blame-the-victim

The Sinister Truth about Peng Shuai Has Been Revealed

THE COOL KID’S PHILOSOPHER

It’s easy to laugh, as some of us do, at the phrase “conservative intellectual.” When the most prominent public spokesmen for the right’s ideas include Milo Yiannopoulos, Charles Murray, and Dinesh D’Souza, one might conclude that the movement does not have anything serious to offer beyond “Feminism is cancer,” “Black people are dumb,” and “Democrats are Nazis.” (Those are, as I understand it, the central intellectual contributions of Yiannopoulos, Murray, and D’Souza, respectively.)

But according to the New York Times, it would be a mistake to write off Conservative Thought so hastily. For we would be overlooking one crucial figure: Ben Shapiro. Shapiro, we are told, is “the cool kid’s philosopher, dissecting arguments with a lawyer’s skill and references to Aristotle.” The Times quotes praise of Shapiro as a “brilliant polemicist” and “principled gladiator,” a quick-witted man who “reads books,” and “takes apart arguments in ways that make the conservative conclusion seem utterly logical.” Shapiro is the “destroyer of weak arguments,” he “has been called the voice of the conservative millennial movement.” He is a genuine intellectual, a man who “does not attack unfairly, stoke anger for the sake of it, or mischaracterize his opponents’ positions.” He is principled: he deplores Trump, and cares about Truth. Shapiro’s personal mantra, “Facts don’t care about your feelings,” captures his approach: he’s passionate, but he believes in following reason rather than emotion. Shapiro, then, represents the best in contemporary conservative thinking. And if the cool kids have a philosopher, it is worth examining his philosophy in some depth.

I will confess, I had not spent much time listening to or reading Ben Shapiro before reading about him in the New York Times. That might be a damning sign of my own closed-mindedness: here I am, a person who considers himself intellectually serious, and I have written off the other side without even engaging with its strongest arguments. So I decided to spend a few wearying days trawling through the Shapiro oeuvre, listening to the speeches and radio shows and reading the columns and books. If Shapiro had arguments that Destroyed and Decimated the left, I wanted to make sure I heard them. I consider myself a bit of a leftist, and I like to know when I’ve been decimated.

I’ll admit that I was not immediately dazzled by the force of Shapiro’s intellect. I started with his controversial recent Berkeley speech. Toward the beginning, he addressed Antifa protesters, whom he called “communist pieces of garbage”: “You guys are so stupid… you can all go to hell, you pathetic, lying, stupid jackasses.” According to the Times, there is a wide gulf between Trump/Yiannopoulos-style vulgar conservatism and Shapiro-style Logical conservatism, but I just am not sure that I see in “Go to hell, you communist piece of garbage” the kind of “polemical brilliance” that Shapiro is reputed to demonstrate. The rest of the speech, when it got beyond making Botox jokes about Nancy Pelosi, was strong on insults (“pusillanimous cowards,” “hard-Left morons,” “uncivilized barbarians”) and light on actual argumentation and substantive factual claims. Shapiro did say that the alt-right are full of “bullshit” and that the left overstates the threat posed by Shapiro’s speeches. (Both true.) The main thrust of the speech, though, is that America is the greatest country in the world, that there are no real injustices facing black people, women, and poor people, and that if you don’t do well economically here it’s entirely your fault. As he says:

This country is an amazing place full of opportunity. Nobody, by and large, cares enough about you to stop you from achieving your dreams. That includes you, people who are shouting out there in the audience. No one cares about you; get over yourselves. I don’t care about you; no one cares about you…That means, in a free country, if you fail, it’s probably your own fault.

Shapiro scoffs at all claims that racism is a serious problem facing black people. This is in part because “I wasn’t an adult when Jim Crow was in place… and I would bet you money that the people in this room haven’t acted in a racist manner, that they haven’t held slaves, or voted for Jim Crow.” He says the idea that black people’s disproportionate poverty has anything to do with racism is “just not true,” and tosses out a few points to prove that the importance of race is overstated: First, Asian Americans are wealthier than white people, which would be impossible if racism determined economic outcomes. (Shapiro doesn’t mention that the vast majority of Asian American adults are immigrants, and they are disproportionately from the wealthier and more highly-educated segments of their own countries.) Second, he says, people of any race who work full time, are married, and have high school diplomas tend not to be poor, meaning that poverty is a function of one’s choice not to do these things. (In fact, this theory, widely cited by conservatives, turns out to be vacuous: of course people who have full-time jobs usually aren’t in poverty, the problem is that black people disproportionately can’t get jobs.) Next, Shapiro says that because black married couples have a lower poverty rate than white single mothers, “life decisions” are what creates poverty. (Actually, even when two black people pool their wealth in a marriage, “the median white single parent has 2.2 times more wealth than the median black two-parent household.”) Finally, Shapiro says that the disproportionately black population in America’s prisons say nothing about racism, because black people simply commit more crimes, and “if you don’t commit a crime, you’re not going to be arrested for it” because “the police are not going around arresting black people for the fun of it.” (I have some black men in Louisiana I’d like Shapiro to meet so that he can explain his theory that people do not get arrested for crimes they haven’t committed. But I’d also like to hear him explain why black men receive 20% longer sentences for the same crime as white men with similar backgrounds.)

What dispirited me about Shapiro’s approach is that he’s clearly not actually very interested in Facts at all. The role that race plays in American life is a serious sociological question, one that isn’t answered easily. But Shapiro plucks only the statistics that suggest race doesn’t matter, and pretends the statistics that suggest it does matter don’t exist. Nobody can trust him, because if he comes across a finding showing that incarceration rates more closely follow crime rates than racial demographics, you can bet it will appear in his next speech. But if someone shows that a white man with a criminal record is far more likely to receive a job callback than a black man without a criminal record, you’ll never hear it mentioned. It would be perfectly reasonable for Shapiro to critique these findings; sociologists critique each other all the time. Instead, he selects only the parts of reality that please him. Just look at his reply when he was asked about the black-white wealth gap: “It has nothing to do with race and everything to do with culture.” That’s a strange thing to say, because the wealth gap has existed continuously since the time of slavery: average black net worth has always been lower than white net worth, and there were massive structural obstacles to the black accumulation of wealth well into the 20th century, as we can see in Ta-Nehisi Coates’ writings on the lasting impact of housing policy. Family wealth is passed down intergenerationally, and so it’s hard to conclude that the fact that the average white family has $13 of wealth for every $1 of wealth held by a black family is the sole result of spontaneous contemporary black cultural choices, with no historical component whatsoever. The impact of human decisions on outcomes, and the factors that shape the available range of choices, are difficult topics in social science with no easy answers. But one thing we do know is that, since black people were enslaved for 246 years (and free for 152), and Jim Crow was in operation during the time of people who are still alive (thereby being a core determinant of both their life outcomes and the capital that they were able to pass onto their own children), anyone who says “culture is everything” and “race is irrelevant” is not actually seriously interested in trying to figure out how the world works.

In investigating Shapiro’s works, then, the first sign that he might not be a “philosopher” was that he didn’t seem especially interested in the central task of philosophy, namely the critical scrutiny of your own beliefs. Shapiro’s worldview is fixed and immovable. Watch the video of his answer on the racial wealth gap: when his black co-panelists laugh at his answer about culture, he does not think to himself “Hm, perhaps they know something I don’t know about what it is like to be black,” he thinks “They must be irrational and in need of my wisdom.” He doesn’t listen to anyone, he just confronts them.

My initial impressions were also soured by Shapiro’s casual bigotry. That may not be the wisest observation to lead with: I’m sure Shapiro would be very pleased with himself to hear me call him a racist. (Though Shapiro always looks somewhat pleased with himself.) Nothing could better prove his point: the left has no arguments, so they resort to calling people they dislike “racists.” And since he explicitly says that he isn’t a racist, what am I doing if not using the classic left-wing “bullying” tactic of dismissing your opponent as a nasty, bigoted individual?

But, well, I don’t know what else to call a statement like this: “Israelis like to build. Arabs like to bomb crap and live in open sewage.” (Shapiro followed it with the hashtag #SettlementsRock.) Arabs like to bomb crap and live in sewage. Perhaps I’m crazy. Perhaps there’s a definition of the word “racism” that wouldn’t include a statement like that. But since the statements “Black people are violent and want to live in sewage” or “Jews are violent and want to live in sewage” would both sound… somewhat racist, I don’t see how the conclusion can be avoided. What do you call a crass pejorative generalization about an entire ethnic group? I know one word, but I’m open to others. (By the way, it’s amusing that Shapiro can see Gazan children swimming in sewage and think “Wow, Arabs must just really have a thing for sewage,” a train of reasoning roughly akin to “Wow, Haitians must really love dying in earthquakes, since a lot of them seem to have done it.” Though I am reliably informed that Shapiro is a master of logic, so I am sure there is more to this than mere simple-minded prejudice.)

Shapiro’s thoughts about Arabs are all along similar lines. Usually conservatives are careful to draw a distinction: they are not condemning an ethnicity, but rather adherents to an ideology, namely Islamism. Not so with Shapiro: for him, the problem is not Islamism or even Islam writ large. It’s Arabs: “The Arab-Israeli conflict may be accurately described as a war between darkness and light. Those who argue against Israeli settlements—outposts of light in a dark territory—argue for the continued victory of night.” Arabs “value murder” while Israelis “value life,” and “where light fails, darkness engulfs.” Arabs are therefore, as an undifferentiated unit, a people of darkness. Palestinian Arabs are the worst of all: they are a “population rotten to the core… Palestinian Arabs must be fought on their own terms: as a people dedicated to an evil cause.” The “Arab Palestinian populace… by and large constitutes the most evil population on the face of the planet.” Since they’re “rotten to the core,” there’s no such thing as a good Arab: your evil is defined by your ethnicity, by being a member of the People of Darkness and Murder rather than the People of Goodness and Light. Again, it may just be my failure to understand Facts and Logic, but I am having trouble understanding how population-level generalizations about the moral characteristics of particular ethnic groups can be anything other than bigotry.

Shapiro has been clear about the implications of his view of Arabs as a dark and murderous people. He has said that “Secular Zionism[, which] requires that Arab citizens of Israel be guaranteed equal rights,” “has always provided the seeds of [Israel’s] destruction.” Instead, “God’s road map requires the Jews to kill those who seek to kill them.” Since Arabs universally “value murder,” I can’t see how this is anything other than a philosophical justification of genocide. Shapiro has said that Arab nefariousness could be stopped without resorting to genocide, and is offended by anyone who tries to invoke the g-word to describe his beliefs. But since he has said

that Arabs are inherently murderous and bent on destroying Israel and

God permits Jews to kill those who seek to kill them, it’s hard to see how he could disagree with anyone who did advocate genocide, except on pragmatic grounds.

Shapiro once explained his actual preferred solution to the problem of the dark Arab hordes: mass expulsion. As he said, bulldozing Palestinian houses and subjecting them to curfews are insufficient “half-measures”: the only solution is to drive every last one of them forcibly from their homes and take their land:

The Arab enmity for Jews and the state of Israel allows for no peace process. The time for half measures has passed. Bulldozing houses of homicide bombers is useless. Instituting ongoing curfews in Arab-populated cities is useless… Some have rightly suggested that Israel be allowed to decapitate the terrorist leadership of the Palestinian Authority. But this too is only a half measure. The ideology of the Palestinian population is indistinguishable from that of the terrorist leadership. Half measures merely postpone our realization that the Arabs dream of Israel’s destruction. Without drastic measures, the Arab dream will come true… If you believe that the Jewish state has a right to exist, then you must allow Israel to transfer the Palestinians and the Israeli-Arabs from Judea, Samaria, Gaza and Israel proper. It’s an ugly solution, but it is the only solution… It’s time to stop being squeamish. (Odd that the NYT didn’t choose to quote this passage in its profile.)

Every last Arab—even those who are Israeli citizens—must be deported, Shapiro said, because their ethnicity means that they harbor a murderous “Arab dream.” But to anyone who thinks this sounds like the textbook definition of “ethnic cleansing,” he has a firm response: “It’s not genocide; it’s transfer. It’s not Hitler, it’s Churchill.” Shapiro is referring to the Allied expulsion of German-speakers from Polish territory immediately after World War II, in which “Anywhere from 3.5 million to 9 million Germans were forcibly expelled from the new Polish territory and relocated in Germany.” Shapiro favorably quotes Churchill’s desire that “There will be no mixture of populations to cause endless trouble … a clean sweep will be made.”

There is only one problem with the precedent cited by Shapiro: it is actually a forgotten historic atrocity, which was characterized by mass rape, torture, and murder, and left at least 400,000 people dead. Germans were interned in concentration camps and endured horrific journeys in which pregnant women froze to death. As Tara Zahra explains in a review of R.M. Douglas’s Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans After the Second World War:

After the Nazi defeat, the Volksdeutsche fled or were expelled to the West, and were stripped of their citizenship, homes and property in… “the largest forced population transfer—and perhaps the greatest single movement of peoples—in human history.” Douglas amply demonstrates that these population transfers, which were to be carried out in an “orderly and humane” manner according to the language of the Allies’ 1945 Potsdam Agreement, counted as neither. Instead…. they were nothing less than a “massive state-sponsored carnival of violence, resulting in a death toll that on the most conservative of estimates must have reached six figures.” …Ironically, then, the postwar population transfers completed a process of segregation and ethnic cleansing that Hitler himself had begun….Interned women throughout Czechoslovakia and Poland were subject to rampant sexual abuse, rape and torture. Germans were also forced to wear armbands or patches marked with the letter “N” for Nemec (German)—collective payback for the humiliation that the Nazis had inflicted on populations in the East. When they were finally transported west, the expellees traveled by cattle car, sometimes going with barely any food or water for up to two weeks. One victim recalled that each morning, “one or more dead bodies greeted us…they just had to be abandoned on the embankments.”… Douglas concludes by calling the expulsions a “tragic, unnecessary, and, we must resolve, never to be repeated episode in Europe’s and the world’s recent history.”

This is the model that Shapiro believed should be applied to the murderous Arabs. (Perhaps Israel could even have them wear patches with little “A”s on them. But that might seem a little racist, and Shapiro is firmly against racism.) Shapiro has since suggested that his position on ethnic cleansing has evolved (without admitting that he ever endorsed it), in part because large-scale population transfer is simply impractical. His position on the inherent evil of Palestinians, however, does not appear to have softened.

As I say, I realize I am playing right into Shapiro’s hands by invoking the r-word to describe his belief that Arabs are bomb-throwing sewage-dwellers who deserve to be ethnically cleansed. But I happen to think Shapiro is a bit inconsistent on this. His standard of evidence for what constitutes ethnic prejudice seems to vary based on who the target is. When it came to George Zimmerman, Shapiro concluded that “there’s no evidence of Zimmerman’s racism.” Bear in mind that Zimmerman: approached a stranger because they had a Confederate flag tattoo so he could brag about killing Trayvon Martin, got thrown out of a bar for calling someone a “nigger-lover,” ranted about his girlfriend sleeping with a “dirty Muslim,” tweeted that the lives of “black slime” don’t matter, labeled Barack Obama an “ignorant baboon,” posted memes comparing Michelle Obama to Chewbacca, and literally had a Confederate flag profile picture and sold paintings he did of said flag. (Oh, and he also murdered an unarmed black teenager and proudly posted a photo of the boy’s corpse on Twitter, but Shapiro has made it clear that he believes Trayvon Martin deserved to die.)

From that, we might conclude that Shapiro has an extremely high threshold for evidence he will consider sufficient to deem someone a bigot. But it doesn’t apply universally: Shapiro seems rather quick to accuse his opponents of anti-Semitic prejudice. That could be because they have described him as a “neoconservative,” which Shapiro considers an anti-Semitic slur. Or they could, like the “Nazis” at PETA, have diminished the relative value of Jewish lives by elevating the importance of animal lives. But nobody is quite as bad as Barack Obama, who Shapiro believes harbors a deep hatred of Jews. As president, Obama was a “philosophical fascist” whose anti-Semitism was “clear-cut.” To support the “fascism” charge Shapiro cites evidence like Obama’s “dictatorial demands (‘I want a jobs bill on my desk without delay’),” the “scornful looks and high-handed put-downs directed at his political opponents,” and the “arrogant chin-up head tilt he uses when waiting for applause.” Shapiro says that Obama’s vision for America is totalitarian, citing Obama’s hope that “the American people [should have] a government that matches their decency; that embodies their strength.”

Alright, well, we may disagree over whether pressuring Congress to pass a jobs bill makes you literally Mussolini. But Shapiro says the anti-Semitism part is clear-cut. Why? Well, the first piece of evidence is that when the Israeli military stormed an aid flotilla bound for Gaza, killing nine activists, the Obama administration soon released a statement saying that “The United States deeply regrets the loss of life and injuries sustained.” “How else are we to interpret [this] lightning-fast, knee-jerk anti-Israel response?” except as evidence of anti-Semitism, Shapiro asks. But perhaps you’re not convinced. Well, Shapiro has more. In 2009, Rahm Emanuel went to speak at AIPAC and told the audience that U.S. efforts to thwart Iran’s nuclear program would be conditional on successful resolution of the Israel/Palestine conflict. This, Shapiro says, showed that Obama harbored a deep animus against Jews, because he holds Israel to a higher standard than he holds anyone else. And while it may have turned out that Rahm Emanuel never actually said anything like this, leading at least one other columnist to issue a correction, Shapiro stood firm. Not only did he not amend the story, but he later called Emanuel (who held Israeli citizenship for nearly two decades, whose middle name is literally Israel, and who even Jeffrey Goldberg thought made the idea of Obama being anti-Israel seem “a bit ridiculous”) a “kapo,” i.e. a Jew who does the Nazis’ bidding. Shapiro said that any Jewish person who voted for Obama was not really a Jew at all, but a “Jew In Name Only” serving an “enemy of the Jewish people.” They may “eat bagels and lox,” but by supporting an “openly” anti-Semitic administration they are “disgusting” and a “disgrace,” and the “twisted and evil” “self-hating Jews” who “enjoy matzo ball soup” and “emerged from a Jewish uterus” but nevertheless choose to “undermine the Israeli government” “don’t care a whit about Judaism” and in fact hold “anti-Semitic views.” (Those may be snippet-length quotes but go and read the columns if you suspect me of excising context or nuance.)

You must forgive me, then, for being somewhat confused by Shapiro’s conception of prejudice, which includes people who say “these deaths are regrettable” but excludes those who use the n-word and shoot black children in the face. But I realize I am missing the meat of the Shapiro philosophy. Nevermind Shapiro The Ethnic Cleanser, what about Shapiro The Destroyer Of Weak Arguments? Shapiro has built his reputation on his formidable ability to dismantle liberal orthodoxies, his dazzling use of logic to expose leftists as vacuous bullies who must stifle conservative speech because they cannot actually refute or debunk it.

I’d like, then, to closely examine how Shapiro destroys a liberal argument, in order to see his famous method at work. Let’s look at how Shapiro “debunks transgenderism.” When a student questioner confronted Shapiro about his belief that transgender women should not be considered women, here’s the argument he gave in defense of the position:

You’re not a man if you think you’re a man…. As far as the actual psychological issues at play, it used to be called gender identity disorder; now they call it gender dysphoria. The idea that sex or gender is malleable is not true. I’m not denying your humanity if you are a transgender person; I am saying that you are not the sex which you claim to be. [I]f you’re going to dictate to me that I’m supposed to pretend, I’m supposed to pretend that men are women and women are men, no. My answer is no. I’m not going to modify basic biology because it threatens your subjective sense of what you are.

When the questioner replied to suggest that transgender people just wanted to fit in, Shapiro hit her with a burst of Stone Cold Logic. After asking her how old she was, he asked her why she wasn’t a different age. Answer: because age is a fact not a choice. Then he asked her why she didn’t just change her species:

SHAPIRO: If I call you a moose, are you suddenly a moose? If I redefine our terms…

YOUNG WOMAN: That’s a completely different thing.

SHAPIRO: Yes, that’s right. Men and women are a completely different thing. This is true. Have you ever met a man or a woman? They are completely different.

Shapiro’s position on transgender people is very simple then. He rejects “the pseudo-scientific nonsense that a man can magically turn into a woman,” because it is no different than thinking an undergraduate can turn into a moose. Shapiro says that “individuals who believe they are a different sex than that of their biology are psychologically ill—self-evidently so” and has compared the idea of being transgender to his schizophrenic grandfather who thought the curtains were speaking to him.

But for a man who loves Logical Argumentation and would never “mischaracterize his opponents’ positions,” Shapiro doesn’t actually seem to grasp what the left argument about gender actually is, or what it is he’s actually supposed to be disproving.

Here is the actual argument that is made: the traditional conception held by people like Shapiro has treated “sex” and “gender” as synonymous. You’re either a man or a woman. Which one you are is defined by your chromosomes. And because chromosomes are part of biology, and can’t be altered, you can—as Shapiro says—no more change your sex/gender through your state of mind than you could change your age. There are men and there are women:

The argument made by the left is that this simple story doesn’t account for something important: in the real world, we don’t form our understanding of whether someone is a man or a woman by their chromosomes. Instead, we form it by how they look and act. What people mean when they say that “gender is a social construct” is not that “chromosomes are a social construct” but that in practice, gender isn’t reducible to chromosomes. In the two pictures above, the person on the left is actually a transgender man and the person on the right is actually a transgender woman. It would seem strange to call the person on the left a “woman” and the person on the right a “man,” because the fact that we associate gender with “masculinity” and “femininity” rather than just “chromosomes” means those words don’t seem to fit those people very well.

This is the reason why people started to draw a distinction between “sex” and “gender,” with sex referring to the biological component and gender referring to those qualities that seem much more fluid. Transgender people do not “think they are a different sex.” Instead, they realize that their “gender” doesn’t match their sex. As a transgender person explained in response to Shapiro, “most of the trans people I know, including myself, are under no delusion about what we were born as or what biological sex we are, we just feel uncomfortable with the features of our biological sex and seek treatment, usually, to alter those features and minimize our dysphoria.”

The dysphoria is not the “delusional belief that you don’t have a penis when you in fact do.” It’s the distress that comes from feeling like a member of the “female” gender despite having the “male” sex, or vice versa. The argument being made is that the existing way we classify sex/gender is not adequately describing the actual fact, which is that because gender captures more than just chromosomes, the traditional terminology causes confusion and needs revising. Scott Alexander has a poignant and funny essay explaining why categories like “male” and “female” are malleable and why we should adjust them depending on the goals we’re trying to accomplish:

In no case can an agreed-upon set of borders or a category boundary be factually incorrect. An alternative categorization system is not an error… Just as we can come up with criteria for a definition of “planet”, we can come up with a definition of “man”. Absolutely typical men have Y chromosomes, have male genitalia, appreciate manly things like sports and lumberjackery, are romantically attracted to women, personally identify as male, wear male clothing like blue jeans, sing baritone in the opera, et cetera. Some people satisfy some criteria of manhood and not others, in much the same way that Pluto satisfies only some criteria of planethood… For example, gay men might date other men and behave in effeminate ways. People with congenital androgen insensitivity syndrome might have female bodies, female external genitalia, and have been raised female their entire life, but when you look into their cells they have Y chromosomes. Most people seem to assume that the ultimate tiebreaker in man vs. woman questions is presence of a Y chromosome. I’m not sure this is a very principled decision, because I expect most people would classify congenital androgen insensitivity patients (XY people whose bodies are insensitive to the hormone that makes them look male, and so end up looking 100% female their entire lives and often not even knowing they have the condition) as women. The project of the transgender movement is to propose a switch from using chromosomes as a tiebreaker to using self-identification as a tiebreaker.

Shapiro thinks being transgender is a mental illness, just as he believes homosexuality should still be considered a mental illness (and was only taken off the list thanks to “pressure group influence”). But mental illness is another situation where the classifications we choose are choices: homosexuality does not “inherently” fit in the category of mental illness; a society decides what it wants to call “illness.” And since there seemed to be very little good to come from calling some perfectly ordinary human trait an “illness,” all this did was create unnecessary stigma. Likewise, it was decided that there was no reason to see “believing your gender identity to be different than your biological sex” an illness, so the DSM was revised accordingly, to focus on what did actually seem a problem, namely the distress this can lead to.

Gender and sex are complicated topics. There are a lot of unanswered questions (e.g. What is identity? Should gender be entirely subjective? What are the differences between racial and gender identity?) All of these, though, are attempts to work out how we should revise our categories in the way that best reflects the human reality and allows us to talk coherently. The traditional categories were just too simple to capture the more complicated facts of how gender actually works. (Actually, Shapiro himself inadvertently proved this. In discussing why he would never recognize Laverne Cox as a woman, Shapiro accidentally referred to Cox as “she” before quickly correcting himself. Why did he slip? Because Laverne Cox does seem like a woman, based on how the category “woman” is applied socially, and it feels weird to call her a man. Even Shapiro’s subconscious is telling him that transgender people should be referred to by the gender they present as rather than by their biological sex.)

Shapiro isn’t interested in discussing any of this seriously. Just look at how he distorted his questioner’s response about moose: he says “Why aren’t you a moose?” and when she replies “That’s different,” he interjects “That’s right, men and women are different.” She clearly said that species and gender are different (which they are, in that there’s a good argument for revising one of the categories but not for revising the other). But he tried to convince his audience that she had essentially conceded his point, by seizing on and spinning the word “difference.” (We call this “sophistry” rather than “logic.”)

At every turn, Shapiro shows that he simply wants to make his questioners look foolish, rather than present the facts fairly. Just look at his discussion of suicide and bullying:

The idea behind the transgender civil rights movement is that all of their problems would go away if I would pretend that they were the sex to which they claim membership. That’s nonsense. The transgender suicide rate is 40%. And according to the Anderson School at UCLA ….it makes virtually no difference statistically as to whether people recognize you as a transgender person or not… It has nothing to do with how society treats you… The normal suicide rate across the US is 4%. The suicide rate in the transgender community is 40%. The idea that 36% more transgender people are committing suicide is ridiculous. [Note: Shapiro has misconstrued a statistic on suicide attempts as a statistic on successful suicide] It’s not true and it’s not backed by any science that anyone can cite. It’s pure conjecture. It’s not even true that bullying causes suicide… There’s no evidence whatsoever that the suicide rate in the transgender community would go down in any marked way if people just started pretending that men were women and women were men.

I can’t find a study from the Anderson School about transgender suicide. The one UCLA study I can find on the subject, the one I think he must be referring to, directly contradicts Shapiro’s contention, concluding that “a higher than average prevalence of lifetime suicide attempts was consistently found among NTDS respondents who reported that they had been harassed, bullied, or assaulted in school by other students and/ or teachers due to anti-transgender bias” and “the prevalence of suicide attempts was elevated among respondents who reported experiencing rejection, disruption, or abuse by family members or close friends because of antitransgender bias.” (Another study found that “social support, reduced transphobia, and having any personal identification documents changed to an appropriate sex designation were associated with large relative and absolute reductions in suicide risk.”) So when Shapiro says that there’s “no evidence whatsoever” and it’s “not backed by any science,” it’s actually backed by the exact study he has just cited. (That study also demonstrates why another Shapiro talking point, that transgender suicides can’t be caused by prejudice because black people have low suicide rates, is false: a crucial determinant of suicide likelihood is people’s level of family support, and if black people have strong support networks, similar levels of discrimination could lead to differing levels of suicide.)

For a man who cares about Facts rather than Feelings, Shapiro doesn’t seem to care very much about facts. There are plenty of minor mistakes that cast doubt on the Times quote that Shapiro “reads books.” Some are just the little slip-ups that come from careless writing, e.g. the U.S. abolished slavery in “1862,” “atheistic philosopher Gilbert Pyle” [sic]. Others are suspicious unsourced generalizations, e.g.“Walk into virtually any emergency room in California and illegal immigrants are the bulk of the population.” But there are also major embarrassing bloomers, like Shapiro promoting the false rumor that Chuck Hagel received a donation from a group called “Friends of Hamas.” A New York Daily News reporter had made up the group’s name, as something so ludicrously over-the-top that nobody could possibly believe it, but Shapiro credulous enough to think the organization could exist, and published an article demanding answers. When it was pointed out that there was no such group, Shapiro did not retract the story. Instead, he doubled down, insisting that because he reported that sources said there was a Friends of Hamas, and the sources did say that, his reporting was sound. (Note: this is not how journalism works.)

There are plenty of other points at which Shapiro has showed that his command of Logic may not be terribly strong. He loves Facts, but will make statements like “monitoring mosques is the simplest and most effective way of preventing terrorist attacks” and cite “simple common sense” as his source. He will look back fondly on the era of the Hays Code, in which movies that did not portray correct moral messages were censored, and state that it is “no coincidence” that many great films were made during this time. (Someone ought to introduce Shapiro to the idea that just because two things occur at the same time does not mean that one of them was responsible for the other.) The ACLU’s attempt to bring Abu Ghraib photos to light was “designed as a direct attack on American soldiers abroad.” (Again, there’s no argument here, he just says it.)

Hip hop is “not music,” people only say it is because of “cultural sensitivity,” and it is the product of a “disgusting” culture; again, one presumes these are just Facts, not Feelings. (No, he didn’t like Hamilton either, and spent part of a radio show playing Hamilton and West Side Story side by side, like a cool kid, in order to show that Hamilton has “forced rhymes that aren’t actually rhymes” and has “no harmony, no melody, just rhythm, and this is my problem with rap generally.”) The Supreme Court’s decision to uphold the Affordable Care Act was literally worse than Plessy v. Ferguson and the case that allowed mentally ill people to be sterilized. (Shapiro believes the decision “said that the federal government can force you to do anything” because it can “tax nonbehavior,” though since there is zero practical difference between providing “a tax penalty for not doing something” and “a tax credit for doing something,” this framework means every tax credit is a form of totalitarianism.) Some of his arguments just make no damn sense at all: witness his contention that capitalism doesn’t mean the greedy pursuit of self-interest, corporatism does, while capitalism just means… I’m not sure. (Try to reconcile his statement that capitalism isn’t about economic self-interest with his statement that capitalism values people by their economic usefulness.) Or his case that socialism is racism because in capitalism people are valued entirely in accordance with their market worth, irrespective of race. (Shapiro has argued that shop owners who discriminate among customers would go out of business, which might be true if there wasn’t a huge racial wealth gap and no consumers ever preferred to patronize racially segregated establishments.)

Shapiro mocked T.I. for naming his children “Zonnique and Deyjah.” (It’s not clear what the Rational basis for disliking black names is.) When Barack Obama said that “we need to keep changing the attitude that punishes women for their sexuality and rewards men for theirs,” Shapiro wondered why Obama thought anyone should “be rewarded for their sexuality.” (I am curious how Shapiro did on the Logical Reasoning section of his LSAT if he believes “Don’t punish X or reward Y” means “reward X and/or Y.”) He thinks that criticisms of those who seem to love wars but decline to fight in them are “explicitly reject[ing] the Constitution itself, [which] provides that civilians control the military.” (Go ahead and try to figure out the reasoning on that one.) He was strongly against a federal ban on using cellphones while driving, because it would take away drivers’ freedom of choice, yet he believes it is “morally tragic” that we no longer use the police to stop people from making and watching pornography, because it follows the “silly” philosophy that “as long as what I do doesn’t harm you personally, I have a right to do it.” (Shapiro said that if pornography is legal, there would be no logical reason not to legalize the murder of homeless people, without addressing the potential meaningful distinctions between “having sex” and “killing a person in cold blood.”) Shapiro may be The Cool Kid’s Philosopher, but on the rare occasions when he actually dips his toe into metaphysics, the results are catastrophic: he argues that atheism is incompatible with the idea of free will because religious people believe that free will is granted by God. (“My beliefs say that your beliefs can’t be true therefore they can’t be true” is known as “assuming the conclusion.”)

But separate from Shapiro’s shaky ability to tell the truth and understand simple reasoning, I find his actual moral values somewhat horrifying. These can’t be “debunked” or “disproven,” of course: they’re matters of differing instinct. But I don’t share Shapiro’s religiously-derived conviction that “any moral system condoning homosexuality” will lead to a “fluid, careless amalgam of values” that will cause America to “suffer the fate of ancient Rome.” (Nor do I see any Facts to support this hypothesis.) I’m especially troubled by Shapiro’s stance on war. In defending the invasion of Iraq, Shapiro specifically praised imperialism, saying that for the United States, “empire isn’t a choice, it’s a duty.” Nevermind “weapons of mass destruction”: maintaining U.S. global power is an end in itself, even if 500,000 Iraqis had to lose their lives a result. Shapiro even endorsed invading countries that do not pose any immediate threat, suggesting that almost any Muslim nation could legitimately be attacked if doing so served the interests of our “global empire”:

Did Iraq pose an immediate threat to our nation? Perhaps not. But toppling Saddam Hussein and democratizing Iraq prevent his future ascendance and end his material support for future threats globally. The same principle holds true for Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Egypt, Pakistan and others: Pre-emption is the chief weapon of a global empire. No one said empire was easy, but it is right and good, both for Americans and for the world.

(We could call this the “Better Kill Everyone Just In Case” doctrine.)

What’s more, Shapiro doesn’t believe that criticizing the American government during a time of war ought to be legal at all. The champion of Free Speech has literally called for reinstating sedition laws. When Al Gore told a Muslim audience that he believed the United States’ indiscriminate rounding-up and detention practices after 9/11 were “terrible” and abusive, Shapiro called the statements “treasonable,” “seditious,” and “outrageous” and demanded that the law respond:

At some point, opposition must be considered disloyal. At some point, the American people must say “enough.” At some point, Republicans in Congress must stop delicately tiptoeing with regard to sedition and must pass legislation to prosecute such sedition… Under the Espionage Act of 1917, opponents of World War I were routinely prosecuted, and the Supreme Court routinely upheld their convictions…. During World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt authorized the internment of hundreds of thousands of Japanese-Americans, as well as allowing the prosecution and/or deportation of those who opposed the war…. This is not to argue that every measure taken by the government to prosecute opponents of American wars is just or right or Constitutional. Some restrictions, however, are just and right and Constitutional—and necessary. No war can be won when members of a disloyal opposition are given free reign [sic] to undermine it.

The Wilson administration’s crackdown on critics of the war, and the imprisoning of dissidents, were actually a low point in the history of American liberty, and the legal decisions upholding these acts are now discredited. But Shapiro sees this, along with the even more disturbing mass internment of Japanese Americans, as a model for eliminating critics of America’s wars. (Although elsewhere Shapiro has called the Supreme Court’s decision upholding Japanese detention “evil and disgusting.” Consistency, as I have indicated before, is not his forte.)

Having surveyed Shapiro’s work, and pointed out the various ways in which he is not terribly logical, not terribly consistent, and not terribly well-informed (in addition to being not terribly humane), it is worth asking why so many people think of him as a “principled” and “brilliant” dismantler of arguments. The answer, it seems to me, is largely that Shapiro is a very confident person who speaks quickly. If he weren’t either of these things, he wouldn’t seem nearly as intelligent. Because he doesn’t care about whether he’s right, but about whether he destroys you, he uses a few effective lawyerly tricks: insist that there’s “no evidence whatsoever” something is true, demand the other side produce such evidence, and when they stammer “Buh-buh-buh” for two seconds, quickly interrupt with “See? What did I tell you? No evidence.” Or, just pluck some random numbers from a study, even if they’re totally false or misleading, e.g. “40% of transgender people commit suicide and the risk doesn’t go down if they are treated better,” which was nonsense but sounded good. Cross-examine people with aggressive questions that confuse them: Are you a moose? I said: are you a moose? No? I didn’t think so. I rest my case. Use shifting burdens of proof: demand a wealth of statistical evidence before you will admit that black people face any unique hardships, but respond to every criticism of the Israeli government by calling the speaker a “proven” and “undeniable” anti-Semite. Disregard all facts that contradict your case, but insist constantly that the other side despises facts and can’t handle the truth. Call your opponents “nasty,” “evil,” “brainless” “jackasses.” All of these techniques work very well, and with them, you, too, can soon be Owning and Destroying your political opponents on camera. (I would probably lose a debate with Ben Shapiro quite badly, as my instinct in public conversations is to try to listen to people.)

Let me tell you why Ben Shapiro actually aggravates me. It is not his voice or demeanor, though I understand why others find these characteristics grating. Nor is it the way he inserts references to first-year law school doctrines even when they aren’t actually relevant. It is, rather, that Ben Shapiro is lying to his audience, by telling them that he is just a person concerned with the Truth, when the only thing he actually cares about is destroying the left. “Facts don’t care about your feelings” is a fine mantra, albeit kind of a dickish one. But it’s worthless if you’re going to interpret every last fact in the way most favorable to your own preconceptions, if you’re going to ignore evidence contrary to your position, and refuse to try to understand what your opponents actually believe. The New York Times actually quoted a sensible-sounding ex-Shapiro fan, who said he realized over time that Shapiro was just concerned with convincing other people he was right, rather than actually being right. Shapiro is annoying because he claims to love speech and discourse, to believe you should “get to know people… get to know their views…discuss,” but if you’re an Arab he’s already convinced you’re a secret anti-Semite, and if you’re a poor black person he doesn’t need to know you to know that you’re culturally dysfunctional.

The encouraging news is that if Ben Shapiro is the sharpest thinker among millennial conservatives, millennial leftists don’t have too much to worry about. You may feel as if Shapiro is a Vaporizer of Poor Logic, the Aristotle of our time. You may feel as if he has brutally torn apart every person who has crossed him in public, through his tried and tested technique of speaking extremely quickly until they give up. You may feel that he is brilliant and thoughtful and sincere.

But before you treat these feelings as real, remember that annoying little fact about facts: They don’t really care how you feel.

If you appreciate our work, please consider making a donation or purchasing a subscription. Current Affairs is not for profit and carries no outside advertising. We are an independent media institution funded entirely by subscribers and small donors, and we depend on you in order to continue to produce high-quality work

Joe Rogan Experience #1139 – Jordan Peterson

45:04

you’ll be able to participate in and if

he’s fun to play with in adults we’ll

teach him things and then he wins at

life and so when you say to your kid it

doesn’t matter whether you win or lose

matters how you play the game what

you’re saying is don’t forget kid that

what you’re trying to do here is to do

well at life and you need to practice

the strategies that enable you to do

well at life well you’re in any specific

game and you never want to compromise

your ability to do well at life for the

sake of winning a single game and

there’s a deep ethic in that and it’s

the ethic of reciprocity in games part

of the reason that we’re so obsessed

with sports is because we like to see

that dramatized you know like the person

we really admire as an athlete isn’t

only the person who wins we don’t like

the narcissistic winners they’re winners

and that’s a plus but if they’re

narcissistic they’re not good team

players they’re only out for themselves

then we think well you’re a winner in

the narrow sense but your character is

suspect you’re no role model even though

you’re a winner and it’s because

we’re looking for something deeper we’re

looking for that the manifestation of

character that allows you to win across

the set of possible games and that’s a

real thing that’s a real ethic it’s a

46:13

fundamental ethic I think what you’re

46:15

pointing out that’s very important is

46:16

we’re we’re searching for the person

46:18

who’s got it all nailed someone who

46:21

tries their hardest but is also honest

46:25

enough about the circumstances to not

46:28

cry foul when it’s gone

46:30

the other person’s way yeah well that’s

46:32

part of resilience that’s right like

46:34

you’re not gonna win it you’re not going

46:36

to you’re not gonna score on every shot

46:37

right it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take

46:39

the shots doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try

46:40

to to hit the goal but part of part of

46:43

being able to continue to take shots is

46:46

to have the strength of character to

46:48

tolerate the fact that that in that

46:49

instance you weren’t on top it’s more

46:52

trivial in games than it is in fights

46:55

and it’s also the response is much more

46:59

negative to the from the fans if you

47:01

lose a fight and complain about it it is

47:04

it’s ruthless there because they

47:07

understand that you’ve made a huge

47:09

character error yeah so why do you think

47:12

it’s more important in fights than it is

47:14

in games why do you think it is because

47:15

the consequences are so grave because

47:17

you recognize that the high is much

47:19

higher and the lows are much lower to

47:21

lose a basketball game sucks but it’s

47:23

nothing like losing a fight there’s no

47:25

comparison it’s not even so what do you

think it is the damages the fighter if

he complains about losing why is that a

mistake why do the fans respond so

negatively to that because they know

they know that you lost they know that

you’re complaining for no reason and

you’re not a hero

they want you to be better than them

they want you to be the person that has

the courage to step into a cage or a

47:47

ring or wherever you with whatever the

47:49

format is you’re competing and to do

47:51

something that’s extremely difficult and

47:53

when you do that they hold you to a

47:54

higher state right to lose with grace

47:56

yes and when you fall especially if you

47:58

were a champion that is one of the most

48:00

disappointing things ever when champion

48:02

complains right and and it is okay so

48:04

response is horrific from the audience

48:06

okay so that’s a great example so let’s

48:08

imagine what does the person who loses

48:11

something important with grace do and

48:13

the answer is fairly straightforward

48:16

accepts the defeat and thinks okay what

48:18

what is it that I have left to improve

48:21

that will decrease the possibility of a

48:22

similar defeat in the future yes right

48:24

soso so what he’s doing is because the

48:27

great athlete and the great person is

48:30

not only someone who’s exceptionally

48:31

skilled at what they do but who’s trying

48:33

to expand their skills at all at all

48:35

times yes and the attempt to expand

48:38

their skills at all times is even more

48:40

important than the fact that they’re

48:41

great to begin with because the

48:42

trajectory is so important more

48:43

important in particular to the audience

48:46

it’s extremely important the audience

48:48

because you are the person who’s

48:49

competing you are expecting them to live

48:52

out this life in a perfect way or in a

48:54

much more powerful way than you’re

48:55

capable yes and so part of that is the

48:57

skill because they put in the practice

48:59

but part of that also is the willingness

49:01

to push the skill farther into new

49:03

domains of development with each action

49:05

and that’s really what people like to

49:07

watch right they don’t like to watch a

49:08

perfect athletic performance they like

49:10

to watch a perfect athletic performance

49:12

that’s pushed into the domain of new

49:14

risk they want to see both at the same

49:16

time you’re really good at what you do

49:18

and you’re getting better okay so you

49:19

lose a match which is not any indication

49:22

that you’re not good at what you do you

49:23

might not be as good as the person who

beat you but if you lose the match and

then whine what you’ve done is sacrifice

the higher order principle of constant

improvement of your own skills yes

because you should be analyzing the loss

and saying the reason I lost insofar as

it’s relevant to this particular time

and place is the insufficiencies I

manifested that defeated me and I need

49:45

to track those insufficiencies so that I

49:47

can rectify them in the future and if

49:48

I’m blaming it on you or the referees or

49:50

the situation that I’m not taking

49:53

responsibility and I’m not pushing

49:54

myself forward and so then you also take

49:56

the meaning out of it like one of the

49:58

things I’ve been doing on my tour people

50:01

are criticizing me to some degree for

50:03

saying things to people that are obvious

50:04

well first of all it’s not like I didn’t

50:06

bloody well know they were obvious when

50:08

I wrote those rulings you were the rules

50:10

in my book for example stand up straight

50:12

with your shoulders back you know treat

50:14

yourself like you’re someone responsible

50:16

for helping it’s like I know perfectly

50:18

well that those can be read as cliches

50:20

the question is cliche let’s say is

50:23

something that’s so true that it’s that

50:25

it’s become that it’s become it’s widely

50:29

accepted by everyone well but we don’t

50:31

know why it’s true anymore and so it’s

50:35

this issue that the issue that we’re

50:37

talking about here or the issue of being

50:38

a good sport we need to figure out why

50:40

that’s true and the reason that it’s

50:42

true is that you’re trying to push your

50:44

development farther than you’ve already

50:45

developed at every point in time and now

50:47

that’s the proper that’s the proper

50:49

moral attitude so

50:56

when you see an athletic performance

50:58

where someone is pushing themselves

50:59

beyond what they are you see someone

51:01

dramatizing the process of proper

51:03

adaptation it isn’t the skill itself

51:05

it’s the extension of the skill when you

51:07

see someone acting like a bad sport then

51:09

they’re sacrificing that and so they’re

51:10

sacrificing the higher for the lower and

51:12

no one likes that in the fights it’s got

51:15

to be see the question is that’s the

51:17

thing I can’t quite figure out is why

51:19

that would be even exaggerated in a

51:20

fight situation and you said it’s

51:23

because the stakes are so high

51:24

yeah the consequences of victory or

51:26

defeat they’re just so much greater

51:29

there’s your your health is on the line

51:32

it’s one of the rare things that you do

51:34

where your health is on the line your

51:37

physical health right so there’s more

51:38

extreme victories and more game defeats

51:40

and so the morality that’s associated

51:42

with defeat is more extreme exactly

51:44

because there’s more on the line and the

51:48

way people treat the champions it’s it’s

51:50

a it’s a very different thing it’s the

51:53

the respect and adulation that a

51:55

champion receives is it’s the pinnacle

51:58

of sports in terms of the the love from

52:01

the audience when someone wins a great

52:04

fight it’s there’s nothing like it and

52:06

this is one of the reasons why these

52:07

people are willing to put their health

52:09

on the line because that high the high

52:11

of victory and it’s not just a victory

52:14

it’s a you know what what is that who

52:16

was it who said the victory is really

52:21

the victory over the lesser you it’s a

52:24

victory it’s always the victory is over

52:28

you’ve got to realize a guy like steep a

52:30

Miocic who defends is heavyweight title

52:33

this weekend in the UFC he is he’s the

52:37

heavyweight champion the world but he’s

52:39

not undefeated he lost in his career

52:41

he’s lost a couple of times and he you

52:43

know as I’m sure he’s lost wrestling

52:45

matches and sparring sessions in the gym

52:48

and all he’s a product of improvement

52:51

right he’s a product of discipline and

52:53

hard work and thinking and strategy and

52:56

constantly improving upon his skills and

52:58

so so in because of that he’s the

53:00

baddest man on the planet so my in my

53:01

book rule for is this is 12 excuse me

53:05

this is from 12 rules for life rule 4 is

53:09

come

53:10

carry yourself to who you were yesterday

53:11

not to who someone else is today yes

53:13

because you need to be you need to have

53:15

a hierarchy of improvement you need to

53:18

be aiming something for something and

53:19

that means you’re going to be lesser

53:20

than people who’ve always already

53:22

attained along that dimension yes and

53:23

that can give rise to envy so the

53:26

question is who should you defeat in the

53:27

final analysis and the answer is you

53:29

should defeat your former self

53:30

you should be constantly trying to do

53:32

that and you’re the right control for

53:34

yourself to because you’re the one who’s

53:36

had all your advantages and

53:37

disadvantages and so if you want to

53:39

compete fairly with someone then you

53:40

should be competing with you and it is

53:42

the case and this is what we were

53:44

talking about – with regards to the self

53:46

improvement of the fighter is well if

53:49

you’re improving yourself then what you

53:51

are doing is competing with your lesser

53:52

self and then you might also ask well

53:54

what is that lesser self and that lesser

53:57

self would be resentful and bitter and

53:59

and aggressive and vengeance seeking and

54:04

all of those things that go along with

54:05

having a negative moral character and

54:07

those are things that interfere with

54:08

your ability to progress as you move

54:10

forward through life so it’s very

54:13

necessary to understand that this is why

54:15

you know I’ve been stressing this idea

54:18

of personal responsibilities like well

54:20

personal responsibility is to compete

54:21

with yourself is to be slightly better

54:23

than yourself the next day and it better

54:25

in some way that you can actually manage

54:27

and that’s humility it’s right like well

54:29

I’m a flawed person and I’ve got all my

54:31

problems could I be as good as person X

54:34

it’s like not the right question the

54:36

right question is could you be slightly

54:38

better tomorrow than you’re currently

54:39

flawed self and the answer to that is if

54:41

you have enough humility to set the bar

54:44

properly low then you could be better

54:46

tomorrow than you are today because what

54:49

you also have to do is you have to say

54:51

well here’s all my flaws and my

54:54

insufficiencies and the best that

54:56

someone that flawed and insufficient

54:58

could do to improve and actually do it

55:00

is this and that’s not worth going out

55:02

in the street and celebrating with

55:03

plaque arts you know it’s like well this

55:05

is why I tell people to clean the room

55:07

it’s not going to brag to someone that

55:08

you did that but someone is insufficient

55:10

as you might be able to manage it and

55:12

that means you actually are on the

55:14

pathway to self improvement and you’re

55:15

transcending your former self and you

55:17

might say well what’s the right way of

55:19

being in the world if there is such a

55:21

thing and it’s not acting according to a

55:23

set of rules

55:24

it’s attempting continually to transcend

55:26

the flawed thing that you currently are

55:28

and what’s so interesting about that is

55:30

that the mean meaning in the meaning in

55:32

life is to be found in that pursuit so

59:56

it’s things are going really badly for

you and that there’s just chance

associated with that sometimes and you

and the people around you are doing

stupid things to make it worse it’s like

okay what have you got under those

circumstances you’ve got the possibility

to slowly raise yourself out of the mire

you’ve got that the possibility to do

just what the fighter does when he’s

defeated which is to say well regardless

of the circumstances that might have led

to my defeat like even if there were

errors on the part of the referee this

is no time to whine about it this is a

time to take stock of what I did wrong

so that I could improve it into the

future and that’s the right attitude you

know in the Old Testament one of the

things that’s really interesting about

the Old Testament stories is in the Old

Testament the Jews keep getting walloped

by God it’s like they struggle up and

make an empire and then they just get

walloped and then it’s all crushed in

there and they’re they’re out of it for

generations and then they struggle back

up and make an empire and then they get

demolished again and it happens over and

over and over and the the attitude of

the Old Testament Hebrews is we must

have made a mistake it’s never to shake

their fist at the sky and curse fate

it’s never that the presupposition is if

things aren’t working out it’s my fault

and that’s a hell of a presupposition

and you might say well of course you

know what’s that that underestimates the

degree to which there’s systemic

oppression etc etc and and the and the

vagaries of fate it’s like it doesn’t

over underestimate it it’s not the point

the point is your best strategic

61:28

position is how am i insufficient and

61:31

how can I rectify that that’s what

61:33

you’ve got and the thing is you are

61:35

insufficient and you could rectify it

both of those are within your grasp if

you aim low enough one of the things why

do you see the that’s another thing you

keep saying aim low enough have a low

enough bar why do you why do you mean

that well let’s say you’ve got a kid and

you want the kid to improve you don’t

set them a bar that’s so high that it’s

impossible for them to attain it you

take a look at the kid and you think

okay this kid’s got this range of skill

here’s a challenge we can throw at him

or her that exceeds their current level

of skill but gives them a

reasonable probability of success and so

like I’m saying it tongue-in-cheek to

some degree you know it’s like but if

you’re but I’m doing it as an aid to

humility it’s like well I don’t know how

to start improving my life someone might

say that and I would say well you’re not

aiming low enough there’s something you

could do that you are regarding is

trivial that that you could do that you

would do that would result in an actual

improvement but it’s not a big enough

improvement for you so you won’t lower

yourself enough to take the opportunity

incremental steps yes and so this is

also what is achieved through exercise

it’s one of the most important well what

do you do when you go and lift weights

you don’t go on like if you haven’t

bench press before you don’t put 400

pounds on the damn bar and drop the and

drop the bar through your skull I know

you think look when I started working

out when I was a kid I was I was wait

about a hundred and thirty pounds and I

was six foot one so thin kid and I

smoked a lot I wasn’t in good shape I

wasn’t in good physical shape and I went

to the gym and it was bloody

embarrassing you know when people would

come over and help me with the goddamn

weights here’s how you’re supposed to

use this you know it was humiliating and

maybe I was pressing 65 pounds or

something at that point you know but

what am I gonna do I’m gonna lift up a

hundred fifty pounds and injure myself

right off the bat no I had to go in

there and strip down and put my skinny

goddamn self in front of the mirror and

think son-of-a-bitch there’s all these

monsters in the gym who’ve been lifting

weights for ten years and I’m struggling

to get 50 pounds off the bar tough luck

for me but I could lift 50 pounds and it

wasn’t fair very long until I could lift

75 and well you know how it goes but and

I never injured myself when I was late

lifting and the reason for that was I

never pushed myself past where I knew I

could go and I pushed myself a lot you

know I gained 35 pounds of muscle in

about three years in University I kind

of had to quit because I was eating so

goddamn much I couldn’t stand it

seething like six meals a day it was

just taking up too much time but there’s

a humility in determining what it is

that the wretched creature that you are

can actually manage aim low and I don’t

mean don’t aim and I don’t mean don’t

aim up but you have to accept the fact

that you can set yourself a goal that

you can attain and there’s not going to

be much glory in it to begin with

because if you’re not in very good shape

the goal

Yuuka day could attain tomorrow isn’t

very glorious but it’s a hell of a lot

better than nothing and it beats the

hell out of bitterness and it’s way

better than blaming someone else it’s

way less dangerous and you could do it

and what’s cool about it there’s a

statement in the New Testament it’s

called the Matthew principle and

economists use it to describe how the

economy in the world works to those who

have everything more will be given from

those who have nothing everything will

be taken it’s like what’s very

pessimistic in some sense because it

means that as you start to fail you fail

more and more rapidly but it also means

that as you start to succeed you succeed

more and more rapidly and so you take an

incremental step and well now you can

64:58

lift 55 pounds instead of 52 point 5

65:01

pounds you think well what the hell is

65:02

that it’s like it’s one step on a very

65:04

long journey and so it’s it and it

65:07

starts to compound on you so a small

65:10

step today means puts you in a position

65:11

to take a slightly bigger step for the

65:13

next day and then that puts you in a

65:15

position to take a slightly bigger step

65:16

the next day and you do that for two or

65:18

three years man you’re starting to

65:20

stride you know what I have so many

65:22

people coming up to me now this is one

65:23

of the things that’s so insanely fun

65:25

about this tour which is so positive

65:27

it’s it brings me to tears regularly

65:30

it’s mind boggling because people come

65:32

up to me and this is happening wherever

65:34

I go now and they say they’re very

65:36

polite when they come and talk to me you

65:38

know and they’re always apologetic for

65:40

interrupting and so it’s never it’s

75:34

that what that means is that these kids

have been educated for twelve years and

no one had ever sat them down and said

okay what the hell are you doing and why

and how are you gonna get like where do

you want to go why do you want to get

there how are you gonna get there

how are you gonna mark your progress

they’ve never walked them through that

exercise you walk people through that

exercise just to get them to do that

increases the probability that they’ll

stay on track by 50% that’s incredible

well it’s one of the things I’ve always

complained about is that they know one

people teach you facts they don’t teach

you how to approach life they don’t

teach you how to think they don’t teach

you how to confront why do the

insecurities and different traps that

your mind will set up for you yeah well

that’s what partly what’s so fun about

doing this lecture tour because that’s

exactly what I’m talking to people about

..

83:28

right I’m transmitting information that

I’ve learned from very very wise people

and so there’s that but also we don’t

want to underestimate the utility of the

technology right because we have this

long-form technology now and it’s

enabling us to have this discussion and

so we can get deeper into things

publicly and socially then we were able

to before and I see this I see this as a

manifestation of that and and as and I’m

hoping too that maybe maybe what’s

happening because we’re gonna have a lot

of adaptation to do in the next 20 years

as things change so rapidly we can

hardly comprehend it and hopefully the

way we’re going to be able to manage

that is to think and hopefully these

long form discussions will provide the

political or provide the public forum

for us to actually think to actually

engage at a deep enough level so we’ll

be able to master the transformations

and I think that’s possible and him

part of the reason that I wrote this

book and well part of the reason that

I’d be doing what I’ve been doing for

84:24

the last thirty years because I really

have believed since nineteen eighty five

something like that that the way out of

political polarization the way out of

the excesses of the right and the left

is through the individual I think the

West got that right the fundamental unit

of measurement is the individual and the

fundamental task of the individual is to

engage in this process of humble

self-improvement I believe that’s the

case and that’s where the meaning is and

that’s where the responsibility is and I

think and I’m hoping that if enough

people in the West and then and then the

rest of the world for that matter but

we’re very polarized in the West right

now if enough people take responsibility

for getting their individual life’s

together then we’ll get wise enough so

we won’t let this process of political

polarization put us back to the same

places that we went so many times in the

20th century I don’t see another

antidote for it it’s not political it’s

ethical this is the message that I

always hear from you and this is you as

a friend this is the you that I

understand but this is not how you’re

commonly represented you are the most

misrepresented person I’ve ever met in

my life

I have never seen someone who has so

much positive that gets ignored and

where people are looking for any little

thing that they could possibly

misrepresent and switch up and change

and I’m kind of stunned by it I mean I

I’m really not sure what it is about you

that’s so polarizing with all these

different people that are deciding that

85:58

you are some sexist transphobic evil

86:04

person that’s this right-wing

86:06

all right the figure you know even to

86:11

the point where it’s it’s it’s kind of

86:14

humorous to me sometimes when I read

86:16

some of these these takes on you what do

86:20

you think that’s from like what what is

86:22

have you this is a new thing for you

86:25

you mean this only been the last few

86:27

years that you’ve gone from this

86:29

relatively unknown professor in a

86:33

university into

86:33

Anto to being this worldwide figure

86:36

where people you’re obviously your

86:39

message is resonating with people in a

very huge way but the people that are

opposing you they’re vehemently opposed

what do you think that is collectivist

don’t like me collectivists what do you

mean by that

people who think the probably proper

unit of analysis in the world is a

political and B group oriented the

identity politics types don’t like me at

all and they have every reason not to

because I’m not I’m not a fan of

identity politics

I think things that’s why you’re

misrepresented but mentally there’s

other reasons I mean I came out against

this bill in Canada bill C 16 that that

hypothetically purported to do nothing

else but to increase the the domain of

Rights that were applied to transsexual

people but there was a there was plenty

more to that bill man let me tell you

and I read the policy dot the policies

that went along with it and it was a

compelled speech bill and so I opposed

it on the grounds that the politicians

87:36

are not supposed to leap out of their

87:37

proper domain and start to compel speech

87:40

it’s not the same as forbidding hate

87:42

speech I’m I think hate speech should be

87:44

left alone personally for all sorts of

87:46

reasons but to compel the contents of

87:48

speech is a whole new thing it’s never

87:51

been done before in the history of

87:52

British common law English common law

87:53

and it’s actually the Supreme Court in

87:56

the 1940s in the u.s. said that that was

87:58

not to be allowed and so it was a major

88:00

transgression and they said well we’re

88:02

doing it for all the right reasons it’s

88:03

like no no you don’t get it

88:05

you don’t get to compel speech I don’t

88:07

care what your reasons are and why

88:09

should I trust your damn reasons anyways

88:11

what makes you so st. like so that you

88:14

can violate this fundamental principle

88:15

and I should assume that you’re doing it

88:17

for nothing but compassion and that

88:18

you’re wise enough to manage that

88:19

properly it’s like sorry no I read your

88:22

policies I see what you’re up to I don’t

88:24

like the collectivists I think they’re

88:26

unbelievably dangerous and I have reason

88:28

to believe that so I think that when

88:31

push comes to shove if your unit of

88:35

analysis is the group and your worldview

88:37

is one group and its power claims

88:39

against all other groups that that

88:41

that’s not acceptable it’s it’s

88:43

tribalism of the worst form and it lead

88:45

to nothing but mayhem and desire

88:47

and part of the reason you’re doing it

88:48

isn’t because your compassion it’s

88:50

because you’re envious and you don’t

88:51

want to take responsibility for your own

88:52

life and I’m calling you on it and so

88:55

you don’t like me so I must be an

88:56

alright figure I must be a Nazi saying

88:59

your house needs a lot of work man

89:01

there’s a lot of rot in the in the

89:03

floorboards

89:04

the plumbing is leaking the water’s

89:05

coming in you’re not you’re not the sage

89:07

and Saint you think you are there’s so

89:10

much work you have to do on yourself

89:11

that it would damn near kill you to take

89:13

a look at it do everything you honestly

89:15

think that that’s why people are

89:16

responding to you in a negative way that

89:18

they only have their own personal

89:20

problems that they’re avoiding it can’t

89:22

possibly be that you represent to them

89:24

something that is either cruel or

89:30

something that is not compassionate

89:33

about people and their differences and

89:35

their flaws and their their humanity

89:38

because I think it’s certainly the case

89:40

that there the vision that’s been

89:42

generated of me is yeah that’s but

89:44

that’s what I’m getting at oh yeah

89:46

there’s that too but why is layers say

89:48

theirs well part of its the political

89:51

polarization you know at the moment

89:52

we’re viewing almost everything that

89:54

happens in the world through a political

89:56

lens at least the journalists at least

89:58

first of all first of all I gotta make

90:01

this clear

conditions oh no we can’t do that it’s

134:32

like the discussion you guys wanted why

do you continue and agree to have these

conversations that are gonna be edited

oh well that’s a good question the Jim

Jefferies one was another one yeah Jim’s

134:43

a friend of mine but I mean he gave you

134:45

a good question and you actually gave a

134:46

good answer you said actually I’m

134:49

probably wrong about yeah yeah and you

134:50

were talking about whether or not gay

134:52

people should whether someone should be

134:55

forced to bake a cake for cake for gay

134:57

people yeah I said forced to probably

134:59

not they said well what if they don’t

135:00

want to get baked a cake for black

135:02

people yeah and he said well actually

135:05

probably it probably should be forced to

135:07

yeah well probably wrong yeah well I was

135:09

probably wrong in everything I did and

135:11

that in that part of the discussion

135:12

because I hadn’t thought that issue

135:15

through enough to actually give a good

135:16

answer he didn’t expect that issue

135:18

because this is not something you talk

135:19

about commonly no and it’s it’s actually

135:21

complicated right I mean obviously the

135:23

whole I won’t serve you because you’re

135:25

black thing is not good but then again

135:27

you have you also have the right to

135:29

choose who you’re going to affiliate

135:30

with but

135:31

that’s complicated because it’s a

135:32

commercial circumstance and then if

135:33

you’re making a cake is that the same as

135:35

serving or is that compelled speech it’s

135:37

like oh my god these are border cases

135:40

that cause a lot of controversy I don’t

135:42

mean serving black people obviously

135:43

that’s not a border case but these cases

135:45

that caused a lot of controversy is

135:47

where two principles are at odds and it

135:49

isn’t exactly clear where to draw the

135:50

line and I’m not happy with you know I’m

135:53

not happy with my answer to that but I

135:55

hadn’t spent that like week it would

135:57

take to think through the issue and

135:59

really have a comprehensive perspective

136:00

you didn’t expect that to be a subject

136:02

anyway no no what how long did you talk

136:05

to Jim for oh I think about 45 minutes

136:08

maybe an hour first Oh two minutes yeah

136:11

well my daughter has told me and and my

136:14

wife as well my son as well and these

136:16

discussions we’ve been thinking about

136:18

how to handle the media which is a very

complicated question and one hypothesis

being don’t do interviews that will be

edited and I’ve thought about that and

and and and being thinking about it and

that might be the right answer it might

be the right answer going fooling it is

right and well it could it could easily

be although it’s the only way you can’t

be misrepresented just all the problems

that I’ve seen with you all of them come

from you being edited yes I mean there’s

complex subjects that people would

disagree with you on but when you look

at complete mischaracterizations of your

point

these have been established because of

editing yes well I guess the only

counter-argument is this and I mean a

lot of these a lot of these

opportunities come I’ve had

opportunities that are coming at me a

rate at a rate that doesn’t allow me to

think them through as much as I could

optimally but but then there’s another

thing which is it isn’t necessarily a

mistake to lay yourself open to attack

because sometimes it reveals the motives

of the attackers like that’s what

happened in the Kathy Newman interview

no that could have gone really sideways

like I was lucky there to some degree

because she interviewed me for 40

minutes or whatever and something like

that and then they did chop it down to

seven minutes or three minutes and it

was exactly what you’d expect and that

is what I expected after

away from the interview I thought oh my

god they’re just gonna chop this into

reprehensible segments and pillory me

but I walked away from it because there

was 50 other things to do but then it

was so funny because they did do that

and then they put up the whole interview

and the reason they put up the whole

interview was because they thought the

interview went fine it isn’t that they

knew that that was gonna cause commotion

not at all not a bit

he

141:23

journalists I’m certainly not taking

141:24

anywhere near the number of

141:26

opportunities that I have in front of me

141:27

right we are trying to be very careful

in picking and choosing but that doesn’t

always go well and it’s like it could be

that it could be that I shouldn’t do

anything that is edited at all that’s

certainly possible so well this is the

problem you speak in these you speak in

these long-form podcasts and interviews

and you get a chance to extrapolate and

unpack some pretty complicated issues

and compare them to other complicated

issues and try to find meaning and

middle ground and and try to try to

illuminate certain positions when you

expose yourself to editing you you

expose yourself to someone

idea of what the narrative should be and

how to frame your positions in it in and

dishonest way yeah and you’re seeing it

time and time again when it exposes the

142:23

problem with medium look I went to the

142:25

Aspen ideas festival last week which is

142:27

a whole story in and of itself but I was

142:29

interviewed there by a journalist from

142:31

the Atlantic Monthly and it was a

142:33

relatively long form interview I think

142:35

we talked for 40 minutes something like

142:37

that and it’s going to be edited

142:39

now I trusted her I trust her now

142:42

whether that’ll be well how that will

142:44

play out in the final edit I don’t know

142:46

because she won’t be the only one making

142:48

the decision right well the question is

142:50

should have I done it well look it was

142:53

the Aspen ideas festival it’s a

142:54

different audience it’s left-leaning

I thought well maybe I’ll go talk to a

left-leaning audience people are always

criticizing me for not doing that I

usually don’t do it because I don’t get

invited but so I went and talked to them

it’s like and Barry Weiss interviewed me

in front of the Aspen ideas festival and

that was long-form uncut and put on the

web and so maybe that was useful the

Atlantic thing well it might be good

we’ll see it does expose me to the risk

though because it’ll be edited so and it

was it wise to do it

look I’ve been fortunate so far despite

the fact that I’ve been taken out of

context at times and fairly significant

proportion of times but not the

overwhelming majority of times the net

consequence of all of that has been to

143:46

engage more and more people in a complex

143:48

dialogue as far as I can tell so that’s

143:51

the good that’s the good it doesn’t mean

143:54

the strategy that I’ve implemented so

143:56

far is the only strategy that will work

143:58

into the future we can also clearly

144:00

establish it you didn’t planning this to

144:02

happen this this whole thing that

144:04

happened from you opposing that bill and

144:07

then going to where you are how many

you

148:11

know what you’re talking about so you

148:13

take the listeners on a journey right

148:15

it’s an exploratory journey but

148:17

fundamentally what’s propelled you to

148:19

superstardom in some sense is not just

your ability which is non-trivial but

the fact that you’re on this giant

technological wave and you’re one of the

first adopters and I’m in the same

situation we’re first adopters of a

technology that’s as revolutionary as

the Gutenberg printing press and so

that’s all unfolding in real time it’s

like look at what’s happening yeah well

the spoken word is now as powerful as

the written word that’s never happened

before in human history and we’re on the

cutting edge of that for better or worse

that’s a very good way to put it the

spoken word is just power yeah and maybe

even more so why is it so accessible to

people that don’t have the time to read

well or stuck in traffic you know or or

and here’s another possibility maybe ten

times as many people can listen to

complex information as can read complex

information in terms of their ability to

process it sure could easily we don’t

know maybe it’s maybe it’s the same it’s

certainly easier to listen to a book on

tape for me than it is to read a book

yeah well so for us so the question is

for how many people is that true and I

would say it might be true for them for

the majority of people and then people

are doing hybrids you know so because

you can sync your book with audible

right so they’ll read when they have the

time but then when they have found time

which is also a major component of this

that that’s the time when you’re driving

or the time when you’re doing dishes is

now all of a sudden you can educate

yourself during that found time this is

149:40

a big revolution and the band blowing

149:43

out the bandwidth makes a huge

149:44

difference because while we talked about

149:46

that at the beginning looks like people

149:48

are more intelligent than we thought and

149:49

you and I are both and the rest of this

149:51

intellectual dark web that’s kind of

149:53

what unites us say is everybody has an

149:55

independent platform virtually everybody

149:57

they have an idiosyncratic viewpoint

150:00

they’re interested in having discussions

150:02

and pursuing for the furtherance of

150:04

their knowledge even though they might

150:05

have a priori ideological commit

150:07

Sam doesn’t I suppose I do and and Ben

150:09

Shapiro certainly does but they’re still

150:11

interested in having the discussion but

150:14

more importantly they’re capitalizing on

150:16

the long form and and the fact that

150:18

that’s possible is a reflection of this

150:19

technological transformation and the

150:21

technological transfer information might

150:23

be utterly profound it looks like it and

150:27

so that’s you know I’ve been trying to

150:29

sort this out because I keep thinking

150:30

why the hell are these people coming to

150:32

listen to what I’m saying it’s like well

150:33

I’m a guru you know I’m a sage it’s

150:35

something like that it’s like don’t be

150:37

thinking that first think if there’s

150:41

situational determinants first take your

150:43

damn personality out of it okay what’s

150:45

going on oh yes this is all fostered by

150:48

YouTube and fostered by podcasts what’s

150:50

so new about that

150:52

no bandwidth restrictions no barrier to

150:55

entrance possibility of dialog because

150:58

people cut up the YouTube videos into

151:00

chunks and make their own comments on it

151:02

it’s a whole new communication

151:03

technology also a lack of interference

151:06

by executives and producers and all

151:08

these different people that have their

151:09

own bodies unmediated yes unmediated is

151:11

giant yeah yeah well that’s all part of

151:13

the reason you’re so popular too is like

151:15

you just put this on like so you’ve got

151:17

exactly the right balance of competent

151:21

production because there’s nothing

151:23

excess about it like it’s competent but

151:26

no more than that I know that’s by

151:28

design but you also don’t edit it it’s

151:30

like what you see is what you get it’s

151:31

like everyone’s relieved by that we can

151:33

make our own damn decisions no I think

151:35

that’s very important if you’re gonna

151:36

have a conversation with someone that’s

151:38

honest you you can’t decide what to

151:40

leave in and what to take out and it’s

151:43

just well that’s partly also why I deal

151:45

with the press the way I do yeah if I’m

151:47

gonna have a full conversation it’s like

151:48

I’m willing to take the hits yeah and

151:50

and I understand what you’re saying but

151:52

that’s one of the reasons why it

frustrates me so much is that I see what

they’re doing and I’m like what you’re

doing is ancient what you’re doing is

it’s it’s this is what people did twenty

years ago thirty years ago for you can’t

152:03

really do that anymore

152:04

you can’t misrepresent people you used

152:06

to be able to if you were in the press

152:07

you could take people quote amount of

152:09

context do whatever the fuck you wanted

152:11

put an article about them they couldn’t

152:12

do a goddamn thing about it it happened

152:14

to me in nineteen

it was like ninety-nine

I did a I had a comedy CD that came out

and this woman wrote an article about it

and it just she just lied she lied about

my perspective she lied about the bits

she misquoted the bits she didn’t just

paraphrase them

she changed what the bits were to make

them you know misogynist or hateful or

whatever it was and in doing so I that

there was no recourse there was nothing

that I could do about them like wow I’d

never experienced that before I was like

this is stunning and then I found out

this person did that a lot and this is

what she did and there’s ultimate power

that comes at being the person who has

the pen being the person who has the

typewriter and you you’re the person who

works for you know the Boston Globe or

whatever the publication is that that is

something that existed forever you know

and that you had to be either a friend

of the press you had to play ball you

had you had a bend to their will you to

do what they wanted you to do and they

could misrepresent you and choose to

paint you in any way they like and it’s

one of the reasons why I don’t do

anything anymore

I don’t do any interviews anymore I

don’t do anything I don’t want to do

anything yeah this I do enough man you

153:28

want to know about me it fucking there’s

153:29

a thousand podcasts there’s more than a

153:32

thousand there’s I think there’s there’s

153:35

1,100 and there’s a bunch of other ones

153:37

three right let’s just it doesn’t make

153:38

any sense

153:39

yeah well that that’s that that it may

153:41

also be the position that I increasingly

153:43

find myself in I think it’s the right

153:45

position because then the

153:47

misrepresentations don’t exist anymore

153:48

so then the only problem is the dispute

153:50

over the actual ideological

153:52

conversations or the other the actual

153:55

concept but you know the thing is you

153:57

know you made a point there that’s quite

153:58

interesting it’s like we are in a new

154:00

media landscape so now if someone comes

154:02

out as a as a media figure with some

154:06

institutional credibility and

154:09

misrepresents its exposed and so then

154:12

the question is how much risk should use

154:14

shoulder to expose the proclivity for

154:16

media misrepresentation and the answer

154:19

to that might be some now it might be

154:22

moving you know maybe I’ve done enough

154:23

of that I mean it would be easier for me

154:26

in many ways if I just stopped doing it

154:28

but but there’s some utility and having

154:31

it play out and so

154:33

well so I’m trying to get I’m trying to

154:36

only take those opportunities that

154:38

appear to have more benefit than risk

154:41

and when I defining benefit

154:44

well the question is then what

154:46

constitutes benefit and I guess what

154:48

constitutes benefit is well that would

154:52

further the attempts that I’m making to

154:55

bring information to a vast number of

154:57

people that could conceivably help them

154:59

stabilize and improve their individual

155:02

lives that’s worth a certain amount of

155:03

risk

155:04

well it certainly increases your profile

155:06

increases your profile and even if you

155:08

know you have 60% of these people are

155:10

gonna get a bad perception of you 40% of

155:12

these people that never heard of you now

155:14

we’re going to understand who you are

155:15

because they do further investigation

155:16

yeah so there’s some benefit in that but

155:18

the negative I mean I get text messages

155:21

from random people that I was friends

155:22

with years ago let’s say this Jordan

155:24

Peterson is just such a lying sack of

155:26

shit and he’s this not only I don’t even

155:28

know who the fuck you are and then

155:30

second of all like why are you

155:31

contacting me you know I’m saying hi

155:33

you’re saying he’s a scam artist he’s a

155:40

fraud he’s in it and I’m like wow and so

155:43

they’ll see an interview you know like

155:45

the the Jim Jefferies clip which is a

155:47

minute long or whatever it is or the

155:49

Vice piece or the the initial Kathy

155:52

Newman piece and they just form this

155:55

determined position on you and then Reid

155:58

hit pieces on you and then this is where

156:01

they take their opinion this is where

156:03

it’s from it’s and it’s like these are

the last gasps of a dying medium I

really do I just I think too I don’t I

don’t think that people appreciate it I

think the people that are listening to

this that do appreciate long-form

conversations and with all warts and all

all the ugliness and the mistakes and

the critical errors and the the people

that appreciate that they they they have

156:29

a real hate for being lied to you know

156:32

because it’s it it changed when when you

156:35

try never being treated as if they’re

156:37

stupid yes

156:38

yeah which they aren’t yeah that’s both

156:41

it’s just it’s it’s deceptive when you

156:44

when you added someone and take their

156:47

words

to context and change them around you’re

being deceptive the New York Times did

that again this week they had some

philosophy professor from Hong Kong

University write a piece on me and he

took they quoted me it was a sentence

there’s like the first phrase was in

quotes and then there was some joining

words and then the second phrase was in

quotes and there was some joining words

and then the third phrase was in quotes

and the three quotes added up to a

statement that bore no resemblance

whatsoever to what I was saying how can

they do that in the New York Times that

seems to me to be something that should

be the the I don’t but they still I

don’t think they can do I think they’re

killing their brand so fast that they

can’t but it is so disturbing to me as a

157:24

person who’s been a fan of the New York

157:26

Times forever I just don’t understand

157:28

how they could allow that to happen how

157:30

could you allow your what what is the

157:33

gold standard for journalism how could

157:36

you allow it to become something that

157:37

willfully misrepresents someone they

157:39

never did to push an idea I never did

157:41

put my book on the New York Times

157:43

bestseller list it’s quite comical how’s

157:45

that possible oh they have rules which

157:48

they don’t disclose but one of them

157:50

apparently is well if the book is

157:51

published and counted and distributed in

157:53

the United States then it doesn’t count

157:54

even though they’ve had books like that

157:56

on the New York Times bestseller list

157:57

before and I think okay well is this bad

158:00

or good it’s like well it’s bad because

158:02

to the degree that I might want to be on

158:04

the New York Times bestseller list

158:05

although I haven’t been losing any sleep

158:07

over but you’re selling I know how many

158:09

books are selling yeah it’s basically

158:10

being the best-selling book in the world

158:12

since January you know it’s gone up and

158:14

down to some degree but right it should

158:16

be the number one New York Times

158:18

bestseller so they they they have the

158:20

reasons and but I look at that and I

158:22

think oh well you can only do that ten

158:24

times until you’re done like because

158:27

it’s a fatal error

158:27

you have the gold standard for

158:29

measurement you’re not measuring

158:31

properly you’re burning up your brand

158:34

you think well we’re the New York Times

158:35

so we can burn up our brand it’s like no

158:38

you can’t Newsweek is gone Time magazine

158:40

is a shallow is a shell of its former

158:42

self like the big things disappear and

158:46

they disappear when they get crooked and

158:48

ideologically rigid and so that’s what’s

158:51

happening at the New York Times not with

158:53

everyone there but with plenty of them

158:55

and they’ll die faster than people think

158:58

but it’s so confusing to me that

159:00

it didn’t used to be that yeah and now

159:04

it is and are they just responding to

159:06

this new world where you have to have

159:08

clickbait journalism and you know some

159:11

people are struggling to find people to

159:12

actually buy physical newspapers which

159:14

is well it’s a different thing it’s hard

159:16

to say like because maybe see it’s weird

159:18

because you don’t have to resort to

159:20

clickbait because these long-form

159:23

discussions are the antithesis of

159:24

clickbait right are they struggling in

159:27

terms of like how many people buy them

159:29

safer oh absolutely every newspaper the

159:32

newspapers in Canada went cap and hand

159:34

to the federal government for subsidies

159:36

about six months ago because they’re

159:37

dying so fast and so some of it is

159:40

they’re being supplanted by technology

159:42

that’s a huge part of it but as they are

159:44

supplanted they get more desperate they

159:46

publish more polarizing stories that

159:48

works in the short term to garner more

159:50

views but it alienates people from the

159:52

brand and speeds their demise classic

159:54

death spiral of a big of a big

159:56

organization and that’s going to clean

159:59

things out like mad I mean I don’t know

160:00

where CNN is in the Cable News rankings

160:03

now our cable show rankings but it keeps

160:04

falling but it’s falling in the rankings

160:07

as cable itself disintegrates and dies

160:09

why do you need cable TV right

160:12

no one needs cable TV the only people

160:14

who have cable TV are the people who

160:16

haven’t figured out yet that you can

160:18

replace it entirely online for like 1/10

160:20

the price with with much less hassle but

160:22

the art is people want a location they

160:25

can go to to find out what’s going on in

160:26

the world and this is the one thing that

160:28

they used to represent and you know I

160:31

mean I don’t think Fox News is any

160:33

better I think you just have these

160:34

ideological extremes left and right and

160:37

I remember very clearly watching the

160:39

election coverage before the election

160:42

like we were leading up to the election

160:44

I would go Fox News and then I go CNN I

160:46

just would go back and forth with them

160:48

on my cable yeah and I would just be

160:49

laughing I’m like what is really

160:51

happening in the world because I’m

160:53

getting to different stories I’m getting

160:55

Russia and I’m getting Hillary’s emails

160:56

this is I don’t know what the fuck is

160:58

what what is happening I’m getting pussy

161:00

grabbing and I’m getting you know

161:03

Benghazi yeah you know I’m this is what

161:05

I’m getting and I don’t understand like

161:06

why this is obviously ideological this

161:10

is well not just look it might be that

161:11

as the technology is supplanted

161:14

the ideological polarization increases

161:17

as the thing dies right there struggling

161:19

for anyone to pay attention and this is

161:21

the way they have to do it to any shore

161:23

and I think what’s happening on the

161:24

other side which is the side you occupy

161:27

say is that a new technology that’s long

161:29

form that deals with many of those

161:32

problems is emerging and it’s going to

161:33

emerge it’s going to be victorious

161:35

but in the me might already be

161:37

victorious in the meantime little baby

161:39

stuff still exists in the digital world

161:42

yeah you know and then you’re getting a

161:43

lot of the articles that are written

161:45

about you people are absorbing these

161:46

articles not from a physical form you’re

161:48

getting it from from digital yeah well

161:50

okay so then the sense is well do you

161:52

have fundamental trust in the judgment

161:54

of your fellow man let’s say and my

161:57

answer to that is yes because although

161:59

I’ve been pilloried to a great degree by

162:02

the radical types in the commentariat

162:05

and in that classic journalists though

162:09

comments with regards to me on YouTube

162:11

are 50 to 1 in my favor and and that’s

162:15

even the case when the ideologues put up

162:16

videos about me they’re designed to

162:18

discredit me and I’ve sold a million and

162:21

a half books it’s going to be published

162:23

in 40 countries and thousands of people

162:25

are coming to my lectures and so I would

162:27

say the attempts to discredit me aren’t

162:30

working so and now I think that’s

162:34

because that even like even if you go to

162:35

youtube you can see Jordan Peterson

162:38

smashes leftist journalists you know as

162:40

a clickbait thing someone’s taken a

162:41

two-minute clip from a video and they

162:43

put it out and they’re using that

162:44

clickbait headlines to attract attention

162:46

it’s like it does attract attention and

162:48

that probably even furthers polarization

162:50

but I think that most people enough

162:53

people that’s the prayer enough people

162:56

are going for the long form thorough

162:58

discussion so that the sensible will

163:02

will triumph that’s what I’m hoping for

163:05

the sensible will triumph no I agree and

163:07

I think that is what’s happened yeah I

163:09

think that’s why this fifty to one

163:10

number exists is that there but the the

163:13

number one in that 50 the 50 verses you

163:17

know the 50 people that are actually

163:18

understanding what’s going on and

163:20

agreeing with you versus the number one

163:22

that are trying to willfully

163:24

misrepresent you they still exist and

163:25

they’re loud you know they’re and

163:27

they’re

163:27

to be right and this is one of the

163:29

things that people love to do they love

163:31

to fight to be right instead of

163:33

examining their position and wondering

163:34

whether or not they are taking you out

163:36

of context and misrepresenting your

163:38

positions to the world willfully and

163:40

doing so in order to paint a negative

163:43

picture of you that does not accurately

163:45

represent who you are what you stand for

163:47

yes but by doing this virtue without any

163:50

of the work they’re also destroying

163:52

their own credits this is what’s

163:54

devastating it’s like the in they’re

163:55

trying to win they’re killing themselves

163:58

right well and that’s a good that’s a

164:00

good motif for the entire conversation

164:03

it’s like try hard to hard to win you

164:06

kill yourself you were talking last

164:07

night when we were when we were over

164:08

dinner you said that one of the most

164:10

deadly things for a fighter to do is to

164:11

overestimate his own position you’re

164:14

gonna get your abilities yes if you

164:17

overestimate your abilities you you’re

164:18

you’re in deep deep trouble because

164:20

you’re gonna get a wake-up call right

164:22

and objectivity is one of the most

164:24

critical aspects of development you have

164:26

to be you have to be objectively

164:28

assessing your strengths and weaknesses

164:30

at every step of the way that’s brava

164:33

bravado right I’m I’m trying to prove

164:35

how I’m so powerful I’m so powerful it’s

164:37

an ego shield and that’s why I was

164:39

saying that the ego is the enemy were

164:40

talking about right so I get you know I

164:42

want to get into this because this is a

164:44

I think this is a fascinating thing with

164:47

you personally that your diet you’re on

164:51

this carnivore dog yeah no okay so I

164:53

want to preface that with something I am

164:55

NOT a dietary expert so I’m not speaking

164:58

as an uninformed citizen yes well this

165:01

is anecdotal evidence from a human being

165:03

it is dealt with autoimmune issues yes

165:05

their whole life yes you have done this

165:08

for how long now I’ve been on a pure

165:10

carnivore diet for about two months and

165:13

a pretty very very low carb greens only

165:16

modified carnivore diet for about a year

165:20

so in the year and-and-and-and a

165:22

low-carb diet for two years so from the

165:25

time that I’ve known you I’ve known you

165:26

for what two and a half years now

165:27

sometimes yeah yeah when I first met you

165:29

you had much more weight on your body

165:31

yeah you look different yeah and you

165:34

were back then you were eating like the

165:36

standard diet right like normal people

165:38

yes pasta

165:40

bread yeah chicken whatever yes right

165:42

you shifted over to only meat and greens

165:46

I saw you and like you look fantastic

165:48

I’m like what are you doing

165:50

you’re like I changed my diet I only

165:51

meat in green so I was like wow that’s

165:53

fascinating well I felt like okay what

165:56

you’re doing is cutting out refined

165:57

sugars and all these different things

165:59

that are problematic preservatives all

166:01

the bullshit processed foods and you’re

166:04

having this extreme health benefit I was

166:05

like wow that’s really excellent you’re

166:07

showing great discipline then you

166:10

decided to take it to another place and

166:11

cut out the greens you know what was the

166:13

motivation for cutting out the greens

166:15

well all of the motivation for this has

166:17

been my experience with my daughter

166:19

because she has an unbelievably serious

166:21

autoimmune disease I just talked to her

166:22

this what is it called

166:23

well it’s rich arthritis but it there’s

166:26

there’s way more to it than that

166:28

but the arthritis was the major set of

166:30

symptoms she had 40 affected joints and

166:32

she had to have her hip replaced and her

166:34

ankle replaced when she was 15 and 16

166:36

and so she basically hobbled around on

166:38

two broken legs for two years in extreme

166:41

agony and that was just a tiny fraction

166:42

of the whole set of problems I just

166:45

talked to her this morning she’s in

166:47

Chicago looks like she has to have her

166:48

ankle replacement replaced so that’s

166:51

next on the horizon but but apart from

166:54

that she is doing so well now it is

166:55

absolutely beyond comprehension so she’s

166:59

she’s she’s very trim she had a baby but

167:02

she’s very trimmed she’s down to about

167:03

118 pounds she’s about five foot six

167:06

she’s just glowing with health all of

167:09

her autoimmune system symptoms are gone

167:11

all of them and she was also seriously

167:13

depressed like severely depressed way

167:16

worse than you think she couldn’t stay

167:17

awake for more than about six hours

167:19

without taking Ritalin

167:21

and she was dying and hide a cousin my

167:23

cousin’s daughter she died when she was

167:26

thirty from an associated autoimmune

167:28

condition so there’s a fair bit of this

167:30

in our family it was bloody bleak I’ll

167:32

tell you and my wife always had a

167:34

suspicion that this was dietary related

167:37

you know and well we did notice that

167:41

when Michaela was young if she ate

167:43

oranges or strawberries that she’d get a

167:46

rash like there were there were there

167:47

and then when she developed arthritis if

167:50

she ate oranges in particular that would

167:51

definitely cause a flare it was the only

167:53

thing we could see

167:54

the problem is is that in order to

167:56

identify a dietary component the

167:58

response has to be pretty quick after

167:59

you eat the thing like if it’s two days

168:01

later how the hell are you gonna figure

168:02

that out a lot of these responses appear

168:04

to be delayed for four days and last a

168:07

month so good luck figuring that out

168:10

anyways Mikayla noticed about three

168:12

years ago no more than that now five

168:13

years ago she was at Concordia

168:15

University and struggling with her with

168:18

her illness and and all the Association

168:20

associated problems she noticed that

168:22

around exam time she was starting to

168:24

develop real skin problems and my

168:27

cousin’s daughter who I mentioned had

168:29

really bad skin problems and wounds that

168:31

wouldn’t heal and that was partly part

168:32

of the process that eventually killed

168:34

her and she thought oh it must be stress

168:36

and then she thought wait a second I

168:38

really changed my diet when I’m studying

168:40

all I do is eat bagels all I do is eat

168:42

bread sandwiches she thought maybe it’s

168:44

the bread so she cut out gluten first

168:47

and it had a remarkable effect like a

168:50

really remarkable effect and then she

168:53

went on a radical elimination diet all

168:55

the way down to nothing but chicken and

168:57

broccoli and then her symptoms started

168:59

to drop off one by one like and and like

169:02

one of the things that happened is she

169:03

started to wake up in the morning she

169:04

started to be able to stay awake all day

169:06

when you’re only staying awake for six

169:07

hours with riddlin staying awake all day

169:09

that’s like having a life and so a whole

169:12

bunch of things improved then her

169:14

depression went away and I’ve had

169:17

depression since I was 13 probably and

169:19

very severe and I’ve treated at a

169:21

variety of ways some of them quite

169:22

successfully but it’s been a constant

169:24

battle and my father had it and his

169:26

father had it and it’s all just rife in

169:28

my family and my wife has autoimmune

169:31

problems and her niece a depression

169:32

define it oh oh would you define it

169:36

because that’s a word that’s a blanket

169:38

term yeah

169:38

well imagine imagine that you wake up

169:40

and that you remember that all your

169:42

family was killed in a horrible accident

169:43

yesterday you would feel that even

169:45

though the times wrong yes yes

169:47

just-just-just worse than that because

169:50

well one of the things Mikayla told me

169:52

was she thought well what’s it like to

169:53

be depressed

169:54

imagine you have a dog and you really

169:55

loved the dog and then the dog dies and

169:57

then about three years ago our dog died

170:00

and that was Mikayla’s dog and she

170:02

really liked that dog and she said that

170:05

was bad but it’s nowhere near as bad as

170:06

being depressed

170:08

and I asked her to at one point when she

170:09

was about 15 or 16 I said look you’ve

170:12

got a choice kid here’s the choice you

170:14

can either have depression or arthritis

170:16

which one I’ll take the arthritis

170:21

after she’d lost two joints so it was no

170:26

joke it’s no joke man it there isn’t any

170:28

no I wouldn’t say that I wouldn’t say

170:31

there’s nothing worse because worse is a

170:33

very deep hole right but it’s bad yeah

170:35

people prove you wrong right oh yes

170:37

definitely worse worse is a deep hole

170:39

anyways her depression went away all

170:41

these symptoms went away and like

170:43

radically so what changed her from

170:45

chicken and broccoli to carnivore well

170:47

she she kept experimenting and she got

170:51

very sensitive to all sorts of foods in

170:53

the aftermath of that too so this is why

170:55

I wouldn’t recommend that anybody does

170:56

this casually because we don’t

170:57

understand much about it but the upshot

170:59

was that well she kept she kept she kept

171:02

experimenting and she started to add

171:04

things back and take them away and

171:06

sometimes when she added things the

171:07

results were devastating she was like

171:09

done for a month she eats the wrong

171:10

thing done for a month all the symptoms

171:13

came back the depression came back she

171:15

thought that her whole dietary theory

171:16

was wrong because it lasted so long it

171:18

was so extreme and it’s like I took her

171:20

two years to figure out that really what

171:22

she could eat was beef and greens and

171:24

then she figured out that she could only

171:25

eat beef so greens themselves well look

171:29

so what happened okay so two years ago

171:32

she said dad you have tried this diet

171:33

because you have a lot of the same

171:34

symptoms as me now I didn’t have

171:36

arthritis but I had a lot of the other

171:38

symptoms and I thought oh Christ

171:41

okay Mikayla I can try anything for a

171:43

month she said try it for a month I

171:44

thought okay whatever I can hang by my

171:46

fingernails from the windowsill for a

171:48

month it’s like it’s just not that big a

171:50

deal

171:50

and so I eliminated I went on really low

171:54

carb diet okay so this is what happened

171:56

I had gastric reflux disorder and I was

172:00

snoring quite a lot I stopped snoring

172:03

the first week I thought what the hell

172:05

that’s supposed to be associated with

172:07

weight loss because I had gained some

172:09

weight I weighed about 212 pounds and

172:11

I’m I what six one and a half so that

172:12

was my maximum weight I stopped snoring

172:15

which was a great relief to tear me so

172:17

that just quit and that’s a big deal

172:18

right because if you snore you have

172:19

sleep apnea and then you don’t sleep

172:20

right it’s like not a good thing okay

172:22

next I started waking up in the mornings

172:25

I’d never been able to wake up in the

172:27

mornings my whole life I always had to

172:29

stumble to the shower and then maybe I

172:31

could wake up took me an hour and I felt

172:33

terrible and so

172:34

all the sudden I woke up it was like oh

172:36

look at that I’m awake in the morning

172:38

and I’m clear-headed and things aren’t

172:40

gloomy and horrible it’s like well he’s

172:42

not weird then I lost seven pounds the

172:44

first month I thought seven pounds

172:47

that’s a lot in a month and I’d already

172:48

gone for a whole year on a sugar-free

172:50

diet I didn’t lose any weight and I’d be

172:52

the exercise a sugar free but did you

172:53

cut out bread no no it was just no

172:55

desserts no sugar no and I thought that

172:57

might do it didn’t make any difference

172:58

at all seven pounds well then then I

173:02

lost seven pounds the next month then I

173:04

lost seven pounds the next month I lost

173:06

seven pounds every month for seven

173:07

months like I’d throw away all my

173:09

clothes I went back to the same weight

173:10

that I was when I was 26 and my

173:12

psoriasis disappeared and I had floaters

173:15

in my right eye and they cleared up and

173:17

then the last thing that went away from

173:20

me I was still having a bitch of a time

173:21

with mood regulation and that sucked

173:23

because when I changed my diet I didn’t

173:24

respond to antidepressants properly

173:26

anymore they weren’t working and so

173:28

although I was getting better physically

173:30

on a variety of ways like radical ways I

173:33

was really having a bitch of a time

173:35

regulating my mood and I was having

173:36

sporadic really negative reactions to

173:38

food when I ate something I shouldn’t so

173:40

that took about a year and half to clear

173:42

up and I was still really anxious in the

173:44

morning up to three months ago like

173:45

horribly and then it would get better

173:47

all day people said well you’re under a

173:48

lot of stress and I thought yeah yeah

173:50

I’ve been under a lot of stress for like

173:52

ten years it’s like it’s a lot but it

173:54

wasn’t any more stressful than helping

173:56

my daughter deal with her illness that’s

173:58

for sure that no this is something

173:59

different and she said to me quit eating

174:03

greens and I thought oh really

174:04

Jesus Mikayla I’m eating cucumbers

174:07

lettuce broccoli and chicken and beef

174:11

it’s like I have to cut out the goddamn

174:12

greens it’s like try it for a month okay

174:17

within a week I was 25% less anxious in

174:20

the morning within two weeks 75% and

174:23

I’ve been better every single day I’m

174:24

better now probably than I’ve ever been

174:26

in my life and I haven’t been taking

174:27

antidepressants for a whole year so I

174:30

don’t know what and I weigh 162 pounds

174:33

like I have no I’m and I’ve actually

174:36

gained musculature I’ve been doing some

174:38

working out but not a lot and so I can

174:42

sleep six hours a night no problem I

174:44

wake up the morning I’m awake if I take

174:45

a 15 minute nap that used to take me an

174:47

hour to recover for

174:48

that’s gone here’s the coolest thing

174:50

I’ve had gum disease since I was 25

174:53

that’s been serious enough to have I’ve

174:55

had to have minor surgical interventions

174:57

scraping and that sort of thing to keep

174:59

it at bay

174:59

it’s go on I checked with my dentist

175:02

before this last tour no inflammation

175:04

and that’s associated with heart disease

175:06

by the way gum inflammation and

175:08

gingivitis it’s a good risk factor heart

175:10

disease it means the systemic

175:11

inflammation is gone and it’s not

175:13

supposed to happen you’re not supposed

175:15

to recover from gingivitis and my gums

175:17

are in perfect shape it’s like what the

175:19

hell so here’s what happened I lost 50

175:21

pounds it’s like that’s a lot right I’m

175:26

nowhere near as hungry as I used to be

175:27

my appetites probably formed by 70% I

175:30

don’t get blood sugar dysregulation

175:32

problems I need way less sleep I get up

175:36

in the morning and I’m fine I’m not

175:38

anxious I’m not depressed I don’t have

175:39

psoriasis my legs were numb on the sides

175:42

that’s gone I’m certainly intellectually

175:47

at my best at the moment which is a

175:50

great relief especially doing this tour

175:51

depression is gone

175:54

I’m stronger I can swim better and my

176:01

gum disease is gone it’s like what the

176:03

hell and you’ve done you’ve done no

176:05

blood work so you don’t know what your

176:06

lipid lipid profile is or no I’ll get

176:09

that done again when I go back take any

176:10

vitamins no no I eat beef and salt and

176:13

water that’s it and I never cheat ever

176:17

not even a little bit no not soda no

176:19

wine I drink club soda well that’s still

176:23

water well you know when you’re down to

176:26

that level no it’s not Joe there’s

176:28

there’s club soda Joe’s really bubbly

176:31

there’s Perrier which is sort of bubbly

176:33

there’s flat water and there’s hot water

176:34

so that’s crazy well we ate last night

176:40

and I ate what you ate just we both had

176:43

that giant tomahawk yeah I had wine

176:46

though yeah

176:47

I’m curious about this I’m very curious

176:50

and I think you might try it but I eat a

176:53

lot of vegetables yeah but I don’t have

176:54

any problems like health problems hey

176:56

man like I’m not

176:58

disclaimer number two I am not

177:01

recommending this to anyone however I

177:03

have had however I have had many many

177:06

people come up to me on the tour and say

177:09

look I’ve been following your daughter’s

177:10

blog and I’ve lost like a hundred pounds

177:13

I think what you lost a hundred pounds

177:16

see I lost 100 pounds in six months I

177:17

talked to a woman yesterday she lost 15

177:19

pounds in one month she was 70 it’s like

177:22

this is all right here’s a question

177:25

why is everyone fat and stupid that’s a

177:29

question man because it’s new is there

177:32

something else it is it’s new and it’s

177:35

not a sedentary lifestyle that that

177:37

hypothesis doesn’t seem to hold water

177:39

there’s something wrong with the way

177:41

we’re eating and the what’s wrong is

177:43

that we’re eating way too many

177:44

carbohydrates I think but they’re never

177:46

on a no x8 shift the elimination of most

177:49

carbohydrates has made a big shift in my

177:51

life and I do cheat occasionally with

177:54

bread and occasionally with pasta I will

177:57

I will go off with ice cream and things

177:59

along those lines but most of the time

178:02

I’m just eating meat and vegetables most

178:05

of the time and then I have a cheat day

178:07

like you know once a week like yeah

178:09

especially if I go to dinner I’ll have a

178:11

little pasta and it doesn’t seem to mess

178:13

too bad but I do feel shitty after I do

178:16

it it’s like for simple mouth pleasure

178:18

I’m allowing myself to feel tired after

178:21

we’re tired yeah that’s a big one man

178:23

yeah but like I out yeah like well

178:26

really I can’t no and it’s so

178:29

interesting to like I can’t believe I

178:31

can wake up in the morning okay that’s

178:33

never happened to me in my whole life

178:35

and when I was a kid 13 12 I had a bitch

178:38

of a time waking up in the morning it

178:40

was just brutal I just thought that’s

178:42

how it was this is what I mean again I’m

178:44

not a nutritionist either but what’s

178:46

fascinating to me is I haven’t heard any

178:49

negative stories about people doing this

178:50

well I have a negative story okay okay

178:53

one of the things that both Mikayla and

178:56

I noticed was that when we restricted

178:59

our diet and then ate something we

179:01

weren’t supposed to the reaction to

179:03

eating what we weren’t supposed to was

179:04

absolutely catastrophic but it show what

179:07

did you switch to what did you eat

179:09

rather um well the worst response I

179:11

think we’re allergic to or allergic

179:13

whatever the hell this is having an

179:15

inflammatory response to something

179:17

called sulfites and we had some apple

179:19

cider that had sulfites in it and that

179:21

was really not good like I was done for

179:23

a month that was the first time I talked

179:25

to Sam Harris you were done for a month

179:27

oh yeah it took me out for a month it

179:28

was awful real yeah yeah so I would sell

179:31

oh and what so this is right before this

179:32

whole truth conversation with Sam Harris

179:35

at the Guthrie in the mud during during

179:36

it was I think the day I talked to Sam

179:39

was like the worst day of my life not

179:40

because of talking to Sam but it was

179:43

just physical Jesus I was so dead but I

179:45

didn’t want to not do it

179:46

cider like what was his own fights in

179:49

what was it doing there oh it produced

179:52

an overwhelming sense of impending doom

179:55

and I seriously been overwhelming like

179:57

there’s no way I could have lived like

179:59

that if that would have lasted for see

180:01

Mikayla knew by that point that it would

180:03

probably only last a month and I was

180:04

like a month yeah my fucking cider well

180:08

I didn’t sleep that that month I didn’t

180:10

sleep for 25 days I didn’t sleep at all

180:12

I didn’t sleep at all for 25 days how is

180:15

it possible that I’ll tell you how it’s

180:16

possible you lay in bed frozen in

180:20

something approximating terror for eight

180:22

hours and then you get up oh my god oh

180:24

yeah no and this is some fucking cider

180:26

from

180:27

that’s what we thought yeah I mean look

180:29

again I don’t know what the hell I’m

180:32

talking about okay this is all a mystery

180:34

to me

180:35

the fact that my daughter was so sick

180:37

see the one thing that I did know cuz I

180:39

scoured the literature on arthritis when

180:41

she was a kid the scientific literature

180:42

and because we were interested in the

180:44

dietary connection and the only thing I

180:46

could find that was reliable was that if

180:48

people with arthritis fasted their

180:51

symptoms reliably went away and that’s

180:53

actually a well-documented finding but

180:55

then if they started to eat again then

180:57

there were symptoms came back and I

180:59

thought well what the hell does it not

181:01

matter what they eat they can’t be

181:03

reactive to everything it’s like no but

181:07

they can be reactive to almost

181:08

everything and the difference between

181:10

everything and almost everything that’s

181:12

a big difference

181:13

and so Mikayla seems to be maybe me too

181:15

and hammies on the same diet because she

181:18

has autoimmune problems on her side of

181:19

the family so Mikayla seemed to inherit

181:21

all of them your skin looks better old

181:24

Jesus Joe I’m waiting whatever here yeah

181:26

yeah you you you look like more vibrant

181:28

it’s very strange thank you thank you

181:30

welcome

181:31

but the see my point is I you’re saying

181:34

that there’s a there is problems with

181:37

this diet but that doesn’t seem to be a

181:38

problem with a diet seems a problem with

181:40

deviating from the diet your body

181:41

becomes a custom with well one of the

181:43

thighs Isis that we’ve been pursuing and

181:46

there’s some justification for this and

181:47

the scientific literature is that the

181:49

reason that you lay on layers of fat is

181:52

because the fat acts as a buffer between

181:54

you and the toxic things that you’re

181:56

eating because fat is actually an organ

181:58

it has functions other than merely the

181:59

storage of of calories and maybe when

182:02

you strip out that protective layer then

182:05

you’re more sensitive to what you

182:06

shouldn’t be eating this is all

182:08

speculative hypotheses right or maybe

182:10

you sensitize yourself by removing it

182:12

from your constant diet I don’t bloody

182:14

well know well I would think it would be

182:16

much more likely that because you think

182:17

about people who are alcoholics they

182:19

develop a tolerance to alcohol

182:20

you know you get off of that and then

182:22

you have a drink and your tolerances are

182:24

shot and then you immediately have a

182:26

reverse reaction to the alcohol yeah

182:28

same thing with marijuana yeah when

182:30

people do it all the time you your body

182:32

becomes tolerant well I think I think

182:34

that the layering of fat on might be

182:36

part of the tolerance mechanism hmm so

182:39

it’s not merely a matter of

182:40

caloric intake it’s a matter of of toxic

182:43

telluric intake buffered by whatever it

182:45

is that fat is doing as a neuro

182:47

endocrine organ but again like I said I

182:50

said I’m out of my depth here but you

182:52

know the whole everyone’s out of their

182:54

depth the goddamn food pyramid was made

182:56

by the Department of Agriculture not the

182:58

Department of Health it wasn’t

182:59

predicated on any scientific studies

183:01

whatsoever

183:01

we should have we shouldn’t be eating

183:03

massive quantities of corn syrup we we

183:05

way too many carbohydrates Michaela

183:09

posted a paper the other day a doctor

183:11

has successfully treated type 1 diabetes

183:14

with a carnivore diet type 1 not type 2

183:17

so that’s bloody impressive yeah it’s

183:21

it’s very curious to me because you’re

183:24

talking about the one adverse reaction

183:26

which is when you deviated from the diet

183:28

yeah what I’m talking about is when I

183:30

read people’s accounts of trying this

183:33

diet it’s almost universally positive

183:35

you know but again that’s probably and

183:41

it’s the same with all these stories

183:42

that I’m collecting as I’m touring and

183:44

you know people lots of people have come

183:46

up to me and said look I lost 45 pounds

183:48

in the last three months I think yeah I

183:51

think what’s shocking to me I think well

183:53

what do you make of that say well I

183:55

can’t believe it well who can oh I

183:56

couldn’t believe it

183:57

fifty pounds it’s like first of all I

184:00

didn’t know I had fifty pounds to lose

184:01

you know I thought it was maybe 20

184:03

pounds heavier than I should have been

184:04

there should have been 185 something

184:06

like that I guess that’s 25 to 30 pounds

184:09

that was the maximum thought no no I

184:11

lost I meant 162 and I was at 212 so

184:14

what’s that fifty fifty pounds it’s a

184:18

lot of weight Jesus I threw had to throw

184:20

all my clothes away

184:22

it’s I can’t believe it when I saw you

184:24

last night I was like you’re so slim

184:26

like your your stomach is completely

184:28

flat and it’s and this is not a lean

184:31

mean fighting yeah man and you’re not a

184:33

an exercise fanatic it’s not like you’re

184:36

starving yourself it’s not like you know

184:37

and I’m not running 5 that’s another

184:39

thing I should say to people if you want

184:40

to try a diet like this you eat enough

184:43

meat and fat so you were not hungry okay

184:46

you can’t get hungry

184:47

you’re not eating enough if you’re

184:48

hungry and if you’re hungry you’re gonna

184:50

cheat and it’s gonna drive you stark

184:51

raving mad the other thing that was

184:53

really cool is like I really liked

184:54

sweets like I’ve kind of lived on peanut

184:56

butter sandwiches and chocolate milk

184:58

not really but that was my go-to food

185:00

you know both of which were terrible for

185:03

me but after I stopped eating

185:06

carbohydrates for a month the

185:08

carbohydrate cravings went away you know

185:11

last night when we were out for dinner

185:12

somebody ordered bread pudding and I

185:13

bloody love bread pudding with caramel

185:15

and and and ice cream so it was sitting

185:17

there and I could smell it like you know

185:19

I thought I could go all fantastic mr.

185:21

Fox on that bread pudding and just tear

185:24

it down in about 15 seconds but it

185:26

wasn’t it wasn’t as intense as a craving

185:28

for a cigarette if you’re Nick’s

185:29

ex-smoker it was like God be really nice

185:31

to eat that but like my appetite

185:34

declined by about 75% that’s been

185:36

permanent that’s been so there’s a

185:38

perverse thing for you

185:39

I eat way less and now I’m not as hungry

185:42

okay how does that make sense

185:44

well you’re not eating way less you’re

185:46

eating way less thing yes you have 30

185:48

ounce steak last night yes yes I’m doing

185:51

my best not to be hungry although it

185:53

didn’t look like I was 30 no no no

185:55

there’s a small 30 on the steak well I

185:57

think it starts out 30 ounces before

185:59

they cook it right loses a considerable

186:01

right right very fatty right but that’s

186:03

the other thing too you you must have to

186:06

get a lot of fat yeah well I eat fatty

186:08

cuts of steak and yeah Michaela is

186:09

buying fat directly from the butcher

186:12

store and we cooked that up cut it into

186:13

small pieces and fry it up till it’s

186:15

crispy Wow it’s actually quite delicious

186:18

it’s not bread pudding with ice cream

186:20

but it’s not funny

186:21

you mean Dino it’s so ridiculous well I

186:23

wanna I want your blood profile I want

186:25

to find out what’s going on with you

186:27

because one of the big misconceptions

186:29

when it comes to cholesterol and

186:30

saturated fat and food is that if you

186:33

eat dietary cholesterol that it affects

186:35

your

186:35

blood cholesterol levels it’s not it’s a

186:38

super common misconception well those so

186:40

the thing about clinical studies with

186:42

diet are virtually impossible to conduct

186:44

because you just can’t you can’t conduct

186:46

a proper randomly distributed controlled

186:49

experiment it’s too hard so a lot of

186:51

what we’re trying to do is pull out

186:52

information from correlations right you

186:55

can’t do it which is one of the real

186:56

problems with correlating meat with

186:59

cancer and diabetes and all these

187:01

different diseases is because people are

187:02

eating a bunch of shit with that oh yeah

187:04

and they have different lifestyle

187:06

profiles or like there’s just endless

187:07

numbers of confounding variables you

187:10

only need one con founding variable

187:12

that’s that’s relevant to screw up the

187:13

study right you can’t get that

187:15

information with correlational studies

187:17

we try because it’s impossible to do the

187:19

studies but how many people are

187:20

incredulous when they’re honey people

187:22

wouldn’t when they’re hearing about this

187:24

Oh everybody everybody well you or not

187:27

but you know you’re interested in this

187:29

sort of thing but they should be

187:29

incredulous like when people make absurd

187:31

claims is like oh well I had 50 health

187:34

problems and I stopped eating everything

187:35

but meat and they went away it’s like

187:36

whoo sure it’s like yeah well wasn’t you

187:39

dying so yeah and I see the results and

187:44

I know it’s an anecdote I bloody well

187:45

understand that and I’m highly skeptical

187:47

about all of this but I’m telling you so

187:49

that’s why I’m telling you what happened

187:51

to me and what happened to my daughter

187:52

and also what happened to my wife

187:53

because she’s Tammy was always in good

187:55

shape and she’s exercised a lot and she

187:58

reduced to the to the pure carnivore

188:01

died about a month ago she lost like 12

188:04

pounds

188:04

she was already slim she’s back to the

188:06

same weight she was when she was 21

188:09

she’s like 58 you know and she doesn’t

188:13

look 58 I can tell you that so it’s

188:16

really fascinating it’s really

188:18

fascinating because I just I as a person

188:22

who studied diet for many years I would

188:25

assume that you need phytonutrients I

188:27

would assume do you need vitamins

188:29

supplements like vitamin C for example

188:30

turns out if you don’t eat carbohydrates

188:32

you don’t need vitamin C ha who woulda

188:34

guessed how does that work I don’t I

188:37

don’t remember Michaela outlined a paper

188:39

for me

188:39

vitamin C is necessary for carbohydrate

188:41

metabolism but if you don’t if again

188:44

remember everyone listening I am NOT an

188:46

expert in this field right so

188:49

but but I want you to get your blood

188:52

tested because I think if be pretty

188:55

funny if it was in good shape yeah it

188:57

would be I mean I’d like to find out

188:59

what your nutrient levels are and where

189:00

they’re coming yeah I mean what what I’m

189:03

getting a little cramping in my toes

189:05

from time to time so I’m not sure about

189:07

potassium possibility that’s a

189:10

supplement it’s very easy which is why

189:12

I’m concerned but like and also minerals

189:15

you know you know in certain minerals

189:17

you’re getting from vegetables that

189:18

you’re probably not getting yeah well

189:20

this is all like look it seems not hard

189:23

to supplement that stuff though

189:24

colloidal minerals you know there’s some

189:26

mineral pills you could take plenty of

189:28

well there are plants are people who

189:30

basically lived on meat you know the any

189:32

what did the mess I basically did yeah

189:35

there some supplementation but not a lot

189:36

yeah and apparently if you do a

189:39

carnivore diet you’re supposed to eat

189:40

more organ meat and I do some of that

189:42

but not a lot but I can tell you like

189:44

I’m I mean well look I wouldn’t be doing

189:48

this if it wasn’t producing positive

189:49

results yeah it’s not like it’s fun

189:51

running for a while well it makes you a

189:53

social pariah mm-hm like let’s invite

189:56

the Petersons over oh yeah they don’t

189:58

eat anything oh we have other friends

189:59

that’s like well that’s how it works

190:01

it’s not malevolence right it’s just if

190:03

you’re a pain no one invites you out so

190:05

so I’m a social pain and an ideological

190:08

pain and now I’m a nutritional pain

190:10

because there’s no friends how difficult

190:12

is it when you’re trying to get

190:13

breakfast like what do you do when you

190:15

oh well lots of times when we were

190:17

traveling we cook so we’ll usually stay

190:20

in places where you can cook oh okay but

190:22

most places you can get a steak mm-hmm

190:25

and so that’s mostly what we do I’ve

190:26

been traveling in a Motorhome and so

190:28

we’ve been cooking in the Motorhome

190:29

and so not carry beef jerky with me

190:32

which we make what so yeah it’s crazy

190:35

you make your own beef jerky well it’s

190:38

like we have a dehydrator and you just

190:40

basically put salt on and throw in the

190:41

dehydrator so that works pretty well you

190:45

anticipate continuing this well forever

190:48

Cod forevers a long time I’d like to be

190:51

able to eat more things but I’m gonna

190:52

experiment with that very very very very

190:55

very cautiously I’m gonna add mushrooms

190:57

next because maybe I could eat them well

191:00

this is why I’m asking there

191:02

positive benefits that a lot of people

191:04

achieve and and experience when they

191:07

switch to a vegan diet yeah one of the

191:09

things it is is you get off of the

191:10

standard American diet with lots of

191:12

refined sugars and a lot of

191:15

preservatives a little shit and then you

191:18

find positive benefits Chris Kresser has

191:21

gone into depth about this but then over

191:22

time the nutritional bent deficiencies

191:25

in that start to wear on your health yep

191:28

and I’m wondering well it’s certainly

191:32

possible well certainly eventually this

191:34

diet will kill me no life will well

191:38

you’re right

191:39

biology will yes unless so it science

191:42

intervened

191:42

might be that for some people of Megan

191:45

dieters or vegan diet is preferable to a

191:48

standard American diet well for sure to

191:50

a standard American diet but also

191:52

there’s so much biological variability

191:54

yeah you know the things that bothers

191:56

some people don’t bother other people at

191:57

all and that’s that’s something that we

192:00

got to take into consideration yeah well

192:01

that’s why I don’t want to universalize

192:03

from my experience you know but but this

192:05

is what’s happened to me and this is

192:07

what’s happened to my wife and my

192:08

daughter

192:08

so and all of its being well with

192:10

Michaela it’s it’s miraculous I cannot

192:13

believe it the last time I saw it made

192:14

me cry I’ve never seen her look like

192:17

that she looks so good she’s so healthy

192:19

and all her other joints are not

192:21

experiencing any problem and she’s

192:22

taking no immunomodulators at all

192:25

no medication none and she was on him

192:27

fro Jesus yes more medication than you

192:30

can shake a stick at methotrexate which

192:31

is basically they use it to treat cancer

192:34

it’s a it’s a what’s what’s the cancer

192:36

treating drugs called whatever I don’t

192:39

remember at the moment she was on Enbrel

192:42

which really really helped but but later

192:43

opened to bacterial infections so she

192:45

always had pneumonia in the fall but

192:48

envel really helped and then heavy doses

192:52

of antidepressants and Ritalin and Jesus

192:54

how long has she been on this carnivore

192:56

diet oh god she’s only been eating meat

192:59

it’s got to be at least six to eight

193:02

months now Wow and does she get blood

193:06

work done uh yep and her blood work I

193:08

won’t comment on that I don’t know the

193:11

details of her blood work

193:14

I don’t know to answer that hmm it’s

193:17

fascinating I’m curious I’m considering

193:19

trying it for a while the problem is I

193:21

eat so much game meat you know what

193:23

there’s a lot get some fat yeah that’s

193:25

the trick there try it for a month see

193:27

what happens you what the hell a month

193:29

you know just a month ya know a months

193:32

not hard yeah interesting

193:36

all right let’s wrap this up all right

193:38

three hours it’s re 2:20 believe it or

193:40

not hey crazy prison it’s always a

193:42

pleasure great see one thing I want to

193:44

bring up ya for it how weird is this

193:46

whole association to you cuz it’s weird

193:50

to me the IDW yeah oh I D WI yeah

193:54

of course it’s election darkweb it is

193:56

it’s like I’ve been trying to puzzle it

193:58

out I mean I think what it is is a loose

194:01

collection of early adopters of a

194:02

revolutionary technology that’s what it

194:05

looks like to me and and it we found

194:06

each other because we’re all doing the

194:07

same thing but it’s also a bunch of

194:10

people that are honest intellectually

194:11

honest about their and and maybe don’t

194:14

even disagree even agree on folio

194:16

definitely but honest about perceptions

194:18

well and also I think interested in

194:20

long-form discussion yeah right and and

194:22

able to engage in it because otherwise

194:23

we wouldn’t be having the relative

194:25

success that we’re having in the in the

194:27

in the milieu you know and it got a name

194:29

and that’s kind of interesting and

194:31

that’s Eric though yeah that’s right

194:32

that’s Eric yes he loves it most

194:42

interesting about I love to rib him yeah

194:44

well it’s got this funny conspiratorial

194:46

element there that’s sort of true and

194:48

sort of mostly dramatic and was a

194:50

mathematician he’s always looking for

194:52

patterns codes yeah yeah I don’t know

194:55

what to make of it I mean things get a

194:57

name and then you think well why did

194:58

that get named and well someone named it

195:00

but yeah but the name stuck so it seemed

195:02

our proposed is some degree and well

195:04

what do we have in common most of us are

195:07

entrepreneurial most of us have our own

195:08

platform so we can speak independently

195:11

most of us are interested in long-form

195:14

philosophical discussions primarily not

195:16

political but but bordering on political

195:18

well just band’s more political oh yes

195:20

he’s the most yeah but he’s also very

195:22

sophisticated political commentators so

195:24

he borders on both the philosophical and

195:26

the religious yes so

195:28

and then we’re we’re we’re all the newly

195:32

new adopters of this new technology so

195:34

that’s enough to put us in a group and

195:35

then well it turns out that we’ve all

195:37

been talking to each other but part of

195:38

the reason for that is while we’re all

195:40

doing the same thing on the net so it’s

195:42

not surprising that we’re talking to

195:43

each other so I always go for the simple

195:45

explanations first you know it’s not a

195:47

movement exactly what it is it’s the

195:49

manifestation of a new technology and

195:52

then well do we have anything in common

195:53

that’s worth discussing that would make

195:56

this a viable group let’s say and the

195:58

answer to that is I don’t know you know

196:01

I’ve been touring with Ruben that’s been

196:03

good it’s been good to have a comedian

196:04

along and he’s also a good interviewer

196:06

he does the q and a’s with me and it’s

196:09

nice to have some levity in the mix

196:11

because of the conversations are the

196:12

discussions with the audience are very

196:13

serious although I can crack a joke and

196:15

I can’t tell a joke but if something

196:19

funny occurs to be I can say it and

196:22

sometimes it’s funny so that’s something

196:24

you know and we’ve been we’ve been

196:27

discussing a fair bit and I had good

196:29

conversations with Shapiro and Harris

196:30

for that matter so there is lots of

196:32

interplay between us but I think that’s

196:35

more because we we inhabit the same

196:37

technological space more than the same

196:39

ideological space apart from the fact

196:42

that we are actually interested in

196:44

dialogue fundamentally so we’ll see I

196:49

mean I’m watching it with curiosity are

196:53

you apprehensive do you think this is

196:54

sure potential downsides so there’s lots

196:56

of downsides to it sure there’s lots of

196:58

downsides I mean first of all you know

197:01

most of us are on an individual

197:04

individualistic path I’m not come I’m

197:06

not really much of a group guy you know

197:08

so am I in this group it’s like well I’m

197:11

pleased to be associated with you guys

197:13

that’s for sure but I don’t really know

197:16

what it would mean or if it should mean

197:17

anything or if it’ll screw up what I’m

197:18

doing or if it I don’t know anything

197:20

about it

197:21

but mostly I’m curious it’s like huh

197:24

this is a group I thought this is the

197:26

Rat Pack I thought what I walked into

197:28

the restaurant of us because we were out

197:29

last night was Ben Shapiro Sam Harris

197:32

Eric Weinstein Dave Rubin Joe Rogan and

197:35

me right and my wife Tammy and so we’re

197:38

all walking in there and I thought well

197:40

this is kind of like being

197:40

back in the 1950s I thought well I know

197:42

maybe it isn’t but that’s what came to

197:44

mind so I thought that’s funny and it’s

197:46

it’s it’s kind of cool and it’s

197:48

interesting and it’s edgy and all of

197:50

that but I’m not I’m not taking it

197:53

seriously

197:54

I’m not also not you know I’m not taking

197:56

it not seriously either

197:58

but I’m just watching I’m watching

198:00

everybody interact because it is a very

198:01

motley crew of people it is so and

198:04

they’re very different and so but it was

198:07

very much joy thank you okay so why did

198:10

you think it was enjoyable it’s good

198:11

conversation I mean yeah everyone that

198:14

was in that group has been on my podcast

198:15

or I’ve been on theirs and you know it’s

198:18

a fun group of really honest interesting

198:22

people that you Lear very peculiar

198:24

people specially Eric yeah he’s

198:27

listening right now I’m fucking with him

198:28

I love that guy but no I mean they’re

198:30

all it’s there everyone’s different but

198:33

everyone’s also unique and they all

198:34

bring a lot to the table and that’s

198:36

what’s interesting about it you know

198:37

think the weird collection yeah you know

198:40

I I don’t know what to think of it like

198:42

when Eric called me up about the whole

198:44

New York Times thing I’m like what are

198:45

you talking about right like why did you

198:49

do that

198:49

what I do what what did you be part of

198:51

the New York Times article I barely was

198:53

I just answered a couple questions but

198:56

there’s a review you’ve got a picture

198:57

yeah they didn’t direct they didn’t

199:00

obsess they shouldn’t taken a picture of

199:02

me I was dressed like I was going

199:03

onstage at the Comedy Store I didn’t

199:05

wear anything any differently they were

199:06

trying to make a big deal of it I’m like

199:07

look I don’t have any time this you want

199:09

to take a picture means is what I’m

199:10

wearing yeah and and we we did it on the

199:13

parking lot above the Comedy Store and

199:15

started to rain I go we’re done I got to

199:17

go I got to go onstage I can’t be

199:19

soaking wet you know and and then go

199:21

onstage and that was it

199:22

you know it was just okay so your take

199:24

on it is that it’s well it’s in turn is

199:26

its interest yes well this is the this

199:29

is probably another thing that unites

199:31

that group of people everyone in that

199:33

group of people is likely to get in

199:36

trouble because they find you too many

199:37

things interesting

199:39

right and it’s trade openness that’s

199:41

another thing that unites all of us yes

199:42

yeah and so and you know curiosity

199:45

killed the cat and so yeah but we’re not

199:47

cats true curiosity also built the

199:50

pyramids it did it did it and it saved a

199:52

lot of caps too

199:55

let’s end with that all right all right

199:57

Jordan all right pleasure my friend

199:59

chewy again see you always yeah yeah

200:01

that’s it folks see you soon

200:05

[Music]

200:10

[Applause]

200:12

[Music]

The sin of silence

The epidemic of denial about sexual abuse in the evangelical church

Rachael Denhollander’s college-aged abuser began grooming her when she was 7. Each week, as Denhollander left Sunday school at Westwood Baptist Church in Kalamazoo, Mich., he was there to walk her to her parents’ Bible-study classroom on the other side of the building. He brought Denhollander gifts and asked her parents for her clothing size so he could buy her dresses. He was always a little too eager with a hug. The Denhollanders led one of the church’s ministries out of their home, which meant the man would visit their house regularly, often encouraging Rachael to sit on his lap, they recalled.

The man’s behavior caught the attention of a fellow congregant, who informed Sandy Burdick, a licensed counselor who led the church’s sexual-abuse support group. Burdick says she warned Denhollander’s parents that the man was showing classic signs of grooming behavior.

.. And so when Larry Nassar used his prestige as a doctor for the USA Gymnastics program to sexually assault Denhollander, she held to her vow. She wouldn’t put her family through something like that again. Her church had made it clear: No one believes victims.

.. Tchividjian says sexual abuse in evangelicalism rivals the Catholic Church scandal of the early 2000s.

.. The sex advice columnist and LGBT rights advocate Dan Savage, tired of what he called the hypocrisy of conservatives who believe that gays molest children, compiled his own list that documents more than 100 instances of youth pastors around the country who, between 2008 and 2016, were accused of, arrested for or convicted of sexually abusing minors in a religious setting.

.. Over 2016 and 2017, Mullen found 192 instances of a leader from an influential church or evangelical institution being publicly charged with sexual crimes involving a minor, including rape, molestation, battery and child pornography. (This data did not include sexual crimes against an adult or crimes committed by someone other than a leader.)

.. a 2014 GRACE report on Bob Jones University ..

56 percent of the 381 respondents who reported having knowledge of the school’s handling of abuse (a group that included current and former students, as well as employees) believed that BJU conveyed a “blaming and disparaging” attitude toward victims.

.. half said school officials had actively discouraged them from going to the police. According to one anonymous respondent, after he finally told the police about years of sexual abuse by his grandfather, a BJU official admonished him that “[you] tore your family apart, and that’s your fault,” and “you love yourself more than you love God.”

.. she was told that her husband “was not attracted to his 11-year-old daughter but rather to the ‘woman’ she ‘was becoming.’ ”

.. Franklin Graham, CEO of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, said President Trump’s “grab them by the p—y” comments and other crude language didn’t matter because “all of us are sinners.”

.. 39 percent of evangelicals were more likely to vote for Moore after multiple accusations that he’d initiated sexual contact with teenagers when he was in his 30s. “It comes down to a question [of] who is more credible in the eyes of the voters — the candidate or the accuser,” Jerry Falwell Jr., president of the evangelical Liberty University, said at the time. “. . . And I believe [Moore] is telling the truth.”

.. It was the same message 7-year-old Denhollander heard: Stay silent, because the church won’t believe you.

.. Why are so many evangelicals (who also devote resources to fighting sex trafficking or funding shelters for battered women) so dismissive of the women in their own pews?

.. many worshipers he encountered felt persecuted by the secular culture around them — and disinclined to reach out to their persecutors for help in solving problems. This is the same dynamic that drove a cover-up culture among ultra-Orthodox communities in New York, where rabbis insisted on dealing with child abusers internally

.. 41 percent of Americans believe that the end times will occur before 2050.

.. In some evangelical teachings, a severe moral decay among unbelievers precedes the rapture of the faithful. Because of this, many evangelicals see the outside world as both a place in need of God’s love and a corrupt, fallen place at odds with the church.

.. “His interest was in protecting the church and its reputation more than protecting his daughter.”

.. forced to reconcile a cognitive dissonance: How can the church — often called “the hope of the world” in evangelical circles — also be an incubator for such evil?

.. SGC president C.J. Mahaney’s return to ministry. Mahaney had been asked to step down from his role in 2011 because of “various expressions of pride, unentreatability, deceit, sinful judgment and hypocrisy.” In 2012, a class-action lawsuit held that eight SGC pastors, including Mahaney, had covered up sexual abuse in the church. Mahaney and the SGC claimed vindication when a judge dismissed the lawsuit for eclipsing the statute of limitations.

.. Denhollander says she told her church’s leaders this was inappropriate, as Mahaney had never acknowledged a failure to properly handle allegations of sexual abuse under his leadership.

.. when Denhollander went public with accusations against Larry Nassar in the Indianapolis Star, a pastor accused her of projecting her story onto Mahaney’s. When she persisted, he told her she should consider finding a new church.

.. in 2016, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that 1 in 4 women (women make upapproximately 55 percent of evangelicals) and 1 in 9 men have been sexually abused.

.. Denhollander was there; she spoke at length in the courtroom, reminding Nassar that the Christian concept of forgiveness comes from “repentance, which requires facing and acknowledging the truth about what you have done in all of its utter depravity and horror, without mitigation, without excuse, without acting as if good deeds can erase” it.