Decoding the Gurus - Interview with Virginia Heffernan on Edge, the dangers of Scientism, & Culture Wars

Episode Date: February 26, 2022

On this week's show we have a broad ranging discussion with the well known journalist and author Virginia Heffernan. Virginia has written a bunch on the topic of technology, social media, scientism, and especially the Edge organisation. We discuss her research into Edge and related figures but also range further afield to cover debates in academia, the culture war and gurus, anthropology debates in the 90s, race & IQ rationalists, and other such topics.One short service note is that Matt is incognito for part of the conversation as he had a prior appointment so you will have to endure Chris functioning on his own but do not fear our intrepid psychologist re-emerges to offer some words of wisdom at the end. Also, the conversation with Virginia was recorded in advance of the events in Ukraine so no recent events are discussed (which is probably for the best).For those who want to do a bit more digging on the topics discussed, below are a bunch of related articles and you can also follow Virginia on Twitter (@page88) and check out her new podcast 'This is Critical' which encourages people to look critically at a wide array of topics, which is quite on brand for us!LinksVirginia's piece on Edge & John BrockmanVirginia's essays on WiredVirginia's Substack piece on Jordan PetersonVirginia's Substack piece on Peter ThielVirginia's WebsiteVirginia's book: Magic & Loss- The Internet as ArtInsider article on the sordid tale of Chris chanTwo articles Chris wrote on his ancient blog about the Captain Cook debate (part 1 and part 2)This Week's SponsorCheck out the sponsor of this week's episode, Ground News, and get the app at ground.news/gurus.

Hello Hello and welcome again to Decoding the Gurus. It's the podcast where an anthropologist and a psychologist listen to the greatest minds the world has to offer and we try to understand what they're talking about. I'm Matt Brown. With me is Chris Kavanagh. And sometimes we have friends on, guests on, to have a bit of a chat they tell us what they think about things we tell them what we think about things and together we make sense of this crazy world don't we Chris we do we do on occasion and we've got a lot of them coming up we've done a lot of interviews Matt on our roster of of super brains that we've spoken to. We have Timba on Toast

of the YouTube channel that we were singing the praises of. We have Liam Bright, noted philosopher and Leverhulme, prize winner. Leverhulme, prize winning philosopher. And Julian Walker

from Conspiratuality Podcast, our good colleagues In the fight against ADC So We've got even more Booked, exciting Famous names, like Josh Zeps Oh we got Josh Zeps

That's right, we've got him We're gonna debate Rogan I try to get out But they keep pulling me back in That's right. We've got him. We're gonna, we're gonna debate Rogan. I tried to get out Matt and they keep pulling me back in. But that's only because it's Josh that we'll agree to do that. And then we have, we have more, there's more. But wait Matt, there's more. There's a veritable slew of interviews because you keep booking them that's right i just want

to talk to people i just that's i can't you know you're on your own mind it's you know sometimes i just i just have it up to here with your sunny disposition and your constant reference of psychology theories. You're like polyamorous, but for podcasting. That's right. I need hot takes. Feed me them. Feed me them. What do you think about gurus?

Tell me. That's my sustenance. But who are we talking to today? Who are we talking to today? Who are we talking to? Ah, well, we are talking to Virginia Heffernan, who is a journalist, cultural critic, author, various other intellectual endeavors. She also has podcasts. She had a long running one during the Trump years called Trump cast. And, and now

has a podcast called, this is critical, encouraging people to take critical look at, at different topics every week. So we had a wide ranging conversation about Virginia and not about Virginia with Virginia and an interesting point to note, it's interesting, I don't know, but it's a point to note is that Matt, being the good scholar and mentor that he is, disappeared in the middle of this interview because he had a meeting, but he reappears at the end. So, you know, if you're a Matt fan and you're like, oh no, years at the end. So, you know, if you're a Matt fan and you're like, oh no, Chris is going to just talk to someone on his own. Yes. But Matt will come back. I promise you at the end.

Stick around. Fast forward. Fast forward. We'll make bookmarks. Let's say we'll do about Matt section. And we, we originally intended to talk to Virginia a little bit about Edge, the online science website slash magazine that was famous for its annual question, where it posed a question to the greatest minds that the internet have to offer. And a lot of them are people that we would now recognize from the guru sphere. are people that we would now recognize from the guru sphere so it was slightly a precursor to the intellectual dark web and um one jeffrey epstein was involved so it's it's a little bit of a assorted tale but we don't get into that until the very end of the podcast so again you have to listen to all the rest of it before you get to that, but it does come at the end. I promise you.

Yeah. And a nice little added flavor to this is that Virginia is sort of more from the humanities background. You and I are kind of the dorky sciencey geeky side of things so it's like it's like a word cell betwixt two shape rotators well you're you're a sheep i got it i got it but you're a shape rotator whereas i'm like a wannabe sheep rotator i'm a word cell that's just like dressed up like a sheep rotator that's right you get like you get like 45 degrees and you're like yeah i can't rotate it looks i just want to put words in the cells and so so yeah the sheep rotator word cell that's really going to you know forever make this

podcast relevant whatever's going on at the time that you're listening to it it's not going to be at all no that's that's just not some obscure internet meme what happened to worm discourse what happened to worm discourse or you know i remember the two plus two equals five wars where's all that that was big news for a while. People still know about Milkshake Duck. That people still know about them. What about that guy? What ever happened to him? Yeah.

Oni-san. What about that guy? He's a weirdo. I think, Matt, you know, God, I do just want to mention that I introduced you to the world of chris chan a while back and i oh yeah i think you were always very grateful that i made you aware of that whole sordid affair yeah you you put you put the name into my mind and i did a deep dive and i i watched videos i read sagas and my god chris no that that was just the most reprehensible it's that point that you just think

humanity is it okay should we just stop this so if you don't know the story of Chris Chan there's some research for you all I'm sorry Edeltrance I'm so sorry

so sorry so sorry you'll be fascinated you'll be appalled and you'll be sorry that you ever ever heard about it well but you know there's bad things on the internet there's some good things there's things I'd like to tell you about for example

it might seem an odd thing to pivot from Chris Chan to this but I hear a plinking in the background, a joyful ditty. And I'm thinking about that we have, we've got problems, Matt. We've got manipulative algorithms in our social media feeds. We've got clickbait and sensationalized content polluting our minds. clickbait and sensationalized content polluting our minds. And there's really, I've just got this strong sense that there's an importance to us to seek out diverse perspectives, identify media bias and political polarization and engage

your critical thinking, pierce your social media bubbles. You know what I'm talking about, man? I think I do. I think I do. I think I do. Is it that scrappy up-and-coming out shit called Grand News? Wow. Yeah, that's right. A website, an app that shows you how breaking news is being covered

across the political spectrum, not just one slice. They go the whole way across. Backwards and forwards. They go. It's all about context, isn't it, Chris? And, you know, we all get our news from somewhere and we all have our preferences and they may well be good preferences

because a lot of it is not good. But it's always helpful to have a better context and know the lay of the land, know the kinds of stories that tend to come to your attention and also be aware of the kinds of stories that don't make it to other segments of the political spectrum. You're right, Matt. And in this era where countries are defeating other countries, it is a good time to identify your blind spots. See how stories are getting covered across the political spectrum.

And Grand News has lots of tools that let you do that. You can look at global coverage, how international stories are being covered across different news outlets, different geographies using a nice little interactive map. So tell me, Chris, if you wanted to do something like that, how would you get there?

That's a great question, Matt. And what you would need to do is that you'd want to go to ground.news forward slash gurus. And that will let them know that we informed you to go there. And that will make everyone happy. Them, us, you, you win. We're all winning. So thank you, Ground News. Compare news coverage, spot media bias, do all that,

and download the app at ground.news.com. Well, okay, Matt. So now to the interview. So we have with us this week a guest, which we sometimes do to try and get people to help us decode what is going on in the online guru or internet space. And our guest this week is Virginia Heffernan, who is an author, journalist, podcaster, and has quite an extensive back history with podcasting. I think, Virginia, you had

Trumpcast, right? And now a new podcast from September last year. This is critical. Yes, that's exactly right. Yeah. So Virginia has covered a whole range of topics, some of which we'll get into. But in particular, we're interested in discussing some of your work and opinions around the rationalist edge. I don't quite know Ted talky side of the online space, about which you've written a lot of good articles on and have also been quite critical of. So thanks for coming on, Virginia. We're looking forward to find out more. Thank you for having me. I've probably never been so eager to talk to people on a podcast as I have been to talk to you. So thank you for accepting my DMs and my enthusiasm about your show and this project of confronting and holding to the fire some very bad ideas on sophistry that have been taking up a lot of air for the last, I would even say the last 40 years, but certainly the last 10 years.

Virginia, you've been exposed to these public intellectual popular writers and so on for such a long time. And so one of the things I was saying to Chris is what I'd be really interested in is to get a sense of how would you describe it and how is it different from orthodox or conventional intellectual stuff that you might see in a university? I mean, one of the things is that it's become orthodoxy itself. So what you see in universities currently is fascinating compared to the line towed by Joe Rogan or Sam Harris or whoever else. So while in, say, history of technology,

I've just been going back over some of the work of Alondra Nelson, who talked about Black anti-avatars online, that work has turned into more recent stuff by Edward Jones Imatop, who has been researching Black androids, which are these automata that are racialized, powered by steam power, take the place of draft horses in the 19th and 20th centuries, and uses them to make a very interesting argument about so-called black steam, which is the use of steam on the Underground Railroad and steam technology as something that black engineers came to be very familiar with and was very threatening to white engineers and slave owners.

So anyway, I bring that up not to sell you on any of this research, but just to say the Academy has been doing that. And in public space, we're having square one conversations about whether Black people are dumber than white people. Like, I don't understand. Did like public intellectuals without degrees, without research, without scholarship, but people with podcasts, the Weinsteins, the whatever, are keeping us, keeping public conversation about interesting ideas so constrained. You know, sometimes there's some undergraduate that just pops off about Ayn Rand at a seminar table, and they're sort of disqualified. Like, there's a gentle way that you kind of disqualify them from more conversation. But these are all the disqualified sophomores who suddenly have

microphones and they haven't advanced. You know, one thing Alondra Nelson noticed in 2002 was the fantasy that there would be a raceless digital future. And then last spring, I know you guys have cited this, but Sam Harris talked about identification with race as a mental illness. That racelessness, not even seeing yourself in the mirror, the kind of amazing personal transcendence he has from social conditions is something that not only should we all aspire to, and not only is it kind of a mistake or you've missed out not to do it, but there's something sick and crazy if you don't do it.

And that is just, it's just a straight line from some of the platitudes of 20 years ago to now. And these are people who at Edge, you know, where I was a member, and elsewhere stand in for intellectuals now. There's a couple of threads that I think are interesting. And the one that strikes me and that Matt and I have talked about is that in a lot of the figures that we cover, in a lot of the figures that we cover, there's a real emanation of grievance about not having succeeded in academia or more accurately, not being recognized for whatever revolutionary

theory that they want to introduce. And that on the flip side, I tend to think that amongst their audience, there often is a genuine hunger for academic style or even if not specifically academic, but kind of intellectual discussion around topics. And in some respects, they do deliver that. If you take the podcast, they often do have experts in relevant fields on talking about their area of expertise. But the point you make that there are these kind of heterodox or controversial topics, which seem to suck like black holes, people into the orbit and the race and IQ debate is one such topic, right? Around which the heterodox have a tendency to hover. And I think there's lots of different reasons that people get into that. Some of them are just outright racism.

But I think that for a bunch of people, it is more the appeal that the kind of forbidden knowledge, right? That this is a topic that is being suppressed by mainstream academia. And I find a general unwillingness within people that view it that way to look at surrounding contextual information. So like say that you have a person who is publishing on recent IQ, right? a person who is publishing on race and IQ, right?

And you can see, if you look at their activity online, that they're also hardline, xenophobic people sharing anti-Semitic memes, right? So that information is not irrelevant to understand what their scholarly endeavor is aimed towards. But a lot of people within the heterodox kind of say, well, that doesn't matter. That information is irrelevant. All you should care about is, does their data show what they say it does? But all data is interpreted and the way that you phrase questions and so on. So the example that springs to mind is the scholar called Noah Karl, who became celebrated amongst the heterodox because he was removed from his fellowship at Cambridge, I think. And there was protests around

his output. And whatever you think about his dismissal and how fair or unfair it was, I saw so many in the heterodox sphere basically refused to pay attention to the fact that his scholarship is unusual. He's publishing in these kind of vanity journals that are focused on race and IQ and immigration and producing articles that are being shared in far-right blogs. And the level of scholarship has serious questions around it. But people acted as if all of that, those flags, they don't matter because it's just about our people publishing statistical analysis in a paper. And he was, but yeah, I know there's a lot of things there, but just to say that like those broader contextual understandings seem to be missing from the heterodox sphere. And also that, that issue

about like grievance around academia is is very real and seems recurrent i mean the the the things you bring up seem to go to the question of you know and i and i come from literary theory so you know everybody's least favorite discipline but you know this french phrase the sujet savoir, the person presumed to know. And the person presumed to know used to be an Oxford Don. And now the person presumed to know is someone with sometimes with the mic for a lot of many hours a day. The never ending conversation about IQ and race. I mean, that really has dogged us all like all my adult life. I've heard about it. People at the Dartmouth Review. I grew up in Hanover, New Hampshire.

The Dartmouth Review was like the National Review, but for Dartmouth College. Love to make fun of all the professors that were in African-American studies for being dumb. I mean, it was just like ludicrous. And it was just it was like playground stuff. It was meant to bother people. Then they get in trouble for it. And then they say that they've been censored, like done and dusted. And then they're like martyrs to the cause.

I mean, we've seen it happen over and over. But anyway, the conversation around IQ, like the conversation around academic, formal academic achievement seems to be about who gets to speak the truth. seems to be about who gets to speak the truth. And if you can find some scientific metric for your own intelligence, then you know you own the mic. You're allowed to publish. You have the mic or you're allowed to speak

or what you say is closer to the truth. And one of the funny ways that this has happened, that that is always a shifting sea. For now, the IQ test seems to still, Charles Murray has not said he thinks that the IQ test is biased, but I'll take another example of one of the shibboleths of this kind of racialized judging of intellectual merit. I don't know if you saw, but Andrew Sullivan some months ago reproduced the old saw about why is it that Jews have won all these Nobel Prizes if Jews aren't intrinsically smarter, right? And I sort of thought, well, wait, why don't we, you must be talking only, there are a lot of Nobel Prizes that are not in the sciences, right?

So all the Nobel Prizes in the humanities have been going, I mean, Yasser Arafat got a Nobel Peace Prize, Barack Obama got a Nobel Peace Prize. So do we think that these figures are somehow more worthy, intrinsically more worthy? No, because achievement in the humanities or achievement in academic life is now seen to be just a product of some kind of affirmative action or wokery, a product of some kind of affirmative action or wokery so that you can move the place where a Joe Rogan to the MMA octagon or to the IQ test or to the Jewishness that somehow like solidifies your place to speak. And, you know, I was thinking about these Black academics who I just referred to, Alondra Nelson and Edward Jones Imhotep. And they, you think like, oh, these people must be talking from the margins about this, you know, African-American studies. No, Alondra Nelson is

at the Institute for Advanced Studies where in Princeton, where we can all agree is like the great Einsteinian, you know, like place where actual verified intelligent people are supposed to be like, and yet now that is slagged off as yet another place that's just trying to hire Black women. And Jones Imhotep is at the University of Toronto taking issue as a historian of science with some of the work of Marshall McLuhan on racelessness, where he also was. So the major work in media studies done at the University of Toronto, the major work in science and technology and rational thinking goes on at the Institute for Advanced Studies. But now those places have been demoted because too many women and Black

people or just too many people that don't look like they're supposed to look. Hmm. One thing that I tend to find important when these kinds of topics come up is that David Reich is the population geneticist who wrote a book, The History of Us, or something like that. It was a book about population genetics. And I read that book and find it really good,

like a really nuanced and useful discussion about the history, like what population genetics and what genetics can tell us about our history and the nature of humans. And like the general message was that humans throughout history have always been a kind of mongrel species. There's always interbreeding between populations and so on. But you can also find out interesting things where there are, for example, social systems that have prohibited intermarriage between castes, right, like in India. And in some cases, the genetic evidence can talk to how enduring those kinds of things are. Let me ask you a question actually about that, because like a lot of people

i'm enthralled to this new book the dawn of everything so i don't mean to be completely sycophantic to the work of david wengro and david graber on this but they strongly caution against these kind of originary stories of humans that take place in small areas. And we also never, like my recent joke with my son is that every story about original humankind starts with 10,000, I mean, 20,000, I mean, 100 million years ago, or was it 10 million years ago? But people lived in tribes. It's just like, we don't have the date and we don't have this archaeological site and we don't have the place. Now you're saying in India, these castes, you know, they're like there was anxiety about caste crossing. But when and what about the places where there wasn't?

This is a real, really important point that comes out in the dawn of everything. And I'm persuaded we know very, very little about how people lived on the ancestral plane. We don't even really know where the ancestral plane is. And that whether we speak in, and I think this is relevant to our conversation, whether we talk about in kind of Russovian terms about how wonderful and matriarchal and we were all bonobos and then things got horrible with agriculture, or we say we were in a Hobbesian world where we were all chewing each other up and we hated each other and we were always fleeing tigers and thus had to eat calories or not eat calories or whatever, all that bullshit. All of it is just those stories.

And that I think is amazing. But anyway, to go back to David Reich, he seems really interesting. I just am now so alert to the number of times we refer as if we know to how people are in a natural state. And I think this is very relevant to philosophy. Yeah. So the more general point I would make there is like population genetics or even studies involving IQ in psychology, like for example, in clinical psychology, if you're looking at the impact of various education policies to deal with developmental learning disabilities. And one measure that can be taken is IQ tests to see the relative impact of different treatments over time.

And I think within the disciplines, within the research literature, that everything has to be taken carefully and looked at critically, methodologically. But I think those uses of IQ, of population genetics, and so on, within the disciplines is often valid, interesting, and kind of informative in useful ways, but they tend not to make much contact with how those things are interpreted in the culture war, right? Like the kinds of studies that I teach in university about educational psychology and clinical psychology studies, nobody talks about them in the culture war, right? Because they're not relevant. But that bit aside on David Reich and population genetics specifically, I think the point that people make about just-so

stories and evolutionary psychology and grand narratives that are woven from very fragmented evidence are all very legitimate objections to raiseyes. But in specific cases, and I think David Reich does a good job of this, that the kinds of things that they're claiming or that he's claiming specifically tend to be talking about very specific populations and asking specific questions. And like, I've tried to make this point

with some race realist people that population genetics, applying various techniques to like, look at populations in Ireland, right. Can, can separate out a whole range, like 10 or so different population groups that relate to this, these ancestral migrations from different locations. Are you going to tell me about how the Heffernans were dominated by the Quinns again? That's all I ever hear. And also, I love there's this Middle Earth quality to talking to actual Irish people as an Irish American, where you say, my name is Heffernan.

And they say, oh, from up the hill. Up the hill? It is Middle Earth. It's the shire but yes i mean i know and also those you know every african every uh irish american is obsessed with with um genealogy and tracing and and it is immensely interesting but it's self-obsessed kind of way i think you're right that there's like a danger by people over-essentializing. Like I saw some stuff about where one of the mass shooter guy recently who was tangentially related to the IDW, I forget his name now, but he wrote a novel and it was essentially

talking about, you know, I'm from the highlands and this means that I'm more aggressive. This kind of like essentialized, not even really EvoCite It's, it's like pop Evo site from the Victorian era. But in any case, those things have influenced, but I think that the example that they gave in terms of the caste system in India, like the records, even back to the Vedas, the ancient records that we have of the Vedic cultures, there's quite strong distinctions made between different castes and different roles of people. And this is a pattern that we often see in various ancient civilizations and modern civilizations too.

So that analysis... I'm so sorry to man-terrupt, woman-terrupt you. No, go ahead. I'm really taking to heart this proposal, invitation in The Dawn of Everything, not to say you see it in a lot of ancient societies without citing exactly which archaeological sites you're talking about. And also remembering that there's also the absolute opposite of that. And let's say thousands of things that we've never thought about before that you just can't believe. And hierarchical versus egalitarian is, in their view, the completely reductive thing we do. And I say this as a liberal. I have been beholden to the Rousseau view.

I've thought I just heard a feminist talk about her book on cooking and I had to turn it off. She was on a podcast and she started by saying, you know, there was a time when, and again, the thing I love of the 10,000, 20,000, a million years ago, a hundred million, I don't know, was it in India? Was it in Ukraine? I don't know. Was it in what was now the Americas? But somewhere at some time, women used to sit around and just played each other's hair and, you know, forage. And they were so happy and it was matriarchal and they just looked after their children. And we need to get back there because of the terrible influence of castes and hierarchies and racism that came later. hierarchies and racism that came later. And then I just interviewed an exercise physiologist who started by saying, you know, on the ancestral plane, 10,000, 20,000, 100 million, 1 million in Ukraine, in wherever, somewhere in the world that I want to imagine in a set piece,

people used to have to run all the time and be efficient about their calories. And I just have had just been reading. I mean, it's monotonous to go through all these sites, but there is something like 150 archaeological sites in the U.S. that suggest a so-called pre-Clovis civilization, like what beginning to be like some kind of Paleolithic civilization. And some of them that have the monuments that you thought were supposed to suggest a hierarchy, like grand burials, actually, when they dig around in them, and this work, this doesn't come from Graeber and Wengro, but comes from Paulette Steeves, who's a native Cree archaeologist. to were sometimes just eccentrics, like dwarfs or people with genetic anomalies that might have been considered special in some way apart from their resources, physical strength, capacity to dominate. But even if that's only one case, the point is we really don't have... Humans were just very creative from the beginning and were never acting. And this is the argument of now most archaeologists were never acting just according to some programming that we can fish out to tell ourselves that women are monogamous or women are not monogamous or all the things that Evo Psych has said, even leaving out that it's politicized.

has said, even leaving out that it's politicized, it's just entirely impressionistic and conjured out of thin air. I mean, and these are people, Pinker, et cetera, who are supposed to be the rationalists and they're not looking at the data. I mean, I hadn't. Had you looked into archaeology since the 60s or 70s? I hadn't. I didn't know there were 150 sites in the U.S. that suggest that humans have been in the Americas for more than 30,000 years, more than 50,000 years. I mean, it blows the mind. But all while I have not been looking at data, I have confidently been making arguments about what sweetheart matriarchs we were and goddesses and whatever, just as it suits my needs. And now I realize that I have no leg to stand on. That part of an argument just needs to be completely, I don't know, the non-90s word for it, but let's just say problematized or at least

subject to an inquiry. Yeah. I would just say that, like in my case, my views around this come from the background in anthropology. So I've done... You know your stuff. Yeah, I've read quite a lot about archaeological stuff related to anthropology and also hunter-gallery societies and the ethnographic... Not fair that I assigned my own ignorance to you. You probably know these sites very well,

but I just... It is amazing... You can assign it to me though, Virginia. Okay, all right. Either one of us really knows the sites in America. But the only reason I bring this up is not to... Not at all chess game kind of way, but more like, doesn't that blow open your imagination to think, I mean, anthropology in general does this, which is like, there are, there's more things in heaven and earth. There are more ways that humans can organize themselves than we could even name. You know, there are people who think their societies, I mean, Chris, this is your jam, like who think feces is a great gift or who think that they should like happily sleep with their nieces or who think that they shouldn't, you know, they shouldn't have sex at all or whatever.

They're just like, you know, there are two ways of seeing the world and our origins that play into this culture war, you know, that we're intrinsically good and egalitarian or that we're intrinsically hierarchical and, you know, rape is sometimes justified or whatever. And we pick and choose so much from them. And part of the reason that you're probably a good critic of these things is that you know that there are so many other ways to imagine how to organize ourselves. And that these are two of the most banal. Yeah, look, I think like both things are true. Like, okay, so now I'm speaking more as a, you know, psychology type person with just a basic understanding of anthropology. I mean, it's true at one side, you know, it's true that there was just, there's huge diversity

in all the different ways that people can organize themselves and live. And one of the things that psychologists, even evolutionary psychologists, always emphasize is our cognitive and social flexibility. We're not like lizards just programmed to do X and Y. There's an amazing amount of flexibility there. And of course, that's where the feedback mechanisms of culture come in. At the same time, of course, the physical constraints of, say, a hunter-gatherer society, and we do know in places like Australia that people have been here from about 40,000 to 60,000 years ago when crossing the land bridge.

We know that they lived under the constraints of that kind of lifestyle. And that does have an effect on the way that one can potentially organize. So likewise, with respect to, say, differences between men and women, there are behavioral differences that we detect, especially among young men. So as you get to my age, you become much more androgynous. Much more womanly. Yeah. But certainly like in terms of rash impulsivity and risk-taking propensity for violence and things like that.

I mean, one of the things that Graeber and Wengro meant to address with this Dawn of Everything, and this is the last time I'll cite it, I promise. Is it some kind of equality or egalitarianism is never possible in any kind of society where there's age and gender just because of strength questions. And I think Hobbes was quite alert to this problem when it came to age, right? I mean, he talks about it's in everybody's interest to be egalitarian because sometimes we'll or to work together because sometime we'll be the old man and problem when it came to age, right? I mean, he talks about it's in everybody's interest to be egalitarian because sometimes we'll, or to work together because sometime we'll be the old man

and we won't be able to get out of bed. But the, but the egalitarianism from, or the sort of status of people from the outside is different from their subjectivity from the inside. And so it is actually sort of astonishing when I, especially reading this work by Paulette Steves about Indigenous culture, to remember again how little we're able to fathom the brains of others. Yeah. She and Wen-Groen Graeber have talked a lot about the indigenous intellectual tradition and its relation to the Enlightenment. And there's something in the words indigenous intellectual tradition that I just had not considered because there's a condescending way to look at indigenous people as like holders of nature and they live in sync with nature and then there's an aggressive colonialist way and neither one of them gives a lot of credit to like a rich intellectual life that women indigenous people even children certainly black people people of all ethnicities are are also constantly imagining other ways of organizing themselves yeah so i mean yeah i mean i want to get at one of the gurus

that i think you guys would take a shot at, which is Yuval Harari, or at least be interested in him, especially as an educator. But, you know, one of the great points that is made about Harari's kind of potted but exciting history of humanity called Sapiens is that he says humans could go either way. Some of them were, some early humans were as peaceable as bonobos and some were as warlike as chimps, right? Graeber and Wengro point out, why didn't he say as peaceful as a hippie commune or as aggressive as a biker gang? Because they were never animals. Like at that point, they're making decisions. Hippies are not living according to programming. They've made a decision that this is an awesome

way to live. And they have full agency and full intellectual lives, as do biker gang members. And just to constantly keep that in front of us, I think is really interesting. So there's a certain way of imagining egalitarian societies or not making a big deal out of the gender distinction when you're thinking about the interior experience. Interiority subjectivity seems to be harder to fathom than just to refer to ovaries or upper body strength or what's that other thing men have? Laser-like focus? What's that other thing men have? Laser-like focus?

Do you guys have laser-like? That's nice. And upper body strength, right? And you can visualize 3D objects in space. I can do more push-ups than my wife. That is a superpower that comes into play very often in my daily life. That's how you settle most disagreements. Pull up bar it quick. In the cavernar.

I think the thing where we really, where like both perspectives really come together is just how misleading it is to, one, impose these satisfying narratives and these sort of moral lessons to draw from, you know, prehistory, for instance. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, you see the evolutionary,

the sort of pop evolutionary psychology I want to emphasize. This is the Bret and Heather Hayings, Gad Saad sort of thing. And you see all kinds of lessons being drawn, and those lessons say more about the person, about the wants and desires of the person who's spinning the yarn than the thing they're actually talking about. And likewise, like you mentioned, the sort of Rousseauian or the kind of sometimes fashionable liberal point of view is to contrast this, you know, technocratic,

hierarchical, modern society with this lovely state of nature. And as a science-y type psychology person, I really despise the idea of confusing what was or what is with what you would prefer and what you would like and to try to use these historical or prehistorical anecdotes as drawing from that, well, this is what we should do today. There's nothing good about whatever natural and inverted commas is. There is no particular moral boon to acting in that way, as far as I can see. Yeah.

I also feel that my, and this goes back to the gurus that you decode on this show are often it's so there's so much obsolete rehash and what they're saying. The problem is that you have all this intellectual energy, as as you point out, Chris, among their listeners and their their acolytes and this almost forensic hysteria that you see at something like QAnon. You know, I just think like, wow, people just really wanted to do a lot of scholarship. And I thought this from the beginning of the internet, that like, it turns out lots of people want to be looking up shit online. And, you know, I think I gave a talk at

some law firm about the internet in the very early days and how they might use it. And someone raised his hand and said he was direct descendant of Cal Coolidge. And he spent many of his billable hours editing Calvin Coolidge's entry on Wikipedia. He had to sign up. This is like day, you know, year two of Wikipedia, where it probably only had American presidents. And, you know, and I just thought, you know, poor guy. I mean, apparently, like, he probably should have been writing biographies or he wanted to do something literally just scholarly, like the things that we would have begged students to do and get interested in. And suddenly they want to write essays on blogs. And so I want to, you know, kind of applaud that. But this strange game of intellectual life is much more ecstatic ways of being,

not to be right and woke and perfect, but to just think more imaginatively about the world. It cannot be that the one conversation we can have is about race and IQ in 2021. Like I just wanna, so let me say that again, race and IQ in 2022. Of course, talking about 2021, like I just want to, or 2020, so let me say that again, race and IQ in 2022. Of course, talking about 2021, that's history.

That's definitely fair game. But do you know what I mean? Like there's like, they're like, it just, how did things get so boring? That I was just, you know, far be it for me to frociate on people going down online cultus acts in the weird topics, but there does seem this fairly common trap where there's a lot of passion, there's a lot of intellectual energy, and there's a lot of resources that people can get caught up in, like QAnon gets presented as anti-intellectual in many ways it is,

you know, but in other ways, it's the same as numerology or it's the same as Ayurvedic medicine or so on. These systems are not non-complex, right?

They have massive interlinking narratives, lots of varied connections and documents that you should get to know. And the same thing happens around ivermectin or COVID. People do end up citing studies, arguing over individual graphs in papers and these kinds of things. But all of that energy is like, I'm often lamenting with Matt and in a way, which is a very like academic style thing to do is

why if you cared about these topics, right? Like if it was an interest, why spend four hours listening to Jordan Peterson and Joe Rogan discuss, you know, whatever it is. For example, for example. Just to pull two names out of a hat that are not at all relevant.

There's these online MOOCs, online courses that are well conducted by good people. You know, I'm not talking about the stodgy professors that the lectures won't make you want to kill yourself. You have people like Paul Bloom or you have all sorts of... Marjorie Garber on Shakespeare is fantastic. sorts of... Marjorie Garber on Shakespeare is fantastic. All the Yale classes that were recorded in 2007

that, you know, when my son was stuck at home, just gave himself a whole Yale education. It's incredible. I mean, in the early days when they were giving away books and lectures and that stuff still there. Gary Kasparov can teach you to play chess. You can listen to Glenn Gould lecture

about how to play piano or about appreciating Bach. I mean, there's a lot more for your brain to do. And I think though, part of the issue is, apart from the fact that maybe a little bit harder to find than a YouTube video or podcast, but, but also that like when you start digging into scholarship, whatever the topic is, the general impression that this is well known is that you start to realize there's lots of things that you don't know. And this topic is much more complicated than you anticipated. And this relates to the point that you made earlier, Virginia, because in my undergraduate degree, I started to dig into the ancient war literature. And this has a very similar debate that David Gravenor and others would be involved with,

with competing camps, essentially arguing about the relative amounts of evidence that we have for whether war and conflict is a modern invention or whether it's a deeply historical thing. We always had intergroup conflict. whether it's a deeply historical thing, we always had intergroup conflict. And there's lots of debates and scholarship around that topic and people in different camps with very strong opinions about it. And the particular opinion where I fall down on that is probably more actually in line with the people who think that intergroup conflict was historically just always there, but not on the same scale. But it doesn't even matter because my point is just that literature is very rich on

both sides or wherever you fall on that debate, but whenever I see it reflected in a Scientific American article, like John Horgan's reflection of it, who in some ways is quite a good science writer, but it always seems to diminish the actual debate and the discussion. And I'm an academic, so I have my bias about that, but I feel like the part that makes it into a 30 minute podcast conversation between Steven Pinker and John Horgan or whatever, does it disservice to the depth of the literature and the arguments on both sides? But it's a depressing thing to tell people, like, if you really care about this subject, you have to go and read books and research literature and do a boring literature

review. And the answer will not be terribly satisfying. You'll just come down with, I find the evidence on this side more persuasive than that side. And, you know, I think it's the opposite of the Yuval Harari, or I'm butchering his name. It doesn't give that satisfaction. So, yeah, I think that's part of the way that these debates get refracted into the culture war. And I think almost always the culture war does it a disservice to the actual research literature. So I want to ask you guys a question and first tell you about my own experience in my former

field. So I did a PhD in English at Harvard and my dissertation was on financial dynamics in these turn of the century American novels, ways that novels dealt with inflation and the passing gold standard. And while I was working on that and doing earlier coursework, the professors were very different. They had different methodologies. They especially had different periods, right? I mean, that was how they were defined. This one does 18th century. This one does medieval. You had to fill that out among the professors. But there was no both sides. Like there was this refracted prism of ways that you could come at literature. And some people took what might've been imagined as a more conservative course

that they were doing old historical readings. They were putting the work of Milton or Spencer in contact in historical context. Some people were doing more out there understandings of like transvestitism and Shakespeare, but nobody there, understandings of like transvestitism and Shakespeare. But nobody, it was impossible to find a fulcrum for schismogenesis, you know, for forming your identity in opposition to someone else's identity. And so even when you talk about Pinker and that science writer debating something

and trying to hear out both sides, I just don't even know what it's like to see both sides. I mean, anyway, and that's where I want you to tell me, Matt, you know, are people still thinking there's something to psychoanalysis and then others are saying, no, it's only cognitive behavioral therapy or something way beyond that? Or do most of you see anyway, is there a both sides in the current state of psychology? And I want to ask you the same thing chris sorry to to turn into a host yeah uh yes and no so yes i mean there is there are certainly psych you know people who are as fans of psychoanalysis um like we we had a staff member for instance that was into positive psychology a different thing but you know it's a little sub-branch plus i think positive psychology is mostly nonsense.

Oh, God, I completely agree with you. Let's move on to happiness studies after this. Yeah, fashionable, trendy nonsense. So, yeah, there is diversity and people who think the other sub-dis completely terrible on the other hand you know there's also you know a mainstream groundswell that is pretty consensus like so it's kind of a bit of both i guess it's not a very good answer i suppose but yeah no no no that's right i mean if you sit down with a positive psychologist do you have like a creepy feeling that that person is you know espouses fascism or do you mostly just think

oh poor them they went down a like you know a road that's not i just think that i just think that i'm very smart okay but i mean everyone can work with people who they think are like not as smart as they are or made some like bad intellectual turns right i mean that seems like the nature of the beast but the kind of the blood sport is not an academic. I mean, academics obviously get irritated with each other all the time, but there weren't, at least in my experience. It wasn't as though, you know, the people who like post-structuralism thought the people who were still studying metaphor systems in Wallace Stevens were fascists and the other didn't think the other was bringing the world down. Outside the Academy, plenty of people said deconstruction was the end of the world. But inside, it's just hard to think of in Faulkner studies, in the study of Milton, how you'd be like, oh, you don't want to go there. That's a third rail subject.

You do not want to see what Brad Weinstein has to say about Paradise Lost because he strongly disagrees with Nicole Hannah Jones and there's going to be blood on the floor. It just doesn't happen. No, that's right. Yeah. We've spoken about this before, which is that people don't appreciate that 90% of the controversies and the disagreements really don't have much political valence to them whatsoever. And yes, you can really, the disagreements can be bitter and nasty, right? But they are sort of mainly academic disagreements. I mean, when I think about my own sub-speciality, which is, you know, look at addiction and gambling in particular, right?

There is actually a bit of a political dimension to it because you have one camp, which is more in the sort of public health frame of mind, which is that, you know, there's the product is the problem and it's fostering addiction. There's obviously companies and interest groups that are happy to facilitate that. And then you have sort of a more medicalized kind of point of view, which is that... Is that what the Sacklers are? They're happy to facilitate that. Yes, that's a diplomatic way to put it, isn't it? And then, so the interest groups and then the... And then you have more of a sort of psychiatric or pathological model, which is that the person who is an addict is kind of the

problem, if you like. They've got some sort of mental disorder that needs to be fixed, right? So I'm sober in AA now. It's been 10 years. And yeah, this debate is supremely interesting, but I'm sure, as you know, AA's position on this is that most people aren't addicts. Like just, you know, we've forfeited the luxuries of normal men by being unable to drink, but that it doesn't have to do with the liquor companies. It doesn't have to do with Ambien or the Sacklers or anyone else. And I know that that is, that that's why people see AA as being not, not sufficiently activist because it's so focused on the moral betterment of the individual there's a gamblers anonymous oh yeah GA yeah yeah which is has the

same philosophy yeah and um and you know but they have a philosophy that works because because and it's natural that they have that focus because they have a focus on helping the people who join the thing right now they they're not in a position to change the society change the world right they're trying to help help the people who come there change and it's very understandable so like i'll i'll just say that like those two perspectives neither is wrong you know there is natural tension between them about where one puts the emphasis but it sort of parallels the sort of nature nurture dispute you know when most most people are coming to realize that all behavior results in interaction between those two things it's it's kind of it's the same logic here really

yeah there's a there's something that you that you can trip on when you're talking you feel like you're talking to someone about ideas and then suddenly you are trespassing on something of great emotional importance to them and it often seems like it's a kind of william jamesian religious experience or some dearly held transformation in their own lives so So I don't know, when I listen, for instance, I've written about Jordan Peterson, and when I listen to him, he's just in a very worrisome physical and mental predicament right now.

I mean, I've worked with a lot of addicts, and I don't think I know someone who's been as tenacious and continues to gun it. You know, I mean, any sponsor in any program would say you need to take a few years off. Like this is, I mean, I look again at the list of health problems that have beset him in the last 10 years by his own description and they're enormous and then and go anyway so but the point is that you don't i don't want to talk to jordan peterson about medicine or psychology or any of it because he's in a imperiled psychically imperiled place and you know i had my bottom was pretty bad and it looked nothing like that. But I certainly wouldn't have wanted to be a philosopher at that time because I would be guarding so many vulnerable flanks in my emotional makeup that I wouldn't be able to think straight. I wasn't able to think straight, you know, and then you see people like in the conspirituality world who, you know,

they've been saved by Shambhala or they've been saved by God or they've been saved by atheism, They've been saved by Shambhala or they've been saved by God or they've been saved by atheism, which has been a wonderful way for some people to repair church-damaged psyches by announcing themselves just friends of only reason. Cold, clear, nonstop reason. They will not even hold a crystal for fear that it's superstitious because it did away with many of the ghosts of their childhood churches. And, you know, you don't want to take away people's conversion narratives, or at least it has to be done with great caution. I think the things like Jordan Peterson's health and the impact that his concerns over health or neuroticism or whatever the case may be, the way that they impact his output. Like some people take that as you shouldn't talk about that, right? It's ad hominem. It's not addressing the ideas, but I think you're correct, Virginia, that they have a

big impact. And when we look at the gurus and kind of see how, you know, their experiences from being rejected in academia are not getting their due. Then come to inform their whole worldview about the way the system is rigged against people and so on, that you can't often understand their ideas in isolation from their personal stories. So it seems like it doesn't mean that there's nothing that says you can't think about Jordan Peterson's arguments and ideas and what empirical things that he presents so far as he does and notice all of the other factors, right? Notice the politics, notice the personal issues and the personality problems. Like you can address both things, right? And the two things are not completely distinct because the ideas come from the person. So yeah, there's,

I think that's just a mistake that lots of people make online that any comment that references a person's personal circumstances or their personality characteristics or their experiences is invalid and it's a complete double standard because those people constantly invoke the personality, the, you know, experiences that they've had with other people to invalidate their perspective. So that's like a frustrating thing that I noticed that double standard. One, one, uh, one thing that is that I find effective about AA for people seeking sobriety is that everybody's subjectivity is compromised. You're only ever working with someone who has an experience that is roughly comparable

to yours. And if it doesn't feel comparable to yours, if you feel like they've suffered way more or way less than you have, then it's a less productive partnership. But what's crazy with Peterson, if we can stay with this digression for a second, is that he also has been so explicit about the depths of his suffering. of his suffering. And then he goes back to being the suje suppose so far, the like person who knows everything and who speaks clearly without any burdensome social identity, race, gender that might confine his galaxy brain, even though he has just told us, I mean, I just called this up because this is the list I gave. So I'm sure you read the interview he gave his daughter, Michaela, last July, but what he talked about daughter, Michaela, last July. But what he talked about, and I mean, we shouldn't give this short shift, four and a half years.

So since he came to prominence of drug addiction, depression, anxiety, autoimmune illness, his wife's cancer. fantasies, a diagnosis of schizophrenia, a diagnosis of psychosis, catatonia, delirium, hallucinations, pneumonia in both lungs, numberless relapses. I couldn't count them, how many relapses. A global tour of rehabs during COVID that included Florida and Serbia, agonizing physical pain, a nine-day coma, seven weeks of amnesia, a torturous movement disorder that he described, 25 days without sleep, and a severe bout of COVID-19. I mean, it's very hard to not have that inflect what he says, only because have had suffered with one of those things addiction and I wouldn't have trusted me to talk about you know anything clear-headed until I was well out of that one important qualifier as well Virginia is that the 25 days of non-sleep were preempted

by consuming a glass of cider, right? Yes, exactly. Well, the cider, right, the cider is the cause of all of it because he doesn't like there to be a moral failing for him. He's happy for other people. But in this case, he blames the cider. Poor old apple cider, man. There's a huge amount, like, I think, in the cider incident about just the reasoning errors and also the biological

plausibility of some of those claims, you know, the tendency towards hyper really 25 nights with no sleep. Like, but there's dragons. I mean, the other, the thing, one thing, and I want to get to Chris, if there's an us and them or to both sides in archaeology. But one of my disappointments at Harvard was seeing that certain people who were really interesting on their subjects, so I'm thinking of this romanticist who did Wordsworth and Keats,

would suddenly hear about a feminist critique of one of the poems they liked, right? But instead of staying with the things they were so good at and continuing to tell us about this particular unpacking of this Latinate component of something of the influence on Wordsworth and the French Revolution, they spent the rest of their career complaining about feminists. Like, you don't have to like them. Just move. Go back. Go back to what you were saying about Chaucer. We don't care.

And that's how I feel about Jordan Peterson. Please don't tell us to eat steak. And please go back and tell us about folklore and your psychological methods and whatever you were doing at Toronto before this happened. Like, you are not a good person to get advice from about addiction. You are an interesting person to listen to on your old subjects. I mean, what was his dissertation again? I bothered to look it up and was like yeah it sounds interesting yeah yeah i'll never hear that jordan peterson again no i don't think i don't like yugi and spirituality but he's pretty

good at it i think as far as i could tell he could stick to that chris chris tell us about your your anthropology divisions and controversies. Oh, okay. Yeah, there's an interesting example there, because I also feel that because of studying anthropology and studying in social anthropology and study of religions, and then as I went on, I joined the dark side, really, of anthropology. And according to social anthropologists, I did cognitive anthropology anthropology more empirical and eventually ended up in the psychology department, right?

The worst possible place for somebody to end their academic trajectory. So anthropology had all these debates like from the 70s up even before that, but like through the 70s to the 90s, there were these very strong

very similar themes to the culture war debates about what discipline is about what should focus on post-colonial studies and and the role of subjectivity and so on and there was this debate that i remember which was between two quite influential anthropologists marshall salons i just quoted him on twitter and got in trouble. I didn't realize. He's the coiner of that word I use, schismogenesis. Oh, well, he's an interesting character. He wrote Stone Age economics and did a whole bunch of interesting things. But he was also, I'm probably getting this wrong.

So if I am just anthropologist, just leave me alone. I think he was quite Marxist inclined and he really didn't like Napoleon Chaglin. So he targeted him quite harshly and I think resigned from the AAA over him being inducted in it or something. But in any case, he's not a like Steven Pinker type figure, right? But he was in this controversy in the nineties with a nuller. This guy was not entirely an anthropologist. He actually came, Matt, from the psychoanalytic tradition as well, but kind of post-colonial analysis.

A guy called Gananav Obiasekere, Sri Lankan scholar. And they wrote these books about Captain Cook apophysis or what happened there, right, with Captain Cook being sacrificed. And then in Marshall Salon streaming, this was an event where there are meaning systems, which are different from different cultures, each culture has, you know, its own set meaning system. And his whole interpretation of that event was Cook's arrival in those islands led to him being understood through the ritual calendar. And

he was kind of taken in. But then when the ship had these difficulties and came back, it was supposed to go away. So when he arrived, he was celebrated as a figure from the mythical ritual narrative that existed there. And then when he came back, that broke with what was supposed to happen. And he came back because the ship had some difficulties and he ended up being killed. Right. And in his analysis, this was to do with the alternative meaning system that he came into and violating that.

And that the way to resolve it was this violent interaction that they had. O.B.A. Seckeray took a different opinion and argued that the natives were more rational than that and that they would never have conceived of a human as being a divine god. So they would have seen that he was a man and instead it was all about the kind of treatment of the natives. And this was like a rebellion, right? About their mistreatment. Now they wrote these books that were extremely harsh about each other. Constantly.

And they landed at the same time. First was Salins, then came Obey a Secre, then Salins wrote a response to Obey a Secre, then Salons wrote a response to Obey a Secre. And this was throughout the 90s. And the books are like, that was my introduction to academics really going at each other. And if you read it, they don't like each other. They think each other, each person is wrong. But in that debate, the interesting thing was Obey a Secre was, one, positing a universal rational mindset that all humans are privy to,

which fits much more closer with a lot of the rationalist evil psych of today. And secondly, he posited that his position as a Sri Lankan gave him insight into how the natives in the Pacific Islands interpreted. in the Pacific Islands interpreted. And whereas Salins was an area specialist who had much more familiarity with that area, and he was positing something of a more cultural relativist position, right? But these don't map onto the standard culture war debates that we have now very neatly.

But in those debates, from my reading of those arguments, the person who had the much more grounded and empirically robust information was Salins. But the debate they had was valuable. And I tended to find the projection of a universal mind to one, be an imposition and then two, to project that like there's, there's a universal indigenous mindset opposed to Western secularism. It kind of, it calls back to all the things that you said at the start, that like things are not that simple, right? There are, you have to take people and societies that they're complicated and there's good and bad components and it doesn't all just fit nicely together like that. There's a black

and white morality play to societies and the history. So it's just an example. No, it's wonderful. I mean, you know how sometimes when you're hearing a debate in the culture wars, right, and it's someone you're not familiar with and they're being described to you, you're waiting for the moment where like, aha, see, a complete Marxist lunatic or just like a soft-headed feminist or whatever, or a complete fascist, right? You're just like, please let them mention one of those things so I know what group class to put them in. My adrenaline's coming up. But as you described that debate, I don't actually really fully get the politics around it. It doesn't map on to something that, like, can, you know, I can put onto Twitter. And for that reason, it is freaking fascinating. Like now all I want to do is understand, is like learn if the Sri Lankan anthropologist like knew the languages better or how he could possibly think that his, he had a privileged position because he was Sri Lankan to the mindset of Pacific Islanders when he was describing a universal mindset that he could access the way Sam Harris does by looking into his own

brain. But I bring these up not to say these are bullshit gurus, but to bring it up to say this is what an interesting intellectual conversation looks like and we are just not having them in the culture wars. Like Captain Cook, has that guy come up in any of these conversations? Because if he hasn't, it's a glaring omission. I'll have to go shortly in order not to disappoint my students by my poor long-waiting suffering but before i do i mean i think that's just a great point of yours that i

wanted to reiterate which is that the discussions aren't interesting that's that's the major that's that's the problem i mean like this morning i was saying yet again, there's this sense-making, tens of thousands of words being written about whether or not ivermectin works as an alternative to COVID, right? Now, this is just an example of a simple empirical question. Like there is no or shouldn't be any political or value or philosophical overtones to it. It's a straight up empirical question. And yet the capital D discourse fails even in this. What chance has it got to answer questions about anthropology? Yes, yes.

Yeah. I mean, I tweeted, there's a little thread today about plague years generally, and I know you have to go, but that I think may put the ivermectin, not the conversation to bed, because it'll never go to bed apparently, but to that this is Procopius's analysis of the first recorded plague the plague of justinian and he describes the kind of insanity that we are seeing right now what he says is every sophist every astrologer comes out to tell you the cause of this thing because it is so appalling that no matter how dumb or smart or rich or poor you are you might still die of this disease. And so they end up saying, but I have a good diet. I mean, literally, plague of Justinian, that your diet, because you exercise more,

because you were an MMA fighter, whatever that was in those days, that you won't get it because you have a special immunity, because you have crystals, because you have ivermectin. These are what people say in plagues. And one way that anthropology or literature or classics can inform our thinking about these things is to remind us that we have been through many plagues before and people always do the same thing. And aren't we lucky that we have amazing, copious literature of past plague

years? How crazy what cool people we are, cool creatures we are, that we made these records that are relevant today. And yet, instead of talking about the context in our beautiful human civilization, evolving human civilization, we just make mistakes over and over again. Yeah, it's frustrating, isn't it? Like, we should get together again sometime and talk specifically about the history of plagues and the sociology of them. Because as you say, like I read, I mentioned this, I've mentioned this a hundred times now, but the Journal of the Plague Year in London by Daniel Defoe. Yeah, great, great one. You know, Camus wrote that book.

There's this lovely, you know, history to it. And, you know, someone, you know, another research focus of mine is anti-x and i and i was studying that and publishing on it um five ten years ago so long before wow with mmr and stuff yeah yeah exactly and and and kavanaugh knows this too which is that there's nothing new in the current anti-vax movement nothing new at all they're recycling i've recycled every single talking point and they don't even know it. I don't think it's depressing. I love the Procopius, every sophist, every astrologer, you know, it's just like, wow, astrology is a system of thought that was sophistry in ancient times.

Anyway, I'm still around. So guys, I'm going to let you guys keep talking about, because I know Chris wants to hit you up and talk about the edge and things like that. But I'll just say it was great to meet you. So great. Such a privilege to talk to you. No, it's not. Obviously, the privilege is mine.

This is too polite for an Australian. All right, guys. Bye now. All right, guys. Bye now. Virginia, the one final point I would say about that debate between Obey a Sacre and silence is that, like you said, trying to fit it into the culture war doesn't really work because the battle lines in that debate were drawn differently.

And I find, and this is probably similar to the point I wanted to make at the start about the caste system or ancient prejudices and intergroup discrimination and all that, that I think there's an impoverished lens when people look back at history and try to extract the kind of moralistic plays that fit, you know, which, whichever way that you want to do it for which side of the culture war, and I, I don't have a both siders view on these kinds of things, but I do think that those on the more social justice inclined side as well, they, they have a tendency to want at least non-Western ancient societies

not to be these places where there was horrific discrimination and, uh, like social inequity and stuff like they, they kind of don't like that version of history so much, but from my reading of it in all of the cultures that I've studied, including non-Christian cultures like Buddhist countries and all those kind of things, you always find it. And you always find these horrific atrocities throughout history alongside these beautiful examples of people caring or systems that seem like more socially enlightened than things that we might have in the modern era. Yeah. And so many eccentricities and idiosyncrasies that don't fit in either bucket.

Yeah. And it's not even, I don't even think you need to go that far back. I read an ethnography about Ireland. A British anthropologist, I think, did it in the, might've been 1920s or 1930s, but he went to rural Ireland and it's a good ethnography. He went and lived there and he talked about the people. And when you read it, it's like, it's recognizably Ireland, but it's Ireland with people with rooms that are for fairies, right? And with rules of inheritance that closely mirror the kind of inheritance systems that you see in Japan with the eldest brother basically inheriting everything. And it's, you know, that's not Ireland now,

right? Like less than a hundred years. But I read that and thought, okay, so I'm from that culture, right? Like my family are all from there. And there's always these linkages with myths and stuff that stay in the culture. But that guy who went and wrote the ethnography and lived there, his record, it describes that reality better than I intuitively know as an Irish person. Because I didn't grow up in houses with, you know, things set aside for fairies and stuff. So I kind of think that like... Things set aside for fairies and stuff. So I kind of think that like... Things set aside for fairies. That's a new next podcast. That's definitely a bonus for your Patreon subscribers.

Do you spell it F-A-E-R-I-E-S? F-A-E-R-I-E-S is how those are referenced in that. But like, there's a story that you can tell about that, about presenting the Irish as irrational people, right? With their myths and legends. And there's reading of history where the Irish are discriminated

against in that way. But there's also the complexities that, you know, lots of people do believe in lots of supernatural things and that kind of stuff. And it's not discriminatory to acknowledge that or to acknowledge that, you know, Irish people have a very strong discrimination against travelers, right? Like gypsy communities, inverted commas.

And so I just always think the complexity of the history of the cultures, that's the part that I like from anthropology. I love it too. You asked about, you know, the divisions of the cultures. That's the part that I liked from anthropology. I love it too. You asked about the divisions that exist there, but there is a stark division in anthropology between essentially the kind of social anthropologists where the postmodern critical theory dominated and now is the primary lens of the discipline and the more empirical biological cognitive side which which tends to so the fascist side the one you chose yes exactly that side but they're they're very strong there's the third reich on your side and what's the other one oh

the good people yeah the good people and the bad people i i i went from the good people to the bad people right but in but in so doing i think i retain the notion that i'm not claiming to have a completely enlightened view of the anthropology discipline i have my biases but i i see the value of like contextual rich ethnography and, and yes, grappling with things like the impact of colonialism and, and race relations and so on. On the other hand, I think that that discipline could benefit from being more empirical and not so ready to, to kill at the mention of biology or evolution because but so the the culture war rages in anthropology as well but it's kind of like it's done the the social anthropologists the postmodern

people won and the cognitive anthropologists went into their own little field so it's what you said you know we can all move on and we can talk sometimes. Well, I guess I mean, well, look, did you read or read about Benjamin Teitelbaum's book, War for Eternity, about Steve Bannon's beliefs? Really, really interesting and right up your alley, I think. But it ends with something that brings to mind that ethnography of Ireland, which is that after just this painstaking analysis of how Bannon was inspired by Hindu nationalism and various traditionalist ways of thinking about time and eternal return and all this other complex stuff that he got, like it seems everyone does, many, many hours of interviews with Steve Bannon, but also he read all his stuff and he knew it all and teased out the fascism. He admitted on the Conspiratuality podcast that he also felt dislocated in some way that featureless, stop me, you probably know this,

but for listeners, in a featureless kind of suburbia in Colorado that made him feel alienated. And one reason to study anything is to relieve that kind of alienation and anything that connects you deeper with that Irish background. I mean, I did some tracing when I was there two years ago with my son and just meeting people that share my name and maybe I could find some physiognomy or imagine that, you know, this is a spiritual tradition that I at least have some more connection to than I do to yoga. You know, maybe some ancestor of mine actually did believe in fairies where, as far as I know, no ancestor of mine understood chi. But so if I'm looking for something, I might go there.

It didn't scratch a niche for me that I know it does for other people. It didn't make me feel more at home in this earth. I feel more inspired. And I think why I prefer post-structuralism to that thing is the problem I start with first is not alienation, but a kind of boredom. So I want to see things in a crazy new way, which is like critical race theory, I realize bothers people, but my experience of critical race theory is not to be made feel guilty, but to be presented. I remember critical legal studies, even I studied with Henry Louis Gates, so I did African-American studies as part of my English degree. And he didn't like critical legal

studies, which critical race theory grew out of. And the thing he said he didn't like about it was that it wanted to destabilize, quote unquote, the yes and the no in the courtroom. So that, you know, your answer to a question question is it a yes or no well yeses and noes are a false binarism and they're all these different degrees and we should destabilize the yes no binary right and he did this in the spirit of academic parody the way people parody post-structuralism what i thought was holy shit i've never thought of that before is there a binarism that we need to think about? And is saying yes and no in the courtroom, like you just to be confined to yes and no,

is there something kind of, I don't know, colonialist about that? Or even if you take it out of moral language, is there another way of doing it? Isn't it interesting to think there might be another way of doing it? What if? How crazy? That kind of thing. I love those responses. They like course through my system. And even when I hear, I was really drawn to conservative thinkers when I was in high school because they were opposite everything I saw. I was like sitting in a shanty town for divestment from South Africa, as one does in the 80s. And some conservative people at the Dartmouth Review pulled down the shanties and gave the wood to the poor for firewood because they believed we were virtue signaling and they were actually helping people, right? I was just like, mind-blowing, man. That is an

incredible political demonstration. Very, very powerful. I wasn't, I didn't feel like pitched battle. I mean, I was looking for purpose and adventure. So I, you know, I liked the prospect that there might be other views. And that's why, I mean, if I have to do it over again, I do anthropology because it keeps you on your toes, right? Like the second you're like, I've really figured out how to eat, how to be, what I'm going to do, how to discipline myself. And then you might suddenly remember that the like, there was some, the Ndembu had other liminal adolescent rights for girls and like life could be totally different. Yeah, it fits with the somewhat trite, but I think accurate thing that traveling introduces

you to your cultural assumptions that you have. Whenever you were talking about the Steve Bannon book, I haven't read it, but I did listen to the interview on conspirituality. And I think that's a really good example. And we see it in a lot of the gurus who you wouldn't politically put together, right? Like for example, Steve Bannon and Russell Brand, they, they seem to be coming from opposite ends of the spectrum. But when we did the episode on Russell Brand, we pulled out this clip where he basically said, I listened to a Steve Bannon lecture and I found like so much that I agreed with, like it was only a bit, you know, about immigration, but the majority of it I'm on board with.

And that's why when a lot of the conspiratoriality people have taken this right-wing turn towards conspiracism yeah that on the one hand it's quite surprising because lots of them seem to be traditional left-wing people in all respects but on the view that the right seems to have gotten recently and i'm not even saying like it's an intentional strategy although in bannon's case it may well be that but this offer that you can provide people with of entering a spiritual war where you are in you know you're not just a person who's part of a You're not just a person who's part of a neoliberal grindstone machine where you just play an insignificant part. No, you're at like the heart of a battle between good and evil, a cabal of pedophiles that are drinking the blood of children. And you can stand up and fight by just typing on Twitter or just going to a protest or this kind of thing.

And I can see that that has such powerful appeal. And in some sense, you can attach it to any political ideology. But I think that the right, at least in recent years, have been especially good with that really since the Tea Party. have been especially good with that really since the Tea Party. But even before that, with conservative talk radio and stuff, conspiracism and concerns about elites are always this component on the right that was effective. And the left has it too, right?

The left has its concerns about elites and technocrats and the social media platforms and i think it's probably a good way to have some empathy that how somebody could get into that mind space without you know it being about them just being racists you know and that plays a part but i think existential insecurity and issues about identity are probably the bigger driver into that world. And then those words are racist and they are anti-liberal. So it shouldn't be ignored that that's a significant component of those worldviews, but I think locating the motivation to join primarily there is not the case because lots of people, they aren't really interested in those issues by inclination, but they get

pulled in as part of the worldview. At least that's what it looks like to me. Maybe I'm too optimistic. No, no, no. I mean, that seems right. I mean, it's sort of whatever kind of dysphoria you start with and are treating, like your description of right. I mean, it's sort of whatever kind of dysphoria you start with and are treating, like your description of that Irish ethnography, it sounds like you didn't want so much to do what I've seen some lefty or, you know, pastel Q, you've probably heard that expression, Yoganon crowd, that they want to peel back. I actually saw in jerusalem this thing that i never get out of my head it was like this huge display in the western wall that wiped away the muslim quarter to show the temple underneath and it was just a way of kind of it was a way that archaeologists and anthropologists

and maybe all of us are like there's all this surface stuff here right that's it's actually this is what it reminds me of. So my hair is mostly gray now, but when I used to color it blonde, the hairdresser would say, we just need to lift, we have to take off the brown to show the blonde underneath, right? And so it's like, there's something down there that's the real thing. And it's not, you're not adding color. Oh, no, no, no. You're just exposing the thing that is muddying it and getting in its way, i.e. your actual brown hair.

So it's sort of sweep away the whole Muslim quarter, and then you'll find out that this is actually the temple. And that is not to wade into those politics. It's just to think about this particular, this is our land. No, it's our land. I'm like signaling under, under, under, right? That seems to go with conspiracy stuff, which is like, once you peel back and once you decide, and this is really what like, you know, the fantasy of Teutons and Apaches that the Reich had, was that there was something about civilization as embodied in medicine, science, law, education, academia, all of that stuff was to be swept away and that there

was some muscular reality underneath it. And that, I hear that in Russell Brand, I hear that in Steve Bannon, I hear that in like, it's just, if we could just get rid of all this stuff, all these people, all these cosmopolitans, all these like annoying demands that they're making on me down to the raw place where I could just like be a natural human among other natural humans, whatever that looks like, then that would be great. So how about we take an atom bomb to everyone or just wait for their demise or at least, you know, shut people out until the rapture comes or whatever. But that there's like, you know, the thing that you want to wipe away is, well, look at that. Everybody, you know, except for five alpha males. I just find that kind of thinking

interesting. But Christian, Christian Picciolini, who was a former white power musician and neo-Nazi, I had him on Trump cast, but he's, he's appeared and spoken a lot. One of the people he kind of counseled out of a far right group joined Black Lives Matter and found that the same capacity to detect sinister forces everywhere that had served him as a right winger also served him as a newly minted kind of detector of systemic racism in everything. I mean, that's not really what's meant by systemic racism, maybe, but, you know, he would say, well, this is, you know, if you sweep this away, what you're seeing is, you know, what you're seeing is nothing but racists. Just as he had said before, if you sweep this away, you see nothing but pedophiles and Hillary Clinton. enticing it's it i mean what i what i keep wanting to say is that it is not what scholarship is and i'm sorry that it stopped there for them you know yeah that comparison you know that it it does make me uneasy when there's parallels that you know and and they can't right the the there is

in the conspirator like i think that some people, if you take a figure like Alex Jones, they focus on, you know, in the public impression of him, it's about, oh, he's talking about hybrid spider babies and fourth dimensional reptiles. But like most of his daily content is like, it's far right, you know, anti-democrat and kind of like demonizing immigrants and stuff. There isn't that, the kind of demonic war war and he's actually like pro-Christian, right? He's like a Christian nationalist, but, but that stuff tends to like not filter out as that that's primarily what's driving him. So like, this is kind of in contradiction to the point about like for the, lots of the ordinary people, they, they do kind of get pulled in

by these kinds of narratives about, you know, uncovering the true self or the authentic self and the, you know, the taking a hold of an ideology. There are on the other hand, like ideologues like Alex Jones, who, who really have these worldviews that are highly political but not recognized as such and i i think that the a linkage which which you've highlighted really neatly is like this belief that underneath everything there's some pure history or you know essentialism of people essentialism of people, essentialism of land, and that if we can just peel back the layers of civilization and the kind of potentially cosmopolitan, right, that we'll get to a more authentic world and more in tune with nature. And there are approaches to that which I think are relatively harmless,

you know, are kind of like recognizing the damage that technology can do or the modern society, the neuroticism that it causes. But the danger is when it's connected to utopian worldviews where the kind of enlightened society is only around the corner. If we can just get rid of this group or that group or these things and i i really think that those are things that we should be concerned with particularly because they're so appealing like it's it's appealing in a individual sense and it's appealing as a group narrative that you know we'll create a perfected society. And I think the tie at the anthropology, that anthropology, if you do it properly,

is constantly telling you there was no perfected society. There's no society in history that was perfected. There's nothing to get back to. There's just the messy reality of the world. And this is probably a bit where I don't know if we agree or disagree, Virginia, reality of the world and this this is probably a bit where i don't know if we agree or disagree virginia but like when steven pinker or hans rosley have their there are plenty of issues with the way that they present their thesis well much less with hans rosley i would say but this notion that there is progress that is worth acknowledging from where we were, you know, 1500 years till now.

And I know that there's like a caricature where they say nobody will recognize that. But I do think on the left, the danger is more in the grounds of not wanting to admit that the modern societies that we live in are significantly improved over most of the historical societies that we have records of, but that doesn't mean no, we are, so therefore everything is good and you know, the people should stop complaining. Like it's that extra step. I don't think you need, but the first step of this society that lots of us live in not everyone around the world and there's lots of variation depending in the given society but it it is a an improvement

right from the the past and i that's the bit that i i mean yeah two things i think that well you know liberal democracy and a modified, controlled market capitalism are better than the alternatives. I mean, at least I can't cook up anything any better. So to the extent that those things have held greater sway over a greater number of people, I think we're doing better than under other feudal systems or outright patriarchy where women and children are owned by men. Yeah. And I can't possibly take issue with the idea that there have been improvements along those lines.

And what I don't kind of get is why it's, as you say, why it's always important to add, they won't let you hear this. They won't let you say this. It's that pose that i don't understand even yeah so i also had matthew remsky on my new podcast the episode's not out yet but it was i'm sure you find him as interesting as i do one of the things i kept wondering is since we you know had some a little bit of our own origin stories yours in ire, mine, I guess, drinking and also, also feeling bored at home as a kid. That also featured in Ireland. Yeah, right. That was just my shorthand for all that. But I was talking to Matthew and, you know, he was saying that he felt this dysphoria and he'd been depressed and he felt as though he was undiagnosed and untreated. And, you know, he fell for a yoga guru early on. And then he was describing various yoga adherents

who had discovered a way of treating trauma using this and that. And not only did their solutions puzzle me, but when did we all start having these profound unaddressed traumas that we liken to combat battle fatigue or shell shock in these privileged places in the world? And are we really all walking around with like such enormous sort of dissociative relationship with with just the stuff of civilization? And, you know, it doesn't have to be derivative securities and the prime mortgage crisis that's your, you know, you identify with. But just recognizing that a street with wide enough shoulders so people can walk down it is not like a horrible thing. street with wide enough shoulders so people can walk down it is not like a horrible thing, right? And other totems of civilization, you know, like people deriding the academy and deciding that all universities are terrible. I mean, have they attended like a second year biology class?

Do they think the Krebs cycle just should never be mentioned again? And so this sort of rejection of all that together with this idea that we have some kind of like enormous, untreatable pain that's very individual to all of us. I just don't know how it happened. And I'm talking, by the way, about white educated elites. I'm not talking about, you know, people with demonstrable suffering from Venezuelans who lose seven pounds a month now, you know, just like we, I think we need to have a place where we know what kind of actual trauma looks like just to remind ourselves that when we're trying to organize ourselves, our pain has maybe gotten too much the right of way in our ideas of how to live our lives and make the world better. But you know, I think one thing that I don't know if it makes us feel better

or worse is that, again, this going into anthropology, but the theories of like Marx and Weber in the early 20th century were also dealing with this in, inui, were also dealing with this inui, inui, I don't know how to pronounce it, like existential angst created by industrialization. And in Mark's case, the exclusion from workers from the product of their manufacturing. And grappling with that seems to have been a longstanding thing. And outside the Western context, I know myself that post-World War II Japan, particularly in the economic boom in the 70s and 80s in Japan, led to massive amount, yes, of like societal excess and all of the stuff that associated with economic booms, but also existential angst on a

massive scale that led to this proliferation. It was called the rush hour of the gods because a lot of new religious movements sprung up to cater towards the educated intellectual elite who were now making a lot of money, were getting into lifetime employment, but they felt unsatisfied. And that's why Aum Shinrikyo, the cult that did the sarin gas attack on the Tokyo underground, that was not appealed by people who were uneducated or marginalized. There were people like that in it, but the majority were highly educated graduates of the best universities in Japan or people that were wealthy and had good jobs. I think that's an example that it is not just a Western preoccupation, but it might be a side effect of modern...

I guess I'm saying that the symptom that a lot of people like Russell Brand and the people that the conspiratorial folks look at are dealing with is a feature of modern capitalist societies and it's it's a real issue okay but let okay there's a lot to say here what if it weren't so you're right to start with max and weber and also one thing that comes to mind every time i get a new book about how we have no attention spans or our attention is sapped. And these books that continue to sell well and get big, whatever advances. I just remember a line from the wasteland, which is we are distracted by distraction

from distraction. Right. So great point. Point made in the 1920s. So this is not, I mean, it hasn't always, let's say, been. So let's imagine that everyone's right and that Facebook likes and beeps and whatever have done something to our, some occult thing called an attention span. Well, and they were just doing it less in Elliot's time, but, and it's gotten worse because of new technology. I mean, way pre-internet a hundred years ago, he was talking about feeling that way and talking about feeling alienated time. And it's gotten worse because of new technology. I mean, way pre-internet, 100 years ago, he was talking about feeling that way and talking about feeling alienated. What's crazy to me is that that language seems almost inevitably, like the idea that we are all having an existential crisis, always tees up a sales pitch for an ideology. The American founding fathers were not

like, do you have a headache? Do you kind of not get along with your mother? Time for democracy. You know, time to shake off your chains. It didn't start as a personal happiness project, which brings me to a long parenthetical about how I just find that only tragedy on campuses has nothing to do with wokery, political correctness, grade inflation, any of the things people claim. I hate that at some of America's best universities, the most subscribed classes are these happiness classes. It just drives me crazy. Like education, making your mind a beautiful place to live by filling it with interesting ideas,

making your private life beautiful and your public life humane is how education should work when you're studying content, not when you're studying tips and tricks to be more productive or compassionate or whatever. And, you know, people have said, well, these they draw on the classics. The last thing I want is a neurobiologist or a quote neuroscientist, i.e. fake field, telling me, like quoting from the Stoics when they don't know the language and they don't haven't really studied it. And I don't want to read Marcus Aurelius on napping or how I should act with my brother. I want to read Marcus Aurelius to be reading this amazing ancient text or read Procopius on the way the Plague of Justinian was not tips and tricks that

I could get from a women's magazine in the eighties. It drives me crazy. And so once you have disaffect or college students being told repeatedly that they're unhappy, they have mental health problems. This, and this is a by-product of, of the internet. I mean, full disclosure, I was on the internet in the ARPANET era when I was 10 by a chance. You're to blame. I'm to blame, exactly. I'm to blame.

And no one, I wasn't, so I wasn't burdened with some idea that it was terrible for me. My parents thought it was awesome. Like I might work for NASA one day. I was like using this thing so much. And I did a chatting on it. And the chatting was like a great way to get to talk to people older than I was about ideas

where I never would have been able to talk to them in person. I mean, I was 11 and I, and you know, I wanted to talk about Reaganomics. Who cared about what I thought about Reaganomics if they knew I was 10, but once I told them I was 19, you know, they listen. And I don't, I can't, I just can't even find, I can't find a reason for someone to just so consistently sell us on. I mean, they did it with TV too. My other, other field, you know, I was a TV critic for years and it's always that the only kind of artifacts of civilization that really interest me are not considered arts, even though as a TV critic, I sat next to the film critic and the opera critic and the book critic, and their fields were considered art. Mine was always a public hazard. And I don't know why that's true. But I do know that ever since the first wave of interest in TV, which was mothers who could not believe how much healthier their kids were because they weren't breaking their arms in the creek all day or like screaming and fighting with their brothers or wrecking the house because amazingly, they would sit still in front of howdy doody enraptured and interested

and she could get some laundry done and then it was considered the most healthy amazing like like abuse eliminating they didn't have to like tie their kids up they didn't have to you know beat them and lock them up they would sit and enjoy a puppet show for freak's sake in a house that didn't have a puppet show in town. So that was the first wave of television. And then after that, it was suddenly ruining your lives for all these reasons. And everyone who did it was bad. And you must be feeling alienated. And then, you know, welcome to this hippie commune. We'll solve that for you. Kill your television. You know, just the there's's, there's something about the pharmaceutical company. Come on of like, have you ever had a headache? We'll take this huge drug. You know, where are

you? You know what it is? It's like the Sackler thing. Where are you on the pain spectrum? Chris, you've seen that. Do you see that thing in dope sick? The Sackler's invented. Do you know what I'm talking about? And don't think so. Oh, it's awesome. I got to send you a picture of it. It's like a really sad in pain face, you know, then getting or maybe it starts happy and then it gets sadder and sadder and more and more miserable. And the Sacklers had anyone who woke up from a surgery or came into the doctor complaining of any kind of pain. Where are you on the pain spectrum? And nobody says they feel fine. And if they point to something like two or above, you're supposed to give them Oxycontin. That is exactly what this feels like. Just like, Chris, do you ever feel alienated or feel like you don't get along with your mother?

Well, I would like to offer you Hindu nationalism because nothing says joy like Hindu nationalism. Yeah, I feel that I'm completely with you on the notion also that in academia the way it features in the culture war is is crazy because the way it's talked about is as if 90 of schools are primarily about critical theory and and like most of universities are about engineers and biology and that or law or what. Or Latin or whatever. If there was like a map of what people think the universities teach

versus what they actually teach, it would be wildly different. But I also am skeptical in the way that you are about these kind of moralizing narratives around new technology and particularly Gene Twenge and Jonathan Haidt to a lesser extent, but he relies heavily on her research. But I tend to think that exactly what you said, and it even affects my personal life because within my family, I tend to be relatively sanguine about children using iPads and stuff like that. From my view, it's what they do on them that matters. The fact that it's what they do on them that

matters. The fact that it's an iPad doesn't matter, right? Like it actually means there can be an interactive component, which cannot exist in most of traditional media. And like my son reads manga, which is like a popular pastime for young kids in Japan. But the way he consumes that is equally as unhealthy as the way that people would play on an iPad, just reading the same story over and over. I mean, 19th century girls were warned about reading novels, that they were instilling poison in their veins and filling their heads with ideas about adultery. She can't get her nose out of a book, you know, the worst thing you could do, right? And now like reading a novel, even a pop novel is like the signature act of

sophistication education this is this is true and i know i've took like a bunch of your time this evening but i i would be remiss if i didn't ask you because you know this area a lot better for me the way that i interacted with edge and the like the yearly question all that thing was I saw Paul Bloom or Steven Pinker or or various people answer some general philosophical question and sometimes the answers were interesting and sometimes I was like who are all these people like this collection of people and that that's the way I consumed edge was you know I think I saw something to be it's about group selection on there but I give it no other thought yeah and yet this organization and that thing also now when I go back and look at it I see Jeffrey Miller is there talking about

eugenics Eric Weinstein is there before anybody knew who he was. And, you know, you have Epstein involved in various ways. And I guess I'm just asking, since you know more about this area and like for the listeners as well, what's the deal with Edge? And was it like all bad or is there stuff that could be rescued from it? Or what was that thing? What was Edge? So John Brockman, who was sort of a dilettante who became a literary agent, also decided to kind of get his clients together in kind of salons. And the sort of founding act of Edge creation is that he managed

to get edge.org, just edge.org on the web early on. And edge and edginess, you know, it's like a very 90s, 90s idea. So that was an asset that he had that. In my view, what happened was the people around Brockman, and I'm not entirely sure Brockman went to college, but he was like sort of hung out with artists doing kind of weird stuff in the 70s in New York. I shouldn't totally guess about that, but they were doing like techie projects. But they weren't the literary critics of the 70s. They weren't the Jacques Derrida's or the Harold Bloom's or the sort of the like kind of heartthrobs of the period that you thought of when you thought of intellectuals. And they weren't painters. They weren't Jackson Pollock. They were more nerdy, really. And they were also not European, most of them American.

They weren't all that stylish and they weren't all that cool. And you can tell that in their kind of early writing. So anyway, he got together this small group of people who I guess mostly described themselves as technologists. And he had this idea that the literary, the humanities were like, had run amok. He wasn't interested in them anyway. And that these, them, these scientists, and there were some big names, including John Searle, there was Stuart Brand, there was ultimately, there was Lawrence Krauss, Marvin Minsky, a lot of people ultimately accused of sexual harassment, abuse, worse. But I think it was just kind of a weird thing where they just met and talked about how they should, you know, they wanted to talk. And they were the non ascendant ones. Like, I can't emphasize. I mean, you know, this like you weren't like I'm into computers. Maybe I'll be a huge intellectual matinee idol. That wasn't how that went, right? It was like just doing this sort of weird back alley stuff. So I do honestly, to cut to the chase on that, think that the beginning was a little bit about reclaiming the mantle of intellectual from literary types, people in the humanities, people like Pynchon or Nabokov or whatever, who were European, were men of the world from these mostly East Coast Americans, often very provincial, who were interested in tech. They wanted to get that.

They wanted to get girls from it. They wanted to get accolades from it. So they start with this level of resentment. And I see this in Stuart Brand's kind of interest in turning over what he and Brockman disparaged as something called a wisdom, which is they thought wisdom was an anesthesia. So wisdom was just like warm, cuddly truisms, I guess, that they may be associated with hippies or they associated with some softer philosophers, I guess, or novelists. And maybe even some of the Eastern types of the 60s and 70s, like Thomas Merton, right? So anyone religious. So they decided that wisdom was terrible, but thinking smart is what they called it. Thinking smart or later, you know, kind of rational thought was the thing.

And Stuart Brand said in one of the early bowl sessions in 1981, and by the way, it was Searle, Stephen Jay Gould, Isaac Asimov, Daniel Hillis, and John Brockman, and Stuart Brand in these early days with their, quote, reality club. Stuart Brand said he was over the, quote, old human interest stuff. The same old he said, she said, the politics and economics, the same sorry cyclic drama, right? Leaving out the same old he said, she said stuff, which obviously later comes back to bite edge

because he said, she said is presumably some kind of like sexual or romantic showdown that he's over right he's also over human interest politics economics and the same sorry cyclic drama to my mind that means he's over basically all of us like he just can't be bothered with politics economics and quote human interest, human interest stuff. It's time to wipe all that aside, you know, just like in that diorama I saw and find this other thing. So, and what they called underneath that, or what they thought the new thing was, or that these things that were obsolete, politics, economics, human interests, he said, she said,

gender politics, they wanted to push aside in favor of something they called science. It's weird that they called that science. And I think that's important because when I became a client of John Brockman's, I was surprised to see that there were not many chemists or biologists who were like, you know, working on some medical project or things that I thought of people in the hard sciences, although there were some. But there were a lot of people like David Brooks or Jeff Bezos or kind of philosophers, novelists, Stephen Jay Gould, probably among the most serious. John Searle, I came to loathe for my own reasons. Isaac Asimov, obviously a big name, but it was really like guys having a bull session. And John Searle, also not a scientist, right?

A philosopher. So I was really surprised how much they nailed this scientist word. And when Edge started putting out its question of the year, which I participated in, on the cover, it said something like, the smartest scientists in the world talk about whatever. And I mean, no one in there was a scientist, or that's not true. Very few people in there were practicing scientists who worked in labs. But I can say for myself, I am the farthest thing from scientists. I have an entirely literary background. I barely stumbled through beaches, coast and wasn't because I was so bad at it. But I soon realized that everybody else was bad at it, too. And even if they, like Scientologists, had stuck the word science after what they did, neuroscience, for example, that cognitive science, it didn't look anything like science. Like there wasn't much data. There was a lot of sitting around

shooting the shit and frankly, a lot of moving away from politics and economics and civilization in a direction that can only be called hard right. Once you say you're over politics, you know, you're over the old he said, she said, meaning gender relations. You have started to kind of think of a world that's like immutable in which you're a god or at least that's what it happened here so he had these two things edge edge was supposed to bring intellectuals together with other kinds of galaxy brain over men self-styled great men a lot of them very rich so his hope was that he would bring a jeff bezos together with someone doing some kind of EvoPsych, another perfect example of like what looked like a non-science to me. But again, I'm not a scientist, but I thought they were supposed to do something rubbing rocks or something with pipettes. And instead, they just seem to be talking about something that I would talk about at a cocktail party, but fine. So he would bring, he would try to bring these people together with these overmen figures for money, but their interests kept narrowing down from anything remotely academic to, you know,

stuff like some of the people he worked with who were later accused of sexual assault, actually rape at Dartmouth and taken off the faculty, did a lot of work on why men are attracted to slim women. You know, that's an anthropological subject, I guess. ridiculous stuff that you would have heard like Man Ray or the Marquis de Sade or something doing kind of whimsical experiments that were just exercises of sexual subjugation and somehow passed as science. And then we get to Epstein. So Epstein was the perfect person for Brockman to fall for because Epstein, a high school dropout, somehow fancied himself a galaxy brain and who would just pronounce weird things. And he even answered one of Edge's questions. Sometime we should find that answer and read it on the show. In fact, I could look it up right now.

But it was just completely nonsensical. Like, word salad would give it too much credit. I mean, I don't even know. Oh, oh, okay. Wait, what is your law, right? That's the, in 2004, know when you are winning, what's your law? Know when you are winning. That was Epstein's answer. And then in 2005, his prediction was consciousness itself will be seen only to be a time sensor, adding to the other sensors of light and space. Dude, let us again. It's like Jim Rogan.

Right. But so this guy was, you know, saying stuff like this that, I mean, if you or I said we'd just be laughed out of wherever we were, but for some reason he gets included in a book like he's like he's a philosopher alongside actual philosophers. And so he got a lot of a lot out of that. And he also was able to start to launder his ill-gotten gains and start trapping, you know, with his methods of blackmail or whatever else he did in laundering some of his money through these contributions to Harvard and MIT, where some of the professors at Edge worked, some of the teachers at Edge worked before, notably, they were fired for sexual assault. Now, the sexual stuff should not, is not, by the way, part of this. When I went to meet with Brockman, he, you, he did a little bit of the stuff that we know Epstein or Harvey Weinstein did, which is just tons of have someone give him

a dossier on whoever he was meeting with. And I had worked with a literary agent first who was from the literary world, right? She was like working with novelists and we had a similar background, but I couldn't figure out how to sell a book on technology. And I had Clay Sharkey's book and Chris Anderson's book on my shelf. And so in desperation, having just had a baby and really eager to sell a book so I could write it, you know, sell the proposal. I looked through their books in their acknowledgements and it was like, I don't know, it was like the Wizard of Oz. They would say like, thanks to my okay wife and a bunch of my friends, but the God who sold the book, John Brockman deserves my most thanks. So I was like, who's this guy?

Called him up. He had me in to talk, made it very clear that he didn't have very many women, but he needed them because he was always criticized for not having men and women. He also told me that his place, the place where he had his office had been the Playboy Club and that there was like all kinds of sexual sadistic shenanigans that he had gone on behind certain doors, which he pointed out to me. And then also just a long commentary on my postpartum body. Did I slap him? No. Did I call, you know, the, what's it called, the human, what's it called? Human resources. I, no, I am a generation Xer. I had done philosophy as an undergraduate. I had spent a ton of time with great men like he, like him. And I knew, I thought it was funny. You know, I just didn't have a,

I didn't have a radar for it. And I hadn't been taught by younger feminists that like, that's bullshit. Like, let's talk about ideas. Why do we have to talk about my body? Right. But I just didn't, I just had a little bit of brain missing. So that was a that was part of it. And he told me over and over again that he couldn't tell me about when conferences were having because they had to be secret because otherwise people would say he had to have women at them. And there was one woman on his list that he would take with him to these various efforts to set up rich guys and academics who, yeah, I'm not going to name her, but she's done a lot of great work kind of exposing everything that

went down there. But most of the women and some dissenting men who've looked into it, including Evgeny Muratov, really see Edge as an Epstein-funded venture that was part of this effort to call him a philanthropist, to call him a... When he was in prison the first time, he hung out his shingle as a philanthropist of science or something. And you'll probably remember that he had a eugenics program that he wanted to advance to populate the world with his pure offspring and repeatedly made the case for eugenics, which some of these guys entertained and some of them didn't. But they certainly entertained, you know, stuff that was close to it, you know, some kinds of scientific racism and other things. But you'll see on the list, it's just, as you said, like people that just remarkably, you just can't

believe that they are all in one place. It's like, you know, stumbling on some back speakeasy and saying like, you're all here, all of these. So, you know, I do want to say there were some bona fide supernova intelligences there, including Lisa Randall, who's the expert on black holes at Harvard, and Frank Wilczek, who is a super interesting physicist who won a Nobel Prize for his work on entropy. But there were so many dilettantes and has-beens and abusers. It was like just one after another. I think almost everyone on the intellectual dark web, no, that's not true, almost everyone on the intellectual dark web. No, that's not true. But many of the people in the intellectual dark web were members. But he also had the pseudoscience people like Rupert Sheldrake and intellectual dishonest people like Jonah Lehrer. I think that more things will emerge

to do with its finances. I mean, as you know, Harvard and MIT have taken a huge hit, you know, with lots of people, including Joey Ito, who was a client, resigning because of his dealings with Epstein, resigning as head of the MIT Media Lab. But, you know, you pull a thread of Sergey Brin, I'm looking right now, Yuri Milner, David Brooks, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, and Bezos, who I said, just the list is amazing. Yeah. I mean, I think that that's, I think that's most of it.

I kind of regret now that I didn't just focus on that from the start too, because you know so much about this area. And it sounds to me like you mentioned the connections at the end there, but this in many respects is the soil from which the IDW springs, right? And there are various people within the IDW that I think have their own origin stories, like Sam Harris doesn't really need them. Yes. I mean, Sam Harris is a very interesting yes i mean sam harris is a very

interesting i mean his his backstory is also very interesting but yeah he's like golden guard money his actual background yeah yeah yeah his father was a very successful tv writer that's right i mean he is a member of edge yes so i think there there are people there. I'm pretty sure Paul Bloom and John Haidt contributed as well. But there were people contributing who I'd regard as good. They're legitimate academics with interesting things to say. But it's exactly what you described, that a lot of them are not scientists. Or if they are, they're in social science, which I'm in myself. But that's a different state of affairs than lecturing about the priorities for all of science for the coming future. And it sounds like the notion of a kind of science dilettante club, almost the Victorian parlor of the modern era is not how that was sold, but I can see very much how that fits into that mold. And yeah, I guess it's an interesting chapter that probably remains

to be better documented or discussed how these things, the IDW and Edge, and where all of the various tendrils of that have spiraled out to, like where are they going? It makes me wonder that if Edge existed during the pandemic and it was still doing the thing. As far as I know, Edge, well, Brockman is still alive. His son runs the company. It took a hit, obviously, when Epstein and maybe a fatal blow. But, you know, I think I'm still on the site. I mean, and if incidentally, I mean, I should just say I did write, I did write, you know, a substantial piece about my experience with Edge and Epstein that I can, I don't know if there's show notes or something.

No, definitely. Direct people to it. One small gem that I discovered in the origins is that people like John Searle came to interact with the edge crowd. And I think Stuart Brand might have been part of this too, as part of the free speech, free love movement in California. What I hadn't known, which by the way, is definitely tied to the like, I've been censored, you know, censored by X. Like it doesn't matter what you were trying to say, you were just censored. And so now that your story is that you're a censored person, but free speech, free love grew out of Searle. This is part of Searle's story,

panty raids. I don't know if these existed in Australia or Ireland or Japan or anywhere else, but panty raids, right? Which were like people just driven wild by coeducation. So they would like go just steal underwear from girls' rooms and then like prance around in it or whatever. And some girls seem to be excited by this and some not, but they were then recruited because they were got in trouble with their colleges. And then they were like pushed to the front lines of this free speech thing because they had been censored. Right. Does this any of this sound familiar? And, you know, so basically they were doing some like vaguely violating, sexy, stupid, farcy thing. But then it crystallized into this noble movement or whatever it was.

And that's where Brockman was right there with that, which is like, oh yeah, we're over the he said, she said thing. I mean, I just think I want, I hope listeners will go back to the Stewart brand kind of manifesto for Edge, which became the intellectual dark web, which is basically we're over the tenets of civilization, including gender relations, politics, economics, and the human interest stuff in favor of this thing that we're going to call science, which is sort of whatever we say goes plus money. And it was a neat trick, you. And it was a neat trick. It was a neat trick. And it's amazing to see pictures of edge events that are very, very well documented, where you just see

everyone you've ever gotten an uneasy feeling from, up to and including someone like David Brooks, just sitting there comfortably with Sergey Brin. And it's like the, they're just like this evil world. There was also this need to bring in women for those, not women like that you could talk to, but young Epstein consort women. And the last time I saw John Searle, he was with a woman who was 70 years his junior, which I think might be a record, did not speak the same language. And he was traveling with her and looked, I mean, I didn't have a way to signal her, but it did not look like an entirely consensual relationship.

And then he was promptly fired from Berkeley. So the like weird sexual stuff, all of it is just completely consistent with the intellectual dark web. that, you know, the people who are imagining the smoke-filled rooms with conspiracies and, you know, the man deciding the world, which exists, right, which do exist, are themselves recreating that very thing with millionaires giving money to people to come up with, like, eugenics plans for the world. And the other thing is, I think Matt and I, to some extent, like we're relatively unrepentant neoliberal shills and we sign on to the, you know, the post-racial future of Sam Harris's dreams. But with the important caveat that we can see how that is often used, right? As a kind of, I don't see race, therefore I cannot in any way contribute to systems

of exploitation. Or I think these people who are talking about systemic racism and stuff, they're race obsessed. I don't see people like that anymore. And it's a very useful rhetorical technique. I think everybody agrees that's the goal, right? It's how close we are to achieving that goal and what obstacles still remain, which are the points of debate. But I think the majority of people, they want that, right? There isn't a set of people that really wanted that in the future will always be focusing on race and gender and so on right i still find the find the insights of feminism and anti-racism or black african-american

studies enormously valuable in just i just putting pressure on what i think, you know? I mean, I think it would be, I think there'd be lost in a raceless society. I mean, I can't even, I know that it's something that happens in Sam Harris's mind during his particular, whether he's seeing, he's busy seeing no color or very trippy, awesome psychedelic colors, something like that.

But otherwise he doesn't see color. He doesn't want to see color. Even whenppy, awesome psychedelic colors, something like that. But otherwise, he doesn't see color. He doesn't want to see color even when he looks at his own face. I mean, yes. And there are also no private languages, right? Isn't that what like that's the signature lesson of Wittgenstein? You can't just like turn invisible and have a robot friend in my own little brain. I don't know if you know that. Or like Hamlet said, I could lock myself in a walnut shell and call myself a king of infinite space. But I, you know, live in this world. And, you know, there isn't a time that goes by that my gender isn't present to me. And if your gender is not present to me, you might just be under the spell of a present to you. You're you might be under the spell of another gender. Like, it just, it seems obvious. But I too like to meditate. Sam Harris,

it turns out, isn't the only person who can meditate, even though he makes it seem like it's very archaic practice or difficult practice and have all kinds of fanciful ideas about myself. have all kinds of fanciful ideas about myself. And then I show up in the regular world and some of those exalted impressions that I can fly or I'm an actual angel reincarnated Mother Teresa, those things turn out to be not true. If you want to be disabused of the notion that you're not white, then just go to a country where white people are not the majority and you will quickly recognize that you, you do have an ethnic identity, but, um, yeah. So like Virginia, I think we've, we've captured like a large amount of your evening and, uh, it's been really interesting, but if there's anything that you wanted to cover that we've done a terrible job of or things that you want to pull us on.

No, no, no, no, not at all. I mean, I think we're agreed on a lot of things. I don't know. I don't know why people became so upset among the specific lines they're upset along. But, you know, there's a like, Matt, you probably know, but there's a kind of expression in Alcoholics Anonymous that my best thinking got me here. And you usually say my best thinking got me here. You know, when you're not looking great, you've maybe like broken a leg and you are sitting in a church basement saying some pathetic serenity prayer. Right. And it means that whatever you thought to that point, like didn't actually like you're not winning now.

And that was the best you could do at every time you were making what you thought were great decisions to like triple your prescription to Xanax or whatever, like Jordan Peterson, you were just like, you know what I could do? I could, I could take 10 more of these. That's my, that's my plan. But you know, when you find yourself having double pneumonia and lying on the floor, it's your best thinking that got you there. Right. So maybe if you're at a place, if many of these gurus are at a place where they're like suffering from COVID and they're in all the straits that Jordan Peterson was in, or in general, just alienated from their friends and unhappy in their lives as they sound like they are, maybe their best thinking was not good enough. thinking was not good enough. Maybe something about the thinking needs to be called into question. And that's where I think this decoding does real service. Yeah. Thanks. Thanks, Virginia. I'm sorry I missed the part about the edge,

but I'll be able to listen back to it with the audience. But yeah, I think, um, I think that's a good point to, to leave it on really, which is, is really, you know, lesson for everyone is that is a bit of epistemic humility, right? And you know, we, you, you work for decades and you get a tiny little bit of knowledge about a very specialized area and you consider quite rightly that you've done pretty well. But at other times we all, and the gurus do this par excellence, but all of us get on the internet, read the headline,

read a couple of abstracts or whatever, and suddenly we've got capital O opinions about everything. I get people asking me, oh, have you seen the latest article in The Lancet about myocarditis? What do you think about that? And that's the wrong, why the hell would you be asking me, oh, have you seen the latest article in The Lancet about myocarditis? What do you think about that? And that's the wrong question. Why the hell would you be asking me about this? This is the wrong way to think.

So I think the gurus flatter themselves, but they also flatter the audience of a kind of, you know, galaxy-brained polymathery. three when when really if if we all just step back a little bit go cautiously um listen to people that have done the work then we can maybe dilute ourselves a little bit less often that is not what a guru would say that is not exciting enough but it also but it does seem sadly for those seeking a real adrenaline rush from intellectual life, really what intellectual honesty looks like. Yeah, yeah, that's right. I mean, actually, sorry, final comment, which is that, yeah, I mean, that's it. I mean, it's not fun. It's not exciting, is it?

It's hard work. As Chris was saying, it's boring doing a literature review. You've got to read a lot. You've got to take notes. It's all this thing. It's all confusing. It's a bit of a mess. You've got to read a lot.

You've got to think notes. It's all this thing. It's all confusing. It's a bit of a mess. And it's a whole bunch of work to get just this far. But what's offered in the public domain now is sit back, relax, let the podcast flow over you. And you're going to leave that with like 10 earth shattering ideas. Like it feel like the effort to pay off ratio feels great, doesn't it? That's it sells.

Oh dear. Anyway, let's all try not to do that. Let's try to be good epistemic practitioners and good, uh, sense makers. Nah, just joking. Don't be a sense maker. Micah's just joking. Don't be a sense maker. I mean, I know, I know that you don't want too much sentimentality, but I really do like this show. And I really think you're performing a surprisingly significant service in the world to just complicate matters and, you know, satirize the kings. Like that's a really important anthropological process right like and and you

know it's simple but i like the way you guys laugh at at laugh at people frankly just making a lot of fun of people is is the is the highest moral achievement of man that we can do we can do. We can do that. I can promise to keep doing that. It's been a pleasure, Virginia. And let's stay in touch. And we'll put all of your articles and also links to the podcast in the show notes. So we do encourage everyone to check out if they want further info about the stuff we talked about or just general other topics that you're covering on the podcast. Because I think your new podcast is very much in keeping with the theme of efforts by looking

critically at topics. So yeah, everyone should go and check it out. Check it out, as I say. Thank you. Thanks very much. See ya. Bye. Thank you.