you're saying that it's an uncontroversial point to say that we should be less ideological, we should be less partisan and less polarized and be able to have conversations across the aisle, that is fine and good. But when they are talking about those things,

all the examples they give and their focus seems to be entirely on left-wing versions of that. And the stuff that's going on on the right as you said really doesn't get very much attention and this is an idw general centrist classical liberal tendency generally not restricted to these two yeah in fact they tend to be apologists for things that trump has done heller at brett's wife famously but not famously because no one knows this, but famously for me, declared after the election that Trump needed to honor his followers by continuing to pursue the election fraud claims. That sounds completely right.

Unless it really was stolen. Well, so, you know, remember my point is at some level stolen is not the right description for what big tech did in the context of this election. But I think we already know that this was not a free and fair election in the way that the founders viewed it. This was a, this was an election on a slanted playing field. Fair enough. Okay. So put it, put aside any question of ballot tampering and all of this, um, slanted playing field in a toss up. Uh, of course the coin came down the way the people who had slanted the playing field wanted it to. Yeah. It is both, you know, not in keeping with apparently who he is as a person, but, um, it's not clear that it, not in keeping with apparently who he is as a person, but it's not clear that it would honor the half of the people who voted, almost,

for him to step out of the fight. So that's an odd position for a liberal to take. Yeah. Anyway, so here's the last clip which i titled guru synergy and book pivot yeah i would say uh i think we're in near perfect agreement here we have to learn each other's language about it yes what i would say is you know uh an explosion is a very dangerous thing but it's a marvelous thing in a cylinder where it can be used to do physical work. And so the point is, yeah, let's not pretend that we are something other than we are, but let's take those impulses and channel them to something productive.

And so, yes, this is actually good because I can bring that back to my book now, because that's what I'm that is really what I'm trying to do in these three books is to say, well, look, don't underestimate your downside, your capacity for mayhem, but don't assume that that makes you unredeemable. Yeah, that was a good pivot. But the other thing, too, is that's a nice example of the extraordinarily long connections that they make. So that conversation started off with Brett's labored analogy about how there's these political differences between conservatives and liberals can be very destructive, but we should turn that into a productive synergy and then jordan connects that to part of his personal philosophy about the you know thanos and your positive your life energies and and so on which are completely different things it's just they're connected in by a very tenuous thread

and yeah so that's a column common element among these guys which is to really leap around within this kind of web of loose associations yeah and i i think we will get into in a minute brett's lineage selection revolutionary theory which invokes a lot of this and in jordan's response to him as well. But just before we do, Matt, I want to also mention, there's this segment, right? And after our last episode, where we listened to Brett and Heller, essentially, yes, and each other into oblivion on ivermectin and the lab lake theory, the mutual back padding is almost impossible to oversee amongst the two of them. And I just want to play this part where Jordan and Brett are talking about how they test

their theories. And the first thing is that Brett acknowledges that there's some issue with their reasoning and the evidence that currently exists for it. So let me just first play that. And then we'll get to how he manages to overcome the issues that this brings up. And I think, you know, what I what I get from what you're saying, and the part I agree with is that, A, I think people like both you and me are too used to having to argue that these patterns are adaptive and therefore entitled to a whole host of defenses that they are not generally given, or at least they are entitled to leeway to be evaluated on honorable grounds rather than castigated for the fact that they don't match up with experiment or something along those lines. So the point there being their claims don't match with experiments or empirical evidence, but they need leeway because they can make adaptive stories.

And we'll definitely get to the adaptive story. That's the lineage selection is coming up, Matt. But let's just regard how Brett does then test his theories against reality. What crucible does he use if he doesn't have peer review and if he doesn't focus on experiments and empirical investigation? The difference between a person who might think such a thing in isolation and a person who has a proper familial context in which to actually check in. So in other words, I have the sense that in part, the reason that I'm able to just simply describe things as they are and do so unflinchingly is because my family understands the same puzzle and they may have different elements that they see with clarity. But there's

no question I can, you know, I can go to Heather and I can say, you know, I ran into this thing today and here's what I'm concerned it implies. And we can have a rational discussion about it without anybody accusing anybody of moral defects or any of the things that have become so common. And so in your case, I know that you have a familial network that provides you that same kind of reality check. And then I wonder, looking at the generation of people advancing the woke revolution, and I see the failure of that very thing. And I can't help but wonder if it isn't connected. I see.

So do you think, Chris, that Heather is providing a good reality check for Brett at this point? Well, not just Heather, but Eric. Of course. It's the confidence with which someone could assert that their close family and friends provide a reality check. Yeah, that's possible. That's possible. They might, you know, say, wind your neck in. It very much depends on their character and tendencies. And are Eric and Heller the kinds of people that we know to be harsh

in their assessment of somebody's out there theories. No, if that's your reality check, your reality is fucked. Yeah. I mean, it's amazingly naive, isn't it, to say that kind of thing? Because if you're in a relationship, if you're married, you know that, you know, you say things to one another that sure you're not going to be morally judged for. You didn't come home from a party and say saying mean gossipy things about the people who were there that you wouldn't necessarily say to

other people and you're not going to get slapped over the wrist for being snarky but he's mistaking that for some kind of epistemic grounding that's so naive and yeah and i think as well he might be regarding it as you know like your wife or partner or husband are probably willing to call you on your bullshit in most relationships in a fairly fundamental way but but that doesn't in any way speak to their you know my wife wouldn't have opinions on my theories about the cognitive science of religion, right? And if she did, I couldn't trust that it would be completely neutral and unmarred by her sympathy for my point of view.

Like Heller and Brett are very much of one mind when it comes to their takes on evolutionary content. of one mind when it comes to their takes on evolutionary content there might be quibbles around the edges but this this is not a crucible of fire for your theories likewise it's clear that they perceive other gurus as performing the same function so the kind of conversation that he's having with jbp there serves as a replacement for critical peer review, for instance, that it seems to slot into what they're proposing, which is a kind of alternative epistemic framework. It's an alternative to this tedious stuff with mucking around with experiments and having to write papers, which is boring and a pain. And then you're going to get nasty peer reviews and you have to, you know, they don't have any time for any of that

and they're proposing that a good substitute for that is having chats with your friends and your family. Long-form podcast, Matt. The defense of Western civilization is here. It's in your ears. It's ringing out. And just to completely illustrates that point. So that's how Brett tests his theories.

How did Jordan do it? And so, like, if you have a family and you have friends, then they'll help you make sure that your jokes are funny and not mean because they'll laugh when they're funny and they'll raise an eyebrow when they're mean. And then you can check in with that. And they'll help you figure out if you're dominating the conversation too much and they'll push and prod you as you do the same to them and everyone stays relatively organized. And when all this hit to begin with, I had quite a large network of people which expanded at some point to include people like you and the so-called intellectual dark web members.

And they were helping me check in on my sanity all the time, you know, helping guide me through the interview process and analyzing my errors and commenting when I did something hypothetically right. Yeah, if the IDW is your sanity check, I'm repeating myself, but you're also fucked. Like, look at what happened to them in the post-election period. There are members of it that you might be, I think Jordan is probably referring to his run-ins with Sam Harris, right?

And their debates about God and so on. And actually that was some of the most direct pushback I think he's ever received. But like, if you're outsourcing your critical analysis to the response of Gad Saad, Jeffrey Miller, and Dave Rubin, who Jordan collaborated with a lot, God help you. God help you.

Because, you know, it's the brain trust that we can only hope society is ready for. So yeah, both of them don't seem like a replacement. At least Jordan, he does have published papers. He has been quite successful in going through peer review and that kind of thing, unlike Brett. they they both seem to just not factor in that there's a lot of synergies and blind spots in those kind of networks that they're talking about where they're ideologically unified they're also not qualified like jordan peterson isn't qualified to push back on Brett Weinstein with his silly evolutionary ideas. So, yeah, it's just astoundingly naive. I see what they're trying to do,

which is to build up an alternative epistemic community and to propose this as an alternative to the supposedly stifling,odoxy corrupt yeah academia and science institutions and so on but it's such a feeble attempt chris i mean the sad thing is is that it actually works among midwits on twitter and so on not not not no don't get personal to the big witch but um i i i also play this clip because it isn't true that like brett doesn't recognize the potential issue because if he just applied this insight from this clip to his previous claim he'd get there so just listen to this this comes much later and you know if we go back to what we were speaking about at the beginning of the conversation, the fact that not only do Heather and I have a great relationship, but we also speak the same language scientifically.

So, you know, it's a kind of across the board sounding board and ability to, you know, I feel no vulnerability there because there's no place where our worldviews aren't compatible. And, uh, you know, I could say similar things about, uh, about Eric. So what that means is that my budget for discordant interaction is probably larger when I get to the outside world because I haven't spent it at home or in the context of family or friends. Yeah. Yeah. You haven't spent the budget of disagreement with your family and friends, but these are the people that you're using to test the validity of your theories. The pattern I keep seeing is just this tendency to turn something completely trivial and mundane like having a comfortable conversational relationship with your partner into something grandiose and special which it just isn't chris it's that's not something

particularly it's not something to talk about as if it puts you in some gives you a special advantage um yeah yeah well so let's see what is the product of this crucible of fire that brett's ideas go through so this podcast it's actually one of the longest discussions about lineage selection by Brett that I've heard. And this is his revolutionary idea when it comes to the modern evolutionary theory and where it's lacking. So let's get into lineage selection. And I think this is him setting up what the context is that makes lineage selection an important theory to consider. This is the great debate in modern evolution. So I don't want to drag you or our viewers too deeply into the weeds here. But my claim is that my field is divided between two camps that are incorrect. One camp are the kin selectionists, right? People who

view this as narrowly genetic. These are my intellectual ancestors. And the other group are the group selectionists who have understood something else, which is that essentially altruism pays. And there are certain places you can stand that it appears that that is a driving evolutionary force, whereas mathematically, it is very difficult to make a robust model of this sort, at least not a realistic one. My point would be the kin selectionists have understood one part of the logic correctly, but they've instantiated it too narrowly. The group selectionists have found a fiction, but just as we were describing 15 minutes ago, that fiction has actually given them license to explore a very fertile piece of evolutionary territory, which is the landscape of cultural evolution. Cultural evolution does not make a tremendous amount of sense through the narrowest kin-selected lens.

It makes a great deal of sense through the group-selected lens, but the gateway is fictional. way is fictional yes so with this he's referring to the ongoing ambiguity and debate regarding kin selection and group selection generally it pertains to a pretty specific area in evolutionary biology which is the problem of altruism right ch, Chris? It doesn't directly benefit yourself or your genetic descendants, which certainly does occur and cooperation generally occurs in social animals. I think, look, I'm not totally up on this topic, but my understanding is that it is still an open debate. I wouldn't call it fundamental to evolution because it is a relatively specific domain that the professor is about. But Brett certainly has his own special take on this, which will bring healing and balance to the force. Yes.

And, you know, I do think this is an area of ongoing heated debate and there's legitimate discussion amongst various experts and the division that he identifies as real, where traditional kin selection people are disparaging of those that focus on cultural evolution and see it as sneaky name group selection dynamics that have been proven incorrect. But there are competing camps on this, and it tends to all revolve around humans, right? Because humans display a level of sociality and altruism, including to non-kin, which is very surprising, right?

And requires explanation, but it's the extent to which that we can analogize the cultural selection processes to biological evolutionary forces and whatnot these these are all legitimate debates uh sorry to interrupt but correct me if i'm wrong but wouldn't you agree that it's very dangerous to take something that you see only in one particular species, i.e. us, which we know almost unique among the species that exist, is hugely influenced by cultural factors. to the extent such that the vast majority of stuff that we do these days is not directly paired to some kind of evolutionarily biological mechanism. There's a huge number of social and cultural sort of intermediate steps. So, yeah, it seems very weak to me, like to lean on humans and to draw big inferences about evolution generally, because we are so weird.

Well, we are, we are weird, but at the same time, we're a product of evolution. And as you say, the thing that in large part distinguishes us, not, not entirely because our brains and not their size, but their organization and whatnot is dramatically different than the majority, you know, that does mark us apart. Not of our evolutionary ancestors, but of the other species which are living today. But I think that we are a cultural species and that culture has allowed us to dominate the natural world and has led to

social and technological process in a manner that enables specific groups to dominate others, which can be tied to the success of people to transmit genes and so on. We have the technology now that essentially, as people often point out, like if we were following evolutionary logic, we should all just be donating males, at least should all just be donating to sperm banks every single day, right?

Because no investment and massive amounts of offspring, but we don't do that. So there's a mismatch with evolution and cultural processes. So yeah, I take the point, but maybe it's my anthropological background that makes me inclined to view culture and dual inheritance theories in general, which are combinations about the role of culture and genetics on human society to be like, I don't take issue with that being described as fundamental because it is fundamental to the world now, but, but you're right in that.

If you're looking at evolution as a biological process for most of, you know, the scope of history, as we know it, cultural evolution is a minor footnote in those in those yeah that's the main point i wanted to make that it's an interesting topic don't get me wrong and i'm not an expert on it but i just wanted to make the point that it's not a fundamental question to biological evolution it's not the kind of thing whichever way it's resolved it's going to be a relatively minor elaboration on the standard modern synthesis of darwinian evolution yeah yeah it just depends on how much you care about humans

in that story so but yeah you could study biological evolution for decades and not focus so much on on cultural evolutionary processes and for most animals that wouldn't really be a huge issue right because there's a there's a relatively constrained amount of animals that engage in social learning or even rudimentary cumulative culture so in fact that you know most of them don't actually have cumulative or it's extremely limited yes so i think it's useful just to spell out the uncontroversial and relatively boring substrate to these ideas which is that yes you know humans are social creatures we have very big brains relatively speaking and we're very good at communicating with each other.

And as a result, our fitness in terms of sexual selection is going to be determined a lot in terms of how well we navigate the social arena, which involves things like communication and cooperation and so on. A Machiavellian intelligence. Yes, that's right. That's right, these political players. Alphas and betas, it Machiavellian intelligence. Yes, that's right. That's right. These political players. Alphas and betas.

It's all omegas and cucks and whatnot. But yeah, so I think, you know, again, I'm biased, but I think this area is fascinating and really interesting. So I take issue with you describing it as boring, Matt, but you mean boring as in it's actually a academic topic that you can get into and that you know has research and discussion and like that doesn't fit neatly into culture war podcasts that's what i meant exactly yes sorry or or let you explain the nazis what they did in world war i, for example. Exactly. That's right.

I just want to draw a distinction between stuff that's real and... Boring researchers and the exciting world of the art of science. Exactly. Exactly. All right. So let's hear what Brett's... What has Brett got to say about this, Chris? What is lineage selection?

Let's put it into what I think the right way of resolving this conflict in evolutionary biology is. So I would argue that the right way of viewing this is something called lineage selection. Now, a lineage is an individual and all of that individual's descendants. Okay. And my point is that is actually a valid target of evolution. Lineages can evolve just the same way individuals can evolve. So we can see adaptation at the lineage level, which will look like if you don't pay close enough attention to what you're looking at, it may look like group evolution, which is in part why the group selections have gotten themselves confused so chris how does a lineage evolve now when we talk about evolution we're usually talking about a population yeah of individuals that can have

offspring together we talk about the average genotype of that collection having some systematic change over time now he describes a lineage as being an individual plus all of their descendants which presumably don't exist at the time no yeah so in in what way is this meaningful at all like yes so there's there's some issues here because it does seem to be slipping in a teleological awareness into evolution about where things are going and where they've been right and simply stating that this approach makes a more coherent perspective than focusing on individual selection or potentially cultural group selection factors. The devil would be in the details, but at first blush, this seems like an extraordinary claim. You know, we'll know from other clips that Brett is also referring to things like the Germans and the Jews as lineages. Yes.

Right. In World War II, which speaks to what, where are the boundaries exactly there? And like, what's the selection pressure that is focusing like what do the national people of germany share genetically that would meet them the you know this coherent unit of selection against the jews and it begs all sorts of questions like for instance if a jewish person is being operated on selection how would they know that someone amongst their descendants wasn't going to have children with a aryan german because that would mess things up completely wouldn't it because in this crazy world view first of all it's nonsensical to talk about

these categories as being populations or lineages or anything. Well, populations may be okay, right, depending on geographic. Yeah, I mean, there's different ones because they do, you know. Oh, they overlap. Anyway. Well, this is a little bit more detailed into the actual mechanisms and how they work. And maybe it'll help you understand what you're missing, what you've got wrong. If we look across the larger landscape, all of the bands of hunter gatherers, how much does the competition between two individuals

within one band over mates affect how many copies of their genes are on that larger landscape? And the answer is almost not at all, right? That is to say, you can have 10 offspring to some other individuals too, right? And you might think that you'd beaten them by a factor of five. But there are two problems with this. One, if you are closely related to him, then a lot of what we narrowly in the kin selected, the traditional kin selected view would regard as a loss to you is actually insignificant compared to the larger landscape. But the other thing is, if your band blinks out of existence five generations down the road, taking all of your great, great, great, great grand offspring, right? If it takes all those people with him, then you have not succeeded. The advantage you got within one generation is completely erased by the loss of the population within which you were embedded. So the point is, if we really understood the mindset

of the individual in rational evolutionary terms, we would understand that they, in some sense, will be built, they will be wired and programmed to behave in such a way, both to advance their own genetic interests, and to protect the long-term population well-being that allows those genes to circulate, right? No, no. No, what do you mean, Mark? the future and to instantiate in people's brains mechanisms that will be concerned about their evolutionary lineage surviving into the future don't you see me this is just the cicadas they are coming out at weird interval that they do to disrupt predator cycles isn't that just a version of this evolution has a it knows these things right it's just gearing people up for protecting their lineage 20 generations down

yes that's the key point the 20 generations down the line he really does think that there's some way in which some kind of intelligent decision is made that takes into consideration things that can happen hundreds of years in in the future that are a species or a group or however or a lineage can somehow look forward and make some strategic decisions there that's that's that's where it goes crazy i mean the first bit was kind of like a dumbed down version of group selection, right? So in an offhand kind of way, he says the fact that another member of my band has a lot more children than I do doesn't really matter because the really critical thing could be the extinction of the entire band, some generations in the future.

Well, first of all, that's a very cavalier way and a really dumb version of group selection. But it's, I mean, I think you're right that it does capture the dynamics in some sense that, you know, part of that argument, which is that like, if your group develops a better bow and arrow than a competing group, that you may find that they're all killed. And there's a massive selection process and it's associated with like cultural development and whatnot like so individual muscular competition for example would not capture that yeah look i mean that's a theoretically plausible way to describe group selection if hypothetically all of the selection pressure was happening at the group level and there was really no selection pressure happening at all at the selection pressure was happening at the group level and there was really no

selection pressure happening at all at the individual level within groups except that's not true right it actually it actually does matter because your genes don't know about any of that and if your mate there is having 10 times as many kids as you then it's just a mathematical fact that your genes will not be represented in subsequent generations to the degree to which your prolific friends are but that's that's kind of the look we don't want to get into a group selection kin selection no no no i i just mean that you're just failing to appreciate the genius of lineage evolution where it it doesn't matter if they win in one generation because in eight generations lineage evolution is going to come in and and destroy those out competing bastards

and they're like this is how it works they're the cuttle that lineage selection is the cuttlefish of evolutionary theory it's it's so so wily that it's ready to point, but not now, not the next generation. You're playing chess. It's playing like Star Trek seven-dimensional chess. Yeah, that's right. So it's like a really terrible version of group selection. Group selection is okay.

Is it? Is it? Sorry. Brett thinks you're wrong so i guess the point is the group selection i would argue is a temporary misunderstanding of lineage selection but it does a good enough job to allow those who are involved in thinking in a group selected way to see human cultural evolution for what it is and that's where the payoff comes so it's the sorry it's the group selection people cultural evolution people who are the inferior copy of lineage selection sorry i just wanted to correct yes no i stand corrected no, I stand corrected. I stand corrected. Yeah, so what makes it really bad is that he uses this very bad idea

of lineage selection, which doesn't make sense. Like there is no way in which these generations that are separated by hundreds of years have any kind of, it's not a meaningful unit to talk about. But the other really bad bit is when he takes this bad idea and then uses it as a tool to explain a whole bunch of things, which it doesn't. Yeah. So where this ends up going. So like, as we've said, Brett famously tried to explain World War II in lineage selection terms, the dynamics there.

And Dawkins, who was on the stage with him, reacted in horrifying fashion. And Dawkins, who is no stranger to often offering evolutionary explanations for behavior or human social actions. So if he's horrified, you know you've got troubles. But I'll play this clip where Brett explains why lineage selection is actually crucial in this modern environment for us to understand. And the end is a genetic one, even though we're not aware of it. If you look at society, any society, it may look increasingly peaceful, but in part, it's being increasingly peaceful on the inside is strengthening it for

battle with other societies on the outside. And ultimately, we can't play that game forever, right? There are no new continents. Our weapons are too powerful. We are too interconnected. We are all bound together in one experiment. And if we continue to allow a dynamic that brought us here to rule, to govern our behavior, we will extinguish ourselves in short order. So my point is the genes and competition between lineages was good enough to generate all the amazing stuff that's built into humans. It also generated all the horrifying stuff. It is now time for us to choose between them because in some sense, we've run to the end of the tape. We have now gotten to a place where the game that brought us here will be fatal.

So first of all, the United States is not a lineage. What? What a closed mind you have. You're shocking me in this episode with your evolutionary naivety. Can't even conceive of America as a lineage. And what is he talking about with if it's more peaceable on the inside, then that's a strategy to enable it to be a more dangerous aggressor to other groups. Lineage selection, Matt, the way it operates, right?

Many generations ago, it worked out that it would be a country founded in the United States composed of immigrants from a whole bunch of different lineages in different countries. But that doesn't matter because those lineages, they had a synergistic connection and they foresaw that the united states lineage was going to be the master lineage to get there so they they built in these cognitive mechanisms to the people who emigrated to america that they would bind together create this kind of unified society of course you know a couple of civil wars that would be different lineages competing between each other and but in the end they would arrive at this advanced society where they would make technological progress political

progress and that on the outside would seem like a good thing but the lineage was actually gearing up the individuals of that society to destroy the other lineages in the other nations which you know what they were running their own things and those dynamics are going to lead to the destruction because the lineage selection just wants to destroy all other lineages it just wants to be the lineage that rules them all and this is evolution science so your skepticism it's it's just frankly disappointing that you have such a non-scientific approach. The truly sad thing is that even though you speak tongue-in-cheek, I think that was a relatively fair elaboration of what he means

by lineage selection. My God, is there a more stupid idea well should we move on from lineage selection to the well actually this is kind of a sub discussion within lineage selection but they do discuss the potential for us to have rape and genocide modules in the brain, which can be activated by certain societal consequences. This is kind of an evil psych argument. on a scale with lineage selection, but let's have a look at some of the arguments related to rape and genocide. Just for a nice relaxing break. Here, let me talk by analogy.

Let us just say that all of us, because for many reasons, are likely the descendants of women who were raped at some point in history. And we likely all carry the genetic capacity to engage in it as a result. But most men that I spend time with, I believe believe are actually not capable of this and they're not incapable of it because they're genetically incapable they're incapable of it because development took that option off the table can i just have one go here to mention so that at some point ancestors may have been violently coerced into sexual reproduction with someone and that we are the ancestors over the span of evolutionary history. Yes.

Okay, fine. Probably true. specific kind of cognitive module, which was inherited because somebody engaged in that behavior. That's a leap for a start, that there is a kind of inherited rape module that this ancestor possessed that others didn't because there was a coercive sexual act i don't know if you've seen animals and and the way that they meet and whatever but like every chance i get chris every chance i get but like going back in the pre-history thousands of years of ancestors and whatnot modern moral assessments of animal behaviors don't really make sense, right? And it also doesn't make sense to regard it as there's like a one-to-one of that there was a cognitive module which resulted in a behavior that led to something, right? Like there's behavioral flexibility.

led to something, right? Like there's behavioral flexibility. It doesn't mean that there was a cognitive module which will be inherited by all ancestors and can be activated under certain circumstances. What I'm seeing here is this tendency to take at base a very trivial statement, but to spin it out into something that's supposedly controversial and profound, but to spin it out into something that's supposedly controversial and profound, right? So it's completely uncontroversial to say that in terms of our physicality and our biology, that human beings, just like every other animal, are perfectly capable of violence and coercion. Yeah. So what? The second point he makes is that that to a large degree has been, in his words,

taken off the table or suppressed by culture, right? So, yes, we don't live in a Lord of the Flies, walking dead, post-apocalyptic kind of culture where anything goes. We live in a society, as George says on Seinfeld. So that's trivial too. So what is his point? Well, let's see. Maybe Jordan can elaborate on that for you. And so I would say that we protect ourselves against that biological propensity, that genetic propensity, partly through socialization, by bringing aggression under control, especially

in its sexual elements, but also by structuring our society so that we never allow ourselves to go somewhere where those motivations are likely to emerge and also where they wouldn't be immediately punished out of existence. But that can happen. I think you see those sorts of things happen in the midst of riots, for example, where a law-abiding person,, a law-abiding person, a generally law-abiding person will get caught up in the chaotic frenzy and find themselves doing things that they had perhaps never done before. So, I mean, maybe that's just an illustration

of the point you made. Yeah, I mean, that's it. I mean, I'm listening to what they say, and it's presented as if there's something something profound being said but if jordan's saying that most societies um anti-social behavior gets punished yeah they put this spin on it as if they're getting at something profound here but insightful but where is it i can't see it i'll try one more i'll try one more maybe it's the link to genocide that will do it for you um so we don't have that in the case of something like genocide i believe we do need to make all of the uh various thought processes that result in warfare and genocide disgusting so that people do not engage in these behaviors. And, you know, if we don't, I suspect we will see exactly what we are seeing now, which is people playing with the very tropes

that create this impulse, not realizing that in some sense, there is a program latent within humans that when activated creates exactly the um the discontinuous kind of behavior that you see in in chimpanzees when they encounter rival males a program inserted by lineage selection to genocide other lineages if they dare compete yeah sorry sorry but i just i couldn't resist that's right there's this extremely boring version of what they're saying which is just like obvious but it's no coincidence that they've chosen to say well what's the what's the evolutionary basis for these things like rape and genocide these are hot button words hot button concepts it's like they've deliberately done that to inject some kind of forbidden sexiness to what they're talking about when they're saying really trivial things like we should agree that genocide

is bad and we should stigmatize genocide well yeah you know that's and i think it kind of is for the most part i don't hear a lot of pro-genocide rhetoric out there a lot of people just you know making pro-genocide statements and casual conversation so what if anything interesting are they saying well i think you're feeling to appreciate the depth of the culture war because this is in the context of pointing out that the kind of intergroup dynamics that are at play there were people on the opposing political side are seen as not just wrong, but subhuman and fundamentally morally corrupt. is playing with forces that we have seen in history when combined with things like encouraging people to disparage their parents or to view their culture as inherently evil and corrupt that lead to Maoist revolutions and the cultural revolution and so on. And as Michael O'Fallon and James Lindsay have told us,

the eventual capitulation of Western democracies to communist China-style totalitarian dictatorships. These are the forces that we're playing with, and this is what they're worried about. So this is the context, right, that the protests in Portland that Brett is complaining about, he is seeing the glowing embers of societal genocide being found by the woke, not by the anti-woke, I imagine.

So that's, I think that is an accurate presentation of why they are regarding this as, you know, that needs to be talked about, is important to talk about, and that we're playing with fire. We could burn down society with these evolutionary forces that normal people don't even realize are on the table. Right. I see. Okay. Sorry, Matt. So in that case, this kind of ejection of bad bespoke evolutionary theory is totally gratuitous

but you know you have to take into context that this is brett's thing and to a certain extent jordan of course you know this is about taking an evolutionary perspective to understand what's going on society yeah and people like this map because what it does is it takes the current moment in you know political disagreements and protests about the american political system or whatever it may be and it reconfigures it into a much grander more more deep and meaningful forces of light and darkness issue about fundamental human nature and evolutionary forces operating over vast time scales. And whatever the validity to the claims made, and I think we've both highlighted that we're highly skeptical of it, I completely get why this would be appealing for an audience to have the culture war

reconfigured in this light yeah I see what you mean it transmutes their political takes to being really the extension of a very deep appreciation of scientific issues yeah I get it. Yeah. And so to follow up on this a little bit, so that's lineage selection is Brett's grand theory. And Jordan, not to be outdone on this episode, outlines a theory of religion that he's been building up throughout all of his writing and research over the past few decades. And, you know, we've already addressed just how much Jordan is into Christianity, the Bible, religion as a meaning system and source of mythos for the world world we covered it in our jordan peterson episode that he couldn't be more interested in the bible and christianity um yeah if he i don't know if he was i don't have a good analogy if he was thomas aquinas that was a good one yeah um and i've got some clips that illustrate the level of interest so here's the first one um there's a scene in genesis where people become self-conscious their eyes are open

and virtually at the same time so the story goes they become capable of the knowledge of good and evil and it's a very mysterious story but after thinking about it literally for a decade or so, I started to understand, I think, that it's a story about, so what happens is people become self-conscious. They become aware of their nakedness, and they become aware of good and evil. They also become aware of their destined, they're destined to work. And work is something that's relatively unique to human beings. If you think about it as delay of gratification, conscious delay of gratification. I'll give up something now, which is a sacrifice, in order to obtain something of more value in the future. You can spend decades reflecting on passages in Genesis.

So these kind of pooling at religion has led Jordan to something of a revolutionary insight that we often find amongst our gurus. So I know something that I'd like to talk to you about. I have some evolutionary ideas. I've been wrestling with these for a long time about the origins of, I suppose, the origins of religious ideas, the evolutionary origins of religious ideas. By the way, this is my field of research in a sense. Like the cognitive science of religion is heavily into this stuff.

But yes, yes, go ahead. Are you excited to hear what's going are you excited i was just gonna say that this promises great things great things yes and so this is just maybe a point to echo is that they get into this like a little bit we covered it with jordan before but his tendency to have differing definitions for words and his tendency to like be saying something is something and is also not something at the same time, right? Did Jesus rise from the dead? Well, you know, that's a question. What does it mean to rise from the dead?

What is dead in a sense? But so here's him talking about the different definitions for truth. Wow. See, it's dead in a sense. So here's him talking about the different definitions for truth. See, it's ideas like that that motivated, at least in part, the discussions that I had with Sam Harris. Because that's a really good example, assuming that it's valid, and it might be, and it might not be. Like, we can't tell. That's an idea. I just had just had you know the echo there you know it might be true it might not be true we can't tell who knows who knows and actually matt before we get into the revolutionary idea of religion there was a feature in this content that I wanted to highlight, which was the tendency for Jordan and Brett

to basically assert that we don't know anything about a given topic. And they do this a lot. They either say that we don't know the impacts or we don't know anything about its power. So here's Jordan on the incomprehensible power of YouTube. It's perverse beyond comprehensibility, which is sort of the hallmark of a traumatizing experience. Because it is exactly that. And I look at it and I can't get my i can't wrap my mind around it it well and i and also that the uh the my degree of exposure you know when i when i decided to make those videos i was playing with youtube

and i was playing with fire like youtube is fire with fire, like YouTube is fire in a way social media is fire in a way that is unimaginable. It's so powerful. YouTube, we'll see but YouTube demolishes the printing press in terms of, of its long term significance. I mean, because now we can now we can, now you can do with video and audio what you did with print and it's way easier. You have access to a massive audience

with no intermediaries whatsoever. And, you know, I don't know really how to grapple with that either, how to comprehend it. It's kind of ironic given that jordan is someone who's really benefited from the thing that he's talking about you know you read this in the guardian every other week and i'm not saying there's no validity to the point here again it's like it's this style that if you have a point to make but you can turn that point up to 11 yeah what would that sound like and it's unimaginable it's

incomprehensible it's like the fucking prometheus discovering fire right or like i feel like that's the theme for this whole interview which is that they take a trivial observation like social media is changing the information landscape for people and they they turn that up to 11. Or they say, yes, people have the biological propensity and capacity for violence and coercion. And then they turn that up to something grand and earth shattering. But when you just strip it away, there's just nothing extra there. It's just they're making an observation that a million people have made before them matt it's incredible that you could say that it's astonishing that you could have that level of

insight i think to see him but it's just it's unbelievable that you could even you know get those forts into a coherent center so um but let me let me just, what else don't we know anything about, Matt? So we don't know about YouTube. Okay. We don't know what regulates human communication. We know that if you restrict the bandwidth, people don't understand each other as well. But we don't know how communication functions. It's too complicated.

Okay. So we absolutely don't know what happens to communication at a large scale when you restrict people to 140 or 280 characters and then put them in a network with millions of other people. We have no idea. And it could be that you tremendously bias the discourse towards impulsive anger. It looks like that if you look at Twitter. I mean, Impulsive anger. It looks like that if you look at Twitter. I mean, and because it's 140 or 280 characters, you can whip something off very quickly. And so it's almost as if the technology is implicitly commanding you to be impulsively aggressive.

Well, Chris, I'll hazard a guess that there are a great many Twitter users who have an inkling of the effects of Twitter on discourse. We don't know anything about it, what are you talking about yeah like he's right in that obviously new technology is it has these effects the medium does affect the way people interact with each other sure that's totally true but just the the level of hyperbole is uh yeah. Well, Matt, there's that. And then there's the fact that we don't know any of that. And we completely underestimate the power of the technology because it looks harmless. It just sits there on your phone and doesn't do anything.

And so, you know, God only knows what kind of Tower of Babel that is. I feel like I know. I feel like I know. I feel like I know. No, you don't know, Matt. We don't know anything about that. One last one we don't know anything about. Here, let me take an example. The point you make about social media and the human psyche,

you could make exactly the same point about pharmaceuticals and physiology. Oh. That we know very little about the way the body actually works. Yeah, I wonder where that's going to go. That's a surprise that he steered things in that direction. Why does he want to talk about pharmaceuticals, Chris? Yes. Well, we already covered where that goes because it goes into Brett's medical skepticism.

And then eventually the doctors are killing us all in the hospitals in our death factories. Chris, if only Brett's research hadn't been suppressed like that. If only they'd listened to him. He could have prevented all this horror. Well, he's getting round to it now with ivermectin. He's got another roll of the dice. But yes, so that was just a side journey into the world of we don't know anything about various things. Before we were talking about that, we were just getting into JVP's religious takes. He had been thinking about Genesis for some time and I thought his analogy of what that story was meant

to be an analogy of sounded like a pretty fair summary. So he'd made a lot of progress over 10 years of thinking about it. What else has he got going? Well, so here we go. What is religion? What is the hero myth, Matt? What else has he got going? Well, so here we go. What is religion? What is the hero myth, Matt?

Are they the same thing? Hmm. Oh. Hmm. So imagine you have a hierarchy, and the most effective way of moving up that hierarchy across time, so that would be something that's stable across multiple landscapes of selection is whatever moves you up the hierarchy and the reason that that's um that benefits fitness is because the females are more likely to mate with the the more the the males that array themselves

near the top of the hierarchy and so then imagine that we've been in these hierarchies forever, and we've observed successful behavior and have an instinct to admire it, because that instinct to admire it facilitates mimicry. And then imagine that we've learned to mimic multiple aspects of behavior that are associated with reciprocity and fair play that move people up competence hierarchies and so we've evolved our morality has actually evolved to match biologically what's being demanded by the social hierarchy and then we abstract out of that the ideal which is

that pattern of behavior that moves you across the largest number of dominance hierarchies got it i think i think um my brain's in recovery because those are some pretty high level ideas coming through there uh i i think i can do a fair summary of it, which is that the hero myth is a instantiation of a biological reality particularly in the Christian mythos with Christ, is the blueprint, the best blueprint for presumably males, but possibly females as well, to follow in order to move up the hierarchies and increase their chance of meeting. So religion, the Christ myth, it's all tied in with biology and in a fundamental sense it's more true than evolutionary theory such as it exists as a reductive description of biology right so does that mean like so emulating christ is gonna get you laid is that the idea

uh yeah and okay so matt let me let me hit you again with some knowledge and that actually exists in our imagination as a latent religious symbol and then that's filled up by narrative constantly refilled and filled. And the ultimate exemplar of that has religious power. And the awe that that inspires is, if you're thinking about it biologically, is the manifestation of the instinct to imitate. And then you think, okay, then you can take that one step farther. If that's true, that ideal does, in fact, end up being the most effective way to live in the broadest possible sense. And so it's valid. And then you might ask, well, is it objectively valid? And that's a very difficult thing to say, because generally, we're not very good at looking at complex patterns as objective reality we tend to have to reduce things to their material substrate and we can get a grip on what's materially true as we become more and more reductionistic but at those higher levels of

abstraction you know like hierarchies have been around for a very, very long time. It's not unreasonable to assume that there's a characteristic pattern of behavior that moves you up or down a hierarchy. Ah, and scene, yes. That's Jordan Peterson. That is most Jordan Peterson-esque, isn't it? My God, it hurts my brain just figuring out what the hell he's actually saying. You know, sometimes people try to argue with us to some extent that Jordan is not a theological figure. His content is inherently political and stuff, which it is but when you listen to this and the passion with which he speaks it's such a mishmash

of evolutionary psychology and religious belief and like psychology and political values as well it's it's all yeah it's all mixed in there but but isn't this what makes him appealing right isn't this why he's a more interesting character than someone like Brett? Because he has this unique synthesis in a way. Like, yes, he is just, you know, reporting conservative values or whatever. But most people couldn't dress up their admiration for Christ and Christianity in this kind of heady mix of, you know, secular God. Yeah, heady mix of cryptic mysticism yeah i agree it's quite amazing but well look it is a mishmash of all those things but does he do it well because i'm really trying to understand what he's talking about but i'm struggling and failing to figure out

how any of it makes sense it sounds like a word salad of things that aren't really connected. He is an interesting figure, definitely, but it's Deepak Chopra with some evolutionary psychology mixed in. And Matt, we've talked about how Brett was smuggling in teleology to his evolutionary model, and this one does it too. So just listen to this. That's conscience as far as I can tell. And it isn't unreasonable to note that our perceptions of that might be accurate. Now, what that means metaphysically, see, I don't understand that either, because human beings are unbelievably complicated. We have the most complicated nervous systems that there are. Our brains are the most complex structures that we know of, except for other brains. So we are

the most complex thing that we know of. And so we're a pinnacle of sorts. And I'm not saying that evolution is driving towards that pinnacle, but in terms of cognitive elaboration, it has. but in terms of cognitive elaboration it has. So is it unreasonable to propose that the ideal form of that complexity is divine? The universe has been aiming at it since day one in some sense. Yes, in fairness to Brett, we took him to task for the weird reification and teleological stuff that he ejects into evolution with his lineage selection but of course we have to bow to the master which is jordan peterson yeah amazing stuff he does that disclaimer thing of saying i'm not of course i'm not saying that

you know there's a teleological purpose the evolution. But then by the end of the paragraph, he's at, but hasn't the universe been aiming at the pinnacle of the, like, you know, Christ narrative since day one? And you're like, no, that is teleology. It blatantly outlined a teleological claim about, you know, the universe having a name and it being instantiated from the beginning. I mean, it's so transparent, isn't it? Like we've said before that Brett and Eric Weinstein's theories and takes just transparent efforts at self-aggrandizement. Just ways to show that they are more brilliant than everyone else and have this amazing perspective that no one else has. With Jordan Peterson, it's a little bit different. He also does seem to be bending over backwards to bring things to a particular point. But for him, that point is religion. He's a psychologist he's interested in science and talks about these things and sometimes

is accurate but his overriding motivation is to somehow interpret this stuff in such a way that it can be made congruent with his very deep religious and spiritual instincts yeah and there's one contradiction inherent in a lot of this that it gets touched on in the end of this segment, which is that Jordan Peterson and Brett are both highly critical of ideologies. They basically say that, you know, this is part of what is tearing society apart, this devotion to ideologies, not seeing people as individuals. And we may agree with various aspects of that, but they need to carve out this space for religion because religion is supposed to be this beautiful, complex thing. I haven't played that many clips of Brett endorsing what Jordan's saying, but just trust me that he's yes-anding constantly here. And at one point, comparing science is indeed just another form of religion in a way. But here's how Jordan gets around the issue that he wants to complain about ideologies, particularly, you know, communism and fascism to a lesser extent, but also fascism. But how does he deal with the fact that religion

can be conceived as an ideology? That's the right way to put it too because most of this see what to me what's happened is that functional mythology has been replaced by inadequate ideology and the ideology and i wrote about this in beyond order there's a chapter called abandoned ideology i think of ideologies as parasites on a fun on a on a on a religious platform they have their power the power they have is because they derive their power from an underlying mythological narrative structure. But they only tell half the story. If that, that's an idea that's akin to the one that you just... Yeah, so that is interesting, isn't it? So on one hand, religion is not a bad ideology because it's grounded in a deeper metaphysical truth and drive.

And those metaphysical Jungian archetypal truths are themselves derived from biological and evolutionary facts, if you follow their argument. So this is the way in which these things are legitimate and other kinds of ideologies aren't. Yeah, interesting. You know, it completely just big you up, Matt. You previously talked about how, you know, Jordan had a theological substrate model of reality where the core thing was theology or theos or logos or whatever he

called it, but it was a metaphysical reality upon which everything else is lumped. And that's exactly what he says here, right? Like ideologies are parasites under this more fundamental reality, which is instantiated in religious doctrine. So in the end, it all boils down to religion. It's not all religions either. This is the important thing because, like, as we saw in the previous content with Justin, or Justin, or with Jordan,

he ties this back to the Christ myth. The other hero myths in Buddhism or Islamism or islam or whatever they're they're important too but they're not the pinnacle which is the you know christian instantiation of the hero yeah like to sort of dial it back from 11 all the way down to 2 there's this version of this which i think you'd probably uh agree with which is that yes cultural artifacts and including religious ones are often not entirely unconnected with some evolutionary substrate like there's the reason why most religions say you should be cooperative and not cheat not lie not steal not sleep not covet thy neighbor's ass that kind of thing that's one thing

but as you say jordan peterson is really a lot more specific than that it's christianity in christ that's that's the important thing here yeah yeah so anyway you know that's his revolutionary theory of religion and i hesitate to go to it because we've ran quite long and it might be good to wrap up. But let's just briefly talk about the other revolutionary theory, which is a synthesis of both their perspectives. And this is on the issue of identity and the current debates around trans stuff. So Brett's component of this relates to the world that we exist in now, the postmodern online world, and the dynamics that this creates for people. So let's hear first Brett building up the foundation, then Jordan's going to add in some more.

Obviously, there's no such thing in the physical world you can transition you can take hormones or blockers you can get surgeries but no no man has ever become a woman and reproduced in a female way? So the point is the physical world has all kinds of constraints that come from physics and biology, which do not translate to the online world. And for people like you and me, for whom the online world is an add-on world, we think, well, obviously real life is the important one. And then the online thing has some interface with it, which is frightening, but we understand how they relate. But if you reverse these two things, then what you get is a generation that it's problem solving mind says, actually, of course, you can transition,

you can transition, and then it is everybody's obligation to live by who you've told us you are and anybody who doesn't is a bad person and what has to be true for that to be the case right so you've got the first pillar that identity in the postmodern world is online you're able to be whatever you say you are and so this doesn't accord in the real world But if you're brought up in the modern era, your real world is partly online. So this is Brett's theory for why we've seen a rise in people identifying as trans or non-binary. A loud minority that their determination of their identity take primacy is, first of all, of their identity take primacy is, first of all, it's just, it's wrong, technically, I think, because an identity isn't merely what you feel you are. An identity is way more complicated than that, as any decent social constructionist should already know. An identity is a role,

a set of complex roles that you negotiate with other people so that you can thrive across a very long span of time. And it can't be something that you impose on other people because then they won't cooperate with you. Now, you might say that you have a right to impose certain aspects of it on other people, and you could have a reasonable debate about that, but identity is definitely not merely what you feel it is, And it's certainly not merely what you feel it is moment to moment. That identity is actually much more like that of a three or four year old child. And I mean this technically, it's not an insult. So when you're a child,

you pick up one identity after another and play with them. I think there's good components here where Jordan is talking about the construction of identity is not just an individual thing. It's also socially, like partially socially constructed by how other people treat you. And I think that's true. Like we can even see that in the way that, you know, most in the IDW identify as liberal, but are they seen that way by the outside world? identify as liberal but are they seen that way by the outside world so self-identification in this case in like political terms is not all that matters in terms of how you are perceived

in the world that's true yeah yeah sure so if he's saying that identity is complicated and it's more than simply proclaiming some kind of category membership that it's socially constructed or whatever that sounds fair enough i suppose yeah so this leads to a discussion of developmental process and three stages of identity formation if we take this model that i think you and i are agreeing on here about the fact that the and i i like your point here here that there are three stages you've got. I assert my identity independent of the world than the world. And I negotiate over what my actual identity is. And then I'm not an apprentice anymore.

And I get to be who I am in the adult world, having been informed by that process. And you imagine that you've got generations now, one and a half of them, maybe, for whom the online environment was so compelling, and so much the source of most of their affirmation, that its rules have become sacrosanct to them. And those rules really do look like, you know, it's a childish world, right? You join some community of people. You tell them who you are. There are rules about them having to respect who you've told them. You know, it is, if I say I'm Pocahontas, who are you to say I'm not, right? All right.

So, there's already a couple of things, like, you have to push back on, which is, one, nobody's saying that identity isn't complicated. No one would say that just because you identify as gay, then nobody's saying that identity isn't complicated. No one would say that just because you identify as gay, then you're saying that is literally all you are and that there is no other facets to your identity, right? That's the first obvious rejoinder. The second one is with some of those identities, like being gay, it does amount to your personal preference. It doesn't really matter what other people think about that. That does seem to be something. Like if you identify as a scientist, say, and you haven't actually done any research work

or published any papers, then I think society is qualified to comment on you taking on that identity. But with other ones, it really is just how you feel and that's all there is to it. There's this part where they're talking about playing with identities and how there's a part of childhood where this takes place and then it comes to an end, right? You're no longer able to pretend that you're Pocahontas or Captain Hook or whatever.

The real world asserts itself and you have to accept that there are limitations to your fantasies. And here's one of the contradictions of this model. So first of all, Brett is suggesting that that stage continues on and comes to subsume the real world in the postmodern online world, because we never give up this fantasy stage. We're stuck in like a kind of regression where we don't deal with the realities. And here's Jordan kind of riffing on that point. And so I see a fair bit of this as delayed fantasy play with the kind of pathology that comes up when you delay a necessary developmental stage. Now, that could be wrong, you know, and probably is, but still, it looks to me like that's part of what's happening.

It's very strange to see this insistence. Like, I just, it's so conceptually unsophisticated. Even the hypothesis that identity is only what you feel that it is. I really feel like he's talking about gamers because really. Gamer gear. It all comes back to gamer gear. I mean, this is your first-person fantasy role-playing game, level 13 paladin or whatever it may be but it's then he's not they're not talking about gamers are they they're talking about who are they they're certainly talking

about trans people but they're also talking about are they talking about gay people as well i don't know who that exactly who they're referring to no it's i think it's primarily trans people or non-binary people gay people tend to get a pass because they did it right. They bent to society's norms to some extent, and that's why they were allowed to enter the marriage sphere and that kind of thing. But to me, Matt, there's an inherent paradox in this claim, right? Because on the one hand, you're saying modern Gen Z people, they have these extended adolescence, which are facilitated by the online environment. And this leaves their identity in flux, right? But one, if the whole point is that you need opportunities to engage this fantasy

play, if that's true, they have had more opportunities than any other generation, right? Like this is their theory that the online world gives them the ability to exercise those muscles a lot. So they should get it out of their system if they have an unlimited resource where it can be whatever they want, purple dragons, unicorns, whatever you want, people will accept it. And I think the other thing that I would push back on is two things. The online environment is not this world of everybody is willing to agree with you and whatever you assert, everyone will be happy to hold your hand and say it's right. Like, no, I don't know which fucking online world they're in. That's not the one I've operated in. And secondly, even if that were true and it were the case that now there's a greater tolerance

for identity fluidity because of online dynamics. Okay, let's accept that premise. Generation Z people are coming to dominate the world because of simple demographic realities. If their new cultural values are such that they accept that identity is fluid, sexuality is not a binary and so on, and these are the cultural norms that they instantiate across societies, then what's adaptive becomes to play by their rules, not to play by the rules of the 1950s or 60s because those people are dead. The new rules of social engagement would be different from what has come previously because, as Jordan says, the online environment is a greater change than the printing press. So new social dynamics emerging. So I see there's this inherent contradiction where even if the dynamics

are what they say, in some sense, they aren't the people who can argue that this isn't better for the world. And I'm talking purely about, you know, their logic. Yeah, yeah. Now, I had a similar thought, which is that they wouldn't dispute that this is the new world we live in now, right? It's a digitally mediated world. And let's take that point as a given and say that, yes, it does permit people to be far more flexible in their identities, allow them to basically live their lives in a form of extended play, according to them. Well, that's the reality, guys. That's the new world. And they clearly feel this is bad. That's the new world.

And they clearly feel this is bad. But, and this is kind of my luxury space communism thinking, I suppose, but like from just purely basic liberal reasoning, the idea is that we want to promote people's autonomy and individuality and ability to essentially do whatever the hell they want as long as they're not hurting anybody else and if your technology facilitates that then you're maximizing individual freedom and this is you know extreme liberalism and i don't know wokeism or whatever sort of comes together in luxury space communism which is you, bring it on, bring on the glands where we can secrete drugs into our own systems and have any kind of mental experiences we like, you know, be able to change our bodies at will. You know, all of that is promoting autonomy, right? And yes, it doesn't

fit very nicely with 1950s culture, but it's not the 1950s anymore. Yeah. And Matt, there's another element here where I think there's a very personal contradiction in this narrative about accepting that society constrains and pushes back for you, that you get the feedback from society and the community, and you should adjust what you do if you're getting feedback that's consistently telling you you're wrong. So who do we know that doesn't heed those signals? So let's just hear that point raised. Well, all right. So I want to link this back up to what you said before about the three stages. So my experience as a scientist is that my most valuable characteristic is the ability to be completely indifferent to the prevailing wisdom on a given point, right? And I think this is-

No personal stake in it. Sorry, they're going to go on, but you get the point, right? Brett is able to ignore all of the societal signals that he's wrong. Well, we've heard before. Look, I could be getting him mixed up with Eric, but one of them has said how they derive so much personal pleasure from knowing that everyone else is wrong and only they are privy to the truth

and completely disregarding all of that feedback from society. But I'm just hung up with the way it began, which was as my experience as a scientist. But that's where my finger went up. I don't know why you would take any issue with that. I'm just being snarky. We'll let it go. We'll let it go.

Yeah. Well, okay. So have we highlighted good things that they said? There is a little folder I have titled Potential Good Stuff. So let me just rummage around in there to try and finish on maybe some positive notes. So one thing is we've talked about the parasociality element with our gurus. And there's this clip where they reference it. And I think they're almost getting that.

They're almost getting it. So listen to this. Whereas social media increasingly fools the mind into, you know, the interaction you and I are having is more or less a face to face interaction. But a lot of interactions that look like face to face interactions don't have these characteristics. And at best, the impact on the mind is arbitrary. So, you know, we're watching things like amplifiers of threat. And, you know, this goes back to the thing we were discussing earlier. Of course, Brett's not including himself as an amplifier no no it's hard for me to find something nice to say because they touch on interesting topics and they make them dumb kin selection

and group selection and they make it dumb talking about lineages and nonsense and oh matt how what are you talking about that's the degree to which religion reflects adaptive and pro-social universal impulses is an interesting topic but jordan peterson makes that dumb and and here they're touching on the they're touching on the impact of social media and making people catastrophize and so on that's's an interesting topic as well. And the degree to which online interactions like the one we're having now may well detach people from the physical world and encourages more and more to think of ourselves as kind of flexible avatars inhabiting a digital space. That's an interesting topic, but they don't deal with any of these topics very well, in my opinion. It's been a couple of weeks since we listened to this.

So now I'm more focused on the clips we've played rather than what I heard before. But it's hard for me to find stuff that was good or just interesting. Well, Matt, I'm going to play you another clip because I think Brett psychoanalyzes his family dynamic very nicely here. But he doesn't quite apply the insight. But I think this actually gives good insight into the Weinsteinian world that we often find ourselves playing in. So listen to this. I may even have a personal stake. I may come up with an idea that compels me that it's probably right a hypothesis and i may advance it and have every

single one of my peers say that's garbage and my sense is not one of oh crap i've said something bad my sense is well wouldn't that be delightful if i'm as right as i think i am then the fact that everybody else doesn't get this makes it even even better right um so my point is that's not normal i know that's not normal and it's not normal for evolutionary reasons that are easy to understand it takes a lot of training to accomplish that yes or a developmental environment that rewards it right sure if you have if you have the right experience but then again you know you said yourself again at the beginning of this conversation, think about the preconditions for that is that in order to open yourself up to that sort of criticism, you have to be supported in all sorts of ways. he's getting it that he realizes he's an outlier but he sees it in a positive sense as opposed to seeing it as like a level of self-confidence that is entirely unwarranted but jordan is also

identifying the point that the reason brett is able to take that position is because he's been encouraged to see himself as a revolutionary figure and had the developmental environment which encouraged that perspective yes yes yes i know he's so close chris so close to a correct diagnosis of what's going on here yeah yeah galileo chris i have to refer to this recent article by heifer haying in aereo where she straight up makes a direct comparison between themselves and their theories about ivermectin and the dangers of vaccines and the lab leak hypothesis as being against the orthodoxy and everyone says they're crazy and directly comparing themselves to Galileo and Louis Pasteur. So I guess that would feel good.

I bet that does feel good to think of yourself as one of those people. Yeah, maybe, maybe. I don't know. I don't know why that would stroke your ego bone. But, well, look, Matt, we've danced in Jordan and Brett's evolutionary garden. Their psychological fairy tale stories, the mythos of the universe instantiated in two podcasts. We have eaten from the forbidden fruit of knowledge.

And Christ-like, we've sacrificed ourselves to this. 40 days and 40 nights. That's what it's felt like. Yeah. We're so high up the hierarchy at this point that we may be careful not to be mobbed by women on the way home after this level of insightful analysis. But yeah, so shall we turn to our final thoughts on this epic collision of galaxy brains in the night? These two great minds.

Galaxy Brins and the Night. These two great minds. I think I just said it before, which is my take on this is that they touch on some topics that could have been interesting. I wasn't expecting to necessarily agree with very much, but, you know, I've settled for interesting, Chris. But once you strip away a lot of the fancy language, then what is there interesting that we heard in this episode? I'm struggling to even find a single thing. I think perhaps noting that social media does provide these avenues for

virtualization and to inhabit avatars. That's potentially interesting, but I just don't feel I dispensed with any of these topics in a very interesting way that's my take okay yeah you know i i might maybe i'm less harsh today because i get some enjoyment from jordan's various elaborate constructions of theories and like he's not always completely obvious like he layers in these religious aspects and ties it to conservative values in a way that i don't like but i you know his speculation is like somewhat entertaining for me and i i think like he does have insightful takes sometimes like i i'll happily go on record saying i find him more interesting than I find most of the other IDW bobbleheads that we have.

I find him more sympathetic too, to be honest, as I said at the beginning. I don't know what it is. It's kind of a gut feeling kind of thing. But at some level, I feel a degree of sympathy with him. And yeah, you know what? I'll walk back a little bit of what I said because I do agree with you, Chris.

I mean, he is interesting like even when he's saying something just so nonsensical really like that for instance his his theory once once you figure out what he's saying he's basically proposing christian religion is not an ideology it's actually tapping into these deep truths that are fundamentally based in these archetypes which are themselves based on evolutionary truths now that's completely wrong right but it is interesting i'll grant him that yeah but well so after giving them that little nod i will say that i think this last secret clip, which I have available to me, is actually what this interaction is mostly about. All of this content that we've been looking at. I think this sums up more the dynamics at play than all of these theories that we've took apart.

Well, you look good, man. And you look, if you don't mind me saying, you look different than you did when I saw you before. Well, I'm older now. Well, but I've noticed this in my clinical clients. When they integrate their aggression, their faces harden. They look determined all of a sudden instead of questioning. And you look like that more than you did. Now, some of that's from getting older, but not all of a sudden instead of questioning and you look like that more than you did now some of that's from getting older but not all of it it's well i think uh you know if i'm understanding you correctly it's probably a lot about um you know getting catapulted into the big leagues and learning to, to play that role.

It's, um, you know, it's trial by fire, but, uh, certainly it's been fascinating and, um,

looking forward to seeing what comes next. He looks well. Famous last words. The gurus for your divorce, my, it requires that your takes be hotter your ideas be grander your theory is more revolutionary and brett and jordan in different ways are victims as much as beneficiaries of what modern guru dynamics require yeah They live up to them. And when they interact together, there's explosive theories that emerge

and will float back into the darkness and have no impact on scientific literature in generations to come. But I would say that because my lineage is doomed. The Irish-Japanese lineage is doomed. No, yeah, just me personally, the Kish japanese lineage is doomed now yeah just me personally the kavana lineage that's just we're we're doomed lineage so you know that's where my pessimism comes from it is it's evolutionary and so that's a cognitive module sorry matt no no no i agree with you that with you there that's all right i'm going down with you. But that's okay. Well, I guess I just say, Chris,

you're also looking remarkably well integrated these days. I just noticed that about you. Just think about your physiognomy. I don't know how to say that. I've never learned how to say it. Do you know how to say it? Mark, I noticed that. But that you saw that.

It's extraordinary. I just want to say, Mark that you saw that. It's extraordinary. I just want to say, Matt, it's unbelievable. We don't even know about my appearance and why it can be like this. We don't have the science to describe it. We don't have the words. We don't have the metaphorical language so that you can perceive that. Let me just finish by saying it's it's truly extraordinary that's all that's all i'll say uh on that shocking note now we've yeah we've had our

fun so goodbye jordan goodbye brett we'll see you again hopefully not too soon. Bye. Yeah. So, Matt, let's do our little bit, you know, our business at the end of the podcast. Let's wind things down, get off these heady highs that we were at and mention to people, first of all, as we said up top, maybe we didn't, maybe it was in a different podcast. In any case, we're going to be channeling our energies into the personal guru sphere. We're taking on Anthony DeMello, the Jesuit, the Christian mystic, who is a personal hero of mine,

or at least was an influential guru back in the day. We're going to look at some of his content next and hopefully have some nice things to say, as well as probably breaking my heart in the process but yeah let's let's go back and beat up teenage chris the largan prayer well i think the good thing is when we we start covering these people that have that are not characters in the culture wars and people i've never heard of that's going to be the real test of our podcast chris if people keep listening despite that then i really feel like we've made it now they'll like it matt they'll

like it some of our best episodes are unexpected figures if it turns out that anthony de bello has got involved in the culture war i'll be very upset especially since he died i think like 15 years ago or something but maybe he's been reinterpreted reinterpreted by a a new generation so i hope he's not in covid denialism territory that would just be yes let's hope he's not making any embarrassing tweets we'll see yes we will but speaking of embarrassing tweets, we have embarrassing reviews. Oh, good. Great. Great segue there. One of them, I feel you did this to us. Our most recent review, a one star, Bayes didn't die for this by final anti-negativist. This has a philosophical twang to it. I don't know. I get like a contrarian philosopher online and energy from it and it it reads matt so-called said in a recent episode that there is never 100 certainty with

anything disgusting theorems have probability one on pain of incoherence cannot believe they let children listen to this filth. One star. What's this about, Matt? Yes, I think I did dare Last Positivist, a.k.a. Liam Bright, if that is indeed his real name, to make that review. I dared him because he said it on Twitter, and he did, with the one-star review, so hats off to him for that. However, I will say that I think he's making a fundamental mistake that all philosophers make which is that they mistake their the little contraptions they make in the platonic arena of forms which can indeed be analytically derived

to be true or not true they mistake that for science chris they mistake that for the real world and we know that gravity works around where we are we know it fits the theory very nicely but we don't know that in the androgynous galaxy that the gravity works exactly the same way we have that degree of caution we have that degree of humility and that's something that i think philosophers couldn't really understand induction chris induction i mean that's probably not a word that liam would be familiar with but uh he should read up on it i agree astonishing astonishing those insights that's all i'll say it's blown my mind um and moving on to i'm gonna read two positive reviews because i i enjoy both of them and they're short. So the first one is A Winding Path for Me by ThatDude6969.

My route to, these guys are great. I need to get that back. My route to finding them was a strange one and it started with Sam Harris. Sam Harris, the Helen Pluckrose, to Ione Italia, to Aaron Rabinowitz, to Chris and Matt. You can probably trace the arc of my politics along the way interesting that's interesting yeah I think he's he's bending

out of Aaron right like unless we're more woke than Aaron like what I'm getting from that is that we're the final destination for politics we're like we're like the resting state like maximum maximum entropy like the heat death of the political universe we are the null hypothesis of politics and this one is from muscle master i believe you know him well matt and you're awful groveling at the feet of him i i believe i've heard, but he loves this podcast. And he says he highly recommends it. The hosts with their posh British accents spend each episode talking about a guru with stellar insight of our culture.

Every episode gives me a great new podcast, Twitter to subscribe to. I think that the hosts are the true gurus of great listening taste. Oh, very good. So we're the gateways to all of the people we can. We are. We're just giving people a smorgasbord of people to follow.

That's our role in this world, Matt. And I endorse that entirely. Follow everyone that we cover. They're all great. Their insights are amazing. That's the message of this podcast, if ever there was one. This is good. That was a good This is good.

That was a good nagging review. And last, Matt, is our shout-outs to our own parasocial cadre of people, the Revolutionary Guard of the Decoding Universe, the patrons. That's right, the listeners suckling at the teat of our parasociality. Lovely. Suckling at the teat of our parasociality. Lovely. Unfortunately, I have randomly picked up the Excel sheet, which doesn't have any highlights of people we've shouted out. So I'm going to use my crazy wisdom to select people randomly on this

that I'm pretty sure we haven't shouted out. So this will be new people. It will be old people. Good luck. Good luck, everyone. So first off, I'm going to thank David Biasotti, who is a conspiracy hypothesizer. Every great idea starts with a minority of one. We are not going to advance conspiracy theories.

We will advance conspiracy hypotheses. There you go. Thank you, David. Much appreciated. Next, a revolutionary genius this time, Ayman Singh. Maybe you can spit out that hydrogenated thinking and let yourself feed off of your own thinking. What you really are is an unbelievable thinker and researcher, a thinker that the world doesn't know. And yeah, why don't we mix things up? I'm getting, you know, good vibes from the universe. So Lisa McLaughlin, Sharna Perez, Adam Session, all of them,

those three guys, conspiracy hypothesizers. It's a popular tier. Is it the cheapest tier? Those three guys, conspiracy hypothesizers. It's a popular tier. It's a popular tier. Is it the cheapest tier? What does money matter in the guru sphere? It doesn't, it's, you know, such materialistic concerns. No, they clearly identified with the highest tier. The highest tier. You know, they just identify whatever they want. They're conspiracy hypothesizers.

I think everyone should learn to identify with the highest theory because that would that would keep their identity more in keeping with reality and the reality in which we totally deserve ten dollars a month luxury space communism hey the only extent so far it seems well anyway conspiracy hypothesizers a lot of you enjoy every great idea starts with a minority of one we are not going to advance conspiracy theories we will advance conspiracy hypotheses and there we are yeah done for today what else is there to say any any last what is there there's nothing to say we have to we have to feed in the outro music the outro music is coming in right now it's beginning to swell it's building to a crescendo and i've already made the muscle master joke do i dare do it again

do i go for another astonishing praise your intellect i i've made all my jokes i'm out i'm i'm running on empty i have a confession to make is that i i've never gotten the reference to the muscle master i don't know who the muscle master is i don't know why you say it it baffles me but i just haven't said anything up until now maybe if you went back and listened to our content carefully matt you would understand the reference what uh do i put you out of your misery well yes i see you much like you know a a small child pulling at the coattails of the emperor to say, you know, bestow on me your wisdom, O Solomon. of jp sears and i forget his name but the navy seal guy that is also a bit of a like idw type that they had this dynamic and that jp was kind of you know groveling at the food oh that's right i remember now okay i get it i was very ticked clearly clearly okay well that so i said i'm gonna make that reference i'm not gonna explain it to anyone you

said ha ha ha what a good idea and your old man mind has just uh failed you once again so here i am young spriteful youthful brain just sending you the package of knowledge there you go matt free of charge thank you i feel less baffled and confused now thank you i appreciate it you're very respectful to your elders i appreciate that that. Wow. In a beautiful way. Well, Mark, it's been great. We're going to love you and leave you. See you in the next Guru Night. See you later.

Adios. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. so by the way don't don't check your reply guys oh we're recording my reply guys what i was just gonna say don't check twitter to be distracted and annoyed so see now now now you're doing exactly the thing i told you what no i'm not yeah let's ignore it i don't know which