You Might Already Be A Member | James Lindsay | EP 367

the world where God demands that you constantly humble yourself in front of what's happening to you you know right now there's fires in the Smoke well guess what everybody in Washington DC New York City has to deal with that reality has imposed itself you have to you have to humble yourself before what's happening around you and make adjustments accordingly you don't get to just assert well I think the world should be this way I think God should honor my sacrifices yeah right I think I should have the tower however it is no if your sacrifices aren't being honored the first question to ask is what have you done wrong [Music] thank you hello everyone watching and listening today I'm speaking with author mathematician and political commentator Dr James Lindsey we discuss Marxism how it evolved from a singular ideology into a Genus spawning many oppressor slash oppressed dogmas across modern culture ideas such as Equity critical race Theory queer Theory we Trace these sub-marxus doctrines back past fundamental narrative into the theological realm and detailed their utility in what would you say justifying the acquisition of power we also discussed the grievance studies Affair of which Dr Lindsay was a co-author so James I kind of feel like I know you I follow you on Twitter and watch all the trouble you cause or some of it anyways and we did do a podcast a number of years ago with Helen and Peter and uh but I actually don't know you and so let's start with that I'd like to know a little bit more about you and let's let everybody who's watching and listening know too so um let's say what what are what are you when you're not causing trouble on Twitter what are you involved in at them what is your what does your actual life look like it's causing trouble on the road yeah well I mean Twitter overlaps with the road because it lives in my pocket so you know that's convenient but I do a lot of speaking I speak a lot I've had the privilege this year of getting to speak all over the world I get to speak at the EU Parliament that was great um right right right and because it's really funny everybody's telling me that and I think it's true this is the best public speech you've ever given public and so what you know what a setting did hit the one congratulations on that front well it turns out that the night before it's a silly story the night before I had a smaller meeting in a restaurant with a number of the MEPS from different countries and I'm trying to talk and I tend to be humorous and speak quickly and this is just my style and that all my jokes were Landing flat and I got kind of awkward and I realized it's they don't speak English English is not even you know they're not even all you know rough on the joke front so then I had to start slowing down and I kept really conscious of slowing down and enunciating and and trying to use simpler terminology to talk about you know neo-marxism and post-modernism it's very difficult so I gave this speech and it just happened to work out but I've had this privilege so you know know 175 flights I took last year to give you a feel for how much on the road there is getting around meeting mostly with Grassroots organizations some bigger political stuff or legislators but mostly moms and dads that are trying to do something in this country and around other like Canada as well to try to change are you mostly in North America when you're traveling overwhelmingly just in the U.S uh-huh overwhelmingly how did the EU invitation come about they reached out to me so I'm not exactly sure how they they got connected with me but one of the MEPS they put together a conference uh at the EU Parliament to talk about was that in Brussels it wasn't Brussels yes it was in their terrible building in Brussels I was it was very important yeah a huge airport would you've been yeah so you know the ultimate Tower of Babel so there's that Park back behind it that has the ostriches you know about these statues so there's a small Park it's you know not very big however many square meters very small grassy area and there's all these strange statues and you come on and you say three-legged statues it looks like aliens and you get closer and you realize they're all ostriches with their heads stuck in the ground and I thought how poetic is this building oh yeah you know uh and it but yeah it was in Brussels and so how were you received there well it was a conservative group it was a center-right European party called identity democracy foundation so they were very warm to me I actually had a handful of uh there was a student group from the foundation that was also present at the EU at the same time and so many of them came maybe over a hundred of them came right and so I I got a lot of feedback actually they sent me messages as one does on Instagram or whatever and said you know this was amazing yeah they you use speech kind of went viral didn't it it did yeah it really took off it actually it kind of lurked for a month and then it exploded about a month later and it's still just going crazy right now and so you said you slowed down and you enunciated more carefully and but what do you think you what do you think you hit on that that made it so attractive as a speech well I was the question of the the whole conference which is a three you know three meeting session that I was at the first one it was what is woke and what does it mean for Europe and so I tried to give in a sense of genealogy of woke and actually a taxonomy is more accurate I started off by saying well I think that woke is in fact Marxism that's evolved to attack the west and the techniques it's using are reminiscent of Mao's Cultural Revolution and so you can say that it's Marxist or malist but then I said we can't understand that unless we understand Marxism in a bigger way if we focus on his economic analysis and capital we miss the entire picture if we take a step back and say that he outlined an entire theory of man and the world and our behavior in it and the meaning of life and purpose Talos for for our being which is to transform the world into the Socialist Utopia to advance history to its intended end then you can see that the particular mode of analysis becomes fungible if it's economic analysis for Marx then you get classical Marxism if it's race analysis for the critical race theorists it's almost you have to massage around the edges but it's almost the exact same Market well that's certainly what it seemed to me to be you know one of the things that's been disturbing I suppose on the gaslighting front is whenever I draw a relationship between post-modernism and neo-marxism first of all people say two things that I don't know what I'm talking about which by the way is rarely the case and second that you know that's that's a conspiratorial misreading of the relationship that there's nothing that most post-modernism has nothing to do with Marxism and you know I've taken that criticism seriously because it happens a lot I think well you know is there some manner in which I have this wrong and then I go back as much as I can to the source documents including Foucault and I think and Dara and I think well they said they were marxists that seems like you know proof and uh the entire intellectual milieu at that time in France was marxistent including people who should have known better like Jean-Paul Sartre so it's like that was the that was the water in which which those particular fish swam and the postmodernists when they themselves say that their what would you say that their intellectual effort is tending in the Marxist direction or as an extension of Marxism I'm pretty much inclined to believe them and so I don't understand how this notion that those two two concepts are separate has come about you do you have any any idea about that I do I've thought tremendously on this question and I believe I have an answer and kind of like yourself if I open my mouth usually I've thought about something before I I spout off and in this case it's the nature of the way these theories evolve they evolve through what technically is called dialectical critique and so each descendant Theory say if we use Marxism as as the common ancestor if you and that's what I did by the way in the EU as I said it's think of Marxism as a genus and then you have all these species well post-modernism is a species but they evolve through dialectical critique so for each new derivative that comes out say postmodernism they have to create themselves by giving a critique of the thing that they were before so they start by saying here's where Marxism is wrong and academics hyper focus on these distinctions and they say look I see they said that's what you think they say just like you say well they say that they're marxists that looks like proof they say well they said we're criticizing Marx so that's proof that they're different in the neo-marxists are no exception and you'll find I literally you think it's a narcissism of small differences yeah so there's a level of analysis at which these I think your genus and species uh metaphor is a good one so there's a there's a level of analysis at which these are all variations on a theme and there's another level of analysis where the well no they're distinctly different which is exactly what does happen in academic microarguments right so you think part of that's well I think part of it's just the attempt to sow confusion as well oh probably so or and then also ignorance on the part of the critics because they just don't know enough about what they're talking about to even know that there's a relationship between post-modernism and new Marxism and Marxism I guess the other issue too is that in principle the post-modernists were skeptical of meta narratives and it does seem not unreasonable to point out that Marxism is a grand meta-narrative yeah so if you're skeptical about metanarratives you know you might start out by being skeptical about Marxism and if you just focused on them post-modern critique of meta-narrative then you'd say Well it couldn't be allied with Marxism because Marxism is a meta narrative but my response to that would be what makes you think that incoherence ever bothered a post-modernist right right in fact they specialize in incoherence and and and I think because it can sow Discord and Chaos most effectively this is why this this metaphor the genus species is so important and for me this you know well Marxism is a grand meta narrative et cetera this is almost like saying imagine that the the animal clade that we're talking about is something to do with cats right and so now we have cats tigers well tigers have a tail right and in lions and lions have a tail and house cats house cats have a tail so cats have tails right well not Bobcats not lynxes right and so if we think of the tail as being a grand meta-narrative in fact the broad historicism of of classical Marxism you find both neo-marxism or critical Marxism and post-modernism are becoming skeptical of this kind of grand uh trajectory of History narrative that was kind of the early modern thought and as we shift from Modern thinking to post-modern thinking away from the scientific and into the kind of blatantly mystical and romantic which the post-modernists are wholly characterized by you can just imagine it it's a cat without a tail yeah yeah I see if we do this you know I said Marxism is economic and critical race theory is race and we can see the queer theory is the concept of who defines what's normal post-modernism is really a Marxist analysis of who gets to say what things mean yeah it seems to me the fundamental core around which these Concepts circulate is well well one core is resentment and bitterness there's an Envy there's no doubt about that on the motivational front yes but the other core more ideological and intellectual would be the notion that every social interaction is best viewed through the lens of oppressor and oppressed and so then you can do that with economics which is essentially what Marx did but once you've established that pattern well it's all about victimization and power so that I think I think it's actually the same claim that that it's it's like a neo-christian claim that emerged out of the Middle Ages because there was a Doctrine in the Middle Ages among some strands of Christian thinkers that the that the secular world the Earthly world let's say was the domain of Satan himself right it was ruled by the prince of power and I think that's exactly what the marxists claim except there you know are they in favor of that or against it it's very difficult to say but their fundamental claim is something like all human relationships can be understand understood through the lens of power and oppression I mean that's Foucault in a nutshell right yeah his whole theory is that everything is carceral power every time I say that word I have to stop intelligence it means prison yeah incarcerated is the is the derivative first yeah for people but um it's all about carceral power so these these sects that you're referring to in the Middle Ages of kind of bizarre Christianity were actually Gnostic heresies that we're developing and I think that actually by means of of hegelth coming down through Marx who inverted it yeah I believe we actually actually are looking at agnostic heresy inside of economics and social in fact if we read phenomenology of spirit from Hegel 1807 is a publication you did distinctly the sense that what he means by spirit is what he says he means by spirit it's a spirit of society it's a social phenomenon it's kind of the the seed of uh of Sociology in a sense and this social spiritual realm is for for Hegel quite literally because he was a heretical theologian is the the working of the holy spirit in the world it's not this you know Transcendent uh person of the godhead it is this this is the functioning of human beings in the collective all and how that's moving through history and so if we relocate as a modern transformation of kind of this heretical Christian middle age Middle Ages you know almost New Age movement of the time mystical movement of the time we have a very clear shift from the transcendental to the social to the social Universe representing the spirit and so then Marx he actually figures out the code he says no hegel's got it upside down we focus on the idea and the state will follow and the spirit will follow the state and he said no no and then this the spirit will will sublate and raise to alphaben in German and raise to a higher level and we'll have a new idea blah blah blah that's his his Trinity cycle his dialectical cycle for Hegel well Marx says no it's upside down we start on the ground we do the work we do the Praxis we do the work as the modern phrasing we do the Praxis we do the activism and we change society directly and then that will cause as Society changes the what he called the inversion of Praxis the social conditioning to rain down on people and actually reify the transformation of society so this I think is where Marx had inverted Hegel and this is where we have a shift from the pre-modern transcendental spiritual to the modern social spiritual and this just becomes the playground of Romantics and eventually The postmodernists Who throw up their hands and say this whole thing is just this you know gigantic Dynamic of power to where if you and I Converse I mean at one point I remember maybe 10 years ago some feminists it didn't go very far but they posited this very post-modern argument that there was no possibility ever for a woman to consent to sex with a man because there's always a patriarchal power Dynamic so there's always no matter what no matter how much you know she says she's interested or whatever there is always always for being coerced so this is I think you know kind of this huge shift and you say you know academics get mired in these micro distinctions yeah and that is partly their job so okay fine but it's also how they carve out territory though that is that there is an incentive structure there yes but this is uh it's so important to to realize that if we don't take a step back and understand this bigger picture that this is a fundamentally theological architecture I like knowing exactly where my meat comes from and with moink I know it's coming from small Family Farms all across the country Mike delivers grass-fed and grass-finished beef and lamb pastured pork and chicken and sustainable wild caught Alaskan salmon straight to your door Mike lets you choose the meat delivered in every box select an existing box or create your own set your delivery Cadence and enjoy delicious meat you can cancel anytime but you won't want to if you're not sure where to start check out their standard box it comes with a little bit of everything chicken ribeye burgers and steak moink is all about 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current set of ideas that I've been working on more recently so um I I mentioned earlier that you could think about Marxism in two ways and the new Marxist variants that we've been talking about you can take you can think about them as um expositors of the doctrine of power that every social relationship between human beings can be understood as a function of domination and compulsion so that would be marriage that would be friendship family economic relationships history itself every single social relationship now that has the advantage of extreme Simplicity and so even if you're not very bright you can understand it it's comprehensively explanatory so that's attractive on a psychological front and then there's a nefarious element and the nefarious element me is that well if it's all about power then not only am I thoroughly justified in my use of power because after all that's just what you're doing but it also uh justifies any accusation possible because you might come up with a claim for example that you're a proponent of free speech and I can easily say well no like as a white colonialist benefiting from the privilege of your position you just use the argument that such a thing as free speech exists to justify your position the power hierarchy right and that's a universal criticism and so then I can take anything that you might claim as positive and just transform it with intellectual Jiu Jitsu into a manifestation of the power drive you know and and it's fair to say that the drive to power is a human motivation but it's not the only it's not the only one that's right and it's also fair to say that when social relations are corrupted they become corrupted in the dis in the direction of power but it's com that's a completely 100 percent different proposition than the claim that all human social relationships are predicated on power I mean you mean all do you yeah okay so I know where okay so so so there's the power claim but then there's this undercurrent of bitterness and resentment and I see this system of ideas that's playing out as an extension actually of the battle between Cain and Abel yes because okay so why yes this bitterness this Envy there's the the the you know the the very devout and and or devout maybe is not the right word but the very obedient Abel and then he says these advantages King gets very upset yes well that's and comes to murder him this is exactly the motivation and this is how do they proceed you know so if we take seriously the concept that this is a gnostic heresy and you look back whether it's Jews right if you come to that conclusion that it was a gnostic heresy because I I didn't know you had pursued this all the way back into the religious realm well I stumbled on a recommendation uh onto a philosopher named Eric foglin who's got quite the reputation for having named Marx as a gnostic and then I went down a rabbit hole reading about gnosticism and reading about um Hegel and his relationship to this kind of mystical reinterpretation of Christianity you know Glenn Alexander McGee air foglundies these analysis I read a little bit of Evola not a big fan of Julius evola's writing but I read a little he makes these claims quite strongly as well and uh then I just started to read the Gnostic texts myself and in the Hermetic texts and so I Stumble I I mean I've been claiming for a decade that this has a religious phenomenon yeah yeah it is posing as sociology and some phenomena in some some fashion but this is what really finally allowed me to put it together and and it doesn't matter gnosticism is by its nature parasitical it's that we have discovered through whatever means divine you know Revelation whatever happens to be the secret salvific knowledge that they don't want you to know so there's some higher truth that's hidden and maybe there's a Code written in the Bible that if you have the secret means of divining it then you can determine what the bible really means and when you go and you talk to the priest and the Priestess no that's a heresy they turn around and say he just doesn't want you to know that which when you say it goes back to Cain and Abel it goes back further than that it goes back to the serpent and Eve God hath not said you know you've got this em emblem of of all authority that has declared this thing then you have the subversive element that comes in and say was that really really sad so so it seems to me that that this is a way of conceptualizing the relationship between the religious and the philosophical and the sociological so if you if you delve deeply enough into the battle between two idea sets and you keep going down as you go down to more and more fundamental layers you approach the religious because the religious is by definition the most fun and I'm offering a definition here that religious is by definition the most fundamental and so I think when you're looking at something like the culture War that's going on you can you can see it as a battle between ideas but then when you trace the ideas back you see it as a battle between narratives and when you trace the narratives back you see as a battle between fundamental narratives and as you approach the most fundamental narrative you're trading on religious grounds yeah so what happens in the story of Cain and Abel of course is that Cain makes second-rate sacrifices right and he knows their second rate and because of their second rate and he's not all in his sacrifices aren't accepted and that's just a phenomenological truth which is life is so difficult that unless you make the proper sacrifices you're not going to succeed and then he calls God out on that says the cosmos is constituted in an ill-gotten manner because I'm not successful and God basically says well if you did things right things would work out for you and instead of Cain accepting that as corrective information his countenance Falls so goes the story and he flies into a murderous rage and destroys his own ideal because he really wants to be able right and then the descendants of Cain become he's murderous Cain obviously because he kills Abel and then the descendants of Cain become genocidal right so so and so the way the biblical narrative essentially opens because Cain and Abel are the first two real human beings right because Adam and Eve are made by God so the the biblical narrative portrays the battle between the spirit of Cain and Abel as the fundamental battle that rages in the human heart so it's the battle between the spirit of proper sacrifice which is what Abel represents the spirit of improper sacrifice that's Cain and the cascading consequences of improper sacrifice and then a metaphysical battle between those two spirits that characterizes well that's when history starts right so that's the central battle in history and I think of Marxism as I think the French Revolution was a manifestation of the spirit of Cain and that the them that Marxism itself is a manifestation of the spirit of Cain and then the postmodern Enterprise that's besetting us now another manifestation of the spirit of Cain and it's the proclamation I don't exactly understand the relationship between that and the claim that it's power that's the ruler of all things but I do know that the spirit of Cain is indistinguishable say in the biblical Corpus from the spirit of Satan and Satan is the the satanic ruler is definitely the ruler that uses power and compulsion and deception to control everything I mean I think your connection that you're looking for um boils down I mean Foucault gives us the hint right everything is a prison this carceral power so what is power in this analysis is the power to compel right to extort to force behaviors to paraphrase Larry Fink and so right no kidding yeah paraphrase Larry thinking and bloody Black Rock if we again if we take this Gnostic concept seriously the gnostics believe that there is an all-good Transcendent God behind everything that's so good that he's completely pure Spirit completely uncorruptable and therefore anything material must not be of that it must be in fact evil and so where did it come from and they've got a mythology for it but it doesn't matter this create this character called the demiurge comes into being through a series of kind of cosmic accidents and the pleuroma as they call this and the demiurge demiurge comes from the Greek demi-orgos Demi ergos means Artisan or Builder he's the architect of the world so he builds out the world but in fact he's a demon and so he builds out the world as a prison so God in Genesis in in Genesis 3 with the fruit has imprisoned Adam and Eve in the garden and the snake is saying did you know he just doesn't want you to know that you're like him this same system this is what Cain's rejecting he's giving his second-rate sacrifices he's not doing what he should God's telling him if he does what he should things will work out and he's like no this system's corrupt right exactly and so this is the same that calls God out on his misbehavior essentially that's right if you don't think that's the sin of Pride there's definitely something wrong with the way that you're thinking right and so I think that this is ultimately the Gnostic motivation it must have been I wonder if it's as surprising for you as it is for me that this is the rabbit hole that you've ended up going down you know I have no idea when we started investigating these theories that you know that the root consequence of that investigation would be to move down levels of analysis into the religious domain so I did start to understand that as you move down levels of analysis you inevitably end up in the religious domain because the religious domain is the deepest level of analysis right so but it I mean has it surprised you that that you're I'm sitting here talking about gnosticism for example trying to diagnose the ills of the modern world yes it has surprised me and it's very curious as well because I was this character I had this it cuts through every human heart soulchin very eloquently put I was this character I was a very frustrated academic and I think it's typical what is the most common I mean maybe there are others but one of the more common psychiatric disorders the academics complain about is imposter syndrome right though I've got this degree but if I'm actually stupid because the PHD earning process is quite difficult and you're always surrounded by people who know far more than you do who remind you of it on a daily basis and so you end up with this massive amount of imposters I'm not really you know good at the thing I'm not as good as they think I am this kind of delusional complex and rather than taking the certification and saying you know well okay I've earned this and so you have this Baseline where you you like marks what do you do with your time you dig into some area you finally see the secret you know truth nobody else saw within that I'm just talking as an Impulse I'm not getting religious yet and you see this and then you write and you write and write and seven people read it nobody cares and you start to think to yourself why am I not getting career advancement why am I not getting the accolades why why isn't Society or if you're marked why isn't everybody else just paying my bills don't they see how important my social theory that I'm writing is so you're doing something that's not particularly but it's Kane this is a second Lucifer by the way it is you're making a second-rate sacrifice and expecting to get first results and that jealousy grows right there well yeah well that intellectual pride is a big part of that too you know I work so hard well it's it's there's it's worse than that even it's not even that I worked so hard like I had clients for example now and then who had a luciferian problem and they were often very smart people who hadn't put in the work that's certainly the case but they were very annoyed because it was clear to them that they were smart as or smarter than everyone else and yet the world hadn't unfolded at their feet Yes you know and so they were very bitter and resentful about that and like it's definitely the case that in Milton like Lucifer who's the bringer of light is definitely an envious intellect right yes and he's the the angel who in God's Heavenly hierarchy Rose the highest and fell the furthest and that's definitely that's something that is definitely something that can characterize intellect because the human intellect is a remarkable uh spirit you might say capable of the greatest good but it is also the thing that can fall the farthest and that wounded intellect is the most vicious of spirits and so that's sort of that combination of Cain and Lucifer and it's also you know it's also the case in the biblical Corpus if you take the stories apart that the spirit that raises the Tower of Babel is the Wounded Spirit of Lucifer and Cain right and that's erecting a technological alternative to God but partly in an attempt to worship intellect instead of well instead of well instead of whatever God might be the highest something like the highest Spirit of genuine self-sacrifice right something like that well the fact is that the the wounded intellector the wounded narcissist doesn't humiliate itself in front of anything but the world or God demands that you constantly humble yourself in front of what's happening to you you know right now you get this weather thing or it's not weather these fires in the Smoke well guess what everybody in Washington DC New York City has to deal with that real reality has imposed itself the Smoky air is here you don't have a choice about whether it's here or not you have to you have to humble yourself before what's happening around you and make it adjustments accordingly you don't get to just assert well I think the world should be this way I think God should honor my sacrifices yeah right I think I should have the tower however it is no if your sacrifices aren't being honored the first question to ask is what have you done wrong yes right and that's more or less by definition right because if the this is also what what one of the things I see problematic in the so-called manosphere online it's because all the men who are unsuccessful are clattering on about what's wrong with women it's like by definition there's nothing wrong with women yeah right if you're not adapting yourself to women it's not the women's problem yeah right what's your problem and that's by definition and it's the same thing in relationship to your relationship to the world is that if your sacrifices aren't being rewarded the right question to ask is how am I prideful and blind not how is the world constituted in yes okay so now you said something interesting biographical you just touched on it sure oh but you said that there was a time in your life where you were bitter I think I've got that right and feeling that you were marginalized and that the world wasn't laying itself at your feet as a consequence of your sacrifices so tell me a little bit about more more about that when that happened and why do you think that the same thing isn't true now or do you you know you know what I mean because if something like that has got you in its grip yeah you think you've escaped from it but that doesn't necessarily mean that you no right right right right so so let's go to like so how long ago was tell me a little bit more about that how long ago was that and what were you doing what was your career at that point so this is right after I left Academia which I didn't get chased out there's a urban legend online of course from the people who hate me that I couldn't get a job now I I took 100 of the job offers that I applied for in other words zero okay so so what what well what what was your academic history well I had I got a Bachelor's in physics and Masters in math and I finished a PhD in math in 2010. it's a PhD in math yeah okay okay so you were you were those are very difficult disciplines right so if you rank order disciplines by IQ math is actually at the top it's hard I think it's math first and then physics right so you got a PhD in math yes okay so you can clearly think on the quantitative side of things yes so okay okay and so then you decided not to apply for academic jobs yes okay and so why did you decide not to apply for academic jobs so at the time the last so this is two thousand maybe seven or eight I don't remember which year was first the last couple of years that I was doing my PhD we had all these you know teaching meetings or I don't want to say faculty meetings because I was a grad student but equivalent to a faculty meeting and the new rule of the of the University was fail the smallest number of kids possible one per per course no more and I'm thinking I teach math what university University of Tennessee wow that was actually a rule that was established mostly informally convention yes it was it was we need to focus on student retention don't alienate students with bad grades that consumerist approach correct yeah bloody managerial speak and Unholy wokism exactly then you have the university the pastored child of the two worst monsters you could possibly put together so I didn't want to participate in that so I chose not to apply for academic jobs at all I didn't want to participate if I can't teach where the students who succeed get treated for success and the students who fail fail and have to try again or go somewhere else or do something different I didn't want to participate in that I I even you know having come from physics I cared very much if I certify somebody as being competent in calculus and they go on in an engineering program and they're not competent in calculus I'm doing it actually a grave evil and if the university is telling me I have to do this or show up and talk to the dean and explain why I failed a third kid in the class I don't want to participate in this system anymore so I just left Elysium is dedicated to the biggest challenge in health aging Elysium brings the benefits of Aging research to everyone they create Innovative Health Products with clinically proven ingredients Elysium works with leading institutions like Oxford and Yale and they have dozens of the world's best scientists working with them eight of them are Nobel Prize winners their Flagship product basis is an NAD plus supplement that has sold over three and a half million bottles why NAD plus studies suggest that any D plus levels and healthy aging go hand in hand in fact at a recent conference eight out of 10 doctors were taking an NAD plus supplement we know there's no such thing as an actual Fountain of Youth but Time Magazine has said that NAD plus is the closest we've ever gotten to one we've got celebrities like Victoria Beckham on our side and doctors like Richard D who says I recommend it to all my patients who are looking for something to improve their overall long-term Health Richard D also has his wife parents and children taking basis as well basis has proven to work in a is backed by clinical trials so support energy production healthy aging and feel good for your age with basis as a special offer exclusive to Dr Peterson's listeners go to trybases.com Jordan and enter code Jordan at checkout to save 25 off your first purchase of a monthly plan restore youthful levels of NAD plus now try basis.com Jordan okay and so how have you kept body will go how have you kept body and soul together since then and because your career is kind of mysterious and then also let's go back to this issue of of bitterness yes yes yes okay so after leaving the university I just got I just got a job actually I didn't I became a massage therapist which is the internet thinks this is just hilarious um it's not a mysterious Story how or why I have two components of this story my wife is one so I had an into the profession you know on a direct line where I understood what it is and what it does and secondly I had injured myself doing Zoo early in my 20s and it turned out that massage therapy was what actually fixed it where all these doctors I had seen weren't able to figure out how to sort out that what I had actually done is messed up my psoas muscle and so the massage therapist was able to massage the problem out of my psoas and the subsequent problems out of my lower back muscles and glutes and thighs and it fixed it and I no longer had you know these terrible episodes lower back pain so I said I want to do this for people so let's go and so I started studying simultaneously medical textbooks on muscle pain and going to massage school which is a little less rigorous and and it did this for a number of years well being academic I became a little academically bored this is a fine career and I enjoyed what I did and was very helpful and rewarding but I needed some academic stimulation so I started to read philosophy of science I started to get in discussion forums online this is where I discovered kind of the feminism you know explosion that was kind of happening and blog blog spaces all over the Internet and everybody's getting accused of this and I got involved in a little bit regretfully now with a new atheism movement and got caught up in all of that for a few years but the resentment I think most of the new atheists actually regret becoming involved yeah I think so I even see Echoes of that at Dawkins now because he's seen what sort of children he produced right yeah very petulant very uh very very not healthy yeah well one of the things I learned from you was Catholic was about as Satan as you get right yeah so you destroyed that you think well you think the Catholics are insane you wait till you see what that's protecting you from right polytheistic paganism totally right oh boy with some child sacrifice thrown in and some nature worship right but of course in in the woke era we live in now we don't have as much you know these pagan gods as they were construed in the pre-modern we have power dynamics uh racism systemic racism well the Irish are going to sacrificed 200 000 cows to Gaia yeah that's right no that's nature worship that is exchange the weather to change the weather it's really pretty damn funny it is it's so it's so appallingly comical that it's it's it is definitely a form of cosmic joke but we do need a few of those sometimes yeah yeah yeah okay you started working as a massage therapist this was around 2007 2008. what the hell did your wife think you were doing oh she thought she loved the idea that we were working together yeah yeah boy that's quite the detour out of the bathroom it was but you know she's not of that world and so she didn't really care one way or the other if I stayed in it or not and uh so she thought it was you know Noble that I was picking up something different and working with my hands and working with people yeah and trying to to help people with chronic pain that you know for whatever how long did you practice as a massage therapist I was licensed for 10 years so I probably practiced regularly for about eight are you good at it were you able to attack you can really get good at yeah touch healing so interesting my wife's a massage therapist yeah it's so interesting to see how much wisdom you have in your fingers you know if you yeah if you if you if you place your hands on people you can feel weirdly enough where there are whatever a knot is you know it must be a place where circulation isn't optimal or where the muscles have tightened up for some reason but it's so interesting that you can feel that out and that you can fix it too yeah yeah I was actually quite good at it and it was pretty nice uh but again academic boredom and so I think maybe just in general that trying to get engaged in these academic activities starting to try to write books and trying to get you know paid attention to it wasn't coming where the world's not laying itself out of my feet My Sacrifice isn't being honored if you will but I got really like I remember telling my wife a couple times like I work so hard I know I'm smart yeah why don't people recognize it and it's so tempting to say Well it must be something wrong you think that was one of the things that tempted you into the new atheist movement I think that was generally frustration with growing up largely a religious in the broadly Southern Baptist south okay I felt the new atheism movement was like a breath of fresh air for me because it was the first place I felt that I had found in the world where I could say what I thought without it you know whatever long set of problems it would create for me you know everybody when I grew up in the South well the thing about people like Dawkins too and Harris for that matter is they are characterized by a certain Clarity of thinking right right and you know I have some what would you say sympathy certainly for for both Dawkins and Harris I think they're both good people in in some fundamental sense I mean I know Harris was trying to ground a transcendental ethic in what he regarded as unshakable truth and he thought the unshakable truth was essentially objective reality and I also have some sympathy for that perspective because it's the post-modern critique of that in part that's led us to where we are right but uh but the problem is is that well we can't go into that there's lots of problems as hadn't you started to stumble into that obviously looking at the strange tangle of religious ideas that have produced the conundrum that we see before us okay so you were keeping Body and Soul together you and your wife by working on the massage front yeah you said that you're that wasn't didn't provide enough stimulation for your your ravenous intellect and you weren't getting a lot of purchase on that front and that was making you bitter and so so how did you can when did you realize that what did you do about it what makes you think you have done something about it well I didn't realize it till after the fact so that helps me think that maybe I have done something about it because it's one of these things I look back at and I say wow I really was a different person and now what made you learn getting beat up by life not physically losing over and over and over again and finally accepting that maybe I have to do something different well that's interesting eh because another thing that can happen if you get beat up over and over and again and lose is that you can get more and more bitter well listen you don't have to learn I had the same lesson though I used to fight I used to fight you know sport fight for real fourth degree black belt all this stuff back in when I was young uh I mean young adult not a child not one of these children black belts you know in my early 20s in my mid-20s and um I fought a lot and frankly sometimes I won but a lot of times especially on the way up I got my ass kicked right and you start learning real fast that you can get as mad as you want as somebody who can beat you up and it doesn't let you they will still beat you up they'll beat you up worse yeah that's right it beats you up much worse right right and that and there's nothing to argue about on that there's nothing there's no debate down on the floor with your nose on the ground that's right right that's right I can't abstract yourself out of that but I think the the kind of magic secret sauce besides getting beat up with all the repeated you know attempts and failure attempt and failure was that I actually just got really busy I didn't have time to ruminate on this because I picked up the grieving studies Affair Peter and Helen and I started to yeah that was all consuming I mean every waking moment that I had for you want to walk people through that a little bit sure so Peter and I had this wild brained idea to write as many fake academic articles for feminist theory gender studies you know all these kind of woke post-modern journals that put them in the highest ones we could get and see how many we could get uh published and we had planned roughly two years our goal was that we were going to start in in August of 2017 writing these things as fast as we could write them and we were going to write until sometime around a year later some summer 2018 we would stop writing and finish the academic process on wherever we got and we'd see what happens so when we wrote the 20th paper which we finished in June of 2018 we called it no more no more new ones let's just finish these do what we have to do to get them you know into the world and see where it goes but then the the article got published on us in in October so we didn't see all the way to the end so we wrote 20. six of them were a learning process they're utter failures I think they proved lots of interesting things it's maybe a discussion for another day but then when there are these 14 others seven of those had been accepted seven more were under peer review a sociologist wrote an article I wish I could remember who it was but soon after this happened and he said that he anticipated that either four or five of those seven based on what the peer review had said and the quality of them four or five of those seven probably would have been accepted as well but the ones that wouldn't were also the earliest among that batch of 14. she got good at writing fake articles we cracked the code and we at one point I wonder if Chad GPT could do that yes no question absolutely no question I'm 100 confident that it could write papers and read them we don't need the academics at all the chat GPT can write them they can do it don't read them that's right yeah and grade them for that matter yeah yeah yeah yeah so I uh I this project just consumed my life you know it's an academic article a new Full you know 8 000 word fully cited academic article we covered 15 sub-domains of academic Pursuit across the 20 papers so we're all over the place having to read as fast as we can read and write as fast as we can write in kabulation together it was all we did and so I couldn't think plus I knew I was doing something productive and then of course why did you think it was productive we thought that you know once we started to get success it was very clear that we had figured something out that was proved against the real world where I mean academic peer review isn't exactly the real world quality real world but it is the system the the actual system where the the real thing that certifies knowledge or whatever we pretend this this corrupt system does where that is and we were we were we were in we cracked the code we we said at one point I said at one point I am convinced now that I could have a 100 success right every paper I write I can get in I can pick a topic write whatever I want and I can get it in and anything gentrification of cornbread was the next one I had planned just something ridiculous that right this was a Humanities focus when you were doing your PhD work well and the previous work on that in in the stem fields had you had any philosophical interest or interest in the humanities at that point or did this all develop after you stopped pursuing them I mean very little I took a philosophy class as an elective as an undergraduate I had a tremendously good time with it but that was it um oh right so this really wasn't so hot that's so interesting you hopped out of that mathematical world into massage therapy and into the humanities and to the humanities yeah right and you were really coming at it from from the perspective of a stem mind you had a stem mind right that's interesting you know a lot of the greatest psychologists in the early part of the 20th century were engineers say they established all the statistical techniques that all the social scientists use right I'm an interesting mathematician though A different kind there's there are 13 different branches of mathematics and what's called an enumerative combinatoric combinator assist that's a lot of syllables enumerative combinatorics gives these very kind of Baroque counting arguments and a common Tauruses will be upset that I called it baroque all the rest of the mathematicians will cheer that I said this that I've confessed this but we give these things that are called Counting arguments so that we say that in an equation is true and identity is true because both sides of it count the same thing in two different ways and so you describe it counts on this side of the equation it counts it this way on this side of the equation it counts it that way a simple example without doing a bunch of math is that if you don't know that the the square numbers 1 4 9 16. so on 25 the square numbers obviously count the number of squares in a square grid and you know n by n well it turns out that the square numbers equal the sum of the first n odd numbers so one then one plus three is four one plus three plus five is nine one plus three plus five to seven is sixteen and on add 9 get 25 and you can see how it goes but what that is is you count the corner that's one then you count the three that go around it that's three more then you count one well it's two by two so there's two then there's two and there's one so that's going to be the next odd number and then it's three three and one so two threes and a one oh the next odd number that's it that's two different measurement techniques would you say well yeah in a sense in a sense it's because that's one of the ways we triangulate on truth right is we use multiple measurement systems to to abstract out the same pattern they call that construct validation construct validation and psychology well psychologists have have tried to wrestle with the idea of how you know when a concept is real right and the reason they wrestled with that was because of of the issue of diagnosis like for example is anxiety and depression are they the same thing are they different right well they overlap to something great and then when you're starting to ask about what whether two things are the same or different you're asking about the nature of reality and you're also asking about the nature of measurement and what psychologists concluded essentially was that to establish something as real imagine there's a pattern there you needed a set of qualitatively different measurement techniques all of which converged on analysis of the same pattern it's what your senses do right because your senses provide five qualitatively distinctive reports and if they converge you presume it's like a definition of real five converging reports using qualitatively distinct measurement processes constitutes reality yeah sure right right so it seems to me there's an analog there of the equation issue that it's true if one counting method produces this result and another counting method produces this result that constitutes an equation and those two things are what would you say there there's things real there that's a fair thing to say so okay well anyway does the word equivalent right yeah right equivalence relation right so right so they're the same yeah yeah so as it turns out this gave me a tremendous amount of background there I think how does math help what I do a lot of background in detecting a pattern and being able to articulate it in a less abstract way as to what it is so I go find I would find patterns and say how can I describe this pattern not just in one way but in two ways right right at the same time and you were doing that in the paper so I read the papers and I detect a pattern of how they use language and how they cite and who they think are important and then I just go reproduce this in another way and of course I'm building a little chat GPT in your imagination more or less yes definitely absolutely and it was extraordinarily successful another by the way thing that math helps with is mathematicians are pretty particular about definitions yes the most right because whatever we say is a definition all of the logical conclusions of that definition in the in the axiomatic system are necessarily True by by consequence forever universally right so if you get it wrong a little bit if you say for example a prime number is a number that's uh divisible by one in itself that's a very common you know Elementary School definition uh that's not adequate because it leaves open the question is one prime and the answer to that is no one is not a prime number number so the actual definition of prime when you get very cautious is it is a number with exactly two factors which sounds like the same thing but it's not the same thing because it removes that one question of ambiguity upon which all expressions of things like the functions right well so okay so partly what you're doing as you're diving into the underlying religious substrate is to go farther and farther down into the axioms well yes but it also I have the ability to read them and when they misuse words I can figure out what they must mean by the word they're using and then I can go start to check that to see right right and when like equity for example like Equity or diversity or democracy or actually literally almost every word or power yeah and so oppression yeah yeah it's really useful to fight figure out what those words mean so that stem mind ends up having been it was trained in kind of these two particular skills and I think I had a proclivity there was definitely why does anybody become a kind of Fringe branch of mathematics where it's hard to get a job if you apply for them because there's just not that many of them why would you do that is because you have a proclivity for it there's a selection bias into that you're interested in it you're good at it I thought it was the most fun thing in mathematics I could have been an algebraist I was good at algebra algebra is very employable it's very necessary it's very useful I didn't want to be an algebraist I wanted to be a combinatorist which why because I really enjoyed it I really enjoyed getting to think that way challenging myself to think that way about patterns and you were able to you think you were able to take that proclivity and then apply it to what you were doing in Humanities and oddly enough what you ended up doing in the humanities was producing parodies of of Humanity's papers and and and so you found that intellectually compelling um what what was your what was your motivation outside of the intellectual compulsion now you you talked a little bit about the fact that you were annoyed about the fact that when you were teaching at the University you were called on essentially to falsify the teaching process so that must be lurking around in there in the background somewhere but what were you in pluck rosenbergosian conspiring about so to speak when you were producing these false papers like why the hell were you doing that because people have hurt no yeah you're just causing trouble like no it's a very simple answer we had seen some of these things because we were involved in a new atheism movement and got attacked by this you know woke virus very early on before anybody knew what to call it we were all saying third wave radical feminism back back then that was the phrase and I think you were the only person saying something like post-modern neo-marxism or something like this and so we were we were looking into this and we would criticize you know this deviates from you know standards of you know free liberal Society this is oppressive this is against Free Speech we would offer these criticisms and you know what we would get back if we didn't get called White or male or something stupid we would get the most substantive criticism we would get is you're not credentialed you don't have a PhD in this you can't criticize it so we thought well you can delegitimize a fraudulent Enterprise we started to read the papers and thought that they were fraudulent and it was an emergency because they were dipping into the science yeah well that made you weird to begin with that you were reading the papers because I think 80 percent is it 80 percent of humanities papers are are never cited once somebody's I asked a question at one point you said this is sex just what's sexist and I said well sexism is systemic this feminist woman was talking to me and I said what does that mean and she sent me a feminist Theory paper about feminism about sexism and I read it and I came back to her and I said okay I kind of get this concept but why do you just why don't you say it's this is systemic sexism and distinguished from what most people think of as sexism she said no it is sexism it's the same thing but they're clearly not the same thing so this made me curious what's going on and then I started to read some of their papers here and there I wasn't that invested in it yet it's 2014 and 50. no it also means it's interesting too it also means that all these see I've noticed this this tendency among creative liberal types right is that they're very very good at producing ideas yes but they're not very good at editing them yes right right and so and those are actually separate neurological functions by the way yes so the two different brain areas do that and so one's a producer and the other is an inhibitor an editor and so if you're in dialogue with someone true dialogue you produce your ideas but the other person can act as a Critic that's what peer review is supposed to do but if no one's reading your papers there's no editing function and so that creativity can just go everywhere and produce false positives which is what unconstrained creativity does sure right it's like well that's a new idea it's like yeah but it's stupid why is it stupid because if you act that out in the world you'll die yes that's like the definition of stupid it is right right and you're supposed to kill your stupid ideas before you act them out and you do that with critical thinking and if these papers aren't being read or they're not being criticized that also means that the people who are producing the ideas don't get to hone their ideas right because they don't get to learn how to distinguish between the smart ideas and the and the ideas that aren't so good right yeah right okay there's no iron to sharpen the iron whatsoever right right right right right there's nothing to separate the wheat from the chaff right right exactly and there's no Spirit of dialogue of truly logical inquiry logos based yeah exactly exactly okay okay so you are bringing that to Bear makes sense too because of the discipline that you came from you're bringing that sharp eye to bear on this collection of of what would you call it mixed mixed creative overproduction exactly so we thought we could expose that problem and simultaneously solve the problem that our our most annoying critics were telling us you have no authority to speak on this because you clearly don't have a degree in it well we thought well I'm not going to go to school and go get a degree why go back to school for The more I've been in school forever I'm not doing more school but if we're publishing at the PHD or the research level right then surely we know something about right right right right well turns out that they did not accept this as a credential they did not that did not satisfy them I'm still right well we can point out for everyone who's watching and listening to that you could this is a rule of thumb and it's a rough one but but it's not so bad if you're trying to understand this is what's a PhD equivalent to and essentially a PhD is equivalent to three published papers so because in most universities um certainly in the social sciences if you publish three papers in well reasonably well-regarded journals and then you aggregate them into a single document add an introduction and a discussion you have a PhD that will be acceptable to your committee right and so if you can produce three published papers you have demonstrated by the standards of the field in fact on on in the in the fields that are less rigorous one or even zero published papers will often do it because lots of times you know the the median number of Publications for a PhD graduate is one yeah immediate right exactly so when you guys publish three not only have you mastered the discipline you've exceeded the norm by a substantial margin sure right right yeah okay so that's so part you were trying to indicate I see so that we were trying to indicate that you knew that you think the lingo exactly this is important to criticize we have this barrier to being able to criticize it and be taken seriously doing so we have an authority Gap and a recognized Authority Gap and a credential Gap and so let's fill it was the other motivation this needs to be exposed and we need to criticize credential ourselves as authorities that can criticize this from the outside that was it because we saw that there were fewer no authorities on the inside who were willing to criticize it and so let's walk me through again why you came to the conclusion that it needed to be criticized you touched a little bit on the fact that you were being attacked when you put forward the new atheism arguments by the postmodern horde but were there other reasons that you felt that there was like a corruption at the core of this that needed to be exposed well we started to read lots of the papers as a matter of fact a lot of this these very silly so you started to learn what was actually happening yes oh that's nasty yeah and so and then there was one though that tipped us over the edge it was actually quite famous it was operating on a half a million dollars of a National Science Foundation money it was a paper that was published in 2016 out of the University of Oregon or four of the some of the professors anyway there were four authors or from University of Oregon and it's about needing to bring feminism into the science of glaciology in order to successfully combat climate change right right they've got a TED Talk out of this I mean this is the most I read this thing and it was so shocking to me as somebody with a background in science I actually shut down for psychologically for almost three days I kind of stayed in a dimly lit room I wouldn't interact I barely ate I was so depressed at this attack on that a journal with this impact factor so high it was a seven for those who know what that means would publish a paper this off course about what the Sciences are about I mean it was suggesting that the Sciences are sexist once they bring in feminist art projects it was saying that in addition to studying and these are true true if I tell you what's in the paper nobody believes in addition to studying satellite photography of glaciers which are the gods I view from nowhere and literally called pornographic pictures because it's you know the the the satellite is a pornographer staring down in Mother Earth at cooning at Mother Earth yes and and I use that g word very uh intentionally they went on to say that unless we take paintings done by women in specific of glaciers and study those as well beside the Satellite photographs then it's not a Comprehensive Science it shuts out all these other perspectives other means of knowing if we don't include indigenous perspectives and mythologies about why ice is the way that it is and why it moves then we're we're obviously being colonialist and masculinist and all these horrible things and I was shocked that a high-end not some Fringe goofy little you know qualitative studies Journal but a high impact factor Journal would publish this Brazen of an assault on the scientific methodology at all I had no idea how how corrupt it was until I saw that I see it and then it shocked you that was I think about it when we were speaking about that it's an image that's come to mind a lot lately for me is that you know the the what we're seeing is the invasion of whale carcasses by snow crabs I don't know if snow crabs is the right word but I think I know what you mean yeah you bet man it's like once something stores up value the universities have stored up value right historical value right credentialing value yeah and unbelievable Financial Resources yes right they are whale carcasses and so now everyone On The Fringe is saying you know I'd like access to that and they make these arguments about why they should be included right the Enterprise because what they're after is access to those stored resources that's right exactly that's exactly right so that was the moment where I I don't think it shocked you so badly I think I treated science as sacred oh yeah well you were part of the new atheist movement right well this is one of the things that's so interesting I think is that and I I don't know what you make of this exactly but one of the things I see happening is that so the enlightenment critique was one of the reasons for the death of God now and the new atheist types Dawkins and and Harris Dawkins in particular would celebrate the death of God because that would free the scientific Enterprise from the superstitious overlay that was interfering with clear rationality right but then that begs the question which is well what is the relationship let's say between the judeo-christian tradition and Science and one answer is antagonistic right and the other is no the judeo-christian tradition established the monasteries for example the universities grow to the monasteries of the scientific tradition grew out of the universities and that there's actually that that the scientific project is actually embedded in the judeo-christian project and the reason for that is the judeo-christian project is predicated on the Greek idea that there's a logos in the world and the Jerusalem idea that there's a logos in the intellect and all of that's a precondition for Science and if we lose God we'll lose science too and I think that I think that's what's happening I think that the new atheists because I think the historical notion that there is an antagonism between science and religion is actually a misreading of History I don't think that is how it laid itself out and I do believe that the and it's an oddly postmodern argument in some ways is that the scientific Enterprise is embedded in the broader judeo-christian narrative so when I look at someone like Dawkins for example I think okay here's what you believe Dr dog do you believe there's logos in the world yes because otherwise there's that there's an intelligible order in the world you believe that studying that intelligible order is Redemptive right no first you believe that you are constitute so that you could understand that yes yes and then you believe that if you understood that order that would be Redemptive it's like every single one of those axioms is religious that's right that is the fundamental uh Construction in fact of a religion it's in fact if we boil it down into legalese what the Supreme Court recognizes as what constitutes an established religion for Establishment Clause purposes is it a comprehensive system of of belief and practice that that this is their definition that answers fundamental questions about the world of man's role in it such that it gives rise to duties of conscience and this is precisely precisely you know the legalese kind of practical version of those same fundamental axioms because these things there is that multi-dimensional convergence of of what's really yeah well it might be you know that the most fundamental axioms of a conceptual system are are religious claims by definition you have to say we hold these things to be self-evident and I would say well Dawkins has to hold the three things that I laid out as self-evident and I think that those are part and parcel of the original judeo-christian argument sure I mean the fact that the the entire scientific Enterprise has as hardcore as physics might be utterly depends on on on a complete and irrational faith that there is a logical structure to the world that doesn't change yeah or that that's intelligent ways that are intelligent right because well you could you could also easily set up as an axiom that it is immoral to analyze the transformations of the material world because all that will produce is danger and you know the the Frankenstein story worry the Golem Story the Tower of Babel story for that matter are variations of that Axiom that's right look look out be careful what you study you know you might open Pandora's Box for example right have your liver torn out forever because you're Prometheus and yeah you know there's certainly you can make a case for that so the Axiom that investigating the transformations of the material world in good spirit let's say in the proper spirit will be Redemptive that isn't that isn't a factual statement right it's a priority claim yeah okay it's like the Axiom of infinity is there Infinity who knows but mathematicians generally accept that okay we're going to use this concept Infinity we're going to say there's Infinity but technically we're going to see what happens it is unknowable if there is infinity right right by definition it's unknowable but there's an axiom called the Axiom of infinity infinity exists it more or less is what it what it states there's a there's a yeah well I've started to understand that like that that that the the the most fundamentally religious and the most fundamentally axiomatic that's the same thing sure sure okay and that makes sense to you that makes complete sense to me yeah yeah okay so now you go down the Axiom hierarchy in the farther down you go the closest you the closer you get to the sacred essentially and I think the reason that it's Sacred By the way so axioms uh constrain entropy that's a good way of thinking about it right and so the reason that you have to hold some things is sacred is because the things you hold as sacred are the things that constrain the most entropy in your conceptual system so if you blow an axiom you D you free the entropy that's what happened to you when you read that paper yes that's why you're hiding in that room for three days three days right right because an axiomatic presumption had been challenged you thought Not only was the scientific Enterprise valued valuable you thought it was valued yes that's right right you were wrong I was wrong you bet man you bet and the stem people are certain they get to find out how true that is you know I saw this five years ago I was warning people and stand by myself you guys are apolitical you are sitting ducks you have no idea what's going to happen when the people who swarm the humanities and those people were partly political the humanities professors so they had some defense you wait till they land up on your Shores you people have no idea what's coming your way they're going to go through you like a hot knife through butter and this this is happening look at our medical journals oh yeah well they say 75 this is so horrible um 75 percent of new applicants to stem positions in the University of California state systems have their applications their research dossiers are unread because their Dei statements aren't sufficient 75 that's an astonishing number it is something it is something to behold boy trophy senko would smile down on this that's for sure that's for sure talk about a coup yeah you know so that you can replace those Decades of work that it takes to become say a PhD in something difficult like mathematics and you can reduce that to a Dei statement and then you can let the dimwitsued evaluate Dei statements decide which mathematicians get to practice math that's right it's like oh my God and now the Dei statement will be written by chat yeah right trick everybody right right right well maybe maybe you technical types have come up with a solution to the Dei problem yeah just get child GPT to rate the statements let me do it you've automated you've automated the compliance process oh yeah that's pretty damn funny yeah yeah you know horrible horrible way so yeah this is this is ultimately what so why do I feel like I've gotten out of this resentment well I'm not resentful okay I feel gratitude I like I began saying I feel very privileged that I get to travel and talk yeah so okay so so let's let's let me unfold what happened to you you published these papers and that caused let's walk through that a little bit that caused all sorts of trouble right so that was wonderful yeah okay so so tell us tell me the story and tell me what's happened in your life since then because I know now I don't know you you were a massage therapist then you wrote These Preposterous papers and there was an explosion around that yeah but I have no idea like how you're keeping Body and Soul together now and so like what what is your professional life at the moment and I mean my professional life now is is is chaos it's been a learning process to deal with the amount of travel the demands on my time the requests and are you being paid as a speaker constantly and is that how you're deriving most of your income most of it yeah so I also created a company called new discourses where I publish my own materials and put on my podcast kind of my own platform right website Etc right and that is that a subscription platform new discourse it has how do you monetize this it's optional subscription and it's only by the generosity of other people that it stays going I don't have any big donors contrary to what the internet believes in urban legends I have none zero I don't think I have a big oil come on big oils yeah right you end big Pharma no doubt yeah yeah big Pharma yeah I'm sure they do yeah I'm sure they do no so but it's optional I give out virtually everything for free I offer one product that's behind a paywall and it's a kind of more personal podcast where I share kind of my more Cutting Edge experimental ideas and stories of from my trips that I think are instructive in some way but other than that it's all public and it's the generosity of of people who appreciate it are you are you approximating something that would be the equivalent of a reasonable academic salary I'm exceeding that oh well congratulations rather well right right well so look at that you started making the right sacrifices and everything turned around that's I feel that way yeah it's not something and again and how do I feel about it great grateful I think your answer is a good one by the way because I was curious serious about that you know because I've watched people who were admired in bitterness say that they're no longer admired in bitterness and I remember I think it's the nietzschean dictum which is something like um you think you're done with the past but that doesn't mean the past is done with you yeah you know and if you've if you've gone down a dark Road and been in that for a long time there are traces of that that last for a long time and they will come and get you if you think you've escaped and so but your your response that you're grateful that's a good response because gratitude is the opposite of bitterness I feel like I get to serve yeah okay that's a good answer I just do I don't ask for you know you asked about the speaking fees yeah I don't ask for very large ones I'm very modest in what I what I ask you know I want my expenses covered obviously but other than do you have an agent I do okay and it's all very very modest they keep everything extremely modest because I I sat down with myself a couple of years ago and I said if it came to the fact that let's say this the right person in the audience because you never know who yeah yeah and I said no over a matter of a few hundred or a few thousand dollars to this event supposing it would fit into my schedule which is busy and I said no to this I've done something Gravely wrong if I don't have time you know we have to so what do you use do you have more invitations than you can fulfill I kind of hit right at the line sometimes well because one of them one of the arguments for raising your face is because it helps you prioritize if you have a plethora of invitation correct but you're right on that I I ride right on the side and it's wonderful that's a nice place I'm also grateful for that I feel like it's just I'd hesitate to use loaded words um glibly but it's almost providential that it's working this way and uh so I'm very excited about it so I don't feel like I fell and I can look back on and reflect but I think that the moment where the decision was made was during the grievance studies papers we wrote one it was about education we called it the progressive stack we said we should Progressive stack the classroom so if you have we're going to do a privileged inventory whether I'll make them do that walk that privilege walk or if you know you have this or that goes forward three steps if you're white walk backwards out of the building or whatever they make you do then we're going to rank all the kids and we're going to put you know your your uh roster for the class will be ordered according to privilege and the intersectional privilege correctly well yes intersection of course and so and and so the more privilege that you have the worse we're going to treat you we're going to ignore you we're going to our phrasing was invite you to listen and learn in silence right last week right and then it progressively got worse to so to speak you know we'll speak over you we'll interrupt you we'll um you know report you for things to the dean or whatever will actually invite you to sit in the floor to experience reparations you should wear chains you should do humiliation things right for the other kids staring at you to overcome your privilege but of course these are hoaxes so we said but we'll do it with compassion critically com compassionate intellectuals yeah we're dealing with compassion and the peer reviewers wrote us back and they said don't use compassion yeah Center the needs of the privileged if you're compassionate with them and instead they recommended well so they so because they figured you were on their side they could show their true colors I think so right because one of the things I have learned is that so serpents camouflage themselves right you know that we can detect serpent camouflage better in the bottom half of our visual field by the way oh yeah yeah yeah you know what the best camouflage is for serpents what's that compassion oh sure sure you bet you bet and it really works on conservatives and the reason it works on conservatives is because you can really make conservatives feel guilty because they're dutiful so they're guilt prone yeah so if you can come after conservatives with compassion and you can say you're not doing your duty on the compassionate front instead of the conservatives going you're a serpent they go oh no you know we could be a little better and of course they could because like who's perfect on that front of course but yeah well we were talking just before we started this podcast about some of the new psychological research on left-wing authoritarianism and so I read a paper here a week ago there's not a lot of papers on this front there's only about 10 because the social psychologists denied that left-wing authoritarianism existed for seven decades right until 2016. before I got what would you say disenfranchised from the University yeah my lab did a study on left-wing authoritarianism the first thing we did was to see if there was a clump of ideas that were statistically related that you could describe as both left-wing and authoritarian and there is and it's identifiable it's exactly the club of beliefs you would have been studying and would suspect yeah we looked at what predicted that predicted Allegiance with that set of beliefs low verbal intelligence negative 0.4 with IQ verbal IQ so you think well how can people be you know unwise enough to to believe these ideas and one of the answers is while they're not that bright as it turns out being female having a feminine temperament right those were the three big predictors other predictors have emerged looking at the similar construct left-wing authoritarianism the best Victor I've seen is malignant narcissism correlation is 0.6 0.6 right which is about as good as the measurement accuracy of the questionnaires yeah right so it it it it actually opens up the question the question is there may be no difference between left-wing authoritarianism and malignant narcissism and what that means is the serpents are using the language of compassion to mask their power striving or simultaneously claiming well of course we can do this because every single social relationship in the world is predicated on nothing but power and if you don't accept that that just means that you're a malignant liar that's right exactly that's normal structure yeah yeah yeah yeah and then that's that kind of discourse is disinhibited in the in the in these disciplines where no one subjects any of the ideas to critical evaluation right and the malignant narcissists are also disinhibited online yeah right which is a huge problem right none of our evolved mechanisms for keeping malignant narcissists under control are operative on the social media that's correct yeah they can do whatever they want they have 100 free reign 30 percent of internet traffic is pornographic right criminality is absolutely Rife on the internet right you can't control it and then you have the subclinical criminality which are the troll demon types yeah yeah and they're monetized by the social media platforms of course I've been trying to convince well convinced I've made a case on social media multiple times that platforms like Twitter for example should separate the anonymous people from the real people they should put them in different categories right because if you can't bear responsibility for your words you shouldn't be allowed free reign in the in the in the realm of discourse and the reason for that people say well anonymity protects Freedom it's like no if you took a hundred Anonymous troll demons one of them is a whistleblower and the other 99 are malignant narcissists so and I think they should be allowed to have their say but they shouldn't be thrown the troll demons and those are what would you say machine human hybrids right because when you're online you're a machine human troll demons are not human right Anonymous troll demons are not human right you don't put them in with the people you put them in like Anonymous troll demon hell and if you want to go there and visit and see what they're up to no problem but they shouldn't be confused with people who will take the consequences of their words onto themselves you haven't operated anonymously no I have not why not they have you just gotta say these things I I you just have to say these things why do you think that I think that telling the truth is the most important thing that we have to do so why don't you why not Shield that with anonymity that's not as Grave how on how on Earth can someone come and challenge me or check me if I'm if I'm Anonymous I can just vanish right right right so what I come and see I don't have to subject any of your ideas to critical evaluation or to take any of the weight of what you say on yourself right or compare it against a pattern of established thought uh I like the idea that I I do understand why some people have certain risks they're not willing to take but I've been trying to encourage them to take those risks understand it's like yeah yeah yeah if you have something to say story of Jonah let me I'll give you a one minute summary the story of Jonah okay so Jonah is just minding his own business God comes along says you know that City Nineveh yeah well those people have deviated from the straight narrow and I'm not very happy and I'm going to wipe them out but I'd like you to go there and tell them what they're doing wrong um and let them know that they're in danger and Jonah thinks there's no bloody way I'm going to a city of 120 000 people to tell them that they're wrong no so he hops on the boat and goes to hell the other direction well then the waves rise and the winds blow and this and the ship is threatened right yeah which means that if you don't say what you're called upon to say then the ship is threatened well the sailors think well there's someone on board who hasn't who's uh on outs with God because that's why the storms are rising so they go talk to everybody on board you've got a problem with God and Jonathan says well as a matter of fact yeah I've just disobeyed a direct order and those sailors say well we got to throw you overboard because like otherwise we're all going to die right so that means if you hold your tongue when you're called upon to speak then everyone dies so off they throw up right now he's drowning and you think well that's pretty bad he's drowning and and then that's not so bad because the next thing that happens is a horrible Creature from the darkest part of the Abyss comes up and swallows him and takes him down to the bottom and so what that means is that if you hold your tongue when you're called upon to speak not only do you put the ship at risk and then lightly drown but then something will happen to you that will make you wish you drown right so Jonah's now in hell right which is where you go when you hold your tongue when you have something to say and he's there for three days in hell and then he repents the whale spits him up on shore then he goes to Nineveh and says I know what I'm talking about you guys you've gone somewhere dark you better get your act together they put on sock cloth and Ashes and repent and God decides not to destroy them and that isn't precisely where the story ends but that's where that party ends yeah yeah hold your tongue at your apparel you know and I knew that because people have talked to me and maybe they've said the same thing to you they said well you know thank you for your bravery and I think it's not bravery I know what to be afraid of and I'm nowhere near afraid as afraid of the people who would want to compel my language as I am afraid of the consequences of not saying what I have to say yeah right the ship sinks you drown and then you wish you would have drowned yeah right yeah yeah I feel that I feel that that's exactly I I see the I see what to be afraid of well you know and that's what this totalitarian state everybody holds their tongue and that's that's this turning point that I was telling you about because I'm I'm getting this feedback from these peer reviewers that have now pulled this mask off of themselves no compassion we're gonna abuse interesting students out of privilege which we had meant college students but this could apply to Children Of course Very quickly and faster because they have no they have no defensive voice look what we did with them with masks yeah so we're going to abuse them and there'll be no compassion we're gonna use What's called the pedagogy of discomfort they told us horrible wow and and so so you really saw the narcissists unmasked in the peer review process I talked with uh Mike Naina who was doing a documentary it recently came out the reformers it's called Uh documenting what we were doing and I called him and I said Mike you gotta we gotta talk about this we get talking about that feedback I sent it to him and we decided that the phrase we used and I've got so much trouble for this online it was that it represents the seed of a genocide I don't know if the seed's going in the ground I don't know if it's going to sprout I know if it's going to grow I don't know if the tree is going to bear fruit you're actually accurate about that you know I I wrote a paper with one of my students who had gone to visit the mass grave sites in Eastern Europe by the way before she became one of my students brilliant girl uh Maya chicken uh what was her name we wrote a paper on the precursors to genocide and uh enhanced victimization the enhancement of the sense of victimization is that one of the steps along the pathway to genocide yeah so get them before they get us for example so I stare this in the face this road if followed to its apparent potential conclusion is a genocide you know that's or totalitarian or and so I I thought about this I sat on this for a couple of weeks and I took one of the braver moments of my life I went to my wife and I said can I quit my job and dedicate my life to it this was the massage therapy job yeah no more can I dedicate all of my time to studying this and telling the world about it as fast as I can learn about it and she being a woman of great practicality and wisdom said can you make money doing that right and I said I don't know it's actually a good question right because I mean it is one way of Market testing the viability of your ideas sure because one of the things you might assume is that if there's no Market what makes you think you have anything to offer yeah exactly right right and so so good discipline she gave me a Runway she's like you have 18 months to figure that out and if we get to the end of 18 months she's a woman so 18 months is 15 months in reality so we got about to month number 15 and it got a little Rocky and then I was actually these like I said I'm completely crowd supported other than the speaking fees and so I because you're actually an autonomous intellectual correct right right right I built it that way it's very intentional it's a very difficult thing to attain so very intentionally so that nobody can tell me I have to show right right right right and because things have to be said and I don't know what has to be said but I can't be told to shut up when I have to say it and yeah I can't have anybody some think tank guy looking over my shoulder saying just don't go there don't insult so and so we're not going to drag that into the light I I can't have any of that and so I wrote myself a salary check at month number 16. yeah that was the whopping total for 16 months of effort to try to build the beginnings of two thousand dollars this is my big oil money two thousand dollars is not zero it's not zero and getting getting from zero to one is really really really hard once you get to two thousand dollars the next two thousand is a lot easier zero is rough man people yeah zero is a black hole it's not like any other number it's a black hole it's really hard to escape it's true you multiply any number by zero what do you get zero right right exactly that's right zero devours everything and getting out of zero is really really difficult but once you get out of zero you can start moving forward essentially that's the Pareto distribution issue yeah yeah so so you made some money right so you saw that there was a market there was a market I was doing something useful I was doing something right uh I very fortuitously chose among this you know we'd written cynical theories that hadn't published yet and so I have this Pantheon of of evils to choose from what do I fo there's two you can't focus what a deal the Ultimate Buffet in hell yeah exactly and I I chose just kind of finger on the ground or ear to the ground I guess is the metaphor I mix my metaphors the critical race Theory would be the most accessible and relevant to start exposing first so I dove into that full blast full bore and I've fortunately created a library of decoding critical race theory in advance of George Floyd dying for the preceding eight months was that video mostly like what no it was mostly writing but what was mostly writing the blog no uh I created the website some of those articles are blog type articles and some of them are explanatory but what I found I thought would be most important and this goes back to that mathematical comment I made earlier about the definitions was I knew they were misusing words and so I started to create a lexicon I started to create an encyclopedia of their terminology and I just would focus on one term after another let me get into their head and know what they mean and go read primary sources when they use the word democracy where does this come oh my gosh we're all the way back to Lenin you know Lenin you feel do you feel that you're dealing with a they or do you you know there's this there's this biblical idea that what we wore against is principalities and I think of a principality one variant of a principality is a system of ideas yeah and I think well there's there's no in a way there's no they there's this there's a system of ideas that's an animated that's a set of animating principles sure right and it partially inhabits a multitude of people well but I think there are there are two answers to this there's a very diffuse they if we say the woke we generally know that we're speaking about people who think in certain ways that they've adopted some of this power analysis but it's very diffuse and maybe it's only a small amount maybe it's a great amount maybe yeah right but then there are the people who pay for it and I mean with large sums of money they're a very distinct they somebody has decided to pour the gasoline into this fire and they decided do you think but do you think that they have any sense they again these people I think they know exactly what they're doing with it they are disrupting Western civilizations so that they can recolonize it with their own position and this is why I get called a conspiracy theorist online despite the fact that they basically write this in their books themselves and who okay for you who who are the primary actors in that they well there's a front that I would I usually typically name that is obviously the people that are the public face of this okay and these are people at the world economic foreign book that he wrote well it says fourth really but the second book he wrote in that series is much more poignant but the way that he writes is it's you know maybe 130 pages of a book or I don't know it's not that long and it's business cliche business cliche business terrifying pair of paragraphs business cliche and so there's a there's a yeah so if you read it in in in regards to the fact that the the the meat it's a lot of fun and a very little Burger his camouflage is managers man right right well I did notice too that a lot of the things I saw at universities that were really deep falsehoods weren't compassion they were managers speak managers speak that's right yeah manager speaking if you read something we made those together it was probably designed to put you to sleep so you don't see yeah managers speak is what people on the administrative front who have absolutely no ability cloaked themselves in so they look competent that's right that's exactly right oh yeah so here's the email in the in the middle almost squarely in the middle of the great narrative for a better future which is the follow-up book to the great reset it's called narrative for a better future the the great narrative for a better future yeah you can't make this up and so right in the middle he has a set of paragraphs it's maybe five paragraphs but it covers three ideas and number one we're going to force all of the corporations to adopt ESG standards and we're going to do that through top down manipulations as a public-private partnership governments and big business working together fascism in other words fascism with the ngos being the coordinating entity so the world economic forum is a is a hub that connects these things which means there's something probably behind it that's a different they that's really that's the Legion by the way yes and then so secondly we're going to transform the youth to demand ESG they won't work in a company they won't buy from a company et cetera unless they're ESG compliant we're going to change the youth culture then third we're going to rewrite the social contract to accept this new only those three things only those three things very nefarious though and he repeats he's got the uniform for it Independence command the accent yeah well the central cast Central Casting that's right he needs a crow on his shoulder yeah yeah or a bald cat to pet yeah right exactly yeah so yeah so he he says a speech earlier this year an interview he says that we're going to rewrite the social contract he says this again and again but he says specifically this time we're going to rewrite the social contract so that Society accepts as we move from an economy of production and consumption to an economy and I kid you not Jordan of caring and sharing oh yeah and that's communist I mean because productive generosity on the free market front hasn't worked correct right right because it hasn't lifted more people out of poverty since the year 2000 than drifted out of poverty in the entire some history of humanity before that yeah but climate change yeah I know exactly yeah yeah yeah yeah so this is you know it's so interesting eh that like I I've got a couple here's some tell me what you think about these ideas so so so tyrants use fear to produce compulsion they're after compulsion they want to aggregate the power and so they'll use fear and apocalyptic fear is the best sort of fear to use of course right and so so now you can tell the tyrants because everybody wants to know who's listening how do you tell the tyrants from the real leaders okay the tyrants will frighten you into compulsion and they'll and they'll use they'll they'll use the crisis and the catastrophe to justify the compulsion and you might say well there's a real crisis and the right answer to that is there's always an apocalyptic crisis that's right that's a that's a universal Eternal truth we and it's partly because all of us die it's partly not because you die and I die but also because every single person we know our whole culture everything we know will die yeah so the apocalypse is always there and sometimes that happens dramatically and sometimes it happens incrementally but it happens and so we're always facing apocalyptic crises because of that and then you say well in spite of that you can have a form of government that's not a tyranny well not if you use the fear of the apocalyptic crisis to compel and to aggregate power and so any leader who tells you that the crisis is so intense that it necessitates emergency compulsion that's a tyrant that's exactly right and then there's another corollary to that which is imagine you're tyrannical and you are genuinely frightened by this crisis then I would say your nervous system as indicated by the paralysis of your fear that you're too small a night for that Dragon right and so you shouldn't be parading yourself around as a leader it's like no you're a frightened Tyrant because you're not a leader and we can tell you're not a leader because you're a frightened Tyrant right if you were a leader even in the face of a crisis you would keep your head that's right and you wouldn't use compulsion that's right so all these apocalyptic nightmare mongers who are saying well well we're going to burn up the planet it's like yeah that and 10 other apocalypses by the way that doesn't mean you get to centralize all the power and take it for yourself and use compulsion this like I really started to understand that as far as I was concerned I was at War when I saw that the leftist radical narcissistic malignant types were willing to sacrifice the poor to their climate scam that's right right so well let's crank up Energy prices well why well because Renewables because climate it's like do you know who you're going to hurt with high energy costs you're going to destroy the marginal right because all you have to do is energy and food there's no bloody difference those people are barely Clinging On to the edge of reality you crank up Energy prices 10 you wipe out like 20 million people yeah it's like well that's okay sir because you know there are too many people on the planet anyways it's like yeah I know who's speaking in that voice exactly you bet right the great Cosmic Joker yeah yeah there's too many people on the planet yeah I watch people actually say that I think do you know who's speaking out of your mouth God stunning so you know what the great narrative is for a better future he accepts he says it explicitly this is closer to the end of the book he in one paragraph says what the great narrative is after he makes his case with you saw the punch line is centralization of power transformation of the universe or whatever the great narrative is we Face multiple existential crises climate change pandemics exactly The Four Horsemen we've faced multiple existential credit the poly crisis they call it yeah yeah therefore we need greater Global cooperation cooperation which of course is going to have to be managed by assistance down that road real fast yeah 700 million cctvs right and gate recognition oh such fun right smile for the government I saw a video that said it showed the guy scan his face to go through the gate and it didn't let him it didn't open and it said in Chinese it says I don't read Chinese but it was translated smile for so I assume it's true smile for the government and he smiled and it opened could you imagine yes well if I'd been in airports I can imagine yeah well yes I hate in my pocket now is my passport from the last time I went to China I keep a little slip of paper they gave after they took all my fingerprints my handprints and scanned my eyes just to go through immigration the last time I went to Beijing in 2019. so I carry it's completely faded you know it's a heat transfer so the Drone is coming your way buddy exactly yeah the gate recognition drone nice poison dart for you yeah exactly this is this is very scary but that's it there's very Tyrant though we're building the good Skynet it's like really yeah building the good stuff yeah yeah yeah yeah wow and so the ESG openly is there to serve the Rock and Larry Fame BlackRock and the United Nations yeah evil Central because they're set up to establish the the reign of the 17 sustainable development goals of what they call agenda 23. I helped write those goddamn things you know oh no and I gotta tell you too we we worked on that document back in 2012. you know why there are 17 of them I'm relentlessly curious about it no no I don't know when when we wrote when we helped write the document there were like 170 and one of the criticisms that I kept living is like hey guys guess what you can't have 170 priorities right you can have one priority because that's what makes it a priority and I try to find out why there were 170 and the answer was well there's 170 different constituents to please and we don't want to offend anyone it's like Oh you mean you don't want to do anything it's like well yeah that is you know wait wait no no that's what we mean but we don't usually say that sure of course right and that I would say in my defense such as it is that if you think the document that was produced in 2012 was bad you should have seen what it was like before it got edited wow right wow yeah right right well one of the things I did realize after going through that process was that well apart from the fact that it was Preposterous to have 170 goals that no one had rank ordered the goals in any halfways intelligent way there was no cost benefit analysis and then Bjorn lomberg's team started to do that right right Bjorn wrote a book a while back called how to spend 75 billion dollars to make the world a better place which is an intelligent approach to I wouldn't say the poly crisis because that isn't how he frames it but you know if we were actually going to try to lift the help lift the remaining people in abject poverty out of poverty laurenburg has shown that there are ways that sure far less expensive than the trillions of dollars that we will waste not not fixing the climate just like they've not fixed the climate in Germany right Germany what catastrophe the bloody and energy costs are now five times as high five times as high unreliable dependent on potent and other dictators around the world right and they're burning late night so per unit of energy they actually produce more pollution than they did before they started the Green Revolution right and they're and their response to that criticism is we have to do stupid things we have to do stupid virtue signaling destructive things faster yeah exactly right God yeah stunning net zero that's right zero for you but you've seen the absolute zero as well that's beyond Net Zero that this is a is a project a think tank project that would come out in 2019 from UK fires f-i-r-e-s which is a conglomeration of the British government and the Cambridge and Oxford and University College London or whatever that's called and all of this lays out the idea that and of course this is just the Overton window stretching we should take it seriously but it's probably not what will happen yeah right but they argue that Net Zero is not nearly enough we must have absolute zero an absolute zero they're saying what they mean absolute zero emissions absolutely well they openly in the documents say people should start buying warmer clothing now especially old people you know but you know they're cluttering up the emergency room no air travel I know I know you know short haul flight say yeah two weeks ago between any two cities that were connected by rail I know the absolute plan is well this is what I said Net Zero means all you peasants who are watching and listening you should pay attention to this Net Zero means zero for you that's what it means and buy Plan you little people you don't need cars God who needs a private automobile I knew 15 years ago that the bloody totalitarians would go after the cars sure because nothing screams Freedom like a 350 horsepower Mustang in the hands of a 16 year old boy it's like no we got to clamp down on that that's right he can go wherever he wants and do whatever he wants you know cluttering up the planet and producing carbon yeah so it's like no cars right the goal is 90 reduction in private automobile uh ownership you think well you get to have an electric car it's like no the grid can't sustain electric charging well how we deal with that how about you peasants don't get to have cars that's right right no cars no flights no meat no heat no air conditioning no container shipping oh yeah well who needs who needs who needs Goods so we go back to our Neo Marxist Herbert marcusa writing in 64 and one-dimensional man and what is he saying it was his argument he says well the problem with socialism is they can't produce the problem with capitalism is it's not sustainable it over produces and ends up so we need unsustainable non-production correct right right that's the Socialist solution and so what we have the best how about we have the worst of Both Worlds yeah and so he says what do we have to do we have to start getting used to less lower standards of living gadgets right right right right all the people who will be getting us used to lower standards of living will be flying around in their private jets deciding how to do that eating steak that's right of course of course oh yeah so you are a conspiracy theorist fundamentally well I mean I I fundamentally reject the word theorist I don't think it's a theory uh I think that they're they're open about their collaboration and so yeah well that's so interesting because we have antifa right and at the same time we have actual Fascism and everything that antifa attacks has nothing to do with the actual fascism that's right yeah so it's so there's another great Cosmic joke for you yeah the anti-fascists are supporting a gigantic conglomeration of governments and large Banks and industries for all working companies Legacy Media isn't that fantastic yeah it's really it's really it's really Cosmic jokes are piling up yeah well I've been posting pictures of evil clowns lately and people think they're wondering what the hell I'm up to you know which form of insanity has now gripped me like I realized that Satan is an evil clown right I started to understand that you know when when I when I encountered the sign that was over Auschwitz because the sign that was over Auschwitz was Arabic mecht Frey yeah which means work will make you free right it's like a thought that's a joke then I thought who would tell a joke in Auschwitz right well yeah but who's the who's the spirit behind himler right who's the great Cosmic Joker and then also uh Mutual assured destruction right the acronym for years was mad I thought oh that's a joke too right right it's all these jokes you know and then I watched the death of Stalin have you seen that no oh it's great it's a movie about I've heard about oh it's so great because it's it's as Bru it it portrays the brutal reality of the Soviet Union there are terrible murderous raping catastrophic things going on in the background of the movie Non-Stop and then there's these five Jokers one of whom is stellen and the rest of his evil crew and they are like they're bumbling parodies right everything's a parody and I realized after really thinking about that and thinking about that motif of the Joker and the and the clown which has become so prevalent in modern culture I thought I CC When Things become totalitarian they turn into a parody right like Dylan Mulvaney is a parody and what's happening to women's sports is a parody and what North Face is doing with their advertising is a parody and it's like oh yes that's right Satan is an evil clown yeah right what did Marcus write in 69 so he wrote in essence Liberation that it's crucial that the resistance meaning them the radicals take on the form he said that's the clownish forms they so irritate the establishment it must become an antinomian Revolution right everything upside down everything upside down everything everything becomes and then so Judith Butler talks about the politics of parody you give this kind of Despair we'll never know any of that happen oh yeah politics strategy yeah politics a parody of the clownish forms that the that irritate the establishment I remember reading this because of course clown world is the meme on the internet they call it yeah yeah and I'm reading Marcus and I stumbled on this taking on the clownish forms it's like oh my God clown world was a plan right the only thing about the evil clowns is they're not funny like that's the people that's funny no they're not funny that's right they're not funny at all it's not funny at all right and so and and that's quite interesting too because one of the things you see about the totalitarian left is they really hate comedians they right so they love parody but they hate comedy that's right right and it's got to be it's got to be parody of the darkest form yeah it's always dark or just almost intentionally stupid or destructive yeah every time every time grotesque frequently grotesque yeah frequently monstrous yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah it's never fun okay so how do you know you're not just crazy um I asked myself that a lot too and I don't know that I have a really great answer for that is your wife sane she seems to be pretty sane she's very grounded okay well that's helpful and she still likes you she's she very much likes me and she's very convinced that I'm not crazy so okay and she is right you could both be crazy do you have friends it's a few yeah are they sane some of them some of them not maybe I don't know uh it's a weird weird world we occupy but yeah most of them are most of them are well that's one of the ways you can check right is you want to have people around you especially if you're playing in this in this abysmal realm let's say you bloody well want to have people around you who will give you the straight story you'll get demented and bent out of shape you know what it need to say about the abyss right you stare into it and it stares back that's right that's right right and if you fight with monstrous forms you have to be very careful that you don't become monstrous yourself right and I don't think you can do that yourself I think you have to have people around you are going tapping the industry hey hey yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah keep the humility up and the Gratitude well humility is absolutely Central this has become this is this has become kind of my main issue I speak often with you know Christian audiences but also political audiences and it just what unites this the the this kind of broadly secular resistance and then the to the woke and then the very religious and it the truly religious are humble before God and the rest of the religious are prideful right true right you know the Canadian government announced Pride season yeah yeah because you know pride pride parade isn't enough Pride day isn't it yeah Pride week well that's not enough either Pride season Pride all year yeah yeah yeah yeah I see it's so interesting to see the worship of Pride it's like well that is what we need it's like yeah I think that's what you mean it looks like that's what you say or the words that's what the words you say mean God only knows what you mean you might not mean anything but the words you say mean something just like Equity means something and hey we're going over to the Daily wire plus side now so if you're interested in that head over there give some consideration to supporting them if you like what they're doing and yeah well thanks again James very good talking with you hello everyone I would encourage you to continue listening to my conversation with my guest on dailywireplus.com

Channel: Jordan B Peterson

Views: 906,774

Keywords: Jordan Peterson, Jordan B Peterson, psychology, psychoanalysis, existentialism, maps of meaning, free speech, freedom of speech, personality lectures, personality and transformations, Jordan perterson, Dr Peterson, james lindsay, theology of marxism, critical race theory, karl marx, james lindsay joe rogan podcast, new discourses mao, james lindsay podcast, james lindsay debates, karl marx philosophy, jordan peterson 12 rules for life, psychology facts, existentialism lecture

Id: bnrdyphape4

Length: 110min 39sec (6639 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 15 2023