 here. It is Friday, January the 13th here in Kudji Sydney, Australia, 4.38pm. I've been listening to a BBC4 podcast series by Helen Lewis, the new gurus, and she asked like why do why do people do it? Why do people make podcasts? And I think part of the reason is you see someone else do it and you think oh I can do that and I can do it better. I read the pundits in the newspaper or I listen to them on TV or I might hear them on YouTube and I have to think oh I've got something sharper, wiser, smarter. What do I think of Dominique Perotet dressing up as a Nazi? Look I think we've all done it right? I mean this isn't just a phase that you go through. It doesn't bother me. I mean I wouldn't I wouldn't advise it but hey we all have nasty sides of ourselves that we just need to find the right situation to express it. Generally speaking most situations dressing up as a Nazi not not appropriate not a good look but you know there are probably some situations where it absolutely rocks and it adds a whole new layer of intensity and joy and excitement to whatever it is that you've got going on. So nice thing to Helen Lewis she's talking about the birth of the new guru. Not only a guru is now available to anyone, no anyone can be a guru and that's what gets us to Russell Brand. Can anyone really be a guru? I would think that you would need high verbal IQ and I think it would help to have charisma which means that you bring energy to people's lives. People like feel better they get an energy bump when they interact with you. So there's a discussion here with Jordan Hall. He used to be a big Jordan Peterson fan. He met a 17 year old girl who was a life coach. Oh yeah I'm sure that there are very savvy 17 year olds who can you know impart something valuable to some people. Sure but so Jordan Hall was very impressed by Jordan Peterson. Jordan Peterson became his guru and then Jordan Hall became disenchanted with Jordan Peterson and apparently all these people told him well you can't you can't get public with that because you'd be betraying this your mentor and that's all the reactions I got. So I started listening to Dennis Prager on KBC Radio in the fall of 1988 and my virtual parasocial relationship where there was that I would call his radio show and I'd argue with him and then I started corresponding with him and we eventually had a few phone calls and met in person but I always had this kind of confrontational combative relationship with Dennis Prager and a lot of people thought oh you know if he inspires you to convert to Judaism you know if he changed your life as you say then you can't be combative anymore now you have to be a dutiful follower and yeah I never went for that but nobody else understood that everyone else understood that just as she'd be trailed but I appreciated the kindness Dennis Prager showed me I appreciated some of the perspectives on life that I learned from Dennis Prager and then I wanted to move on and a lot of people don't want you to move on in life right because we only have so much processing power so we just kind of want to put people in boxes like family members relatives friends acquaintances like we want to put them in a box the idea that they just like radically move on you know in ways that we're not conceiving that's upsetting to people so they'll call it betrayal right betrayal is the hyperbolic turn that we use when people have choices make choices make decisions go in directions that we weren't expecting right so oh yeah my friend would rather you know go kickboxing on Friday night than then hang out with me I feel betrayed because you know last Friday night you know I thought I forwent what I wanted to do so that I could hang out with him right your friend has behavior and and different priorities than what you expected and so you experience that as betrayal but betrayal is simply a hyperbolic hyperemotional term that we give to other people making decisions that we don't expect and don't like speculating about Ukraine COVID and a new world order in between yoga sessions in the whole counties there are hundreds thousands online preachers fulfilling the role that might once have been held by a traditional religious authority are we then an increasingly secular society I really are online gurus fulfilling you know the role that used to be held by religious preachers I think it's a people sharing experiences and opinions and say demystifying parts of life like I know some things that you don't know you know some things that I don't know now we have a forum where we can talk to each other and I assume we all share a kind of a similar similar event you know we're all right-wing I believe I heard a great take on Andrew Tate today okay so I've never been able to summon much interest in Andrew Tate and just find him gross but I'm down with hearing your take on Andrew Tate so I'm currently exiled from my from my unit from my apartment here so I'm hanging out at the beach in Kudji I've just been on walk about past five hours in my thongs I think it's the first time I've ever walked like 12 miles in thongs and it wasn't so bad I went down on the ocean I was clamoring over rocks and you know thongs are actually better than my skeetches which you know just falling off very easily yeah Andrew Tate is a degenerate I don't think we are I think it's become popular to imagine that because more people particularly younger people yeah and I think that's a stupid perspective the word religion has a meaning it has various meanings but some bloke skeetches yeah some bloke just a finding on YouTube it's not fulfilling your religious needs this is this is not a religion what we've got going on here it's a community of blokes all right so yeah we are objectively definitively an increasingly less religious society no matter what this academic has to say say that they're religiously unaffiliated that means that they don't believe in God or don't believe in anything this is Tara is about a book called strange rights new religions for God this world what's actually happening is that the way that people particularly younger people are thinking about religion yeah we are definitively less religious and what an amazing side here at the koojee koojee beach right if people don't participate in an organized religion or in a disorganized religion all right we are definitively less religious words I have a meaning that the meanings change that can be multiple meanings but the idea that we're not becoming less religious it's just bogus is changing is becoming less institutional less about organized religion and more about what you might call the spiritual but not religious you have this great phrase about remixed religion what is that remixed religion is the idea that okay so she just said we're not becoming less religious we're becoming spiritual not religious okay spiritual is not religious okay so religion has requirements right there are rules there's organization right and spirituality is something you can do on your own and no one can tell you that you're wrong right so once one understanding of the difference like spirituality is for people who want the benefits of organized religion without paying the price there's only one approach there there are other approaches that are much more understanding or positive of spirituality but there are definitively differences so here this academic expert says oh we're not any less religious oh we're less religious but we're more spiritual what's that meaning ladies increasingly people want to kind of mix and match elements of belief systems or practices or rituals depending on what works for them a kind of curated bespoke religion of one so this is the kind of a la carte version of religion where you pick bits and pieces from Buddhism perhaps or from some of the newer wellness kind of things and mash it all together absolutely what are these new religions of the internet that you're interested in name a few for me sure yeah there's something to that but it's always been that way guess what people have always mixed and matched in the sense people have always taken on some responsibilities and some sacrifices in the name of their religion or culture or community and try to get away with other things chat says I think one-third Gen Z's or atheist depend on the country traditional religion think compatible with the dominant liberal egalitarian religion of Westerners yeah so liberalism has undercut yeah many of the the truth claims of religion and so in the United States for example the religion of niceness so to speak using very expanded use of the term religion all right has kind of superseded the individual truth claims of organized religions are being an American means that you're nice about all religions and that's you know much more important than the exclusive claims of any one religion so yeah a lot of young people they don't like the exclusive claims of Christianity and I'm sure if they got to know Judaism Islam they would not like the exclusive claims found there I'm interested in various cults of fandom wellness culture modern occultism the kind of neo-paganism and witchcraft particularly popular with younger progressive women libertarians who believe that the idea that one religion is true and others are false yeah that's kind of like anti-american to to believe that because it's not very nice now what she's describing as cults all right all in group identities are culty you can't have an in group identity without taking on the characteristics of cults technology will save us all the activists the people on the reactionary right fascinated with an idea of a return to a time where men were men and women were women communities involved in the pink or polyamory reimagining what it is to be with one another romantically and sexually your time is limited so don't waste it living someone else's life don't be trapped by dogma which is living with the results of other people's thinking don't let the noise of others opinions drown out your own inner voice that's Steve Jobs right he's he's being cast here is the ultimate guru and most important have the courage to follow your heart and intuition they somehow already know what you truly want to become so I'm interested in your take on how important a finger like Steve Jobs and the kind of tech utopianism he represents was in bringing around these new ideologies hugely hugely important so I think that just as a people will say that the Protestant Reformation of the printing press went hand-in-hand so too did this birth of the new internet culture really give rise to this new religious landscape because we're so used to now engaging in these kind of disembodied digital landscapes that are correspond to our desires and Steve Jobs in particular is I think one of the major ideological for runners of the shift which really arise out of this 1960s and where else could we have these kind of you know discussions outside of the disembodied space of the internet right we like to talk about things on this show that you're not allowed to talk about in polite society so as long as society is oppressing us censoring us right denying us our free speech wanting to persecute us for entertaining various heretical ideas now we'll have to find niche places on the internet where we can gather have a good chin wag American counterculture with obsession with being who you really are I think if you look at sort of the process of the technological revolution that we're all in it's a process of taking very centralized things and making them very democratic if you will very individualized do you think this is a golden age of gurus I absolutely do I think the internet has become this spiritual marketplace where everybody is trying to sell some sort of spiritual fulfillment and that brings me back to Russell Brent because you see oh so on the internet people are trying to sell something unlike in real life like in real life we're trying to sell things to we're trying to sell ourselves trying to sell a particular picture of ourselves we're trying to sell you know our favorite team our favorite song right the incident is just an extension of real life I was there when Russell the Guru was born although I didn't realize it at the time what was it like working with Russell Brad everything you'd imagine and more example so he came into our editorial conference and just delivered this sort of flawless monologue that had us kind of all sitting there going back okay that was a simple time well 2013 when brand guest edited a magazine I worked for the new statement you read okay I'm operating this a little fast let me slow this down saying there was no point in voting and he went on television to tell Jeremy Paxman the same thing I'm nearly pointing out that the car is calling for a revolution yeah absolutely I'm calling for change I'm calling for genuine alternative I say when there is a genuine alternative so an actor and a comic and an ex-drug addict is calling for a revolution and people are not voting right I don't think that's exactly gonna shake the foundations of British democracy genuine option until then that interview was like an explosion he was saying something to boo and exciting or naive and dangerous like who would consider that explosive to boo exciting dangerous I mean that's insane this guy is an actor a comic a recovering addict massive drug abuser like where would you be thrown that you know this actor do suggest that people don't vote in a perspective he saw himself as a revolutionary and saw that there was a huge audience for someone telling mainstream politicians and mainstream journalists but they were out of touch so yeah an actor wants to play a role it sees himself as a revolutionary that's what actors do they're very emotional flighty people revolution is totally going to happen I ain't got a flicker of doubt this is the end gurus by their nature outside the establishment today I would be more cautious about praising Russell Brown's incredible verbal fluency not everyone uses that power for good now when I watch okay so she's talking again like verbal fluency is this incredible power that some people have but the verbally fluent never take you any way you don't want to go isn't that an eagle song is a witchy woman or a peaceful easy feeling but anyway the verbally fluent guru can never take you any way you don't want to go so they're not nearly as dangerous as Helen Lewis pretends man she needs to read not born yesterday right we did not evolve to be gullible there's certain like basic points about life that just you know cut through the BS that is constantly you know flowing through mainstream media like this the series that we obviously did not evolve to be gullible right the verbally fluent guru so we're going to take you anywhere that you don't want to go such basic you know common sense evolutionary common sense man why isn't she up to date on this about vaccines and the new world order or I have it YouTube is restricted okay so if Russell brand talks about vaccines the new world order he's not going to shift anywhere anywhere that they don't want to go he's not going to convince people who believe in the efficacy of vaccines to not take the vaccine and he's not going to convince people that who aren't you know already conspiratorily minded that there's you know this very dangerous new world order coming down the pike access videos we have been officially censored by YouTube they took down one of our videos for misinformation okay so one thing you can learn from Russell brand if you want to be a podcaster going to be a successful live streaming you got to have that enormous amount of energy Dennis Prager talked about this when he started going on radio the station manager the program director would just keep on him more energy more energy more energy so if you're going to be good at doing this right you have to bring five to ten times the amount of energy that you would bring to an ordinary everyday conversation and you got to have that rising pitch right he's keeping that pitch very high to to compel your attention so he's a very good presenter how big I think hang on did I fall under the spell of a guru if so I'm not the only one in this series we will meet all kinds of gurus some you will have heard of others will be incredibly famous to their followers just not to you did you fall under the spell of a guru you're only gonna fall under the spell of a guru who's taking you where you want to go right have you ever fallen under the spell of a charismatic bus driver right do you allow a bus driver who you like you know to take you in a direction you don't want to go no you get off the bus like I'm in Sydney I'm not you know exactly familiar with you know which route should I take and I'm looking at my phone if I ever see that I'm going in the wrong direction I get off the bus at the next available stock stop no matter how charismatic the bus man and live streamers pundits gurus exactly the same way anytime they start taking you in a direction you don't want to go right you're gonna get off that bus there's a guru for every area every demographic every modern worry we'll hear from gurus predicting the future you've had a good run but unfortunately this good run has ended discover what happens when you put faith and money in a digital currency there's a common term that people say in Bitcoin came for the gains stay for the revolution but our journey will begin in the world of wellness as I explore how people are cleansing their bodies and their souls how can I find a way that makes me feel the most juicy and excited to be alive and for me it's like drinking my piss once a day makes me feel good excellent wonderful okay here we go gazing into the abyss this is talking about Neo reaction Jordan Peterson and company great I'm glad it's the BBC okay this is Helen Lewis BBC and the series is called the new gurus the new gurus and this is episode 5 gazing into the abyss is about Jordan Hall Jordan Peterson the new reaction I thought it was a very high caliber interview I would like it to have been longer and I would like it I would you know I remember the camera after we'd finished filming this 90 minutes going well I don't see we're gonna watch all that and you're like actually as it turns out 55 million people in September 2018 I interviewed the Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson for GQ you could have one thing answer for everything you could let me part of the patriarchal institution I don't think you're obeying the rule that says maybe treat people as if they have something worth hearing so I'm not so a lot of these journalists like Helen Lewis they want to show off for the journalistic peers to show how tough they are but that's just lousy interview technique right a good interview follows a protocol just like a plane takeoff and a plane landing and sticking your opinions and reciting moral judgments where you're conducting an interview just shuts the other party down and puts them into a defensive mode so you don't get good quality content but a lot of journals like Helen Lewis they just want to preen and show off at the expense of getting a good quality interview the viral moment of my career watched by more than 50 million people on YouTube David Fuller was one of them I am a journalist and filmmaker and I'm also the founder of the rebel wisdom media channel David found Peterson such an inspirational guru that he quit his job to follow his teachings but he doesn't feel like that anymore do you feel betrayed wow people come along and they meet a particular need in our life and so whether it's a father figure or a guru or rabbi or teacher or an inspiration right people can just come along and they can they can set off some you know a charge inside us unleash energy inspire us to go in a new direction and but in the final analysis that their reflection of us so when when I was like really into Dennis Prager right that was a reflection of me all right and I always knew that from from the beginning that you know whoever I resonate with that that's saying a lot about me it's not just that all this third party has all these amazing qualities no if I know if I like a TV show that reflects something about me if I like a book it reflects something about me if I like a song I reflect something about me if I like a pundit it reflects something about me because the pundit can never take you anywhere you don't want to go there's a disappointment I've really wrestled with a sense of what is my personal loyalty towards him so this is where I found it so helpful to have a situation this perspective so you can take on a hero and then you find out their feet of play but when you realize that your heroes are only heroic in certain situations and in other situations they are the opposite of heroic that's simply what it means to be human like in some circumstances you would meet me and encounter me and I will be polite I'd be helpful I might be you know fun or amusing honest forthright and other situations you'll encounter me I'll be unpleasant angry suspicious shut down it depends on the situation right no one's brave in all circumstances no one's honest in all circumstances no one's you know forthright in all circumstances like we're all profoundly affected by the situation that we're in yeah yes this is the story of a man who found his guru and how he lost that fake Helen Lewis a starfighter of the Atlantic and I think we're living through a golden age of gurus every way you look online people are giving and taking advice take ownership of your job of your team oh that's shocking that's revolutionary amazing I mean there's no sense of wider perspective any way you look offline people are taking and giving advice right the internet is a part of the real world it's not separate from the real world in the real world people are constantly giving advice people constantly taking advice right so the internet isn't different from the real world it's not some revolution as our trusted institutions waivers we're looking to notice that rising pitch right the power and the energy behind those words that's how you capture attention you bring a lot of energy and you got the rising pitch and you tell people you've got to take control of your life right that's how you want to speak you want to grab people's attention charismatic individuals to tell us how to live it's got religious elements to tell us how to live no we want people to guide us where we want to go we're not looking at people just to tell us how to live she's got no clue the role of the guru right I might turn to one friend for advice about buying a car another friend for advice about whether you know invest my 401k another friend for you know advice about you know meeting connecting with a particular woman might turn to someone else for advice on clothing I turn to someone else for advice on sound quality turn to someone else for advice on live streaming turn someone else for advice on podcasting all right we turn to people for advice in the direction we already want to go right we're not turning to people just to really nearly tell us how to live our lives cult like elements certainly this idea that it's us against the world cult like elements us against the world that's inherent in all in group identity there's just no sense of the wider the wider perspective right all in group identities are like calls right you can't have a strong in group identity without you know carrying on many courtee particular this is a story about economics and technology and about our search for certainty in an uncertain world just as people will say that the Protestant Reformation of the printing press went hand-in-hand so too did this birth of the new internet culture really give rise to this new religious landscape how are these gurus changing our lives and the world around us and who holds them to account for BBC right you know who holds gurus to account reality reality holds me to account it holds you to account right and the reality is if you stop thinking about what your boss wants you'll be out of a job if you stop thinking about what your friends want you'll be out of friends you stop thinking about what your spouse wants you'll be out of a spouse right reality bites you stop taking other people into consideration stop taking their needs and your consideration right you'll lose the from your life and so it's not like gurus just running loose until BBC and Helen Lewis came along to hold them to account knew also holds gurus to account other gurus right we enjoy critiquing and challenging each other to the extent that you know I'm a guru like we enjoyed talking with friends they're trying to restrict my mobile data limit it's oppression the globalists elites are trying to shut me down I think oh I reached my global data limit so they cut it off and ask me if I want more bloody hell like when I use my Aussie Oppo phone and I need to turn it up a bit because there's a lot of noise around me they go hey do you consent to have your you know phone raise the volume to unsafe levels yes I can send buddy how the nanny stayed mates here for BBC sounds this is the new gurus a series about looking for enlightenment in the digital world episode 5 gazing into the abyss okay people are usually looking for enlightenment in the digital world they're looking to solve problems and that's the easiest way to get an audience you solve people's problems you know if they've got yellow teeth if they're not wearing clothes that are well-fitting or flattering and people you know have problems with their their hearing or their sight or you know creating a delicious dinner or losing weight right if you solve people's problems you'll get an audience right when when I release a video that gets very few views that's because that video is not solving anyone's problems right make a video that solves people's problems show them how to get cheap airfares we'll get a lot of use the man David Fuller chose as his guru Jordan Peterson is the author of the best-selling self-help book 12 rules for life okay so Jordan Hall chose Jordan Peterson to be his guru because Jordan Peterson unleashed things and Jordan Hall that he wanted unleashed Jordan Peterson took Jordan Hall on a journey where Jordan Hall wanted to go it's not like Jordan Peterson kidnapped Jordan Hall and sent him in a direction completely antithetical to everything that Jordan Hall wanted rule one is stand up straight with your shoulders back and rule two is that's that's bad advice all right make the problem solve the problem be a government guru right set up straight with the shoulders back that that's bad advice you have all sorts of interfering muscular tension patterns right you may have one shoulder higher than the other your head made up forward and forward head posture you have learned to get through life by tensing up right that's that's how you have navigated a lot of difficult painful situations and by tensing up to force your way through very difficult circumstances you're then implicated into yourself you know unnecessary muscular tension and compression and kind of pulling down your musculature patterns and just like trying to override that by standing up straight with the shoulders back that's not going to do it what you need to do is start subtracting all these layers of unnecessary tension and compression that you have accumulated as you found your way through life and this will be incredibly disconcerting because we tend to know ourselves by our tension patterns and we tend to take on the tension patterns of people we like and admire such as our parents so get me to a good alexander technique teacher and begin the process of subtraction of unnecessary compression and tension patterns treat yourself like you're someone responsible for helping a number three which is very tightly associated with number two make friends with those people who want the best for you the same year I interviewed Peterson he was anointed a member of a band of anti-woke warriors known as the intellectual dark web here is one of its members the conservative commentator Dave Rubin describing the group on his podcast a few months ago one of my favorite people to sit across this table from Eric Weinstein came up with the phrase intellectual dark web to describe this eclectic mix of people from Sam Harris to Ben Shapiro to his brother Brett Weinstein to Jordan Peterson what an incredibly pretentious title for just an incredibly pretentious group of people and they're later described in this podcast as producing scholarship I am not aware of much scholarship being produced by the intellectual dark web all of whom are figuring out ways to have the important and often dangerous conversations that are completely ignored by the mainstream if you've read a story about wokeness or cancel culture lately thank the intellectual dark web so critical race theory it's everywhere if you say this to a feminist you're a sexist they have redefined the term racism it's all woke it's all woke culture they have millions of followers who are incredibly loyal online armies rallying to their banners okay they don't have millions of followers who are going in a direction they otherwise would not have gone through if they didn't discover the intellectual dark web right they have millions of people who basically agree with them and they fulfill these people's needs for assurance right they are very adept at giving their audience what they want to hear they confirm their audience's prejudices and whenever they deviate from what their audience while guess what the audience goes away it's not like the audience has to hear every single Jordan Peterson video every single Eric Weinstein video right as soon as Eric or Jordan say something that their audience doesn't want to hear their audience that part of the audience just goes away so she portrays these gurus who just have millions of people on their back and call that these gurus like marionettes and they can just pull the string and millions of people jump but look you're all individuals right you come in here with your own personality with your own views and to the extent that I have any effect on you it's only because you want to go in a particular direction that I might be offering their fans cannot get enough of their content this conversation is over seven hours the fans cannot get enough that's because their fans don't consume all their content if fans only consume the content that is amenable to them to their predisposition to taking them where they want to go right so she's just saying things are just patently untrue bogus you think she'd be a little more thoughtful and careful some folks that's too long for some too short for some just right the intellectual yeah that's Lex Friedman and he's what yet seven hour conversation was who was that with but we talked about incredibly shallow vapid banal like Lex Friedman Joe Rogan Jocko Willink I mean these are all good for men I mean these are all like really like low IQ productions I mean just just banal silly vapid perspectives dark where promised to bring polite taboos around race and gender declining birth rates islamism and the decline of Western civilization their freewheeling provocative controversial discussions resonated with people who've grown up in stuffier or formulaic media environments people like David Fuller I've been a journalist for about 20 years so yeah if you want to hear distant perspectives that listen to generally thoughtful genuinely thoughtful people like Paul Godfried or Jared Taylor or Peter Brimlow or Amy Wax and Nathan Kaftus, Nevin Sesadik, J. Michael Bailey I mean there are a lot of genuine distant intellectuals out there you then have to go for the junk food of the intellectual dark web. I made documentaries for Channel 4, BBC but at the same time I was also doing a lot of personal growth work a lot of spiritual work I studied philosophies I was always deeply interested in kind of ideas and always a little bit frustrated by what I consider to be sort of the narrowness of the conversation in the newsroom and we never really asked the sort of deeper questions and in particular in a way that is because the news essentially repackages what bureaucracies release right the news right the professional news business is a business right they sell advertising and the the news section of the news business is that they secure information and decisions and reports released by various bureaucracies whether it's a jury whether it's you know the Department of Labor which is releasing unemployment statistics whether it's the presidential administration laying out their legislative agenda whether it's Fortune 500 company or you know a neighborhood store right these are bureaucracies that you know release information to the public and so the news is simply telling you what various bureaucracies say and you know maybe different bureaucracies have different opinions like the Republican and Democratic Party and often have very different opinions and so they all report what these bureaucracies tell them right it's not necessarily reality right it's frequently completely divorced from reality love to get more wisdom and truth that was happening in the world from your friend from a stranger in a park they're from a live streamer from you know a clerk at the County Court House right you'll often get you know more real talk from from your girlfriend from some stranger you talk to on a bus then you get on the NBC Nightly News which is just going to prevent you the reports and decisions made by bureaucracies I shouldn't have what goes in the whole left by religion when David Fuller first heard about Jordan Peterson the Canadian psychologist wasn't yet the full-blown culture warrior he would eventually become David was enthralled by peasants online lectures posted on YouTube and I found the way that he knitted together the great psychological thinkers like Jung and Freud with the phenomenologists together with the deep mythological really compelling and I feel like that work is some of the most profound stuff I've encountered or listened to so when Jordan Peterson situation changed when he became a celebrity it changed him and so a lot of people who are good in a particular area when they get some amount of fame they then feel like you know oh I have so much more wisdom to share and they start sharing opinions on all sorts of things about which they have no expertise very common trajectory these figures of the imagination can reveal the structure of reality to you and that's what happened with Jung that's what he described in the red book I also that I've never gotten into Jordan Peterson I don't have anything against him some of the things he says are stupid some of the things he says are smart some of the things I don't know but I've never sought out his perspective on anything you know I can't help kind of getting bombarded with Jordan Peterson stuff but I've never been one who's looked to Jordan Peterson for wisdom has found you know particular value or benefit from Jordan had sympathy with a lot of his criticisms of identity politics like if you're one eighth black what does that make you exactly are you black are you white are you oppressed or great question if you're one eighth black you're filling out the US census you accounted as black right if you're seven eighths wide one eighth black US census report counts you as 100% black right if you are three quarters white and you're one quarter Filipino US census report counts you as one quarter as 100% Filipino right so that's how the US census reports distort the demographics of the United States right the country is far whiter than US Census Bureau's information says because it's sport distorted with a particular agenda of accentuating the number and preferably the power of non-whites so you encountered him as a speaker so this is something that really could have only happened in the supposed YouTube era yes when did you decide you wanted to interview him and why I became hugely taken with his thought and I was all I kind of obsessed and then I thought he's doing these Bible lectures in Canada in Toronto so this is something about Jordan John Paul right it's like we have you know empty spaces inside in our soul in our life you like something needs to change and someone comes along and catalyzes us in you know moving off in a new direction so we may you know become obsessed for a while and we don't usually stay obsessed with you know gurus for that laugh all right we may suck them dry for everything they have to offer us and then we move on people go half way across the world for sports game like this is for me like going watching an amazing super bowl interviewing Jordan Peterson at that point yeah and what did you think of him then what was he like when you met him warm welcoming I got the sense of a sort of classic eccentric professor what is the masculinity we can aspire to well it's responsibility fundamentally to put it symbolic so it's very easy to be warm and welcoming when you feel how much someone loves the respects and venerates you right someone comes to you you know filled with warmth and gratitude and respect and tells you how you've changed their life you know obviously you're gonna be warm and welcoming in response right you want to come on the chat and tell me you know how much I've changed your life I mean then I'm gonna be warm and welcoming that's that's no surprise so that Dennis Prager was warm and welcoming to me or Jordan Peterson was warm and welcoming to this block all right that's only to be expected most people are gonna be warm and welcoming you know when you give them a tongue bar yes that your responsibility is to incarnate the spirit of the logos that's your role in life I look back at the interview that I did with him in 2017 and I see a person who was much more relaxed than I think he became so I was just laughing there when Jordan talked about oh your role in life is to incarnate the logo so no idea what that means but I just had this involuntary laughing reaction so and I love him that is my my shortest kind of compressed and my head went forward so every emotion is only possible with a particular alignment of the body so if I maintain in a complete serenity in my face my musculature if there wasn't any compression or tension in my shoulders and in my back I wouldn't have been able to laugh you can only feel depressed if you literally pull down and depress on yourself so every single emotion whether it's joy anger resentment laughter it's only possible with a particular alignment of your body and so you'll see when I live stream or you'll see anyone when they go through different emotions you'll see the alignment of their body change as they experience different emotions so laughter they'll have to be some compression and release there's some distortion and pulling down and compressing of the musculature and then a release of that as they laugh afterwards you met him then essentially pre guru you met him when he was still a person robin a phenomenon yes he had a certain profile at that point but he guess what even phenomenons are still persons all right so you become a star or phenomenon right there's just part of you as a phenomenon you know and then large part of you still a person we never get to graduate from being a human being we never get to graduate from being a flawed vulnerable human being who may be quite adapted to certain situations and quite maladapted to other situations right no matter how big our star no matter if we're royalty no matter if we're Hollywood actors or live streamers with thousands of viewers never get to graduate from being flawed vulnerable human beings who are impressive in some situations and depressive in other situations wasn't the stratospheric figure that he then became after he had this interview with Kathy Newman on Channel 4 News where I've been working for about ten years as David says Peterson became a superstar thanks to a combative interview he did with Kathy Newman it took okay it wasn't the Kathy Newman interview that made Jordan Peterson a superstar Jordan Peterson performed extremely well in a lot of interviews and in many public presentations and Jordan Peterson made Jordan Peterson a star it wasn't Kathy Newman Jordan Peterson always possessed tremendous charisma people always were oriented towards him and charisma simply means that you you give people energy they feel better when they interact with you and so they seek more and deeper and more intense interactions because they find that they get energized from from interacting with you so that's charisma you know charismatic person goes through the day you know adding energy to the people that he interacts with and from those interactions he gets energy so that he then has more energy to to share with other people so that's a successful life you go through the day and you keep adding up to your store of energy because you get on the same you know the same situation with others right you get you know tuned into other people you create a shared reality with someone else even if it's just saying good morning but there's like if there's something genuine in your good morning other people will feel that you'll have an experience where you're on the same page with someone else and then both of you will get energy from that and out of that energy will come a bond between you and out of that bond will become or come an ethic right you can never form bonds with anyone without a morality and ethical system that then develops from so the charismatic person goes through the day goes through life yeah getting on the same page tuning in to other people and then creating a shared experience with them and because they they're capable of tuning into you and sharing a real experience with you you know sharing understanding your concerns you know sharing your fears and your hopes and your dreams you know acknowledging your humanity all right they tune into you they get on same page with you create a shared experience with you and that energizes both of you and so the charismatic person is skilled at tuning in to his audience tuning into people as individuals or turning into people as groups understanding where they're at they're talking to them in a way that connects and then out of that connection always comes energy a bond and an ethical system place on an old school broadcaster but it went viral on YouTube do you believe in equal pay well I made the argument there so you don't even know I'm not saying that at all because a lot of people listening to you will just say I mean are we going back to the party actually listening I thought it showed up so many of the kind of the fault lines of the conversation in a really fascinating way particularly this clash between the alternatives so this Kathy Newman this is you know happy interrupting a terrible interviewer she doesn't regret anything about that interview right she's just you know still so proud of it even though she was made to look like for the mainstream I found that quite difficult it's like kind of your parents fighting David's loyalties were torn between the old and the new the mainstream and the alternative he chose the new setting up a YouTube channel called rebel wisdom to showcase the emerging superstars of the intellectual dark web oh well these people now have this incredible reach to influence the conversation imagine how shallow Jordan all would have to be to think that the intellectual dark web was something significant that you know he wanted to showcase I mean imagine just like the very shallow low level of understanding he had of reality to think that there's something special about Eric Weinstein and who is his brother at Evergreen College Brett Weinstein Ben Shapiro Sam Harris Joe Rogan Jordan I mean imagine like his shallow understanding of life there's lack of wisdom and depth but he thinks that you know these are important thinkers I was sympathetic to the intellectual dark web certainly at the beginning I faced a few cancellation attempts myself so I can tell you it does feel like there are professional and personal consequences for dissenting from the fashionable consensus on topics this is the bioethicist Alice Drager there was this cultural feeling certainly in the United States that people have been forbidden supposedly from saying certain things because the left had become so policing and the left had become so policing and is so policing ironically for a group whose members often claimed that liberal institutions were outdated and irrelevant okay so when people say they're forbidden from saying things they mean that they don't want to face the consequences would come if they say certain things that's what's really going on in 2018 the intellectual dark web was anointed as the hot new thing by the impeccably liberal New York Times Alice who had written a provocative book about the handling of controversial academics took their call so you could have been part of the intellectual dark web what happened I was approached by Barry Weiss at the New York Times and she identified me in her thinking as being sort of part of this intellectual dark web group and every time she mentioned it to me I giggled I thought it was so silly the other thing was that the people she would name I had no idea who they were I mean I vaguely heard of Jordan Peterson but literally the rest of them I had to look them up so how could I be part of a web that I didn't know any of the people in it the newspaper center Pulitzer prize-winning photographer who wanted to shoot Alice behind her house in dim light looking moody so we went out to this place behind my fire department that's the thing about the news is it's so hyped beyond reality it's so packaged to you know get attention right to attract eyeballs that's that's the business of news tracking eyeballs how do you get eyeballs right you hype you exaggerate you manipulate right you use all sorts of artificial and theatrical means to capture attention news is frequently not very good for you because it distorts reality to try to capture your attention so that they can then sew you advertising open field and reads that's a deer wandering around he was like waiting for the perfect light to shoot me and the more I stood there the more that this is just stupid right because like I don't disrespect this person or very right but like what is going on here so I can't look very now like I don't think I make any sense for this article Alice wasn't trying to be an outsider and she also didn't understand how the other members of the IDW was supposed to be outsiders when thousands of people were coming to their talks and furthermore I think what they all seem to have in common is trying to piss off progressives and I don't think that's a worthy intellectual goal anymore than pissing off conservatives is a worthy intellectual goal that's not intellectualism so Alice no what they all had in common was you know willingness to say anything almost to garner attention and to advance themselves right so they were all into their career success but they were never going to jeopardize their career success by ever actually saying any you know painful truths that might make their lives you know less comfortable this is not a crew in the intellectual dark web who has much to offer you know a thinking person pulled out of the future the idea of being targets of persecution modern-day Galileo's was key to the appeal of the intellectual dark web that's a very potent message isn't it for a guru is to say people don't want you to hear this but I mean these guys who think they're modern-day Galileo's it's absolutely absurd that is completely disconnected from reality it's not an idea of truth we're talking hacks here you don't really add anything I've got to tell you anyway oh it's always been this ancient to Texas you can find the gurus will always say I have the secret wisdom they don't want you to hear it makes it extra attractive but if Alice didn't want it yeah that's what marketers do right that's what you know hype hype artists do right it's people who don't mind being dishonest to try to advance their interests don't mind trying to lie lie and manipulate you to advance their own fame anything to do with the intellectual dark web plenty of people were happy to take her spot I used to say there was IDW adjacent I guess this is James Lindsay my typical reach right now is somewhere in the one to five million people range James became famous his part in the soak and how do you build up you know this this big following you tell people what they want to hear I need to be predictable so I remember I got a big bump after the 2020 election when I just made a tweet outlining what I thought Donald Trump's strategy would be to try to fight the election results and so I you know I suddenly got a flood of like a hundred new subscribers but when I didn't continue along that predictable line when I said that there's no evidence of a vertebrate then you know I lost that audience right you get an audience I just servicing them just like a prostitute services an audience you tell them what they they want to hear you give them something predictable called grievance studies hoax alongside two co-conspirators he submitted spoof papers to academic journals subjects included a conceptual penis and dogs raping each other in parks the trio wanted to expose as they saw it the politically correct excesses of academia so some of these journals will accept anything particularly if you pay for the publication so these weren't the most prestigious journals that accepted these nonsense contributions the intellectual dark book kind of is a movement was sort of pricking that bubble and trying to pop it and my suspicion of academia now is total I actually think I trust like the van down by the river this is free candy or like probably send my kids into the free candy van before I would trust academia at all I first interview James and 20 okay so if you send you know publication to you know academic journal that you know publishes everything you know if you pay them it's not exactly the indictment against academia academia is incredibly diverse there's some academics who are doing good work there are some plumbers who are doing good work there are some psychiatrists and psychotherapists landscapers who are doing good work now most are just mediocre and then a significant number of bad jobs in 2018 when he'd recently finished the grievance studies hoax and he struck me as interesting and eloquent as well as competitive confident maybe a little self-aggrandizing I didn't think about it much for a couple of years until I heard that he'd been in a hype okay so anyone who's gonna broadcast their opinions like I do or James Lindsay does or Helen Lewis does it's gonna be self-aggrandizing right so narcissism is usually not a condition it's a situational thing all right and so if I'm gonna sit here in a park on a Friday afternoon it's about 5 30 p.m. here Friday afternoon January 13th in Sydney Australia yeah there's gonna be an overly inflated sense of self you know it's just you know so sure that I have something important to say so I'm gonna sit here in a park bench now and talk to a little phone my friend say how do you talk to a little phone for as long as you do because I think I have important things to say I'm fired up about saying them I think that there are other things that I've heard on a park ass that the silly and stupid and that I want to point them out all right I so charged up and when you're that charged up to share your opinions yeah you're obviously gonna have some self-aggrandizement tendencies my profile fight on Twitter with the Ashwitz Museum actually joined Twitter in 2012 I was abnormally patient okay there's nothing about being a museum which gives you greater wisdom than being a plumbing company there's nothing about being in the Holocaust business that automatically gives you greater wisdom or greater righteousness greater clarity greater prestige than if you're a plumber right surviving a Holocaust does not make you wiser or kinder or a finer human being making your living from selling things with regard to a genocide does not make you automatically a wiser kinder greater finer institution or human being so there's no reason that fighting with you know the Auschwitz shop you know is any more or less troublesome than you know fighting with it with a plumber or a landscape architect right some some museum or shop you know with regard to some genocide it's not automatically imbued with wisdom and grace and and profundity and clarity and goodness and righteousness right it's it's another organization you know trying to make a buck and trying to hype its influence and trying to change other people's opinions and trying to attach itself to you know a sacred historical event which now they're probably one regarded something is occurring outside of history this is something in sacred history this is like a transcendent event not in ordinary history and they have the the magic key to this you know sacred holy thing normally willing to engage in dialogue and what I was doing was destroying myself mentally and emotionally with the level of frustration the trolling etc. and so self-defensively just being dismissive and rude is a strategy is oh well let's have a dialogue I would love to have a debate no screw that your mom sucks you know just go right to the throat and just because it's Twitter okay but that ends up with you arguing with the Auschwitz Museum I didn't quite argue that she keeps going back as though the Auschwitz Museum is a repository of wisdom goodness kindness truth clarity but there's nothing inherent in being a museum related to some genocide that automatically bestows any of these qualities right it's just she's talking as though she's taking for granted but because this is a museum attached to a particular you know sacred holy outside of history event through the prism through which everything else must be viewed right so therefore you can't argue with them right she's saying anytime you say something sacred you say you can't argue with it so she's saying that this particular genocide this is sacred right and you'll notice people never want to argue or even discuss or you know entertain any challenge to anything they hold sacred and so many secular people right they don't hold anything religious sacred but they'll hold you know particular genocide sacred they'll hold a particular you know egalitarian perspective oh you know all people must have identically similar gifts any differences in life outcomes between groups that that must be related you know entirely to social structural forces right that and that is a belief that takes on all the qualities of a sacred belief for them talk to you later bye bye