In this episode, Matt and Chris pour themselves a stiff drink and slip into the fever‑dream crossover of Jordan Peterson and Michael Shellenberger, a conversation that opens with the claim that Western Europe is now the single greatest threat to free speech; yes, croissants and GDPR apparently out‑authoritarian China and Russia. According to Shellenberger, we can now rest safe as free speech has been restored and “America Is Back!” thanks to God-Emperor Trump and the living avatar of honest utterance, Elon 'Horus' Musk.Our hosts marvel as Shellenberger insists USAID is a rogue soft‑power leviathan that somehow staged January 6th, sabotaged the 2020 election, and deserves to be nuked from orbit... although he can’t quite prove any of that YET. Alongside the conspiratorial drivel there is also a heavy serving of Peterson's obscurantist mythicism and dinner‑party anthropology as he explains how Hungary is a model democracy, the US nation beset by parasites, and that this is all inevitably connected to how people are not paying enough attention to Jesus.But that is not all! You will also learn about Manly Men vs. Gentlemen, Musk’s “move fast and break government” ethos, and the revelation that free speech is not a nice‑to‑have but a must‑have—unless you are a lawyer, journalist, or student on the wrong side of the Trump administration. So buckle up for an hour of dystopian déjà vu, as two self‑styled rebel intellectuals morph into state propagandists, cheerleading every single action of Trump and Musk while lecturing the rest of us on free thought.Sources“Trump, Musk, Kennedy: The Dawn of Transparency,” The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast, Ep. 526.Shellenberger's Substack, including gems like "Why Trump’s Victory Is, For Millions Of Us, Cathartic" and "Both USAID And The CIA Were Behind The Impeachment Of Trump in 2019"Taibbi & Shellenberger testify to the House Judiciary Committee to help uncover "the Biden-Harris Administration's unconstitutional censorship campaign"Singal-Minded articles detailing Shellenberger's sloppy journalism and conspiracy theories
Hello, welcome to Decoding the Gurus, the podcast where an anthropologist and a psychologist listen to the greatest minds the world has to offer, and we try to understand what they're talking about.
I'm Matt Brown, and with me is the snowy-to-my-tintin co-investigator extraordinaire, what's his name again?
Christopher Kavanagh.
That's right.
Yeah, he's the anthropologist.
Yeah, there you are.
What are you?
I'm a psychologist.
Oh, by process of elimination, you're the psychologist.
That's right.
You could have deduced that.
You could have deduced that, Chris.
If I had a formula, I would have worked that out.
And I do note, Matt, here, your...
What is it?
Neo-neo colonialism?
Because you are the product of a colonial state, Australia.
Yes.
But you're kind of the offshoots of colonialism, right?
You were also a prison colony.
So you're a prison colony, colonial state.
But by comparing me to a dog, you are inflicting...
Neo-colonialism on an Irish person.
Yeah, it's an insidious system.
No, no.
You misunderstand.
It's a term of affection.
Snowy was a good, loyal dog.
Good dog?
Yeah.
He was the smartest character, wasn't he?
He was actually probably the best character in those...
No, Captain Haddock.
I really should be compared to Captain Haddock because...
I like him.
Everybody wants to be Captain Haddock, don't they?
The kind of belligerent drunk sea captain.
I like how they indicated drunkenness in those...
Oh yeah, the little spinny thing above his head, right?
Yeah.
The portrayals of drunkenness I also remember being pretty accurate.
Yeah, pretty accurate.
Like Surly, then he starts crying and then he starts fighting people.
That's how it usually goes.
Yeah, yeah, that's it.
Well, there we go.
Tinting comparison sorted.
Notice that Matt didn't even consider to compare me to Professor Calculus, which, frankly, again, reverse racism, whatever it is, it's something.
It's something to behold.
You're too young and good-looking.
All right, fine.
Professor Calculus does look a bit like Glenn.
Once you see it, you'll never be able to unsee it.
Yeah, so we're not here to discuss Professor Calculus or Captain Haddock, though, Matt, this is the coding episode.
We get down to business early.
So who are we here to discuss today?
We are talking about some Michael Schellenberger.
Yeah, Michael Schellenberger.
This is a character I'm sure you know well because you know everyone.
Sadly.
This is someone, like before today, I knew his name.
I had vague associations with him, but I knew very little about him.
What I learned...
You loved.
Well, he's had an interesting career arc.
He's a little bit older than me.
And he sort of started off in...
He's an anthropologist.
That's what I discovered.
Like you, Chris.
I didn't even know that.
Okay, he's an anthropologist, was he?
Apparently, he's got a Master of Arts in Anthropology.
Yeah, but yeah, he grew up in, this is going too far back, but he's a Quaker.
He grew up in, he comes from a Mennonite type.
I knew that.
Yeah, yeah.
But yeah, you know, his early career was kind of in activism on the sort of general California type left, you know, activism to save California's last ancient redwood forests and campaigns to make Nike improve their factory conditions,
all that stuff.
I do know about this, yes.
Now, I'm not going to give a blow-by-blow account of his career.
You can say what you want.
But what I learned was that there's this relatively recent, I mean, recent in terms of, like, he's not young.
So, recent in, like, the last five, ten years, he sort of has veered quite a bit right.
And I guess it sort of started with this kind of...
Pro-nuclear stuff, you know, post-environmental politics and, like, tech solutions for environmental problems as opposed to degrowth or sustainable development, that kind of thing.
And kind of setting himself up against progressively more of the left-wing, you know, orthodoxies, I suppose.
Was his homeless stuff before or after the anti-nuclear stuff?
Because, like, I know he had a particularly...
Technocratic or maybe blame the poor stance on the homelessness crisis or whatever.
That's right.
So he was proposing, I think, progressive things, like a statewide agency responsible for procuring shelter beds and providing psychiatric and addiction care.
But I think he...
You know, he also was in favor of mandating stuff, treatment for people that are drug addicted or prescribed treatments for people who are mentally ill rather than, you know, giving support per se.
He ran for governor in California in 2008 and '22.
Yeah, it didn't get much of the vote, but it came like third or something.
So yeah, losing with the shot.
So yeah, but it more recently has veered.
And I guess it was the Twitter files, you know, linking up with the sort of pro-free speech, anti-censorship type people.
Maybe you can take over and tell us a bit more about that.
So-called pro-free speech, I think, would be the way to put it.
He's basically now firmly emerged in the MAGA camp.
But, like, he was one of the hand-picked journalists by Elon Musk, for example, to release the Twitter files, right, and detail the corruption there.
He's talked about the censorship industrial complex, right, with Rene DiResta, a previous guest on this podcast, at the head of it.
They're censoring everybody.
Rene DiResta.
She's like an octopus.
Her tentacles are everywhere.
Yeah, she is, according to him.
And he's also more recently had various run-ins with Jesse Singal, who has presented, like, how sloppy his journalism is, even in the case where...
One of Schellenberger things was reporting on the WPATH files, like these leaks from the WPATH, some organization around transgender healthcare stuff, right?
But again, Jesse Single was criticizing how sloppily he was presenting that stuff.
Yeah, that's a theme, by the way, that came across in what I was looking at too.
It's not so much whether the thing he was arguing for is necessarily right or wrong.
Yeah, because Nukio, I'm for that.
Yeah, it was more that he would take a position and then reinterpret and cherry-pick, arguably, the evidence for it and filter it all through his particular framework to come up with a very particular narrative.
So yeah, I think he seems a bit fluid in terms of what he's focusing on, as we'll hear in talking to Jordan Peterson.
He now seems to be firmly aboard the MAGA train, particularly that faction that is aligned with Elon Musk, this sort of, I don't know what to call it, this techno, I don't know.
Utopians?
Yeah, but we'll hear it.
So this is from the source material that we're looking at, is Trump, Musk, Kennedy, The Dawn of Transparency, episode 526.
Of Jordan B. Peterson's podcast.
There's been 525 previous episodes of Jordan.
I sometimes think, Chris, that maybe we're creating too much content.
Maybe we should decrease...
We aren't.
Jordan is.
That's it.
So this is very much in the frame of the current going on...
In America and reactions to it.
And we saw before the election the degree to which Jordan Peterson was essentially a state propagandist for the incoming Trump regime, right?
He likened them to superheroes and gods, demigods.
He went for the cabinet, give them all a glowing report.
They're all A + stars.
Robert Kennedy, Tulsi Gavard, J.D. Vance, not a single figure.
Amongst the incoming administration that Jordan could find anything, you know, negative to say about them.
So we know how Jordan feels, but now they've been in control for a couple of months.
So we'll get to hear what does Jordan think about things now that they've started to actually, you know, administer their policies.
And maybe Schellenberger, the diligent renegade who, you know, is always willing to call out corruption and to, you know, look where the...
People in power don't want you to look.
Let's see how he does.
But this is Jordan Peterson's introduction of Schellenberger compared to our meandering one.
Hi, everybody.
I had the opportunity to speak today to Michael Schellenberger, who's, well, he was a Democrat at one point, like so many people, and has turned more to the...
Well, I wouldn't say conservative side exactly.
He's turned to whatever this new emergent side is that's signified by the union, let's say, of Trump and Musk and J.D. Vance and Mehmet Oz and Robert Kennedy and Tulsi Gabbard, etc., etc., whatever that is.
And I've had Michael on as a guest a couple of times on the show.
He's a journalist.
He broke the Twitter files.
Elon Musk gave him access to the...
The Twitter back end to delineate what had been occurring before Musk purchased the platform.
And Michael was also instrumental in breaking the WPATH files.
And WPATH is, well, you could call it an organization, but it's more like a cabal of perversion and incompetence, I would say.
That seems like a balanced description.
I do like the way that they're all, you know, Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, they're all incapable of just acknowledging that somebody is firmly right-wing now, right?
Like, you can support all the right-wing policies.
You can produce this propaganda for them.
You can appear only exclusively on right-wing.
Let's talk about how great the new administration and whatnot is.
And yet they're always like, well, is he conservative?
Are these people conservative?
Like, is the leader of the Republican Party actually a conservative?
It's, you know, it's all very fluid.
It's all very hard to say.
Yeah, indeed.
Yeah.
So, yeah, Jordan Peterson, you know, if you want to visualize this, he's wearing what can only be charitably described as a clown suit.
Yes.
Which is now par for the course.
I hadn't seen this particular one before.
He looks like the Joker, as usual.
And he talks in this interview far more than the person he's interviewing.
Yes, that's standard Jordan Peterson protocol.
Yes, that is what he's doing.
And they start off things, Matt, with the concern that you flagged up at the beginning.
Free speech.
Free speech is under threat in the modern world.
You might imagine It's from repressive totalitarian states where, you know, the media is controlled by the government or even perhaps in America now where, you know, people are being deported for views that they express that don't align with the present or the reigning political power.
Well, most recently, lawyers that had the temerity to investigate law firms, that is.
Again, lawyers, you know, media outlets being sued, this kind of thing.
These are...
You might imagine that these might be concerns about free speech that they're talking about, but not exactly.
So let's see where their concerns lie.
We obviously had a massively historic election that also signified a change in the media environment, of which you've been a really fundamental part.
I think we saw today Vice President J.D. Vance gave a major speech at the Munich Security Summit in Munich, Germany.
Where he very strongly articulated what I think you could argue is the new national conservative case, which included grave concerns around losing Europe to mass migration.
It included a strong defense of free speech.
And this is now the second time that I think he has intimated, this time I think he was softer than the first time, that...
Europe's move towards totalitarianism, particularly this mass censorship that they want to impose on our social media companies and on us, on our voice in Europe, that that was not only unacceptable, but that it puts our alliance in danger.
I mean, he specifically said it puts NATO in danger.
So I think the Europeans today got a sense of the depth of which America cares about free speech.
That free speech for us is a must-have, not a nice-to-have.
In Europe, it feels like it may be more like a nice-to-have.
And I think you finally got an administration that's just saying, hey, we're not going to tolerate this censorship and totalitarianism that you're imposing on our companies and attempting to impose on our people.
So it wasn't super clear to me, maybe I'm not up to date on Vance's speeches and so on, what they're referring to with this terrible outbreak of mass censorship in Europe.
I'm sort of going to preemptively hand it to them in some degree, since for the little I gather, it seems like there is some legitimate concerns one could have, I think, about some laws in, say, the UK, where you may have police turning up at your door and saying you've been posting bad things on social media.
What else is he referring to?
Yeah, well, I think he's talking about, in this specific context, stuff like that around which are I do believe in general, somewhat exaggerated, to put it mildly, amongst, you know, the trigonometry set.
But they are talking about, you know, actual things that can happen because there is the point that the American...
Is it the First Amendment?
Right?
The free speech or whatever?
I don't know.
I think it is.
Yeah, the First Amendment of the United States protects freedom of speech, religion, press and assembly.
Okay, so, yeah, so, you know, other countries have different...
But it is certainly not the case that the Trump regime has been displaying itself, you know, an unparalleled supporter of the right to freedom of speech.
In fact, there's been much more evidence of widespread suppression of free speech in the Trump era.
You can look at the way that they're attacking Media organizations, as you said, you can look at the way that they have went systematically through government agencies and tried to introduce loyalty tests, right?
There's any manner of things, not just the most recent treatment of the students related to Palestinian protests and that.
But so they are here talking about the speech where, you know, J.D. Vance stood up and gave a...
A rising speech to the gallored European leaders and whatnot, that Europe's stance on free speech is unacceptable.
You know, this is a red line for us Americans.
That's why we're taking such a, you know, a thing here.
And this was, I think, before the German elections, when there was, you know, there were concerns about alternative for Deutschland, where Elon and Trump, I think as well, were, you know, hoping for...
A hard right party to win power.
But that didn't come to be, right?
But I believe that speech was prior to the election.
So kind of, you know, implying that they're restricting the freedom of speech of this valid populist movement and whatnot.
So Vance was condemning them for excluding the alternative for Deutschland from the discourse, the conferences and so on.
I see some of the other concerns that Vance has got is one of them is criminalization of religious expression.
So with this, it's stopping individuals who are doing that kind of silent prayer protest.
It's not always so silent.
Yes, in front of abortion clinics.
Yeah, which can be very easily seen as intimidation of the women who are wanting to go in there.
And the other one was this, you know, not liking their approach to disinformation.
People like Vance and Elon Musk, obviously, what you and I, Chris, and many Europeans would describe as straight-up disinformation and propaganda, they would see as important truths that the mainstream media doesn't want you to hear about.
So whatever you think about that, I mean, I think it's fair to say that calling these differences of opinion about free speech, like authoritarianism or a...
The biggest threat to freedom in the West is a bit over the top.
Well, they're going to go on about it, but I don't even grant them the charity of saying difference of opinions over free speech because they just constantly demonstrate they don't care about freedom of speech.
They're absolutely fine restricting it in ways that they agree with.
So it's just, I guess, platitudes is maybe the right word.
Like, disingenuous.
It's like a thing that they want to batter people with, but they absolutely do not apply the standards that they're claiming to their own side.
So in any case, let's hear a little bit more of this being fleshed out.
And this is Schellenberger talking about his reaction to hearing this.
And I think he really spoke for Americans this way, certainly for me, which is that we actually really love Europe.
Like, Americans really care about Europe.
Like, not just as a tourist destination, we care about it as an idea, as the birthplace of the Enlightenment.
I mean, for us Americans, Europe is where our ideas that our country was founded on were born, but they were never fully realized until you got to the United States and until you had Thomas Jefferson insist against Alexandra Hamilton that we were going to have a Bill of Rights.
And that the first thing was going to be free speech and that we weren't going to mess around about it, that this was number one, that we didn't want to have a country without having this guarantee.
And like I said, I just think, I don't think Europeans understand the depth of our commitment to that, that really when they start threatening our free speech rights, as they've been increasingly doing, they need to know that they are threatening their security, that it really makes us, we're tired.
America is tired.
Like, we're very, very tired.
Yes, yes.
They love free speech.
Everything's going great in America at the moment.
They're carrying the torch for freedom of all kinds.
They respect Europe as the initial experiment.
You know, there were some attempts to do government and whatnot there, but it didn't reach its pinnacle until we got America and the founding followers, right?
And then that is where civilization has kind of peaked over in the US.
Yeah.
So, I mean, we don't need to rebut this, but we could mention a few of the many actions that the Trump administration has taken against free speech, like pursuing lawsuits.
We already have.
Yeah.
Pursuing lawsuits and regulations against media outlets, anyone who criticizes their policy, changing the defamation laws so you weaken the protections there.
So people with a lot of money, like Mask, who is very much known for...
His proclivity to use his money to do those kinds of, to call them nuisance lawsuits, sort of diminishes them because what they do is they frighten people from publishing critical things because it can be incredibly expensive.
Or they just bankrupt them from the legal.
So that notion about we're so very tired of people frivolously attacking our right to speech.
Good God.
And let's just put aside all of the sacking of government employees, even members of the military, who voice anything that isn't showing complete loyalty and ideological conformity to the current administration, withdrawing federal funding from universities that are not aligned with conservative viewpoints.
We could go on.
We could go on, especially in terms of their treatment of science.
But they love free speech.
America...
The birthplace of the Enlightenment, but we've forgotten all those values.
And now, you know, they're going to become increasingly important because of how principled the Trump administration is in its concern for those.
And just one bit more.
We love Europe, we believe in Europe, but they're testing our patience.
And I think we finally have an administration that can communicate the depth of our concern around their push towards censorship.
And really, they pioneered it, they developed it.
A lot of it was, you know, we've certainly done our part to bring it there.
You know, Western Europe is currently the greatest threat to free speech in the West.
And I think they need to understand that that's a big problem when it comes to US-European relations.
There you go.
Not just repeating, you know, what J.D. Vance claimed, but absolutely endorsing it.
The greatest threat to free speech in Europe is Western Europe.
That's the...
You know, the area where you can't criticize the government, Matt.
Or set up alternative political parties or make media outlets that are strongly critical of the government.
It's Western Europe where that is the primary concern.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So, disagree.
But that's his opinion.
Very good.
And you also get that motif about, you know, we're so tired.
You know, you usually hear that on the...
Like, social justice side.
Like, I'm so tired of defending this, you know, do the work.
So Schellenberger's making a combination here of left and right-wing tropes and, you know, the kind of reverence for Europe, Matt, you know, the idea of Europe, the Roman statues, the busts, the classical architecture,
Greek philosophers, that were behind.
But this modern Europe with its, like, Gay pride police cars and locking people up for making jokes.
That's the big concern here, right?
And, like, obviously, it probably goes without saying, but, you know, if you consider Russia at least to be adjacent to Europe, there are some concerning trends in Russia regarding free speech curtailment that might come into play,
but that kind of stuff wouldn't be.
Yes, and also they'll go on to talk about Eastern Europe as still being a shining beacon, but they're not thinking of Eastern Europe when they're talking about that.
Allow me to illustrate, yes.
So, you know, you could also be concerned with things like Hungary's well-documented ruling back of press freedom and whatnot.
You know, if free speech is this red line for you, that's definitely going to get on your goat.
Or...
Yeah, well, you know, we should differentiate this a bit, too.
I spent a lot of time traveling in Europe in recent years, and I've made it a point in all of the countries I've visited, and that's most European countries, East and West, to meet with thought leaders, politicians,
journalists, actors, in all the countries that I've gone to, at dinners and lunches.
You know, I've come to a number of realizations as a consequence.
The first is very much akin to what you're describing, which is, like, what the hell's going on in France and Germany and the UK, the Netherlands, Western Europe, let's say, Western Europe.
That's a consequence, in my opinion, fundamentally, of Brussels, the European Union, the pernicious effect of Davos.
The globalist utopians, the apocalypse mongers, the people who tell you that the future's a miserable and wretched place unless you give us all the power.
But that's not Europe.
That's Western Europe.
Now, the Eastern Europeans, they're a different bunch, you know, and, well, we could walk through them to some degree.
Let's start with Hungary, because that's a country that's been absolutely pilloried by the legacy media in the press, in the Western press.
And, you know, that Orban has been described as, you know, shoulder to shoulder with, of course, Adolf Hitler, because, you know, he's the guy you drag out when you don't have anything else to say.
And I've been to Hungary a number of times, and Hungary has a very sophisticated family policy, pro-family policy, and it's been quite effective.
They've knocked their abortion rate down 38% with no increase in policing, so to speak, right?
It's part of a cultural shift.
Mmm.
So, there you go, Matt, as you said.
They've got big concerns about what's going on in Western Europe, but in Eastern Europe, I think it's basically any...
Government that has a right-wing populist leader.
There, the concerns are much less.
So, you know, people have complained about judicial independence being undermined by urban media control, lockdowns on NGOs and academic institutions, legal manipulation, various things.
There's been mass protests.
But, you know, Jordan went to dinner with thought leaders.
And various people in political power in Hungary.
And he's been very impressed all the times that he's been traveling around.
So who are you going to believe, Matt?
These lying NGOs, probably funded by George Soros.
That was actually something Orban has claimed.
So who are you going to believe?
Those or the people who work for the regime, who are taking you out for a state dinner, who are inviting you to give you an award for your commitment to free speech?
Which one?
Which one, Mark?
Well, Chris, they've been raising the fertility rate over there.
I think that's the best demonstration that free speech is alive and well.
Yeah, certainly absolutely related.
Yeah, absolutely related.
Actually, I was doing a little bit of looking around and I thought I would have to hand it to J.D. Vance because I saw that as well as criticising the Western European countries, who are all socialists and hate freedom, as we know, he did criticise an Eastern European country.
J.D. Vance's.
J.D. Vance's, that's right.
But then I looked into it.
I saw he was criticizing Romania's current government, which is a center-left Social Democratic Party.
And he was criticizing them for invalidating a far-right candidate due to alleged Russian interference.
This is a topic I don't know about, but I just think it's telling.
That's the only time he did punch east.
As I say, it's when somebody got in the way of alleged Russian interference.
So, yeah, look, I mean, just stepping back a bit.
I mean, transparently, what is going on here?
Vance and Trump and the entire MAGA thing are clearly not pro-European, not pro-NATO or the European Union.
If there's a vibe-based reason for why that is, it's because they are incredibly far right by Western standards and they don't like Western Europe because Western Europe is like Democrats, but more so, frankly.
That is the real reason.
And like you said, the free speech stuff gets bandied about like a little cudgel, but it's just transparently not the reason why Vance and Trump dislike them so much.
And you heard the, you know, the litany of enemies that this Jordan Peterson is trotting out, but this is in line with Schellenberger later, right?
There's the European Union, Davos, the globalist utopians, the apocalypse mongers, right?
So this is, it's an Alex Jones-ian rant, like kind of conflating, you know, and Jordan Peterson is often doing this with postmodern neo-Marxist globalists, right?
And the general connecting factor is anybody that is viewed as like...
Center or more to the left of like a hard right populist leader, right?
But alongside that, you also get this kind of appeal, you know, that it's the legacy media demonizing them, right?
It's all a smokescreen and the way that you can actually find out.
This is why these fucking dinners should be outlawed, that the IDW people keep going on.
Because he actually makes reference again to, like, when I was traveling around and I was having dinners and lunches, you know, I didn't see any of the things that NGOs or, like, freedom of speech organizations.
Things which purely exist to promote journalistic free speech.
You know, that's all they're for.
Rank Hungary.
As having really severe problems.
But Jordan Peterson doesn't care about that because he had a nice conversation at dinner.
And this is just this thing that we see all the time in this heterodox sphere.
It's like, if they met someone and they had a good time, then everything's obviously being exaggerated about the criticism.
They never actually do any work to look into press freedoms or anything like that.
That doesn't matter, right?
It's just their personal experience is the most important.
Well, personal experience is important, but also they like the vibes, right?
They like the ultra-conservative, traditionalist, family, Christian vibes, as opposed to the decadent West, which, of course, is the line that Vladimir Putin's Russia has been trying to push for so long.
Yes, so just to give a bit more flavor to those vibes.
And my experience in Budapest, in particular, Like, I got to know the Hungarian president.
That's not Orbán, the previous president.
And she was the author of the Hungarian, or one of the authors of the Hungarian pro-family policies.
And I also saw Budapest rebuilding itself.
The goal of the Orbán administration is to make Budapest into the most beautiful city in Europe.
And, you know, they have some real geographic advantages there.
It's built along a river, and it's very beautiful already.
And then Poland.
Poland has a thriving economy.
They don't have an immigration issue.
And the Eastern Europeans are incredibly, incredibly dedicated supporters of the Western tradition and the U.S. in particular, not least because they remember what it was like to spend 75 years under the thumb of the Soviet totalitarians.
So even the left-wingers in Eastern Europe aren't completely out of their minds.
You know, like they are in Germany in particular, right?
So it would be useful for the, and maybe this is already happening, but it would be useful for the Trump administration people to differentiate between the Western Europeans, the Eastern, you know, the European Union types, the globalists, the WEF,
and the Eastern Europeans who are, like I thought the last few times that I went through Europe that it...
The salvation of Europe would be Eastern Europe, surprisingly enough.
Like, who would have ever guessed that was going to be the case?
Yeah, so Eastern Europe is the salvation.
Not economically, one would assume, since, you know, despite some progress, they're still well behind more developed Western European countries, but purely in terms of returning to conservative, cultural, Christian values,
traditional family structures.
And, you know, I mean, I think it's fine to...
Provide financial support to families, tax exemptions and so on, the number of kids, that kind of thing.
Parental leave, all those are good things, but the less solubrious side of it is the restrictions on LGBTQ rights, right?
Not allowing any kind of representation in education and media and basically sending the cultural message that it's not okay to be gay.
Yeah, there's that.
And there's also here, Matt, that Peterson has the bugbear about the Soviets, right?
The communists.
That's an issue, right?
So he mentions that these people in Eastern Europe remember what it was like to live under the Soviet system.
And so they're not attracted to communism, right?
But he sort of ignores the modern version of that, which is Poland, Georgia, you know, Ukraine.
Those are countries in Eastern Europe that are rather concerned not about the communist Soviet Russia, which doesn't exist anymore, but the modern expansionist Russia run by Putin.
And so Peterson and Schellenberger, you know, in general, have been rather apologetic for the Russian regime and painting, you know, the...
The reaction against that is overwrought and largely led by NATO and Western European expansionism, all those kind of things.
But there, it's interesting that he can acknowledge the Eastern Europe dislike for the influence of the Soviet Union, but he doesn't seem to be capable of putting the next stage of that,
that they might have legitimate concerns.
About the modern Russian state, which has invaded, you know, neighboring ex-Soviet satellites in recent history.
But yeah.
I mean, yeah, I think the skew that he puts on it is this, basically.
In Jordan Peterson's framing, Eastern Europeans who have lived under communism really understand the value of liberalism, right?
And totally love these ideas of freedom and democracy because they know how terrible the alternative is.
In the decadent West, they kind of love communism now.
They're really into it.
But, you know, that is not the correct framing, I think.
On one hand, yes, there's a huge amount of sentiment towards westernization, for want of a better word, in places like Ukraine, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and so on.
But at the same time, you have other parties and other segments, which is nostalgia for communism that is there, that exists.
Even in Eastern Germany.
But also, under communism, there was quite a lot of promotion of traditional conservative social structures, which is often aligned with those groups.
So, yeah, it's a bit more complicated than that.
And the kind of attraction that there is in Eastern Europe, which is legitimate, I think, is for precisely the kind of political and economic organization that exists in Europe today.
Not in some sort of, you know, rose-tinted image of the past that Jordan Peterson has.
And yeah, you know, there are left-wing parties in the West, but if you take like the Greens in Germany or other left-wing parties, they're not radicals that are looking to institute communism.
But in Jordan Peterson's mind, they are, right?
Because they're too left-wing.
He sees that as equivalent to communism.
And in the wake of, you know, all the news surrounding various students in the U.S. or green card permanent resident holders, whatever, all being threatened, if not actually deported for supporting anti-American points of view,
right, in the parlance of the current Trump regime.
Or doing these mass roundups of people.
We are alleged to be members of gangs, right?
But without actually taking them to court and whatever.
Like, these are all infringements of free speech because if you're not granted a judicial process, this would be constraining your free speech, right?
Like in a country, this kind of thing.
But listen to Jordan Peterson on his conclusion here when it comes to Europe and free speech.
So, and the free speech issue...
Thing is, you know, we still don't understand free speech properly because, you know, you said that if the Europeans keep undermining free speech and that battle's being played out in the virtual world,
particularly with regards likely to X, say, more than anything else, that their security is going to be undermined.
And you were thinking about...
them compromising their relationship with the U.S. But what's necessary to understand is that you do undermine your security by interfering with free speech because there's no difference between free speech and creative and corrective thought.
Those are the same thing.
And so any culture that clamps down on the right to free speech, which isn't just another hedonistic privilege, they literally interfere with the mechanism that keeps their And all of this is based on European regulators,
the European Union, putting some potential penalties on Musk's ex regarding the dissemination of disinformation and promoting Nazis, for instance.
Indisputably does.
Like all of this stuff about free speech and how Europe is, you know, back trailing towards fascism and stuff is because they want to place some restrictions, like some degree of moderation on that platform.
Well, it is that, as he mentions X, but it's also, you know, things around hate speech laws and all that kind of stuff.
So there is, there's a...
Discussion that you can have there about government overreach and the way that laws are applied too heavy-handedly by the police or whether the police should be going out and dealing with people's opinions online that they tweet about.
I would probably agree with Schellenberger and Peterson and more reasonable versions of their criticisms about where that balance should be.
But it's the absolute rank Hypocrisy that gets me because if you made this kind of peon for freedom of speech and expression and how it's the fundamental value of a society and Western Europe is, you know, damaging itself by forgetting what that means,
then you should absolutely be a critic of the Trump regime when it starts doing all of the various chilling things which it's done, you know, towards free speech.
Very, very overt measures.
But Jordan Peterson, Michael Schellenberger, any other cadre of MAGA apologists never do.
They never will.
And just to highlight, we'll go back to Schellenberger now.
This is him talking about, well, Trump is back.
So what's happening in America in comparison to the West, which is letting itself down?
Western Europe, it's letting itself down.
What's going on in America?
Look, you know, America is, I mean, sounds so corny, but I mean, America's back in just a big way.
I mean, you've just got a character there in the White House that is, they are moving faster than anybody.
I mean, I was just there talking to folks, you know, various places, and everybody's surprised at how fast they're moving.
And of course, Elon has accelerated that, the number of things that are happening.
The thing that we were ostensibly going to talk about today, for example, not to, we don't have to go to it right away, but just...
The whole reason there's a debate in the United States right now about the United States Agency for International Development, USAID, is simply because Elon was seeking to basically gain access to the computer systems, the servers, the buildings themselves that these agencies occupy.
And that was the agency that wouldn't give them access.
It wouldn't give them clearance.
So that was when Trump, they just shut it down.
They just were like, if we can't get...
We were the...
He's the democratically elected president of the United States who has full authority, according to Article 2 of the U.S. Constitution, over every single executive branch agency, and that includes Agency of International Development, when they are refusing access to the representative of the president of the United States,
who happens to be our greatest technologist, they just were like, fine, if you're going to play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
And the stupid prize they got was that they got shut down, including pulling back all of their people.
So the incident they're referring to is when USA attempted to prevent Elon Musk's cyber whiz kids from accessing classified information in their things.
And, you know, this has been in the news, right?
They, like, email, like, I forget, but they're basically communicating with each other or completely insecure.
So there's a lot of...
Oh, Signal.
They were on Signal and they accidentally added a journalist to the...
Yeah.
But that wasn't Doge.
That was another incompetent aspect of the...
No, that's right.
Separate issue.
Another separate issue is Donald Trump with his treatment of classified documents and so on.
But I mean, the point is, is that these government agencies have rules for accessing classified information, security clearance, right?
Because USAID is not just...
Purely humanitarian stuff, it is also connected to geopolitical stuff.
It's kind of got a twin mandate, it's fair to say.
It's partly humanitarian, yes, but it's also partly in furthering American geopolitical interests.
So I could well imagine that there are security things in place.
Anyway, whatever.
Trump, it's been shut down.
It's been totally, totally shut down.
It's all ended now.
Well, that's not, yes.
One, that's not true.
And two, Schellenberger speaks with competence that like, you know, we're in the US and the president has complete control over USAID, right?
And that's not true.
The USAID exists by congressional statute, right?
They set the budget for it.
The president appoints the administrator.
And this requires Senate.
It's all tied into the American system, which is set up around three separate checks and balances.
And that's a trend that's been going on even before Trump, with the presidency accruing more and more power.
And it's been sped up a lot under Trump.
So the way Schellenberger represents it, it's all very simple.
Trump was elected by the people.
Trump's the president.
He's the king of America now.
Anyone that Trump appoints can do whatever they want because they have the mandate of Trump.
Yeah, so what's Congress even for?
Why do you need any of these other organizations?
You just have a king and the king does whatever they want, right?
The Supreme Court, yeah.
And in this case as well, like you mentioned, Matt, with Doge, the issue is that Trump just created a new organ, right?
System, the agency, whatever you want to call it, but the actual legal rules around what it can and can't do, what they can and can't access, are unclear, right?
And it's even unclear when there's been challenges what exactly Elon Musk's role is in government, right?
Because he's not elected and there are obviously restrictions on people who, you know, the president can appoint special advisors and whatnot, but it doesn't just give them full access to everything that they want.
Access to, right?
People have rights to privacy.
But Schellenberg, or again, somebody who's supposed to be this, you know, lone journalist willing to stand up about corrupt use of power or whatnot, has no issue with that.
He's just like, this is the deep state preventing Elon Musk from, you know, bringing America back.
America's back, you know, as he said at the start, especially in the light of America tanking.
The economy, just very recently.
It's back in a very interesting way, but to Schellenberger and Peterson, it's all good.
It's all glory to the leader.
Everything they're doing is great.
Elon Musk is the chief technologist.
That's it.
It's propaganda.
It is propaganda.
That's the thing that was getting me about, because I agree with you with the European thing.
The little I know about some of the laws around speech and stuff in Europe, I tend to agree with these guys around those particular things to some degree.
But clearly, that's not what's important to them.
They are first and foremost cheerleaders for Elon Musk, for J.D. Vance, Donald Trump, this cadre of powerful people that are running things and just simply not interested in anything else.
I mean, what's also telling Chris is we focus on playing clips.
So we talk about what they talk about.
Yeah.
But it's true this was a month ago, but it is telling what they don't talk about.
Like, I bet they won't be talking about any of the controversies which have been all over the news in terms of what you just referred to, for instance, the way that Trump's tariffs things have caused a major crisis for very little discernible gain and frankly make no sense according to anyone who understands the economy.
I mean, I don't see them.
Addressing those sorts of issues critically, rather it's a matter of just acting as cheerleaders for whatever it is they happen to be doing.
Well, I just had a look at Schellenberger's Substack, and you have Bacha Ungar Sargon, Trump is waging class warfare on Wall Street for the sake of the American working class.
That's the most recent argument.
Tariff chaos is the messy birth of a new nationalist order.
There you go.
Yeah, that's it.
Indifference to working people behind elite panic over tariffs.
Those elites, they're such tough cocks, Chris.
They're so weak.
Yeah, it's only them that will suffer from tariffs on Chinese goods.
That's it.
If the economy collapses, Matt.
You know, it's not like ordinary working class people feel very near the brunt of that.
It's only going to affect billionaires and millionaires.
Yeah, that's right.
That's right.
If there's a lot of inflation and things end up costing a lot more, that only really affects those very rich elites.
Yeah, so I think the point is that this is...
I don't know.
I mean, it's the usual story, isn't it?
It's presented as this is an intellectual discussion about fundamental issues.
Jordan Peterson, in his amazing way, relates it to all kinds of abstruse concepts that he's got floating around his head.
But, you know, really what it is, is partisan cheerleading.
It's not even partisan.
It feels absolutely like propaganda.
It is propaganda.
Yeah, that's correct.
For the American administration.
And just to give another example, you know, we heard...
U.S. aid and high aid is preventing the will of the dear leader and the corruption that's been uncovered by Elon Musk and whatnot.
But it might go farther than that.
What you're seeing them bringing into government, which none of us could have imagined, is first of all this awareness that you can't really reform institutions.
People talk about that, but really you have to just shut them down.
And build something fresh.
That's the only way you can get the old guard out and you have to have new leadership and a new constitution or a new set of rules.
But also that you don't really know what's going on until you move fast and break things.
And so, like, this is something, you know, that I experienced too, which is like, you just have to go out there and sort of do things in the world to figure out what is the federal government.
You sort of think you know what the federal government is because we, you know, we have lists of...
We didn't know what they were doing.
And what we discovered is that they were part of the blowback of U.S. counterterrorism, counterinsurgency, counterpopulism that was pushed abroad with the Arab Spring and then the color revolutions in Eastern Europe and came back.
And that those characters that led the censorship, disinformation, lawfare and other dirty tricks that they used for regime change abroad.
Brought those tactics and strategies to the United States and weaponized them against Trump, MAGA, Republicans.
Right, right.
Now, I've been looking into USAID because I knew very little about it until Trump got rid of it.
Like Schellenberger, right?
He said, nobody knew you.
Nobody knew.
That's right.
But it's actually pretty easy to find out because you can search, what's it called, foreignassistance.org.
You can actually see all the funding for the different things and there are breakdowns there.
Let's follow.
So according to Schellenberger, with USAID, it's primarily been used for dirty tricks campaigns, fostering terrible things like Arab Spring, regime change overseas.
And now USAID has then taken this sort of bag of dirty tricks and been applying it to the US population.
Is that right?
Yeah.
I mean, it was a little bit confused because he said, What we discovered is that they were part of the blowback of U.S. counter-terrorism, counter-insurgency, counter-populism that was pushed abroad with the Arab Spring and then the colour revolutions in Eastern Europe and came back.
And then those characters used their specialities in censorship, disinformation, lawfare against MAGA people, right?
But so, like, if I'm following along here, so...
The Arab Spring and the colour revolutions.
So that would be like the yellow shirts in like...
Oh, sorry, in France.
He said Eastern Europe.
So those are inauthentic movements, right?
But aren't a bunch of those populist?
Because he describes it as anti-populist, but they were...
A lot of those were also movements to try and oust dictators.
And based on the people having had enough and wanting to have a government, not an out-of-touch elite that was extracting things.
It sounds a little bit confused, but I think the general thing is for Schellenberger, this is the interesting horseshoe thing.
Where he is in the camp that the US foreign policy, it's all just the US doing bad things, overthrowing countries and meddling in foreign affairs, right?
Like, you know, the CIA doing dirty tricks in Iran and all that kind of stuff.
And then that's come back.
So like, I guess he would probably be someone that presents the Maidan revolution, for example, as a Product of US interference, right?
In Ukraine.
Yeah.
So, anti-populist because it iced the pro-Russian.
Yeah, it is very confusing because the way they phrase it is confusing.
And maybe it's confusing on purpose because I don't think Michael Schellenberger fully understands or cares, really.
I get the general point there.
I think he just kind of mixed in things together, right?
The general point is U.S. has been doing terrible things abroad.
The U.S. was part of this or involved with it.
It's maybe the soft power wing of that.
And they were bringing back these techniques to the U.S. Now they're being uncovered that they were doing this.
But also, isn't part of the narrative that U.S. Was anti-American?
Like, it was supporting Hamas and it was, you know, they got this wrong because they identified the condoms going to Hamas or whatever, but it was actually, they just got, like, the names confused and all that kind of thing.
So, is the point that there was a reaction to the American foreign policy thing and it led to, like, an anti-American policy which was in USAID?
And then that was, like, transferred back to...
I'm not sure.
I mean, I was looking into the USA thing, right?
And there's definitely, like most, you know, government agencies, there are all kinds of audits and things that are always going on.
They sometimes find that money was misspent or, you know, they didn't get good value for money, all the usual things.
But fundamentally, it's, what, maybe 1% of government spending.
It's pretty small.
A lot of it, like the big ticket items that it's spent on is economic development, humanitarian assistance, like food aid and stuff like that when there's, you know, a crisis.
One of the big ones is health, so HIV, AIDS funding and other initiatives like to prevent contagious diseases, right?
Stuff like malaria.
And, you know, there's percentages being spent on what they call peace and security and, you know, various other governance things and whatever.
Most recently, a lot of it's been spent on Ukraine.
Right?
A lot of it has forms.
So it's a pretty general, it's a very general kind of category of American spending, like encompassing everything from malaria reduction programs, providing family planning, including contraceptives, to very poor countries where,
you know, they've got...
Very unfortunate if they have the same name as a terrorist organization.
Any location or...
I can't remember if it was Gaza or Hamas, but there was one where there was a confusion over their naming.
But at the same time, it includes military support to Israel.
And a lot of non-military support to Ukraine to basically bolster their economy as they resist Russia.
So, I mean, here's my take.
Here's my guess of it.
Because from what I heard from these guys in this interview, it's very confused.
All they know is that they don't like it.
All I know is it's completely corrupt.
Yeah, it's a villain because Trump said it's a bad thing.
Exactly.
Trump said it's a bad thing, so now we figure out how it's a bad thing.
I think it's very similar to the thing that went on with tariffs.
Trump unveiled tariffs against everybody, which makes no sense, but there is no shortage of people just jumping in to sane wash it.
Like Michael Schellenberger.
Established.
And, you know, we leapt over the bit at the start, Matt, but I think it's worth noting we always talk about the anti-institution, anti-establishment sentiment, right?
And here you hear it in force that, look, the establishment, the institutions are so corrupt.
They need to be absolutely torn down and built up with new leadership, right?
And like, you know, these guys, they constantly go on about how...
The far left is radical communists that want to return to a year zero.
But their rhetoric here is exactly the same.
They're saying this is so rotten, it's so corrupt, and there's so many corrupt individuals that are going to prevent the glorious new regime.
So we've got to wipe it all out, only install loyalists, and restart society.
You might say a year zero.
Well, it's very ironic because right at the very beginning, Chris, you noted a very common thing, which is Jordan Peterson, when he introduced Schellenberger, is reluctant to say that he's moved in a strongly conservative direction.
Yeah.
You know, he qualifies it.
So, I mean, this is a common thing that we see with our gurus, but with these guys in particular, which is a great reluctance to accept the fact that they are conservative, right?
And now at the same time, we see this reluctance.
As you pointed out just then, that the program of Make America Great Again, Make America Healthy Again, whatever it is that the MAGA project is doing, is incredibly radical.
It's incredibly radical.
So you have this weird situation where these cheerleaders for what is a kind of revolutionary, year zero, utopian type movement, like to represent themselves as just sensible.
Centrists, reasonable type people.
I mean, it kind of parallels on the left where I think a lot of left-wing people are basically conventional, institutional, favoring, you know, stay-the-course type people, people like me.
But we also sometimes like to think of ourselves as radicals and revolutionaries because it's kind of cooler.
So there's kind of an inverse thing.
Yeah, but it's an inverse because they're actually...
They're actually doing it.
They're actually doing it.
They're trying to dismantle it, not just say it.
You also heard, just to mention, the Mark Zuckerberg move fast and break things being referenced.
It's kind of, as you hinted when you introduced him, Schellenberger likes to present himself as on the cutting edge of modern technology and this kind of Silicon Valley.
Ethos, right?
But, of course, it's like cheerleading a very specific segment of that.
But, like, just by invoking, you know, the cat faces, move fast, and briefings, and the USA, nobody knew what it did.
But actually, you know, people in government did know what it did.
Civil service people were aware, right?
It's just like, it's the same thing as Elon Musk discovering the stuff around the grooming gangs in the UK.
Like, they act like if they never learned it.
It's there for absolutely...
They're like babies.
They don't have an image that knowledge exists before they come across it.
They don't have a theory of mind yet.
They can't accept that anyone else could know something.
Object permanency doesn't seem to exist.
But anyway, let's see what else links into this USAID stuff.
Because we're painting them as polemical partisans who will wedge anything into a Trumpist narrative.
But perhaps that's unfair, man.
Perhaps that's unfair.
How did it become so deranged that it would use the weapons of regime change against our own democratically elected president from 2016 to 2020, including many of us suspect but can't yet prove in January 6th?
How did that happen?
And then the subsequent question is, what do we do now?
I mean, Jordan, after we've spent billions of dollars creating this elaborate foreign policy establishment, otherwise known as the blob, which includes many academic journals, academic divisions of universities, whole think tanks, parts of the federal government, nobody has theorized what comes now.
Nobody has theorized what happens if the United States shuts down its main agency for soft power.
That's what USAID was, Agency for National Development.
It was just a mechanism of soft power alongside the CIA.
It was really supposed to be, you know, State Department, AID, CIA, all supposed to be run by the National Security Council, all supposed to be run by the President of the United States.
What happens when that's not there anymore?
Yeah, what happens indeed?
But at the beginning, Chris...
January 6th.
Yeah, January 6th.
So, remind me, when he's saying this, is he still referring to USAID as being like an instrument that's being deployed against Americans?
Yeah, yeah.
This follows on.
I mean, it's unclear, right?
But it's probably the whole...
Deep state apparatus, right?
But yeah, so they use the weapons of regime change against their own president.
So presumably suggesting that, you know, the 2020 election that Donald Trump lost was because the Biden administration, you know, was...
I mean, we've learned it, Matt, with the Twitter files and whatnot, that it was...
That's the only way Trump could have been defeated.
And actually, January 6th itself, as Schellenberger says there, he can't prove it yet.
But he suspects that that may be not what it appears on the outside.
And you've probably got a clip of this, but I think a little bit later on, he suggests that the January 6th thing was kind of orchestrated by the left, like ensuring that the capital wasn't properly protected.
And so really, they kind of brought it upon themselves.
Yes.
So let's have a listen to some of that.
Basically, Jedi mind trick, brainwashing to pre-bunk or program the journalists and the social media companies into thinking that a future story about Hunter Biden and Burisma would be a Russian hack and leak operation and spreading disinformation in advance,
programming people, and then demanding censorship on the basis of it.
And I think we're going to find out a lot more about January 6th as well as a kind of construction rather than something organic.
A clear decision was made at a minimum to not provide adequate security.
We know that for sure because the Capitol Police Chief has written a whole book on it.
And so you look at that series of events and you also look at what the U.S. security state had done in places like Brazil and the Philippines and other parts of the world.
And of course, this goes back decades.
And it's a clear...
It's a clear counter-populist effort run by these deep state organizations, run by people who had lost their minds, you know, who have all the rational abilities, but they had lost, they had Trump derangement syndrome and turned their enormous powers, their incredible psychological,
sociological, political, technological powers against their own people to undermine democracy and attack free speech.
Oh, fuck me about that.
It's chilling, right?
This is absolute propaganda.
It is insane, isn't it?
Taking the January 6th Capitol attack, a thing which is quite obviously orchestrated by Trump in plain sight.
Trump and his supporters, and it's been documented in a whole bunch of investigations, a whole bunch of detailed legal cases that he is only able to get out of.
Because of, like, becoming president again and because the Supreme Court, you know, granted him immunity in essence.
Yeah, and now he's in the process of punishing the law firms that were involved in those cases and extracting hundreds of millions of dollars from them in punishment.
Like, it is chilling.
And this is classic conspiratorial logic, isn't it?
Where you take the thing that is the main fly in the ointment.
Like, the main thing that doesn't fit your narrative nicely, which is that Trump did encourage an attack on the Capitol and that, like, rabid right-wingers, people that love Jordan Peterson and people like him, did this thing.
No, no, no, no, no.
It might seem like that.
Actually, it was a construction by the deep state.
USAID.
Of all instruments.
Who would have guessed, right?
But USA.
Well, if you'd known about it, Matt, if you'd known the deep and dirty tricks that they were up to, it would have been obvious.
But, you know, we didn't know.
No one knew.
No one knew what USA was.
I do find it chilling, like this degree of, yeah, just rampant conspiracism.
And, you know, basically in the service.
In the service of the regime.
Yeah, that's right.
In service of the current.
Regime is a good word for it.
And then it becomes just straight up propaganda, right?
It becomes like the conspiracy theories that, well, you know, authoritarian regimes have always used to garner popular support.
Yeah, it's a worry.
Even with the buzzwords, right?
You got Trump derangement syndrome thrown in there.
And you also had this, you know, these deep state actors who were able, you know, with their enormous powers, incredible psychological, sociological, political, technological prowess, right?
They wielded it and they got Biden into power.
Then they had four years to build in deeper, you know, to set everything up more strongly, to entrench deeper and deeper and prevent it.
Funnily, they failed, despite Trump saying in advance that they would stitch up the election results, that the media, you know, would never allow him to win again, all of that.
So they had even longer to do it.
And despite all this power that they'd amassed.
They weren't able to do it.
It's probably because Elon Musk bought Twitter and was able to free speech.
There's always reasons, Chris.
You can't stop the will of the American people.
Their love of freedom.
Even the deep state can't do that.
There you go, Matt.
Regime change being weaponized against people.
On January 6th and all this kind of thing, right?
But, you know, Jordan Peterson, we heard him compare Tulsi Gabbard and the collection of Trumpian thunderheads to the, you know, greatest superheroes, the X-Men.
They're the champions that we need, Matt.
They're the greatest thinkers the world has seen since Socrates.
Let's hear a little bit more about...
Jordan Peterson's view of Musk.
Because, you know, Musk has now been involved in things with those and whatnot.
So has he changed his opinion?
You know, has he reassessed that thing at all?
And his ability to insert himself into these hidden systems is absolutely revolutionary.
You know, it's a mythological trope, an ancient mythological trope that...
It's the evil brother of the rightful king who is one of the prime enemies of the state.
It's the evil brother of the righteous king and it's the goddess of chaos.
Those are the two enemies.
It's the social structure pathologized or the natural world rebelling.
Right, so historic enemies.
Well, the evil brother of the king is camouflage and corruption.
And what happens...
As a system develops is that it accretes predators and parasites.
That's a biological metaphor.
And if the load gets too heavy, the system collapses.
And the antidote to that, the Egyptians had figured this out, the ancient Egyptians.
The antidote to that was clear, honest speech and careful attention.
The Egyptians actually had a god who specified that, signified that.
That was Horus, and he was the defeater, the eternal enemy of the evil king.
And Musk is playing that role with his...
No, no.
So I guess all those audits and things I read, they don't exist.
They don't exist.
Jordan's probably not read them.
Classic, yeah.
He doesn't look at them, so they don't exist.
Yes, that's classic Jordan.
In case the rampant conspiracism of Schellenberger wasn't convincing enough for you, what you really need is a kind of fairy tale that encompasses these deep Jungian archetypes of the rightful king,
the agent of chaos, the...
I forget who the brother was, but I think the brother is...
The evil brother.
The evil brother, is that the deep state?
Yeah, I was wondering where he was going to put that there, but yes, it seems the deep state is the evil brother.
I see.
Forget about the goddess of chaos.
Or maybe the goddess of chaos.
It's both.
Yes.
So, yeah, so we're seeing, you know, maybe Jordan Peterson's fairy stories are kind of...
Whimsical and charming in the context of a self-help book to some degree.
But here it's simply at the surface of straight up propaganda, right?
Yeah.
So Elon Musk is not an incompetent buffoon barreling around, you know, saying he's going to cut four trillion or whatever.
Constantly downstream that doesn't understand what agencies do or how even their accounting works, right?
It's not that.
He's actually an instantiation of the Egyptian god Horus, who is a manifestation of honest speech and careful attention.
Oh, that sounds like that.
That sounds like Elon Musk.
Exactly like Elon Musk.
And is the eternal enemy of the evil brother.
I'm somewhat dubious of Jordan Peterson's knowledge.
He speaks very confidently.
Any time that I've heard him actually describe things, it's often very inaccurate.
But nonetheless, let's accept that Horace is the eternal enemy of the good king's evil brother, which is the deep state in this analogy.
So you've got Schellenberger, as you said, who provides the conspiratorial dribble with reference to the CIA and all these programs and the kind of investigative reporter.
Slant, right, that he has, which is all just propagandist bullshit, right?
Fantasy as well.
And Jordan Peterson here contributes to it by saying, like, what if we add mythology?
What if we call them, like, gods amongst men?
And then there's even that bit where he likens the deep state, I think, to predators and parasites, right?
Always good, Matt, to just...
Get that in, though.
The reference that your enemies are filthy parasites or biological things that are attacking the integrity of the system that need to be wiped out.
And just in case you missed it, he said, that's a biological metaphor.
Just to make that clear.
That's not at all like the propaganda that was going on in Rwanda where they were calling tootsies similar things.
No, no.
It's a scientific metaphor.
No, Jordan knows.
All about that.
So he wouldn't be, you know, he's concerned about that trend towards dehumanization, right?
So he laud Elon Musk as a god man and instantiation of Horus.
I wonder if Hermes was busy.
But in any case, Matt, they're not going to focus on this parasite metaphor to focus on the people that they're criticizing because they know where that dehumanization might lead.
Well, if we put more energy and time into reducing the efficiency, yeah, but then you wouldn't be running your business anymore, right?
So there's like, you can waste time trying to deal with the waste.
Then there's fraud.
That's bad.
That shows not just a kind of, you know, I think people tend to think of fraud like, oh, the police haven't done a good enough job or the police are corrupted.
It represents a weakening and corruption of the body, of the system that you're actually, as you said before, it's not, there's always parasites.
There's always viruses.
When the host becomes vulnerable and weakened and old and prone to disease is when you're prone to fraud.
And then you get the worst of them all by far, which is abuse, by which is abuse of power.
And we are coming out of a period of extreme abuse of powers.
I mean, we can debate the period of time that's relevant.
I think the last 12 years...
We should think of it as a woke reign of terror, meaning a period of great fear, certainly universities, media, wokeism.
I mean, really, it starts with Black Lives Matter, ends with the election of President Trump in 2024.
That was a period of abuse of power.
Every single major institution, medical power, educational power, media power, political power.
All very familiar, though, isn't it?
This is the standard MAGA alternative reality, right?
It is the alternative.
But I mean, it's so obviously an inversion of reality.
Complaining about presidential overreach in the past 12 years.
And I would imagine that's accepting Trump's period there.
But their presentation there, Matt, is like, it's all ended.
Like, there was overreach.
The president was overreaching his power, was not heeding the checks and balances that are in place.
And now it's all being corrected by God-leader Trump and his servant Horace.
And again, Matt, that thing that I want to highlight there, the weakening and corruption of the body of the system from the parasites and viruses, which are always there.
They've been corrupting the healthy body.
Where is this imagery from?
Where is the imagery where you compare the people that are damaging the state, preventing the glorious leader from enacting his vision, to these parasitic entities that are sucking the lifeblood of the nation out?
Does any of that sound familiar?
It's so on the nose that I feel like it should be incredibly obvious, but I don't know.
Maybe...
Maybe not.
I don't think it is obvious to them, but certainly not to Jordan.
He's so delusional.
And so I don't think the listeners get it.
I think they believe what it says on the tin, which is this is about freedom.
This is about correcting this woke reign of terror.
And yeah, I mean, it is frightening because that is the fascist kind of mindset where black is white, white is black.
You could say the most outrageous things, concoct the most outrageous fictions, and it somehow still works.
Yeah.
Well, Matt, you know, you mentioned fascism there, right?
I know you left these, like the furrowing, these accusations, you know, like the candy.
I do.
Just one man mentions their struggle in Geo and the parasites besetting the nation, and you're immediately willing to, you know, draw parallels.
But, you know, what I...
What I think is important here is to think about, like, what makes people man?
Like, where does economic development of prosperity come from?
And what makes people manly man?
It's tariffs, isn't it?
Is it tariffs?
Well, let's hear something.
I've got two clips that speak to these important things, and I'll hear no more mention of fascism, okay?
Okay.
And what gets revealed when Elon and Trump break open the U.S. government is we see this agency that was always there in their peripheral vision.
Everybody sort of knew about, but you kind of forgot about, USAID, Agency for International Development.
And what opens up is a bunch of, you know, things that you had forgotten but are important to remember.
The first is that human economic development.
Prosperity growth comes from within.
It comes from the core values of within.
Namely, delayed gratification, hard work, saving on principle, waiting to get married until you can afford your own home and sustain your own family, which means healthy sublimation.
That those things are the recipe.
Integration.
Integration, not sublimation.
Yes, and Jordan embarks very enthusiastically on the very important delineation of integration from sublimation.
But the important thing is, Chris, as you know, is that it's really what drives economic growth, what brings people out of poverty, what prevents the spread of contagious diseases is being a manly man.
Internal values, man.
Ask not what the state can do for you.
Ask what you can do for the state, right?
Shouldn't we all be wanting to work for the national ethic, right, to build this great nation of ours?
Sure, it might involve sacrifice.
It might involve delaying gratification.
But these are values that have been core to our people for many, many centuries.
Well, Chris, this is why I said I think this is straight up exactly the same as the recent thing with the tariffs, where you had propagandists like this.
Coming up with all of these post-op explanations for why the random fucking thing that the dear leaders have done makes perfect sense, right?
So here, he's actually referring to the USAID thing specifically.
And so not only is USAID a terrible thing because it's totally corrupt and it's so wasteful, you know, it's just wasting all this money.
But not only that, it's actually an insidious force, which is just...
They're doing CIA-style dirty tricks campaigns, which have now been turned against the American people.
Not only that, actually, you know, humanitarian aid is a waste of money in and of itself.
Like, you think you're helping by preventing the spread of contagious diseases worldwide, preventing the spread of AIDS, HIV?
No, you're not.
Actually, humanitarian aid is a waste of time.
People need to look deep into their soul and pull themselves up by their bootstraps.
So that's a waste too.
It's just that kind of over-explaining.
They're just coming up with reasons why post hoc, oh yes, it was a great idea to just completely dismantle this government program.
Well, actually, Matt, if you think about it, these programs that, you know, USAID was funding to, like, reduce malaria in Africa and whatnot, sure, they might be, in some sense, like, strengthening the health in those countries where you could talk about, like, history that involves,
you know, exploitation that the U.S. may have been involved with a little bit, right?
Like, you could view it as that, but you can also view it as weakening the U.S., like making it, you know, parasites leaching off the power.
Of the US and this kind of thing.
I mean, both views, right?
They're equally just a matter of framing.
It's all in the eye of the beholder.
And I mean, manliness, man.
You know, we like to think about what it's...
You can't even talk about health anymore without being right-wing, right?
We've established that.
We know that's true.
But people need to talk a bit more about what it means to be a man.
We don't hear about it enough in these podcasts in The Head of a Dark Sphere.
So let's see if Schellenberger has a take on that.
I mean, I think that that picture that you're describing is the same one that Harvey Mansfield lays out in his wonderful book, Manliness, where he has three levels of masculinity.
The first is weak men who are incapable of defending themselves and others.
Manly men who are strong men who look down on the weak men, Will also abuse their power.
And then the gentleman, who has the power of the manly man, but keeps it in reserve to protect his family, you know, his bride, his children, his family, his nation, civilization, but he's not going to abuse his power.
So we've seen a regression where civilization was created by gentlemen, as you said.
Gentlemen, they became gentlemen.
In the process of creating civilization, they become gentlemen.
Or in the process of becoming gentlemen, they create civilization, which is to say a society based on universal rules, on the view of humans as all equal under first God and then equal under the law.
And that everybody has these fundamental, inalienable human rights.
This is the basis of what we call Western civilization, and it's a civilization of gentlemen.
Well, we've seen a mass derangement, you know, over the last 12 years, but particularly with the election of Trump, you saw a derangement occurring in every institution.
And what happens with USAID?
And within the intelligence communities and the foreign policy establishment is a massive derangement and abuse of power where the gentlemen stop being gentlemen, they become aggressive manly men, and they decide that they know what's best, and they can't stand all this democracy,
which they dismiss as populism, and they describe populism as its opposite.
They project onto populism, totalitarianism.
And in the name of preventing totalitarianism, create a censorship industrial complex, which was already, we know, was international.
US, UK, US, Brazil, US, Europe, Canada involved in it, particularly the Five Eyes, all coming out of the intelligence community because they're the ones that had run the censorship and disinformation operations, again, in Arab Spring and then the Color Revolutions.
So this is...
That's mental, obviously, on multiple levels, but let's just start with the most concrete level, which you brought up earlier, Chris.
He's saying that the USA people, who are not the proper gentlemen, not the good manly men, but the second tier...
No, they are manly men.
They're not gentlemen.
The gentlemen are evolved manly men.
That's right.
They've regressed to second tier men.
Bullies, in other words, who have forgotten about the fundamental principles of equality before the law and free speech, presumably, and so on.
And that's why they are kind of repressing populist movements, right?
Yes.
Around the world.
But, as you pointed out, the USA, it's done many things.
This is probably a tiny...
Section of the things that it's done, like politically oriented stuff.
But they were supporting these popular movements like colour revolutions, the Rose Revolution in Georgia, Serbia, Euromaidan and so on.
The Arab Spring thing.
So how does that fit this thing?
Because those, like, I mean, that's populism, right?
And that's what they're all for.
I think that's the contrast.
This is why I interpret.
This is why I had an issue with this before.
I think the missing thing is basically in Schellenberger and Peterson world, the populists can only be right-wing, authoritarian-type populists.
So any of the revolutions that were undermining of that are anti-populists, even if they were Apparently, popular uprisings, they were actually grassroots stuff seeded by the...
So it's actually like the overlap with the grey zone view of the world, where all of that is inauthentic, CIA-backed revolutions against legitimate governments.
Yeah, and just to point out the other stupid thing about this is that in Schellenberger's crazy portrayal there, it's basically USAID is indistinguishable from the CIA.
Oh yeah, he mentioned that earlier.
He actually wants to put the letters together.
Yeah, whereas when we're talking about those sorts of politically, culturally oriented activities, they're things like supporting election monitoring groups, like in Ukrainian elections, or funding investigative journalism or anti-corruption campaigns.
Like, they're not assassinating people, right?
It's not a dirty tricks campaign, right?
Well, are they not, Matt?
You know, they probably keep that stuff off the books.
That is what he's implying.
So, like, the end of that clip, just to make it clear, where he says, you know, all those skills come back after the color revolutions and whatnot, it leads to this.
They turn all that back on the United States, first with the Russiagate conspiracy theory.
This idea that Trump is secretly controlled through a sex blackmail operation by Putin.
Second, through the, you know, the dismissal of COVID origins.
Then you see it with the Hunter Biden laptop, an elaborate conspiracy theory that the laptop is a Russian information operation as opposed to, which they knew it was not because the FBI had the laptop seven months earlier.
So, you know, just to make sure, everything, Matt, right?
COVID origins, the Russia get.
That's all that knowledge comes back to, you know, be put to good use there.
Okay, so let's just point out the obvious here, which USAID has not interfered with domestic US politics or organized some sort of dirty tricks campaign to undermine MAGA.
Come on, Matt, isn't it behind?
The Russia conspiracy?
Like, wasn't it giving talking points to Rachel Maddow?
How can you speak so confidently?
You don't know what...
Nobody knew what USAID was up to, right?
Like, it could be behind all of them.
Could be just a front for the CIA.
Yeah, could be.
No evidence of that as far as I know.
So, yeah, so it's really quite rampant conspiracism, isn't it?
So USAID now been turned into...
A movement of not gentlemen, but manly men who are out there doing nefarious things all over the world.
It looks like they're not supporting populist movements or democratic movements or anti-authoritarian regimes or democratic sort of objectives.
No, no, no.
They're doing dirty tricks to suppress that, again, against all evidence that I was able to see.
And now also without any evidence, they've turned those tools...
Against the American people to make people think bad things about Donald Trump, like that he encouraged people to storm the Capitol building or to hide Democratic things.
That's the rampant conspiracism that's on display here.
And the other logic I want to highlight here, because, you know, I am not somebody that has the kind of Hassan Piker view of the West, right?
Like everything that the West has ever done is terrible.
But I'm also not someone with a Pollyannish view of like the West.
Right. So Schellenberger there says like, you know, the Western
But, you know, if you go back and you actually read history, the history, the development of, you know, the Western nations and their power bases and whatnot,
that was not people behaving as gentlemen generally, right?
Like, there are movements.
That you can highlight if you want to, you know?
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Look, you can highlight sort of, I guess, the various political revolutions and evolutions that happened in Europe where it led to the demise of monarchies and aristocracies and so on and created a kind of civil culture, you know, basically.
The middle class and varying degrees of democracy could actually run the show and you can talk about how that is like a culture of mutual respect as opposed to domination, right, by power, right?
That's the sunny side, right?
There's also, as you said, there's a dark side to it as well, right?
There's an awful, like, exploitation, colonialism, a whole bunch of things never did not go away.
Including, you know, rampant, like, mistreatment.
If you don't even want to talk about the colonialists...
Talk about poor people and women.
Talk about poor people and women, maybe.
Yeah, like the notion that, you know, I'm sorry to bring it up, guys, just because I've been reading about it a bit lately, but, you know, the potato famine.
If that is an example of, like, people behaving as gentlemen, you know, in Western civilization, good God, I'd hate to see them when they're behaving as friendly men.
It's because the evolution towards gentlemen hadn't fully...
It hadn't come to its culmination, which we're seeing now.
In Donald Trump.
In Donald Trump.
Yeah.
It's farcical.
This is a cartoonish presentation.
Well, I know.
And also, Matt, just to mention, no role for women.
No, no.
They didn't write a mention there.
No, no.
Women, no.
Western civilization.
Sorry, ladies.
It's a man.
It's gentlemen.
It's gentlemen.
We're responsible for that.
But it is so clearly dumb, right?
It's in the same vein as Jordan Peterson's incredibly stupid, mystical, magical fairy tales to understand things.
It's on a level of that stupid trope about hard times create strong men.
I think that's what it's Largely drawing on.
Yeah, like this.
The intellectual level here is one of a bad name.
That is the best you can say about it.
Yeah, it's also funny that the author that he mentioned is Harvey Mansfield.
It's not his fault, but he wrote a book about manliness.
His name is Mansfield.
But in any case, again, I just want to...
Look, I'm going to do it without the...
The irony, drenched delivery, right?
Yes.
These are two guys offering apologetics for hard right administration in the US, which is currently going about making challenges to checks and balances on power, demonizing immigrants and opponents of the regime,
all this kind of thing.
And they are invoking these concepts of parasites and viruses invading the nation.
The robust health of the nation is built on love of country, on individual virtue of real manliness.
Right. And that's right.
The overthrowing of all these corrupt institutions, which we need to get rid of, which have been keeping the country in bond.
Does this really not sound familiar?
I'm not saying that they're instigating a fascist state, but I am saying that the rhetoric that they're using here is exactly in line with that and stuff that the Trump government is doing.
Frankly, is invoking those parallels.
So it's just that these two flatter themselves.
You know, they are essentially doing this thing of studiously ignoring all of the anti-democratic authoritarian shit that the Trump regime is doing and projecting it onto any critic, any opponent,
any...
Institution that dares to stand up to the leader and this God-manifested helper, Elon Musk.
And it should be obvious that these are rank propagandists for an administration.
But they still style themselves as renegade intellectuals.
And it's pathetic.
Yeah, renegade intellectuals and true Democrats.
You know, that's how they style themselves.
And it's just incredibly offensive, just personally.
Like, you know, and this is a situation where Congress is, like, cowed, basically.
Oh, yeah, but in part because it's made up of people from the party who are, you know, behind the leader, right?
Yeah, yeah, there's a lunatic wing, and anyone who might disagree with the dear leader on the Republican side is keeping their mouth shut.
So yeah, the reality of what's going on, I think, is that there is a worrying lurch towards authoritarianism and a decrease in democratic institutions in the United States.
That's just, in my opinion, a fact about what's going on.
Yeah, it is on the level.
And these guys sound like proto-fascists.
I called Jordan Peterson an accidental fascist before and I'll call both of them.
Proto-fascists at the moment, because whether they have enough self-awareness to understand what they are or not, that is, as you pointed out, what they are propagandizing for.
That's the language that is the language of fascists.
Yeah, yeah, it is.
So, okay, now two final clips, Matt, to finish off, right?
One is highlighting.
Jordan Peterson's approach to psychology and the way that he uses citations from studies and whatnot grounds that we're familiar with.
And the last one, it wouldn't be a proper Jordan Peterson thing if we didn't mention how this connects to religion.
So first, in regards to psychology literature citation, listen to this.
So, okay, so Musk is in there with this incredibly...
Sophisticated technology, rapidly tracking down spending.
So the first question is, like, what the hell are these agencies actually doing?
And it's not like anyone knows, not thoroughly.
Then the next question, of course, is, how much of it is waste?
Okay, so the management literature indicates management and literature on productivity and creativity.
There's two indications from that literature that are germane.
The first is that 65% of managers in private companies add negative net value to their companies.
Wow.
Okay, that's in profitable, well-run private companies, right?
65%.
Okay, and then you might ask, well, how can a company survive?
And the answer to that is the square root of the number of people engaged in a given domain?
Of effort?
Do half the work.
So if you have 10,000 employees, 100 of them do half the work.
And so that means that Musk can do what he did with Twitter, let's say, and fire 85% of the people.
And all that happens is profit margins go up and everything runs more efficiently.
And so...
Will Elon find a trillion dollars worth of waste in the next four weeks?
It's like, I guess we'll see.
No, the answer is no, Jordan.
He didn't.
But, yeah.
Yeah.
It's an interesting proposition, isn't it?
The square root of the number of people do half the work.
That comes from Price's law, apparently.
And the idea originally came from scientific research, which is the idea that a small number of researchers are.
Responsible for a disproportionately large amount of research, which I think there could be some truth in that, right?
The distribution of advancements is very unequally distributed.
You have a few people who hit the jackpot.
But this is extrapolating it like Jordan Peterson does.
In any organization, you can fire three quarters of the people.
It'll run just as well.
Clearly not true.
Apart from the girls, like once you do that, theoretically, you could do it again, right?
So it's good to put people, keep winnowing it down.
Make it even more efficient.
There's no downsides.
I presume Jordan should advocate for that at the organizations he works for.
Like the Daily Wire could probably cut 75% of its staff or Jordan Peterson's, you know, various endeavors.
They should cut 75% of their staff.
I think we'd lose 75% of podcasts, Chris.
That's it.
Yeah, well, we probably could.
But, you know, this is just Jordan Peterson kind of working backwards, right, from a position that he wants to defend.
Yeah, well, this is what I'm saying.
Like, these guys are basically, they just chill.
They're propagandists for whatever it is that Trump is doing at the moment.
Or Musk, in this case.
Or Musk, yeah, them together.
But, you know, sacking people, that's great.
There's no downside.
Getting rid of USAID.
That's a great idea.
It's a terrible organization for about six different reasons.
Tariffs, if they talk about tariffs, as you found that he has, you know, they're great for always, like, Trump or Elon Musk could literally do anything, like take a big fat crap in the middle of the road, and these guys would stand around praising it and talking about what a wonderful idea it was.
I know.
And it's, as we've talked about, it's the fact that these people style themselves as these brave Men willing to stand up and fight the battles that nobody else will.
And they're absolute licks fiddles.
They're pure licks fiddles.
So he said, Jordan said, we'll see if Elon finds four trillion.
So I'm sure he's followed up on that.
I'm sure he will.
He didn't.
He dramatically reduced the amount that he said he was going to find.
That's an issue.
But no, I don't think that will be the case.
So, yes, it's just the highlight that the citations to literature and whatever, they're just purely there to justify whatever the particular thing is that they want to say now.
It doesn't matter.
So it's window dressing, really, like Jordan Peterson's reference to world religion and to psychology and any of that stuff.
And same goes for his magical, poetic fairy tales, referencing all of those things.
It is just fantastical.
Just So Soar is in service of something else.
So, yeah, it's not fun to listen to a couple of propagandists for an hour and a half, Chris.
No, but that's what they are, and that's part of the reason I wanted to do this episode, because it's just so clear from this content that this would build itself as, like you said, an intellectual discussion between two people with different expertise talking about contemporary issues.
You know, debating the merits and demerits of blah, blah, blah.
But that's not what it is.
It's two propagandists just offering apologetics for everything that the Trump administration does while, you know, constantly preening themselves as these, like, independent renegade intellectuals.
And in regards tying it into religious stuff, Matt, here you go.
I promise that we'll end on this.
Lovely.
And we're also trying to teach this at University of Austin.
But it's a picture that a citizen, it's not just something, yes, you're a citizen by fact of being born in that nation, yes, but there was this older idea of the citizen, which came from older Europe, which was that to be a citizen was something that was a privilege and an honor,
and it came with some intense responsibilities.
And you're in service, you know, so you sort of say, what is it?
The gentleman is in service of civilization, of peace, of prosperity, of freedom, of reproduction, continuing the civilization, continuing.
There's a picture of an evolution of human consciousness, as we've talked about before, that, you know, gets into trouble when the stories that Christians had told start to get challenged, you know, by...
Copernicus, Galileo, Darwin.
We get to the crisis of meaning.
We get to nihilism, the death of God.
We had two first bad waves of a totalitarian nihilistic response to the death of God in fascism and communism.
They get repressed and we push away, but then we get this thing we call wokeism, and it develops and develops after the fall of communism, really starting in the early 90s, and then fully comes to...
It's just...
Deranged, mad power with the woke reign of terror exercising this just wanton aggression and nihilism.
I think you can make a case, and I think this is the appropriate case, and I think it can easily be documented historically and mythologically that when the integrating ethos collapses, that's equivalent to the death of God.
And the reason for that...
Specifically in the West is because, well, here's a way of thinking about it.
There's no doubt that the passion of Christ is an archetypal representation of voluntary self-sacrifice.
I don't think that would come as a shock to anyone to say that.
But when you understand that the ethos of voluntary self-sacrifice is the antidote to power and hedonism, then that takes on a new light.
because then you might say, "Well, what happens if you kill God, so to speak, in the Nietzschean sense?" And at least in the Christian West, what that means is you remove from the central place the insistence that the drama
of self-sacrifice is the altar of the divine, let's say.
And that has cascading consequences.
Ta-da!
Ta-da!
Jordan Peterson in full flow.
After all of that, God knows what he meant.
It's easy to forget the weird stuff from Schellenberger at the beginning.
I'm struggling to remember because Jordan's thing is like a...
Oh, it washed over you.
It washes over you.
Maybe I can exercise the Jordan part because it's very, you know, Jordan Peterson.
It's just him taking the chance to riff on something that he always says, which is like...
Jesus is the best archetype of sacrifice.
Him and Peugeot have this thing that now everything in society is based on sacrifice.
Everything in relationships, it's all sacrifice.
And Jesus is the ultimate sacrifice.
So you remove that piece.
It's the bottom of the Jenga tower.
And then everything starts to fall apart because the society doesn't properly revere sacrifice and our values corrupt.
He's riffing on wokeism is a manifestation of the failure to centralize the Jesus myth in Western civilization anymore.
I see.
And you were going to say, Matt, about the Schellenberger section.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Because I almost forgot.
Because when Jordan Peterson gets going with his magical mystery tour of allegories, it's like a Jedi mind trick.
My mind goes blank.
But we mustn't pass over the fact that Schellenberger there is listing.
The great tribulations of the last hundred years.
We had the fascism.
We had communism.
Two terrible, terrible things.
And number three, up on the same level and maybe worse, wokeism.
From the 90s onward.
So, you know, there's a slight discrepancy in the death tolls attributable to those movements.
You know, like just a slight, a few millions in the ledgers that are missing for the...
The wokeism, but wasn't it really a tyranny of the mind, Matt?
But, you know, wasn't that on a similar level?
Yeah, you could try to make that argument, that you would struggle.
Yeah.
Yeah, so, yeah, we shouldn't let that pass by.
It reminds me of the people online that really love that movie 300, because they just love the idea of the sort of citizen...
You know, the citizen soldier in ancient Rome or ancient Greece, right?
And a citizen wasn't just anyone, right?
First of all.
No, you have to have a privilege.
You have to be a man.
You've got to be contributing to the fertility.
Yeah, reproduction.
That's important.
That's important.
And, you know, I suppose you've got to be willing to sacrifice, right?
You've got to be sacrificing.
For your nation state.
Nation.
He did mention that.
You've got to be sacrificing for the nation.
Now, they don't really make it explicit, but implicit in it kind of goes against what they were saying at the beginning about democracy and equality and fairness and so on.
It kind of implies there is a tiered social system.
There's citizens and non-citizens.
But, Matt, if citizens are the gentlemen who...
Are the ones that create the civilization, who protect it, and who are, you know, the driving engine.
Isn't it only fair that they have a little bit more say over how it runs?
And, you know, if you have manifestations of God in the administration, you know, who are the mere mortals that stand in their way but parasites, you know, preventing the Uberman?
Yeah, like the 75% of employees who really should be sacked.
Yeah, who cares about them?
Presumably, they're not working class, right?
Because, you know, Schellenberger and Jordan and Trump, of course, champions of the working class.
So those 75% that you cut out of the companies, you know, the deep state or whatever, they're, you know, they're like enemies of the people.
Well, they're parasites, Chris, I think.
Yeah, that's dark shit.
I've seen residences of this in various stupid, dark, Yeah, it's not particularly pretty.
They sort of surround it with some highfalutin kind of language.
But when you strip it back, it's not actually something that is the best part of, to use their words, Western civilization.
Whatever is good.
Whatever the good part.
Of the democratic traditions and liberalism and so on, the stuff that they cherish so much about Europe.
Whatever the good part is, the bit that they like is not that.
It's some prehistoric shit.
Yes, I'm inclined to agree.
So this was like a two-for-one episode, right, Matt?
We had Schellenberger, we had Peterson, but they're essentially performing the same role, just with different flavors.
And Schellenberger is a conspiracy theorist.
That's primarily what it is.
It actually runs through all of his previous coverage.
He's like Eric Weinstein in that sense, that that's his beating heart.
He's now found an administration which is conspiracist at its heart and also appeals to other themes that he's found about the issues besetting society or really doing the individual failure and not having enough individual willpower.
Yeah, he's an interesting case, I guess, of the malleability of someone like that who seems to exist at that intersection of the horseshoe where they can drift backwards and forwards, you know, have this early career supporting progressive things.
Probably the arguments and stuff they were proposing for stuff that may well have been good were pretty bad at that time, pretty much like our favorite Englishman.
What's his name?
Russell Brand.
And it's so easy for them to drift over to the extreme right.
And I think the fundamental thing is that conspiracism where they're sort of untethered.
They can adjust themselves to any kind of regime.
So, yeah, it's disturbing.
I did not enjoy this, Chris, but yes.
That's all right.
That's all right.
Well, Matt.
Any broad takeaways?
I mean, I think I already offered my overview of them a couple of steps back, so I won't rehash it.
Do you have any general takeaways, or are you just eager to leave them behind?
Are they secular gurus?
I think the answer is, like, yes, because of all the dressing up shit they do.
I think so, too.
Like, I think I've given most of my takes along the way, and I totally concur with what you said.
Oh, yeah, I think they are.
I think Schellenberg is a guru, like Jordan Peterson.
Like the stylistic differences, but he's very much representing himself as providing intellectual analysis and so on when he's doing exactly the opposite.
It's either, you can call it conspiracism, you can call it propaganda, you can call it rank partisanship.
But yeah, it is very, very stupid, but it's masquerading with some degree of plausibility to their audience as something.
Yeah, so there's a lot of it going about these days.
That's true.
That's true.
Well, that's Schellenberger and Peterson done again.
We're not fond of them, to put it mildly.
But now, Matt, people that we are fond of.
Our patrons.
It's a good shift, right?
A bit of a hard lift down there.
But, you know, I think I did it nicely.
So I'm going to mention some conspiracy hypothesizers.
Then I'm going to mention some revolutionary thinkers.
And then I'm going to mention some galaxy brain gurus.
And you're not going to stop me, Matt.
No matter...
How much you try.
These people are all gentle men and gentle women.
They are.
These are people that love Western civilization to a man and woman.
They would sacrifice everything to preserve it.
And I'm sure they're all fertile.
And reproduce.
Reproduce.
Yeah, that's it.
They are protecting the nation of the reproduction.
All of our patrons are incredibly fertile.
I just know this.
Go ahead.
That's it.
Ugh.
Ugh.
Yeah.
Terrific rhetoric.
But, um, okay.
So, conspiracy hypothesizers.
We have Leo Will, Borja Daguerre, Scott, Ivan Castanedo Barrientos, Adam Tate Haworth, Samuel Phillips, Nathan Hedden, Nick Hallowez, Christian Owens,
Elf von Licht.
Nicholas Harding, Everything Important, Mark Morabito, Kathy Murphy, Richie Wunderlich, Josue Arias, Ryan, Viblet, Peter Michalak, Jonas, Shane Nolan,
Amy T, Suzanne, Andrew Barron, Mark Steffi, Matthew Griffin, Dean Russell, Pedestrian 101, Richard Moyes, Tim, Colin Brown, Ryan, Sarah Imrzik, and Ankom Andy.
Wonderful.
Thank you all.
Go forth and reproduce.
I feel like there was a conference that none of us were invited to that came to some very strong conclusions and they've all circulated this list of correct answers.
I wasn't at this conference.
This kind of shit makes me think, man.
It's almost like someone is being paid.
Like when you hear these George Soros stories, he's trying to destroy the country from within.
We are not going to advance conspiracy theories.
We will advance conspiracy hypotheses.
Good job, sir.
Okay.
Revolutionary geniuses.
I enjoyed laughing at these conspiratorial freaks a lot more when they weren't running the American.
Nation.
I know.
I've got to say, the current environment just adds a dark aspect to it.
I know.
I know.
There is that.
But these revolutionary geniuses aren't responsible for that.
No.
Don't blame them.
They're on the side of good.
Every one of them.
That's not parasocial cultishness at all.
No, no.
And they can hear the Decoding Academia series, which is most important of all.
They will hear the review of COD.
God bless them all.
They include Matthew Pridham, Nestor Kohler, Peter Schiebel, LBBS, David Hine, Arne Alswick, Sizz the World, Elephant Gun, Paul Herrick, Adam Brady,
Lord M2K, Tommy Lepsoy, That's fantastic.
Play the clips.
I'm usually running, I don't know.
70 or 90 distinct paradigms simultaneously all the time.
And the idea is not to try to collapse them down to a single master paradigm.
I'm someone who's a true polymath.
I'm all over the place.
But my main claim to fame, if you'd like, in academia is that I founded the field of evolutionary consumption.
Now, that's just a guess.
And it could easily be wrong.
But it also could not be wrong.
The fact that it's even plausible is stunning.
Okay.
Okay.
That was Jordan Hall, Matt.
You remember him?
I do remember Jordan Hall.
And, you know, Chris, hot off the presses.
Just tweeted by Jordan Hall just a couple of hours ago.
You ready for this?
Oh, yeah.
Contemporary wisdom.
Contemporary wisdom.
A lot of stuff going on, but Jordan Hall understands what's happening.
A lot of it.
A lot of it.
You all ready for this?
That's him now.
I'm reading it.
You all ready for this?
One.
Neoliberalism is imploding.
It had to happen sometime.
Liberalism is intrinsically unstable, and it seems like it's happening now.
Agreed, Chris?
Yeah, yeah, fine.
Two.
As the neoliberal global order unravels, we will see the bursting forth of older, more fundamental lineages, sometimes called civilization states.
Okay, with him so far?
Yeah, I'm okay with this, yeah.
Number three, here is a real surprise.
Civilization states are also intrinsically unstable, and we are rapidly approaching a point where they will also begin to dissolve.
Yes, even old and integrated ones like China.
Oh, okay.
Bet you didn't see that one coming.
But four, Jordan Hall knows what's going to happen.
He knows what's coming.
What will emerge is a very, very decentralized set of nations without states.
Closer to indigenous nations than civilization slash empires brought into coherent coordination by a complex of hyperstructures.
Yeah.
No, that's clear.
Yep.
That's pretty.
So, you know, maybe everything will be okay.
There's going to be a set of...
Indigenous hyperstructures.
Yeah.
Decentralized indigenous states brought into coherent coordination by a complex of hyperstructures.
So that's a relief.
Yep.
Yeah, that's a, well, yeah, that's, I thought he wasn't going to justify those outlandish games until I heard about the hyperstructures.
Now I realize I was foolish to doubt him.
Yeah.
So that's, that's Jordan Hall.
Some people have suggested we return to him.
Maybe, maybe we should, maybe we should.
But I suspect he's going to be doing all the same whitewashing of the Trump regime that the rest of them are.
In any case, Matt, people that wouldn't be whitewashing the Trump regime, that would include Galaxy Brain Gurus, of which I have a few, a handful to provide you with.
Okay?
So these are the top people in the Decoding the Gurus sky.
And they are Dave, Alistair Forbes, Overzealous Euphemist, Lewis Kahn, Mr. Tasbian Lander, Brian Palmer, Jeremy, David Ortego, Alexander Cabanoff, Owen,
Leanne Jadani, Foggers, Jeff Hackard, Nick, Uncle, Full Metal T-shirt, Robbie Lallybird, Jub Jub, Joanna Scanlon, Epic Backflip, Briley Hull, Jacob Folkman, Spaza, Hugh Dogg, Parminder Singh,
Nobody, W. Stella Licht, and Llewellyn.
That's all Galaxy Brain gurus.
Galaxy Brain, top tier.
Thank you very much, guys.
And just a hand tip to Colo Revived, who DM'd me that tweet from Jordan.
Just giving credit where it's due.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
And I also did happen to meet a Patreon member in Japan, Matt.
We had a drink.
I shan't reveal their identity, lest they want to be anonymous.
But it was someone I also met.
In America.
That's right.
Yeah, they've also met you.
They've completed that.
Well, they just need to meet Editor Andy now.
But yeah, so I enjoyed that.
Had nice chicken, nice beers, and good stimulating conversation.
So thank you to the anonymous Patreon member.
This is unfair.
You're getting far too much like parasocial turned real social.
I paid for my own beers.
No, I know, but you're just getting the social contact.
You also got to go out for sushi with Josh Zipps.
I mean, what do I get?
No one's coming to Bundaberg to meet me.
No one's coming here.
That's right.
We talked about Bundaberg, Boondaberg quite a lot during that lunch.
So don't worry.
It was like you were there in spirit.
I was there in spirit.
That's it.
Galaxy brain gurus, they need a clip.
That's what they're all waiting on.
They're not going to be satisfied until they hear it.
They'll haunt us like ghosts unless you play it.
Go ahead.
We tried to warn people.
Yeah.
Like what was coming, how it was going to come in, the fact that it was everywhere and in everything.
Considering me tribal just doesn't make any sense.
I have no tribe.
I'm in exile.
Think again, sunshine.
Yeah.
I wonder if Michael O 'Fallon would also be apologetic for Trump.
I mean, you wouldn't imagine that.
It's not something like, you know, all those dire warnings and whatnot.
These are all heterodox thinkers, Chris.
They think outside the box.
Unpredictable.
They go their own way.
Yes, they're firebrands.
Yes, they're sometimes controversial, but they're all going in their different directions wherever their logical trains have thought.
I'm sure you're wrong in predicting that he would be doing the same kind of whitewashing for Donald Trump as the rest of them.
Can I just mention Mark the fetish?
I thought that's quite funny.
I've got my notifications set up so that...
Well, they're not notifications, but it goes to my email when we get YouTube comments.
I should turn that off.
But somebody commented on the Flint Dibble video, which was called Flint Dibble and the Underground Pyramids, debunking Joe Rogan again.
And the commenter said, the liar returns.
In reference to Flint.
He's trying to conceal the truth.
He's trying to conceal the truth about those massive skyscrapers-style rock constructions, tunneled out of the rock, and then they built the rock constructions back in the rock.
That's what they're up to.
He's hiding the truth.
He doesn't want people to know about that.
They're beyond our ken, Matt, the ancients.
They're beyond our ken.
What was it?
Was it a power plant?
Was it a big divining rod?
Tesla coil.
Tesla coil is involved somehow.
I just know that.
I've got a feeling.
Well, that's it.
Good job, Matt.
You did well today.
We'll be out of Schellenberger.
I can't remember who's next, but it's something great and exciting, so don't worry about it.
Yeah, yeah.
Oh, it's Gary's Economics.
Look forward to that.
People will welcome that because they really love it.
That's going to be a lot of fun.
It seems unfair to be punished by both sides of American politics at the same time, Chris.
