28: Resurrection of Jordan Peterson (w/Jeff Brown)
This week we inaugurate “The Conspirituality Ticker,” a weekly bullet-point rundown on the ongoing pandemic of influencers who spread medical misinformation to sell disaster spirituality. We’ll also continue with “The Jab”, our segment on conspirituality-driven vaccine hesitancy.The big news this week is the resurrection of Jordan Peterson. After surviving a medically-induced coma in a Russian rehab facility, and then COVID on top of that, Peterson has re-emerged, weakened but resolute, as both hero and provocateur. The announcement from Penguin Canada that his new book of another dozen self-help rules prompted Penguin employees to protest their involvement in an emotional town hall.In this episode, we’ll dive into Peterson’s imaginarium. We won’t totally discount his button-down commonsensical advice, but we will explore how it has lent intellectual support to the alt-right. Is he a conspiritualist pioneer as he wars against the Neo-Marxist Cabal and dreams of a Jungian promised land? Matthew will add a view from Peterson’s hometown of Toronto, where the messianic prof has been open about his ambitions in right-wing Ontario politics. Julian interviews dissociation debunker Jeff Brown, who champions “enrealment,” and has a heartfelt critique of what he calls the “new cage” movement.Show NotesJZ Knight Called for ‘Military Coup’ After Biden Took Lead in Presidential BidDefiant Night: Hundreds Gather at Pier Bowl for Mask-Burning RallyToronto public health shuts down Etobicoke restaurant for allowing indoor dining in defiance of COVID-19 measuresAdam Skelly’s GoFundMeSkelly hauled off by the po-po$15,000 Fine After Secret Hasidic Wedding Draws Thousands of GuestsSplitting 5 to 4, Supreme Court Backs Religious Challenge to Cuomo’s Virus Shutdown OrderSupremes’ opinionsCanadian Bar Association on c16, which Peterson didn’t understandPeterson co-presents with Proud Boy founder Gavin McInnes
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This is episode 28, Resurrection of Jordan Peterson.
This week we inaugurate the Conspirituality Ticker, a weekly bullet point rundown on the ongoing pandemic of influencers who spread medical misinformation to sell disaster spirituality.
We'll also continue with The Jab, our segment on conspirituality-driven vaccine hesitancy.
The big news this week is the resurrection of Jordan Peterson.
After surviving a medically-induced coma in a Russian rehab facility, and then COVID on top of that, Peterson has re-emerged, reanimated perhaps, weakened but resolute as both hero and provocateur.
The announcement from Penguin Canada that his new book of another dozen self-help rules prompted Penguin employees to protest their involvement in an emotional town hall.
In this episode, we'll dive into Peterson's Imaginarium.
We don't totally discount his button-down, commonsensical advice, but we will explore how it has lent intellectual support to the alt-right.
Is he a conspiritualist pioneer, as he wars against the neo-Marxist cabal and dreams of a Jungian promised land?
Matthew will add a view from Peterson's hometown of Toronto, where the messianic professor has been open about his ambitions in right-wing Ontario politics.
I'm interviewing dissociation debunker Jeff Brown, who champions enrealment and has a heartfelt critique of what he calls the New Cage Movement.
This is the Conspirituality Ticker, a weekly bullet point rundown on the ongoing pandemic of messianic influencers who spread medical misinformation and sell disaster spirituality.
First up, Jay-Z Knight called for military coup after Biden took lead in presidential bid.
Jay-Z called for a coup?
That's right, I know.
This is coming from the Nisqually Valley News out of Yelm, Washington.
Reports that Yelm's most famous resident, Jay-Z Knight, who channels an ancient spirit being called Ramtha for for her students at the Ramtha School of Enlightenment, has said some interesting things on Parler.
So quoting from the Valley News, around 7 p.m. on Thursday, November 5th, Knight published a post on Parler, a new free speech social media application similar to Twitter, saying that Trump should bring the military in to combat the barred legal observers.
This is in all caps, and they're quoting the Parler post.
Sir, please step in.
Bring in the military.
Create a local coup d'etat.
It's misspelled.
Invalidate all the votes in vote counting areas in every state that barred legal observers.
Do it now, she wrote from her account at Jay-Z night.
And can I please have a pony for Christmas?
Wait, did she really spell it capital C, capital O, capital U, capital P, lowercase d?
Yeah.
Capital T, lowercase a. That's right.
The ta, I guess, on the Solfeggio scale.
I'm wondering actually whether or not this was in the voice of Ramtha.
Maybe it wasn't from Jay Z Night at all, but I don't know if he has his own Parlor account.
And I know at least five more famous people in Yelm than him, so I don't know about that.
Back to the Valley News.
Shortly before the race was called for Biden, Knight again called for some type of military intervention.
Sir, they may have big this, big that, but you have us ABD.
We are just as tough and scrappy as that army of 1776.
So give us orders, she wrote.
According to the report, a spokesman for Knight suggested the posts needed more context to be fully understood.
Oh, she.
I'm sorry, I said he.
I get confused with the Chandlers and the gods.
I'm sorry.
I'm sorry.
So anyway, connecting a tangential dot, if anybody out there has been watching The Vow, you might be interested to know that one of the two heroes of the narrative, Mark Vicente, was a member of Ramtha's group, and that this was the cult that was instrumental in the production of the BS pseudoscience and conspirituality classic documentary, What the Bleep Do We Know?
Matthew, did you start our Poller account yet?
I know you were going to look into that.
I know.
You know, Instagram was enough, like not kicking, kicking and screaming.
Not a chance.
I'll let the real misinformation journalists do that.
Next up, Defiant Knight.
Hundreds gather at Pier Bowl for mask-burning rally.
This is a headline from the San Clemente Times, where they set the scene, quoting from the article, As the clock struck 10 p.m.
on Saturday, November 21, hundreds enthusiastically threw face masks into a fire pit on the beach near the San Clemente Pier, sending a sharp rebuke to Governor Gavin Newsom and His limited curfew imposed on counties struggling to get a handle on the latest surge in coronavirus cases.
Led by San Clemente resident Alan Hostetter and his American Phoenix project, Saturday's demonstration was advertised as, quote, a clear act of defiance, unquote, that coincided with the first night of the state's limited stay-at-home order.
Quote, this mask burning we're about to do is the Boston Tea Party of 2020, Hostetter said.
Eliciting cheers from the crowd of maskless demonstrators, many of whom donning Make America Great Again caps waved American and Trump 2020 flags.
Now, there are a lot of anti-mask actions happening all over every day, but you can count on friend of the podcast and yoga teacher and singing bowl aficionado Alan Hostetter to make a pseudo-Vedic sacrifice out of it.
Listeners will remember Alan from episode 21, where we reported that he calls BLM a domestic terrorism group, also conflates BLM with Antifa.
He's also been a guest speaker at a couple of QAnon events.
Amazing guy.
You know, I just want to say that one thing, though, I don't know if you followed this, but Newsom was Hosting a dinner at a very expensive restaurant.
And and stuff like that just doesn't help.
In fact, this morning on Morning Joe, Joe and Mika went over a number of the leaders like the mayor of Denver.
In Cabo, exactly.
You know, Austin's mayor, which is awesome for Austin.
That's the hotbed of where a lot of this resistance is happening anyway.
And it really isn't helpful when our leaders are doing these things.
Now, that said, this this mask burning, you know, rally during the week when we have the most hospitalizations and deaths ever over the whole course of the pandemic in any country is not helpful either.
What do we want?
COVID-19.
When do we want it?
As soon as possible.
In two weeks.
After incubation.
Yeah, you know, it's, it's obviously the hypocrisy and the heightened sense that there's some kind of aristocratic elite who is making one rule for the, for the plebs and, and, you know, feeling free to flaunt it themselves.
It's not good.
But, but the analysis is still really faulty, right?
If these, if these are people who are getting tested every day or every other day and, you know, they're, they're in a, they're in a certain kind of bubble, they're doing what they're doing and it's, it, Ordinary people are not having tyranny imposed upon them, for fuck's sake.
That's not really what's happening.
Do you know, I wanted to ask, though, when Newsom is confronted on this, if he responded at all, and how did he respond?
He apologized.
Right.
Okay.
What was the sort of substance of the apology?
Was it this was a family gathering or we've been tested a lot or, you know?
No, it was more of, I mean, the thing about Newsom is he's a slithery character.
He always has been.
I've been tracking him since I moved to California almost 10 years ago.
And that's just, it's part of his brand.
People kind of accept that here.
But some people, some people don't.
Some people think he's Hitler, which is from one of the Hostetter rallies from a few months ago.
Right.
But, but, you know, he just said it was a mistake and moved on from it.
And that was pretty much it.
Because what I've noticed is that when this happens in my neck of the woods, and this is also related to part of the story that's next on the ticker actually, is that some.
Sometimes the sort of upper echelon politician who's being appealed to to, you know, enforce some kind of accountability on the underling will use this, well, he's a family guy, he's, you know, it's just a, he didn't, you know, I'm not gonna come down hard on somebody having a gathering, but, you know, let this be a lesson to everybody and we can all do better.
And it's, I'm always interested in this kind of entree of, Well, we have leeway if you are a Democrat with a Democrat and a Republican for a Republican.
that seem to, I don't know, give leeway, at least at some points, for politicians to make exceptions.
Well, we have leeway if you are a Democrat with a Democrat and a Republican for a Republican.
In general, there is some leeway.
And I would say that, for the most part, Democrats and liberals are more critical of their leaders than Republicans, as has evidenced by the last four years.
But no, really, the family argument has been destructed over the course of the last few decades.
You're just nice in Canada.
That doesn't exist so much here.
Yeah, it's really hypocritical.
But I think, for me, the thing that always stands out with this stuff is that either we are a collective of people who are doing our best in imperfect ways to manage a really, really difficult situation, or there's some kind of, you know, contested legal, whether it's fair or not fair.
So much of it just feels adolescent to me.
Our attitude is, Newsom, you have a strong presence and you're a good leader in some capacity and you've done a lot of good things.
Be a little more careful.
Yeah.
Right.
But Haasetter and those crews, they're going to use that as fuel.
And that's the real problem.
In fact, I know Julian's going to address this in the job.
It's the same thing with anti-vaxxers.
Like, I wrote about the AstraZeneca trials this week.
It's just don't put forward faulty evidence because you're only fueling the other side who are going to think that you're not doing anything right anyway.
Yeah, excellent point on that.
And I saw several different people were sharing.
An article, I believe, from the journal Science, basically, you know, talking about that and talking also about how there has to be transparency around, you know, the side effects as people are developing an immune response and being really open to that.
Because if it isn't openly communicated, it does fan the fires of conspiracy theories.
But interestingly, here, you know, here are people who are kind of conspiracy leaning, who are referencing an article from Science.
And this is how the process unfolds.
There's an unfolding process, and to your excellent point, Derek, publishing too early while the process is still in progress is not smart.
Yeah, but publishing too early is really tempting, given the memification of the culture and how fast misinformation spreads.
And yeah.
All right, next up, from my neck of the woods here in Toronto, the headline from the Toronto Star is, Toronto Public Health shuts down Etobicoke Restaurant for allowing indoor dining in defiance of COVID-19 measures.
I actually grew up in Etobicoke in the West End.
This is a story of alt-health freedom and grilled meat.
Adam Skelly, who is the owner of three locations of Adamson's BBQ, took to Instagram to protest new pandemic business restrictions imposed throughout Ontario's red zones, where infection rates are soaring and cases threaten once again to overwhelm the strained medical system.
So Skelly's Instagram rant doubted the numbers, the validity of the PCR test, and the seriousness of the disease, and vowed to open for indoor barbecue dining on the day the new lockdown measures took effect.
And his publicity was really effective because he drew a crowd that was too large for police officers to risk breaking up.
It took two more days for the province, Toronto Public Health, and police to bring the hammer down, changing the locks on Skelly's digs, one of three locations in the city, by the way, with the others not subject to closure, and to use horses to disperse the protest crowds and dramatically haul Skelly off under arrest as he smiles defiantly for the cameras.
Now, he now faces charges related to illegal opening and code violations, but a GoFundMe campaign for his legal costs has almost topped $300,000, with many of the donors on the site cheering Kelly on from the U.S.
Now, our tie-in here is that some joker on Twitter highlighted the story with the hashtag BBQinOn because they sussed something out, which actually I've been working on behind the scenes.
So I'll get to that in a moment.
But Skelly posted $50,000 in bail and was released on condition he wouldn't go near his restaurant nor communicate on social media.
So his next court date is January 4th.
And if convicted, he'll face really heavy fines and possible jail time.
It makes me happy to know when that the American influence has spread to Canada and you're having some good protests up there now.
It's influence, it's money.
When we get to Jordan Peterson, the same thing happens because the tons of cash that he started raising on Patreon every month after he got his start through Rebel Media certainly did not all come from Canada.
I mean, he had an international audience as well, but You know, the backstory here that I'll be publishing on soon is that amongst the hundred-odd protesters at Adamson's over those couple of days, there was a distinctive flag seen waving.
It has a black circle on it with a red slash, which, if you tilt it to the side a little bit, looks like a Q. And the flag is the emblem of an organization called The Line Canada, which is a QAnon-adjacent group Founded by a Kengan Water MLM distributor named Lamont Daigle.
Now, I was able to interview Daigle for an upcoming feature for The Walrus.
It should be online today, actually, so we'll post that if it comes up.
But the general angle is that QAnon, as QAnon further internationalizes, it's finding local political wedge issues and coordinating themes amongst libertarianism and libertarianism, or sorry, libertarians and ethno-nationalists who all benefit from its kind of mythic superstructure. libertarians and ethno-nationalists who all benefit from its kind of And of course, anti-lockdown protests and anti-vax propaganda are also main sources of glue.
Just reading the show notes as you as you go through these, the words QAnon adjacent group founded by Kangen Water MLM distributor Lamont Daigle.
Right.
Just looking at that, it boggles the mind.
Well, but it all I mean, I think.
I think we really struck a vein here with our landscape because so many of these things link up together, don't they?
I mean, one of the things that I spoke about with Daigle at length was his earlier involvement in men's rights movements.
He didn't reference Peterson directly, but I'm sure there's an influence there.
And then also within the line Canada, there is some glorification of ayahuasca as a pathway towards becoming awakened to the political realities of the day.
Things link up in a pretty eerie way.
That is very interesting, too.
I just, I didn't know what Kengen water is.
We have these sorts of places here in Los Angeles as well.
And the fact that water is subject to MLM schemes... Oh, it's not just water, though.
It's alkaline water through a scientific process of a very special $3,000 machine.
It's restructured, I think.
It hues to the shape of the bottle that it's in.
Our vitriol is acidic, but our water is alkaline.
$15,000 fine after secret Hasidic wedding draws thousands of guests.
This was first reported in the New York Post, I believe, but we'll link to a New York Times article.
The reports are of a Hasidic wedding that 7,000 unmasked people into a Brooklyn synagogue on November 8th.
The happy groom was the grandson of one of Williamsburg's top Orthodox rabbi leaders.
The event was advertised in 19th century fashion by word of mouth only.
No posters, emails, no social media.
And then secret video footage from the ceremony shows the masses of celebrants dancing wildly and singing to God at full voice, unmasked in the cramped building.
So, quoting from the Times, the wedding in Brooklyn, which lasted for more than four hours, was held at the Yetev Lev de Satmar synagogue in Williamsburg and celebrated the marriage of Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum, the grandson of Satmar Grand Rabbi Aaron Teitelbaum.
The bride's name could not be determined, which I found eerie.
Last month, Satmar leaders canceled another wedding in Williamsburg, which they said expected 10,000 guests.
That was to be held for the grandson of Rabbi Teitelbaum's brother and longtime rival, Grand Rabbi Zalman Teitelbaum.
An account of the wedding was published on November 11th by Der Blatt.
A Yiddish-language newspaper closely aligned with the Satmar leadership in Williamsburg and the New York Post then published a story about the wedding on Saturday citing Der Blatt and videos that it obtained of the event.
Derblatt described the wedding as, quote, an experience for which words do not suffice and a celebration the likes of which we have rarely had the good fortune to experience, according to a translation provided by Hasidic activists, which I assume means people who have left the Hasidic sects. which I assume means people who have left the Hasidic That usage of the word activists was interesting to me.
The newspaper also said it knew about the wedding in advance but had participated in an elaborate scheme to hide the events so as not to attract an evil eye from the ravenous press and government officials who have in the past exploited the present situation to disrupt already planned simchas, which is a Hebrew word for a joyful event.
So we're not sure whether in sickness and in death are featured in the Hasidic vows, but we hope that that part of the happy marriage isn't put to the test in another week.
They all had the time of their lives, apparently, right?
Right, right.
Well, this has been a continual problem during the entire pandemic.
I mean, New York police have gone into that community specifically to break up various events like funerals.
There's been a few funerals that have been high profile as well.
You know, and I don't want to pick on one particular community.
I mean, I think this happens in every community, but I have a little bit of experience with the Hasidim because before I knew her, my wife used to live in Williamsburg across the street from where the Hasidic neighborhood started.
And they would, on Saturdays, she would walk through the neighborhood.
And besides getting spit at by the men when she was wearing shorts, which was common, People would ask her inside to come inside of their apartment to turn on utilities because they weren't allowed to touch it.
And that was a very common thing.
And, you know, when I when I see it brings it, I mean, it brings up a much larger question than this podcast that we can answer right now.
but it brings up, I think, something you're going to touch upon later with Peterson, Matthew, which is the distance between what you profess and then what you actually do.
And that is a recurring theme that I'm just picking out over and over again in so many of these stories that we cover.
And there is a certain level of keeping your identity.
I mean, there are many Chinese people in New York and Chinatown that don't speak a word of English, and they've specifically kept Chinatown separate for generations on purpose.
And it's understandable in some sense if you want to keep your culture, but also not being able to assimilate to the point of understanding the rules of the larger structure of the society, which hurts people in this case with the pandemic, is really dangerous.
You know, there's another piece there, too, that I need to look into again.
It's been a while, but at some point we're going to have to talk about RFK Jr.
a little bit more.
And my sense is that some of his anti-vax activism has been most successful amongst immigrant communities like the Somalis in Minnesota and amongst the Hasids in New York, I'm remembering.
And, of course, that success then characterized by outbreaks of diseases that otherwise would have been prevented by vaccines.
Well, it would be really interesting to me to see whether or not he ingratiates himself to those communities by acting as a kind of, you know, religious bridge builder in some way.
Whether he takes the time to learn about what the Hasidim actually believe and try to accommodate them or try to show how, you know, their view of the world is actually coherent with opposing vaccination.
Absolutely.
And we also do know that that he and his his colleagues do have a strong focus right now on the African-American community.
Yes.
Right.
And, you know, using the angle of social justice as being a sort of somehow overlapping with vaccine freedom.
Right.
Medical freedoms.
Last on the ticker, splitting five to four, Supreme Court backs religious challenge to Cuomo's virus shutdown order.
So we're going to link to The Times again here, but then also to the Supreme Court filings themselves and the opinions.
Our arch-Catholic law professor who's never tried a criminal case, Amy Coney Barrett, wrote the majority opinion for a sharply divided Supreme Court ruling that struck down Governor Cuomo's lockdown restrictions on religious gatherings as being unconstitutional.
The suit was brought by her church's Archdiocese of Brooklyn.
Barrett's unsigned opinion is carefully worded to emphasize the unfairness of classifying religious activities as non-essential, which leaves Justice Gorsuch to really bring out a subtle conspirituality theme that pandemic measures are suppressing spirituality, and he does so through some elite strawmanning.
So, quoting from his opinion, He's talking about while imposing restrictions on religious gatherings, quote, the governor has chosen to impose no capacity restrictions on certain businesses he considers essential.
And it turns out the businesses the governor considers essential include hardware stores, acupuncturists and liquor stores, bicycle repair shops, certain signage companies, accountants, lawyers and insurance agents are all essential, too.
So at least according to the governor, it may be unsafe to go to church, but it is always fine to pick up another bottle of wine, shop for a new bike or spend the afternoon exploring your distal points and meridians.
Who knew public health would so perfectly align with secular convenience? - That's a good experience.
Okay, so good.
I mean, it's good.
But I mean, come on, like, obviously, the hardware stores are going to be doing curbside pickup or they're it's going to be like two inside at a time.
acupuncturists if they're if they're covered by health and by health insurers, then that is in some in some cases, that's like a like a legitimate those are medical appointments, certainly medicine adjacent.
Medicine adjacent, at least.
And then a lot of people, can we just note, too, how many people have complained about, oh, such and such is closed, but they've left the liquor stores open.
Let me just, like, say, from the perspective of somebody with alcoholism in the family, do you really want, do you really want People to be forced into withdrawal psychosis because that's what would happen.
Like, it just doesn't, it's an ableist argument and a very elitist argument as well.
It reminds me of, you know, people saying, oh, you know, if we want more money, we should raise taxes more on alcohol and cigarettes or something like that, which, you know, within reason is reasonable, but it really just punishes the poor.
So anyway, I just I just never like to see that.
It's a childish argument as well.
It's really it's not even an argument.
Right.
At all.
It's just it's just point.
It's a lack of an argument, really, because you can't actually argue on the grounds of what is actually being discussed.
Yeah.
So bicycle repair shops.
I mean, I think what he's he's got to be leaving out here is what the actual protocols are for all of those other small businesses.
Right.
I live two blocks from a bike shop.
It's where I get my bike serviced and they do not open the front gate.
You have to meet them and they'll come and bring you what you want or you bring your bike in that way.
And comparing that to a church service is absurd.
Yeah, well, I mean, the points of conflict were around, you know, should it be less than 25 people in a gathering or less than 10 people in a gathering?
But I mean, I think the overall point that the government is probably trying to make is we really want to avoid 7,000 people from gathering at a wedding in Williamsburg without wearing masks.
And, you know, we need some teeth to do that.
Well, yeah, and we also want to limit 50 people from gathering in an enclosed space and singing together without masks on, right?
And yeah, it's all imperfect and we're figuring it out as we go along.
The Jab, our weekly segment on the crucial COVID vaccine and the misinformation conspiritualists love to spread about it.
Derek recently did a great Instagram post and then Patreon bonus summary of the excellent new book by Jonathan Berman called Anti-vaxxers.
One key distinction Berman makes is between the roughly 2% who are anti-vaxxers and the 20% who are vaccine hesitant.
Of course, we know that in our subculture those numbers skew significantly higher.
And we know that the impact of conspirituality's layered propaganda, which nests the question of vaccines into a labyrinthine, alt-health, sovereign, lightworker, militia-fascist mythology, will likely make resistance to the COVID vaccine even higher.
Berman also cautions against following the data-deficit model, or thinking that just delivering information, facts, and evidence will sway people who are already emotionally convinced otherwise.
Consistent with the advice of our two oft-cited expert interviewees, Imran Ahmed and Steve Hassan, first, don't engage the hardcore misinformation directly, especially online.
Don't boost it in the algorithm.
And second, approach those you care about educating or helping with empathy, respect, and patience.
Personally, I'll let you all know when I've mastered both or either of those principles.
It's difficult to do.
This week I did some Facebook posting about the idea of a vaccine-hesitant decoder ring, partially inspired by some requests on Instagram, and that's now been turned into an article that's up on Conspirituality.net in the transmissions section where our blog posts are, and that's replete with citations for everything that I talk about in the article.
Right now, I just wanted to illustrate some points I made there using numbers.
And bear in mind, these numbers may vary slightly depending on the source, but what if I told you that your odds of being struck by lightning are between 1 in 3,000 and 1 in 15,000?
I imagine you'd still occasionally make a dash for your car in the rain.
How about that your odds, and therefore your child's odds, of dying by drowning were 1 in a much smaller 1,200?
You'd probably still go swimming, right?
Speaking of cars, did you know your lifetime odds of dying in a car accident are around 1 in 100?
That's a desperately high probability, but last I checked we were all still driving, though perhaps quite a bit less during quarantine.
So I wanted to contrast that with some numbers on diseases.
Smallpox for hundreds of years would ravage countries, laying waste to as high as 25% of the population.
In fact, smallpox is estimated to have killed 300 million people in the 20th century alone.
Mummified bodies tell us that this disease dates back at least as far as ancient Egypt, some three to five thousand years ago.
Now, the numbers going back that far become quite enormous if you want to do the calculations.
People who survived smallpox had terrible scarring on their bodies and were sometimes left blind.
But thanks to the vaccine, smallpox was eradicated from the planet in 1977.
I won't go into detail now about the devastating nature of other diseases and the incredible track record of robust vaccination programs, except to say that in the case of polio, which also dates back at least as far as ancient Egypt, have you guys seen this, the image of the priest with the withered leg from ancient Egypt?
No, I haven't seen that.
Yeah, it's fascinating.
It kills or paralyzes about 5,000 people per million in a given population without the vaccine.
But with one, it is likewise headed now in the direction of being completely eradicated, going from around 350,000 cases in 1988 to just 22 reported cases worldwide in 2017.
So those are some numbers just for context.
And they're in relationship to this fact.
The CDC estimates by contrast that for the childhood vaccines that we all receive in privileged countries that have medical infrastructure, serious adverse reactions occur at around one or two per million.
Most people who have one of those reactions will make a complete recovery from that serious reaction.
But in even more rare instances, disability or death does occur, which of course is awful.
But again, it's important to contrast that with the World Health Organization's estimation that globally, vaccines save 2 to 3 million lives per year.
So if we consider these numbers, the benefits and likely positive individual outcomes outweigh any risks of vaccines by several orders of magnitude.
And the comparative risks of everyday activities or situations like driving, swimming, getting caught in the rain, struck by lightning, they're much higher.
The risks of remaining unvaccinated in the face of any of these illnesses, including COVID-19, are always many times higher than any risk of a negative reaction to the vaccine.
And the system in place for researching, testing, peer review, and oversight is actually really quite strong.
So that's just a little excerpt from this vaccine-hesitant decoder ring.
I encourage people to go to the website and check it out if you want more.
You know, something just clicked when you were reading that and the argument that a lot of anti-vaccine activists make is the damage to children or damage to anyone, but specifically usually to deal with children, right?
Yeah.
Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but most of the time when someone is damaged by a vaccine as a child, they're immunocompromised in some capacity, correct?
Yeah.
Because that's actually a small percentage of children cannot get vaccinated.
So that's why herd immunity is so important to protect the children and adults who cannot get vaccinated because they're immunocompromised.
Exactly.
And some of those kids have pre-existing allergies that Yeah, so if the argument about from this crowd that people who are dying of COVID-19 are the people who don't take care of the immune system and they deserve it, well then doesn't that argument also work for the people who are hurt by vaccines?
Wouldn't you have to apply it to them as well?
There is a logical inconsistency there.
Surprise, surprise.
It's just, I mean, reading Berman's book, and I have to reach out to the publicist because I hope to have him on our podcast soon.
Great.
He does a wonderful job at being very empathetic about, you know, understanding the reasons why people, and he makes great points in that sense.
But that lack of logic, logical consistency, which you just mentioned, is continually frustrating.
Because if you can't apply the argument broadly, you shouldn't be making that argument.
Derek, does he also create some sort of calculus that tracks the relationship between the 2% of people who are hardcore anti-vax and the 20% that are vax hesitant?
Like I imagine, I'm wondering, I mean, they're tied together, right?
Because the vax hesitancy people are going to be listening to those 2%.
If the 2% grows, what happens to the 20?
Well, exactly.
And that's what he talks about, the interventions necessary to make sure that they don't become activists.
He has a whole chapter devoted to understanding how people go from hesitancy to activism.
Oh, wow.
So that that really clocks with Imran Ahmed, too, because because if you take if you really focus on deplatforming the 2% and making sure that the 20% don't cross that threshold over into taking their place, then, yeah, that's that would be the that would be the thing.
Some combination of deplatforming or just not engaging if you don't have the power to deplatform and also providing accurate information and having good, empathic conversations that address what people's real fears are.
But back to what you were saying, Derek.
It reminds me a bit of the like, we want to save the children who are being sex trafficked, right?
But we don't care about the kids being held in cages at the border.
We are so concerned with the tiny percentage of people who really, really do have, especially kids, adverse reactions.
But surely the way to protect Children who are immunocompromised or do have allergies, who otherwise would be vulnerable to all these childhood diseases, is to get herd immunity all around them, which is the whole point, right?
Like a lot of people, I was introduced to Jordan Peterson out of nowhere.
And then suddenly he was everywhere.
And I want to start this segment by looking at the value of some of the things he says and writes.
And I know some listeners will be upset by that, but this is something we've discussed before, and I think Peterson makes a perfect example of this idea.
No one is purely evil or purely benevolent.
We can learn from people we don't agree with, and there are certainly things that I don't agree with when it comes to Peterson.
But there are also ideas that I do agree with, so I want to present them to Matthew and Julian for discussion as they've approached him from different angles, and we can kind of flesh out a bit of perhaps the evolution and timeline as well.
So shortly after 12 Rules for Life was published, I was assigned to cover Peterson over the course of three months by my editor at Big Think.
And that meant generating a lot of content about him over that quarter.
So I had to approach his work from a variety of angles.
And I actually recommend this if you're a writer in general.
If you only approach a subject from one angle, you're bound to miss a lot about that person.
Make no mistake, Jordan Peterson is wildly popular.
Going back and research for this piece, I checked the numbers on some of my articles, and they're pretty high.
Two of them top 100,000 readers at 138,000 and 192,000.
readers at 138,000 and 192,000.
But the most circulated one is the one I'm going to start with.
And 388,000 people read that piece.
And I only share those numbers because around the time when 12 Rules for Life was published, readers could not get enough of him regardless of your And I think that is important to remember.
Now that top-performing article dealt with Peterson's 10 rules for writing.
And I'm not going to list each one, because all of these pieces are linked to in the show notes, but I'll highlight two quotes from his writing course.
The first, production, the first major step, and editing, the second, are different functions and should be treated that way.
This is because each interferes with the other.
The purpose of production is to produce.
The function of editing is to reduce and arrange.
Now, very basic seeming, but as I've made the shift and watched our culture make the shift from journalism to blogging, there are many, many posts that have never been edited.
And a lot of writers actually don't even realize they need editing, which as a former magazine editor, I ran into a lot.
And this is just very common sense, good, strong writing advice.
And we have to remember that before Peterson exploded into fame for reasons that Matthew will get into, he was a professor and there is a very strong, his 10 rules for writing course was pretty popular.
I like the second as well.
If you force yourself to reconstruct your argument from memory, you will likely improve it.
Generally, when you remember something, you simplify it while retaining most of what is important.
Thus, your memory can serve as a filter, removing what is useless and preserving and organizing what is vital.
What you are doing now is distilling what you have written to its essence.
Now again, a good tip for writers, and it has to do again with the editing process of actually forcing yourself to jot down your memories and then after being written, going back and thinking about it again.
V.S.
Napal, who's a fabulous writer, also has some similar ideas about writing, where he talks about Sentence structure should be as short as possible, right?
The idea of writing is communication and you want to get things across to people.
So anyway, just an example of how Peterson, in his professorial role and not in his role outside into the world that he stepped into, seems to be a solid professor and his three-hour courses on mythology were getting hundreds of thousands of views.
Have you guys seen any of them?
I'll talk about one of them, which I actually attended live.
Yeah, there's a lot to say about what he does in those courses.
And there's also a time arc as well, because what he does in the early 2000s is much different than what he does after he gets his Bill C-16 bump.
He also talks a fair bit about psychedelics as well.
It's one of his topics.
Psychedelic sacraments as sort of doorways into a deep relationship to myth and self-actualization.
Yeah, I did watch one of those and relating to Christianity, which is obviously something we recently covered from Brian Murarescu.
But that is something that's been around.
So again, just more examples.
Now, another high performing piece is his philosophy of cleaning up your room.
And this one's a little more contentious, but this in hindsight.
This is something Matthew is going to speak to in a bit.
I think he's going against his advice a bit here with another 12 rules.
But the heart of the argument is sound, and this goes back to what I said before about the Hasidim and living what you say.
And here's just a straight quote from his book.
My sense is that if you want to change the world, you start with yourself and work outward because you can build your competence that way.
I don't know how you can go out and protest the structure of the entire economic system if you can't keep your room organized.
I don't fully agree with that, but let's move on.
He's such a hypocrite.
He's such a hypocrite.
There was nothing about his popular life, about his life in celebrity, that had anything to do with internal self-organization or continence, really.
And I mean, just going back to the Ten Rules for Reading, you know, it's like, Okay.
Writing.
Writing, yeah.
I mean, okay.
So, production and editing should be separable.
If you can reconstruct your argument from memory, it'll sharpen up.
These are great on paper.
It really doesn't account for the fact that as a charismatic, logorrheic, non-stop content producer, he didn't follow any of those things ever.
Okay, we'll get there, we'll get there, we'll get there, we'll get there.
We'll get there, because that's actually, well, let me finish this quote.
You know what, Chad?
Maybe hypocrite isn't the right word.
It's just conflictual.
It's like, it's contradictory.
Everything, everything that's presented is so alluring because, because in fact, I think it's like, it's something that he can't do.
And so it's like, it's like, he's going to be really passionate about how necessary it is because he's actually holding on by his fingernails or something.
If you can't even clean up your own room, who the hell are you to give advice to the world?
And Matthew, I can see your room right now, so we should have a talk.
Well, did you see his room?
Did you see his room in the background of the YouTube videos?
Oh my gosh, the last year or so, you know, it looked like a dumpster fire.
No, I checked out over the last year, honestly.
In 2020, there's been no JP in my life.
So I'm going back a few years and I want to make that clear.
And again, these are things that I wrote about before or during a lot of the process and before the fallout that we're going to get to.
Again, just pointing out that people are complex and you can learn from some people.
Now, I don't agree with the whole economic system because people in the economic system might not be able to even have a good home and so they kind of have some ground to make criticisms.
So, it's kind of a privileged argument.
But I do also agree with Matthew's point because His advice on writing, if you've read 12 Rules for Life, it's a really hard book.
It's just the most rambling diatribe.
Pulling out quotes, I always underline.
Joseph Campbell used to say that his yoga practice was underlying books.
And I love that.
Underlying passages in books.
And I love that.
Honestly, out of that entire 500-page book, I got like a page of usable material.
And they're really strong, but getting through all of that to get to that was really hard.
The last piece I want to get to him, and I think this will segue nicely, is his all-meat diet.
And this is where things really go off the rails.
I'm speculating here, but maybe it was his quick rise to fame, the adoration, the criticism.
But his daughter, Michaela, introduced him to an all-meat diet that supposedly did wonders for her and supposedly cured his depression, which obviously didn't work.
But it's not actually a diet.
It's an eating disorder called orthorexia, which I've discussed on this podcast before.
And here we start to segue into, I think, where All of that, all of the charisma that he had, but when it was met with fame, seemed to have catalyzed some sort of mental health problem.
There's so many interesting sort of contradictions and contrasts.
I think he is a very complex character and what he represents on the public stage is a fascinating thing to explore.
But just the fact that his whole message is around this kind of tough daddy, clean up your room, stand up straight, approach women with an air of confidence and you'll succeed in the world.
You know, this whole kind of it's very masculine.
But actually his demeanor when he's presenting his material, I actually find always very emotional here.
He always feels like he's on the edge, and he always feels like he's extemporizing, and he's responding in the moment, and he's trying to grapple his way towards something that he feels is really of the essence, but he's afraid it's going to be misunderstood.
There's so much there that's really tricky.
I know people who really love his stuff.
I've appreciated some of what I've seen from him.
I do find his...
Conflating a lot of postmodern stuff that I have strong criticisms of with Marxism, like really sort of odd and not particularly accurate.
It's ahistorical.
It's out of his lane.
He's a clinical psychology professor.
He doesn't really know his political history.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, he's fascinated with it.
But yeah, I mean, that yearning quality of his speech, I think, gives him a kind of pass with regard to the content of a lot of the toxic masculinity.
It's like he's able to, almost like Alan Alda, effect a kind of, you know, throwback, you know, I don't know, sexual politics, that somehow you forgive because he's got a high, creaky voice and he apologizes a lot and he seems to be Canadian and polite.
Although, as a Canadian, I can say he has really sharp daggers beneath that vest coat and the watch follow.
Well, that's what I was going to say.
He presents himself in this very sharply dressed, throwback sort of way.
That Alan Alda comparison is brilliant.
From my point of view, sitting here in Toronto, where he's from and where he lives, there's been a ton of coverage over the years about how his fascination with anti-authoritarianism is usually indistinguishable from libertarian or alt-right views, or is used to provide intellectual cover for libertarian or alt-right views.
I do want to just interrupt super briefly and say I have heard him on multiple times when pressed say with absolute disdain, I despise the alt-right, I despise white supremacy, I want nothing to do with those people, I know where that shit goes, I hate Nazis, and I have a strong critique of where authoritarian left-wing stuff can go.
Yeah, I mean, I've heard that too.
And there's something more complex in the fact that he is happy rubbing shoulders with alt-right politicians, that he's been happy taking money from Rebel Media, which is like the Breitbart News of Canada.
He's either blind to his political associations, or he doesn't care about them, or he's venal and he enjoys the cash, or he thinks it's a blessing from the gods of Jung or something.
I don't know.
But like he, anyway, I'll get into the politics because that's what, and actually his real political positions and relationships here where he lives, because that's what a lot of people miss.
So I'm going to link to like a bunch of articles on his like, Gender critical position, his reliance on the conspiratorial conflation of postmodernism and Marxism, which just does not make sense at all.
His, you know, heteronormative assertions, his historical ignorance around Nazism, which he called atheistic at one point.
And then his proposals.
He proposed at one point that he was going to create a website where leftist professors could be doxed.
He's also subtly denied climate change.
It's all out there, but the problem is that Peterson, as I've said, is really, really Canadian, and with this passive-aggressive mixture of politeness and self-deference, which allows him to make almost every statement that he makes plausibly deniable.
And, like, unless he's intubated in Russia, he never shuts up.
So his followers can always find something that seemed to modulate his problematic statements.
The man is just never stops talking.
So here are a couple of things that I want to bring to the table that aren't typically discussed when people are doing the culture war thing with him.
You know, where they're sort of tangoing on whether he's simply an open minded thinker and a kindly guide to young men or whether he's a sloppy thinker who's either too stupid or too narcissistic to realize he's become an alt right shill.
And And I want to preface this by saying that I don't think I'm going to violate my own ad hominem rules here whereby I commit to not conflating a person's humanity with their views and their public impact because
But at the same time, because so much of the discourse around Peterson depends upon how people get up in their feelings about him personally, plus a distinct lack of information about what he actually does here in Toronto, that's a real problem.
Here's the list of local, you know, the man on the street, what has Peterson done, where he lives, and I think that it casts a certain light on the arguments around the value of Peterson's work, which are complex.
So, first of all, the only reason the three of us are talking about him is that in 2006 he went to the Canadian Senate hearings on Bill C-16.
And this proposed a minor language change to the criminal code that would encourage the proper gendering of trans people.
And his argument was that the law would compel him to speak in certain ways and threaten him with imprisonment if he didn't use the proper gender pronoun.
Now, the Canadian Bar Association just laid this out as a total lie.
Basically, I don't know if there are any legal organizations, either provincial or federal or private, that came out in support of his view.
Nobody thought that the language proposed in the legislation was going to do what he really whipped up a whole sort of hunt about.
And this is why we're talking about him, because It's the wedge issue that made him the darling of rebel media here in Canada, which was founded by right-wing commentator Ezra Levant.
And around that time, I think this is in 2016, he claimed that a $400,000 research grant was denied him.
Actually, this is in 2017, because of his political views.
Of course, we can't know whether that's true or not.
You know, tenured professors apply for grants, they get them, they don't get them.
Each, you know, there might be better projects that are proposed.
But he was surprised by this and he took to the media to complain about it and to speculate that he was being discriminated against.
So Rebel Media set up a GoFundMe that quickly raised $250,000.
Which, of course, is all unaccountable.
If the Shirk Foundation in Canada had actually given him the grant money, he would have had to clock all of it and say who he was paying, where it was going to, and he'd have to produce the research.
But Rebel Media sets him up with his money, and that also plugged him into the cash streams of the North American alt-right.
And by the summer of 2017, he was headlining conservative roundtables Sitting shoulder to shoulder with people like the current Premier of Ontario, Doug Ford.
Put a pin in that, because that's important.
But also, the Proud Boys founder, Gavin McInnes, who was a colleague of Levant at the time, and I think instrumental in founding Rebel Media.
And that burst of crowdfunding eventually became a Patreon juggernaut that hauled in $80,000 a month, according to The Guardian, reporting in May of 2018.
We're talking about a tenured professor here.
Who, while he's pulling in all of this money, which is totally unaccountable, is also mouthing off on YouTube about how his own university is filled with leftists that should be doxxed, right?
He's not, you know, so yes, there's a polite demeanor, and there's like, the knives are fluttering under that, like, you know, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory getup.
So, in 2018, There was a new government here in Ontario, so the Conservative Party put Doug Ford up for the premiership, he won it, and they rolled out a plan to rescind an update to the Ontario sex education curriculum.
was replacing the outdated, pre-digital, pre-gay marriage, pre-trans awareness version that was more than two decades old.
The new curriculum was thoroughly researched and vetted by top educators in the province.
It was championed by the Ontario Human Rights Commission and by the Ontario Institute of Studies and Education.
By the way, you should know that the primary political issue in Ontario provincial politics is the Conservative Party set against the teachers' unions.
So whenever you say the word teacher or whenever a Conservative politician in Toronto says the word teacher, people are entrained like, you know, barking seals to thank, you know, Marxists or leftists or people who are getting too much money or they shouldn't have the summers off.
So, Peterson was opposed to the sex-ed update, and he called Ford's predecessor, who was Kathleen Wynne, who just happens to be a center-left lesbian, you know, former education minister, he called her the most dangerous woman in Canada, which is totally absurd.
But it's like red meat to the right wing.
Then in October, Peterson had a secret private meeting with Doug Ford after tweeting out a call for the abolishment of the Ontario Human Rights Commission and the Ontario Institute for Studies and Education.
The tweet reads, The faster the Ontario Human Rights Commission is abolished, the better, Ford Nation.
There isn't a more dangerous organization in Canada, with the possible exception of the Ontario Institute for Studies and Education.
So he's deleted the tweet, of course.
But then, in supporting various Tory causes on the ground, he actually considered running for the premiership.
He was also influential in raising the profile of an arch-Catholic leadership candidate named Tanya Granick-Allen, and she was a single-issue politician with just a regressive stance on the sex ed curriculum, and she ended up being the leadership kingmaker.
Now, today, she's tweeting out support for Adam Skelly, who's the BBQ Anon hero.
She's a West Ender just like me.
Now, even closer to home, if you read only one more article about Jordan Peterson, we're going to post one written by Bernard Schiff, who's the senior psychology professor who got Peterson his job. who's the senior psychology professor who got Peterson his job.
It's a super brave article that mourns the loss of a friend to depression and paranoia, and then regrets bystanding through it all.
And quoting from the article, Schiff says, several years ago, Jordan Peterson told me he wanted to buy a church.
This was long before he became known as the most influential public intellectual in the Western world, as he was described in the pages of the New York Times a few months ago.
It was before he was fancied to be a truth-telling sage who inspired legions and the author of one of the best-selling books in the world this year.
He was just my colleague and friend.
I assumed that it was for a new home.
Because there was a trend in Toronto of converting religious spaces vacant because of their dwindling congregations into stylish lofts.
But he corrected me.
He wanted to establish a church, he said, in which he would deliver sermons every Sunday.
So, yeah, I mean, for Torontonians, we all know that everyone on the tenure track at University of Toronto basically lives in a part of town called the Annex, where Peterson, his present century home, is.
And Schiff's remark that he thought that Peterson was interested in taking over a church really does reflect the gentrification arc of the 1990s in that area.
He was right, that warehouses, factories, and churches were reno'd into artist lofts and condos.
And while Schiff is painting a picture of somebody who wants to be a preacher from days of yore, this particular detail illuminates for me that Peterson, regardless of how much he rails against it, is actually Like this on-the-nose postmodern figure and content provider who mixes media, scrambles sources, obscures citations, creates simulations.
The interior of his house, the downstairs walls, are completely covered in Soviet and fascist art.
But then the upper floor is renovated to look like some sort of Haida Gwaii longhouse with carved thunderbirds and sacred forest animals.
So, You know, for someone who traffics in certainties like men are men, women are women, the West is West, and the East is East, he really doesn't show that he knows who the fuck he is.
He was a leftist as a teen, wants to be a preacher.
He falsely claimed that he was made an honorary member of a First Nations tribe here in Canada.
He's anti-authoritarian, but he seeks out an audience with Victor Orban.
So, like, to me, none of it adds up beyond the picture of this very precarious, charismatic dude with a pathological relationship to attention who's just, like, spinning out until he bursts into flames.
But how do you feel about him?
Yeah, lots of feelings.
I mean, it's really personal because I hear over years commentators speaking about Peterson in the abstract as though he's generating content, when really what's happening is that he's casting a spell over a widening circle that emanates out from the local captive audience.
And this was really driven home when I went to see him in person, finally, and I got the cult thing.
So, I went to one of his lectures.
It was in his series, you know, Bible and Mythology, or Mythology and the Bible, or something like that.
And, you know, it's a 12-part series, three-hour lectures.
He bounces onto the lecture stage late.
There's 500 people in the auditorium, and most of the crowd Like, stands up or leans towards him in this swoon, and the guy next to me literally screamed out, there he is, there he is, like Peterson was Bono.
And then Peterson, like, drops into this trance monologue for two and a half hours, and the crowd is totally entranced.
And the two and a half hours wasn't enough.
Like, he went overtime.
And, you know, for him it was clear that lecturing is a ritual experience.
So he's extroverted when it's happening, but he's also lost within himself.
It's mirrored in this body language of hunching forward and downward gazing and this endless oral and chin touching while in these loopy run-on sentences that sometimes move forward and then they sometimes collapse back on themselves.
And you can feel Watching him that speech itself is a way of ritualizing his core theme of harmonizing chaos and order in such a way that order or the masculine prevails for at least as long as he's talking.
And I think that's why he keeps going because I think he feels that his talking gives shape to chaos.
So I can't remember the name of the lecture, but it was like, you know, Old Testament themes.
It was floods, you know, Noah's flood, Mesopotamian flood, the Sumerian floods.
But he didn't cover any of the advertised material, except for a few begrudging references to floods in like Murcia Iliadi in the last 15 minutes with some crappy graphics.
And then there was the Q&A, and no one asked him about the lecture content.
They lined up to like lob him these softballs about postmodern Marxism.
And one guy offered him coding help for his online university that hasn't come to be.
And no one seemed to care.
We all paid $35 a head that the promised topic had been completely abandoned.
So 500 people, that's $17,000 in revenue for the evening.
He might have paid the videographer who was there if she wasn't a student volunteer, and I bet that he rented the university hall at a discounted faculty rate.
And then, it doesn't stop, because...
I go to the can downstairs, which feels like a hockey game, like real testosterone lineup, no eye contact.
And then I exit the building and into a thick crowd to find Peterson surrounded by 200 millennials on the front steps.
And he keeps speaking, holding court until about 11 o'clock.
It's a beautiful May night.
The crowd is 80% men, but he stood close in front of this young woman and locked eyes with her to answer her series of questions.
And that went on for about 20 minutes.
And, like, he absorbed every dewy-eyed question into this feedback loop, and the inner ring around him seemed to think that he was speaking to each one of them individually and privately, which is also, I think, enhanced by his, like, YouTube thing, too, which also, I think, feels inappropriately intimate.
Anyway, thinking back on that night, I'm not surprised at what we've learned since, that he was heading into a mental and physical health crisis, that he couldn't actually turn off the chaos of his fame, no matter how much order he spoke at it.
That he wasn't sleeping.
Like, the dude should have been going home, right?
Like, he was standing on the steps.
He obviously needed a nap.
And, you know, so then we find out he turned to, you know, the orderliness of medication.
And then that too became chaotic.
So the whole thing, you know, has this bipolar flavor to it with soaring heights and catastrophes.
It's like he's thrust into ever-escalating fame both by his sort of intense emotional reactivity and by his need for attention and by his intellectual intensity, I think it's important to say.
And then somehow in the midst of all of that rambling stuff that you're referring to, he distills some message down that will really appeal to, if you will, a lowest common denominator of his audience, right?
Who are really going to buy into this idea that he's going to help them organize their lives.
And at the same time, he's going off the rails, which raises the question, how do you come back from everything he's been through in the last year in terms of his mental and physical health and have another book that is going to purport to give even more advice on how to get your shit together?
Well, also, I mean, it's been reported that he has some cognitive deficits from the injuries sustained during the medical coma.
And so it's like, you know, he's probably going to have help researching and writing.
And, you know, if he came back and said, wow, I really...
I got ahead of myself there.
I am a clinical psychology professor and I'm pretty good at that research tip.
I didn't know what I was getting into when the runaway train of viral social media took over my life.
And I'm going to pull back a little bit and concentrate on what I know.
Um, that would be different.
But the announcement of of yet another yet another self-helped home is is a little bit it's it's a little bit suspicious to me.
Well, I wanted to well, first off, I want to bring up one thing, because we talked about, you know, in Slack about the the dis and even now the distance between what you profess and then.
What actually happens, and the idea that he was peddling an all-meat diet as some sort of cure-all in that article, which was the last one I wrote about him, I quote University of Chicago's Microbiome Center, Jack Gilbert, he's a faculty director, where he talks about what actually happens in your body on an all-meat diet, so meat and salt, and that's all you intake.
Your body would start to have severe dysregulation within six months of the majority of the processes that deal with metabolism.
You would have no short-chain fatty acids in your cells.
Most of the byproducts of gastrointestinal polysaccharide fermentation would shut down, so you wouldn't be able to regulate your hormone levels.
You'd enter into cardiac issues due to alterations in cell receptors, and your microbiota Biota would just be devastated.
And of course, the link between the microbiome and cognitive health is much more well understood now.
But I do want to ask one question here as we wind down, which is this because I completely agree with you about Coming off of that, I don't expect humility.
And if it is, I would expect false humility coming from his past.
But hey, who knows?
There could be some revelation that happened.
Absolutely.
So we'll give space for that.
But I do have a problem with protesting the publication of the book.
And you could be mad at your publisher for choosing to take on a book by such a polarizing figure.
I get that.
But any time Book censorship comes in.
It's problematic to me for a number of reasons, and I wanted to know how you guys feel about that protest.
Well, how was it about censorship and not the employees of the publishing company saying, boy, that's a really shitty choice, and some of us are trans people, and some of us have been negatively impacted by his drumming up of alt-right politics here in Ontario?
Because the ask is not to publish it, though.
I know, but I mean, was that going to go anywhere?
Like, I mean, what else would they ask?
And is that really censorship?
Well, the ask of not publishing a book, yes, I think that is censorship.
I think censorship is, you know, the state coming in and saying, you can't publish that book and here's why.
You know, but we're talking about, we're talking about, you know, people having an argument, uh, about, about values and whether or not they want to be associated with a, with a company that, that, that puts out what they believe is harmful.
Well, in a way you, you, you get into, I think what is a, a, a banal sounding kind of cliche principle, but nonetheless is important, which is where do you draw the line?
Right, so do I have to agree with everything that the publisher I work for puts out?
Am I completely unable to tolerate disagreement or feeling that I actually don't like the person and what they're saying?
Where is that line where it crosses over into quote-unquote hate speech or something that is genuinely harmful?
And this is the arena where a lot of the debate around cancel culture that we've waded into a little bit comes up, right?
Right.
And Matthew, I want to say I do agree with your point about having problems and expressing that because we did the whole thing with Hay House.
So I agree on that point.
But I think the difference for me in this sense is that did those employees who were protesting read the galley?
And I think that's an important piece because what if that revelation did happen where his rules are revived and he's coming forward as something else?
I don't think that's the case, but what if that is actually the case and he apologizes in some sense because that protest happened as soon as it was announced and I highly doubt that the galley got around to those employees.
So that sort of trigger happiness is more of what I'm questioning than the fact that I completely agree with you that Let's bounce it over to another thought experiment example, though.
Let's say that you are working for Netflix and you find out that Netflix has contracted Mickey Willis to do a documentary about whatever it is, but it sounds legitimate.
Would you ask the employees of Netflix who were like, don't give this guy a platform.
This is ridiculous.
He's been harmful in X, Y, and Z ways.
Would you ask that they saw his script before they protested?
Yeah, I would.
I mean, absolutely.
I think actually seeing what is planned at the very least, maybe not the script, but understand the premise of it.
Because what we're talking about is we are leaving no room for forgiveness or potential apologies.
And again, I don't expect it from Peterson, so I want to make that clear.
At the same time, and if you want to, I mean, Netflix, first of all, Netflix, if you go to Netflix, on my same feed, you will find like anti-Trump, but then an entire miniseries glorifying the Trump family.
If you go to Amazon Prime, you're going to find a whole range of liberal documentaries, but you're also going to find some propaganda.
Dinesh D'Souza.
Exactly, Dinesh D'Souza and other propaganda.
Right, you know, my thought experiment isn't that great because we'd have to, we'd have to like theorize about a, like a, you know, a firmly liberal left media platform that decided to somehow, you know, publish, publish or work with Mickey Willis.
Yeah, so the analogy needs some tweaking.
I think it's important to acknowledge that we're choosing to engage in a conversation over many of these episodes on something that is very, very complicated and difficult.
It's true.
The whole thing about deplatforming, censorship, free speech, a diversity of opinion, the healthy debate.
It's just very, very complicated.
And I think what often happens is that one side or the other will oversimplify it down into some kind of binary where one side is where what on one side of the equation is like horrific oppression that's going to lead to Nazism.
And on the other side is the sense of being on the on the side of right.
What's difficult is that both sides will see themselves in the heroic position when it's oversimplified in that way.
I think what's interesting about Peterson is that he's got a really firm paper trail of statements that if I were a publishing platform, I'd want to see him reckon with if he had had some sort of come-to-Jesus moment.
I mean, there's a deleted National Post or Toronto Sun article that really framed his position towards C-16 where he says that The ideology that's driving, this is a paraphrase because I haven't seen it in a while, but he says basically that the ideology that drives the proposed legislation to include trans awareness into the criminal code is consistent with Marxist ideologies that have massacred hundreds of thousands.
Mm-hmm, which is clearly so hyperbolic and hysterical.
At the same time, I must say, you obviously are much more familiar with him because of your vantage point, and so I'm taking all of this in, and I want to do my own consideration of how I think about him moving forward.
I have also seen him in interviews when asked directly, would you use a transgender person's pronoun if they asked you in an in-person situation?
And he said, yes, of course I would.
Of course I would.
He has said, of course I would, but he's also given other answers like, well, I might if they ask me politely, or I might if... There's that Canadian passive-aggressiveness you're talking about.
It's not just that.
It's the complete, utter overexposure of this man's face to the public where there's so many things that he's bloody well said, and I would protest it just because of that.
Like, give somebody else a goddamn book contract.
There's just too many Peterson books and media pieces out there, you know?
Well, Julian, I'll say this, and I think you've brought a bunch of clarifying points today, but it's really true that being able to look at it, and I did play this role with Peterson because I don't know his history nearly as much as Matthew, and because I'm only going by a book and not as much of the history, But also being able to weigh all of those things, because again, I think that is an important aspect of any debate, is being able to look at a broad array of things and come to conclusions based on that.
And I think that's what triggered me personally about that immediate town hall by the publishing company, because of all those factors, because it was very reactionary, probably for good reason for some of those people.
But at the same time, What?
So you pull the book?
You don't think that's going to make another publisher pick it up and sell more?
Publicize it more?
Because that's what's going to... And it's going to give it fire.
But you're absolutely right.
There is no easy answers there.
But I do think that having conversations that extend and think about all about these people and the situations they're in in a holistic fashion is very important.
I'm joined today by Jeff Brown, author of six books, including Soul Shaping, An Uncommon Bond, and most recently Grounded Spirituality. and most recently Grounded Spirituality.
He's been featured on NPR, Good Morning America, and other TV shows, and also made the documentary film Carmageddon.
I first became aware of Jeff through his passionate and pointed social media posts about grounded and emotionally honest spirituality, which feature his many novel turns of phrase, like the new cage movement, enrealment, and the school of heart knocks.
Hi, Jeff.
I'm so pleased to talk to you today.
Welcome to Conspirituality.
Thank you, Julian.
It's a pleasure to be with you and not feel so alone with my thinking anymore.
That's really quite comforting for me.
Yeah, I absolutely agree.
I'm looking forward to where we're going to go with this.
Your new book is called Grounded Spirituality, and it starts with a kind of anecdotal case history in the form of a conversation with someone who has been very spiritual for a long time, but still feels sort of lost.
And I actually really, really relate to this guy's story.
It's beautifully done because you get to illustrate the core ideas that differentiate this more human embodied process oriented spirituality from a more transcendentalist and I think you even refer to it as a patriarchal model.
I'd love to hear your nutshell on grounded spirituality and why it matters enough So that you're willing to sort of stand for it as a new model, right?
Got it.
So let me start by reading a definition of grounded spirituality from Grounded Spirituality.
Grounded Spirituality is an all-encompassing experience of spirituality that is rooted in and threads throughout all aspects of our humanity and earthly experience.
We begin and end our spiritual quest within the ground of our being, our embodied humanness, as both interpreter of experience and as our individuated portal to divinity.
We don't look outside our human form for spirituality.
We look deeper within name and form, cultivating a more refined understanding of the divine reflection that exists right in the heart of our selfhood.
We honour its sacred qualities and transformative properties, celebrating it as the perfectly constructed laboratory of expansion that it is.
With our feet rooted firmly on Mother Earth and in daily life, we become grounded in reality in all its identifiable forms.
We expand outward and inward from there.
Just a little more.
In essence, grounded and spirituality are synonyms.
They both mean reality.
The more deeply grounded you are in your body and selfhood, the more fully you're here.
The more fully you're here, the more spiritually you experience.
It is from the depths of your being that you have the greatest access to the everything.
What this means, in concrete terms, is that we stop stepping away from the uncomfortable elements of our humanness, and we fully incorporate and live deeper within the often maligned self, understanding and appreciating that the more developed the localized self is, the more profound our connection to the spiritual realms.
Rather than identifying the self as the enemy of the sacred, we recognize that it's indistinguishable from it, and we embrace, honor, and live through every aspect of the self.
Your selfhood, the thing you can truly stand in, the only thing that's truly yours, and the only way you can connect with the world at large and sense, feel, penetrate this awake universe." Why this matters to me, and why I think this really matters, because of where we're at as a species, and the perils before us, is because my experience of this thing we've been calling spirituality.
I used to think it was like there's some people bypassing reality with this thing called spirituality.
That was my first level of penetration into the inquiry.
I mean, Carmageddon, Ram Dass, Bhagavan Dass, they're all bypassers.
And I started to, oh, that's what John Well was talking about.
But then I began to realize that the entire system is a bypass construct, and that it's patriarchally oriented and organized, and that really it's about pitting our humanness against our sacredness.
So, you find your most awakened, enlightened experience, I call it self-avoidance, masquerading as enlightenment, they call it mastery, being awakened and enlightenment, and that my belief is that if we keep floating above the human experience,
If we keep dissociating from our humanness, our story, our feelings, our body, our beautiful personal identifications, our trauma history, all of the rest of that, and calling that awakening, we will never do anything to even recognize or to take action to transform this species in the direction of something that will preserve, perpetuate, and develop us.
And so I think at this moment in time, if we don't start critically reviewing everything Including yoga that we've been calling spirituality.
I believe that we're doomed It's a it's a powerful manifesto and I'm right there with you, you know I feel like part of how we've been connecting initially in preparation for this is sort of recognizing some of the parallel paths in our thinking and our experience and I feel like I feel like I've been, I felt like someone who was sort of alone in the world shouting into the void about this stuff for a couple decades.
And very often people would say, why do you have to be so mean about this?
Why do you have to be so critical?
It doesn't really matter.
And one of the things I say a lot on this podcast is that very often the way spirituality is conceived of is that it is simultaneously too sacred to criticize, but too inconsequential to have an impact on the world.
You know, everyone can just believe whatever they want, and who cares, live and let live.
And for years I've been saying this stuff has consequences, and the consequences play out in our real everyday lives, but they also play out in the world.
Huge.
Now that something we've been calling spirituality is mainstreaming, It is utterly important that we go deeper into the question of whether what people are learning as spiritual is in fact helpful to the species.
It was one thing when it was the peripheral person, the little quiet yoga studio that just barely survived economically.
That's not what's happened anymore.
Now everybody's got Eckhart Tolle's The Power of Now, a book I call The Power of Self-Avoidance, in their house.
Everybody thinks that their pain is something called the pain body, like they're talking about a, you know, a car part.
Everybody's dissociating and thinking that that experience of relief is actually resolutional and transformative and actually integrating and spiritual.
And so now is the time we have to go deeper into the question.
If we keep kissing the ball sack of lineage, or in this moment, kissing the cabal sack of lineage, We know.
We know where Q is leading us.
Q is only one symptom of the bigger problem.
But the real problem is what we've been calling spirituality as something that bifurcates and dissociates our consciousness rather than something that actually really gets us here.
So why does it matter?
Because if we're not really here, if we're not really in our feet, if we're not really integrated, if we're not really understanding how our trauma is running our show, then we are going to do nothing to heal as individuals and we'll do nothing to heal the collective.
And now in the heart of a pandemic, we're seeing more and more why it's utterly and absolutely essential that people are here.
When you see people speak common sense now, it's shocking.
Because it's so hard to find, and all the more reason why we have to do something to invite people to create models that bring people back into true presence.
Presence as a whole being experience, not presence as a dissociated, bifurcated, patriarchal consciousness.
Stillness and silence aren't the only answer.
They wanted stillness and silence because sound and movement brought up their stuff.
So we need a spirituality that reconnects us with everything we're holding.
And then move from that place outward into something maybe called the non-dual field.
Not as an avoidance structure, not as the avoid-advaita movement, but as something that is actually emanating from a grounded, embodied, true presence.
Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.
So when I did bioenergetics with Alexander Lohan, he would come in the room bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.
I thought, this guy's spiritual, that's spirituality.
And then I would watch Eckhart Tolle talk like an automaton and I thought, this is not, this ain't spirituality.
This is a marketing construct.
This is his pattern of avoiding his stuff.
This is his way of egoically claiming he's enlightened while bashing the ego at the same time.
But none of it felt real to me because I want something real.
It's the only thing that makes me feel safe in the world.
Yeah, you know, I wonder if you've gotten this question that I get a lot too, which is, well, if you're so goddamn critical of spirituality, why, why even be involved with it?
Why, and why call what you're doing spirituality?
And my answer is always, well, there, there is actually a path of integration and deeper sort of awakening, if you like, although that word has become very tarnished.
That goes right through the heart of your trauma, of your suffering, of your vulnerability, of your mortality, of your existential angst.
And what we've been calling spirituality is this bypassing, transcendentalist, dualist bifurcation where there's a kind of shitting all over of our humanity in order to sort of dissociate into some sort of fanciful alternate reality.
Have people come at you with that one?
They've come at me with everything.
I have a folder with thousands of threat emails, attacks on my perspective.
There's nothing angrier than an angry Buddhist.
I mean, it's important for me to say that.
And you know, so just on the basic level, the idea that you can't critically review or judge spirituality.
I mean, of course, the fact that they're saying that they're judging my judgment of spirituality.
Yeah, absolutely.
I don't even see that.
But you know, you get why the Guru wanted this.
No anger, no judgment, no gossip, premature forgiveness, so the Guru could get away with anything and nobody would ever look to it, you know.
They're so busy God-jectifying the guru that they're not willing to look at any of the roots of why this person is creating this kind of a teaching.
But on the deeper level, you know, I have been attacked on every level just simply because I have the audacity to think that I can question this holy cow called spirituality.
They're fine, and it's ironic that often that people are doing it, you look on their pages, they're criticizing political perspectives.
Legal decisions, all every aspect of society, except this one protectorate element of society called spirituality.
And that's the thing that terrifies me the most.
We don't have to give up on the word spirituality.
We just have to define it differently.
And I think ultimately what we're going to do is define it as humanist.
And I think that that's really the ultimate direction we're going to go.
So that the most fully experienced in real Embodied notion of humanness becomes our experience of this thing called spirituality.
I think that's the only direction we can go.
Yeah, I like that a lot.
I like too that you're calling out the tendency to put, whether it's religious or less conventional spiritual beliefs, in an airtight compartment that should remain absolutely free from any kind of critique.
Meanwhile, you know, I'm skeptical about whether COVID-19 is real, and I have all these opinions about politics, and I'm going to speak my mind very aggressively, but how dare you say anything about the guru or about the tradition, right?
Don't question Deadheart Tolle, buddy.
I mean, you know, that's big trouble.
You can question everything except the real roots of Ulrich Tolle, which is his real name is Ulrich, the roots of his perspective, the origins in his psyche.
I mean, why aren't we asking the question when anybody presents himself as a spiritual teacher or guru, what are the psychological roots of this?
Why does this person need this view?
What purpose is this serving in terms of them avoiding their material?
Why shouldn't we be asking that question?
My experience has been the most so-called enlightened teacher is usually the most fucked up person in the room because they are masterful at presenting themselves as somehow having transcended the thing everybody in the room also wants to transcend.
It's a big joke, really.
Yeah, I often think of it as a kind of Machiavellian, you know, narcissistic defense where there's so much careful attention to how to manipulate what people's deepest vulnerabilities are in order to put oneself in that special position, that unassailable position.
So with regard to all of that, if we pivot to what we talk about on the podcast, I know that you know that we've been covering The overlaps between New Age beliefs in the yoga and wellness space and the apocalyptic conspiracy theories of QAnon, which sort of infiltrated in various guises over this last year.
COVID denialism, seeing quarantine as a form of oppression, 5G and vaccines as a kind of mark of the beast.
There's all this very heavy mythological language, right?
That's the mythic literalist language, we should say, really.
I often feel that, you know, influencers who are who are peddling this stuff, it's the same kind of shtick that you were just criticizing, where there are these identified special people who are intuitively sort of just channeling the most outrageous statements about the nature of reality and the planet and what we're going through right now and the great awakening that's coming and the emergence of 5D.
And that, To me, that's been the thing, is that the New Age community was primed for this kind of next-level madness.
What does it lead to?
It leads to becoming a Trump supporter and buying a gun and moving to Texas when, you know, six months ago you were living in some New Age enclave and practicing yoga every day.
It's completely nuts.
I'm just curious about your thoughts about that whole thing, if it's something you've been observing and reflecting on.
I mean, I think that, you know, 2020 has forced people in really primarily one of two directions.
You either get really more reality-based, or you get way more dissociated.
And because most of what I believe is the spiritual community has already been fragmented, dissociated, and in denial around their trauma history, you know, the trauma history is running the show, it makes It's the most obvious thing in the world that they would lead in the direction of these very disoriented, not reality based, fantastical notions.
So Q is a very simple example of it.
You know, many of these people have always got objectified the guru.
So now they need a new heroic figure.
So Donald Trump, I mean, of all people, the most truly fucked up human in all of America who became the president becomes their symbol of, you know, heroic saviorship.
It's preposterous, but not surprising at all because they're not here.
You're dealing with a lot of people who have perfected the art of a particular spiritual practice, whether it's yoga or meditation.
They're masters of a singular realm of consciousness, and they are underdeveloped in every other part of that in their lives.
So they're not here.
They're not present.
And 2020 didn't make them more present.
It made them go farther away.
And so Q makes perfect sense.
It's like a comic book story.
It supports the part of them that always wanted to see themselves as this heightened rebels against the mainstream system.
So now they're again the heightened rebels who know the real truth.
We're in denial.
We're not educated.
Educate yourself.
Call you sheeple.
All of these preposterous things because they're not intact or integrated enough to recognize that the fact that they even believe that is coming from their unresolved pain body, right?
So, to me, the issue is in Q, because after the pandemic pressure comes down, some of them will come back a little more into reality, I believe.
And then there'll be Y or Z or G or T, and there'll be a whole... I mean, I think until we get to the heart of what we're calling spirituality, we're not going to avoid things like Q popping out, because they're a reflection of that.
Yeah, one thing I wanted to ask you about with regard to that is I know we have a shared kind of fascination with, you mentioned Alexander Lowen, Stanislav Grof, I don't know what your sort of psychedelic experience, history is.
No psychedelics, but plenty of holotropic breathwork, which is super adjacent, right, in terms of the pathway.
And also, the low end stuff, bioenergetics and all of that, I think of it as kind of the prototypical phase of somatic psychology.
It's all about catharsis, and it's all about these altered states in which not only do expansive sort of Mental experiences, for want of a better word, emerge, but there's also intense embodied process, right?
And what a lot of times gets described as moving energy, spontaneous, you know, kind of very, very profound physical experiences.
How, like, where are you at with all of that, right?
Well, I guess, let me backtrack slightly.
One of the things we've noticed, because I've been a huge proponent of that particular path for some time as well, one of the things we've noticed, though, is that within the New Age community of people who have been susceptible to what we call conspirituality, There is a significant number of people who are also into that stuff.
And they're into psychedelics, which admittedly are also much more intense in terms of the propensity to dissociate.
But they're into holotropic breathwork and they're into getting into altered states through various spiritual practices.
But still, and they all talk about trauma, and they talk about releasing energy, right?
And big, big openings that transform them from then onwards.
How do you make sense of that in terms of it not doing the trick?
Great.
So I have a simple way and a complex way to answer it.
So when I was making Carmageddon, my film with Bhagavan Das and Ram Das, I had this interesting experience as I would go to see Bhagavan Das, and I had this profound experience.
The chants, the sound was reverberating inside of me.
It was opening my digestion.
I would release emotionally.
It brought me so deeply into the depths of my body and my trauma history.
And so I made the assumption that Bhagavan Das was having the same experience as me.
Yeah, yeah.
And what I eventually found out, and then one day we were in Toronto at the yoga show, and after the kirtan, he couldn't find his shoes.
He could never find his shoes.
He could never find his feet.
So I had to always find his shoes for him, because he couldn't remember where his feet were.
So then I understood, you can engage in a lot of these practices, but your intentionality is what determines the outcome.
He was doing these things to get out of here, to catapult himself out of here, and I was doing these things to go more into here.
So, I think a lot of times what's happening is people are participating in these things as fuel for them to then move forward and outward, away from their human experience, and others do them to go more deeply into an experience of embodiment.
Bioenergetics, I didn't experience that as an altered state.
I felt like he was cracking me open to that which I was holding and had no conscious awareness of it because of my armor and my defenses.
I felt more beautifully and brilliantly human after time with Al Lowen in that office.
Before I would go in, I'd look outside.
He was in a horse farm in Connecticut.
And I would experience my separateness, separate Jeff going into Al Owen's house, separate horses, separate feel.
I would do this profound work and come into contact with stuff I was holding that I had no conscious awareness I was holding in my adapted survivalist life and come back outside and have an experience of unity consciousness that was rooted in and emanating from my feet.
I know many Dukages who've worked in somatic psychotherapy that will come out of that experience feeling propelled and catapulted to a more so-called heightened consciousness, but quickly lose contact with their embodied experience.
So I think you can do all kinds of things.
It just really depends on a very subtle level on why you're doing them and where your intentionality is.
Well, yeah, and then that that, of course, raises an interesting psychological and philosophical question is that which is what determines your intention, right?
I mean, and I think the real question that we have to ask is, what does it mean to be here?
I mean, what are we talking about when we talk about presence?
Just because they say the power of now or be here now doesn't mean they're in the now.
That's the trick.
This is an industry.
They're all making a living playing these various games.
But if we really care about humanity, let's start at the beginning.
What is spirituality?
What is presence?
What does it mean to be a whole human?
What does it mean to be a truly integrated being in contact with your humanness and your sacredness at the same time?
And I think if we don't ask those very basic questions, we're never going to get anywhere.
We're not going to transform this paradigm at all.
And my worry about focusing too much on Q is that we get away from the core questions.
Sure.
Yeah.
Sure.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
The other interesting thing with regard to parsing out some of this stuff is that a key aspect of the conspiritualist zeitgeist is this There's often a return to nature, right, as a rejection of medical science, it's a rejection of government.
There's a sense of wanting to return to the old ways of being in touch with nature and having a sovereignty over your own body, where you don't have to listen to public health recommendations, where you're free to be without a mask because maybe you're at some higher vibration or some shit like that.
And it's fascinating because Part of what I hear you saying is it's easy to be confused by the appearance, right?
By the putting on of the costume, by the using of the words, by the wearing of the mask that says this is some kind of ultimate humanistic expression of spirituality, my sovereign self who's going to refuse a vaccine and believes that 5G is the devil, right?
It is such a razor's edge.
And it feels to me like maybe what you're talking about with regards to walking that razor's edge and making these fine distinctions is... It's everything.
Yeah.
These distinctions are everything.
And they are very subtle.
We've got to slow down and look close at this.
So if I think of it this way, if I hadn't made one, for whatever reason, I made the decision to go deeper into my unresolved material as part of my transformative process.
If I had stayed in my rebel position from the age of 13 with my unresolved issues with authority, if I had not stood down my mother and knew that I was empowered as an individual, if I had not manifest many of my dreams in the world to prove to myself that I already was sovereign, so sovereign I could wear a mask and not feel like I was being compromised, If I hadn't done that work, I could easily be wandering around.
Psychologically, it would be necessary for me to believe that all of the things they're asking me to do have something to do with external control, denial of my sovereignty, because I am still living inside of a survivalistic trauma avoidant world.
So, Julian, for me, I just make a simple distinction between a survivalist consciousness and a more authentic consciousness.
My work in my life has been to move from my adaptations and disguises, the way I get through the world effectively, to figure out who the fuck am I, what lives inside of me, what is my soul scriptures, what is my true path.
That bridge crossing, I believe, is where we're at as a collective.
All of these patriarchal spiritual people following QAnon are trapped in a survivalist consciousness.
They think they're in an authentic consciousness, but they are being completely ruled by their unresolved trauma and their unresolved authority issues.
They are defining life based on what gets you through life, not by trying to become the most inclusive, in-reeled, embodied, in-heartened consciousness.
And really, the work we're trying to do is get people to cross to a more authentic consciousness, inclusive consciousness.
Inclusive in relation to their parts.
Everything is alive and connecting and flowing and streaming and not blocked off and armored and fractured and fragmented.
And to get to this place, well, we have to have these kinds of conversations and develop new models.
We need new spiritual models that actually help people to cross the bridge from a survivalist consciousness where you think enlightenment is something that allows you to run away from all your stuff to a version of spirituality that allows you to embrace every aspect of your humanness and see the healing journey as part of the awakening journey itself.
These are two different worlds in terms of consciousness.
And if a pandemic comes in and you're in a survivalist consciousness in the spiritual world, it's very unlikely you're suddenly going to wake down and start crossing the bridge to authenticity and integration.
This is not the time for that.
Yeah, and so when you say survivalist, I mean, part of what I hear in that term is living through the lens of your defense structure.
Absolutely.
Essentially, you know, running to transcendence and calling that awakening.
You know, I just see little boys, you see when little boys get caught when they're hand in the cookie jar and they pick up a Captain America shield and they go, I am Captain America.
That to me is most of the spiritual world in many ways on many different levels.
They just don't want to drop down and just acknowledge that they fucked up and that they have stuff just like the rest of us.
And they bash the ego and that's part of the game because they're actually moving from the unhealthy aspect of the ego in every regard.
So we want to come down into the body and find a more integrated, honest, genuine way of being where we're not in denial around precisely what it is that we're holding.
We're holding so much.
We're holding so much in this world.
I want to shift to ask you about a fellow Canadian who's been in the news recently, once again.
This guy.
He's so Alberta.
He is just so Alberta, this guy.
Sorry, with all due respect.
I'm going to ask you to unpack that in a moment to someone who's not Canadian, but Jordan Peterson.
Over the past couple years, he's been almost as controversial as he is popular, but the latest story, which you may be aware of, is about a group of employees from Penguin, his publisher, protesting the publishing of his new book.
He's a clinical psychologist who positions himself as, this is my languaging, a Jungian, along with having a kind of straight-talking disciplinary and daddy thing about standing up straight and cleaning the room, right?
So, I'm really curious about your thoughts about Jordan Peterson.
We're actually talking about him on this episode quite a bit.
So, I would come back, first of all, to this distinction between a survivalist consciousness and a more authentic, inclusive consciousness.
I think he's a perfect reflection.
He's like Trump.
He's an old T-Rex.
You know, they know that they're kind of at the end of their time, and they're just going to come back and eat the world one more time with these ridiculous, conditioned notions of masculinity.
You know, this is like the malevolent survivalistic warrior consciousness.
It's nothing new or interesting about it.
I find it absolutely unbearable.
And usually when I encounter that, it's somebody who's really afraid to claim the vulnerability of the unresolved emotional body and move to a more gender inclusive experience of their own consciousness.
So I don't find any, I mean, I wrote about the Awakening Man.
I wrote the Apologies to the Divine Feminine.
I'm fascinated by Where we go progressively and authentically and inclusively now with respect to gender, what we hold on to that's healthy and not unhealthily conditioned, what we craft and co-create, how we understand gender, what's going on with the young people I think is beautiful and brilliant and absolutely liberating.
And when I hear Jordan talk, I just see a guy who's trapped inside of a survivalist, very archaic version of masculinity.
He has a very articulate way of speaking, very erudite and academic, but I'm more interested in where it's coming from in him.
I don't know much about him.
I know that my understanding is that he got on some kind of a medication Not that long ago, because his wife wasn't well.
In other words, he couldn't handle the experience of whatever that was without that.
And so it makes me wonder, without knowing him, if what's really happening for him is this is a guy who's not well-equipped with respect to the emotional body, like most people with his patriarchal perspective are.
And, you know, if he has work to be done on a more integrating level, and if he does that work, as I did with Loewen, you know, the more I went down into the blungs and what I was holding and the rage and the old stuff and the old memories, the more I dropped into a more surrendered consciousness where my warrior self, which is overdeveloped, had to find a way to integrate with my more surrendered, more traditionally feminine self.
And I think You know, it's like, why can't you get a Trumpian to listen to you?
It's because they're in that consciousness.
And unless you get them somatically to drop down or to have a horrible life experience that wakes them down, you're wasting your time trying to interface with that consciousness to transform it.
They need to have an experience of it.
So when I hear him talk, I just wonder what needs to happen for him to understand what you and I are talking about.
Yeah, it's been so interesting to watch his rise over the last couple years and to see that there's a whole group of especially young men who he resonates with and I think who he really reaches out to in terms of listening to what you're saying it makes me wonder about a kind of hyper defensive fear of losing masculine power or of never really figuring out how to feel powerful as a man.
And so perceiving as a threat, anything that is vulnerable, feminine, outside of the patriarchal order, et cetera.
Absolutely.
We've been seeing this for centuries.
Jordan Peterson isn't saying anything new or interesting.
There's been millions of Jordan Petersons since the beginning of time.
He just does it in a more articulate and eloquent way.
You know, he talks a lot about purpose, and a lot of people in this world haven't found what I might call sacred purpose in their lives.
And I think people are attracted to the idea that he's going to show them what it's like to be a purposeful man.
The problem is, at least in my experience, you don't come into contact with your sacred purpose unless you can marry your willfulness with your ability to surrender and be receptive.
Because only when I dropped down into my surrendered receptive body was I able to find the blueprint for my sacred purpose in this lifetime.
If I just stayed in my willfulness, I could be absolutely focused and tunneled, but I wasn't able to come into contact with why I was here.
The why I was here only happened when I could get more truly here and truly present, which means, and included, being able to surrender to the physical and emotional body in a more receptive and vulnerable way.
He's talking to them about purpose, like Tole talks about purpose, but to me they're the same guy, because neither of them are in their bodies and are surrendered to their emotional body, so they can't actually come into contact with the why they're here, because they're not here.
Yeah.
He's just not here.
He just doesn't feel here to me.
He just feels like a brilliant academic head-tripper who can out-talk everybody, but I just can't really feel the whole being there.
Yeah, it is a fascinating story arc, right?
Here's this guy who's a professor of psychology, comes to prominence in a very political way, and sort of translates that big exposure into putting out this book that is really a self-help manual aimed at, aimed, I would say, largely at young men who feel lost and confused.
And so then let's identify the problem.
Right.
Right.
The problem is somehow that you're lost and confused and you don't you don't have enough masculine discipline.
You haven't had a daddy to tell you that you should stand up straight, clean up your room and approach women with a sense of confidence so that you're not a little pussy, basically.
Right.
And and then on top of that, as though being a pussy would be a bad thing.
Exactly.
Exactly.
That there's this weak kind of feminized masculinity somehow.
And then on top of that, let's layer a bunch of philosophical references.
Yeah, Jungian bullshit.
Yeah.
And so that somehow my pathway of telling you, or his pathway to be more correct, of telling you how to be a man Uh, is then linked to a kind of hero's journey that has mythic and spiritual purpose about it, even though there's not a lot of... What does it even mean?
Where are they going to find their purpose?
Where's the purpose?
I mean, purpose is wonderful.
It's a trendy term in this trendy bullshit industry I'm part of.
But what are we even talking about?
Where does somebody find their purpose?
They don't find it in the absolute self.
They have to find it in the localized self, in the heart of the Julian Walker story is your purpose.
We don't want to dishonor your story.
So he's not leading them in that direction.
He's not leading them in the direction of being able to open their hearts.
It's like I had a cousin who used to come see me and he was like, Jeffrey, Jeffrey, I'm a radiologist.
I make all this money, but I hate my job.
What should I do?
Who am I?
Should I marry her?
And I used to say, well, how do you feel?
And he would say, well, I think, and I'd say, well, this has gone on for seven years because until you can say, answer the question from how you feel, you're not going to answer the question.
All of it is inside of the physical and emotional body.
It's not a cerebral construct.
Your purpose is not held as a cerebral construct.
It's a felt experience.
So if Jordan can't really have an all encompassing felt experience, he's not going to lead anybody in the direction of finding their path.
You're gonna have a bunch of charged-up guys going, yeah, Jordan, buying his books, and then they're completely back in their basements, living in their parents' basement, completely confused as to what to do with their lives.
They have to go down into the body and have a more inclusive, gender-inclusive experience in the conditioned sense of willfulness and surrender and receptivity.
Only in the heart of that will you yield the fruits of your labor.
He's not leading them anywhere.
He's just selling product.
You know, to me, he's, he's the spiritual community.
I mean, he's not in the spiritual world, but it's all, I've been in this, when I joined the spiritual community, so-called writing community, I thought I was going to find this amazing cadre of like hundreds of sort of like-spirited others that were doing self-originating work.
It didn't mean that you were the first person to think of something, but it came from inside of them.
I was, and I have found like three people like that and a hundred fucking frauds.
Many I'm suing.
It's just plagiarism, imitation.
So, you know, I think we want to invite humanity in the direction of self-originating experience, which begins in the heart of the story, not bypassing the story, not turning around the story like the great bypasser Byron Katie.
But actually really getting inside of Julian Walker and Jeff Brown and figuring out what's inside of me.
What is my real-time lineage?
What is my ancestry?
What are my encoded soul scriptures and paths?
Where is the purpose in my feet, in my knees, in my hips, in my heart, in my breath, in every single part of me?
That's the only direction and that will embody us and ground us and we'll be here.
And once we're here, we'll look around horizontally and see how much work there is to be done to make this world a better place.
But until we get into our bodies, if we keep bifurcating our consciousness, we're never going to change anything, and we're done.
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