Bret Weinstein & Jordan Peterson: Two gargantuan intellects stare into the abyss
The big dog of the Intellectual Dark Web, Jordan Peterson, is back! And this hero, this mythical archetype, is welcomed back from his long hiatus by DTG regular, Bret Weinstein . To his credit, Bret does the impossible and makes Jordan seem surprisingly humble and reflexive simply by virtue of comparison.The duo cover a lot of territory, ranging from hot takes about how hospitals probably kill more people than they save (Peterson), the evolutionary modules controlling rape and genocide (Weinstein), how religion contains the ultimate evolutionary cheatsheet to ascend the hierarchy (Peterson), and how they are both absolutely crucial for understanding everything wrong with what's going on these days (BOTH).So yes... Chris and Matt couldn't resist returning to this epic crossover of two guru favourites one last(?) time for a bit of decoding. There's a heaping of the usual trademark guru dynamics on display, as well as the obligatory ersatz academ-ese, mutual back-patting, and huge leaps of speculative reasoning. These guys ping-pong back and forth to build up a pretty impressive synthesis of latent religious symbols and Bret's bespoke alternative evolutionary theory of 'lineage selection'. You will come away with your brain a smouldering ruin after dealing with so many high level ideas... you have been warned!P.S. If you make it all the way to the end you'll get to hear Matt DESTROY a so-called philosopher's Low Quality Criticism with REASON and SCIENCE.LinksDarkhorse Podcast: Jordan Peterson is Back!Jordan B. Peterson Podcast S4E10: Minefields and the New Political Landscape | Bret WeinsteinCritical Article on Peterson that appeared in the Times that he complains aboutTWiV 760: SARS-CoV-2 origins with Peter Daszak, Thea Kølsen Fischer, Marion KoopmansTWiV 762: SARS-CoV-2 origins with Robert Garry Nice blog debunking the claims made in Wade's Medium piece on the Lab Leak Detailed Twitter thread by virologist Kristian Andersen discussing lab leak investigationsP.P.S. The Alternative Title: 'Lineage selection hierarchy heroes 2: Choose your guru!' suppressed by the Distributed Australian Dilettante or DAD.
Hello and welcome to Coding the Gurus, the podcast where an anthropologist and a psychologist listen to the greatest minds the world has to offer and we try our very best to understand what they're talking about.
I'm Matthew Brown and with me is Dr. Chris Kavanagh.
This is an impromptu, crazy wisdom.
We don't know what's going to happen.
Chris is going to surprise me.
How are you, Chris?
Good afternoon, Professor Brown.
And yes, may I just correct you that This is not impromptu.
This is long overdue.
It's actually...
We announced that we were going to do Jordan and Brett together and then we proceeded to slot in two episodes in front of them in the queue.
We had a nice crossover episode with Aaron looking at Michael O 'Fallon.
And then we had...
Brett and Heller sneak in ahead of Jordan with the coronavirus vaccine skeptic hot take.
That was very rude of them to sneak in like that, just to barge in, push it.
They're obviously not English.
Yeah, don't they know about the secret value of lines and cues?
These things provide meaning and purpose to the British and their culturally...
Neighbouring societies.
How about Australia?
Do you believe in queues?
Do we queue?
Yeah, we do queue.
We're pretty good at queuing.
You queue for like shrimps and at thong shops.
No, in Thongshox, it's just like a crowd of people surging forward and grabbing them madly.
I got the pink ones!
I got the pink ones!
Yeah, so let's see if it plays out that way, but we're planning to get fairly quickly into the actual meat of the episode today because it feels like with the previous Brett and Heller episode that we've built up the...
Characters already and got a lot of that normal blah, blah, blah, banter, banter, banter business out of the way.
And now we're just going to get into the meat just to, you know, the people want, what they can, what they pay for.
In some cases, yes.
All right, well, let's get to it.
I don't know what it is.
Yeah, well, what do you say, Chris, to people who accuse us of being an anti-Weinstein hate cast?
And that we have an unhealthy obsession.
I say, welcome to the episode about Brett and Jordan!
Yeah, look, we're going to get out of Weinstein world after this episode and we're going to take a little holiday from the culture war into personal gurus and left-wing gurus and...
The Weinsteins are always there, orbiting in the guru sky, like the moon and Mars, and you can work out which is which yourself.
And it's like, you know, you see a full moon one day and you're like, oh, look at that, a big full moon.
But it's always there.
It's always there.
Yeah, we can always return to them.
Whenever we feel...
Yeah, I suspect they still will say stupid shit.
Well, I think so.
But I suspect, like, we're probably going to be talking about something to do with lab leak hypotheses and so on.
And that's bigger than...
No, yeah.
I think this is a point that we should probably mention.
Just quickly address some of the feedback we got on the Brett and Heller episode.
We didn't get many people attempting to defend their take on Ivermectin.
No.
Or defending their conspiracy theories about the virology community that much.
Or defending their views that the vaccines are dangerous, unsafe, akin to playing Russian roulette with a loaded revolver.
You did have the classic defense of that from vocal distance saying...
Yeah, he compared it to Russia Roulette, but he wasn't being hyperbolic, and he didn't mean, you know, that it's...
It was unsafe.
He didn't mean to say that it was unsafe.
Yeah, someone said this on our Reddit too, and I had to respond just pointing out that when you're making a comparison...
To a drug, to playing a game where if it goes wrong, you blow your fucking brains out.
But it is indeed a rhetorical technique and an effective analogy in the sense of like an emotionally powerful imagery.
And Brett completely understands that by drawing an analogy to Russian roulette, it makes the point more scary, seem more threatening.
And so on.
And if you can't get that, God help you.
No, it definitely takes a spectacular degree of obtuseness to pretend not to get what is meant by that.
Yeah.
Oh, sorry.
But no, you brought up the lab link, right?
And that is the part that we got the...
Various people commenting on the account and the Reddit.
And it just so happened that the week we released this, the lab leak itself became a topic of conversation because there was some news report.
I can't remember where I think the Washington Post was talking about some unsourced government documents that suggested three employees at the Wuhan lab got ill.
And this led to various people...
I'm cropping up and saying, you know, maybe we've been too quick to dismiss the lab leak and it's now a whole thing online of people saying the journalists got this all wrong again and they were too dismissive.
They vilified anyone that brought it up and now...
We're having to reassess things.
And so, within that reconsideration, some people have pointed fingers at us, saying, well, you guys seem to have been very down on the lab leak.
What do you think now?
Hey, go on your face!
And, well, what do you think, Matt?
Should we repent and retract all our criticisms of the people that are arguing the lab leak is 95%?
Likely to have a card?
Or what do you think?
You know me better than that.
I will never repent.
Never surrender.
No, of course.
So this is a pretty obvious thing to say, but I guess it needs to be said that the first point is that, yes, some new information has come to light.
Some people got sick at the center.
So that's adding...
Possibly.
Possibly, right.
So it's possibly adding...
A little bit of evidence on that side of the scales.
But I think my impression is that it's still extremely unlikely that it was a lab leak.
That little piece of extra information notwithstanding.
So it's still unlikely as it stands today.
And I don't think very much has actually changed.
Having said that, even if...
There were some stunning new developments that came to light and we became 100% certain that, in fact, it was definitely a lab leak and we knew that for certain, then it would still not have been a correct thing to say now or before.
That probability was 95% because given the information we have at the moment, the probability is low.
So people expressing an extremely high degree of certainty of there being a lab leak and giving conspiratorial and other kinds of rationale that are inconsistent with what the experts are saying.
Then that's just a bad style of reasoning, regardless if on the off chance they turn out to eventually be correct.
The obvious example for this is Alex Jones claims everything is a false flag immediately when it happens, especially if it is anything to do with the right wing being criticized.
He will make that claim.
Now, generally things are not false flags.
There could be some occasion where...
There's a bizarre circumstance as an event does turn out to have been faked or exaggerated in the media or whatever.
But that wouldn't mean that Alex Jones's approach to assessing the information is correct or that indeed Alex Jones was right.
It's more, you know, a broken clock can be right on occasions and not for the reason that it's tracking time correctly.
And in the case of the lab leak hypothesis, I've pointed out unendingly here, on Twitter, wherever I'm speaking, the general consensus of relevant researchers, which is what I'm basing my opinion on.
I'm not a virologist, so I didn't derive the information about the virus from my own investigations into the genetic nature of the virus.
I'm relying on relevant experts and my ability to assess their consensus.
And what I've assessed at as...
Is that the vast majority of them consider a lab leak extremely unlikely, but they do not rule out entirely the possibility, and they usually state this when they're discussing it.
Now, when they're discussing the lab leak, they often will be referring to the version of the lab leak which is focused around gain-of-function research, serial passage, or other manipulations of the virus in a lab setting.
And that's the part that they're most critical of because they see various evidence from the genetic structure of the virus and attempts to reconstruct its evolutionary path and whatnot that make it very improbable in the majority of people's judgment that it comes from an artificial source and is the product of gain-of-function experiments.
The other part where it is a virus that was collected, not altered.
At the lab and due to contamination or travel or field workers or whatever escaped from a member of the lab transporting it out or some material or equipment or so on.
That gets translated as not as unlikely but still unlikely given the amount of potential transmission pathways that just come from nature and from being in a huge city.
In China, where there's millions of people doing millions of things, traveling all over from different places.
So, yes, there's the possibility, but it fundamentally hasn't changed in recent times.
All that we've heard is that some in the intelligence community, particularly the US intelligence community, have increased their likelihood reading because of these Unverified reports about workers getting sick at the institute.
And that's okay.
So that's something to factor in.
But like one, until there's actual confirmation that the workers did get sick, it's just a report.
Two, people get sick all the time.
You know, in the flu season, people can get sick.
Three, this virus primarily gives people mild symptoms and is transmitted asymptomatically, right?
Notion that there were some sick workers at the Virology Institute, it is not the smoking gun it's portrayed at.
Like, people could have been infected at the Virology Institute and not have been noticed, right?
Not got sick.
And it'd still be transmitted.
So that's specific, like, that's getting into the weeds on the point about the sick workers.
But I just want to point out that, like, there's lots of sources.
And in any field, you will have outliers who rate things higher than other people, or there's some disagreement about the relative probabilities attached.
But I would recommend that anyone interested in this, go and listen to the This Week in Virology podcast.
At the time we're recording, it's the most recent episode, but it includes an interview with three of the members of the World Health Organization investigation.
If you listen to that, you get the clear impression that these are not people trying to cover things up.
These are people doing their best to uncover the origins of the virus.
And yes, they're not able to do the kind of CSI detective work in the lab to rule out the lab escape.
But they are seriously investigating it.
And if evidence comes to light that shows it's more likely, they explicitly state, You know, they're open.
Please send it to them.
They want to hear about it.
But the thing which they are not is these cartoon villains trying to shush up like the real outbreak reason, just for geopolitical reasons.
They're not that.
And you can hear it.
And they have all these really interesting lines of evidence to pursue, right?
Things that they want to do, check blood banks in China, that they need China's cooperation to get...
So they're understandably treading carefully to try and avoid China basically pulling all cooperation and not being able to explore the various lines that they want to.
Now, I get that that's a political consideration, but it's just reality that if China thinks that people are just trying to vilify it and stuff, that there's a danger.
They won't get access to any of these resources and we won't know it.
Yeah, it's just not a simple issue as people portray, but simply acknowledging that the likelihood against a lab leak is heavily skewed in the negative, but it still can't be ruled out.
That's not a hot take.
No.
So most people seem to be getting their opinions on this issue from various journalists and news sources, if not simply social media.
But it's actually quite easy to access the academic literature on this.
And you can quite easily access what the genuine experts, the genuine professionals, the people that have decades, in some cases, experience of working with these viruses, working in labs just like that lab.
Doing genetic profiling and figuring out all the properties, whether it's a mosaic virus or has had recent recombination events or whatever.
And most of those technical details, like you, Chris, I don't attempt to get into the weeds and analyze the little things myself because I know that I'm not qualified.
I do not have the expertise in that area.
But it's very easy to access.
Summary articles, the commentary, and the sort of high-level review articles, which do summarize the scientific consensus.
You can use Google Scholar.
You can very easily see which articles have received a lot of citations and represent kind of the centroid of opinion.
And I've got three articles in front of me here, which are quite detailed technical papers published in places like The Lancet or Nature.
Yeah, they all say the same thing, which is a human-induced kind of origin is not consistent with any of those analyses that they've done.
Yeah, but I think people that take a different stance on this view that as there's been a false consensus created by...
These mainstream publications and it was too hasty.
And that's why we have this letter right from the relevant scholars in the field saying that we still need to investigate other possibilities.
But the point I would respond to there is that letter itself indicates that its position is the same as the...
WHO's stated position, the same as the EU member states and the same as the US.
Like, official stance.
So you're referring to the statement in support of the scientists, public health professionals and medical professionals of China combating COVID-19?
No, that's the original one that came out early in the pandemic and is regarded as having vilified those who would argue about the lab leak.
The more recent one was a letter published, I think, Science Magazine with Bloom.
Who is a respected researcher, is the lead author on it.
And it basically just said, we need to continue investigating the origins of the virus, including checking if a lab leak is possible.
And yeah, the response on this week in virology and stuff to that sentiment has been to say, yeah.
Of course, because we all agree that that is necessary, that we should continue.
So I think that one issue I take with this, Matt, is that there's so many people now who are...
Ascribing to this, you know, look at the way the media covered this in the past and they point to article headlines that were critical or, right, that reference conspiracy theories.
But they're not factoring in that there are conspiracy theories.
There are people who are advocating versions where the virus has features which are impossible to explain through a natural origin.
And this is what the researchers are usually...
That's right.
There are conspiracy theories where Fulci is in league with or is covering his butt because he personally...
Okayed funding.
You know, authorized okayed funding and so on.
And that is a conspiracy theory.
Whether or not you think it's true or not, that is a conspiracy.
Yeah.
So, Chris, I think I just want to emphasize that that is different from saying that there is a small but real likelihood.
That despite the evidence otherwise, it could have been a result of a lab leak.
No, exactly.
That's not a conspiracy.
That's acknowledging uncertainty.
And that is something that I've seen consistently in the academic and scientific literature on this, even when they're essentially presenting the evidence against that.
They are careful to mention that they do not have definitive proof one way or another at this point, and they specifically mention that alternative as a possibility.
So, it seems like a Mott and Bailey type scenario, because that is the reasonable version.
Yeah.
And that is, the reasonable version is exactly the same as the orthodoxy or the scientific consensus, but that is then conflated with a broad spectrum.
Of what are basically conspiracy theories.
Yeah, and it has a very familiar pattern, right, which revolves around anomaly hunting and internet sleuthing.
So the dynamics in play look very familiar.
Well, Chris, actually, in front of me, I have an article which is called Disinformation, Misinformation and Mistrust in the Time of COVID Lessons Learned.
Or unlearned from AIDS denialism.
And it's quite interesting because it details a huge number of similarities in terms of the disinformation and conspiracy theories that were floating around with HIV.
And at the time, it was a tremendously mysterious and frightening and, you know, difficult to deal with issue.
And there were conspiracy theories, so many kinds of conspiracy theories all over the world.
Similarly with the 9/11 terrorist attack, spawned a huge number of conspiracies.
climate change is another topic.
As you say, it's impossible to ignore the context here, which there absolutely are.
Conspiracy theories floating around and they have quite a lot of popularity.
So it's quite reasonable for scientists to write an article condemning.
Those conspiracy theories about the Wuhan virus.
And that is not to say that they are arguing that there is a 0% probability that there could be a lab leak.
Those are two separate things to my mind.
Yeah.
And the last point I'll make about this is just that while everybody is talking about acceptability to media narratives and...
How going along with the crowd is wrong.
And look, we've seen now we can see through the people who dismissed the lab leak hypothesis.
The irony for me is that this is very much a media created narrative that the lab leak has suddenly become much more likely.
The researchers seem a little bamboozled.
By what's changed, apart from the ones who are in favor of a lab leak, but they're a small minority.
So they're happy by this change.
But like, Nate Silver coming out and saying he put the possibility at somewhere around 50-50, or that's what he was seeing from relevant experts.
And then I saw a bunch of virologists responding saying, what are you talking about?
Like, maybe you should sample from relevant experts.
Nothing has fundamentally changed in recent times.
I'll just read this last little quote.
This was Matt Ridley.
I think it's a journalist.
In March last year, it was widely agreed by everybody sensible, me included, that talk of the pandemic originating in the laboratory was pseudoscientific nonsense.
Today, the mood has changed.
And he links to a Spectator article.
Eric Weinstein quote tweeted that and says, everybody sensible?
No, and not by a long shot.
You mean everyone tied to consensus, which is totally different.
We have got to stop listening to everybody sensible.
And look, that perfectly encapsulates the mood that I'm seeing.
And the lesson is wrong.
No, we don't need to stop listening to sensible sources and people with relevant expertise.
We should listen more closely.
To what they're saying.
And not just focus on the headline of some article, even it be one of the New York Times.
And even when you read those articles in the body of the text, it will often say no expert was willing to completely rule out the possibility of a lab leak or something like that.
But people just focus on the headline.
So screw you all saying that you need to be skeptical of media narratives and immediately buying into the trendy new media narrative.
Yeah.
Live up to your own principles!
Okay, but the one thing we can agree on is that Brett Weinstein doesn't include himself in the set of reasonable...
Eric.
Oh, with Eric this time.
I feel like you're doing it just to trigger me.
Yeah, yeah.
Okay.
So I actually honestly thought it was Brett who said that, because he might well have said that, obviously.
Yeah, they're interchangeable in some respects.
So yeah, look, there's our view on the lab.
Mark it down, write it in your calendar, put it down, stamp it, and let's come back in a couple of years when we have transmission chains and investigations completed.
Everybody wants to find out.
What the origin is.
Like, well, not everybody.
I'm sure there's some people that don't care or whatever, but I mean, interested scientists want to know the transmission change.
Well, actually, well, that's something to be mentioned.
I mean, first of all, there's...
Underlying of that stuff is the assumption of that false consensus, yeah, of this stifling orthodoxy, whether the mechanisms of it are nefarious or whether it's just a kind of a groupthink or, you know, unwillingness to be embarrassed or something like that.
There's a very strong belief among many, many people that that is a real phenomenon.
And I'm very suspicious.
I mean, just from the impression I get from the kinds of nerds, frankly, who do this kind of work, they don't seem to be like that at all.
They seem to be like uber nerds, very much interested in knowing where it came from, how it works, all of that technical stuff.
And I don't have the slightest sense at all that there's some kind of stifling orthodoxy, let alone some kind of strong-arming happening to stifle heterodox views.
So if you don't accept that, then what you are essentially doing is saying, I do not want to listen.
To the many, many people who have genuine expertise and have actually done the work to do things like sequence genomes and sample animals, etc., etc.
I don't want to listen to them.
I want to listen to armchair opinionators and podcasters.
So that, to me, is a baffling decision for anybody to make.
But the thing is, Matt, people will reference that there are experts like Richard E. Bright.
And Alina Chan, who's not a virologist, but has some relevant areas of expertise.
There are experts that are more in favour of this and who have relevant expertise.
And I might differ a little bit with you in that I do think there can be a pressure, even on the geeky types.
To conform to a broad consensus.
But I'm not saying that that would prevent them if the evidence went the other way to switch their views.
I don't think that at all.
But what I do think is that that's also normal.
If you're in a field and there's a position which the majority of people consider to have low probability attached to it, and you assign to it a high probability, yes, people will look askew at your Probability assignment because it's out of step with what most others would consider the reasonable conclusion to reach.
But the opposite dynamic also occurs.
Like I know with climate change and other controversial issues, the black sheep scientists who take a contrarian point of view seem to get...
Media attention and invitations to speak and so on and generate this profile out of all proportion to their actual degree of, I guess, weight in the field.
No, 100%.
I'm completely on board with that point because I can see that happening in the dynamics of the people that are promoting the lab being much more likely than people are assigned.
So it's 100% a dynamic.
But essentially all I'm saying, and I think you probably would agree with this, that it isn't like if you take a position which is against a broad consensus that you don't feel some sense of pushback or concern about how you'll be viewed by colleagues or whatever.
That's what happens when you take a minority position.
And if you're right, in the end, if it turns out that your assignments were more correct, then history will record that the minority view was right and people were wrong to dismiss it.
And that's the bet that people like Brett are taking.
But the issue there is they are not people in the field doing relevant work with relevant expertise.
They're not drawing.
Their conclusions based on their long careers in virology.
So they're drawing their position based on their contrarian scientific hipster-ish.
Tendencies.
That's wrong to credit that with foresight because that's the same as Alex Jones predicting everything is a false flag.
Yeah, that's right.
And I suppose the other thing you have to take into account is the, well, first of all, the lack of skin in the game and that they don't have a reputation to lose, really.
And they've got everything to win in terms of making those long shot bets on contrarian positions.
And we have seen that they have a tendency to take a lot.
Of contrarian positions.
It's not like this is the only one.
Yeah, Unity 2020.
It's memory hold now.
People don't remember, but Brett tried to have a campaign to select the president, which was insanely stupid.
That's right.
And as well as the contrarian position on the origins of the virus, there's also contrarian positions on fluoridation of the water.
Very, very dangerous, apparently.
Evolutionary theory, completely wrong.
Actually, it's got to be something more like his alternative theory.
Drug testing safety.
Oh, God.
Yeah, you just keep going.
Yes, drug testing.
You know, his experiments with telomeres prove that pretty much all the pharmaceuticals available at the moment have unrealized dangers, and the entire field has missed that.
And even just with COVID, it's not just the origins.
It's also the vaccines are unsafe, that an ivermectin is a fantastic alternative.
You name it.
Every contrarian position that is available to be taken, he will take them.
So I fully suspect that sooner or later, he's going to get one of them right.
You know, if you put enough bets, eventually get one, and you can bet that will be the only...
Yeah, it's the same psychic thing, right?
What's that phenomenon called, where psychics do that?
Sharpshooter fallacy, where you draw the target after you hit, I think, or at least that's close enough to it.
Well, anyway, it's that thing where you only count the positives.
You make a whole bunch of guesses.
I mean, it happens in the stock markets, too.
If you want to be, say, a fund manager or something like that, then you set up a whole bunch of guesses.
A bunch of different funds and 9 out of 10 of them do really badly.
One of them makes these fantastic 15% a year returns and it really did.
And then you can go ahead and advertise that fund as proof of your amazing ability to predict the markets.
Well, I know we talked too long, but I just want to mention the scam that I really like.
The one where it's an old-fashioned proper scam where you send out letters.
To...
A large selection of people about some tournament, like the World Cup, and you predict the match, right?
And you send 50%, one team will win, 50%, the other team will win.
And then you burn the people that go out and you keep doing it.
And you have to start with a really big sample.
But by the end, you've got someone on the hook where you've got eight predictions in a row.
Correct.
And they've only got the winning ones in the mail every time.
And then you say, if you want another prediction, send the money to such and such.
That's it, right?
Because you don't see all of the other field predictions that are in the wake of that one success.
Absolutely.
Yeah, that's a good one.
I like that scam.
Yeah, it'll probably still work.
You can adapt it for the internet age.
Don't get any ideas, listeners.
Don't get any ideas.
Don't do it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
Soma.
After a very short introduction segment.
That was the introduction?
No, I don't know.
Maybe it'll be a separate thing.
It might be a separate thing.
But now...
That's not a sound effect that anyone knows.
That was the drumbeat to introduce the long-advertised episode on Jordan Peterson and Brett Weinstein's crossovers on their two...
The Dark Horse podcast and the Jordan Peterson podcast.
So we looked at both of them by accident.
We've got a lot of clips.
We've got a lot of clips.
And I also think it's probably good that we got out a little bit of the frustration with Brett's COVID takes and anti-vaccine stuff because These episodes don't really focus on that.
In fact, Jordan admits that he's been out of it, so he's not really sure what's going on.
He's not following anything.
So they don't spend much time on that, which is probably good, because as a result, it gives them time to talk about many other things.
Yes.
There's a lot of stuff in there, but none of it is super topical and political.
Well, most of it isn't anyway.
It'll be refreshing.
It'll be good, at least slightly.
Yeah, and now you may remember this episode, Matt, or these crossovers got some attention because of a specific clip that was included in the Jordan Peterson episode,
I believe it is.
So I thought we could get that out at the front just to deal with the elephant in the room about...
The dangers of medicine.
So let's listen to that clip.
I suspect if you did these statistics properly, I suspect that medicine, independent of public health, kills more people than it saves.
I suspect if you factor in phenomena like the development of superbugs in hospitals, for example, that overall the net consequence of hospitals is negative.
Now, that's just a guess, and it could easily be wrong.
But it also could not be wrong.
And that is a good example.
That's where my thinking about what we don't know has taken me with regards to the critique of what we do.
The fact that it's even plausible is a stunning...
Well, you know, medical error is the third leading cause of death.
And that doesn't take into account the generation of superbugs, for example.
That was something.
That it's even plausible, Matt.
That it's even plausible is stunning.
I enjoyed that clip because it's, apart from what they're actually saying, they both use those trademark phraseology of which they are known so well for.
I don't know that that is true, but it could well not be true.
And the disclaimer is right.
So this is just a guess.
It could be wrong.
And that's what people grab onto when they want to defend these kind of clips.
As long as there's a disclaimer somewhere in there, then people will say, look, he's just spitballing ideas.
He acknowledged that he doesn't know.
And isn't that epistemic humility?
But then they go on to talk as if their guess is true and build on it.
Yeah, and it's stunning.
It's stunning, Matt.
This happens a lot in IDW content when there's crossovers.
They editorialize how amazing each other's possessions are, right?
So, Chris, have you ever considered that normal household toilets could be actually the most dangerous thing for human beings?
It could be responsible for more deaths than lightning strikes, donkeys, cars.
I mean, I don't know if that's true, but if it was true, it would be absolutely stunning, wouldn't you say?
It's stunning.
That it's even possible for you to suggest that.
It's stunning.
The fact that you could suggest that is breathtaking.
Yeah, you see the problem?
You see the problem?
You see the problem?
You can literally make anything sound like it's an electrifying point which Needs to be taken seriously.
And people have done the work, by the way.
Like Michael Marsh has an article up rebutting, like looking at the relevant statistics about hospital-caused deaths and so on.
And basically saying, no, it doesn't hold up on quantitative grounds.
But just generally, on common sense grounds, it doesn't hold up, right?
Because...
Okay, let's eliminate public health.
That's a huge thing to eliminate, but fine.
Let's take it out.
Now, are we really claiming that all of the hospitals all over the world, in the developing world and the highly developed countries, all of their treatments for malaria, for infections,
all of that, that on average, that is killing people?
More than it helps them.
If so, why the fuck are we funding these death machines in each country?
Like, no!
And giving birth and so on and so forth, right?
It's obviously wrong.
And it's obviously based on Jordan's personal unpleasant experience recently in hospitals, which I have to say...
To some extent, it's self-inflicted from traveling all over the world to get unusual treatments in Russian hospitals that will put you in medical comas.
I'm not denying he's had a hard time of it, but it does sound like they don't factor in that maybe this is just like a wild claim based on a personally harrowing recent experience with hospitals.
Yeah, look, I think we could get hung up and overanalyze this one little segment.
Perhaps the last thing to be said is, as you say, they have very little interest in actually checking whether any of their suppositions are plausible, let alone actually backed up.
And as you say, other people, like Michael, actually, you can do that.
You can actually look into it and check to see whether you're talking utter bullshit or not.
But they're lazy, Chris.
They don't bother.
And what they will do, though, Matt, is if there's an article that comes out saying superbugs may be a potential threat thriving in hospitals, they'll retweet that, right?
And then that's to say, well, look who's laughing now.
And, yeah, so it is an intellectual laziness, in a sense, to not follow up on these things and to come back and hold up your hand and say, Yeah, that's speculation I made last episode.
Turns out that was absolutely wrong.
Hospitals are good.
Yes.
I mean, so if you're not prepared to do that kind of work, then perhaps don't make the wild speculations.
Because if they thought there was any chance that they were right about that, then that's obviously a big deal, right?
If hospitals are killing more people than they save.
And if they were the ones to bring this fact to people's attention, then they would be rightly lauded for that.
The fact that they don't bother to even look into it when such degrees of prestige and recognition are there for the taking, Chris.
By showing people this terrible truth, the fact that they don't bother indicates to me that they don't think it's true.
Or, more accurately, they just don't have any interest in whether it's true or not.
So it's very much in the mould of Donald Trump has been described as a bullshitter.
So bullshit is a technical term describing people who say things.
Without necessarily intending to deceive, but rather just having a complete disregard for the truth.
So actual deception, you know what's true, you care about what's true, but you actually want to deceive people.
Bullshitting is when you just really don't care.
And I think, honestly, their behavior just again and again tends to illustrate that they fall into that category of bullshitters.
Yeah, and I mean, we covered this last week, but just to highlight why Brett might be receptive to that message that Jordan...
The hell you've been through makes this point very clearly.
But, you know, I'm constantly struck by the fact that our narrative about medicine proceeds from an entirely false premise, which is that we know a great deal about the body and have all of these useful interventions.
What we have is a lot of interventions where sometimes we know what one of their effects is.
We very rarely understand why the spectrum of collateral consequences are what they are.
And all of these systems are linked together, and nobody is tracking the long-term implications of anything.
So we have this sort of obsessive focus on the things that you can detect on very short timescales and almost a studied ignorance of what the same pharmaceuticals or procedures do to us long-term.
Yeah.
So, I don't want to go back into this world, but I just want to say, what other rubbish that people are not tracking long-term harms of pharmaceuticals or don't care about them, and that, in general, we have no knowledge about the effects of drugs over long term.
So, this is all just him linking these things back into his telomeres view, and we've heard the depths of his skepticism.
But it shouldn't be any surprise when he has that kind of attitude that he ends up endorsing vaccine skepticism or ivermectin as a suitable treatment.
It's just, yeah.
You name it.
If the take is cynical and if the take is one that says that all our systems are corrupt and that you can't trust anybody or anything and that we don't know anything, then that'll be his take.
And it's such a consistent pattern.
So, yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
So, let's move to something.
It's not really more fun, but it is at least a different topic.
So, Jordan Peterson, as most people would know, has been through some trials and tribulations with his physical and mental health.
So, in this interview, And in recent interviews he's conducted, he's kind of returning to the fold and detailing how he's still ongoing with his struggles.
You know, I get up.
I can hardly stand up when I wake up in the morning.
I feel so bad.
I can't believe I can be alive and feel that bad.
I stumble downstairs and I'm in the sauna for about an hour and a half, and then I can stand up long enough to have a shower, which I do for about 20 minutes, and I scrub myself.
From top to bottom, trying to wake up.
And then I can more or less get upstairs and I eat.
And then I go, I walk like 10 miles every day because I need to do that in order to deal with this, whatever it is that's plaguing me.
And I can get myself to the point where by this time in the afternoon, I'm more or less functional, but then it repeats the next day.
And so, and it's so...
My God, that's terrible.
It is.
It's terrible.
It's so terrible.
It's so terrible that I can't think about it without it being traumatic.
So I have a hard time figuring out where to place my mind because this has been happening.
It's been happening every day, really, for two years.
I think it's fair to say that every single day of the last two years has been worse than any day I had previous to that.
And in some sense, like there's an obvious mythic, Guru arc in this.
He's underwent this terrible trial and he's now coming back.
And Brett draws that parallel explicitly.
So this is at the very end, but I'll play this clip first.
Then we'll go into some of the clips where Jordan is detailing his suffering and his reaction to it, which I think is interesting, especially in light of our previous episode where we focused on how central suffering and pain.
is to his philosophy.
But here's Brett assigning him mythical hero status.
The amount of effort it takes for you to get to the point where you can be productive in the day, the amount that is riding on your doing it, the number of people who are listening to you and who basically need your influence in their life.
And, you know, in some sense, You know, it is, it's a mythological story, and I know you will have spotted that a thousand times over, but just the Herculean effort, the tremendous amount that's riding on it,
and the degree to which you're paying some inhuman price in order just to continue playing your role is profound.
And so the advice, to the extent that I have in it...
I don't see how you can see that.
It shocks me that you say that.
I mean, that isn't to say...
You disagree?
No.
It seems like that from inside here.
That was pretty good.
I didn't intend that, but that's another...
It is absolutely shocking that you have that insight that I completely agree with.
It's unbelievable.
I'm not laughing in a mean kind of way.
It's just I genuinely find Jordan Peterson's mannerisms very, very funny.
It's such a distinctive style.
But yeah, there's Brett doing some incredible pandering and hyperbole in complimenting Jordan Peterson on how absolutely central and crucial he is to people.
Yeah, I'm not quite sure how, if you just look at his post-recovery output.
Well, you know, he is a self-help guru.
Many people have claimed that his writing has turned their life around.
So, I get why you could see that welcoming him back, if you view him as having a very positive impact on many people's lives.
But there is a certain elevation.
Like, a narcissistic elevation of your personal struggle to the level of a mythical quest that, you know, is suffering beyond magnitude.
And I don't want to too much hammer on that.
Like, I think it's quite clear his suffering is real and has produced real trauma.
So I don't want to...
Make fun of the trials and tribulations that he's gone through.
Even if they are self-inflicted, it's quite real.
But it's just this casual elevation of everything.
Everything is on level 10. Everything is these huge issues and the culture is riding in it.
Instead of personal tragedy for somebody who's a prolific writer.
Well, the thing too is that it's not an isolated occurrence.
Like, if you think back to the episode between Douglas Murray and Eric this time, they followed the same pattern, the same mode, didn't they?
These conversations we're having right now are just crucial.
Civilization is on the precipice.
We are the fin line.
If we go, if the podcast goes down...
We all go down.
Yeah, so, you know, it's hard for us not to take note of self-aggrandizement and narcissism are domains on the Garometer.
So, yeah, look, we don't want to hit poor old JVP too hard, but yeah, we have to take note of it.
Yeah, so here's Jordan displaying some reflexivity about the situation that he finds himself in, which I find refreshing.
I really can't say.
You know, it's a while ago now, so that's part of it.
But so much has happened to me that's been so strange in the last four years that I have a very difficult time making any sense of it.
I can't even really think about, especially the last two years, I can't really think about them in any consistent and comprehensive way.
I mean, my family situation has been so catastrophic, and my illness, and my wife's illness, it's just been, although she recovered.
Completely, thank God.
It's just been so utterly catastrophic that my thinking about it is unbelievably fragmented.
And I'm struck dumb still to some degree by all of what emerged as a consequence of me making the first videos that I made.
So to walk back slightly, some of what we said before.
There's no doubt that Jordan Peterson does have a melodramatic, epic tone, and he brings that to describing himself and so on.
But at times, he can be quite, I guess, disarmingly frank and open, I think.
And I actually, like, on a sort of gut level, I don't...
I don't mind him.
There's a part of me that kind of likes Jordan Peterson a bit, and I don't like Brett.
Matt, didn't you say this podcast isn't about our personal likes and dislikes?
It's all about the arguments.
It is, it is.
I'm just talking in terms of those gut reactions.
I have to admit my that's coloured a fair bit by the reason anti-vax turn that he's taken, and I don't.
Like that, somebody being that irresponsible when literally people are dying out there.
But yeah, Jordan Peterson, yeah, I find him a little bit disarming and attractive in situations like that.
Yeah, look, I'm going to say as well that I don't like Jordan Peterson's politics.
I understand a lot of the criticisms that are leveled.
At him.
And there's a lot of issues that are worthy to draw.
And I don't think they're marginal points.
Like for me personally, his willingness to appear with Stefan Molyneux repeatedly, for example.
These aren't minor things, right?
But with that, I will say that I find him definitely a deeper character than people like Brett.
And if you do extract the large political element from his I think we can see this contrast really nicely in the next clip when Brett is trying to tell Jordan that he must have foresaw what
would happen when he made his stand about the speech laws in Canada and whatnot.
So let's just listen to that and I think the contrast comes out nicely.
You felt obligated to stand up and say no, which resulted, as you know better than anyone, in you being mocked for overreacting.
And then here we are years later, and it turns out that you saw with absolute clarity what others couldn't even imagine.
Yes, but I certainly didn't see what was going to happen to me.
Right.
With clarity, you know.
So, quite a strange route.
It wasn't possible to see what would happen with specificity to you.
Correct in seeing that you knew that something very dramatic was likely to come from your standing on principle and that that didn't provide any license to do anything but make that stand?
That was Brett trying to rescue the point that had been...
Completely battered backwards, right, by Jordan.
But you can hear the difference there, right?
There is a level of self-doubt in Jordan that isn't present in Brett.
No.
No, there's also a degree of frankness.
I think he does literally, at that moment, search his memory and think of what he's going to say based on what he can remember, sort of shooting from the hip in a sort of open...
So Brett was essentially setting him up to say, yes, I knew that I would be setting myself up for this Christ-like journey to suffer all the trials and tribulations, but I had to do it to save.
And that's why Brett was so surprised that he didn't take it.
He didn't take it.
There's a clip a bit later where they're still talking about what happened to him, how it came about.
And again, the contrast is what I want to focus on.
So here's Peterson again showing some awareness that he may have played a role in his own downfall.
It wasn't easy to take me out.
Although, I've been taken out a lot.
Like, far more than I thought might be possible.
I can't separate that exactly from intrinsic health problems, you know?
But I, despite my, you know, I don't have, it isn't obvious to me that I can go back to the university.
I'm still employed there.
I'm on leave.
They would take me back.
I don't know if I can do it.
I don't have my clinical practice anymore, which I really miss.
I love doing that.
And that was 20 hours a week, you know.
So that's a lot of time.
I finished writing this book, but I'm not writing right now.
And so a lot of, I don't have any pressing financial concerns.
And so that's, of course, that's a huge privilege, a huge benefit.
And thank God for that.
But despite me being distributed like that, I was still taken out pretty hard.
I mean, the thing that strikes me about that is how different JBP is from people like Douglas Murray or Brett and Eric Weinstein when they...
Speak publicly like this on a podcast.
It feels to me that characters like that are just continually spinning a legend about themselves and really do focus on curating the little episodes and the little things that happened into this self-aggrandizing narrative.
And look, no doubt JVP has that in him as well, but he does do that, right?
But not to the same extent.
And at times like that, he's, you know, I think he is honestly telling people how he views his own life, the stuff that didn't look good, the stuff that doesn't make him look good, the things that he's sad about, etc.
And I guess when I was saying that he is a sympathetic character, that's what I'm referring to.
I'm not referring to his political worldview or his anti-mystic pseudoscience nonsense.
I just mean just basic stuff like that.
I think this is a part of his appeal, that he is willing to express this kind of vulnerability in front of an audience and talk about issues.
But I mean, still at the back of it, there's the kind of conspiratorial notion that people were focused on taking...
And, you know, this comes off the bath of complaining about the way that he was treated in a recent interview.
So he definitely has a persecution complex, but it's just they can't compete with Brett.
And here's the contrast about why Brett thinks maybe Jordan was taken out.
So, yes.
Well, you know, I confess I have wondered while you were Incommunicado over the last year, whether that was just Goliath's good fortune or if there might be something more to it,
because you were such a singular voice at the point that Tammy got sick and then you did, that obviously it was a tremendous blow to those of us in intellectual dark web space in our ability to...
To fight and to hold the line.
But you clearly have been taken out in your words deliberately multiple times.
And how it comes about, I don't know.
It's amazing to me that it continues to happen.
So that has a more conspiratorial...
Like Brett is careful in what he says, right?
But if you parse it, he's saying maybe there was some nefarious plan to take you out because you were a challenge to the powers that be.
And like, by how?
By making him...
Have an insane terroring schedule that led to him becoming addicted to anti-anxiety medication and so on and so forth.
Or by a BBC reporter giving him an unsympathetic interview.
That's not taking somebody out.
It reminds me, it's been said by others, that some of these characters like James Lindsay and so on have really become...
What they describe as their nemesis.
These activists who supposedly are creating this grand narrative about the world, that they are trying to change the world and are constantly under threat by these nebulous forces like systematic racism and so on.
That's people like Lindsay's view of this.
So they've become what they beheld.
Brett's framing there, he really is framing themselves as activists engaged in a struggle, in a battle, and that they had lost JBP, one of their champions, if not the champion, at that crucial time and the rest of them had to hold the line.
It's a very odd framing, isn't it?
It's mythical as well, or legendary, the forces of good and evil.
But, yeah.
Jordan is more aware than Brett is that he has some degree of responsibility for the situation that he finds himself in.
And he also, I think, recognizes his flaws a little bit better, as this clip will indicate.
So far, it doesn't seem to.
But, you know, there's always the possibility that it'll be the next one that'll work.
And it's not like I have any shortage of things wrong with me.
There are things wrong with me, you know.
Now, whether they're ethical things or not, that's a whole different question.
But, like, nobody has a, nobody has a, what?
No one has an untrammeled conscience, that's for sure.
So, and I'm not too worried about the economic attack.
I mean, I'll just make my, if it gets out of hand, I'll just make all my finances public.
I mean, I've never made any apologies for being an evil capitalist.
So a quick question there for you, Chris.
What's he referring to with the economic attack?
Ah, yeah.
So this is that there's some mumblings about an article forthcoming that will be talking about his finances and critical.
So this is him saying this is the latest attempt to take him out is this forthcoming article.
I don't know if it ever came out, but that's what he's referring to.
Yeah, so that also illustrates that he isn't above seeing himself as the target of a large amount of campaigns.
But he does also attract critical coverage.
And sometimes it is somewhat outsized, I think, to the level of his content.
But there are stuff to criticize, as we've mentioned.
So yeah, but I think it is refreshing when somebody recognizes in this space, at least in the guru space, that they have issues and they're not perfect.
And it sounds like he's being sincere in that.
So yeah, and we can cut him a little bit of slack, I suppose, because he's not the only one who catastrophizes.
a little bit and sees the personal attacks in a bit of an overblown way.
So, an area that we should probably reference at the start or near the start is this tendency...
Which has become more pronounced post-illness to become emotional during interviews and this content.
So he was always a figure who had an element where he was on the verge of emotionality and talking about certain topics.
And he was known for this, right?
Like in his audio book for 12 Rules for Life.
In several of the chapters, he's crying or on the verge of tears when discussing things.
And you have to consider that he selected to keep that in, right?
Not to reread it without.
So I think emotional displays are part of his repertoire.
But since he's came back post-illness, it's almost a feature of every interview that he's done.
It's getting better now a little bit.
There's interviews where it doesn't come up, but it felt like there was a degree of emotional instability that he couldn't really control his reaction.
I don't want this to be the case about picking on someone with a mental illness and emotional fragility, but I do want to just highlight it as perhaps it's worth considering when he's in this state to what extent it's reasonable for people to be Relying on his assessment of things to have a balanced perspective on things.
So let me play a clip and you can see what you think.
One of the things that torments me constantly is, and I think it's really hurt me to discover this, is I had no idea how deep the desperation was for people.
Who lack encouragement.
It's just because every time I talk about this, it makes me tear up because of what I've seen, I think.
But all these people that I've met.
Yeah.
So that is, I guess, the topics that he tends to get emotional about are issues like this, like feeling very moved by The degree to which people respond,
for instance, to his encouraging self-help material.
So yeah, it is unusual.
Like normally a psychologist, a clinical psychologist like Jordan is actually extremely detached.
It's kind of counselling 101, not to be highly emotionally engaged with your clients or the people you're trying to help.
So yeah, it's worthy of note.
I think it speaks to the inverse side of the parasocial relationship that you often see with gurus, that Jordan is demonstrating a deep emotional concern for his audience's well-being,
right?
And I think that's the flip side of, of course, there's parasocial exploitative.
Versions of that relationship.
And Jordan's may fall into that category.
But I think this is giving you an example of why people would feel that he genuinely cares about their plight.
Because I know that you can fake emotionality.
You can train yourself to cry on command.
But it doesn't feel like that when I hear that.
It's very different from Alex Jones performatively crying.
It more feels that whatever you think of the reasons that he's getting, Emotional.
And in some sense, it's very abstract, a lack of encouragement amongst young men.
But it's clear that this registers emotionally for him.
And I think that's why a lot of people respond to his content, because they recognize that there is a genuine commitment to the issues that he claims to care about.
Yeah, we've talked about something similar with Tai Nguyen in terms of that parasociality.
And we've talked about the manipulative ways in which a guru can interact with their followers.
But with Tai, we started considering the degree to which it's more of a dynamic that exists between the guru and the followers.
And they are moved or influenced or affected by that dynamic as much as their followers.
Yeah, I'll just play one more clip to cap this and then we can move on to something slightly less depressing.
To see the depth of hunger that people had for an encouraging word was unbelievably tragic and for people to come up to me repeatedly over and over and over.
Hundreds, maybe thousands of times and say, you know, I was in such desperate straits, looking for some encouragement, unable to find it.
And then, you know, I came across your lectures.
I thought, Jesus, it's pretty thin gruel to feed a starving population.
I mean, I'm absolutely pleased beyond belief that people have found what I've done useful.
But that doesn't...
Decrease the impact of the realization of just how hurt, how much hurt there is.
Yeah, so it's almost difficult to talk about this because I don't want to be overly dismissive of how Jordan's feeling.
But one thought that did occur is that what seems like an overblown degree of emotional engagement.
With the impact and relationship he has with the people he's influenced, it almost, perhaps I'm being uncharitable, but it does seem a bit like the flip side of narcissism.
So that's obviously one of our domains and our garometer.
But when you genuinely do see yourself as having such an important and deep and profound influence on so many people, Then if one is at least even just somewhat emotionally sensitive,
then, yeah, I suspect this is kind of the flip side of narcissism in a kind of a generous sense, just in the sense of really truly believing that you do have such a profound impact on people.
Yeah.
Well, like I said, to get out of the...
Emotionally wrought weeds.
Let me make our kind of random point, Matt, here, which follows up on our episode with Aaron, actually.
So I just want to note the introduction music to Jordan's podcast and see if this rings any thematic bells for you.
Brett Weinstein is a theoretical evolutionary biologist, host of Dark Horse podcast, and a former professor at Evergreen State College.
And so on.
You know, James Lindsay's new discourse also starts with this classical music intro.
Music. Music.
Hello, everyone.
This is James Lindsay.
You are listening to the New Discourses podcast.
And it's just becoming fairly...
Standard feature amongst the people that we look at.
So at least Brett starts with like a little jaunty melody.
He didn't go for the stereotypical classical music intro.
Yeah.
So these musical introductions are a little bit like the Roman statue avatars you see on Twitter.
It's like a total signal of something.
Something, something, Matt, indeed.
And another thing which was quite entertaining about this episode was the The dynamic between Brett and Jordan.
Because in a very real sense, as we'll get into with some of their theories, they're both riffing on each other's, you know, it's a conversation.
So that's to some extent natural.
But there's this dynamic with gurus where...
They're trying to always offer like another harder take or like yes and.
It's about like listening to amateur improvisers where you shouldn't negate the last person.
You should build on it.
And I've got a couple of clips that speak to that.
So I'll play one now and let's hear that in action.
But I want to go back a little bit.
A lot of what you say resonates with me here.
I suspect the answer with respect to what animals do and don't do is more nuanced than you're thinking.
Okay, so you got it right, but you need to just take it to the next level to get it.
Here's another one.
I think this is JP doing the reverse.
Okay, so I'm going to branch out two ways there.
I don't...
There's no objections to the argument that you laid out come into my mind, and it's obviously something you've thought about a lot, and I can't spin up a hypothesis about lineage selection versus group selection sort of on the cuff.
I would say, however, that it isn't clear to me how that argument, independent of its validity, is related to my original proposition that It's misleading in some sense to think of the genes more in charge than the consciousness.
Yeah, that gets into the theoretical weeds.
But the dynamic I wanted to highlight with that is the kind of complementary disagreement, right?
Where the wrongness is first presaged with an ego-stroking claim about, well, that's a brilliant observation.
And it's fascinating that you have that.
My point was perhaps slightly different than I think offers a different take.
Like, you see these in normal conversations, but the level it gets to in this conversation, I have some more clips after these, it gets quite impressive how far they take it.
But how is it going so far?
Yeah, I see what you're referring to, for sure.
I'm sure there's a few other examples of this, and this is not...
Probably the main thing we want to draw out of this, but we could talk about what they're talking about, right?
So the point that...
And we will!
Yeah, so let's not get ahead of our skis.
But the point that Jordan's making there is that people are conscious, people think, right?
And people communicate.
And that creates a kind of social environment in which sexual selection...
Therefore, evolution takes place.
So obviously, for instance, it's pretty much well accepted that...
The evolution of the capacity for language greatly increased the complexity of the social environment among primates as compared to, say, whatever, I don't know, dogs, wolves.
And therefore, it was a bit of an evolutionary, likely an evolutionary arms race going on in terms of better communicators, better social operators doing better and so on.
So that's the reasonable version.
But the way they talk about it is, yeah, they take something, a relatively anodyne point, and they spin it off into some pretty
Yeah, we'll get to lineage selection and the rape and genocide cognitive toolkits that people possess.
But like I said, the guru one-upmanship continues.
So here's another couple of clips of that dynamic in action.
What practical difference do you think that makes in relationship to What are the implications of that view compared to the implications of group selection viewpoint?
Well, they're subtly distinct, but I would argue, in the end, decisive.
I like that.
What difference does it make?
A subtle one.
A subtle one, Jordan.
And we'll get to the differences between lineage selection and group selection in a little bit.
But here's an example of them riffing off each other, the yes anding.
Because you have to make snap emergency decisions that might not be in your best long-term interest.
But the long-term interest speaks inside you.
Agreed.
Agreed.
But less and less well as we have abandoned the mythology that used to undergird it.
So as we have become more secular.
Why would you say that?
That's a very interesting thing to say.
Why do you believe that?
Well, it's like jazz.
It's guru jazz.
This is, I think, the payoff at the end where this reaches the comparison that Jordan makes about this conversation.
God, you know, I feel like I'm caught in a modern incarnation of the arguments between Freud and Jung.
Is that right?
Yes, because...
I'm not playing Freud's role, am I?
Yes, I think you are.
Oh, terrible.
It's not an insult by any stretch of the imagination.
But what I hear is genes as id.
Well...
Let me just walk through the analogy.
Sure.
Brett didn't like being called Freud, but just drawing the parallel, like, Matt, you know, this conversation, it reminds me in a way of Einstein and if Einstein and Galileo met and they were sharing ideas, it would be a similar kind of thing, right?
Of course, you're Galileo and this, whereas I'd be Einstein.
Yeah, I'm okay with that.
Yeah, a lot of the conversation is pretty meta, isn't it?
Like it's reflecting on their own conversation and who they are and where they're coming from.
It reminds me a little bit of that other conversation between gurus we covered between Douglas Murray and...
It was Eric, wasn't it?
Douglas Murray and Eric?
Yes.
Yeah, so they were doing a lot of one-upmanship, which is...
That's an interesting point, but this is a much more interesting version of what you said.
Yeah, let me just...
There's...
We do get, I have it in a separate folder, although I realize now that there's some overlap.
We do get the obligatory amount of back padding and like praising of each other as these figures that are able to do the necessary work, talk about these difficult issues in a way that others can't.
So let me play you a few examples of that.
Exactly.
We don't have the luxury.
And it's not that everybody needs to look deeply into those dark places, but we need to agree that it has to be done, that people who are capable of figuring out what's there have to be licensed to do it, and we have to avoid demonizing them for thinking about it and discussing it.
That's himself.
That's himself, obviously.
Yes, he's referring to himself there.
Well, it's a funny question for you to pose to me because I have the feeling that the answer will be entirely native to you.
I literally don't believe I had any choice.
People frequently ask me why I stood up.
And my sense is if I think through the alternative, I simply can't live with it.
I can't sleep.
Right.
This is asking why Brett was able to stand up in the face of tyranny.
And yeah, he wouldn't be able to deliver himself, Matt.
He's built a different way.
They can look into the abyss and come back with the answers for us.
But normies like us, we're just wallowing around in the gutter and complaining about people like Brett and Jordan for doing the necessary mental work.
Yes.
Yes, it's a familiar thread.
And so in any case, I think the short answer is we look around the world and everybody makes arguments that sound as if they come from first principles.
But most people do not arrive at conclusions from first principles.
If they extrapolate at all, they don't do it very well.
And that results in a severe compartmentalization of thought.
And that means that when confronted with changes that threaten a system on which we are dependent, most people don't recognize it.
And if they do recognize it, they wouldn't know what to do about it.
They struggle a bit, don't they?
Because they have such different interests.
Jordan's pretty frank in saying that he doesn't really understand Brits.
Ideas about lineage selection and evolution.
And Brett doesn't really have any interest in the metaphysical Jungian stuff that floats Jordan's boat.
So they seem to struggle a little bit.
I mean, I get why you would say that.
But I think that there
a lot of them building off each other's theories in this when they start talking about trans issues.
There's like Jordan takes a developmental angle, Brett takes an evolutionary cultural angle and they come and put it together and make like.
I think there is elements of synergy.
I mean, they certainly see themselves as having a very stimulating conversation, which is plugging in.
Answers and insights for them that were heretofore lacking.
But I also agree with your point that in large part, like we see with Eric and Douglas, that they're just ping-ponging off each other into their particular areas of interest.
And everyone does that to an extent, right?
These are normal conversation dynamics, but with the gurus, they're always ramped up to 11. Yeah.
The interesting thing about them is the...
A degree of confidence with which they feel that they can improvise theories and hypotheses out of a conversation and that the product of that is going to be a grand new synthesis which provides something extra and above what the more pedestrian academic literature can provide.
Yeah, I think that's the bit that makes it special.
Yeah, so there's a lot as well of describing each other as exceptional conservatives or liberals that occupy a space that few are willing to go to.
So here's two examples of that.
That's where I want to go.
But what I'm discovering is that the bedrock of my liberalism is nothing like So,
but that policy must be based on a dispassionate analysis of problems.
I did like that because, Brett, finally...
Acknowledged that his liberalism is rather different from what most people consider liberalism.
He tends to say that and argue that he is a radical liberal.
But I've met very few people who have said the problem with Brett Weinstein is how incredibly liberal.
He is.
And how radical, liberal he is, right?
So you alluded to my political leanings, and you and I both know what you mean by that.
I'm a liberal, and I would actually, I describe myself sometimes as a reluctant radical.
Maybe that is the response amongst Glenn Beck or Tucker Carlson to Brett, but it's definitely not amongst the left side of the political field.
No, no.
Here's another clip about the kind of political project that Brett and Jordan belong to.
In other words, I think there's a new dialogue that has to happen.
Those conservatives who understand the puzzle need to get together with those liberals who understand the puzzle and figure out what the new insights are.
Because we are somewhere so novel that if there's one thing we can say, it's that our system is unstable and it is putting us in great jeopardy.
Which means that even if your impulses are conservative, and you point out correctly that I have some conservative impulses, even if your impulses are conservative, we aren't anywhere, right?
We're on a precipice in a windstorm.
And at some level, we have to make enough progress relative to the fundamental instability of the system.
Sorry, it cut off randomly, but I think it doesn't matter.
You know where it's going.
It feels like it could have gone on for another 20 minutes.
It's so vague, isn't it?
Chris, it's just so nebulous.
What is the puzzle?
What are the insights?
What is he talking about?
Basically, they're complaining about political partisanship and the need for people to be willing to treat Individuals that they don't agree with as not fundamentally evil, right?
Liberal people should be able to acknowledge there are some benefits to conservative perspective and vice versa.
And that kind of centrism reaching across the aisles, I think in general, that I would be on board with as something which is useful.
In this modern era, I think it's worth considering things like in the context of America where they're both mainly focused on.
One of the political parties is a personality cult focused around a reactionary populist.
So, like, pretending that that isn't the reality isn't going to change it because not even people who would have previously been considered moderates, like just...
Mainstream conservatives are being kicked out of the Republican Party for not getting on board with the doctrine about what happened on the 6th of January.
So yeah, they act as if the polarization, that it's a circumstance which is just unfortunate and that it's really both sides are doing it equally and we need to get out of this immunization cycle.
I don't think they grapple fully with the reality of what is going on in American politics and the mainstreaming of the conspiratorial right in the Republican Party.
Even if you take issue with the social justice left and their role, Biden is the president.
So I'm not making a case here for that we need left-wing polarization.
I'm just saying the...
The reality is that it isn't a situation in where both political parties are equally extreme in the candidates that they field and whatnot.
Yeah, I know what you're saying.
It's an uncontroversial point to say that we should be less ideological, we should be less partisan and less polarized and be able to have conversations across the aisle.
That is fine and good.
When they are talking about those things, all the examples they give and their focus seems to be entirely on left-wing versions of that.
And the stuff that's going on on the right, as you said, really doesn't get very much attention.
And this is an IDW general centrist, classical liberal tendency generally, not restricted to these two.
Yeah, in fact, they tend to be apologists for things that Trump has done.
Heller.
Brett's wife, famously, not famously because no one knows this, but famously for me, declared after the election that Trump needed to honor his followers by continuing to pursue the election fraud claims.
That sounds completely right, unless it really was stolen.
Well, so, you know, remember, my point is, at some level, Stolen is not the right description for what big tech did in the context of this election, but I think we already know that this was not a free and fair election in the way that the founders viewed it.
This was an election on a slanted playing field.
Fair enough.
Okay, so put aside any question of ballot tampering and all of this.
Slanted playing field in a toss-up.
Of course, the coin came down the way the people who had slanted the playing field wanted it to.
It is both, you know, not in keeping with apparently who he is as a person, but it's not clear that it would honor the half of the people who voted, almost, for him, for him to step out of the fight.
So, that's an odd position for a liberal to take.
Yeah.
Anyway, so here's the last clip, which I titled Guru Synergy and Book Pivot.
Yeah, I would say, I think we're in near perfect agreement here.
We have to learn each other's language about it.
Yes.
What I would say is, you know, an explosion is a very dangerous thing, but it's a marvelous thing in a cylinder where it can be used to do...
physical work and so the point is yeah let's not pretend that we are something other than we are but let's take those impulses and channel them to something productive and so yes this is actually that's good because i can bring that back to my book
now because that's what i'm that is really what i'm trying to do in these three books is to say well look don't underestimate
downside your
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Don't assume that that makes you unredeemable.
Yeah, that was a good pivot.
But the other thing, too, is that's a nice example of the extraordinarily long connections that they make.
So that conversation started off with Brett's labored analogy about how there's these political differences between conservatives and liberals can be very destructive, but we should turn that into a productive synergy.
Then Jordan connects that to part of his personal philosophy about Thanos and your life energies and so on, which are completely different things.
It's just they're connected in by a very tenuous thread.
And yeah, so that's a common element among these guys, which is to really leap around within this kind of web of loose associations.
Yeah.
And I think we will get...
Into, in a minute, Brett's lineage selection, revolutionary theory, which invokes a lot of this in Jordan's response to him as well.
But just before we do, Matt, I want to also mention there's this segment, right?
And after our last episode where we listened to Brett and Heller.
Essentially, yes and each other into oblivion on ivermectin and the lab leak theory.
The mutual back padding is almost impossible to oversee it amongst the two of them.
And I just want to play this part where Jordan and Brett are talking about how they test their theories.
And the first thing is that Brett acknowledges that there's some issue with Their reasoning and the evidence that currently exists for it.
So let me just first play that.
And then we'll get to how he manages to overcome the issues that this brings up.
And I think, you know, what I get from what you're saying, and the part I agree with, is that A, I think people like both you and me are too used to having to argue that these patterns are Adaptive and therefore entitled to a whole host of defenses that they are not generally given.
Or at least they are entitled to leeway to be evaluated on honorable grounds rather than castigated for the fact that they don't match up with experiment or something along those lines.
So the point there being their claims don't match.
With experiments or empirical evidence.
But they need leeway because they can make adaptive stories.
And we'll definitely get to the adaptive story.
The lineage section is coming up, Matt.
But let's just regard how Brett does then test his theories against reality.
What crucible does he use if he doesn't have peer review and if he doesn't focus on...
Experiments and empirical investigation.
The difference between a person who might think such a thing in isolation and a person who has a proper familial context in which to actually check in.
So in other words, I have the sense that in part the reason that I'm able to just simply describe things as they are and do so unflinchingly is because my family Understands the same puzzle,
and they may have different elements that they see with clarity.
But there's no question.
I can go to Heather and I can say, you know, I ran into this thing today, and here's what I'm concerned it implies.
And we can have a rational discussion about it without anybody accusing anybody of oral defects or any of the things that have become so common.
And so in your case, I know that you have a familial network that provides you that same kind of reality check.
And then I wonder, looking at the generation of people advancing the woke revolution,
and I see the failure of that very thing.
And I can't help but wonder if it isn't connected.
So do you think, Chris, that Heather is providing a good reality check for Brett at this point?
Well, not just Heather, but Eric.
Of course.
It's the...
It's the confidence with which someone could assert that their close family and friends provide a reality check.
Yeah, that's possible.
That's possible.
They might, you know, say, wind your neck in.
It very much depends on their character and tendencies.
And are Eric and Heller the kinds of people that we know to be harsh in their assessment of somebody's out there theories?
No!
If that's your reality check, your reality is fucked.
Yeah, I mean, it's amazingly naive, isn't it, to say that kind of thing?
Because if you're in a relationship, if you're married, you know that, you know, you say things to one another that, sure, you're not going to be morally judged for.
You come home from a party and say mean, gossipy things about the people who are there that you wouldn't necessarily say to other people and you're not going to get slapped over the wrist for being snarky.
He's mistaking that for some kind of epistemic grounding.
That's so naive.
Yeah, and I think as well, he might be regarding it as, you know, like your wife or partner or husband are probably willing to call you on your bullshit in most relationships in a fairly fundamental way.
But that doesn't in any way speak to their, you know, my wife.
Wouldn't have opinions on my theories about the cognitive science of religion, right?
And if she did, I couldn't trust that it would be completely neutral and unmarred by her sympathy for my point of view.
Like, Heller and Brett are very much of one mind when it comes to their takes on evolutionary content.
There might be quibbles around the edges, but this is not...
A crucible of fire for your theories.
Likewise, it's clear that they perceive other gurus as performing the same function.
The kind of conversation that he's having with JPP there serves as a replacement for critical peer review, for instance.
It seems to slot into what they're proposing, which is a kind of alternative.
Epistemic framework.
It's an alternative to this tedious stuff with mucking around with experiments and having to write papers, which is boring and a pain.
And then you're going to get nasty peer reviews and you have to, you know, they don't have any time for any of that.
And they're proposing that a good substitute for that is having chats with your friends and your family.
Long form podcast, Matt.
The defense of Western civilization is here.
It's in your ears.
And it just to completely illustrate that point.
So that's how Brett tests his theories.
How did Jordan do it?
And so like if you have a family and you have friends, then they'll help you make sure that your jokes are funny and not mean because they'll laugh when they're funny and they'll raise an eyebrow when they're mean and then you can check in with that and they'll help you figure out if you're dominating the conversation too much and they'll...
Push and prod you as you do the same to them, and everyone stays relatively organized.
And when all this hit to begin with, I had quite a large network of people, which expanded at some point to include people like you and the so-called intellectual dark web members, and they were helping me check in on my sanity all the time,
you know, helping guide me through the interview process and analyzing my errors.
Commenting when I did something hypothetically right.
Yeah, if the IDW is your sanity check, I'm repeating myself, but you're also fucked.
Like, look at what happened to them in the post-election period.
There are members of it that you might be...
I think Jordan is probably referring to his run-ins with Sam Harris, right, and their debates about God and so on.
And actually, that was...
Some of the most direct pushback I think he's ever received.
But if you're outsourcing your critical analysis to the response of Gadzad, Jeffrey Miller, and Dave Rubin, who Jordan collaborated with a lot, God help you.
God help you.
It's the brain trust that we can only...
I hope society is ready for.
So, yeah.
Both of them don't seem like a replacement.
At least Jordan, he does have published papers.
He has been quite successful in going through peer review and that kind of thing, unlike Brett.
But they both seem to just not factor in that there's a lot of synergies and blind spots in those kind of networks that they're talking about where they're ideologically unified.
They're also not.
Like, Jordan Peterson isn't qualified to push back on Brett Weinstein with his silly evolutionary ideas.
So, yeah, it's just astoundingly naive.
I see what they're trying to do, which is to build up an alternative epistemic community and to propose this as an alternative to the supposedly stifling, orthodoxy, corrupt...
Yeah, academia and science institutions and so on.
But it's such a feeble attempt, Chris.
I mean, the sad thing is that it actually works among midwits on Twitter and so on.
Matt, Matt, Matt, Matt.
Don't get personal to the midwits.
But I also play this clip because it isn't true that, like, Brett doesn't recognize the potential issue.
Because if he just applied this insight from this clip, To his previous claim.
He'd get there.
So just listen to this.
This comes much later.
And, you know, if we go back to what we were speaking about at the beginning of the conversation, the fact that not only do Heather and I have a great relationship, but we also speak the same language scientifically.
So, you know, it's a kind of across the board sounding board and ability to, you know, I feel no vulnerability there.
Because there's no place where our worldviews aren't compatible.
And, you know, I could say similar things about Eric.
So what that means is that my budget for discordant interaction is probably larger when I get to the outside world because I haven't spent it at home or in the context of family or friends.
Yeah.
Yeah, you haven't spent the budget of disagreement with your family and friends, but these are the people that you're using to test the validity of your theories.
The part I keep seeing is just this tendency to turn something completely trivial and mundane, like having a comfortable conversational relationship with your partner, into something grandiose and special, which it just isn't,
Chris.
It's not something to talk about.
As if it puts you in, gives you a special advantage.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, so let's see what is the product of this crucible of fire that Brett's ideas go through.
So this podcast, it's actually one of the longest discussions about lineage selection by Brett that I've heard.
And this is his revolutionary idea when it comes to the modern evolutionary theory and where it's lacking.
So let's get into lineage selection.
And I think this is him setting up what the context is that makes lineage selection an important theory to consider.
This is the great debate in modern evolution.
So I don't want to drag you or our viewers too deeply into the weeds here.
But my claim is that my field is divided between two camps that are incorrect.
One camp are the kin selectionists, right?
People who view this as narrowly genetic.
These are my intellectual ancestors.
And the other group are the group selectionists who have understood something else, which is that essentially altruism pays.
And there are certain places you can stand that it appears that that is a driving evolutionary force.
Whereas mathematically, it is very difficult.
My point would be, the kin selectionists have understood one part of the logic correctly, but they've instantiated it too narrowly.
The group selectionists have found a fiction, but just as we were describing 15 minutes ago, that fiction has actually given them license to explore a very fertile piece of evolutionary territory, which is the landscape of cultural evolution.
Cultural evolution does not make a tremendous amount of sense through the narrowest kin-selected lens.
It makes a great deal of sense through the group-selected lens, but the gateway is fictional.
Yes.
So with this, he's referring to the ongoing ambiguity and debate regarding kin selection and group selection.
Generally, it pertains to a pretty specific area.
In evolutionary biology, which is the problem of altruism, right, Chris?
It doesn't directly benefit yourself or your genetic descendants, which certainly does occur and cooperation generally occurs in social animals.
I think, look, I'm not totally up on this topic, but my understanding is that it is still an open debate.
I wouldn't call it fundamental.
To evolution, because it is a relatively specific domain that the professor is about.
But Brett certainly has his own special take on this, which will bring healing and balance to the Force.
Yes, and you know, I do think this is an area of ongoing heated debate, and there's legitimate...
Discussion amongst various experts, and the division that he identifies is real, where traditional kin selection people are disparaging of those that focus on cultural evolution and see it as sneaky name group selection dynamics that have been proven incorrect.
But there are competing camps on this, and it tends to all revolve around humans, right?
Because humans display a level of sociality.
And altruism, including to non-kin, which is very surprising, right?
And requires explanation.
But it's the extent to which that we can analogize the cultural selection processes to biological evolutionary forces and whatnot.
These are all legitimate debates.
Chris, sorry to interrupt, but correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't you agree that it's very dangerous to...
Take something that you see only in one particular species, i.e.
us, which we know is almost unique among the species that exist, is hugely influenced by cultural factors.
And to the extent such that the vast majority of stuff that we do these days is not...
Directly paired to some kind of evolutionarily biological mechanism.
There's a huge number of social and cultural sort of intermediate steps.
So, yeah, it seems very weak to me, like, to lean on humans and to draw big inferences about evolution generally because we are so weird, basically.
Well, we are weird, but at the same time we're a product of...
Evolution.
And as you say, the thing that in large part distinguishes us, not entirely because our brains and not their size, but their organization and whatnot is dramatically different than the majority, you know, that does mark us apart.
Not of our evolutionary ancestors, but of the other species which are living today.
But I think that we are a cultural species and that culture...
Has allowed us to dominate the natural world and has led to social and technological process in a manner that enables specific groups to dominate others,
which can be tied to the success of people to transmit genes and so on.
We have the technology now that essentially, as people often point out, If we were following evolutionary logic, we should all just be donating meals, at least should all just be donating to sperm banks every single day, right?
Because no investment and massive amounts of offspring, but we don't do that.
So there's a mismatch with evolution and cultural processes.
So yeah, I take the point, but maybe it's my anthropological...
Background that makes me inclined to view culture and dual inheritance theories in general, which are combinations about the role of culture and genetics on human society.
I don't take issue with that being described as fundamental, because it is fundamental to the world now.
But you're right in that if you're looking at evolution as a biological process throughout most of...
You know, the scope of history as we know it.
Cultural evolution is a minor footnote in those processes.
Yeah, that's the main point I wanted to make, that it's an interesting topic, don't get me wrong, and I'm not an expert on it, but I just wanted to make the point that it's not a fundamental question to biological evolution.
It's not the kind of thing, whichever way it's resolved, it's going to be a relatively minor elaboration on...
The standard modern synthesis of Darwinian evolution.
Yeah, yeah.
It just depends on how much you care about humans in that story.
But yeah, you could study biological evolution for decades and not...
Focus so much on cultural evolutionary processes.
And for most animals, that wouldn't really be a huge issue, right?
Because there's a relatively constrained amount of animals that engage in social learning or even rudimentary cumulative culture.
So, in fact, most of them don't actually have...
Or it's extremely limited.
Yes, so I think it's useful just to spell out the uncontroversial and relatively boring substrate to these ideas, which is that, yes, humans are social creatures.
We have very big brains, relatively speaking, and we're very good at communicating with each other.
And as a result, our fitness in terms of sexual selection is going to be determined a lot in terms of how well we...
Navigate the social arena, which involves things like communication and cooperation and so on.
A Machiavellian intelligence.
Yes, that's right.
That's right.
These political players.
Alphas and betas.
It's all omegas and cucks and whatnot.
But yeah, so...
I think, you know, again, I'm biased, but I think this area is fascinating and really interesting.
So I take issue with you describing it as boring, Matt.
But you mean boring as in it's actually an academic topic that you can get into and that, you know, has research and discussion and, like, that doesn't fit neatly into culture war podcasts.
That's what I meant.
Exactly.
Yes.
Sorry.
Or let you explain the Nazis, what they did in World War II, for example.
Exactly, that's right.
I just want to draw a distinction between stuff that's real and...
Boring researchers and the exciting world of the Arctic.
Exactly, exactly.
All right, so let's hear what Brett's...
What has Brett got to say about this, Chris?
What is lineage selection?
Let's put it into what I think the right way of resolving this.
Conflict in evolutionary biology is.
So I would argue that the right way of viewing this is something called lineage selection.
Now, a lineage is an individual and all of that individual's descendants.
Okay?
And my point is, that is actually a valid target of evolution.
Lineages can evolve just the same way individuals can evolve.
So we can see adaptation at the lineage level, which will look like, if you don't pay close enough attention to what you're looking at, it may look like group evolution, which is in part why the group selectionists have gotten themselves confused.
So, Chris, how does a lineage evolve?
Now, when we talk about evolution, we're usually talking about a population of individuals that can...
Have offspring together.
We talk about the average genotype of that collection having some systematic change over time.
Now, he describes a lineage as being an individual plus all of their descendants, which presumably don't exist at the time.
Not yet.
So, in what way is this meaningful at all?
Yes!
So, there's...
There's some issues here because it does seem to be slipping in a teleological awareness into evolution about where things are going and where they've been.
And simply stating that this approach makes a more coherent perspective than Focusing on individual selection or potentially cultural group selection factors.
The devil would be in the details, but at first blush, this seems like an extraordinary claim.
We'll know from other clips that Brett is also referring to things like the Germans and the Jews as lineages.
Yes.
In World War II, which speaks to...
Where are the boundaries exactly there?
And what's the selection pressure that is focusing?
What do the national people of Germany share genetically that would meet this coherent unit of selection against the Jews?
It begs all sorts of questions.
For instance, if a Jewish person is being operated on selection, how would they know that someone...
Amongst their descendants wasn't going to have children with an Aryan-German because that would mess things up completely, wouldn't it?
Because in this crazy worldview, first of all, it's nonsensical to talk about these categories as being populations or lineages or anything.
Well, populations may be okay, right?
Depending on geographic...
Yeah, I mean, there's different ones because they do, you know...
Oh, they overlap.
Anyway.
Well, this is a little bit more detail, Matt, into the actual mechanisms and how they work.
And maybe it'll help you understand what you're missing, what you've got wrong.
If we look across the larger landscape, all of the bands of hunter-gatherers, how much does the competition between two individuals within one band over mates affect how many copies of their genes are on that larger landscape?
And the answer is almost not at all, right?
That is to say, you can have 10 offspring to some other individuals too, right?
And you might think that you'd beaten them by a factor of five.
But there are two problems with this.
One, if you are closely related to him, Then a lot of what we narrowly in the traditional kinselected view would regard as a loss to you is actually insignificant compared to the larger landscape.
But the other thing is, if your band blinks out of existence five generations down the road, taking all of your great, great, great, great grand offspring, right?
If it takes all those people with him, You have not succeeded.
The advantage you got within one generation is completely erased by the loss of the population within which you were embedded.
So the point is, if we really understood the mindset of the individual in rational evolutionary terms, we would understand that they, in some sense, will be built.
They will be wired and programmed to behave in such a way.
Both to advance their own genetic interests and to protect the long-term population well-being that allows those genes to circulate, right?
No, no.
No, what do you mean?
Evolution has the ability to perceive the future and to instantiate in people's brains mechanisms that will...
Be concerned about their evolutionary lineage surviving into the future.
Don't you see that?
This is just the cicadas.
They are coming out at a weird interval that they do to disrupt predator cycles.
Isn't that just a version of this?
Evolution knows these things.
It's just gearing people up for protecting their lineage 20 generations down the line.
Yes, that's the key point.
The 20 generations down the line.
Really does think that there's some way in which some kind of intelligent decision is made that takes into consideration things that can happen hundreds of years in the future,
that a species or a group or a lineage can somehow look forward.
And make some strategic decisions there.
That's where it goes crazy.
I mean, the first bit was kind of like a dumbed-down version of group selection, right?
So in an offhand kind of way, he says, the fact that another member of my band...
Has a lot more children than I do.
Doesn't really matter because the really critical thing could be the extinction of the entire band some generations in the future.
Well, first of all, that's a very cavalier way and a really dumb version of group selection.
But it's, I mean, I think you're right that it does capture the dynamics in some sense that, you know, part of that argument, which is that if your group develops a better bow and arrow than a competing group.
That you may find that they're all killed, and there's a massive selection process, and it's associated with cultural development and whatnot.
So individual muscular competition, for example, would not capture that.
Yeah, look, I mean, that's a theoretically plausible way to describe group selection.
If, hypothetically, all of the selection pressure was happening at the group level, And there was really no selection pressure happening at all at the individual level within groups, except that's not true, right?
It actually does matter because your genes don't know about any of that.
And if your mate is having 10 times as many kids as you, then it's just a mathematical fact that your genes will not be represented in subsequent generations to the degree to which your prolific friends are.
But that's kind of the...
Look, we don't want to get into a group selection, kin selection.
No, no, no.
I just mean that you're just failing to appreciate the genius of lineage evolution.
It doesn't matter if they win in one generation, because in eight generations, lineage evolution is going to come in and destroy those out-competing bastards.
They're like, this is how it works.
Lineage selection is the cuttlefish of evolutionary theory.
It's so wily that it's ready to pounce, but not now, not the next generation.
You're playing chess.
It's playing like Star Trek seven-dimensional chess.
Yeah, that's right.
So it's like a really terrible version of group selection.
Group selection is okay.
Is it?
Is it?
Sorry.
Brett thinks you're wrong.
So I guess the point is the group selection, I would argue, is a temporary misunderstanding of lineage selection.
But it does a good enough job to allow those who are involved in thinking in a group-selected way to see human cultural evolution for what it is.
And that's where the payoff comes.
So it's the, sorry, it's the group selection people, cultural evolution people who are the inferior copy of lineage selection.
Sorry, Matt, I just wanted to correct.
Yes, no, I stand corrected.
I stand corrected.
Yeah, so what makes it really bad?
Is that he uses this very bad idea of lineage selection, which doesn't make sense.
There is no way in which these generations that are separated by hundreds of years have any kind of...
It's not a meaningful unit to talk about.
But the other really bad bit is when he takes this bad idea and then uses it as a tool to...
Explain a whole bunch of things, which it doesn't.
Yeah.
So where this ends up going, so like, as we've said, Brett famously tried to explain World War II in lineage selection terms, the dynamics there.
And Dawkins, who was on the stage with him, reacted.
In horrifying fashion.
And Dawkins is no stranger to offering evolutionary explanations for behavior or human social action.
So if he's horrified, you know you've got troubles.
But I'll play this clip where Brett explains why lineage selection is actually crucial in this modern environment for us to understand.
And the end is a genetic one, even though we're not aware of it.
If you look at society, any society, it may look increasingly peaceful.
But in part, it's being increasingly peaceful on the inside is strengthening it for battle with other societies on the outside.
And ultimately, we can't play that game forever, right?
There are no new continents.
Our weapons are too powerful.
We are too interconnected.
We are all bound together in one experiment.
And if we continue to allow a dynamic that brought us here to rule, to govern our behavior, we will extinguish ourselves in short order.
So my point is the genes and competition between lineages.
Was good enough to generate all the amazing stuff that's built into humans.
It also generated all the horrifying stuff.
It is now time for us to choose between them because in some sense we've run to the end of the tape.
We have now gotten to a place where the game that brought us here will be fatal.
So first of all, the United States is not a lineage.
But what a closed mind you have.
You're shocking me in this episode with your evolutionary naivety.
Can't even conceive of America as a lineage.
What is he talking about?
If it's more peaceable on the inside, then that's a strategy to enable it to be a more dangerous aggressor to other groups.
Lineage selection, Matt, the way it operates, right?
Many generations ago, it worked out that it would be a country founded in the United States composed of immigrants from a whole bunch of different lineages in different countries.
But that doesn't matter because those lineages, they, you know, they had a synergistic connection and they foresaw that the United States...
Lineage was going to be the master lineage to get there.
So they built in these cognitive mechanisms to the people who emigrated to America that they would bind together, create this kind of unified society.
Of course, you know, a couple of civil wars, that would be different lineages competing between each other.
But in the end, they would arrive at this advanced society where they would make technological progress, political progress, and...
That on the outside would seem like a good thing, but the lineage was actually gearing up the individuals of that society to destroy the other lineages in the other nations, which, you know, they were running their own things.
And those dynamics are going to lead...
Because the lineage selection just wants to destroy all other lineages.
It just wants to be the lineage that rules them all.
And this is evolution, Matt, science.
So your skepticism, it's just frankly disappointing that you have such a non-scientific approach.
The truly sad thing is that even though you speak tongue-in-cheek, I think that was a relatively fair elaboration of what he means by...
Lineage selection.
My God, is there a more stupid idea?
Well, should we move on from lineage selection to the...
Well, actually, this is kind of a sub-discussion within lineage selection, but they do discuss the potential for us to have rape and genocide.
Modules in the brain which can be activated by certain societal consequences.
This is kind of an evo-psych argument.
So I don't know where that falls on a scale with lineage selection, but let's have a look at some of the arguments related to rape and genocide.
Just very nice, relaxing break.
Here, let me talk by analogy.
Let us just say that all of us, because for many reasons, are likely the descendants of women who were raped at some point in history.
And we likely all carry the genetic capacity to engage in it as a result.
Most men that I spend time with, I believe, are actually not capable of this.
And they're not incapable of it because they're genetically incapable.
They're incapable of it because development took that option off the table.
Can I just have one go here to mention?
So, at some point, ancestors may have been violently coerced into sexual reproduction with someone and that we are the ancestors.
Over the span of evolutionary history?
Yes.
Okay, fine.
Probably true.
But the notion that rape, that behavior is a specific kind of cognitive module which was inherited because somebody engaged in that behavior.
That's a leap for a start.
That there is a kind of...
Inherited rape module that this ancestor possessed it always didn't because there was a coercive sexual act.
I don't know if you've seen the animals and the way that they mate and whatever, but like...
Every chance I get, Chris.
Every chance I get.
But like going back in the prehistory thousands of years of ancestors and whatnot, modern moral assessments of Animal behaviors don't really make sense, right?
And it also doesn't make sense to regard it as there's like a one-to-one of that there was a cognitive module which resulted in a behavior that led to something, right?
Like there's behavioral flexibility.
It doesn't mean that there was a cognitive module which will be inherited by all.
What I'm seeing here is this tendency to take at base a very trivial statement, but to spin it out into something that's supposedly controversial and profound, right?
So it's completely uncontroversial to say that in terms of our physicality and our biology, that human beings, just like every other animal, are perfectly capable of violence and coercion.
Yeah.
So what?
The second point he makes is that that, to a large degree, has been, in his words, taken off the table or suppressed by culture, right?
So, yes, we don't live in a Lord of the Flies, walking dead, post-apocalyptic kind of culture where anything goes.
We live in a society, as George says on Seinfeld.
So that's trivial too.
So what is his point?
Well, let's see.
Maybe Jordan can elaborate on that for you.
And so I would say that we protect ourselves against that biological propensity, that genetic propensity, partly through socialization, by bringing aggression under control, especially in its sexual elements, but also by structuring our society so that we never allow ourselves to go somewhere where those motivations...
Are likely to emerge and also where they wouldn't be immediately punished out of existence.
But that can happen.
I think you see those sorts of things happen in the midst of riots, for example, where a law-abiding person, a generally law-abiding person, will get caught up in the chaotic frenzy and find themselves doing things that they had perhaps never done before.
So, I mean, maybe that's just an illustration of the point you made.
Yeah, I mean, that's it.
I mean, I'm listening to what they say, and it's presented as if there's something profound being said.
But if Jordan's saying that most societies' antisocial behavior gets punished, yeah?
They put this spin on it as if they're getting at something profound here, but insightful.
But where is it?
I can't see it.
I'll try one more, Matt.
I'll try one more.
Maybe it's the link to genocide that will do it for you.
So we don't have that in the case of something like genocide.
I believe we do need to make all of the various thought processes that result in warfare and genocide disgusting so that people do not engage in these behaviors.
And, you know...
If we don't, I suspect we will see exactly what we are seeing now, which is people playing with the very tropes that create this impulse, not realizing that in some sense there is a program latent within humans that,
when activated, creates exactly the discontinuous kind of behavior that you see in chimpanzees when they encounter rival males.
A program inserted by lineage selection to genocide other lineages if they dare compete.
Yeah.
Sorry.
Sorry, Matt.
I couldn't resist.
No, no.
That's right.
There's this extremely boring version of what they're saying.
Which is just, like, obvious.
But it's no coincidence that they've chosen to say, well, what's the evolutionary basis for these things like rape and genocide?
These are hot-button words, hot-button concepts.
It's like they've deliberately done that to inject some kind of forbidden sexiness to what they're talking about when they're saying really trivial things like, we should agree that genocide is bad and we should stigmatize genocide.
Well, yeah.
You know, I think it kind of is for the most part.
I don't hear a lot of pro-genocide rhetoric out there.
A lot of people just, you know, making pro-genocide statements and casual conversation.
So what, if anything, interesting are they saying?
Well, Matt, I think you're feeling to appreciate the depth of the culture war because this is in the context of pointy night that the kind of intergroup dynamics that are at play there were People on the opposing political side are seen as not just wrong,
but subhuman and fundamentally morally corrupt.
This is playing with forces that we have seen in history when combined with things like encouraging people to disparage their parents or to view their culture as inherently evil and corrupt that lead to Maoist revolutions.
The Cultural Revolution and so on.
And as Michael O 'Fallon and James Lindsay have told us, the eventual capitulation of Western democracies to communist China-style totalitarian dictatorships.
These are the forces that we're playing with, and this is what they're worried about.
So this is the context, right, that the protests in Portland that Brett is complaining about, he is seeing the glowing embers of Societal genocide, being fanned by the woke, not by the anti-woke,
I imagine.
So I think that is an accurate presentation of why they are regarding this as, you know, that needs to be talked about, is important to talk about, and that we're playing with fire.
We could burn down society with these evolutionary forces that normal people don't even realize are on the table.
Right.
I see.
Okay.
Sorry, Matt.
So in that case, this kind of ejection of bad, bespoke evolutionary theory is totally gratuitous.
But, you know, you have to take into context that this is Brett's thing and to a certain extent Jordan's as well.
Of course.
You know, this is about taking an evolutionary perspective to understand what's going on in society.
Yeah, and people like this, Matt, because what it does is it takes The current moment in, you know, political disagreements and protests about the American political system or whatever it may be.
And it reconfigures it into a much grander, more deep and meaningful forces of light and darkness issue about fundamental human nature and evolutionary forces operating over vast time scales.
And whatever the validity.
To the claims made, and I think we've both highlighted that we're highly skeptical of it.
I completely get why this would be appealing for an audience to have the culture war reconfigured in this light.
Yeah, I see what you mean.
It transmutes their political takes to being really the extension of a very deep appreciation of scientific issues.
Yeah, I get it.
Yeah.
And so to follow up on this a little bit, so that's lineage selection is Brett's grand theory.
And Jordan, not to be outdone on this episode, outlines a theory of religion that he's been building up throughout all of his writing and research over the past few decades.
And, you know, we've already addressed Just how much Jordan is into Christianity, the Bible, religion as a meaning system and source of mythos for the world.
We covered it in our Jordan Peterson episode that he couldn't be more interested in the Bible and Christianity.
I don't know if he was, I don't have a good analogy, if he was Thomas Aquinas.
That was a good one.
I've got some clips that illustrate the level of interest, so here's the first one.
There's a scene in Genesis where people become self-conscious, their eyes are open, and virtually at the same time, so the story goes, they become capable of the knowledge of good and evil.
And it's a very mysterious story, but...
After thinking about it literally for a decade or so, I started to understand, I think, that it's a story about, so what happens is people become self-conscious, they become aware of their nakedness, and they become aware of good and evil.
They also become aware of their destined, they're destined to work.
And work is something that's relatively unique to human beings.
If you think about it as...
Delay of gratification, conscious delay of gratification.
I'll give up something now, which is a sacrifice, in order to obtain something of more value in the future.
You can spend decades reflecting on passages in Genesis.
So, these kind of pooling at religion has led Jordan to something of a revolutionary insight that we often find amongst our gurus.
I know something that I'd like to talk to you about.
I have some evolutionary ideas.
I've been wrestling with these for a long time about the origins of, I suppose, the origins of religious ideas, the evolutionary origins of religious ideas.
By the way, this is my field of research in a sense.
Like the cognitive science of religion is heavily into this stuff.
But yes, go ahead.
Are you excited?
I was just going to say that this promises great things.
Great things.
Yes, and so this is just maybe a point to echo is that they get into this like a little bit.
We covered it with Jordan before, but his tendency to have differing definitions for words and his tendency to like be saying something is something and is also not something at the same time, right?
Did Jesus rise from the dead?
Well!
You know, that's a question.
What does it mean to rise from the dead?
And what is dead, in a sense?
So here's him talking about the different definitions for truth.
See, it's ideas like that that motivated, at least in part, the discussions that I had with Sam Harris.
Because that's a really good example, assuming that it's valid, and it might be, and it might not be.
Like, we can't tell.
That's an idea.
I just had the echo there, Matt.
It might be true.
It might not be true.
We can't tell.
Who knows?
Who knows?
Actually, Matt, before we get into the revolutionary idea of religion, there was a feature in this content that I wanted to highlight, which was the tendency for Jordan and Brett to basically assert that we don't...
We don't know anything about a given topic.
And they do this a lot.
They either say that we don't know, you know, the impacts or we don't know anything about its power.
So here's Jordan on the incomprehensible power of YouTube.
It's perverse beyond comprehensibility, which is sort of the hallmark of a traumatizing experience.
Because it is exactly that.
And I look at it, and I can't wrap my mind around it.
Also, my degree of exposure...
You know, when I decided to make those videos, I was playing with YouTube.
And I was playing with fire.
Like, YouTube is fire in a way.
Social media is fire in a way that is...
Unimaginable.
It's so powerful.
YouTube, we'll see, but YouTube demolishes the printing press in terms of its long-term significance.
Because now you can do with video and audio what you did with print, and it's way easier.
You have access to a massive audience with no intermediaries whatsoever.
I don't know really how to grapple with that either.
How to comprehend it.
It's kind of ironic given that Jordan is someone who's really benefited from the thing that he's talking about.
You know, you read this in The Guardian.
Every other week.
And I'm not saying there's no validity to the point here.
Again, it's like, it's this style that if you have a point to make, but you can turn that point up to 11. What would that sound like?
And it's unimaginable.
It's incomprehensible.
It's like the fucking Prometheus discovering fire, right?
I feel like that's the theme for this whole interview, which is that they take a trivial observation.
Social media is changing the information landscape for people.
And they turn that up to 11. Or they say, yes, people have the biological propensity and capacity for violence and coercion.
And then they turn that up to something grand and earth-shattering.
But when you just strip it away, there's just nothing extra there.
It's just they're making an observation that a million people have made before them.
Matt, it's incredible that you could say that.
It's astonishing that you could have that level of insight.
I think to see him, but it's just, it's unbelievable that you could even, you know, get those thoughts into a coherent sense.
So, but let me, let me just see, what else don't we know anything about, Matt?
So we don't know about YouTube.
Okay.
We don't know what regulates human communication.
We know that if you restrict the bandwidth, people don't understand each other as well, but we don't know how communication functions.
It's too complicated.
Okay, so we absolutely don't know what happens to communication at a large scale when you restrict people to 140 or 280 characters and then put them in a network with millions of other people.
We have no idea, and it could be that you tremendously bias the discourse towards impulsive anger.
It looks like that if you look at Twitter.
I mean, and because it's 140 or 280 characters, you can whip something off very quickly.
And so it's almost as if the technology is implicitly commanding you to be impulsively aggressive.
Well, Chris, I'll hazard a guess that there are a great many Twitter users who have an inkling of the effects of Twitter on discourse, but...
We don't know anything about it, Matt.
What are you talking about?
He's right in that, obviously, new technologies, it has these effects.
The medium does affect the way people interact with each other.
Sure, that's totally true.
But just the level of hyperbole is, yeah.
Well, Matt, there's that.
And then there's the fact that we...
We don't know any of that.
And we completely underestimate the power of the technology because it looks harmless.
It just sits there on your phone and doesn't do anything.
And so, you know, God only knows what kind of Tower of Babel that is.
I feel like I know.
I feel like I know.
No, you don't know, Matt.
We don't know anything about that.
One last one we don't know anything about.
Here, let me take an example.
The point you make about social media and the human psyche, you could make exactly the same point about pharmaceuticals and physiology.
That we know very little about the way the body actually works.
Yeah, I wonder where that's going to go.
That's a surprise that he steered things in that direction.
Why does he want to talk about pharmaceuticals, Chris?
Yes, well, we already covered where that goes because it goes into Brett's medical skepticism and then eventually the doctors are killing us all in the hospitals in our death factories.
Chris, if only Brett's research hadn't been suppressed like that.
If only they'd listened to him.
He could have prevented all this horror.
Well, he's getting round to it now with Ivermectin.
He's got another roll of the dice.
But yes, so that was just a side journey into the world of we don't know anything about various things.
Before we were talking about that, we were just getting into JVP's religious takes.
He had been thinking about Genesis for some time, and I thought his analogy of what that...
Story was meant to be an analogy of, sounded like a pretty fair summary.
So he'd made a lot of progress over 10 years of thinking about it.
What else has he got going?
Well, so here we go.
What is religion?
What is the hero myth map?
Are they the same thing?
So imagine you have a hierarchy, and the most effective way of moving up that hierarchy across time, So that would be something that's stable across multiple landscapes of selection, is whatever moves you up the hierarchy.
And the reason that that benefits fitness is because the females are more likely to mate with the males that array themselves near the top of the hierarchy.
And so then imagine that we've been in these hierarchies forever.
We've observed successful behavior and have an instinct to admire it because that instinct to admire it facilitates mimicry.
And then imagine that we've learned to mimic multiple aspects of behavior that are associated with reciprocity and fair play that move people up competence hierarchies.
And so we've evolved.
Our morality has actually evolved.
To match biologically what's being demanded by the social hierarchy.
And then we abstract out of that the ideal, which is that pattern of behavior that moves you across the largest number of dominance hierarchies.
Got it?
I think my brain's in recovery because those are pretty high-level ideas coming through there.
I think I can do a fair summary of it, which is that the hero myth is an instantiation of a biological reality about existing in hierarchies as social primates.
And the version of the hero myth that is instantiated in religion, particularly in the Christian mythos with Christ, is the blueprint, the best blueprint for...
Presumably males, but possibly females as well to follow in order to move up the hierarchies and increase their chance of mating.
So religion, the Christ myth, it's all tied in with biology.
And in a fundamental sense, it's more true than evolutionary theory, such as it exists as a reductive description of biology.
Right.
Does that mean emulating Christ is going to get you laid?
Is that the idea?
Yeah.
Okay, so Matt, let me hit you again with some knowledge.
And that actually exists in our imagination as a latent religious symbol.
And then that's filled up by narrative, constantly refilled and filled.
And the ultimate exemplar of that has religious power.
And the awe that that inspires is, if you're thinking about it biologically, is the manifestation of the instinct to imitate.
And then you think, okay, then you can take that one step farther if that's true.
That ideal does, in fact, end up being the most effective way to live in the broadest possible sense.
And so it's valid.
And then you might ask, well, is it objectively valid?
And that's a very difficult thing to say because generally we're not very good at looking at complex patterns as objective reality.
We tend to have to reduce things to the material substrate and we can get a grip on what's materially true as we become more and more reductionistic.
But at those higher levels of abstraction, you know, hierarchies have been around for a very, very long time.
It's not unreasonable to assume that there's a characteristic pattern of behavior that moves you up or down a hierarchy.
Ah, and scene, yes.
That's Jordan Peterson.
That is most Jordan Peterson-esque, isn't it?
My God, it hurts my brain just figuring out what the hell he's actually saying.
You know, sometimes people try to argue with us to some extent that Jordan is...
He's not a theological figure.
His content is inherently political and stuff, which it is.
But when you listen to this and the passion with which he speaks, it's such a mishmash of evolutionary psychology and religious belief and psychology.
And political values as well.
It's all mixed in there.
But isn't this what makes him appealing?
Isn't this why he's a more interesting character than someone like Brett?
Because he has this unique synthesis in a way.
Yes, he is just reporting conservative values or whatever, but most people couldn't dress up their admiration for Christ and Christianity in this kind of heady mix of secular gods.
Yeah, heady mix of cryptic mysticism.
Yeah, I agree.
It's quite amazing.
But, well, look, it is a mishmash of all those things, but does he do it well?
Because I'm really trying to understand what he's talking about, but I'm struggling and failing to figure out how any of it makes sense.
It sounds like a word salad of things that aren't really connected.
He is an interesting figure, definitely, but it's Deepak Chopra with some evolutionary psychology mixed in.
And Matt, we've talked about how Brett was smuggling in teleology to his evolutionary model, and this one does it too.
So just listen to this.
That's conscience, as far as I can tell.
And it isn't unreasonable to note that our perceptions of that might be accurate.
Now, what that means metaphysically, see, I don't understand that either, because human beings are unbelievably complicated.
We have the most complicated nervous systems.
That there are.
Our brains are the most complex structures that we know of, except for other brains.
So we are the most complex thing that we know of.
And so we're a pinnacle of sorts, and I'm not saying that evolution is driving towards that pinnacle, but in terms of cognitive elaboration it has.
So is the ideal form of that, is it unreasonable to propose that the ideal form of that complexity is divine?
The universe has been aiming at it since day one in some sense.
Yes, in fairness to Brett, we took him to task for the weird reification and teleological stuff that he ejects into evolution with his lineage selection.
But, of course, we have to bow to the master, which is Jordan Peterson.
Yeah, amazing stuff.
He does that disclaimer thing of saying, I'm not, of course, I'm not saying that, you know, there's a teleological purpose to evolution.
But then by the end of the paragraph, he's, but hasn't the universe been aiming at the pinnacle of the, like, you know, Christ narrative since day one?
And you're like, no, that is teleology.
Like, that's, you just blatantly outlined a teleological claim about, you know, the universe having an aim.
And it being instantiated from the beginning.
I mean, it's so transparent, isn't it?
Like we've said before that Brett and Eric Weinstein's theories and takes are just transparent efforts that...
Self-aggrandizement.
Just ways to show that they are more brilliant than everyone else and have this amazing perspective that no one else has.
With Jordan Peterson, it's a little bit different.
He also does seem to be bending over backwards to bring things to a particular point.
But for him, that point is religion.
He's a psychologist.
He's interested in science and talks about these things and sometimes is accurate.
But his overriding motivation...
Is to somehow interpret this stuff in such a way that it can be made congruent with his very deep religious and spiritual instincts.
Yeah.
And there's one contradiction inherent in a lot of this, Mark, that it gets touched on in the end of this segment, which is that Jordan Peterson and Brett are both highly critical of ideologies.
They basically say that, you know, this is part of what is...
Tearing society about this devotion to ideologies, not seeing people as individuals.
And we may agree with various aspects of that, but they need to carve out this space for religion because religion is supposed to be this beautiful, complex thing.
I haven't played that many clips of Brett endorsing what Jordan's saying, but just trust me that he's yes-anding.
Constantly here.
And at one point, comparing science, isn't it just another form of religion in a way?
But here's how Jordan gets around the issue that he wants to complain about ideologies, particularly, you know, communism and fascism, to a lesser extent, but also fascism.
But how does he deal with the fact that religion can be conceived as an ideology?
That's the right way to put it, too, because most of this...
See, to me, what's happened is that...
Functional mythology has been replaced by inadequate ideology.
And the ideology, and I wrote about this in Beyond Order, there's a chapter called Abandoned Ideology.
I think of ideologies as parasites on a religious platform.
They have their power.
The power they have is because they derive their power from an underlying mythological narrative structure.
But they only tell half the story.
If that, that's...
That's an idea that's akin to the one that you just...
Yeah, so that is interesting, isn't it?
So on one hand, religion is not a bad ideology because it's grounded in a deeper metaphysical truth and drive.
And those metaphysical Jungian archetypal truths are themselves derived from biological and evolutionary facts.
If you follow their argument.
So this is the way in which these things are legitimate and other kinds of ideologies aren't.
Yeah, interesting.
You know, it completely, just to big you up, Matt, you previously talked about how, you know, Jordan had a theological substrate model of reality where the core thing was theology.
Theos or Logos or whatever he called it, but it was a metaphysical reality upon which everything else is lumped.
And that's exactly what he says here, right?
Like, ideologies are parasites under this more fundamental reality which is instantiated in religious doctrine.
So, in the end, it all boils down to religion.
It's not all religions either.
This is the important thing because, like, as we saw in the previous content with Justin, or Justin, or with Jordan, He ties this back to the Christ myth.
The other hero myths in Buddhism or Islam or whatever, they're important too, but they're not the pinnacle, which is the Christian instantiation.
Yeah, like to sort of dial it back from 11 all the way down to 2, there's this version of this which I think you'd probably agree with, which is that, yes, cultural artifacts, including religious ones, are often not entirely unconnected with some evolutionary substrate.
Like, there's the reason why most religions say you should be cooperative and not...
Cheat, not lie, not steal, not sleep, not covet thy neighbor's ass, that kind of thing.
That's one thing.
But as you say, Jordan Peterson is really a lot more specific than that.
It's Christianity and Christ that's the important thing here.
Yeah, yeah.
So anyway, you know, that's his revolutionary theory of religion.
And I hesitate to go to it because we've ran quite long and it might be good too.
But let's just briefly talk about the other revolutionary theory, which is a synthesis of both their perspectives.
And this is on the issue of identity and the current debates around trans stuff.
So, Brett's component of this relates to the world that we exist in now, the postmodern online world and the dynamics that this creates for people.
So let's hear first Brett building up the foundation, then Jordan's going to add in
Obviously, there's no such thing in the physical world.
You can transition, you can take hormones or blockers, you can get surgeries, but no man has ever become a woman and reproduced in a female way.
Right?
So, the point is, the physical world has all kinds of constraints that come from physics and biology, which do not translate to the online world.
And for people like you and me, for whom the online world is an add-on world, we think, well, obviously, real life is the important one.
And then the online thing has some interface with it, which is frightening, but we understand how they relate.
But if you reverse these two things...
Then what you get is a generation that its problem-solving mind says, actually, of course you can transition.
You can transition, and then it is everybody's obligation to live by who you've told us you are, and anybody who doesn't is a bad person.
And what has to be true for that to be the case, right?
So you've got the first pillar, that identity.
In the postmodern world is online, you're able to be whatever you say you are.
And so this doesn't accord in the real world.
But if you're brought up in the modern era, your real world is partly online.
So this is Brett's theory for why we've seen a rise in people identifying as trans or non-binary.
Loud minority.
That their determination of their identity take primacy is...
First of all, it's wrong, technically, I think, because an identity isn't merely what you feel you are.
An identity is way more complicated than that, as any decent social constructionist should already know.
An identity is...
A role, a set of complex roles that you negotiate with other people so that you can thrive across a very long span of time.
And it can't be something that you impose on other people because then they won't cooperate with you.
Now, you might say that you have a right to impose certain aspects of it on other people, and you could have a reasonable debate about that, but identity is definitely not merely what you feel it is, and it's certainly not merely what you feel it is moment to moment.
That identity is actually much more like that of a three or four-year-old child.
And I mean this technically.
It's not an insult.
So when you're a child, you pick up one identity after another and play with them.
I think there's good components here where Jordan is talking about the construction of identity is not just an individual thing.
It's also socially...
Like, partially socially constructed by how other people treat you.
And I think that's true.
Like, we can even see that in the way that, you know, most in the IDW identify as liberal.
But are they seen that way by the outside world?
So self-identification, in this case, in, like, political terms, is not all that matters in terms of how you are perceived in the world.
That's true.
Yeah, yeah, sure.
So if you're saying that...
Identity is complicated and it's more than simply proclaiming some kind of category membership that it's socially constructed or whatever.
That sounds fair enough, I suppose.
Yeah.
So this leads to a discussion of developmental process and three stages of identity formation.
If we take this model that I think you and I are agreeing on here about the fact that the, and I like your point here, that there are three stages.
You've got, I assert my identity independent of the world, then the world and I negotiate over what my actual identity is.
And then I'm not an apprentice anymore and I get to be who I am in the adult world, having been informed by that process.
And you imagine that you've got generations now, one and a half of them maybe, for whom the online environment was so compelling and so much the source of most of their affirmation.
That its rules have become sacrosanct to them, and those rules really do look like, you know, it's a childish world, right?
You join some community of people, you tell them who you are, there are rules about them having to respect who you've told them.
You know, it is, if I say I'm Pocahontas, who are you to say I'm not, right?
All right, so there's already a couple of things that you have to push back on, which is one.
Nobody's saying that identity isn't complicated.
No one would say that just because you identify as gay, then you're saying that is literally all you are and that there is no other facets to your identity, right?
That's the first obvious rejoinder.
The second one is with some of those identities, like being gay, it does amount to your personal preference.
It doesn't really matter what other people think about that.
That does seem to be something.
If you identify as a scientist, say, and you haven't actually done any research work or published any papers, then I think society is qualified to comment on you taking on that identity.
But with other ones, it really is just how you feel, and that's all there is to it.
There's this part where...
They're talking about playing with identities and how there's a part of childhood where this takes place and then it comes to an end, right?
You're no longer able to pretend that you're Pokerhontas or Captain Hook or whatever.
The real world asserts itself and you have to accept that there are limitations to your fantasies.
And here's one of the contradictions of this model.
So first of all, Brett is suggesting that that stage continues on and comes to subsume the real world in the postmodern online world because we never give up this fantasy stage.
We're stuck in like a kind of regression where we don't deal with the realities.
And here's Jordan kind of riffing on that point.
And so I see a fair bit of this as delayed fantasy play.
With the kind of pathology that comes up when you delay a necessary developmental stage.
Now, that could be wrong, you know, and probably is, but still, it looks to me like that's part of what's happening.
It's very strange to see this insistence.
It's so conceptually unsophisticated.
Even the hypothesis that identity is...
Only what you feel that it is.
I really feel like he's talking about gamers.
Because...
Because really...
It all comes like the gamer gear.
I mean, this is your first-person fantasy role-playing game, level 13 paladin, or whatever it may be.
But they're not talking about gamers, are they?
They're talking about...
They're certainly talking about trans people, but they're also talking about...
Are they talking about gay people as well?
I don't know exactly who they're referring to.
No, I think it's primarily trans people or non-binary people.
Gay people tend to get a pass because they did it right.
They bent to society's norms to some extent, and that's why they were allowed to enter the marriage sphere and that kind of thing.
But to me, Matt, there's an inherent paradox in this claim, right?
Because on the one hand, you're saying modern Gen Z people, they have these extended adolescents which are facilitated by the online environment.
And this leaves their identity in flux, right?
But one, if the whole point is that you need opportunities to engage this fantasy play...
If that's true, they have had more opportunities than any other generation, right?
Like this is their theory that the online world gives them the ability to exercise those muscles a lot.
So they should get it out of their system if they have an unlimited resource where it can be whatever they want.
Purple dragons, unicorns, whatever you want, people will accept it.
And I think the other thing that I would push back on is two things.
The online environment is not this world of everybody is willing to agree with you and whatever you assert, everyone will be happy to hold your hand and say it's right.
Like, no, I don't know which fucking online world they're in.
That's not the one I've operated in.
And secondly, even if that were true, And it were the case that now there's a greater tolerance for identity fluidity because of online dynamics.
Okay, let's accept that premise.
Generation Z people are coming to dominate.
The world, because of simple demographic realities, if their new cultural values are such that they accept that identity is fluid, sexuality is not a binary, and so on, and these are the cultural norms that they instantiate across societies,
then what's adaptive becomes to play by their rules, not to play by the rules of the 1950s or 60s, because those people are dead.
The new rules of social engagement would be different from what has come previously because, as Jordan says, the online environment is a greater change than the printing press, right?
So new social dynamics emerging.
So I see there's this inherent contradiction where even if the dynamics are what they say, in some sense...
They aren't the people who can argue that this isn't better for the world.
And I'm talking purely about their logic.
Yeah, yeah.
Now, I had a similar thought, which is that...
They wouldn't dispute that this is the new world we live in now, right?
It's a digitally mediated world.
And let's take their point as a given and say that, yes, it does permit people to be far more flexible in their identities, allow them to basically live their lives in a form of extended play according to them.
Well, that's the reality, guys.
That's the new world.
And they clearly feel this is bad.
And this is kind of my luxury space communism thinking, I suppose.
But from just purely basic liberal reasoning, the idea is that we want to promote people's autonomy and individuality and ability to essentially do whatever the hell they want, as long as they're not hurting anybody else.
And if your technology facilitates that...
Then you're maximizing individual freedom.
And this is, you know, extreme liberalism and, I don't know, wokeism or whatever, sort of comes together in luxury space communism, which is, you know, bring it on.
Bring on the glands where we can secrete drugs into our own systems and have any kind of mental experiences we like, you know, be able to change our bodies at will.
You know, all of that is promoting autonomy, right?
And yes, it doesn't fit very nicely with 1950s culture.
But it's not the 1950s anymore.
Yeah.
And Matt, there's another element here where I think there's a very personal contradiction in this narrative about accepting that society constrains and pushes back for you, that you get the feedback from society and the community, and you should adjust what you do.
If you're getting feedback that's consistently telling you you're wrong.
So who do we know that doesn't heed those signals?
So let's just hear that point, Reist.
Well, all right.
So I want to link this back up to what you said before about the three stages.
So my experience as a scientist is that my most valuable characteristic Is the ability to be completely indifferent to the prevailing wisdom on a given point.
Right?
And I think this is...
No personal stake in it!
So, you know, they're going to go on, but you get the point, right?
Brett is able to ignore all of the societal signals that he's wrong.
Well, we've heard before, look, I could be getting him mixed up with Eric, but one of them has said how they derive so much personal pleasure from knowing that everyone else is wrong and only they are privy to the truth and completely disregarding.
All of that feedback from society.
But I'm just hung up with the way it began, which was my experience as a scientist.
That's where my finger went up.
I don't know why you would take any issue with that.
I'm just being snarky.
We'll let it go.
We'll let it go.
Yeah, well, okay.
So, have we highlighted good things that they said?
There is a little folder I have titled, Potential good stuff.
So let me just rummage around in there to try and finish on maybe some positive notes.
So one thing is we've talked about the parasociality element with our gurus.
And there's this clip where they reference it.
And I think they're almost getting it.
They're almost getting it.
So listen to this.
Whereas...
Social media increasingly fools the mind into, you know, the interaction you and I are having is more or less a face-to-face interaction.
But a lot of interactions that look like face-to-face interactions don't have these characteristics.
And at best, the impact on the mind is arbitrary.
So, you know, we're watching things like amplifiers of threat.
And, you know, this goes back to the thing we were discussing earlier.
Of course, Brett's not including himself as an amplifier.
No, no.
It's hard for me to find something nice to say because they touch on interesting topics and they make them dumb.
Kin selection and group selection, and they make it dumb talking about lineages and nonsense.
Oh, Matt, what are you talking about?
The degree to which religion reflects adaptive and pro-social universal impulses is an interesting topic.
But Jordan Peterson makes that dumb.
And here they're touching on the impact of social media and making people catastrophize and so on.
That's an interesting topic as well, and the degree to which online interactions, like the one we're having now.
May well detach people from the physical world and encourage us more and more to think of ourselves as kind of flexible avatars inhabiting a digital space.
That's an interesting topic, but they don't deal with any of these topics very well, in my opinion.
It's been a couple of weeks since we listened to this, so now I'm more focused on the clips we've played rather than what I heard before.
But it's hard for me to find stuff that was good or just interesting.
Well, Matt, I'm going to play another clip because I think Brett psychoanalyzes his family dynamic very nicely here, but he doesn't quite apply the insight.
But I think this actually gives good insight into the...
Yeah.
this. I may even have a personal stake.
I may come up with an idea that compels me that it's probably right.
A hypothesis.
And I may advance it and have every single one of my peers say that
That's garbage.
And my sense is not one of, oh, crap, I've said something bad.
My sense is, well, wouldn't that be delightful?
If I'm as right as I think I am, then the fact that everybody else doesn't get this makes it even better, right?
So my point is, that's not normal.
I know that's not normal.
And it's not normal for evolutionary reasons that are easy to understand.
It takes a lot of training to accomplish that.
Yes, or a developmental environment that rewards it.
Right?
Sure.
If you have the right experience.
But then again, you know, you said yourself, again, at the beginning of this conversation, think about the preconditions for that, is that in order to open yourself up to that sort of criticism, you have to be supported in all sorts of ways.
That, Matt, those insights, right?
Like Brett, in some sense, he's getting it.
That he realizes he's an outlier, but he sees it in a positive sense as opposed to seeing it as a level of self-confidence that is entirely unwarranted.
But Jordan is also identifying the point that the reason Brett is able to take that position is because he's been encouraged to see himself as a revolutionary figure and had the developmental environment which encouraged that perspective.
Yes, yes, yes.
I know.
He's so close, Chris.
So close to a correct diagnosis of what's going on here.
Yeah.
Yeah, Galileo, Chris.
I have to refer to this recent article by Heather Haying in Aereo where she straight up makes a direct comparison between themselves and their theories about ivermectin and the dangers of vaccines and the lab leak hypothesis.
As being against the orthodoxy and everyone says they're crazy and directly comparing themselves to Galileo and Louis Pasteur.
So I guess that would feel good.
I bet that does feel good to think of yourself as one of those people.
Yeah, maybe.
I don't know.
I don't know why that would stroke your ego bone.
Well, look, Matt, we've danced in Jordan and Brett's evolutionary garden.
They're psychological.
Fairy tale stories, the mythos of the universe instantiated in two podcasts.
We have eaten from the forbidden fruit of knowledge.
And Christ-like, we've sacrificed ourselves to this.
40 days and 40 nights, that's what it's felt like.
Yeah, we're so high up the hierarchy at this point that we may be careful not to be mobbed by women on the way home after this level of insightful analysis.
Yeah, so shall we turn to our final thoughts on this epic collision of galaxy brains in the night?
These two great minds.
I think I just said it before, which is my take on this is that they touch on some topics that could have been interesting.
I wasn't expecting to necessarily agree with very much, but, you know, I'll settle for interesting, Chris.
But once you strip away a lot of the fancy language, then...
What is there interesting that we heard in this episode?
I'm struggling to even find a single thing.
I think perhaps noting that social media does provide these avenues for virtualization and to inhabit avatars, that's potentially interesting, but I just don't feel I dispensed with any of these topics in a very interesting way.
That's my take.
Okay, yeah, you know, maybe I'm less harsh today because I get some enjoyment from Jordan's various elaborate constructions of theories.
And like, he's not always completely obvious.
Like, he layers in these religious aspects and ties it to conservative values in a way that I don't like.
But, you know, his speculation is like somewhat...
Entertaining for me.
And I think he does have insightful takes sometimes.
I'll happily go on record saying I find him more interesting than I find most of the other IDW bobbleheads.
I find him more sympathetic too, to be honest, as I said at the beginning.
I don't know what it is.
It's kind of a gut feeling kind of thing.
But at some level, I feel a degree of sympathy with him.
And yeah, you know what?
I'll walk back.
A little bit of what I said, because I do agree with you, Chris.
I mean, he is interesting.
Like, even when he's saying something just so nonsensical, really.
Like, for instance, his theory, once you figure out what he's saying.
He's basically proposing Christian religion is not an ideology.
It's actually tapping into these deep truths that are fundamentally based in these archetypes, which are themselves based on evolutionary truths.
Now, that's completely wrong, right?
But it is interesting.
I'll grant him that.
Yeah.
So, after giving them that little nod, I will say that...
I think this last secret clip, which I have available to me, is actually what this interaction is mostly about.
All of this content that we've been looking at.
I think this sums up more the dynamics at play than all of these theories that we've took apart.
Well, you look good, man.
And you look, if you don't mind me saying, you look different than you did when I saw you before.
Well, I'm older now.
Well, I've noticed this in my clinical clients.
When they integrate their aggression, their face is hardened.
They look determined all of a sudden instead of questioning.
And you look like that more than you did.
Now, some of that's from getting older, but not all of it.
Well, I think if I'm understanding you correctly, it's probably a lot about You know, getting catapulted into the big leagues and learning to play that role.
It's, you know, it's trial by fire, but certainly it's been fascinating and I'm looking forward to seeing what comes next.
He looks well.
Famous last words.
The guru sphere devours, Matt.
It requires that your takes be harder, your ideas be grander, your theories more revolutionary.
And Brett and Jordan, in different ways, are victims as much as beneficiaries of what modern guru dynamics require.
They live up to them.
And when they interact together, there's explosive theories that emerge.
We'll float back into the darkness and have no impact on scientific literature and generations to come.
But I would say that...
Because my lineage is doomed.
The Irish-Japanese lineage is doomed.
Now, yeah, just me personally, the Kavanaugh lineage.
It's just we're a doomed lineage.
So, you know, that's where my pessimism comes from.
It's evolutionary instilled.
It's a cognitive module.
Sorry, Matt.
No, no, I agree with you there.
That's all right.
I'm going down with you.
That's okay.
Well, I guess I'd just say, Chris, you're also looking remarkably well-integrated these days.
I've just noticed that about you.
Just think about your physiognomy.
I don't know how to say that.
I've never learned how to say it.
Do you know how to say it?
I noticed that, but you saw that.
It's extraordinary.
I just want to say, Matt, it's unbelievable.
We don't even know about my appearance and why it can be like this.
We don't have the science to describe it.
We don't have the words.
We don't have the metaphorical language so that you can perceive that.
Let me just finish by saying it's truly extraordinary.
That's all I want to say.
On that shocking note.
Yeah, we've had our fun.
So goodbye, Jordan.
Goodbye, Brett.
We'll see you again.
Hopefully not too soon.
Bye.
Yeah.
So, Matt, let's do our little bit, you know, our business at the end of the podcast.
Let's wind things down, get off these heady highs that we were at and mention to people, first of all, as we said up top, maybe we didn't, maybe it was in a different podcast.
In any case, we're going to be, Channeling our energies into the personal guru sphere.
We're taking on Anthony DeMello, the Jesuit, the Christian mystic who is a personal hero of mine or at least was an influential guru back in the day.
We're going to look at some of his content next and hopefully have some nice things to say as well as probably breaking my...
Hard in the process.
But yeah, let's go back and beat up teenage Chris, little arrogant prick.
Well, I think the good thing is when we start covering these people that are not characters in the culture wars and people I've never heard of, that's going to be the real test of our podcast, Chris.
If people keep listening despite that, then I really feel like we've made it.
They'll like it, Matt.
They'll like it.
Some of our best episodes are unexpected figures.
If it turns out that Anthony DiMello has got involved in the culture war, I'll be very upset, especially since he died, I think, like 15 years ago or something.
But maybe he's been reinterpreted by a new generation.
I hope he's not in COVID denialism territory.
That would just be sad.
Yes, let's hope he's not making any embarrassing tweets.
We'll see.
Yes, we will.
But speaking of embarrassing tweets, we have embarrassing reviews.
Oh, good.
A great segue there.
One of them, Matt, I feel you did this to us.
Our most recent review, a one-star, Bayes Didn't Die For This by Final Anti-Negativist.
This has a philosophical twang to it.
I don't know.
I get like a contrarian philosopher online energy from it.
And it reads, Matt, so-called, said in a recent episode that there is never 100% certainty with anything.
Disgusting.
Theorems have probability one on pain of incoherence.
Cannot believe they let children listen to this filth.
One star.
What's the disappointment?
Yes, I think I did dare Last Positivist, a.k.a.
Liam Bright, if that is indeed his real name, to make that review.
I dared him because he said it on Twitter and he did with the one-star review.
So hats off to him for that.
However, I will say that I think he's making a fundamental mistake that all philosophers make, which is that they mistake their...
The little contraptions they make in the platonic arena of forms, which can indeed be analytically derived to be true or not true, they mistake that for science, Chris.
They mistake that for the real world.
And we know that gravity works around where we are.
We know it fits the theory very nicely.
But we don't know that in the Andromeda galaxy that gravity works exactly the same way.
We have...
That degree of caution.
We have that degree of humility.
And that's something that I think philosophers couldn't really understand.
Induction, Chris.
Induction.
I mean, that's probably not a word that Liam would be familiar with, but he should read up on it.
I agree.
Astonishing, no sense.
That's all I'll say.
It's blown my mind.
And moving on, I'm going to read to...
Positive reviews because I enjoy both of them and they're short.
So the first one is A Winding Path for Me by ThatDude6969.
These guys are great.
I need to get that bit.
My route to finding them was a strange one and it started with Sam Harris.
Sam Harris to Helen Pluckrose to Ione Italia to Aaron Rabinowitz to Chris and Matt.
You can probably trace the arc of my politics along the way.
Interesting.
That's interesting.
I think it's bending out of Aaron, right?
Unless we're more woke than Aaron.
What I'm getting from that is that we're the final destination for politics.
We're like the resting state.
Maximum entropy, like the heat death of the political universe.
We are the null hypothesis of politics.
And this one is from Muscle Master.
I believe you know him well, Matt.
And you're often groveling at the feet of him, I believe.
I've heard rumor.
But he loves this podcast and he says he highly recommends it.
The hosts, with their posh British accents, spend each episode talking about a guru with stellar insight of our culture.
Every episode gives me a great new podcast Twitter to subscribe to.
I think that the hosts are the true gurus of great listening taste.
Oh, very good.
So we're the gateways to all of the people.
We're just giving people a smorgasbord of people to follow.
That's our role in this world, Matt, and I endorse that entirely.
Follow everyone that we cover.
They're all great.
Their insights are amazing.
That's the message of this broadcast, if ever there was one.
This is good.
That was a good nagging review.
And last, Matt, is our shout-out to our own parasocial cadre of people, the Revolutionary Guard of the Decoding Universe, the patrons.
That's right.
The listeners suckling at the teat of our parasociality.
Lovely.
Unfortunately, I have...
We've randomly picked up the Excel sheet, which doesn't have any highlights of people we've shouted out.
So I'm going to use my crazy wisdom to select people randomly on this that I'm pretty sure we haven't shouted out.
So this will be new people.
It'll be old people.
Good luck.
Good luck, everyone.
So first off, I'm going to thank David Biasotti, who is a conspiracy hypothesizer.
Every great idea starts with a minority of one.
We are not going to advance conspiracy theories.
We will advance conspiracy hypotheses.
There you go.
Thank you, David.
Much appreciated.
Next, a revolutionary genius this time, Ayman Singh.
Maybe you can spit out that hydrogenated thinking and let yourself feed off of your own thinking.
What you really are is an unbelievable thinker and researcher, a thinker that the world doesn't know.
And, uh, yeah, why don't I mix things up?
I'm getting, you know, good vibes from the universe.
So Lisa McLaughlin, Sharna Perez, Adam Session, all of them, Matt, those three guys.
Conspiracy hypothesizers.
It's a popular tier.
It's a popular tier.
Is it the cheapest tier?
What does money matter in the guru sphere?
It doesn't, it's, you know, such materialistic concerns.
No, no, they clearly identified with the highest tier.
The highest.
They just identify whatever they want.
They're conspiracy hypothesizers.
I think everyone should learn to identify with the highest because that would keep their identity more in keeping with reality and the reality in which we totally deserve $10 a month.
Luxury space communism, eh?
The only extent so far, it seems.
Anyway, conspiracy hypothesizers, a lot of you.
Enjoy.
Every great idea starts with a minority of one.
We are not going to advance conspiracy theories.
We will advance conspiracy hypotheses.
And there we are.
Done for today.
What else is there to say?
Any last...
What is it?
There's nothing to say.
We have to feed in the outro music.
The outro music is coming in right now.
It's beginning to swell.
It's building to a crescendo.
I've already made the muscle master joke.
Do I dare do it again?
Do I go for another astonishing pre-assure intellect?
I've made all my jokes.
I'm out.
I'm running on empty.
I have a confession to make is that I've never gotten the reference to the muscle master.
I don't know who the muscle master is.
I don't know why you say it.
It baffles me.
But I just haven't said anything up until now.
Maybe if you went back and listened to our content carefully, Matt, you would understand the reference.
Do I put you out of your misery?
Well, yes, I see you much like, you know, a small child pulling at the coattails of the emperor to say, you know, bestow on me your wisdom, O Solomon.
And I say to you, Matt, Matthew Remski.
Disgust in the dynamic of JPCers and I forget his name, but the Navy SEAL guy that is also a bit of a like IDW type that they had this And that JP was kind of,
you know, groveling at the food.
Oh, that's right.
I remember now.
Okay.
I get it.
I was very tickled.
Clearly, clearly.
Okay.
Well, that.
So I said, I'm going to make that reference.
I'm not going to explain it to anyone.
You said, ha ha ha.
What a good idea.
And your old man mind has just failed you once again.
So here I am, young, spiteful, youthful, brilliant, just sending you the package of knowledge.
