Decoding the Gurus - Interview with Manvir Singh on Gurus & Shamans

Episode Date: November 17, 2022

We are back with another academic-themed interview with the evolutionary/cultural/cognitive anthropologist Manvir Singh. That's right two anthropologists from the same relatively obscure field on the same podcast but don't hold that against Manvir, we promise he's much more insightful than Chris!Indeed, Manvir joins us to share his expertise on Shamanism and to examine whether there are any significant parallels between Shamans and Gurus. Along the way, you will gain new esoteric knowledge into things such as the differences between prophets, gurus, and shamans; whether evolutionary anthropology is all bunk; and the importance of linguistic and kinetic performances for generating credibility and authority. Matt was absent during the interview so he could not keep Chris' tangents in check but he does participate in the ever-extending discussions in the intro and outro segments. Here you will discover the respective grievances that our hosts have been mongering, as well as how Matt deals with some critical feedback from disgruntled psychoanalysts!In short, there is something for everyone. So open your third eye and join us on an ecstatic spirit flight as we reveal the secret cosmic mysteries of the modern gurus (for those brave enough to listen).LinksManvir's (2018) BBS article on ShamanismManvir's article in Wired (2022) The ‘Shamanification’ of the Tech CEOFollow up Twitter thread on the evidence for fasting benefitsManvir's Aeon article (2022): The idea of primitive communism is as seductive as it is wrongManvir's WebsiteBen Shapiro: Politics, Kanye, Trump, Biden, Hitler, Extremism, and War | Lex Fridman Podcast #336Matthew Remski's thread on the DiAngelo Episodeand_furiouser's thread on the DiAngelo Episode

Hello and welcome to Decoding the Gurus, the podcast where a psychologist, Matthew Brown, and a cognitive anthropologist, Christopher Kavanagh, are from Australia. He's from Northern Ireland, a long time ago. Let me start again. What? No, that was good. You called me a cognitive anthropologist. I, let me start again. What? No, that was good. You called me a cognitive anthropologist. I was very happy with that.

That's right. But there's a lot of little bits I have to mention. I've got to get it in the right order. And if I mix it up, it gets confusing. You think all the people will, like, they'll get all angry and just turn off the podcast now? Yes, they expect me to get it right. They have expectations about the spiel.

They like the spiel. They get upset when it changes.. They have expectations about the spiel. They like the spiel. They get upset when it changes. That was 90% of the spiel. What was the missing bit? I think all of the jigsaw pieces were there, but they didn't quite connect together in the way they were meant to. That's okay. That's okay.

Everyone knows. You know what's going on. Everyone knows who we are. You know who he is. You know who I am. And I'm not that long out of Northern Ireland, Matt. Let's just be clear. It's not that long ago. Really? It's not that long out of northern ireland matt let's just be clear it's not that long ago it's not that long ago okay so you're still connected to your roots you know

that's right i'm still chris from the block you don't like me it's like generations ago so i've like been officially you know de-membered i'm no longer a part of the club, the Irish club. I'm still like, no, I will say I got chipped because of the Dylan Moran thing. I read a thread in Reddit about that. Yeah, I read it. The Irish, they're revolting as they tend to do because they're saying, I'm wrong. In Ireland, we call them Dylan Moran. Moran, yeah. Morin. But do

we? Well, actually, there's a question because I'm not, I don't know, but maybe I'm not doubting the Southerners, which Dylan Morin is one of about his pronunciation of his name. But is that what we call him in northern ireland that's the question well you know what i'm actually going to check this with my dad because i'd completely forgotten this but i actually have morans morons in my family tree right there are there are relatives up there in the family tree that i remember my grandparents and parents and uncles

or whatever referring to and i just like it clicked when i read that in the reddit thing i remember them referring to them as morons morons not morons like like family you have a family history of morons it's like i've overthought it now, but it's pronounced like Aaron, like Moran, Moran. Moran. Yeah. No, that sounds right. Yeah, and I never made the connection.

It's like these incidents existed in different parts of my brain. And so I'm going to do an experiment, right? I'm not going to tell my dad anything. I'm just going to ask him. Oh, that's a good idea. And I check i'll check this chris oh and look i'm not saying that being from belfast that i can just use that to say my dialect is a weird part of belfast that's that's how we pronounce it i'm not saying i would strategically use that to deflect the criticism, but, you know, maybe some people in Belfast pronounce it a different way. It's possible.

Who knows? Who knows? Only people from Belfast would know that. But, like, I'm pretty sure I've heard Moran, Moran. I've heard Moran. Now that sounds right. I don't know. It's funny.

Yeah, it does. Like, you've heard it too. Like, I've heard it, and I sounds right. I don't know. It's funny. Yeah, it does. Like, you've heard it too. Like, I've heard it and I never really connected it with the spelling. Like, it's just something I heard. Anyway, look, there's no doubt. You Northerners do have different accents from the South. That's right. There is no doubt.

I've heard Liam Neeson. I've heard Liam Neeson before. I know what Liam Neeson sounds like. I've watched, like, The Wind That Shakes the Barley and other... That's another one. I got confused that Liam Neeson was not... I thought he was Southern Irish. I can't

trust me about anything. Yeah, so... Well, anyway, that was one piece of feedback dunking on you or me or both of us. It's unclear. The Irish maybe as an ethnic group. But there was another piece of feedback from our recently very well received Robin DiAngelo episode, Matt, and it's directed mainly to you, so I thought it's important that we cover it.

And there were two of them actually, one through our Patreon and one via email. actually, one through our Patreon and one via email. And I suspect that there may be a confounding professional aspect to these, but let me read out one to you, what they want to say. One point in the parallels you drew between D'Angelo's understanding of systemic races and psychoanalysis. You failed to recognize the critical distinction. While there are central psychoanalytic developmental narratives that are considered common to everyone, even if they differ across various schools, someone working from that point of view would make no claims about the ubiquity of disorders in that development because they are not ubiquitous. An analyst does not preach about the inherent moral feelings of development to every poor

soul who walks into their office. Rather, he or she aims to help particular people if problematic dynamics happen to be relevant to the trouble they're describing. As I understand it, D'Angelo insists that every white person suffers from racism just by existing. There is no possibility that the white person could naturally develop as anything other than a racist because they are born into an inherently bad system in which the problem coincides with living. In contrast, the psychoanalytic point of view maintains that normal development leads to normal people.

The Oedipal conflict, for instance, is automatically resolved by most people in early childhood. That's the default. Only when there is evidence of some disruption in the form of symptoms is there a hypothesis that development somehow went awry. Psychoanalytic theory does not assert, to paraphrase Robin DiAngelo, that nothing exempts me from the forces of an Oedipal conflict in adulthood, because normal development is that exemption. So Matt said it best mid-pod, white fragility is pseudo psychoanalytic. And they acknowledge that maybe at some time in analytic history, there would have been

stronger parallels, but not today, Matt. Not today. And that's from Matthew Zimmerman. i think a very well argued case um so would you agree yes yes yes yes if you make me force me to be fair and everything like that of course of course i know those things i know those things i don't like psychoanalysis i don't like psychoanalytic theory mainly just because i don't think it's a parsimonious explanation for things i think it's a bit of a historical thing it can be a useful frame for therapy i bet there's a lot of useful frames for therapy you know i got the same problem with unionism it's just a bit too humanities kind of go with your feelings vibe i will say that i

think that the you know the id the superego the ego the you know those sorts of general ideas like it's an important part of psychological history and i think some of the insights there are good i just think it's been superseded by you know some other less literary more sciencey psychology so that's my prejudice right i'm just putting my cards on the table but i do want to acknowledge the key point that he's making which is that psychoanalysts don't assume that every single person that walks through the door has an oedipus complex but i was like my very restrictive analogy was just that you know this has been a problem that's been pointed out with psychoanalytic theory as a

theory not as a therapeutic technique but as a scientific theory which is that you're seeking to test whether or not the theory is valid then you do some sort of experiment you do you collect some sort of evidence and you see whether or not the thing is supported and you know a problem that has been identified not just by myself but by others is that if you get evidence for it then if there is confirmed if you see like a distinct lack of evidence for it then there's the potential to say oh well that's because it's being suppressed etc so that was the only analogy i was drawing i realized i was being a little bit unfair and i have a prejudice against psychoanalysis i'm sorry so what's happened there is that your apology has boomeranged

into a damning critique of the empirical basis for psychoanalytic approaches. I'm quite impressed with that. But look, we can't stop

him from dunking on psychoanalysis. It's 20 percent of his personality um so i've although you argued cogently uh matthew zimmerman look look look matthew think of it this way you know how in psychoanalytic theory people have like you know some people not everybody but some people have sort of psychological psychic energy trapped at various developmental stages that's like me but with psychoanalysis i've psychological, psychic energy trapped at various developmental stages. That's like me, but with psychoanalysis. I've got some psychic energy trapped in antagonism towards psychoanalysis.

And, you know, until I resolve these issues, the dunks are going to keep coming. That's right. That's right. And our Patreon commenter, who I will not mention in case they want to remain anonymous because I'm always bad at remembering that. I'll end up casting myself as a defender of analysis, which is not my role, but I have my own criticisms of that. But, you know, I will say that I'm a little bit on board

with the more that I look at the gurus with the unresolved issues with childhood and development playing a part in adults' lives, at least I think the gurus could be well-served by some sessions with a psychoanalyst. So, yeah, there's something to it, Matt. There's something there. They all have these narratives. No, I, there's something to it, Matt. There's something there. They all have these narratives. No, I think there is. I mean, you know, like I said, I've got a prejudice against it because I'm very much on the buttoned-down scientific kind of thing.

But that's not to say there isn't utility in metaphor and in that more expansive, extravagant, literary, elusive, metaphorical way of looking at things. And yeah, you know, I think people get inspired by different things and we all need frameworks to navigate stuff. We have, look, we're having a little opening segment now about psychoanalysis and our encounters with it. And I will mention that even in the anthropological realm, some people apply, attempt to apply

psychoanalytic approaches to like historical material and that kind of thing. I'm very dubious. Ghanav OBS-Ekere did it with Captain Cook. And I'm not sure I buy all of his analysis of what was going on there. And the same way, like our friend Jordan Peterson adopts a Jungian framework. And the same way, like, our friend Jordan Peterson adopts a Jungian framework. Not exactly Freudian, but we've all seen the issues that can come from that. So, you know, that's all we're just saying.

We're just saying. That's it. I think a good compromise middle of the road resolution here is to say that, look, sometimes it might be abused. It might be abused. It might be. Yeah, it is. It might be. It is. it could be well it's uh or or or this is just evidence of our repressive our fragility

well i was gratified to see that relatively few people did accuse us of what my fragility in our critiques of d'angelo i was gratified though to see that at least some people did say that i'm glad to i would have been disappointed if someone hadn't said it was like a podcast just demonstrating my fragility like it's such a low-hanging pinata somebody should have just smacked it open and they they did so i was gratified to see that as well yeah um we got some good feedback from someone we both like on Twitter. Furious and Furiouser is how I remember them from Twitter. Now they're currently called parody Elon Musk parody account, which is pretty much. Topical.

Yeah, very topical and all power to them for that. But they made some great comments about something that we might have missed or glided over a little bit, which was that they noticed that D'Angelo did seem to be making a few different points that sounded an awful lot like deepities. And we've talked about deepities before, but we didn't really talk about it a lot in relation to D'Angelo. But a couple of quotes she's made there, which is that, for example, whiteness has meaning, even if you don't think it does i don't need to understand racism for it to be valid nothing exempts you from the forces of racism i mean these are kind of are they

true are they not it's kind of hard to say but it does sound a little bit like deepak chopra and i thought that furious and furious made a pretty good point there about the dbds because i i sort of i was a bit distracted by the other stuff and I don't think I really thought about how they were a bit Deepak Chopra-esque. I think that's their username rather than their actual name. I'm not sure. They're an internet figure, I can't account. They're an entity.

What is Furious and Furiouser? What are they, Matt? Who are they? I assume they're a collective there are a number of ferrets construct a construct ferrets in a suit that's what i that's right yes and and there was also a good thread done by a friend of the podcast and host of conspirituality matthew remski riffing on the episode and and talking about the you know dynamics relating to his work and experience you know with cultish dynamics and it was i thought it was really good as well so maybe we'll stick in the links to both of their threads so people can check it out

before twitter goes down in flames yeah yeah i think overall just the general vibe i get from people's responses to it and we weren't very concerned about this about releasing this one we weren't concerned about blowback or anything because we thought would you know we have something of a reputation for being critical yes but i think even handedly critical against bullshit wherever we feel that we see it and if we do say so ourselves if we do say right or wrong but i don't think we're perceived as political agitators um which is accurate in my in my view you're so wrong but uh like you just don't pay enough attention on reddit to the like idw folk some people really think we're just but no actually they're wrong because they you know if

you had asked them to predict would we do a critical episode on d'angelo they would have been like no because they can't do they're on board with that they're trying to promote it the white fragility so so yeah so suck it suck it idw yeah yeah that well it did it did occur to me though chris like I wonder what would be the... I mean, we make fun of the W, right of center people. Chuckleheads. Chuckleheads. Yeah, having a go at it. Same with just political partisans,

and you can just disregard everything. But I do wonder, though, if we did three or four or five left-wing... Lefties in a row. In a row. I think we'd see a bit more of that that's coming from the left concern well you would eventually but like we're gonna do a lefty season so so what are you saying about you're worried about because we're gonna do that i'm not worried i'm not worried yeah we're gonna do a lefty, so we'll test that theory.

But, you know, we'll chuck in, we'll chuck a right winger to slam into the, what's that, the rampant pattern matching whenever people are getting things wrong. So, yeah. You can't win, I think. If you do, you know, a few lefties and a few righties, then you get accused of, like, aiming for the center. Yeah, as if you're

just like keeping everything in balance so you just can't win wait we win we're all right we just do who we want to do hashtag winning winning yeah dragon energy dragon blood god that's a long time ago but charlie sheen said anyway yeah we think we're all right we you know we do the people that we find interesting and and yes we do think about what message we're sending by the people that we cover but we'll get there everyone eventually nobody will we do a bit of meta thought but we don't we try not to let that guide us yeah like you said we we do what we do people can think what they think um yeah the dtg matter that's it that's you got to keep that in mind yeah the tax season matters ending um so new one will start soon i have one more thing chris one more thing before we get to it you know usually in the intros you raise your grievances and we all have to listen to them and you know that's good

that's fine that's fine that's you know people like that that's why we that's why we're here that's why we listen but i have a grievance this time and it's it's relating to you and you've been doing it ever since i met you which is you persist you persist in sending me photographs of all of the beautiful lovely lovely delicious food that you consume it seems like on a daily basis you're just out there in japan eating i do consume food on a daily basis this is true very photogenic food i have to say and you know you know you know the situation i'm in you know where i live i live in regional queensland it's like 300 kilometers to the nearest decent bakery this is the food situation i'm in if i want something good to eat, I have to cook it myself.

And I usually can't be out. You have to hunt it first. Catch it. Yeah. And like sending me this stuff. Do you understand? It's like sending like photographs of water to a man dying of thirst in the desert. It's like sending photographs of you on a date with your girlfriend to an incel.

This is what you're doing you're hurting me you want to hurt me look what i'm doing is sharing culture across the internet i'm letting people and this is all i have ma i've got i've got young kids and too many jobs and commitments so all i've got is the nice japanese food that's that's the that's the one indulgence left in my life so i can't stop it's gonna have to continue you'll you'll get more because i can't you know can't be drinking whiskey and fine beers fine beers but so so that's that's what I do. I eat good food. I'm in Japan. I'm in Japan. This is what Japan

is for, Matt. But yeah, I do realize it's kind of mental torture, but I'll never stop it. No, that's fair. No, fair enough. Fair enough. You're right. I get to indulge myself in ways that you cannot or choose not to, whatever. I don't want to go in your

bodies of water with large aquatic predators so you you you can do that all you want and send me the pictures and i feel no fomo in that situation just like yeah that's all right stonefish poisonous predatory fish just didn't have it that nice blue water but fair enough fair enough all right well i've got that off my chest tell me what we're doing today what's going on no i'm not i'm not letting you leave this room without my grievance but you'd first address i've got one matt i've got one and it comes with a clip it's got a clip there's even a little clip for you that you one. And it comes with a clip. It's got a clip. There's even a little clip for you that you don't know about.

This is a surprise clip. You see, you have access to this thing called a soundboard, which I don't even know what that is, but this is the thing I've heard you refer to. You can use clips and stuff. I can't do that. I can't do it. Have you ever made a clip?

I've never made it. You can upload it. So here we go. Listen to this. have you ever made a clip? I've never made a clip. You can upload it. So here we go. Listen to this. Let's see if you can identify the voices in this clip and why this might have annoyed me. Now, that comes with, you know, some responsibilities on Anil's personal part,

which would be, you know, to be, for example, I think more responsible in dissemination of information himself sometimes. He got himself in trouble the other day for tweeting out that story about Paul Pelosi that was speculative and untrue. And I don't think what he did is horrific. He deleted it when he found out that it was false. And that's actually a free speech working, right? He said something wrong. People ripped into him. He realized he was wrong. He deleted it, which seems to be a better solution than preemptively banning content which only raises more questions than it than it actually stops with that said as the face of of responsible free speech you know and and that's sort of what he's pitching at twitter he i think should should enact that himself and be a

little more careful in the stuff that he tweets out well that's a tricky balance the reason a lot of people are freaking out is because one he's putting his thumb on the scale by saying he is more likely to vote republican he's showing himself to be center right and sort of just having a political opinion versus being this amorphous thing that doesn't have a political opinion i think if i were to guess i haven't talked to him about it but if i were to guess he's sending a kind of signal that's important for the twitter the company, because if we're being honest, most of the employees are left-leaning. So you have to kind of send a signal like a resisting mechanism to say, since most of the employees are left, it's good for Elon to be more right to balance out the way the actual engineering is done to say we're not going to do any kind of activism activism inside the engineering if i were to

guess that's kind of the effective um aspect of that of that mechanism and the other one by posting the pelosi thing is probably to expand the overton window like saying we can play we could post stuff we can post conspiracy theories and then through discourse figure out what is and isn't true what's your grievance about this chris i recognize i recognize that very funny little voice he has a funny voice i had this is not a this is this is below the belt i'm sorry but that's ben shapiro yeah obviously that i mean that's it's well well trorodden territory to note that, so you're not the only person that's recognized that.

He does have a funny kind of point dexter voice, and Lex has his own distinctive twang. But the bit about Elon balancing out the Twitter employees, I just, you know, okay, okay. Yes, I'm sure that's it, Lex. It's not at all him being reactionary, but it's more Lex's idea that what Elon was doing

was a five-dimensional chess move in order to show that now Twitter is a space where we will share right-wing conspiracy theories. And this will help the discourse because we'll find out that it's wrong. And like, ah. Yeah, I have heard that clip. I saw that it was described as like Lex's, I mean, it's such a charitable interpretation where it's like oh

he's doing five-dimensional chess this is his way of expanding the overton window and modeling good behavior or something and no it's obviously just he bought in the stupid conspiracy yeah and shared like a very crap conspiracy prone website like infowars basically and but it's that notion that lex you know this is why i think lex can be a little bit insidious in his naivety because he's his position is basically arguing that like well isn't promoting conspiracism in a way good for the discourse and he also mentions in this interview that he signed up the bench of heroes daily wire and you know the way that lex would frame that is he's getting sources from across the spectrum i'd be very curious how many left-wing sites that le signed up to. You know, he has Joe Rogan as a mentor. He idolizes Elon Musk.

He's signed up to the Daily Wire, pals around with Michael Malice and whatnot. I think Lex is just unaware himself of where his own Overton window is being pulled. It's that thing, isn't it, where Lex's excessive charity is always- To certain people. To certain people, yeah, selectively applied. And this kind of extending infinite love to whoever, Vladimir or something it's it's actually not a virtue and i

know like extreme naivety is not a virtue though to his credit and again i think credit where credit is due he did recently have an episode with fiona hill who is a kind of foreign policy expert on russia and ukraine and she had a very good episode discussing the situation and Putin's motivation and whatnot. And I do think that it's right to recognize that people like Lex do do that and that the discussion is useful, but it doesn't actually balance up like presenting Oliver Stone as an equally well-informed just that's an alternative perspective it's like that peak balance of having the climate change denialist followed by an environmental scientist or climatologist on so yeah yeah no i completely agree and like we're

very critical of many of the people we cover including lex fredman but this is not to say that they never do anything good that they don't have any good intentions it's just that i don't know like if you're if you're getting it wrong 50 of the time or more then i don't know just just like if you can't recognize joe rogan's q and stuff there's just this fundamental limitations to your perspective and lex's naivety or whatever like selectively applied extreme charity i mean he doesn't have extreme charity there's critics right he just blocks people on twitter for very slight criticism so you know it's not the love needs to be reciprocated. Right. And the danger, the danger there is that, you know, it should be a specific kind of person. Yeah.

I just want old fashioned journalists. I've said it before. I want old fashioned journalists who are not looking for love in the discourse. The wrong places. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Agreed.

Well, well, so Matt today, now that we've aired those grievances, yours and mine, and we've, we've caught up on the gurus fear to, to some extent today, I have an interesting interview with a roller fascinating academic, if I do say so myself. No, I'm not talking about myself. fascinating academic if i do say so myself no i'm not talking about myself i i interviewed manvir singh somebody who you follow on twitter and um yeah they have come across his work i think he's a very interesting person with an expertise in shamanism and we discuss potential parallels to gurus and potential discrepancies so yeah yeah no and i just um i i do follow menvis singh and we talked about him for a long time actually before he came on and i was looking forward to this interview oh yeah quite a bit i don't look

forward to all of our interviews chris i come to some of them with great reluctance. I get your insult, I guess. But I was looking forward to this one, and I missed it due to no one's fault but my own. It was in my calendar. You put it in my calendar. It was up there in the evening, and when I glanced at it in the morning, I hadn't made the window big enough, and it wasn't showing the evening.

It's all right, Matt. I had an evening. I had an evening. couldn't i couldn't be there i'm sorry i wasn't even gonna mention it although i do realize that now i should explain that you're not there for this interview but i know matt was matt may have been slightly i was i was I was indisposed. Inebriated. Either or. Yeah, I was. It was just, it was impossible. So it's unfortunate. It's just unfortunate.

And in any case, as a result, Manvir and I kind of geek out a little bit on various anthropological topics. But yeah, I think people will enjoy anyway. And you can listen back, Matt, and you'll have your own decoding the guru's experience for yourself and you can see all the insights that you missed i don and we'll we'll we'll get your feedback after yes yes and we'll get manvid back and i'll be there for that one Okay, so here we go. Okay, so joining me today is the academic researcher Manvir Singh, currently affiliated with the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse. Though when I met you at a conference on top of an ancient citadel in Arice, you were somewhere else. You were at Harvard at that time, right?

I was, yeah. I was doing my PhD then at Harvard. Yes. So, Manvir, I would, if I was identifying what you are, not as a person, but as an academic. I would put you in cultural anthropologist or evolutionary anthropologist, but is that a slur against you? Or what do you self-identify as? At the moment, I guess I identify as an anthropologist, as a cultural or cognitive or evolutionary anthropologist so your work is

is really interesting and like kind of straddles a couple of different disciplines and for people who are familiar with the work of joe henrik he was your supervisor right for your phd so he straddles economics and anthropology and psychology field so you're following in those uh that week i'm trying to think of a good metaphor i'm not a good guru i'm very bad with metaphors so um yeah an interesting thing that is relevant for our show is like we're often dealing with evolutionary psychologists who are in the guru sphere and that tends to be people that are very concerned with meeting habits and and also evolutionary strategies and that kind of yeah dovetail possibly into manosphere kind of stuff but we quite

often do have people because Matt and I argue that there is terrible work in evolutionary psychology the kind of area but there's also good work and the good work that's in that field is often very good

and very interesting and like I kind of view evolution as an important frame when you're looking at human culture to use. And your work is often one of the ones that I cite as good examples of how you do it right. But I'm curious, do you encounter much pushback because of adopting an evolutionary frame or that doesn't come up that much in in your research life that people are you know doubt the the use of an evolutionary frame yeah i mean i

guess it depends on who we're talking about but in anthropology there is this huge schism where a lot of people are very against evolutionary approaches so there was actually i remember i once applied to a position and my my cover letter is typically when i was a graduate student human evolutionary biology and i took off that and replaced it with p-body museum of archaeology and ethnology um because I thought even the word evolutionary would be triggering. Yeah, I understand that I'm applying for various positions recently, including at Christian universities, and my upbringing as a Catholic often comes into mentions and cover letters. I don't dwell so much on my current status of belief, but, you know, just you do what you have to when you're applying for positions. But yeah, so your work has looked at a whole bunch of different topics.

One that's, I think, quite relevant to the gurus that we look at is your treatment of shamanism and the evolutionary role that it may have played in societies so i want to ask you about that but i also want to ask before that like a good anthropologist so manvir you're like field sites or where you've done most of your research what what kind of part of the world or what kind of communities do you regard yourself as specializing in so i've done most of my work with these people the mentawai so they live on this archipelago the mentawai archipelago off the west coast of Sumatra. So for anyone who's familiar, Indonesia is this nation of islands stretching from New Guinea to the Indian Ocean. And so almost as far west as you can go, right at the edge of the Indian Ocean is the Mentawe Archipelago. And I've been working there since 2014. And I have studied shamanism there. I've studied their indigenous religion,

healing ceremonies, and their law. More recently, I have also been scoping out visiting communities in Colombia, particularly the Orinoco region, like the Northwest. But that my first trip was just earlier this year. It's, it's much more of a shallow research experience. And now how long did you spend like in total in the communities in Sumatra? In total, I've spent maybe like 13 months. Yeah. I haven't been able to go since the beginning of COVID, unfortunately, but i'm hoping to go this coming january for a couple months the world is returning to open status the even japan just like last week i think opened the borders again so yeah so they with that nice ethnographic content explained so you i could attempt to summarize it but I'd probably do it poorly you wrote a

target article for bbs behavioral and brain sciences which for people who probably most of the people most of the people who listen won't know this is a journal where when you write a target article you then get a bunch of responses from all different scholars experts in the field and then you have to write a response to their critique so it's a very involved thing and and you wrote an article which was a single author piece which means that you have to deal with all of the criticism so it's already like a significant like piece of work they undertake. But the thesis in that, it was outlining a kind of evolutionary perspective on shamanism. So how would you kind of broad picture summarize that, what your thesis was? Yeah, so we could break it down at a couple levels.

Yeah, so we could break it down at a couple levels. Most generally, the argument was that shamanism reliably develops in human societies everywhere because it is just an incredibly compelling means of controlling uncertainty. And I can break that down a little, but the idea is essentially people want control over the uncertain in their lives, both informationally. So we want information about all of this stuff. And then we also want outcomes to happen in our favor. And that creates these kinds of markets of magic. Specialists are competing to provide the most compelling services, the most compelling means of controlling uncertainty. And that drives the evolution of this incredibly psychologically compelling cluster of practices to essentially convince clients that this individual can provide them with exactly what they need. And I can go a bit into more like what those techniques are, but that's the general perspective on shamanism. So in that framework, that compelling cluster of features, cognitively compelling and socially compelling cluster of features, what are they? Like, what are the key ones?

Yeah, so the thing that I argue in that piece in which I really focus on that piece in which I use as a perspective on all of these is different practices that make an individual seem different from normal humanity and in so doing make them seem, make it seem more plausible or more tenable that they have special powers. So in something that I'm writing right now, I'm thinking about these all as I'm trying to coin this word, or I was like, there needs to be a word for this for this process and i've been thinking about this word xenize which comes from like xeno xenos meaning foreign or other and it's like using all of these techniques to to look like you are fundamentally different from normal humanities are you a bit of a lot of deprivation. You have these dramatic initiations

where you claim that, you know, your skeleton has been reconstructed. You talk about dying and coming back to life, about having your body parts replaced with new body parts. All of these are about a practitioner undergoing some kind of fundamental transformation about like drifting away from normal humanity. And that makes it more plausible, more compelling, more tenable, that they can do things that normal humans cannot. And so related to that is trance. You know, this thing that really defines shamanism is that they enter what seem to be these non-ordinary states. And some people will argue that, oh, the non-ordinary states, the trance of shamanism is all about what trance psychologically does.

You know, it creates greater insight. It allows you to be a better problem solving, whatever. What I'm arguing is that, yes, trance might have these effects, but the reason that trance so often occurs is it's kind of this performance of otherness. It's this individual who is experiencing, who is looking nothing like what a normal human does, and that makes it more compelling more credible that they are are doing something that normal humans cannot do is that all clear yeah yeah very clear and there's there's kind of two immediate parallels that like crop up to me the the obvious one related to the show that you're currently on is that we find similar sorts of narratives, obviously, without the magical elements, usually.

It depends on whether Jordan Peterson is talking or not. But in the narratives of the gurus that we look at, where they often have these stories about in how childhood they were recognized as special. childhood they were recognized as you know special and in many cases it's actually presented as that they were seen to have learning difficulties or some problem but this was later recognized as a unique way of approaching the world so that seems to parallel and maybe in a less dramatic less supernatural way the kind of narrative that you're describing shamans to go through and that makes me you know it's a very peeling image like as the gurus of the modern secular instantiation of shamans when we can talk about that idea but the other one which i'm just curious to get your thoughts on first is so like superhero narratives and in popular media or or

like you know anime characters in in japan they often are represented in the same way having these special powers and transformational experiences and you find those in lots of myths and legends. So is the argument that that is a cognitive attractor that applies broadly across all these contexts, but there's additional elements that make it flow into the shamanism stream? Or is that like slightly different when you're talking about, you know, kind of fictional figures who you can't probably directly interact with? Yeah, that's a great question. So I guess we can start with the second one. The parallel you're drawing with superheroes, I think is a great one. And that's like one that I often think about where I think that really demonstrates this logic where the storyteller,

the narrator, the writer needs to convince you, at least in this world that they're building, that this person can shoot lasers out of their eyes, that they can be incredibly fast, that they can be a spider or whatever, that they can do things that the average person cannot. And what's really fundamental to that is explaining why they can do this and other people cannot. How have they been essentially transformed to facilitate that? And that seems to explain or contribute to the fact that superhero stories are incredibly diverse. But one of the few things that all of them seem to stare is an origin story. It's something that tells you why this person is other, why they deviate from humanity. I've actually lately been reading a lot into a superhero origin

story. So it's great that you brought this up. And one thing that I really like about them, and that I think provides an interesting parallel for shamanism, is that they really seem to reflect people's conception of what constitutes essential transformation. So, you know, if we go from the 1940s to now, we see that origin stories change over time. First, there, you know, if we go from the 1940s to now, we see that origin stories change over time. First, there, you know, it's a lot about nuclear stuff. And then at points, it's about magical stuff. Now it's really about like, bioengineering, genetic mutants. As our conceptions of like a fundamental transformation changes, so do the stories to convince us or to at least tell us

that these individuals are different. To your broader question about like, how should we think about the relationship between superheroes and Shamu? Or of all of these narratives, these fictional narratives. So I think what's going on across them is they're reflecting this more general intuition that if a person claims to do things that normal people cannot, if they essentially like violate our concept of what a human is capable of, they have to be a different kind of entity. They have to be conceptually different. In superhero stories, that deviation is used towards the narrative or for the function of exploring like what someone could do if they have special powers and you know thinking about the entertainment or whatever in shamanism this intuition is leveraged to create the experience to create the perception that this individual

can provide a service you know shamanism is a service in many in many instances and i think some people are resistant to this idea but shamanism is is overwhelmingly a service and oriented profession in a way you know and so they might be using similar narratives that fictional writers are at least like on a on a maybe a higher level if we think about them in this higher level comparison but for them it's really about using those narratives to convince you that that they can provide a service that other people cannot yeah um and i think that brings us to your first topic which we can also go into yeah so i i do want to get the gurus but i i want to follow up with something that you kind of raised there because in your paper you're talking about like shamanism as one of the potential first professions to

emerge in in societies and cross-culturally recurrent profession and i can imagine there's some well actually i don't this is a probably a for you. So I can imagine some more progressive, liberal-minded people somewhat reactive to the notion of seeing shamans as a profession and creating narratives about their powers and that kind of stuff. Because there's somewhat of an implication of potentially exploitative or at least deceitful approach to things. But on the other hand, I know from anthropology that shamans very much regard what they're doing, yes, as a calling, but also as that's their profession and that's what they do. So I'm wondering, your article, I know for evolutionary anthropologists or that kind of thing, that's a perfectly reasonable thing to discuss shamanism as a profession. But do you get pushback from putting a potentially Western, modern frame on a practice which it doesn't fit well onto. And relatedly, how do the people in the communities react? Are they aware of your kind of theory around shamanism? And how do they react to that? Okay, that's a

great question. There's a lot there. So I'll start to address whatever I remember, and then we can dig in. So it was actually being in Mentawi that really highlighted for me the extent to which shamanism is service is centered around a service and it's a bit complicated because on the one hand shamans are so in mentawi they're known as sikere and they are regarded as as you know special powerful humans and they're charismatic and they they provide a center to social spiritual political life on the other hand it's it's quite clear to many people that that it's a service because you know you're sick you have to choose among these sikere they have to you're evaluating different ones there's constant talk about who's you you know, to what is his trans fake?

Does he really know the songs? Like, is he truly a Sikere? Is he just a Sikere because, you know, his dad was able to whatever pay them? And is it always a he, by the way, in those communities? Yeah, it's slightly complicated. So the word Sikere refers to both individuals in a couple. So the, and the couple is usually male and female. Actually, every example I know is male and female. But it is the man who is called to... So a simple answer to your question is yes, it's a he. But it's a bit more complicated because both of them are known as Sikere.

They heal in something called Pabete, healing ceremonies. And in the healing ceremonies, it's almost always the male who is called. I actually, in my data set of 40-something ceremonies, don't have a single one in which a female is called. Although I spoke to a doctor who's been in Mentawi for a long time, and she has said that she has seen or heard of females being called. So I don't want to say that females are never called. These are like female deities or spirits that are...

No, no, sorry. Sorry, the female and the couple. Like a woman sikere, a woman shaman. I was thinking symbolically like a male and female, but you mean actual couples. Yeah, so, okay. So I'll give you a simple version. And then if we want to, we can go into the complex version. A simple version is in Mentawai, overwhelmingly men are shamans and men are called teal in healing ceremonies. Men, male shamans are believed

to have the power to see spirits and they provide these services. The more complicated thing is that when a shaman is initiated, both he and his wife have to observe particular taboos. Both he and his wife come to be known as sikere. And there are a couple of these wives I know of who are also regarded as having these special powers. And although I have never seen them called in one of these babette one of these kind of all-day healing ceremonies i have heard that these women are sometimes called in like more private healing contexts so yeah i'm sorry for sidetracking you that was a very clear explanation and i'll remind you as well that

you were explaining about the reaction to like your framework and stuff sorry i interrupted you right yeah it's kind of a complicated thing because in mentawe people recognize they recognize that that sikere are competing and that you choose them on the basis of who seems the best. But there is a double narrative where you never want to signal that. So sometimes I'll talk to someone and I'll be like, why did you choose these Sikere to come and heal you? And they'll say, oh, they were nearby or, you know, they're my wife's relatives. But of course, you know, the wife has many relatives in this area.

There are many Sikere nearby. And then when I've talked to other people, it's like, yes, we want to talk like that because if we get sick and other Sikheti are not available, we don't want to give the impression that we prefer some over others or that we think that some are good and others are not. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, yeah. are you are ranking them and comparing them in your mind but you don't want to do that verbally because you don't want people to feel like you you undervalue them or maybe publicly offend them yeah so i imagine there are concepts of like honor or equivalence to honor in in play like fierce yeah it's not necessarily honor and so for instance i was recently reading this phonography of bedouin egyptian bedouin society or maybe libyan bedouins um where honor i think looks very very different and mentally it's like it's more like general reputation um

it feels different from from like a very honor-based society so just politeness like kind of the social norm you shouldn't denigrate people yeah it's more like politeness yeah that makes sense that makes sense yeah so there's a there's a recognition that you know people it is a profession or different options and so on and and yet maybe it's not entirely kosher to completely focus on the commercial aspects as like the main thing right because it's exactly dealing with uh spiritual powers and that that kind of thing it's dealing with spiritual powers it's's dealing with illness. This thing, it also manifests in how shamans provided their services. So it's not super appropriate for a shaman to be asked to be paid.

But a gift? And yet it is always expected that when a shaman comes, you will sacrifice pigs and chickens, and that the shamans will get the best parts. But it is not, it's a little complicated to talk about that as payment, because the shaman wants to maintain, or there's this maintenance of a perception on, on both the provider and the and the client's part that the shaman is here to heal you and that you are, are in turn, sharing with the shaman. A to heal you and that you are in turn sharing with the shaman. A similar thing actually occurs with food sharing in Mentawai. People will, for example, someone might have a, they might call a lot of people to help them move a house or help them construct a house. And then it's expected that afterwards they will share meat. They might kill

a pig and distribute the meat to everyone who shared. But it is quite litigious, but there are certain domains in which the transactional nature is a bit... Taboo? Yeah, a bit taboo. That sounds similar to a lot of parallels I can think of, including in Japan around the provision of funeral services. There's obvious costs and money involved, but a lot of it has to be phrased in a specific way

not to make it seem profit-orientated, even though a lot of it looks very much like standard capitalism just in a specific domain. But I guess the difference would be... It's like a potluck in yeah context but i'm thinking that that's like in the case of like korean shamanism which i'm you know vaguely familiar with it feels like there's a much more direct than the word acknowledgement of payment for services and stuff but it'll depend on the context as to how much that is kosher.

That kind of answers the question around how receptive they are. How about evolutionary anthropologists, like I say, I think they'd be pretty open to that consideration, but do you ever get accusations that you're applying westernized, ethnocentric categories that don't make sense in indigenous perspectives? Sure, yeah, yeah sense in indigenous perspectives. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. And in many ways, and shamanism is a topic where that has long been something that people have talked about. And I think for very good reason, you know, earlier you have Eliad, I hope I'm pronouncing his name right, he's so big in the field, but

he comes out with this book Shamanism and he talks about a very particular model of shamanism, which involves soul flight and hunting and gathering societies and animal spirits. So I define shamanism much more generally as I think do many people of individuals entering what appear to be non-ordinary states to engage with unseen realities and provide services. Eliade had a much more constrained definition or a much more constrained framework. Siberia is the model. Like I mentioned, your soul leaves your body in trance. There are different levels. There's a lot of importance of flight. There are animal helpers. And so people had this

framework and then they're going to different contexts, wildly diverse contexts and applying this very particular model. So that's just to say that I think shamanism, like many topics in anthropology, has been saddled with this problem of having a particular expectation and projecting it onto the society. And I think the study of shamanism is still quite wary of that. And so, of course, I've been, I've confronted that. But then there is, as you talked about, like the particular way in which I frame shamanism, and that's something I'm constantly working on and constantly being careful about. The way that I really think about shamanism is that it is a technology it's you know made performing deviations from from normal humanness to assure you that that i can do things that normal humans cannot and i this is this can be used for good you know

polly weisner this anthropologist who works with the these um south african the juan z i'm like wary about saying their name because i i don't feel confident in my ability to like properly do clicks it's better than mine trust me just but so she was recently telling me about a time when she was in the field and she woke up screaming. She was incredibly anxious and they immediately started a trance dance. Some of the people in the camp went into trance and they healed her. They're putting their hands on her, they're entering trance. And she talked about really feeling love, really feeling... The way that it's conceptualized there is like half death, really feeling the way that it's conceptualized there is like half death, that you are going to the edge of death. It's an incredibly dangerous or risky endeavor. And so everyone coming out,

everyone clapping all night, these shamans showing up for you really is a demonstration of commitment, of investment. And she said the next day she felt so much better. And so I just want to provide that as an example of a case where, you know, I think it's a technology that could be used positively or has many positive effects. But I think that it also is often used for exploitation've ever come across from a shaman. So it was from a shaman among the Sora, a group in India, and he channeled this, he's working with a young widow, and he channels her husband. And, you know, possessed by her dead husband, presumably, he says something like, I really want to have sex with you, but i must do it through the body of this shaman but you know there are all kinds of examples of shamans exploiting their position the perception of their power for sex for food for resources for whatever you know shamans are humans they're people who have self-interest it ends and want to use that to get what they want yeah so that's you know that's a really fascinating example and like two things i wanted to mention in response was one i have a very similar opinion

to you about the criticisms of the term religion right applied broadly there's lots of legitimacy to those critiques but i think you can you can bypass them in large respect by just applying a sensible definition that people think you can't do that but i disagree so i'm completely on board with your approach to shamanism but what you were just saying about you know people performing social roles and shamans being like parts of community often associated with healing and can actually be you know healers providing herbal remedies and actual medicines in communities as well but i think to like western audiences they're aware of and often very critical of the people who claim to channel dead relatives right there are many people are

aware of cold reading and and hot reading techniques right there so for those that aren't but like people appearing to solicit the information but really using kind of manipulative techniques in order for you to give them the information or hot reading being just that you collect the information through other sources like maybe you get people to write cards down and and then you know extract the information from it so there there's a lot of very prevalent critiques of that kind of the word is escaping me for those people but that people who channel the dead and mediums mediums yeah yeah but on the other side there's the current growing industry around psychedelic experiences and ayahuasca ceremonies and you know the kind

of fascination in the tech spheres with taking trips into the jungle to have vision quests and that kind of thing and maybe that's always been there i think like if you go to the 80s you're going to find yuppies also expressing interest in it but seeing those things as within the same arena i think is something that people don't do and they would be more wary of applying the same kind of criticisms that they would to mediums operating in a paranormal sphere as they would to applying criticisms to you know something which is seen as a non-Western cultural context. So, yeah, but I personally just feel that, you know, like you say, humans are humans. Some of them are good, some of them are, and even the ones that are engaged in the exploitative behaviors are often, you know, in other aspects of their life very nice so yeah it's a complicated topic and i guess manvir that

leads nicely to the connection to modern gurus and i don't know how how closely you follow modern gurus the kind of people we talk about jordan peterson and brett weinstein and and all those such figures but just broadly speaking initially do you yourself see you know kind of parallels there or you think they're kind of different phenomenon with quite strong divisions yeah so i don't think those are mutually incompatible like i definitely think shaman's are different from modern gurus like i definitely think shans are different from modern gurus and i think there are there are probably parallels so i can i can try to elaborate on some parallels but maybe it would be better if i like asked you directed questions to to pull out the the parallels sure i've i know

a couple of gurus yeah so i guess we can go from from ends. One end would be to start by saying, to what extent are gurus would promise some control while potentially not actually being able to provide it. Do you think that happens? Yeah. So the two things that immediately come to mind are one, the response in the pandemic where many gurus leaned into the vaccine narratives or promoting alternative treatments, ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, right? And in those respects, yes, it's a very direct medical setting, but they are in essence claiming that they have the correct procedures, you know, the correct medicines that you need to

guard your health and that there are these threats that other people don't recognize as threats. And so there's a parallel there, but there also seems to me like this might be a bit of a more of a stretch but let's see what you think uh jordan peterson and the more like symbolically inclined and maybe slightly religiously inclined in his case heavily religiously inclined gurus i think they and actually maybe some of the secular ones present a kind of spiritual health right that like people today modern secular society in a kind of barbarian way are very alienated they're very atomized and they've lost their heart right and so if they engage with the kind of thinking the kind of philosophies or the kind of traditions that they are highlighting people can regain their vitality and spiritual

essence and you know in in many cases become the young men that they were supposed to be so that that seems to strike me as like two potential clear parallels. Yeah, yeah, no, I think both of those make sense. I think the second one, I would imagine that it would be especially potent or effective if it could be connected to things that people are dissatisfied in their life, things that people want control over or want to resolve that they currently cannot. Oh, you want, you know, whatever whatever x you want to be more healthy you want this something that that people can't get control over but um yeah there would be some promise of a service a partner yes exactly yes yes um and so okay so if we're going back into

this parallel with shamanism the next question would be what gives these people the credibility? These people are presumably claiming to have insight, have solutions into problems that are otherwise very hard to resolve, into information that is otherwise very difficult to acquire. And, you know, as magical religious specialists, they use a number of techniques to create perceptions of authority. But, you know, the one that I have really been thinking about and talking about is this showing that you are fundamentally different from other people. So you mentioned something like this earlier that, you know, they think about the world in a different way, you know, from an early age, they had different kinds of minds. But yeah, then the next, if we're thinking about the parallel, the next question I would ask you is, are there ways in which the gurus that you just mentioned also create authority or credibility by promoting perceptions of differing fundamentally or in interesting ways from normal humans? Yeah. So there is the, like you say, there's the

hard word, there's often these references to always thinking differently, right? That they just seen the world in a way that other people never could. And like, there's this clip that I might insert here where you have Eric and Brett Weinstein, the brothers, discussing their experiences together and basically saying that they are somewhat unique in that when they find themselves in this situation where everyone else, every scientific authority is telling them that they're wrong, that that gives them pleasure and more certainly that they're right. I think you and I share a certain delight when we do our homework and we discover something interesting and absolutely nobody else gets it. That would feel bad to most people because they would feel like, what am I doing wrong? Why does nobody else understand this point to you and me?

That feels good. It is to know that you have achieved something, you have discovered something, and that nobody else can even recognize it gives you some sort of sense of how far ahead you might be. It seems pathological, but like, I see it, but the from my perspective, but that, that strikes me as what you were talking about, you know, always having this shifted perception. But the other component is that many of them claim to undergo a kind of trial by fire in the modern environment. It's often a public cancellation effort. And in those cases, they often say that, you know, where other people would have folded or kind of bowed down to the mob that they were to steal a jordan peterson metaphor like they would go into the belly of the wheel fight the

dragon and and come back not necessarily like fully transformed but more realized the person that they always felt that they were and now the world gets to see and they also do tend to say explicitly i'd lean into brett weinstein because he kind of fits the mold so well but he explicitly talked about identifying others who are reliable because of undergoing similar ordeals and you know i think he's less applicable to the kind of toxic guru approach, but like Sam Harris, in a way, displays a great sympathy for anybody that has underwent a kind of cancellation effort. So I don't know if that's stretching the parallel, but public cancellation seems to be potentially playing the role of a ritual transformative

event, which gives you like special insight and power yeah i mean it's interesting i do want to be careful about not stretching the analogy what about so this is this is my perception i'd like to ask you a question so my perception is that shamanism in large part, or at least in many traditions, is a parenthesis ship system where you do take a guru or a master and you learn the techniques over time. And in many cases, the kind of secular gurus, they don't emphasize that. They emphasize the ersatz knowledge. Maybe they had some figures who know inspired them but in most occasions

they're saying it was their unique insight and they were interested in other people with unique insights but it's it's fundamentally coming from them and my my impression with shamans is rather that they are tapping into a power which already exists and traditions and systems which are like kind of like a profession like you say so is that a distinction or is that specific schools or cultures of shamanism yeah so i don't know systematic work that has looked at the frequency with which shamans train with or you, you know, have learned from particular people, I do share your impression that it's quite common. At the same time, two things come to mind. So first, it is the case that shamans sometimes do build credibility without necessarily bringing on a teacher. They

might, you know, from an early age, enter trance, and then spontaneously heal people. The other thing that you actually remind me of are prophets. And I think of prophets often as a special class of shamans, where, you know, if we think about shamans as service providers who enter non-ordinary states, prophets often are also promising services or promising control, but over problems that are much larger. And so, you know, prophets are co-creating with their audiences narratives about

the end of the world or large society being pit against you and your group. And they often use similar techniques as what we might think of as more mundane shamans, narratives of difference, narratives of fundamental transformation, often also explicitly trans, but the scope of the problem is much larger. And so, you know, maybe they have some of their authority or expertise draw on a tradition, draw on learning from someone, but of course they also have to build something much larger than that. You know, it's not only, okay, yes, I have the training to treat these illnesses, but I, for some reason, have to be the guy, have to be the person who can get the British colonial monster out of here, or who can, you know, bring back the planes that

brought incredible gifts, or who can liberate us from the end of the world. I also just wanted to be clear and careful about not overstretching the analogy with the gurus. Because, you know, obviously the gurus are not entering trance. They're not entering like non-ordinary states. They're not healing as much. So, you know, I think we can get insight into how they work through some of these structure analogies.

But I don't want to claim they're shamans. And I also want to be like quite clear about the ways in which they're not. No, I think that's an important caveat to add. And also, I think the prophet archetype might actually be a better fit, like you described. And also, it's not our particular area of expertise, but I'm thinking that there are probably a lot more overt sales in the conspirituality sphere, like the kind of health and wellness figures that I don't know if you're aware of the liver King, this extremely buff,

uh, I think 50 year old man with an improbable six pack who consumes raw meat and, you know, I've heard about this. Is this the person who's constantly or connected to this area where they're drawing parallels with the inuit oh they're hunter gatherers that only maybe maybe i'm it's i don't think he does that specifically but it's kind of

hard to tell because they're just constantly describing it as that they're connected to the ancient traditions of man and it it goes to hunter galleries but occasionally goes to atlantis so it's you know you can take your your pick but so one thing i was curious about manvira and it's given that you know you were talking about shamans being people who were marked as extraordinary or have some feature, right, which they can use to signal themselves as different. And I'm thinking about like the case of Aum Shinrikyo, the leader Asahara Shoko was blind, right? And there's a long history in Japan of blind people being masseuse, but also people that can channel spirits or are connected to unseen forces, right? And also in lots of societies, women who are traditionally excluded from various spiritual roles

are able to enter through like kind of shamanist channeling practices, not also the case in Japan. So in that respect, I'm just curious, is that something from your research that you've seen that people with disabilities or physical deformities that this gives them an avenue in societies that you know otherwise would be they're likely just to face discrimination and exclusion or what marginalization that's the word that's the word thank you so is is shamanism in in societies potentially providing like this avenue for people to potentially deal with or to transform what would be seen as you know marginalizing forces into a power like or is that giving too much of a positive gloss on on that feature no so i i would generally agree i would say that in many contexts people use particular features that would otherwise be sources of marginalization as signs of shamanic power, potential shamanic power.

An example, the Wikipedia page for shamanism, the main picture is a Buryat shaman. If you zoom in on his finger, you actually see that he has, I'm not sure how you describe it. It might be that he has two thumbs that are fused into one, or he had a single thumb that was split early in development and then fused. But that is a, these, you know, other fingers are common signs in North and Central Asia. Yeah. The blindness example you provided, I think is interesting, not only because it points at this larger phenomenon, but also because in different contexts, different characteristics are taken as markers. So like I mentioned in Central and North Asia, having an extra finger is often taken as a marker. Or I

was recently reading, if you're born as a baby still in the amniotic sac, you know, the water doesn't break, that is taken as a sign. Or in some cultures, if your teeth come in from a different part of the mouth, that is taken as a sign as you're developing it. It's culturally variable which particular experiences or characteristics can be taken as signs. But yeah, I agree with your comment. And yeah, the other comment that you made that in many contexts where women are oppressed or marginalized and especially prohibited from engaging in some kind of otherwise, you know, ritual authority. Those are societies in which you develop these cults, these women-led shamanic cults. There's like a great book on this topic by Lewis. It's all about how reliably this pattern seems to emerge where those societies that are most hierarchical,

that are often most oppressive towards women, also in a strange way seem to end up producing these shamans. Yeah, I know, I know I've touched it on the tangent, but I, and I think you touched on this in your paper, but I can't help but ask about it. So it seems to me then that when you get world religions like Christianityianity and islam you know becoming dominant within societies and interacting with shamanistic traditions yes there there is co-option of those into the traditions you know people getting visions communing with angels or saints or those kind of things. But my impression is that there is a much stronger tradition of repression of those expressions and seeing those people as a threat. And actually,

in the more religiously inclined gurus that we look at today, they often are invoking, you know, they're talking about symbolic interpretations of society and culture but they they invoke that kind of figure like witches and like with jordan peterson and the chaos dragon so they invoke them as potential sources of disorder so i'm wondering from a you know cultural evolution perspective is that the case that doctrinal religions just strongly prohibit the expression of shamanism in the territory where they're dominant? Okay, that is a great question. And that's something I think about a bunch. Yeah, I think one story that people often tell about the history of religion is something like in the beginning, there wasamanism and then shamanism was replaced by

or evolved into these doctrinal world religions but another way that one can think about it and actually a way that i think is more accurate is to to think that shamanism and these doctrinal religions are constantly warring against each other and this this is because, first, shamanism is very often a bottom-up phenomenon. It is, you know, people are looking for control, they want to heal, they want otherwise inaccessible information, they want their business to do well. I was talking to someone yesterday who works with the shwar and they're like, yeah, the night before big soccer games, they go to shamans. You know, people want control over uncertainty and shamanism is this practice that that just develops because it is so psychologically compelling that is threatening for institutionalized

religion for religious authorities because it threatens their monopoly, their jurisdiction over the supernatural. Shamans are charismatic upstarts. They are charismatic fires that threaten to draw followers away from you. And so doctrinal religions, institutionalized religions, they take different approaches to quashing this. One approach, I remember reading some stuff, and I think this is in the BBS paper, about in the 15th and 16th centuries, the Catholic Church was, in a striking way, trying to delegitimize trance. They were trying to draw on the arguments of natural philosophers who are saying trance is a natural phenomenon. natural phenomenon. When you deprive yourself, when you withdraw from sensory stimulation, the experience, the shaking, the sensory dissociation is not out of the supernatural, but that's like a natural physiological response. An interesting case for like Catholic churches weaponizing science. You can even actually see this happening in the history

of religions. So one example is Mormonism. Early Mormonism really overwhelmingly featured charisma, featured speaking in tongues, featured healing. And I think there's an early quote from Brigham Young, maybe that's something along the lines of we are reproducing like the earliest days of the the christian communities and then you'd find later quotes by brigham young where he is arguing that no one should you know this ecstasy that people are experiencing is introducing mud into the religious dogma you know he's very he's very against it because he can recognize that it's threatening their their religious authority he was the person that looked in the hat right is that him no no that is um joseph smith oh sorry yeah that's another prominent

early mormon yeah so because that strikes me as you know not necessarily going into a trance, but you're gaining access to secret knowledge via an unusual apparatus, like the hat that no one else should look into. Yeah, so anyway, I'm conflating two early Mormons. But I mean, it's also interesting because the Mormons have had a publicity campaign, we might say. I don't want to be sacrilegious, but I guess I am to some degree. They've had a publicity campaign where they have recast the supposed gift of tongues. So in early Mormonism, Joseph Smith lays out the spiritual gifts that God gives us. One of them is the gift of tongue. And the gift of tongues is classically very often understood to be, when you feel the Holy Spirit, you can speak languages that you otherwise cannot. It's a

demonstration of especially you doing something that a normal human cannot. It's a demonstration of divine intervention. Now, if you talk to Mormons, they will talk about the gift of tongues being the ease with which you can learn new languages um in the efforts to be a missionary and i think that is a great example of the kind of institutional evolution that that religions undergo from something more based in charisma to something more institutionalized based on for instance missionizing ah that's that's extremely fascinating. And I want to put on that prayer, but I also remember being a good interviewer that you were enumerating the possible characteristics that are parallel or not, right? And we covered, I think, a good range of them already. a good range of them already. Was there any others that you were thinking of that we didn't get to with like the guru-shaman potential

for parallel or disjunction? No, the main two that I wanted to cover were, are they service providers and are they deviating from normal humanists to provide that? Is there anything else that is relevant? Well, I mean, so something that I think about a lot with shamanism is the use of, for lack of a better word, the arena of the performance to create an incredibly vivid experience. Shamans are in front of you battling against witches. They are dancing for hours and you yourself are falling into trance. You yourself are feeling it. They really make it real. So the next thing I would ask is, do gurus make it real?

I was going to switch it right. You wrote a similar question. So that's like a great introduction to that, because that seems to me an area where there's a difference. Because traditionally, look at what most of the gurus do. Even in the case where there is theatrics, you know, with Jordan Peterson performance and Matthew Remsky from Conspiratuality has talked about him going on the stage and kind of pacing around in a trance-like state just linking concepts and stuff but the performance is very much academic in style it's a lecturer in a hall maybe sitting down on a fancy chair and debating with other people right it has a very western aesthetic to it i think rather than the stuff that you might see in the health and wellness sphere which more readily parallels trans rituals or shamanistic performances but but the question that i had related to that is one thing that we see in pretty much all the gurus

we cover from whatever side of the spectrum they're from or wherever their arena is they're from or wherever their arena is, they're extremely good linguistically. They're metaphorically excellent and they're able to talk seemingly endlessly about topics and get lost in metaphors and go down these rabbit holes and sound extremely affordative. So they are charismatic. Most of them are very charismatic, but in a talking, linguistic way. So my kind of question to you was, is that something that shamans also have, or is theirs more like a kinetic charisma that they don't have to necessarily be good at

talking and waxing lyrical for hours because they can buttress it with performances or you know does it depend yeah so again without there being systematic data i'm just going to talk about impressions but my impression is that across societies rhetorical competence is is pretty often a component of charisma. Not necessarily a necessary or important component of shamanic charisma, but something that people just find compelling in charismatic individuals. And so I think shamans benefit from being charismatic in any way, from being socially compelling to being even like a good hunter, something that shows that, oh, there's something else going on with this guy.

So I would say that being rhetorically fluid is not necessarily like a very shamanic trait, but it's a charismatic trait and shamans benefit from being from being rhetorically competent so if you have that facility it would be good but it's not like a foundational requirement whereas i would i would argue in the case of like the secular modern gurus that's the core component because that's what they have right there in the lieu of ritual performances to heal people what they tend to be offering is podcasts and like long-term discussions right for consumption so in those arenas obviously you you want that but on the other hand and this is completely like farler a field but i i feel a category of people who possibly merge those two things is

the kind of modern influencers and twitch streamers and this kind of you know vtubers because they they do have the same thing that they need to have this verbal fluency and stability to talk for hours on streams but they also often get into like some of the streamers that i'm familiar with they've started you know to do tours and put on shows and they're cultivating the ability to perform to live crowds and it's a kind of different skill set but there's a lot of cross pollination and ability so yeah i guess they are a potential avenue for you know gurus they're just not the kind of gurus that we tend to focus on but like twitch streamers and and vtubers are maybe that it's horrifying to think of them as the potential new shamans but i there might be

some parallels worth exploring there as especially with the ability for VR technology or motion tracking to make people appear as fundamentally improbable and impossible characters. So, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Can I jump in really quick? Yeah. Thinking about the parallels and the differences with shamans, it seems that here's one hypothesis or one impression that the thing that shamans are building their credibility on is their ability to engage with unseen realities, to have powers that normal humans do not, often powers related to supernatural abilities.

And that is what is really valuable for them to provide these services, to help people with the uncertainty in their lives. The little bruise that you were talking about. So again, they confront a similar problem. They want to assure people that they have solutions or information that other people do not. But their authority seems to come less from having powers that allow them to engage

with unseen realities you know having these fundamental powers and more from having knowledge perspectives you know it's it's kind of like it reminds me of like a priestly a priestly authority yeah where it's it's more familiarity with texts familiarity with bodies of knowledge um and and that i think connects to the ways in which you're talking about them being different. It's not necessarily they have a different skeleton or they almost died and they came back to life or whatever. It's more like they had these early experiences

that showed that their minds see problems in a different way or that they think about knowledge in a different way. And their ordeals are also demonstrations of patterns of thought in a way. You know, I went through this ordeal, but I could maintain the way that, the special way that I see problems. And it also highlighted for me other people who think about things in these ways. Is that one way? That's just a hypothesis. I see two ways you could go with it, right? And I think the way that you're outlining this is probably the more compelling argument than that applies to a broader range of people.

And in that frame, I think, again, the modern secular gurus as prophets who are reinterpreting traditions or texts, right, in ways that they weren't before because of special insights seems like a more appropriate comparison but there are some exceptions like there are gurus who they're ostensibly talking about science and you know maybe evolutionary perspectives and so on this kind of scientific framework or advanced statistics but that's really a gloss on the way that they actually treat it which is like a mystery tradition where there's the actual scientific literature there's a the normal statistical analysis and everyone does it wrong but they can approach it and see the kind of fundamental mysteries that are there and so they're they're treating the scientific literature not in the way

that a normal scientist would but more as like an alchemist right kind of going in and discovering the mysteries that other people have not seen and because of that they orientate themselves towards like galileo and einstein and revolutionary, as opposed to, you know, just like a scientist doing the work and coming up with these insights. They do reference that, but it's much more in the realm of like revolutionary thinkers who deserve Nobel prizes than like workaday scientists who worked out something that other people missed. Yeah, yeah.

That's interesting. That's interesting that's interesting i mean now we're just starting to deviate but what this is highlighting in an interesting way is that there are so many ways of building credibility or authority when authority comes from knowledge because i often think about there being this dichotomy and this is this is actually like rooted in weber is how I pronounce his name in my head. I say that. That's what I often said. So I was like, shit, did I say it wrong earlier? So that's good. I actually forget his typology of authority. But the way that I have thought about it, often inspired by encountering his texts early on, is you can have authority on the basis of

charisma and you can have authority often on the basis of knowledge of texts. And this is how I think about shamans as compared to priests. And of course, each of them blends with the other. I don't want to say shamans don't get authority from knowledge and priests don't get authority from charisma or ecstatic contact, but if we want to think about that dichotomy but then it's also like actually you know as we're chatting it's like oh there's so many different ways of having credibility having authority yeah convincing people that that you can provide services with the domain of authority on the basis of knowledge or the authority on the basis of information where one is like the scientist where it's familiarity with the scientific method

and this very powerful way of producing insight and learning about the world and then it's this like much more peculiar one that you're talking about which is like i don't even actually fully understand it because the natural question is why should you be right and all of the scientists be wrong like that is i i think i have the answer to that oh yeah yeah what is the answer i think i'm channeling matt in the in in this answer but the problem i think you're encountering manvir is one that matt and i encounter where you're not a raging narcissist i know that sounds disparaging but it's literally true that a lot of the behaviors of the gurus are kind of inscrutable. Like, why would they do that?

But it does make sense through the prism of a self-regard, which is beyond, you know, normal human levels. And which means that when you try to conceptualize it, you're like, but nobody would, you know, actually. People don't think like that. But I think the level of self-regard and self-confidence that gurus have, and if you want to put it positively, it's what lets them become these like huge figures in the cultural space. And it's what lets them like confidently state their theories. But on the other hand, it's what allows them to believe they've perceived something in fields of science, which they have never published in, or, you know, like published a paper in that they now think they have synthesized the thing which everybody has overlooked.

And lots of people recognize cranks through that. not so clear that when somebody is actually successful and when they are seen as an intellectual when they claim to be doing it like you can't just dismiss them in the way that you know bob in his basement is claiming that he corrected einstein because there's no sign that he actually has intelligence and expertise that deserves recognition whereas like the guru figures they do that and they often have you know degrees and and careers um so yeah so the puzzle the puzzle that comes to me then is if i am a potential follower if i am looking for ways of dealing with my health or spiritual well-being why should i believe that this person has insight that transcends science? Like what, how can they make that credible? Like that's the problem shamans are running into.

Shamans are running into this thing where it's like, yeah, you, you want to, you want to heal your, you want, you want rain. I can talk to the rain, got it. And the natural question is like, how can you do that? You're just a regular person. And then they have to do performances or, you know, they have to have their skeleton replaced. They have to enter trance. All of this, according to one perspective, is a way of dealing with this natural skepticism. So then, yeah, then the same question arises over here. How can you convince an audience that you transcend science, for lack of a better phrase?

I can answer what the gurus do, and it's essentially that they disparage institutional knowledge as corrupted and sinister forces behind it. So the true science is good, but you can't see the true science anymore because it's you know being taken over by fauci and the forces behind it but and even the ones that are like less conspiratorially minded than that maybe the main thing is like all of the scientific journals now nature and whatnot they're captured by wokeness so you you can no longer trust them to not be promoting a specific ideology whereas the guru they've demonstrated that they will stand up to you know prevailing winds and you can trust them um for that reason so invoking conspiracy and invoking that the other sources of knowledge are corrupted that tends to be a recurrent pattern that we observe um and it works

and and also telling your followers that if they agree and if they can perceive the corruption and go along that they are kind of uniquely critically minded and special you know people as well like that that kind of flattering approach it's really effective and i kind of you know, people as well. Like that kind of flattering approach, it's really effective. And I kind of, you know, I think I get the appeal because there's been lots of times in my life as well where I felt like, oh, I've got this insight that, you know, from reading these things or studying the stuff that other people like.

And it gives you this sense that you have this insight that other people are not privy to. So if someone else can offer you that, it's definitely really appealing. Yes, yes, yes. Okay, that makes sense. That makes sense. Leveraging a maybe a conspiratorial tendency or a skepticism or perception of corruption or a resistance to wokeness that that is already there leveraging

that to further delegitimize and then presenting yourself as legitimate does that ever happen with shamans in regards to either science or potentially rival religious traditions seeing them as corrupted or like foreign religions kind of coming in and destroying the culture? Yeah. So I guess my first answer would be yes. Foreign religions come in and they are very competitive and have a huge threat for shamans. And shamans and other local magical religious specialists

want to try to delegitimize. That is hard though. There is a lot that's very compelling or attractive by foreign, by world religions. One of them being like stuff, you know, world religions come in and both their practitioners have incredible stuff. And when I say both, I mean like foreign religions come in, they have incredible stuff that both like gives them some more authority or legitimacy. Oh, this is a worldview that's connected to incredible material plenty or like incredible technologies. But also they can be like, if you join our religion, we'll give you all these clothes. So I often think, I think that sometimes local practitioner strategies has to instead be to be syncretic, that, you know, we have to pull in some of these influences. It's also the fact that like people on an everyday basis are often quite open to trying various things. In the community where

I work, it's not uncommon. Someone has a kid who has like a crazy illness. They'll go to some shamans they'll go to a christian healer they'll go to a muslim healer they'll go to the clinic they will they'll just try everything um yeah that's a you know in the the flip reverse this this example has been battened around in my head like 10 times so i need to i need to expel it um like in the reverse way, I feel like, you know, when you were talking about that distinction between charismatic and textual authority, and of course, there's always going to be like boundary cases, right? But the example which sprung to mind is the Jesuits, because you have the spiritual exercises from Loyola, which seem to be much more, you know, charismatic, kind of entering trance and having a direct spiritual experience

with the transcendent nature of Christ. But the other thing the Jesuits are famous for is being extremely erudite and scholastic and focusing very much on textual authority. So they kind of combine both aspects of authority in a specific branch of monastic Catholicism. So it's just a specific example, but you're going to get blendings, you're going to get co-options going in both directions, probably shamans adopting things from doctrinal religions as part of their performance. So, yeah. Yeah, yeah. And just to quickly jump in,

I also want to highlight that shamans definitely very often use both. And I think we can think about them as drawing on two texts. One is the indigenous knowledge that has been passed down for, you know, that has perceived to be passed down for a long time.

So in Mentawai, if you want to become a Sikere, you have to get your eyes magically treated. You have to observe deprivation, but then you also need a teacher who teaches you the songs. They teach you the herbal knowledge. There's an authority given to, you know, this indigenous body of knowledge, which I think can be considered a text. But then, yeah, like you're saying, they can also draw on this other source of authority. And in an interesting way, when a shaman is drawing on a doctrinal religion for authority, they're again doing both. They are drawing on both the charismatic source of that authority, the fact that some people might believe in a Christian God now. And so you can draw upon the idea that you have a connection to the Christian God in some way.

Yeah. But then they can also draw upon texts. They can recite prayers that are believed to be, you know, ritually potent. Yeah. And, you know, as you well know, when you go and look at traditions which are now portrayed as like extremely doctrinal and early practices tend to be like heavily magical, right? The Buddhas are reciting spells to ward off misfortune and stuff like that so there's definitely like an overlapping of those potential authorities and i like the the view of it as there's all these different wells that you can draw on but the important thing is to have a source of authority for why you can do something which

other people haven't and why you are a figure that deserves status right yes that is the that is the main thing that they have to deal with why why should i go to you and not anyone else it's just bringing to mind that jordan peterson might like this discussion because you know he's all about ascending competence hierarchies and he has a like a somewhat of an obsession with status and he sees jesus as the ultimate manifestation of the embodiment of the competence hierarchy so in his world frame in some sense like the figure of christ is a shamanic emblem that should be emulated. I don't know if it's exactly fits into the shamanic frame, but like it's not just a deliverer of doctrine.

It's a kind of evolutionary figure to be represented. So he might like this notion that, you know, the religious traditions are all offering these different ways of increasing your status within a given society i could ask you a million things about these topics but i want to ask you something a bit left field of shamans from something that i saw you recently covered but i don't want to if there's anything that you wanted to ask or cover before I shift gears a bit. No, no, feel free to shift. I'm curious where you'll go. Yeah.

So there were two things. And one is I saw you make these very good threads on Twitter, kind of summarizing your articles sometimes, but also just about your thoughts related to usually anthropology. also just about your thoughts related to usually anthropology and i i really recommend anybody to go follow them because they're a good example i think of evolutionary theorizing being applied you know with cultural sensitivity but um i did notice that you threw some shade at david wengro and graber um the right the dawn of everything in a recent thread and you know maybe that's not the way that you want to frame it but trust me like we're we're into the late stages of this conversation so it's only people that like us that are still here so the chance of a wengro graber fan like being deeply offended are low but um i find with that book and i can say up front i

haven't read it i've read detailed reviews i used the little blinkist free trial and and consumed you know the summary of the book and i find it very like on one hand the part i agree with is that kind of the legitimate critique about this evolutionary ladder of societies is obviously wrong and there's been more diversity that's been recognized in human history but that strikes me as like something that anthropologists have already long agreed on all of them but the kind of notion that they want to present to me it had a had a very clear, like, their political ideology leans a certain way. And so they find lots of evidence that this is, you know, not only feasible from the human past, but it is feasible again in the future. You know, capitalism necessarily

is not the final stage for where humans are but i i wondered your critique of when growing graver or like where you agree and differ maybe you have read the book so i i was curious just to explore your opinion on that that's my cards up front so where do you fall yeah so my thoughts about that book on the one hand i think that it is a very important book that is making an argument that in many ways i very much agree with you know like you've said i think many anthropologists recognize that but i i think a the idea that there is there are evolutionary stages that human societies move through has, as you said, long been dismissed. But I do think among anthropologists, among social scientists, and even among some anthropologists, the idea that there was much greater social diversity before agriculture, you know, during the first 5,000 years of the Holocene, I don't think is greatly appreciated.

And so I think the effort of summarizing a lot of that research is commendable. So I think arguing against some of our conceptions of pre-agricultural hunter-gatherers and the diversity of early agricultural societies in early states an awesome commendable project yeah definitely i agree with that yeah on the other hand like you said it does strike me that they have political aims political messages that they want to push, and that guides how they interpret evidence. And in some ways, I disagree with the kinds of conclusions they make. So, you know, they really want to make... There are two arguments that I think they're making a lot. One is that we are really under-appreciating how socially flexible human societies can be. Yeah.

And, you know, I think in some ways that's like we just said, a good message to really appreciate that they are rejecting patterns that have been demonstrated and appreciated and patterns that I actually think are important for understanding what pre-Holocene, Pleistocene societies were like, pre-agricultural societies are like. So an example is that they appear to be very anti-behavioral ecology. And behavioral ecology is this investigation of how both evolutionary and ecological forces interact to shape behavior. vary in all kinds of ways. One of which is that we find more hierarchical, more sedentary, larger groups in areas with dense, rich resources. So even if you look at hunter-gatherers, they create larger, more hierarchical, more sedentary societies in places that have dense, rich, reliable resources. And I think that this is actually important because it helps us appreciate the kinds of social diversity we saw in the Pleistocene. Oh, hunter-gatherers lived in places that today have fish, etc. And so we can expect that there was much more hierarchy, much more sedentism, much larger groups. push the story that human societies are flexible in a way beyond ecological constraints. And in a way, I think they end up politicizing something like behavioral ecology. They turn the study of the ecological and evolutionary determinants of behavior into a reactionary project that denies human fundamental flexibility, which I don't really

appreciate. But at the same time, so that is, I think one like unfortunate thing that's happening in the book. The other is that they really insist on this story that yes, human societies were much more flexible in, in, in the deep past, but they also exhibited these three fundamental freedoms, the freedom to move, the freedom to disobey, and the freedom to create new social orders. And I don't think we can make those kinds of inferences. There is, to me, kind of an irony of that book where they are arguing against one, the idyllic picture, or one simplistic picture of the past. You know, we lived in small mobile nomadic

egalitarian bands but then they kind of replace it with another that's one of uber freedom that history was was incredibly free and free in these ways that um we don't appreciate and now we have lost those freedoms it's in a way reproducing a fall from eden story yeah or a fall from grace story um but again i i do want to highlight that that the project of bringing together this this ethnographic and archaeological evidence to demonstrate human social flexibility and diversity i think is a great one um i just disagree with with those those two. Those specific conclusions. But yeah, I would emphasize the same point that like I said, I have not read the book yet,

but from all of the accounts that I read, including the critical ones, they were very clear that it's a remarkable book and like an achievement to bring all the material together. So in some respects, I feel like they wouldn't like the comparison, but you know, Guns, Germs and Steel and these kind of books are in some sense valuable because they present these big theses, which then stimulate people to argue wherefore to explore data sets.

And some of the rejoinders to Jared Diamond are excellent, right? And you learn a lot by seeing how people refute the arguments. So yeah, so that was great. And I really appreciate the summary. There's more things I could ask, but I want to get to the one last one before I tie up and let you escape. And it was just, I also noticed, Mandir, that you had an article recently published that was arguing against there being well-documented benefits for intermittent fasting, at least in the way that it's popularly conceived. I saw that you got some pushback or significant pushback might be like more accurate. And then you made a thread summarizing that okay well maybe this is what

we can say about where there's like strong evidence of benefits or not but like lots of our gurus are fans of like very specific diets right all meat diets lex friedman was waxing lyrical on the recent episode about intermittent fasting and many of the tech ceos do it as well so i was just kind of curious for a condensed summary of what you concluded from investigating that topic and and was the pushback particularly fierce or is that my misperception i was just wondering people seem to get very sensitive about you know when you talk about the fad diets um so so yeah yeah okay a couple things one so my first article i had this article for wired in their ideas column which argued that it didn't argue that intermittent fasting did not

have effects it argued that a lot of people now use fasting regimes to create perceptions of themselves as special it actually was arguing that like this is a kind of a shamanic technique and you know shamans this is one of the most common practices that shamans engage in deprivation and my own fieldwork in mentale i've had you know some experimental studies that suggest that people infer, you know, special power, they infer mental difference from deprivation. And so I was arguing that a lot of tech CEOs use, that they use many practices, including deprivation schemes, all kinds of fad diets to promote perceptions of otherness.

It is true that in the article, I had a line that said that it did not look like fasting has short-term cognitive benefits. And I was citing two reviews. The citations are not apparent in the Wired piece, but when you submit any of these articles, you need to have all your fact checking. So you have to cite all your claims for the fact checkers. And so I had two citations to recent reviews. If you go to Google and you type in fasting cognitive benefits and you look at the most cited reviews, those are the two that I found. And then I got quite a bit of pushback. Do you know Dave Asprey? Dave Asprey is- Oh, yes, I do. I just heard him being discussed on the Conspiratuality podcast as it happens. Yeah. So Dave Asprey told me on his podcast, he is a huge advocate of intermittent

fasting and of biohacking. And he was ready to really fight. We came to a common understanding, but yeah, so people were sending me references. And so in the end, you know, I had this sentence that said that there does not seem to be cognitive benefits of short-term fasting. I believe I put in the phrase short-term because I could not find studies on longer-term effects. But yeah, I put together a thread. I would need to look again at the thread, but I believe these were the conclusions. One, it does seem to be the case that if you put subjects on short-term fasting, you know, you fast for a day. So like dopamine fasting, that leads to cognitive deficits.

And, you know, to make this easier for people reading the thread, I just colored findings in these tables from the reviews, red or green, according to whether it's deficits or benefits. And you look at the short-term fasting review and it's like almost all red. Yeah, yeah. Then there is, what is the effect of intermittent fasting on like neurological disorders? And there does seem to be,

the evidence is pretty striking, both from animal models or non-human animal models and from humans showing that, I think both among individuals who have neurological disorders and potentially over the long run among individuals who do not have neurological disorders it increases there are cognitive benefits for individuals with cognitive or neurological disorders and over the long run if i think

i think this should be looked at in the review produces the likelihood of neurological disorders. And over the long run, I think this should be looked at in the review, reduces the likelihood of neurological disorders. You should note that with animal models, these, I think, are fasting regimes that are unrealistic for a human. You know, it's like, you start like what I think would be equivalent to like the age of 15 for a human and you go into like 85 for a human. You know, they start like in adolescence, like rat adolescence or earlier, and they stretch through the entire life. Then finally, there is the long-term effects, the long-term cognitive effects of intermittent fasting. So I was sent a review, I think it was published earlier this year in April, and it had five or six human studies. So it's a very, very young literature. All of

them, I think, have been published since 2018. I think four actually suggested positive effects over long run intermittent fasting and two were inconclusive. So, you know, I did say that as a part of this thread, I was like, okay, it does seem like there's potentially, I mean, it's an incredibly young field. It's like three years old. There are six studies, but there are potential cognitive benefits. Then I looked at sleep. There are a bunch of reviews on sleep. It doesn't look like there are effects on sleep. So that is what the thread showed. For me, that is a perfect summary. And I didn't know that you talked directly to Dave Asprey. So that's interesting. I have to hunt it down. But the one thing I will say, Manvir, is like from that and from the various things that you've said in this interview, you would not be a good guru because you're too clear about the limitations of evidence and about, you know, the relative uncertainties that we have. And that does not go well. But it does go well for a career as

like a scientist and a researcher. So this is probably you've chosen the right profession. But yeah, so I could continue talking to you, I think, endlessly, but your life and my parenting, Judy's call. So I just want to thank you for coming on and also apologize that the more laid back member of the hosting duo is not here. He's here in spirit. I am channeling his energy. But yeah, he was otherwise disposed today so couldn't be here but he he definitely will have missed out and be sad not to have talked to you but yeah so thanks very much for discussing the parallels and indulging my endless fascination with gurus and yeah i i think there are a lot of

interesting overlaps. And oh, yeah, that thing that I'm supposed to ask everybody is, so if people want to follow you or, you know, see your work, where do they go? Google Scholar, I would recommend. But aside from that. Aside from Google Scholar. So my website, manvir.org, M-A-N-V-I-R.org. So my website, manvir.org, M-A-N-V-I-R.org.

And then my Twitter, which is my name without the vowels, M-N-V-R-S-N-G-H. It's not a great Twitter handle. I'm trying to buy at Manvir from this woman, refuses to sell it to me. But we'll see. Mine is C underscore Kavna. So, so you know i can't say that's a particularly catchy but i think that's better because i mean that's my name because i think the absence of vowels i think can be confusing it's like a little a little bit yeah yeah i you know tech speech allowed us to understand that. But that skill is becoming an ancient technique

that the youngsters no longer have with their emojis and whatnot. But so, Manvir, thanks so much again for coming on. I'll put a ton of links in the show notes so people can check out your threads and your papers as well. And yeah, I hope to see you in the future when I return to conferencing

and I'll probably try to convince you to write a paper and do most of the work. Let's see if I can do that. But cheers for coming on. It's a pleasure. Yeah, thank you for having me. This was a lot of fun. And I'm back.

Bye-bye, Manvir. Hello, Matthew. I had a good time with Manvir, but I'm back to the homestead, the hearth, the Irish Jews on the table. This is my comfy chair. It was just the dalliance. It didn't mean anything, Matt.

It was just... I've been waiting for you here in the cottage, Chris, peeking out the window, wondering when you would darken my door. Thank goodness you're back. And we can do the outro together. Yes. Well, yes. So, Matt, that was the interview.

We covered a lot of grind i've just you know i always like to ask you this but you know which part in specific was was your favorite part like is there an insight in particular that you you find useful or you know it was mainly the middle bit it was the middle bit that i that i really yeah i got the most out of yeah i mean don't get me wrong the beginning and the end were good too but the end was good yeah yeah well that's all right that's all right so with your insightful review of my discussion with man beer it's, for us to turn to other insightful reviews that we may or may not have received from our listeners.

In some cases, our critics. Yeah, we'll be the judge of that, whether or not they're insightful. Let's see what we've got. Yes. So I've got a five-star to start us off, and it's by Hoss Bossman. Good name. And the title is Addicting Funny Informative Crap.

So, yeah, that seems fairly accurate. But this podcast is one of my current favorites the hosts have cool accents from europe which i know is only half true in a sense because the one guy is australian however although it is a separate landmass australia is technically part of europe subjects of the crime many say i like it when the hosts talk about Brett Weinstein, which is good because they do that a lot. He's weird and fascinating to me. Overall, that's my review. It's just my opinion.

So don't blame me in my mentions. Rest in power, James Brown. Nice one. Nice one. Yeah, we do talk about Brett a lot. He is fascinating. I think we'll keep talking about him. We can't stop him and his brother and Heather, of course. Don't leave

Heather out. We dislike her as well. We can never really get away from Brett, although I will say listening to his recent content, it's just depressing. It's just depressing. Yeah. Thanks, BadStats, by the way. I keep trying to forget, Brett, but it keeps coming up in my feed.

I can't help but watch. I have to click on the video and then I see things that burn my soul. He's been interviewed by Robert Wright, former guest on the podcast. So I'm kind of curious to see that discussion because his review of it sounded like he was a little bit annoyed with it. But he also seemed to believe he got the better of bob so i'm well brett would always think that so yeah i know there's no there's a we don't have a negative review but we've only got five stars we have to encourage people to leave us reviews uh you know flattering insulting whatever you want leave us Leave us some more.

Five stars ones will get read out first. You can say the meanest things you want, but say it underneath those five stars and we will shout you out. We will cover it. We got this very long review from IT Folder. I can't read it all. It's a five-star review, Matt. So like you said, it's good.

But let's see if you pick up on the theme of it. Okay. The title is Love It. But when these voices first appeared, I enjoyed their apparent commitment to objective truth in a way that was being destroyed elsewhere by the rise of populism and the internet. Then watched in horror as to varying degrees,

they failed to all the same pitfalls they claimed to be calling out. Decoding the gurus is the perfect antidote. Love it. So wait, I'm a little bit confused. Was he talking about us? Was that? Anyway, however, I do find on some discussions, the elephant in the room is you can never really know your own biases. And that includes Chris and Matt. It's all very well relentlessly trying to pin down Sam Harris and tell him, you don't realize this because of your biases. But what if the reason Chris and Matt think he has biases is because of their biases?

Now my biases are no doubt leading me to the fence of Sam Harris. It's a hole of mirrors, Chris. It's a crazy thing. There's no way out of here. Yeah, but it continues. The charge in Sam's case in particular seemed to be less disagreeing about what he says is true about the world

and more who he chooses to speak to and what he spends his time criticizing, highlighting. It goes on. And then for me, it's indicative of his ability to orientate all discussions back towards what is objectively true about the world rather than get lost in playing to the tribe or any of the other psychological pitfalls some of the gurus fall victim to. And so on.

So there's a kind of long discussion about Sam, whether he has tribal biases or not. And it's actually quite interesting back and forth in this review. It's a journey assessing whether it's my biases that are the issue or Sam's biases. And it ends with this part. my biases that are the issue or Sam's biases. And, uh, the line, it ends with this part. I get that Sam's conviction is he couldn't possibly be biased about anything.

And that's a little bit too strong. He loses me sometimes in that regard because it seems to undercut his arguments about others. I totally get why, because admitting that leads to a pretty nihilistic place where you must concede nobody can really be sure they're right about anything. However, I get the same feeling listening to Chris's conviction that Sam is objectively biased, as though it was actually Chris who was the true arbiter of these matters, the one who sees them clearly. And there's actually what Sam claims to be. Is all of this just because of my biases? Probably. Mostly, I really like Sam, and I think he's pretty rational and worth

listening to, but I also love absolutely everything about the coding degrees. So I'm trying to reconcile the marking tone with which you guys speak about him a lot. I like this review. This is good. This is from the heart. Yeah, he's speaking to

a real thing,ris there's no there's no perfectly objective computer there are no heroes there are no heroes least of all chris least of all chris at least oh god oh god the things we could say about chris but look this is i think you know if you want to pit me and Sam in a little virtual game against each other, you know, if one of us has the power to strongly acknowledge that they are biased and have tribal biases, the other one doesn't. You know, I'm just saying one of them is claiming to have a greater level of detachment than the others. Because my point is everybody is in the mud. We're all subject to these biases. Now, we're not all equally subject to them.

There's an important point. But there is nobody on this earth who doesn't have in-group biases, except maybe, I don't know, the Buddha. But even him, he's just a man Now Chris correct me if I'm wrong but I think you would agree that it's a little bit of a red flag when somebody says that they have no biases whatsoever, is that right?

It's a huge red flag Yes, and this is a bit of a callback to Robin DiAngelo because she would say the same thing, but instead of biases, she'd say racism, right? Oh, no, you're trapping me in there. This is our catch-calling too. Well, yes, this is true, but I don't... Oh, weird. No, it's the same because I going to say, there's no moral feeling of this. It's just a part of being human to have. But look, there's a difference.

Because it's in human nature to have a blind spot. Sam Harris often uses that analogy. But it's true. You cannot undo it, but it is there in your vision. And you can do various things to look for it and whatnot, but that doesn't mean that by saying everybody has a blind spot that you're doing the same thing that like Robin D'Angelo is doing, right? There can actually be things that you cannot ignore.

And I think in-group biases towards people that you feel a closer affiliation to ideologically or interpersonally it's just an aspect of being a social premier and you can you can dampen it you can try and reduce how far you exercise it and that kind of thing and i think sam does do that to a lesser extent than lots of the people that we cover in the guru sphere but i think anybody that thinks they've completely transcended that is on very shaky grind you know i think at a philosophical level the reviewer there is is quite correct that it's you know we're all looking through a glass darkly and you know you're right to to be as the d'angelo parallel that's I'm hoisted by my own petard hanging from the flag

swinging around it's not you though Chris it's all of us there's no way out of this hall of mirrors so agreed we do the best we can do the best we can and you can you can't do better the work is never done

do better. The work is never done. Do better, people. Yeah. It's an ongoing process of reflection that you need to commit to for your entire life. Oh, my God. This is going to dramatically affect our Robin DiAngelo Garamata episode.

We're going to have to see a lot. Oh, my God. So thank you for the self-reflective review IT folder. And with the mocking tone that we use in reference to Sam on occasion, it is meant in a charitable way. You know, I had a rather challenging conversation with Sam. I'm sure he felt the same way.

We have our clear differences, but I do respect a lot of what he puts out content-wise. And I find people forget, we had an odd conversation before we got into the political disagreements and tribalism about his meditation app and largely there we we saw you know eye to eye on many respects so yeah i look an it folder himself if he or she can can like sam a lot but also like us despite us being mean to sam that's a good sign in itself right so you know just being able to hold different different things you're doing You're doing that. Maybe you're the one IT folder. You're the hero we need. You're the one. You can restore balance to the force. Yeah. Yeah. So that's our reviews.

And last, Matt, the last thing, patrons. We have patrons. If you were a patron, you could have heard this conversation with Manveer weeks ago. You can hear our Decoding Academia series where we talk about research. And you can get live updates from me apologizing for us being late with various things. So, you know, there's tons of things for people to look to and we have to shout out those people that are kind enough to support us and our endeavors yes so you shout out your people chris i've got a couple of extra people and i'll shout them out after after you

do your shout outs okay so today for conspiracy hypothesizers we have have Marius Woops, Hola Gatito, George Weiner, Paul Reedy, Catherine, Dylan Osborne, the real deal and Professor Weinstein again, Jim G, Ryan Chandler, Sue Simmons. Some of those names may sound familiar to you. And this is because I've switched formats. I haven't completely reconciled them, but there we go. So you're getting your shout out. Double shout out. Okay. Let's shout out everybody twice. Thank you, everybody. Triple shout outs. I feel like there was a conference that none of us were invited to that came to some very strong conclusions. And they've all circulated this list of correct answers. I wasn't at this conference. This kind of shit makes me think, man, it's almost like someone is being paid.

Like when you hear these George Soros stories, he's trying to destroy the country from within. We are not going to advance conspiracy theories. We will advance conspiracy hypotheses. So those were our conspiracy hypothesizers for this week. Our revolutionary thinkers, we have Rebecca L. Shanawani, Dez Ebuya, Adam G., Ayman Singh, and Jack.

Oh, and David Ferguson as well. Good on David Ferguson. Wonderful. Love these guys. They're in the middle of the pack, not falling behind, not showing off. Thank you.

Yeah. Thank you both. Oh, all. All. I'm usually running, I don't know, 70 or 90 distinct paradigms simultaneously all the time. And the idea is not to try to collapse them down to a single master paradigm. I'm someone who's a true polymath.

I'm all over the place. But my main claim to fame, if you'd like, in academia is that I founded the field of evolutionary consumption. Now, that's just a guess. And it could easily be wrong, but it also could not be wrong. The fact that it's even plausible is stunning. Yeah, we said it before, but these clips are thematic and we appreciate that about them. Very good. Yeah, I really like that interchange between Jordan and and and brett it just sums up what absolute bubble heads they they are so there's that but finally matt finally we need to thank our galaxy brain gurus the greatest of all the patreon supporters first amongst equals. Yes. Yes.

Okay. So we have Jay Jones. I'm going to shout them out again. I know we've shouted them out, but an influential hog dealer, Chris Spanos. Again, you're welcome.

You're welcome. There's probably like your fifth shout out, but there you go. And there are other people that have been waiting a long time. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. But we do appreciate you. We do. Just forget that ton of boys. There's no favoritism.

It's just disorganization. It's just disorganization. That's right. I've switched things over. This is to make us more organized. David Ainsworth, Travis, and Kirsten Greed, who again, Kirsten, I'm sure that's the second time, but Mark

K maybe this is your first time. So thank you to Mark K and death stab lore. We we've definitely definitely talking about the detective staff lawyer. So there we go again, you know, like Moses Mohammed, we haven't thanked him. Moses Mohammed. I think I remember that. Yeah. And Trey DeVille.

Oh, and Alex Bandar. Alex Bandar. That's a pretty good name. Steve Donnelly. We thanked him, Matt, but there he's gone. He's a Galaxy Brain Guru. I can't stop myself. Eason Jostad.

Eason Jostad and Tim Morris as well. All Galaxy Green gurus we need to thank. All right. Thank you all, but especially the ones that we haven't previously thanked. Yes. We thank the people that we have thanked 50% left. Yep. We tried to warn people.

Yeah. Like what was coming, how it was going to come in, the fact that it was everywhere and in everything. Considering me tribal just doesn't make any sense. I have no tribe. I'm in exile. Think again, sunshine. Yeah. You know, that made me remember the Michael O'Fallon 2030 him talking to 2020 him.

And, you know, what will 2050 him think about 2018 him that whole conversation people should go back to that episode she did be curious but yeah that's that's champagne dtg that we need to get back to that kind of thing so good i mean joven d'angelo's it's fine it's fine but that's that's the classics that fine. But that's the classics. That's the gold. That's the classics. That's the good shit. Shit. The hard stuff. So, yeah. Well,

we're finishing our tech season. No, no, Chris. I've got a couple more people I need to shout out. Oh, sorry. Let it never be said that the squeaky wheel does not get the grease because if you complain to me on Twitter, I will shout you out. That is my response. I like that. This is actually should be our complete mechanism. If it's been the ages since

you haven't got your shout out and you're annoyed that I'm shouting out people I've already shouted out again multiple times before I've got to you, I'll cast Matt on Twitter and you will get your shout out. You might. If I'm sober and I'm paying attention and all the stars align, I may make a note and shout you out. So we have a couple of people. First one is Current Affairs Spokane and we're using the twitter handles here because we we haven't cross-tabulated twitter databases with the patreon databases unlike us to be sorry disorganized but there we go yeah we don't

we don't have the databases we don't have the tech but um current affairs spokane i think so actually i just realized current affairs spokane said that his name did get mentioned on their weekly shout outs but it didn't feel as good as he'd hoped so chris oh yeah could you make him feel better make him like shout him out in a way such that it it makes him feel as good as he would hope i I appreciate your support so much. It means so much. All the people's support, I don't think about it that much.

It's water off a duck's back, but your support, your support means the world to me. Current affairs, he's tearing up a little bit as he says this. I am. Thinking about all those current affairs Spokane who haven't had encouragement, Matt.

You know, it just makes me very sad. Okay, good. That was from the heart. Thank you. Dedicated mathematical mime as well. I also mentioned that she hadn't got a shadow and it's been 11 months and she's just been telling herself that it would take too much time to praise her.

And no, no, no, no, no. I don't care how long it's going to take. We will make the time. And especially because- I like the username. Dedicated mathematical mime. Yeah, and she's got a cool like black and white sort of historical we will make the time and especially because i like the username dedicated mathematical mind yeah and she's got a cool like black and white sort of historical picture i think it could be a lady female scientist a lady oh imagine that on twitter i think it's a picture of a historical

famous scientist but i don't recognize unfortunately um general lab aspiring a mathematician um very sadly suffering you know dealing with some medical issues right now was in hospital having a procedure done and damn it if that's not a good reason to get a special purpose shout out and for chris to shed a few tears uh for you then i don't know what is so get well soon i hope you're recovering well dedicated mathematical mime and just keep listening and for god's sake don't cancel your patreon subscription no matter what you do yeah just leave it on you know if things go bad at least you're you can't afford medication or whatever you know just cut some no yeah oh my well I wasn't expecting that term. But, well, yes, I'm very sorry to hear about the health issues.

I'm very happy to hear what I've been told. So, no, but we, yeah, our thoughts go out and, you know, just keep thinking in all those paradigms. Like if you think in all the different ones, no illness can actually get to you because you're just shifting paradigms constantly. So take Jordan Hall's advice and just keep shifting paradigms. That will serve you well. But I'm sure you'll be fine.

That's right. Very good. Is there more? Have you had more call stations? I think I have, but I forgot about those ones. We'll get to them next time. These are the ones I made a note about. That's all right. We're encouraging bad behavior.

But that's all right. We don't think these things through enough. That's our brand. That is our brand and we'll die by it. So, all right, Matt, this was an interesting episode. Thank you to Manvir. Thank you to you. Thank you to the patrons. Thank you to the other episode. Thank you to Manvir. Thank you to you. Thank you to the patrons. Thank you to the other listeners. Thank you to Japan for hosting me, my university for employing me. Thank you all, one and all. Thank you, gurus, for doing what you do.

You make it possible for the show. Thank you especially to the patrons who haven't been shouted out yet. We'll get to you, but thank them in particular for their patience. We appreciate you all. We do. I thank them most of all. Chris, any final words for me? No, I just want you to pay attention to the distributed idea suppression complex and be aware of the gated

institutional narratives, if you would. Okay. All right. Good. I'll pencil that in for tomorrow. So we'll get that done. That's all right. If you don't have time, grab a little feed of your muscle master. Okay. I do.

See you. Bye-bye. Thank you. you