You are the Target ｜ James Lindsay ｜ EP 367 (bnrdyphape4)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=bnrdyphape4

the world or God demands that you constantly humble yourself in front of what’s happening to you. Right now, you’ve got this fires and the smoke. Well, guess what? Everybody in Washington, D.C., New York City has to deal with that. Reality has imposed itself. You have to humble yourself before what’s happening around you and make adjustments accordingly. You don’t get to just assert, well, I think the world should be this way. I think God should honor my sacrifice. Yeah, right. I think I should have the tower however it is. No, if your sacrifices aren’t being honored, the first question to ask is what have you done wrong? Hello everyone watching and listening. Today I’m speaking with author, mathematician and political commentator Dr. James Lindsay. We discuss Marxism, how it evolved from a singular ideology into a genus, spawning many oppressors slash oppressed dogmas across modern culture. Ideas such as equity, critical race theory, queer theory. We trace these sub-Marxist doctrines back past fundamental narrative into the theological realm and detail their utility in what would you say, justifying the acquisition of power. We also discuss the grievance studies affair of which Dr. Lindsay was a co-author. So James, I kind of feel like I know you. I follow you on Twitter and watch all the trouble you cause or some of it anyways. And we did do a podcast a number of years ago with Helen and Peter. But I actually don’t know you. And so let’s start with that. I’d like to know a little bit more about you and let’s let everybody who’s watching and listening know too. So um, let’s say what, what are you, when you’re not causing trouble on Twitter, what are you involved in at the moment? I think causing what is your, what is your actual life look like? Causing trouble on the road is what I’m involved in. Yeah. Well, I mean, Twitter overlaps with the road because it lives in my pocket. So, you know, that’s convenient, but I do a lot of speaking. I speak a lot. I’ve had the privilege this year of getting to speak all over the world. I got to speak at the EU parliament. That was great. Right, right, right. Because it’s really funny. Everybody’s telling me that I think it’s true. This is the best public speech you’ve ever given public. And so what a, you know, what a setting did hit the one that you hit. Congratulations on that front. Well, it turns out that the night before it’s a silly story. The night before I had a smaller meeting in a restaurant with a number of the MEPs from different countries and I’m trying to talk and I tend to be humorous and speak quickly and this is just my style. And then all my jokes were landing flat and I got kind of awkward. And I realized they don’t speak English. English is not even, you know, they’re not even all fully fluent. Yeah, that’s particularly rough on the joke front. So then I had to start slowing down and I got really conscious of slowing down and enunciating and trying to use simpler terminology to talk about, you know, neo-Marxism and postmodernism. It’s very difficult. So I gave this speech and it just happened to work out. But I’ve had this privilege. So, you know, 175 flights I took last year to give you a feel for how much on the road there is getting around. Meeting mostly with grassroots organizations, some bigger political stuff or legislators, but mostly moms and dads that are trying to do something in this country and around other, well, Canada as well to try to change. Are you mostly in North America when you’re traveling? Overwhelmingly, just in the U.S. Overwhelmingly. How did the EU invitation come about? They reached out to me. So I’m not exactly sure how they got connected with me, but one of the MEPs, they put together a conference at the EU Parliament to talk about… Was that in Brussels? It was in Brussels. It was in Brussels. Were you in their terrible building in Brussels? I was. And with the very… A huge airport? Yeah, a huge airport. You’ve been, right? Yeah. So, you know… The ultimate tower of Babel. So there’s that park back behind it that has the ostriches. You know about these statues. So there’s a small park. It’s, you know, not very big, however many square meters, very small, grassy area. And there’s all these strange statues. And you come on and you say, three-legged statues. It looks like aliens. And you get closer and you realize they’re all ostriches with their heads stuck in the ground. And I thought, how poetic is this building? Oh, yeah. You know? But yeah, it was in Brussels. And so how were you received there? Well, it was a conservative group. It was a center-right European party called Identity Democracy Foundation. So they were very warm to me. I actually had a handful of… There was a student group from the foundation that was also present at the EU at the same time. And so many of them came, maybe over a hundred of them came. And so I got a lot of feedback. Actually, they sent me messages, as one does on Instagram or whatever, and said, you know, this was amazing. This was great. Yeah, well, the EU speech kind of went viral, didn’t it? It did. Yeah, it really took off. It actually, it kind of lurked for a month and then it exploded about a month later and it’s still just going crazy right now. And so you said you slowed down and you enunciated more carefully. But what do you think you hit on that made it so attractive as a speech? Well, the question of the whole conference, which is a three meeting session that I was at the first one, was what is woke and what does it mean for Europe? And so I tried to give, in a sense, a genealogy of woke and actually a taxonomy is more accurate. I started off by saying, well, I think that woke is in fact, Marxism that’s evolved to attack the West and the techniques it’s using are reminiscent of Mao’s cultural revolution. And so you can say that it’s Marxist or Maoist. But then I said, we can’t understand that unless we understand Marxism in a bigger way. If we focus on his economic analysis and capital, we miss the entire picture. If we take a step back and say that he outlined an entire theory of man and the world and our behavior in it and the meaning of life and purpose, telos for our being, which is to transform the world into the socialist utopia, to advance history to its intended end, then you can see that the particular mode of analysis becomes fungible. If it’s economic analysis for Marx, then you get classical Marxism. If it’s race analysis for the critical race theorists, it’s almost, you have to massage around the edges, but it’s almost the exact same architecture. Well, that’s certainly what it seemed to me to be. You know, one of the things that’s been disturbing, I suppose, on the gaslighting front is whenever I draw a relationship between postmodernism and neo-Marxism, first of all, people say two things that I don’t know what I’m talking about, which by the way is rarely the case. And second, that, you know, that’s a conspiratorial misreading of the relationship, that there’s nothing, that most postmodernism has nothing to do with Marxism. And, you know, I’ve taken that criticism seriously because it happens a lot. I think, well, you know, is there some manner in which I have this wrong? And then I go back as much as I can to the source documents, including Foucault and I think, and Derrida, and I think, well, they said they were Marxists. That seems like, you know, proof. And the entire intellectual milieu at that time in France was Marxist, including people who should have known better, like Jean-Paul Sartre. So it’s like that was the, that was the water in which, which those particular fish swam. And the postmodernists, when they themselves say that their, what would you say, that their intellectual effort is tending in the Marxist direction or is an extension of Marxism, I’m pretty much inclined to believe them. And so I don’t understand how this notion that those two, two concepts are separate has come about. Do you have any idea about that? I do. I’ve thought tremendously on this question and I believe I have an answer. And kind of like yourself, if I open my mouth, usually I’ve thought about something before I spout off. And in this case, it’s the nature of the way these theories evolve. They evolve through what technically is called dialectical critique. And so each descendant theory, say if we use Marxism as the common ancestor, if you, and that’s what I did, by the way, in the EU, as I said, think of Marxism as a genus. And then you have all these species. Well, postmodernism is a species, but they evolve through dialectical critique. So for each new derivative that comes out, say postmodernism, they have to create themselves by giving a critique of the thing that they were before. So they start by saying, here’s where Marxism is wrong. And academics hyper-focus on these distinctions. And they say, look, they said, they say, just like you say, well, they say that they’re Marxists. That looks like proof. They say, well, they said we’re criticizing Marx. So that’s proof that they’re different. And the neo-Marxists are no exception. And you’ll find Marxists today. So you think it’s narcissism of small differences, to use the Freudian term. I do. Yeah. So there’s a level of analysis at which these, I think your genus and species metaphor is a good one. So there’s a level of analysis at which these are all variations on a theme. And there’s another level of analysis where the, well, no, they’re distinctly different, which is exactly what does happen in academic micro-arguments. So you think part of that’s, well, I think part of it’s just the attempt to sow confusion as well. Oh, probably. And then also ignorance on the part of the critics, because they just don’t know enough about what they’re talking about to even know that there’s a relationship between postmodernism and neo-Marxism and Marxism. I guess the other issue too is that in principle, the postmodernists were skeptical of metanarratives. And it does seem not unreasonable to point out that Marxism is a grand metanarrative. So if you’re skeptical about metanarratives, you might start out by being skeptical about Marxism. And if you just focused on the postmodern critique of metanarrative, then you’d say, well, it couldn’t be allied with Marxism because Marxism is a metanarrative. But my response to that would be, what makes you think that incoherence ever bothered a postmodernist? In fact, they specialize in incoherence, and I think because it can sow discord and chaos most effectively. This is why this metaphor, the genus species is so important. And for me, well, Marxism is a grand metanarrative, et cetera. This is almost like saying, imagine that the animal clade that we’re talking about has something to do with cats. And so now we have cats, tigers. Well, tigers have a tail. And then lions, and lions have a tail, and house cats have a tail. So cats have tails, right? Well, not bobcats, not lynxes. And so if we think of the tail as being a grand metanarrative, in fact, the broad historicism of classical Marxism, you find both neo-Marxism or critical Marxism and postmodernism are becoming skeptical of this kind of grand trajectory of history narrative that was kind of the early modern thought. And as we shift from modern thinking to postmodern thinking, away from the scientific and into the blatantly mystical and romantic, which the postmodernists are wholly characterized by, you can just imagine it’s a cat without a tail. I see if we do this, I said Marxism is economic, and critical race theory is race, and we can say that queer theory is the concept of who defines what’s normal. Postmodernism is really a Marxist analysis of who gets to say what things mean. Well, it seems to me the fundamental core around which these concepts circulate is, well, one core is resentment and bitterness. There’s an envy. There’s no doubt about that on the motivational front. But the other core, more ideological and intellectual, would be the notion that every social interaction is best viewed through the lens of oppressor and oppressed. And so then you can do that with economics, which is essentially what Marx did. But once you’ve established that pattern, while it’s all about victimization and power. So I think it’s actually the same claim that it’s like a neo-Christian claim that emerged out of the Middle Ages, because there was a doctrine in the Middle Ages among some strands of Christian thinkers that the secular world, the earthly world, let’s say, was the domain of Satan himself. It was ruled by the prince of power. And I think that’s exactly what the Marxists claim, except they’re, you know, are they in favor of that or against it? It’s very difficult to say. But their fundamental claim is something like all human relationships can be understood through the lens of power and oppression. I mean, that’s Foucault in a nutshell, right? Because his whole theory is that everything is carceral power. Every time I say that word, I have to stop and tell it. It means prison. Incarcerated is the derivative for people. But it’s all about carceral power. So these sects that you’re referring to in the Middle Ages of kind of bizarre Christianity were actually Gnostic heresies that were developing. And I think that actually, by means of Hegel coming down through Marx, who inverted it, I believe we actually are looking at a Gnostic heresy, a guy hidden inside of economics and social. In fact, if we read Phenomenology of Spirit from Hegel, 1807’s a publication, you get distinctly the sense that what he means by spirit is what he says he means by spirit. It’s a spirit of society. It’s a social phenomenon. It’s kind of the seed of sociology in a sense. And this social spiritual realm is, for Hegel quite literally, because he was a heretical theologian, is the working of the Holy Spirit in the world. It’s not this transcendent third person of the Godhead. It is this, it is the functioning of human beings in the collective all and how that’s moving through history. And so if we relocate as a modern transformation of kind of this heretical Christian Middle Age, Middle Ages, you know, almost New Age movement of the time, mystical movement of the time, we have a very clear shift from the transcendental to the social, to the social universe representing the spirit. And so then Marx, he actually figures out the code. He says, no, Hegel’s got it upside down. We focus on the idea and the state will follow and the spirit will follow the state. And he said, no, no, no. And then the spirit will sublate and raise to Alfhaven in German and raise to a higher level and we’ll have a new idea, blah, blah, blah. That’s his Trinity cycle, his dialectical cycle for Hegel. Well, Marx says, no, it’s upside down. We start on the ground. We do the work. We do the praxis, do the work is the modern phrasing. We do the praxis. We do the activism and we change society directly. And then that will cause as society changes the, what he called the inversion of praxis, the social conditioning to rain down on people and actually reify the transformation of society. So this I think is where Marx had inverted Hegel. And this is where we have a shift from the pre-modern transcendental spiritual to the modern social spiritual. And this just becomes the playground of romantics. And eventually the postmodernists who throw up their hands and say this whole thing is just this gigantic dynamic of power to where you and I converse. I mean, at one point, I remember maybe 10 years ago, some feminists didn’t go very far, but they posited this very postmodern argument that there was no possibility ever for a woman to consent to sex with a man because there’s always a patriarchal power dynamic. So there’s always, no matter what, no matter how much she says she’s interested or whatever, there is always, always her being coerced. So this is, I think, kind of this huge shift. And you say academics get mired in these micro distinctions and that is partly their job. So, okay, fine. That’s also how they carve out territory. That is, there is an incentive structure there, yes. But this is, it’s so important to realize that if we don’t take a step back and understand this bigger picture that this is a fundamentally theological architecture. I like knowing exactly where my meat comes from. And with Moink, I know it’s coming from small family farms all across the country. Moink delivers grass-fed and grass- finished beef and lamb, pastured pork and chicken, and sustainable wild-caught Alaskan salmon straight to your door. Moink lets you choose the meat delivered in every box. Select an existing box or create your own. Set your delivery cadence and enjoy delicious meat. You can cancel anytime, but you won’t want to. If you’re not sure where to start, check out their standard box. It comes with a little bit of everything. Chicken, ribeye, burgers, and steak. 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So tell me what you think about this set of ideas that I’ve been working on more recently. So I mentioned earlier that you could think about Marxism in two ways and the new Marxist variants that we’ve been talking about. You can think about them as expositors of the doctrine of power, that every social relationship between human beings can be understood as a function of domination and compulsion. So that would be marriage, that would be friendship, family, economic relationships, history itself, every single social relationship. Now that has the advantage of extreme simplicity. And so even if you’re not very bright, you can understand it. It’s comprehensively explanatory, so that’s attractive on a psychological front. And then there’s a nefarious element. And the nefarious element is that, well, if it’s all about power, then not only am I thoroughly justified in my use of power, because after all, that’s just what you’re doing, but it also justifies any accusation possible. Because you might come up with a claim, for example, that you’re a proponent of free speech. And I can easily say, well, no, like as a white colonialist benefiting from the privilege of your position, you just use the argument that such a thing as free speech exists to justify your position in the power hierarchy. And that’s a universal criticism. And so then I can take anything that you might claim as positive and just transform it with intellectual jiu-jitsu into a manifestation of the power drive. And it’s fair to say that the drive to power is a human motivation, but it’s not the only human motivation. And it’s also fair to say that when social relations are corrupted, they become corrupted in the direction of power. But that’s a completely, 100% different proposition than the claim that all human social relationships are predicated on power. You mean all, do you? Okay, so I know where, okay, so there’s the power claim, but then there’s this undercurrent of bitterness and resentment. And I see this system of ideas that’s playing out as an extension actually of the battle between Cain and Abel. Okay, so why yes? But this bitterness, this envy, there’s the very devout, and devout maybe is not the right word, but the very obedient Abel. And then he has these advantages, Cain gets very upset. Yes, well that’s- And comes to murder him. This is exactly the motivation. And this is, how do they proceed? You know, so if we take seriously the concept that this is a Gnostic heresy, and you look back, whether it’s Jews pre-Christ- How did you come to that conclusion that it was a Gnostic heresy? Because I didn’t know you had pursued this all the way back into the religious realm. Well, I stumbled on a recommendation onto a philosopher named Eric Foglan, who’s got quite the reputation for having named Marx as a Gnostic. And then I went down a rabbit hole reading about Gnosticism, reading about Hegel and his relationship to this kind of mystical reinterpretation of Christianity, you know, Glenn Alexander, Mickey, Eric Foglan, these analysis, I read a little bit of Evola, not a big fan of Julius Evola’s writing, but I read a little. He makes these claims quite strongly as well. And then I just started to read the Gnostic texts myself, and the Hermetic texts. And so I stumble, I mean, I’ve been claiming for a decade that this is a religious phenomenon- Yeah, yeah, it is. Posing as sociology in some fashion, but this is what really finally allowed me to put it together. And it doesn’t matter. Gnosticism is by its nature parasitical. It’s that we have discovered through whatever means, divine revelation, whatever it happens to be, the secret, salvific knowledge that they don’t want you to know. So there’s some higher truth that’s hidden. And maybe there’s a code written in the Bible that if you have the secret means of divining it, then you can determine what the Bible really means. And when you go and you talk to the priest and the priestess, and that’s a heresy, they turn around and say, he just doesn’t want you to know that. Which when you say it goes back to Cain and Abel, it goes back further than that. It goes back to the serpent in Eve, God hath not said. You’ve got this emblem of all authority that has declared this thing. Then you have the subversive element that comes in and say, was that really, really said? So it seems to me that this is a way of conceptualizing the relationship between the religious and the philosophical and the sociological. So if you delve deeply enough into the battle between two idea sets and you keep going down, as you go down to more and more fundamental layers, you approach the religious because the religious is by definition the most and I’m offering a definition here that religious is by definition the most fundamental. And so I think when you’re looking at something like the culture war that’s going on, you can see it as a battle between ideas, but then when you trace the ideas back, you see it as a battle between narratives and when you trace the narratives back, you see it as a battle between fundamental narratives and as you approach the most fundamental narrative, you are treading on religious grounds. So what happens in the story of Cain and Abel, of course, is that Cain makes second-rate sacrifices and he knows they’re second-rate and because they’re second-rate and he’s not all in, his sacrifices aren’t accepted and that’s just a phenomenological truth, which is life is so difficult that unless you make the proper sacrifices, you’re not going to succeed. And then he calls God out on that and says the cosmos is constituted in an ill-gotten manner because I’m not successful and God basically says, well, if you did things right, things would work out for you and instead of Cain accepting that as corrective information, his countenance falls, so goes the story, and he flies into a murderous rage and destroys his own ideal because he really wants to be Abel. And then the descendants of Cain become, he’s murderous, Cain obviously, because he kills Abel, and then the descendants of Cain become genocidal. Right, so the way the biblical narrative essentially opens because Cain and Abel are the first two real human beings, right, because Adam and Eve are made by God, so the biblical narrative portrays the battle between the spirit of Cain and Abel as the fundamental battle that rages in the human heart. So it’s the battle between the spirit of proper sacrifice, which is what Abel represents, the spirit of improper sacrifice, that’s Cain, and the cascading consequences of improper sacrifice. And then a metaphysical battle between those two spirits that characterizes, well, that’s when history starts, right, so that’s the essential battle in history. And I think of Marxism as, I think the French Revolution was a manifestation of the spirit of Cain, and that Marxism itself is a manifestation of the spirit of Cain, and then the postmodern enterprise that’s besetting us now, another manifestation of the spirit of Cain, and it’s the proclamation, I don’t exactly understand the relationship between that and the claim that it’s power that’s the ruler of all things, but I do know that the spirit of Cain is indistinguishable, say, in the biblical corpus from the spirit of Satan, and Satan is the, the satanic ruler is definitely the ruler that uses power and compulsion and deception to control everything. I mean, I think your connection that you’re looking for boils down, I mean, Foucault gives us the hint, right, everything is a prison, this carceral power. So what is power in this analysis? Is the power to compel, to extort, to force behaviors, to paraphrase Larry Fink. And so… Right, no kidding. To paraphrase Larry Fink and his bloody black rock. Again, if we take this Gnostic concept seriously, the Gnostics believe that there is an all-good, transcendent God behind everything that’s so good that he’s completely pure spirit, completely uncorruptible, and therefore anything material must not be of that, it must be in fact evil. And so where did it come from? And they’ve got a mythology for it, but it doesn’t matter, this create, this character called the demiurge comes into being through a series of kind of cosmic accidents in the pleroma, as they call this. And demiurge, demiurge comes from the Greek demiurgos. Demiurgos means artisan or builder. He’s the architect of the world. So he builds out the world, but in fact, he’s a demon. And so he builds out the world as a prison. So God in Genesis, in Genesis 3, with the fruit, has imprisoned Adam and Eve in the garden. And the snake is saying, did you know? He just doesn’t want you to know that you’re like him. This same system, this is what Cain’s rejecting. He’s giving his second rate sacrifices. He’s not doing what he should. God’s telling him if he does what he should, things will work out. And he’s like, no, this system’s corrupt. And so this is the same pattern. Yeah, it calls God out on his misbehavior, essentially. That’s right. If you don’t think that’s the sin of pride, there’s definitely something wrong with the way that you’re thinking. Right. And so I think that this is ultimately the Gnostic motivation. It must have been, I wonder if it’s as surprising for you as it is for me, that this is the rabbit hole that you’ve ended up going down. You know, I have no idea when I started investigating these theories that the root consequence of that investigation would be to move down levels of analysis into the religious domain. So I did start to understand that as you move down levels of analysis, you inevitably end up in the religious domain because the religious domain is the deepest level of analysis. Right. But has it surprised you that you’re sitting here talking about Gnosticism, for example, while trying to diagnose the ills of the modern world? Yes, it has surprised me. It’s very curious as well, because I was this character. I had this, it cuts through every human heart, as Solzhenitsyn very eloquently put. I was this character. I was a very frustrated academic, and I think it’s typical. What is the most common, I mean, maybe there are others, but one of the more common psychiatric disorders that academics complain about is imposter syndrome. Right. Oh, I’ve got this degree, but I’m actually stupid because the PhD earning process is quite difficult, and you’re always surrounded by people who know far more than you do, who remind you of it on a daily basis. And so you end up with this massive amount of imposter syndrome. I’m not really good at the thing. I’m not as good as they think I am, this kind of delusional complex. And rather than taking the certification and saying, well, okay, I’ve earned this. And so you have this baseline where you, like Marx, what do you do with your time? You dig into some area, you finally see the secret truth nobody else saw within that. And I’m just talking as an impulse. I’m not getting religious yet. And you see this, and then you write and you write and write and seven people read it. Nobody cares. And you start to think to yourself, why am I not getting career advancement? Why am I not getting the accolades? Why isn’t society, or if you’re Marx, why isn’t everybody else just paying my bills? Don’t they see how important my social theory that I’m writing is? So you’re doing something that’s not particularly useful. But it’s Kane. This is a second. It’s also Lucifer, by the way. It is. You’re making a second rate sacrifice and expecting to get first rate results. And that jealousy grows there. Well, yeah, well, that intellectual pride is a big part of that too. I work so hard, where’s mine? Well, it’s worse than that even. It’s not even that I worked so hard. Like I had clients, for example, now and then, who had a Luciferian problem and they were often very smart people who hadn’t put in the work. That’s certainly the case. But they were very annoyed because it was clear to them that they were smart as or smarter than everyone else. And yet the world hadn’t unfolded at their feet. And so they were very bitter and resentful about that. And it’s definitely the case that in Milton, Lucifer, who’s the bringer of light, is definitely an envious intellect. And he’s the the angel who in God’s heavenly hierarchy rose the highest and fell the furthest. And that’s definitely something that can characterize intellect because the human intellect is a remarkable spirit, you might say, capable of the greatest good, but it is also the thing that can fall the farthest. And that wounded intellect is the most vicious of spirits. And so that’s sort of that combination of Cain and Lucifer. And it’s also the case in the biblical corpus, if you take the stories apart, that the spirit that raises the Tower of Babel is the wounded spirit of Lucifer and Cain. Right. And that’s erecting a technological alternative to God, but partly in an attempt to worship intellect instead of whatever God might be, something like the highest spirit of genuine self-sacrifice, something like that. Well, the fact is that the wounded intellect or the wounded narcissist doesn’t humiliate itself in front of anything, but the world or God demands that you constantly humble yourself in front of what’s happening to you. You know, right now, you get this weather thing, or it’s not weather, these fires and the smoke. Well, guess what? Everybody in Washington, D.C., New York City has to deal with that. Reality has imposed itself. The smoky air is here. You don’t have a choice about whether it’s here or not. You have to humble yourself before what’s happening around you and make adjustments accordingly. You don’t get to just assert, well, I think the world should be this way. I think God should honor my sacrifice. I think I should have the tower however it is. No, if your sacrifices aren’t being honored, the first question to ask is what have you done wrong? Yes. And that’s more or less by definition, right? Because this is also one of the things I see problematic in the so-called manosphere online. It’s because all the men who are unsuccessful are clattering on about what’s wrong with women. It’s like, by definition, there’s nothing wrong with women. If you’re not adapting yourself to women, it’s not the women’s problem. It’s your problem. And that’s by definition. And it’s the same thing in relationship to your relationship to the world, is that if your sacrifices aren’t being rewarded, the right question to ask is how am I prideful and blind not? How is the world constituted in an ill-gotten manner? Okay, so now you said something interesting, biographical. You just touched on it. Sure. But you said that there was a time in your life where you were bitter. I think I’ve got that right. And feeling that you were marginalized and that the world wasn’t laying itself at your feet as a consequence of your sacrifices. So tell me a little bit more about that, when that happened, and why do you think that the same thing isn’t true now? Or do you, you know what I mean? Because if something like that has got you in its grip, you think you’ve escaped from it, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ve escaped from it. So let’s go to like, so how long ago was, tell me a little bit more about that. How long ago was that? And what were you doing? What was your career at that point? So this is right after I left academia, which I didn’t get chased out. There’s a urban legend online, of course, from the people who hate me, that I couldn’t get a job. Now I took 100% of the job offers that I applied for. In other words, zero. Okay, so what was your academic history? Well, I got a bachelor’s in physics, a master’s in math, and I finished a PhD in math in 2010. So PhD in math. Yeah. Okay. Okay. So you were, you were, those are very difficult disciplines, right? So if you rank order disciplines by IQ, math is actually at the top. It’s hard. I think it’s math first and then physics. Right. So you got a PhD in math. Yes. Okay. So you can clearly think on the quantitative side of things. Yes. So, okay. Okay. And so then you decided not to apply for academic jobs. Yes. Okay. And so why did you decide not to apply for academic jobs? So at the time, the last, so this is 2007 or eight, I don’t remember which year was first. The last couple of years that I was doing my PhD, we had all these, you know, teaching meetings or I don’t want to say faculty meetings because I was a grad student, but equivalent to a faculty meeting. And the new rule of the, of the university was fail the smallest number of kids possible, one per, per course, no more. And I’m thinking, I teach math. What are we doing? What university? University of Tennessee. Wow. That was actually a rule that was established. Mostly informally. The convention. Yes. It was, it was, we need to focus on student retention. Don’t alienate students with bad grades. That’s that consumerist approach to it. Correct. Yeah. It’s all financial. Unholy alliance of bloody managerial speak and unholy wokeism. Exactly. Then you have the university, the bastard child of the two worst monsters you could possibly put So I didn’t want to participate in that. So I chose not to apply for academic jobs at all. I didn’t want to participate. If I can’t teach where the students who succeed get treated for success and the students who fail fail and have to try again or go somewhere else or do something different. I didn’t want to participate in that. I even, you know, having come from physics, I cared very much. If I certify somebody as being competent in calculus and they go on in an engineering program and they’re not competent in calculus, I’m doing actually a grave evil. And if the university is telling me I have to do this or show up and talk to the dean and explain why I failed a third kid in the class, I don’t want to participate in this system anymore. So I just left. Elysium is dedicated to the biggest challenge in health, aging. Elysium brings the benefits of aging research to everyone. 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And secondly, I had injured myself doing jujitsu early in my 20s. And it turned out that massage therapy was what actually fixed it where all these doctors I had seen weren’t able to figure out how to sort out that what I had actually done is messed up my psoas muscle. And so the massage therapist was able to massage the problem out of my psoas and the subsequent problems out of my lower back muscles and glutes and thighs. And it fixed it. And I no longer had, you know, these terrible episodes lower back pain. So I said, I want to do this for people. So let’s go. And so I started studying simultaneously medical textbooks on muscle pain and going to massage school, which is a little less rigorous. And did this for a number of years. Well, being academic, I became a little academically bored. This is a fine career and I enjoyed what I did and was very helpful and rewarding. But I needed some academic stimulation. So I started to read philosophy of science. I started to get in discussion forums online. This is where I discovered kind of the feminism, you know, explosion that was kind of happening in blog, blog spaces all over the internet. And everybody’s getting accused of this. And I got involved in a little bit regretfully now with the new atheism movement and got caught up in all of that for a few years. But the resentment. I think most of the new atheists actually regret becoming involved in that. I even see echoes of that in Dawkins now because he’s seen what sort of children he produced. Right. Yeah. Very petulant. Very, very, very not healthy. Yeah. Well, one of the things I learned from you was Catholic was about as sane as you get. Right. Yeah. So you destroy that. You think, well, you think the Catholics are insane. You wait till you see what that’s protecting you from. Right. Polytheistic paganism. Totally. Right. Oh, boy. With some child sacrifice thrown in and some nature worship. Right. But of course, in the woke era we live in now, we don’t have as much, you know, these pagan gods as they were construed in the pre-modern. We have power dynamics, racism, systemic racism. Well, the Irish are going to sacrifice 200,000 cows to Gaia. Yeah, that’s right. You know, that’s nature worship at its finest to change the weather. To change the weather. It’s really pretty damn funny. It is. It’s so appallingly comical that it is definitely a form of cosmic joke. Well, we do need a few of those sometimes. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So you started working as a Masaurus therapist. This was around 2007, 2008. What the hell did your wife think you were doing? Oh, she thought she loved the idea that we were working together. She did. Yeah. Boy, that’s quite the detour out of the math realm. It was, but you know, she’s not of that world. And so she didn’t really care one way or the other if I stayed in it or not. And so she thought it was, you know, noble that I was picking up something different and working with my hands and working with people and trying to help people with chronic pain that, you know, for whatever reason. How long did you practice as a massage therapist? I was licensed for 10 years. So I probably practiced regularly for about eight. Were you good at it? Were you able to attend? Quite good, yeah. You can really get good at touch healing. Yeah. It’s so interesting. My wife’s a massage therapist. Yeah. It’s so interesting to see how much wisdom you have in your fingers. You know, if you if you place your hands on people, you can feel weirdly enough where there are whatever a knot is, you know, it must be a place where circulation isn’t optimal or where the muscles have tightened up for some reason. But it’s so interesting that you can feel that out and that you can fix it too. Yeah, I was actually quite good at it and it was pretty nice. But again, academic boredom. And so I think maybe just in general that trying to get engaged in these academic activities, starting to try to write books and trying to get, you know, paid attention to it wasn’t coming. The world’s not laying itself out at my feet. My sacrifice isn’t being honored, if you will. But I got really like, I remember telling my wife a couple of times, like, I work so hard. I know I’m smart. Yeah. Why don’t people recognize it? And it’s so tempting to say, well, it must be something wrong with them. Do you think that was one of the things that tempted you into the New Atheist Movement? I think that was generally frustration with growing up largely a-religious in the broadly Southern Baptist South. Okay. I felt the New Atheism Movement was like a breath of fresh air for me because it was the first place I felt that I found in the world where I could say what I thought without, you know, whatever long set of problems it would create for me. You know, everybody when I grew up in the South, what church? Well, the thing about people like Dawkins too, and Harris, for that matter, is they are characterized by a certain clarity of thinking. Right. Right. And, you know, I have some, what would you say, sympathy, certainly for both Dawkins and Harris. I think they’re both good people in some fundamental sense. I mean, I know Harris was trying to ground a transcendental ethic in what he regarded as unshakable truth. And he thought the unshakable truth was essentially objective reality. And I also have some sympathy for that perspective because it’s the postmodern critique of that in part that’s led us to where we are. Right. But the problem is that, well, we can’t go into that. There’s lots of problems. And you’ve started to stumble into that, obviously, looking at the strange tangle of religious ideas that have produced the conundrum that we see before us. Okay. So you were keeping body and soul together, you and your wife, by working on the massage front. You said that that didn’t provide enough stimulation for your ravenous intellect. And you weren’t getting a lot of purchase on that front. And that was making you bitter. And so when did you realize that? What did you do about it? What makes you think you have done something about it? Well, I didn’t realize it until after the fact. So that helps me think that maybe I have done something about it. Because it’s one of these things I look back at and I say, wow, I really was a different person. And now what made you learn? Getting beat up by life, not physically, losing over and over and over again, and finally accepting that maybe I have to do something different. Well, that’s interesting. And because what another thing that can happen if you get beat up over and over again and lose is that you can get more and more bitter. Well, this is what you don’t have to learn. I had the same lesson, though. I used to fight. I used to fight, you know, sport fight for real. Fourth degree black belt, all this stuff back when I was young. I mean, young adult, not a child, not one of these children black belts, you know, in my early 20s, in my mid 20s. And I fought a lot. And frankly, sometimes I won. But a lot of times, especially on the way up, I got my ass kicked. And you start learning real fast that you can get as mad as you want as somebody who can beat you up. And it doesn’t let you up. They will still beat you up. They’ll beat you up worse. That’s right. It beats you up much worse. Right. And that and there’s nothing to argue about on that. There’s nothing. There’s no debate down on the floor with your nose on the ground. That’s right. That’s right. I can’t abstract yourself out of that. But I think the kind of magic secret sauce besides getting beat up with all the repeated, you know, attempts and failure attempt and failure was that I actually just got really busy. I didn’t have time to ruminate on this, because I picked up the grievance studies affair. Peter and Helen and I started to do that was all consuming. I mean, every waking moment that I had for you want to walk people through that a little bit? Sure. So Peter and I had this wild brain idea to write as many fake academic articles for feminist theory, gender studies, you know, all these kind of woke postmodern journals, that put them in the highest ones we could get and see how many we could get. Published and we had planned roughly two years. Our goal was that we were going to start in August of 2017, writing these things as fast as we could write them. And we were going to write until sometime around a year later, some summer 2018, we would stop writing and finish the academic process on wherever we got. And we’d see what happened. So when we wrote the 20th paper, which we finished in June of 2018, we called it no more no more new ones. Let’s just finish these, do what we have to do to get them, you know, into the world and see where it goes. But then the article got published on us in October. So we didn’t see all the way to the end. So we wrote 20. Six of them were a learning process. They’re utter failures. I think they prove lots of interesting things. It’s maybe a discussion for another day. But then there are these 14 others. Seven of those had been accepted. Seven more were under peer review. Sociologist wrote an article, I wish I could remember who it was, but soon after this happened, and he said that he anticipated that either four or five of those seven, based on what the peer review had said and the quality of them, four or five of those seven probably would have been accepted as well. But the ones that wouldn’t were also the earliest among that batch of 14. So you got good at writing fake articles. We cracked the code. And we at one point, I wonder if chat GPT could do that. Yes, no question. Absolutely no question. I’m 100% confident that it could write papers. And read them. We don’t need the academics at all. The chat GPT can write the papers and read them. That’s right. And grade them for that matter. Yeah. Yeah. So I, this project just consumed my life. You know, an academic article, a new full, 8,000 word fully cited academic article. We covered 15 sub domains of academic pursuit across the 20 papers. So we’re all over the place having to read as fast as we can read and write as fast as we can write and cobble these things together. It was all we did. And so I couldn’t think, plus I knew I was doing something productive. And then of course, why did you think it was productive? We thought that, you know, once we started to get success, it was very clear that we had figured something out that was proved against the real world. I mean, academic peer review isn’t exactly the real world, the real world, but it is the system, the actual system where the real thing certifies knowledge or whatever we pretend this corrupt system does, where that is. And we were in, we cracked the code. We said at one point, I said at one point, I am convinced now that I could have a 100% success rate. Every paper I write, I can get in. I can pick a topic, write whatever I want, and I can get it in. And anything, gentrification of cornbread was the next one I had planned. Just something ridiculous. Right. And this was a humanities focus. When you were doing your PhD work, and the previous work on that in the STEM fields, had you had any philosophical interest or interest in the humanities at that point? Or did this all develop after you stopped pursuing them? I mean, very little. I took a philosophy class as an elective as an undergraduate, had a tremendously good time with it, but that was it. Oh, right. So this really wasn’t so, that’s so interesting. You hopped out of that mathematical world into massage therapy and into the humanities. And into the humanities, yeah. Right. And you were really coming at it from the perspective of a STEM mind. You had a STEM mind. That’s interesting. You know, a lot of the greatest psychologists in the early part of the 20th century were engineers, eh? They established all the statistical techniques that all the social scientists use. I’m an interesting mathematician, though. A different kind. There are 13 different branches of mathematics. I’m what’s called an enumerative combinatorics, a combinatoricist. That’s a lot of syllables. Enumerative combinatorics gives these very kind of Baroque counting arguments. A combinatoricist will be upset that I called it Baroque. All the rest of the mathematicians will cheer that I said this, that I’ve confessed this. But we give these things that are called counting arguments so that we say that an equation is true, an identity is true, because both sides of it count the same thing in two different ways. And so you describe, it counts on this side of the equation, it counts it this way. On this side of the equation, it counts it that way. A simple example, without doing a bunch of math, is that if you don’t know that the square numbers, 1, 4, 9, 16, so on, 25, the square numbers obviously count the number of squares on a square grid, n by n. Well, it turns out that the square numbers equal the sum of the first n odd numbers. So 1, then 1 plus 3 is 4, 1 plus 3 plus 5 is 9, 1 plus 3 plus 5 plus 7 is 16, and on add 9 get 25, and you can see how it goes. But what that is is you count the corner, that’s one, then you count the three that go around it, that’s three more, then you count one, well it’s two by two, so there’s two, then there’s two and there’s one, so that’s going to be the next odd number, and then it’s three, three and one, so two threes and a one, the next odd number, that’s it. Is that akin to two different measurement techniques? Well, yeah, in a sense, in a sense. Because that’s one of the ways we triangulate on truth, right, is we use multiple measurement systems to abstract out the same pattern. They call that construct validation and construct validation in psychology. Well, psychologists have tried to wrestle with the idea of how you know when a concept is real, and the reason they wrestled with that was because of the issue of diagnosis. Like for example, is anxiety and depression, are they the same thing, are they different? Well, they overlap to some degree, and then when you’re starting to ask about whether two things are the same or different, you’re asking about the nature of reality and you’re also asking about the nature of measurement. And what psychologists concluded essentially was that to establish something as real, imagine there’s a pattern there, you needed a set of qualitatively different measurement techniques, all of which converged on analysis of the same pattern. It’s what your senses do, right, because your senses provide five qualitatively distinctive reports, and if they converge, you presume, it’s like a definition of real, five converging reports using qualitatively distinct measurement processes constitutes reality. Yeah, sure. Right, right. So it seems to me there’s an analog there of the equation issue, that it’s true if one counting method produces this result and another counting method produces this result, that constitutes an equation, and those two things are, what would you say, there is equal, the same is real there? I don’t know if that’s a fair thing to say. So, okay, well anyway, equivalent is the word, but equivalent, right, equal, equal, right, equivalence relation. Right, right, right, so they’re the same. Yeah, yeah. So as it turns out, this gave me a tremendous amount of background there. I think, how does math help what I do? A lot of background in detecting a pattern and being able to articulate it in a less abstract way as to what it is. So I would find patterns and say, how can I describe this pattern, not just in one way, but in two ways at the same time? And you were doing that in the papers? So I read the papers and I detect a pattern of how they use language and how they cite and who they think are important, and then I just go reproduce this in another way and of course- So you’re building a little chat GPT in your imagination? Yeah, more or less, yes. Definitely. Absolutely. And it was extraordinarily successful. Another, by the way, thing that math helps with is mathematicians are pretty particular about definitions. Yes. The most. Right, of course. Because whatever we say is a definition, all of the logical conclusions of that definition in the axiomatic system are necessarily true by consequence forever, universally. Right. So if you get it wrong a little bit, if you say, for example, a prime number is a number that’s divisible by one in itself, that’s a very common elementary school definition, that’s not adequate because it leaves open the question, is one prime? And the answer to that is no, one is not a prime number. So the actual definition of prime, when you get very cautious, is it is a number with exactly two factors, which sounds like the same thing, but it’s not the same thing because it removes that one question of ambiguity upon which all expressions of things like the fundamental theorem of arithmetic- Right, so deeper axioms, right. Well, so, okay, so partly what you’re doing as you’re diving into the underlying religious substrate is to go farther and farther down into the axioms. Well, yes, but it also, I have the ability to read them and when they misuse words, I can figure out what they must mean by the word they’re using and then I can go start to check that to see. Right, right, right, like equity, for example. Like equity or diversity or democracy or actually literally almost every word or power, yeah. And so- Oppression, yeah, yeah, it’s really useful to figure out what those words mean. So that stem mind ends up having been, it was trained in kind of these two particular skills and I think I had a proclivity, there was definitely, why does anybody become a kind of fringe branch of mathematics where it’s hard to get a job if you apply for them because there’s just not that many of them, why would you do that? It’s because you have a proclivity for it, there’s a selection bias into that, you’re interested in it, you’re good at it, you’re talented in it. I thought it was the most fun thing in mathematics. I could have been an algebraist, I was good at algebra, algebra is very employable, it’s very necessary, it’s very useful. I didn’t want to be an algebraist, I wanted to be a combinatoricist, which, why? Because I really enjoyed it, I really enjoyed getting to think that way, challenging myself to think that way about patterns. And you were able to, you think you were able to take that proclivity and then apply it to what you were doing in humanities, and oddly enough, what you ended up doing in the humanities was producing parodies of humanities papers, and so you found that intellectually compelling. What was your motivation outside of the intellectual compulsion? Now you talked a little bit about the fact that you were annoyed about the fact that when you were teaching at the university, you were called on essentially to falsify the teaching process, so that must be lurking around in there in the background somewhere, but what were you and Pluckrose and Boghossian conspiring about, so to speak, when you were producing these false papers? Like why the hell were you doing it? Because people have asked, are you just causing trouble? No, it’s a very simple answer. We had seen some of these things because we were involved in the new atheism movement, and it got attacked by this, you know, woke virus very early on before anybody knew what to call it. We were all saying third wave radical feminism back then. That was the phrase, and I think you were the only person saying something like postmodern neo-Marxism or something like this, and so we were looking into this, and we would criticize, you know, this deviates from, you know, standards of, you know, free liberal society. This is oppressive. This is against free speech. We would offer these criticisms, and you know what we would get back if we didn’t get called white or male or something stupid? We would get the most substantive criticism we would get is you’re not credentialed. You don’t have a PhD in this. You can’t criticize it, so we thought, well, you can delegitimize a fraudulent enterprise. We started to read the papers and thought that they were fraudulent and it was an emergency because they were dipping into the sciences. Well, that made you weird to begin with that you were reading the papers because I think 80 percent, is it 80 percent of humanity’s papers are never cited once. Somebody’s, I asked a question at one point. You said this is sexist. What’s sexist? And I said, well, sexism is systemic. This feminist woman was talking to me, and I said, what does that mean? And she sent me a feminist theory paper about feminist, about sexism, and I read it and I came back to her and I said, okay, I kind of get this concept, but why do you just, why don’t you say it’s, this is systemic sexism and distinguish from what most people think of as sexism. She said, no, it is sexism. It’s the same thing, but they’re clearly not the same thing. So this made me curious what’s going on. And then I started to read some of their papers here and there. I wasn’t that invested in it yet. It’s 2014 and 15. You know, it also means, it’s interesting too. It also means that all these, see, I’ve noticed this tendency among creative liberal types, right, is that they’re very, very good at producing ideas. Yes. They’re not very good at editing them. Yes. Right, right. And so, and those are actually separate neurological functions, by the way. So the two different brain areas do that. And so one’s a producer and the other is an inhibitor, an editor. And so if you’re in dialogue with someone, true dialogue, you produce your ideas, but the other person can act as a critic. That’s what peer review is supposed to do. But if no one’s reading your papers, there’s no editing function. And so that creativity can just go everywhere. It can produce false positives, which is what unconstrained creativity does. It’s like, well, that’s a new idea. It’s like, yeah, but it’s stupid. Why is it stupid? Because if you act that out in the world, you’ll die. Yes. That’s like the definition of stupid. That is. Right, right. And you’re supposed to kill your stupid ideas before you act them out. And you do that with critical thinking. And if these papers aren’t being read, they’re not being criticized. That also means that the people who are producing the ideas don’t get to hone their ideas because they don’t get to learn how to distinguish between the smart ideas and the ideas that aren’t so good. Right. Yeah. Okay. There’s no iron to sharpen the iron whatsoever. Right, right, right, right, right. There’s nothing to separate the wheat from the chaff. Right. Exactly. And there’s no spirit of dialogue, of truly logical inquiry, logo-spaced inquiry. Yeah, exactly. Okay, okay. So you are bringing that to bear. It makes sense too, because of the discipline that you came from. You’re bringing that sharp eye to bear on this collection of, of what would you call it? Mixed creative overproduction, hyperproduction. Exactly. So we thought we could expose that problem and simultaneously solve the problem that our most annoying critics were telling us. You have no authority to speak on this because you clearly don’t have a degree in it. Well, we thought, well, I’m not going to go to school and go get a degree. Why go back to school for more? I’ve been in school forever. I’m not doing more school. But if we’re publishing at the PhD or the research level, then surely we know something about it. Right, right, right, right. Well, it turns out that they did not accept this as a credential. They did not, that did not satisfy them. I’m still somebody who lacks a PhD. Right. Well, we can point out for everyone who’s watching and listening too that you could, this is a rule of thumb and it’s a rough one, but it’s not so bad if you’re trying to understand this, is what’s a PhD equivalent to? And essentially, a PhD is equivalent to three published papers. So because in most universities, certainly in the social sciences, if you publish three papers in reasonably well-regarded journals and then you aggregate them into a single document, add an introduction and a discussion, you have a PhD that will be acceptable to your committee. Right. And so if you can produce three published papers, you have demonstrated by the standards of the field. In fact, in the fields that are less rigorous, one or even zero published papers will often do it because lots of times, you know, the median number of publications for a PhD graduate is one. Median, right, exactly. So when you guys publish three, not only have you mastered the discipline, you’ve exceeded the norm by a substantial margin. Sure. Right, right. Okay. So that’s so partly you were trying to indicate, I see, so you were trying to indicate that you knew the lingo. Exactly. This is important to criticize. We have this barrier to being able to criticize it and be taken seriously doing so. We have an authority gap and a recognized authority gap and a credential gap. And so let’s fill it was the other motivation. This needs to be exposed and we need to credential ourselves as authorities that can criticize this from the outside. That was it. Because we saw that there were fewer no authorities on the inside who are willing to criticize it. And so let’s walk me through again why you came to the conclusion that it needed to be criticized. You touched a little bit on the fact that you were being attacked when you put forward the new atheism arguments by the postmodern horde. But were there other reasons that you felt that there was like a corruption at the core of this that needed to be exposed? Well, we started to read lots of the papers, as a matter of fact, a lot of this, these very silly. Oh, I see. So you started to learn what was actually happening. Yes. Oh, that’s nasty. Yeah. And then there was one though that tipped us over the edge. It was actually quite famous. It’s operating on a half a million dollars of National Science Foundation money. It was a paper that was published in 2016 out of the University of Oregon, or four of the, some of the professors anyway. There were four authors from University of Oregon. And it’s about needing to bring feminism into the science of glaciology in order to successfully combat climate change. Right. They’ve got a TED talk out of this. I mean, this is the most, I read this thing and it was so shocking to me as somebody with a background in science. I actually shut down for psychologically for almost three days. I kind of stayed in a dimly lit room. I wouldn’t interact. I barely ate. I was so depressed at this attack on that a journal with an impact factor so high, it was a seven for those who know what that means, would publish a paper this off course about what the sciences are about. I mean, it was suggesting that the sciences are sexist, unless they bring in feminist art projects. It was saying that in addition to studying, and these are true. If I tell you what’s in this paper, nobody believes. In addition to studying satellite photography of glaciers, which are the God’s eye view from nowhere and literally called pornographic pictures, because it’s, you know, the satellite is a pornographer staring down in Mother Earth, at Gooning at Mother Earth. Yes. And I use that G word very intentionally. They went on to say that unless we take paintings done by women in specific of glaciers and study those as well, beside the satellite photographs, then it’s not a comprehensive science. It shuts out all these other perspectives, other means of knowing. If we don’t include indigenous perspectives and mythologies about why ice is the way that it is and why it moves, then we’re obviously being colonialist and masculinist and all these horrible things. And I was shocked that a high, not some fringe goofy little, you know, qualitative studies journal, but a high impact factor journal would publish this brazen of an assault on the scientific methodology at all. I had no idea how corrupt it was until I saw that. I see. And then it shocked you. That was it. I think about it when we were speaking about that. It’s an image that’s come to mind a lot lately for me is that, you know, what we’re seeing is the invasion of whale carcasses by snow crabs. I don’t know if snow crabs is the right word, but- I think I know what you mean. Yeah, you bet, man. It’s like once something stores up value, the universities have stored up value, right? Historical value, right? Credentialing value and unbelievable financial resources. Yes. They are whale carcasses. And so now everyone on the fringe is saying, you know, I’d like access to that. And they make these arguments about why they should be included, right? Into the enterprise because what they’re after is access to those stored resources. That’s right. Exactly. That’s exactly right. So that was the moment where I got- Why do you think it shocked you so badly? I think I treated science as sacred. Oh yeah. Well, you were part of the new atheist movement, right? Well, this is one of the things that’s so interesting, I think, is that- and I don’t know what you make of this exactly, but one of the things I see happening is that- so the enlightenment critique was one of the reasons for the death of God. And the new atheist types, Dawkins and Harris, Dawkins in particular, would celebrate the death of God because that would free the scientific enterprise from the superstitious overlay that was interfering with clear rationality. But then that begs a question, which is, well, what is the relationship, let’s say, between the Judeo-Christian tradition and science? And one answer is antagonistic, right? And the other is, no, the Judeo-Christian tradition established the monasteries, for example, the universities grew out of the monasteries, the scientific tradition grew out of the universities, and that there’s actually- that the scientific project is actually embedded in the Judeo-Christian project. And the reason for that is the Judeo-Christian project is predicated on the Greek idea that there’s a logos in the world and the Jerusalem idea that there’s a logos in the intellect, and all of that’s a precondition for science, and if we lose God, we’ll lose science too. And I think that- I think that’s what’s happening. I think that the new atheists, because I think the historical notion that there is an antagonism between science and religion is actually a misreading of history. I don’t think that is how it laid itself out. And I do believe that the- and it’s an oddly post-modern argument in some ways, is that the scientific enterprise is embedded in the broader Judeo-Christian narrative. So when I look at someone like Dawkins, for example, I think, okay, here’s what you believe, Dr. Dawkins, you believe there’s logos in the world, because otherwise there’s an intelligible order in the world. You believe that studying that intelligible order is redemptive, right? No, first you believe that you are constituted so that you could understand that order, and then you believe that if you understood that order, that would be redemptive. It’s like every single one of those acts seems as religious. That’s right. That is the fundamental construction, in fact, of a religion. It’s in fact, if we boil it down into legalese, what the Supreme Court recognizes as what constitutes an established religion for establishment clause purposes, is it a comprehensive system of belief and practice that this is their definition, that answers fundamental questions about the world and man’s role in it such that it gives rise to duties of conscience. And this is precisely, precisely, you know, the legalese kind of practical version of those same fundamental axioms, because these things, there is that multi-dimensional convergence of what’s really going on here. Yeah, well, it might be, you know, that the most fundamental axioms of a conceptual system are religious claims by definition. You have to say, we hold these things to be self-evident. And I would say, well, Dawkins has to hold the three things that I laid out as self-evident. And I think that those are part and parcel of the original Judeo-Christian argument. Sure. I mean, the fact that the entire scientific enterprise is as hardcore as physics might be utterly depends on a complete and irrational faith that there is a logical structure to the world that doesn’t change. Yeah. Or that only changes in ways that are intelligible. Right. Because, well, you could also easily set up as an axiom that it is immoral to analyze the transformations of the material world because all that will produce is danger. And, you know, the Frankenstein story, the Gollum story, the Tower of Babel story, for that matter, are variations of that axiom. It’s right. Look, look out, be careful what you study. You know, you might open Pandora’s box, for example. Right. Have your liver torn out forever because you’re Prometheus. And, you know, there’s certainly, you can make a case for that. So the axiom that investigating the transformations of the material world in good spirit, let’s say in the proper spirit, will be redemptive. That isn’t a factual statement. Right. It’s a priori claim. Yeah. That’s an axiom. Yeah. Okay. It’s like the axiom of infinity. Is there infinity? Who knows? But mathematicians generally accept that, okay, we’re going to use this concept of infinity. We’re going to say there’s infinity. But technically, we’re going to see what happens. It is unknowable if there is infinity. Right. Right. By definition, it’s unknowable. But there’s an axiom called the axiom of infinity. Infinity exists. Yeah. More or less is what it states. There’s a- Yeah. Well, I’ve started to understand that like that, that the most fundamentally religious and the most fundamentally axiomatic, that’s the same thing. Sure. Sure. Okay. And that makes sense to you. That makes complete sense to me. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So now you go down the axiom hierarchy and the farther down you go, the closest you, the closer you get to the sacred essentially. And I think the reason that it’s sacred, by the way, so axioms constrain entropy. That’s a good way of thinking about it. Right. And so the reason that you have to hold some things as sacred is because the things you hold as sacred are the things that constrain the most entropy in your conceptual system. So if you blow an axiom, you free the entropy. That’s what happened to you when you read that paper. Yes. That’s why you’re hiding in that room for three days. Three days. Right. Right. Because an axiomatic presumption had been challenged. You thought not only was the scientific enterprise valuable, you thought it was valued. Yes, that’s right. Right. Right. And it was not. It turns out you were wrong. I was wrong. You bet, man. I was wrong. You bet. And the STEM people are certainly going to find out how true that is. You know, I saw this five years ago. I was warning people in STEM. I said, you guys are apolitical. You are sitting ducks. You have no idea what’s going to happen when the people who swarmed the humanities, and those people were partly political, the humanities professors, so they had some defense. You wait till they land up on your shores. You people have no idea what’s coming your way. They’re going to go through you like a hot knife through butter. And this is happening. Oh, yeah. Look at our medical journals. Oh, yeah. Well, they say 75 percent, this is so horrible, 75 percent of new applicants to STEM positions in the University of California State Systems have their applications, their research dossiers are unread because their DEI statements aren’t sufficient. 75 percent. That’s an astonishing number. It is something to behold, boy. Yeah, Trophin Lysenko would smile down on this. That’s for sure. That’s for sure. Talk about a coup. Yeah. You know, so that you can replace those decades of work that it takes to become, say, a PhD in something difficult like mathematics, and you can reduce that to a DEI statement, and then you can let the dimwits who evaluate DEI statements decide which mathematicians get to practice math. That’s right. It’s like, oh my God. And now the DEI statement will be written by ChatGPT. Yeah, right. It will trick everybody. Right, right, right. Well, maybe you technical types have come up with a solution to the DEI problem. Yeah. Just get ChatGPT to write the statements. Yeah, well, let me do it. You’ve automated the compliance process. Oh, yeah, that’s pretty damn funny. Yeah. You know, horrible, horrible way. So yeah, this is ultimately what it was. So why do I feel like I’ve gotten out of this resentment? Well, I’m not resentful. Okay. I feel gratitude. Like I began saying, I feel very privileged that I get to travel and talk about these issues. Yeah, so okay, so let’s let’s let me unfold what happened to you. You published these papers, and that caused, let’s walk through that a little bit, that caused all sorts of trouble, right? That was wonderful. Yeah. Okay, so tell me the story and tell me what’s happened in your life since then, because now I don’t know, you were a massage therapist, then you wrote these preposterous papers, there was an explosion around that. Yeah. But I have no idea like how you’re keeping body and soul together now. And so like, what what is your professional life at the moment? And I mean, my professional life now is is is chaos. It’s been a learning process to deal with the amount of travel, the demands on my time, the request. And are you being paid as a speaker constantly? Yeah. And is that how you’re deriving most of your income? Most of it. Yeah. So I also created a company called New Discourses, where I publish my own materials and put on my podcast, kind of my own platform, right? Right. And that is that a subscription platform? New Discourses? It has. How do you monetize that? It’s optional subscription. And it’s only by the generosity of other people that it stays going. I don’t have any big donors. Contrary to what the internet believes in urban legends, I have none. Zero. I don’t think I have a big oil. Come on, big oils. Yeah, right. You and big pharma, no doubt. Yeah, yeah, big pharma. I’m sure they do. Yeah, so it’s optional. I give out virtually everything for free. I offer one product that’s behind a paywall. And it’s a kind of more personal podcast where I share kind of my more cutting edge experimental ideas and stories from my trips that I think are instructive in some way. But other than that, it’s all public and it’s the generosity of people who appreciate it. Are you approximating something that would be the equivalent of a reasonable academic salary? I’m exceeding that. Oh, well, congratulations. Rather well. Right, right. Well, so look at that. You started making the right sacrifices and everything turned around. I feel that way, yeah. Isn’t that something? And again, how do I feel about it? Great. Grateful. I don’t feel like I should be bigger. I think your answer is a good one, by the way, because I was curious about that, you know, because I’ve watched people who were admired in bitterness say that they’re no longer admired in bitterness. And I remember, I think it’s the Nietzschean dictum, which is something like, you think you’re done with the past, but that doesn’t mean the past is done with you. You know, and if you’ve gone down a dark road and been in that for a long time, there are traces of that that last for a long time and they will come and get you if you think you’ve escaped. And so, but your response that you’re grateful, that’s a good response because gratitude is the opposite of bitterness. I feel like I get to serve. Yeah, okay. That’s a good answer. I just do. I don’t ask for, you know, you asked about the speaking fees. I don’t ask for very large ones. I’m very modest in what I ask. You know, I want my expenses covered, obviously, but other than that. Do you have an agent? I do. Okay. It’s all very, very modest. I keep everything extremely modest because I sat down with myself a couple of years ago and I said, if it came to the fact that, let’s say the right person’s in the audience, because you never know who’s in the audience. And I said no over a matter of a few hundred or a few thousand dollars to this event, supposing it would fit into my schedule, which is busy. And I said no to this. I’ve done something gravely wrong. If I don’t have time, you know, we have to. So what do you, you have more invitations than you can fulfill? I kind of hit right at the line. Sometimes they, well, because one of the arguments for raising your fees is because it helps you prioritize if you have a plethora of invitations. Correct. But you’re right on the, I ride right on the margin. And it’s wonderful. Well, that’s a nice place. I’m also grateful for that. I feel like it’s just, it’s a, I hesitate to use loaded words glibly, but it’s almost providential that it’s working this way. And so I’m very excited about it. So I don’t feel like I fell and I can look back on and reflect. But I think that the moment where the decision was made was during the grievance studies papers, we wrote one, it was about education. We called it the progressive stack. We said we should progressive stack the classroom. So if you have, we’re going to do a privilege inventory, whether I’ll make them do that walk, that privilege walk, or if you know, you have this or that goes forward three steps. If you’re white, walk backwards out of the building or whatever they make you do. And we’re going to rank all the kids and we’re going to put, you know, your roster for the class will be ordered according to privilege. And the more- Intersectional privilege. Correct. Well, yes, intersectional, of course. And so, and so the more privilege that you have, the worse we’re going to treat you. We’re going to ignore you. We’re going to, our phrasing was invite you to listen and learn in silence. Right. And then progressively got worse to- So to speak. You know, we’ll speak over you. We’ll interrupt you. We’ll, you know, report you for things to the dean or whatever. We’ll actually invite you to sit in the floor to experience reparations. You should wear chains. You should do humiliating things. Right. For the other kids staring at you to overcome your privilege. But of course, these are hoaxes. So we said, but we’ll do it with compassion, critically compassionate intellectualism. Yeah. We’ll do it with compassion. And the peer reviewers wrote us back and they said, don’t use compassion. They said it’ll threaten to re-center the needs of the privileged if you’re compassionate with them. Instead they recommended what they call- So because they figured you were on their side, they could show their true colors. I think so. Right. Because one of the things I have learned is that so serpents camouflage themselves, right? You know that we can detect serpent camouflage better in the bottom half of our visual field, by the way. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know what the best camouflage is for serpents? What’s that? Compassion. Oh, sure. Sure. You bet. You bet. And it really works on conservatives. And the reason it works on conservatives is because you can really make conservatives feel guilty because they’re dutiful. So they’re guilt prone. Yeah. So if you can come after conservatives with compassion and you can say, you’re not doing your duty on the compassionate front, instead of the conservatives going, you’re a serpent, they go, oh no, you know, we could be a little better. And of course they could because like who’s perfect on that front. Of course. But, well, we were talking just before we started this podcast about some of the new psychological research on left-wing authoritarianism. And so I read a paper here a week ago. There’s not a lot of papers on this front. There’s only about 10 because the social psychologists denied that left-wing authoritarianism existed for seven decades, right, till 2016. Before I got, what would you say, disenfranchised from the university? Yeah. My lab did a study on left-wing authoritarianism. The first thing we did was to see if there was a clump of ideas that were statistically related that you could describe as both left-wing and authoritarian. And there is. And it’s identifiable. It’s exactly the clump of beliefs you would have been studying and would suspect. We looked at what predicted that, predicted allegiance with that set of beliefs, low verbal intelligence, negative point four with IQ, verbal IQ. So you think, well, how can people be, you know, unwise enough to believe these ideas? And one of the answers is, well, they’re not that bright as it turns out. Being female, having a feminine temperament, right? Those were the three big predictors. Other predictors have emerged looking at the similar construct, left-wing authoritarianism. The best predictor I’ve seen is malignant narcissism. The correlation is point six, point six, right, which is about as good as the measurement accuracy of the questionnaires. So it actually opens up the question. The question is, there may be no difference between left-wing authoritarianism and malignant narcissism. And what that means is the serpents are using the language of compassion to mask their power striving. Well, simultaneously claiming, well, of course we can do this because every single social relationship in the world is predicated on nothing but power. And if you don’t accept that, that just means that you’re a malignant liar. That’s right. Exactly. That’s the whole structure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then that’s that kind of discourse is disinhibited in these disciplines where no one subjects any of the ideas to critical evaluation, right? And the malignant narcissists are also disinhibited online, right? Which is a huge problem, right? None of our evolved mechanisms for keeping malignant narcissists under control are operative on the social media. That’s correct. Yeah. It’s really bad. They can have 20 accounts. They can do whatever they want. They have 100% free reign. 30% of internet traffic is pornographic, right? Criminality is absolutely rife on the internet, right? You can’t control it. And then you have the subclinical criminality, which are the troll demon types. Yeah. Yeah. And then they’re monetized by the social media platforms. Of course. I’ve been trying to convince, well, convince, I’ve made a case on social media multiple times that platforms like Twitter, for example, should separate the anonymous people from the real people. They should put them in different categories, right? Because if you can’t bear responsibility for your words, you shouldn’t be allowed free reign in the realm of discourse. And the reason for that, people say, well, anonymity protects freedom. It’s like, no, if you took 100 anonymous troll demons, one of them is a whistleblower and the other 99 are malignant narcissists. So, and I think they should be allowed to have their say, but they shouldn’t be thrown the troll demons. And those are, what would you say? Machine human hybrids, right? Because when you’re online, you’re a machine human hybrid. Troll demons are not human, right? Anonymous troll demons are not human. Right. You don’t put them in with the people. You put them in like anonymous troll demon hell. And if you want to go there and visit and see what they’re up to, no problem. But they shouldn’t be confused with people who will take the consequences of their words onto themselves. You haven’t operated anonymously. No, I have not. Why not? You just got to say these things. You just have to say these things. Why do you think that? I think that telling the truth is the most important thing that we have to do. So why don’t, why not shield that with anonymity? That’s not as grave. How on earth can someone come and challenge me or check me? If I’m anonymous, I can just vanish. Right. So you don’t have to subject any of your ideas to critical evaluation or to take any of the weight of what you say on yourself. Right. Or compare it against a pattern of established thought. I like the idea that I do understand why some people have certain risks they’re not willing to take, but I try to encourage them to take those risks. I understand. It’s like, yeah, yeah, yeah. If you have something to say, story of Jonah. Let me, I’ll give you a one-minute summary of the story of Jonah. Okay. So Jonah’s just minding his own business. God comes along and says, you know that city Nineveh? Yeah. Well, those people have deviated from the straight and narrow, and I’m not very happy and I’m going to wipe them out. But I’d like you to go there and tell them what they’re doing wrong and let them know that they’re in danger. And Jonah thinks, there’s no bloody way I’m going to a city of 120,000 people to tell them that they’re wrong. No. So he hops on a boat and goes the hell the other direction. Well, then the waves rise and the winds blow and the ship is threatened. Right. Yeah. Which means that if you don’t say what you’re called upon to say, then the ship is threatened. Well, the sailors think, well, there’s someone on board who’s on outs with God because that’s why the storms are rising. So they go talk to everybody on board. You’ve got a problem with God. And Jonah says, well, as a matter of fact, yeah, I’ve disobeyed direct order. And the sailors say, well, we got to throw you overboard because like, otherwise we’re all going to die. Right. So that means if you hold your tongue when you’re called upon to speak, then everyone dies. So off they throw it right now. He’s drowning. And you think, well, that’s pretty bad. He’s drowning. And then that’s not so bad because the next thing that happens is a horrible creature from the darkest part of the abyss comes up and swallows him and takes him down to the bottom. And so what that means is that if you hold your tongue when you’re called upon to speak, not only do you put the ship at risk and then likely drown, but then something will happen to you that will make you wish you drown. Right. So Jonah’s now in hell, right. Which is where you go when you hold your tongue, when you have something to say. And he’s there for three days in hell. And then he repents. The whale spits him up on shore. Then he goes to Nineveh and says, I know what I’m talking about. You guys, you’ve gone somewhere dark. You better get your act together. They put on sackcloth and ashes and repent and God decides not to destroy them. And that isn’t precisely where the story ends, but that’s where that part ends. Yeah. Hold your tongue at your peril. You know, and I knew that because people have talked to me, maybe they’ve said the same thing to you. They said, well, you know, thank you for your bravery. And I think it’s not bravery. I know what to be afraid of. And I’m nowhere near as afraid of the people who would want to compel my language as I am afraid of the consequences of not saying what I have to say. Yeah. Right. The ship sinks, you drown, and then you wish you would have drowned. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I feel that. I feel that. That’s exactly. I see what to be afraid of. Well, you know, for a person in a totalitarian state, everybody holds their tongue. And that’s this turning point that I was telling you about because I’m getting this feedback from these peer reviewers that have now pulled this mask off of themselves. No compassion. We’re going to abuse students out of privilege, which we had meant college students, but this could apply to children. Of course. Very quickly. And faster because they have no defensive voice. Look what we did with them with masks. Yeah. So we’re going to abuse them and there’ll be no compassion. We’re going to use what’s called the pedagogy of discomfort, they told us. Horrible. Wow. And so. So you really saw the narcissists unmasked in the peer review process. I talked with Mike Nena, who was doing a documentary recently came out. The reformers it’s called, documenting what we were doing. And I called him and I said, Mike, you gotta, we gotta talk about this. And we get talking about that feedback. I’d sent it to him. And we decided that the phrase we use, and I’ve got so much trouble for this online, it was that it represents the seed of a genocide. I don’t know if the seed’s going in the ground. I don’t know if it’s going to sprout. I don’t know if it’s going to grow. I don’t know if the tree is going to bear fruit. You’re actually accurate about that. You know, I, I wrote a paper with one of my students who had gone to visit the mass grave sites in Eastern Europe, by the way, before she became one of my students, brilliant girl, Maya Chikich was her name. We wrote a paper on the precursors to genocide and enhanced victimization. The enhancement of the sense of victimization is the one of the steps along the pathway to genocide. Yeah. So. Get them before they get us, for example. So I stare this in the face. This road, if followed to its apparent potential conclusion is a genocide. Well, that’s what happens to Kane’s descendants. And so I thought about this. I sat on this for a couple of weeks and I took one of the braver moments of my life. I went to my wife and I said, can I quit my job and dedicate my life to it? This was the massage therapy job? Yeah. No more. Can I dedicate all of my time to studying this and telling the world about it as fast as I can learn about it? And she being a woman of great practicality and wisdom said, can you make money doing that? And I said, I don’t know. It’s actually a good question, right? Because I mean, it is one way of market testing the viability of your ideas. Because one of the things you might assume is that if there’s no market, what makes you think you have anything to offer? Yeah, exactly. And so, so she gave me a runway. She’s like, you have 18 months to figure that out. And if we get to the end of 18 months, she’s a woman. So 18 months is 15 months in reality. So we got about to month number 15 and it got a little rocky. And then I was actually, like I said, I’m completely crowd supported other than the speaking fees. And so I… You’re actually an autonomous intellectual. Correct. I built it that way very intentionally. That’s a very difficult thing to attain. So I did this very intentionally so that nobody can tell me I have to shut up. Right, right, right, right. Because things have to be said and I don’t know what has to be said, but I can’t be told to shut up when I have to say it. And I can’t have anybody, some think tank guy looking over my shoulder saying, just don’t go there. Don’t insult so-and-so. We’re not going to drag that into the light. I can’t have any of that. And so I wrote myself a salary check at month number 16. That was the whopping total for 16 months of effort to try to build the beginnings of this of $2,000.Thisismybigoilmoney.$2,000 is not zero. It’s not zero. And getting from zero to one is really, really, really hard. Once you get to $2,000,thenext$2,000 is a lot easier. That’s 100%. Zero is rough, man. Zero’s hard. And people, yeah, zero’s a black hole. It’s not like any other number. It’s a black hole. It’s really hard to escape from zero. Well, it’s true. You multiply any number by zero. What do you get? Zero. Right, right, exactly. It’s right. Zero devours everything. And getting out of zero is really, really difficult. But once you get out of zero, you can start moving forward exponentially. That’s the Pareto distribution issue. Yeah. Yeah. So you made some money, right? So you saw that there was a market. There was a market. I was doing something useful. I was doing something right. I very fortuitously chose among this. We’d written cynical theories. We hadn’t published yet. And so I have this pantheon of evils to choose from. What do I focus? You can’t focus on all of it. What a deal. Yeah. Ultimate buffet in hell. Yeah, exactly. And I chose just kind of finger on the ground, or ear to the ground, I guess, is the metaphor. I mixed my metaphors. Critical race theory would be the most accessible and relevant to start exposing first. So I dove into that full blast, full bore, and I fortunately created a library of decoding critical race theory in advance of George Floyd dying for the preceding eight months. And was that video mostly? No, it was mostly writing. It was mostly writing the blog? No, I created the website. Some of those articles are blog type articles, and some of them are explanatory. But what I found I thought would be most important, and this goes back to that mathematical comment I made earlier about the definitions, was I knew they were misusing words. And so I started to create a lexicon. I started to create an encyclopedia of their terminology. And I just would focus on one term after another. Let me get into their head and know what they mean and go read primary sources. When they use the word democracy, where does this come from? Oh my gosh, we’re all the way back to Lenin. Lenin defined democracy. Do you feel that you’re dealing with a they? Or do you… There’s this biblical idea that what we were against is principalities. And I think of a principality, one variant of a principality, is a system of ideas. And I think, well, in a way, there’s no they. There’s a system of ideas that’s a set of animating principles. And it partially inhabits a multitude of people. Well, I think there are two answers to this. There’s a very diffuse they. If we say the woke, we generally know that we’re speaking about people who think in certain ways, that they’ve adopted some of this power analysis, but it’s very diffuse. And maybe it’s only a small amount, and maybe it’s a great amount, maybe it’s on this issue and not… But then there are the people who pay for it. And I mean, with large sums of money, they’re a very distinct they. Somebody has decided to pour the gasoline into this fire. And they decided… But do you think that they have any sense? They again… These people? I think they know exactly what they’re doing with it. That they are disrupting Western civilization so that they can recolonize it with their own position. And this is why I get called a conspiracy theorist online, despite the fact that they basically write this in their books themselves. And who… Okay, for you, who are the primary actors in that they? Well, there’s a front that I usually typically name that is obviously the people that are the public face of this. And these are people at the World Economic Forum, overwhelmingly centrally. Did you read Klaus Schwab’s Great Reset? I did. It’s quite the aggregation of cliches. I got about a third of the way through it and I thought, no, I just can’t do this anymore. So, the great narrative, his second book that he wrote… Well, it’s his fourth, really, but the second book he wrote in that series is much more poignant. But the way that he writes is, it’s maybe 130 pages of a book or I don’t know, it’s not that long. And it’s business cliche, business cliche, business cliche, terrifying pair of paragraphs, business cliche. And so there’s… Oh, he’s right, eh? Yeah. So if you read it in regards to the fact that the meat, it’s a lot of fun and a very little burger. His camouflage is manager speak. So there is a… So you’re asleep before you get anywhere. Right, right. Well, I did notice too that a lot of the things I saw at universities that were really deep falsehoods weren’t compassion, they were manager speak. Manager speak, that’s right. Manager speak. If you read something and it’s putting you to sleep… Then you, like I said, you mate those together. It was probably designed to put you to sleep so you don’t see… Yeah, manager speak is what people on the administrative front who have absolutely no ability cloak themselves in so they look competent. That’s right. That’s exactly right. Oh yeah. So here in the middle, almost squarely in the middle of The Great Narrative for a Better Future, which is the follow-up book to The Great Reset. It’s called Narrative for a Better Future. The Great Narrative for a Better Future. You can’t make this up. And so right in the middle, he has a set of paragraphs. It’s maybe five paragraphs, but it covers three ideas. And number one, we’re going to force all of the corporations to adopt ESG standards and we’re going to do that through top-down manipulations of the public-private partnership, governments and big business working together. So fascism in other words. Fascism. With compulsion. With the NGOs being the coordinating entity. So the World Economic Forum is a hub that connects these things, which means there’s something probably behind it that’s a different they that’s really organized. That’s the Legion, by the way. Yes. And then so secondly, we’re going to transform the youth to demand ESG. They won’t work in a company. They won’t buy from a company, et cetera, unless they’re ESG compliant. We’re going to change the youth culture. And then third, we’re going to rewrite the social contract to accept this new name. Only those three things. Only those three things. Very nefarious though. And he repeats this. Well, he’s got the uniform for it. The space uniform. And the accent. Yeah. Central casting. Central casting. That’s right. He needs a crow on his shoulder. Yeah. Or a bald cat to pet. Yeah, right. Exactly. So yeah. So he says this speech earlier this year, an interview. He says that we’re going to rewrite the social contract. He says this again and again. But he says specifically this time we’re going to rewrite the social contract so that society accepts as we move from an economy of production and consumption to an economy, and I kid you not, Jordan, of caring and sharing. Oh yeah. And that’s communism. Because productive generosity on the free market front hasn’t worked. Correct. Right, right. Because it hasn’t lifted more people out of poverty since the year 2000 than lifted out of poverty in the entire some history of humanity before that. Yeah, but climate change. Yeah, I know. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So this is it? Yeah, it’s so interesting, eh, that like I’ve got a couple, here’s some, tell me what you think about these ideas. So, so, so the tyrants use fear to produce compulsion. They’re after compulsion. They want to aggregate the power. And so they use fear. And apocalyptic fear is the best sort of fear to use. Of course. Right. And so, so now you can tell the tyrants, because everybody wants to know who’s listening, how do you tell the tyrants from the real leaders? Okay, the tyrants will frighten you into compulsion. And they’ll, and they’ll use, they’ll, they’ll use the crisis and the catastrophe to justify the compulsion. And you might say, well, there’s a real crisis. And the right answer to that is there’s always an apocalyptic crisis. That’s right. That’s a, that’s a universal eternal truth. We all, and it’s partly because all of us die. It’s partly not because you die and I die, but also because every single person we know, our whole culture, everything we know will die. So the apocalypse is always there. And sometimes that happens dramatically. And sometimes it happens incrementally, but it happens. And so we’re always facing apocalyptic crisis because of that. And then you say, well, in spite of that, you can have a form of government that’s not a tyranny. Well, not if you use the fear of the apocalyptic crisis to compel and to aggregate power. And so any leader who tells you that the crisis is so intense that it necessitates emergency compulsion, that’s a tyrant. That’s exactly right. And then there’s another corollary to that, which is imagine you’re tyrannical and you are genuinely frightened by this crisis. Then I would say, your nervous system has indicated by the paralysis of your fear that you’re too small a knight for that dragon. And so you shouldn’t be parading yourself around as a leader. It’s like, no, you’re a frightened tyrant. You’re not a leader. And we can tell you’re not a leader because you’re a frightened tyrant. If you were a leader, even in the face of a crisis, you would keep your head and you wouldn’t use compulsion. So all these apocalyptic nightmare mongers who are saying, well, well, we’re going to burn up the planet. It’s like, yeah, that and 10 other apocalypses, by the way, that doesn’t mean you get to centralize all the power and take it for yourself and use compulsion. And this, like, I really started to understand that as far as I was concerned, I was at war when I saw that the leftist radical narcissistic malignant types were willing to sacrifice the poor to their climate scam. That’s right. Right. So well, let’s crank up energy prices. Well, why? Well, because renewables, because climate, it’s like, do you know who you’re going to hurt with high energy costs? You’re going to destroy the marginal, right? Because all you have to do is energy and food. There’s no bloody difference. Those people are barely clinging on to the edge of reality. You crank up energy prices 10%. You wipe out like 20 million people. It’s like, well, that’s okay, sir, because, you know, there are too many people on the planet anyways. It’s like, yeah, I know who’s speaking in that voice. Exactly. You bet. Right. The great cosmic joker. Yeah. Yeah. There’s too many people on the planet. I watch people actually say that. I think, do you know who’s speaking out of your mouth? God. Stunning. So you know what the great narrative is for our better future. He says it explicitly. This is closer to the end of the book. In one paragraph says what the great narrative is after he makes his case with, you saw the punchline is centralization of power, transformation of the universe or whatever. The great narrative is we face multiple existential crises, climate change, pandemics. Exactly. The four horsemen. We face multiple existential crisis, the poly crisis they call it now. Therefore we need greater global cooperation. Cooperation. Which of course is going to have to be managed by a system of stakeholders. The Chinese are wandering down that road real fast. 700 million CCTVs. Right. And gate recognition. Such fun. Right. Smile for the government. I saw a video that said it showed the guy scan his face to go through the gate and it didn’t let him through. It didn’t open in a said in Chinese. It says, I don’t read Chinese, but it was translated smile. So I assume it’s true. Smile for the government. And he smiled and it opened. Could you imagine? Yes. Well, of course. I’ve been in airports. I can imagine. Well, yes. I hate airports. In my pocket now is my passport from the last time I went to China. I keep a little slip of paper they gave after they took all my fingerprints, my hand prints and scanned my eyes just to go through immigration. The last time I went to Beijing in 2019. So I carry it. It’s completely faded. You know, it’s a heat transfer. Soon the drone is coming your way, buddy. Exactly. Yeah. The gate recognition drone. Nice poison dart for you. Yeah, exactly. This is very scary. But that’s it. There’s your tyrant though. We’re building the good Skynet. It’s like, really? Yeah. Building the good Skynet. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. And so the ESG openly is there to serve Black Rock and Larry Fink, Black Rock and the United Nations. Evil Central. Because they’re set up to establish the the reign of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals of what they call Agenda 23. I helped write those goddamn things, you know. Oh, no. And I gotta tell you too, we worked on that document back in 2012. You know, either or 17 of them. I’m relentlessly curious about that. No, no, I don’t know. When we wrote, when we helped write the document, there were like 170. And one of the criticisms that I kept living is like, hey, guys, guess what? You can’t have 170 priorities. Right. You can have one priority, because that’s what makes it a priority. That’s it. And I tried to find out why there were 170. And the answer was, well, there’s 170 different constituents to please. And we don’t want to offend anyone. It’s like, oh, you mean you don’t want to do anything. It’s like, well, yeah, that is, you know, we know, that’s what we mean. But we don’t usually say that. Sure. Of course. Right. And that I would say in my defense, such as it is, that if you think the document that was produced in 2012 was bad, you should have seen what it was like before it got edited. Wow. Right. Wow. Yeah. Right. Right. Well, one of the things I did realize after going through that process was that, well, apart from the fact that it was preposterous to have 170 goals, that no one had rank ordered the goals in any half ways intelligent way. There was no cost benefit analysis. And then Bjorn Lomborg’s team started to do that. Right. Right. Bjorn wrote a book a while back called How to Spend Seventy Five Billion Dollars to Make the World a Better Place, which is an intelligent approach to, I wouldn’t say the poly crisis, because that isn’t how he frames it. But, you know, if we were actually going to try to lift the help, lift the remaining people in abject poverty, out of poverty, Lomborg has shown that there are ways that are far less expensive than the trillions of dollars that we will waste not fixing the climate, just like they’ve not fixed the climate in Germany. Right. Right. Germany, what a catastrophe. The bloody and energy costs are now five times as high, five times as high, unreliable, dependent on Putin and other dictators around the world. Right. And they’re burning lignite. So per unit of energy, they actually produce more pollution than they did before they started the Green Revolution. Right. And their response to that criticism is, we have to do stupid things. We have to do stupid virtue signaling destructive things faster. Yeah, exactly. Right. God. Yeah. Stunning. Net zero. Net zero. Zero for you, peasants. Well, have you seen the absolute zero as well? That’s beyond net zero. This is a project, a think tank project that came out in 2019 from UK FIREs, F-I-R-E-S, which is a conglomeration of the British government and Cambridge and Oxford and University College London, or whatever that’s called. And all of this lays out the idea that, and of course, this is just the Overton window stretching. We should take it seriously, but it’s probably not what will happen. Yeah. Right. But they argue that net zero is not nearly enough. We must have absolute zero and absolute zero. Oh, they’re saying what they mean. Absolute zero emissions by 2050. That’s where everyone freezes. And absolute zero. Well, they openly in the document say people should start buying warmer clothing now. Especially old people, you know, but you know, they’re cluttering up the emergency rooms anyway. That’s right. No air travel at all. I know. I know. You know, France and short haul flights, say, two weeks ago between any two cities that were connected by rail. I know the absolute plan is, well, this is what I said. Net zero means all you peasants who are watching and listening, you should pay attention to this. Net zero means zero for you. That’s what it means. And by plan, you little people, you don’t need cars. God, who needs a private automobile? I knew 15 years ago that the bloody totalitarians would go after the cars. Sure. Because nothing screams freedom like a 350 horsepower Mustang in the hands of a 16 year old boy. It’s like, no, we got to clamp down on that. That’s right. He can go wherever he wants and do whatever he wants, you know, cluttering up the planet and producing carbon. So it’s like no cars, right? The goal is 90% reduction in private automobile ownership. You think, well, you get to have an electric car. It’s like, no, the grid can’t sustain electric charging. Well, how we deal with that? How about you peasants don’t get to have cars? That’s right. Right. No cars, no flights, no meat, no heat, no air conditioning. No container shipping. Oh yeah. Well, who needs goods? So we go back to our neo-Marxist, Herbert Marcuse, writing in 64 and One Dimensional Man. And what is he saying? It was his argument. He says, well, the problem with socialism is it can’t produce. The problem with capitalism is it’s not sustainable. It overproduces and ends up destroying itself. So we need unsustainable non-production. Correct. Right, right. That’s the socialist solution. And so how about we have the best? How about we have the worst in both worlds? Yeah. And so he says, what do we have to do? We have to start getting used to less, lower standards of living, fewer gadgets. We, we, we, we. Right, right, right, right. And all the people who will be getting us used to lower standards of living will be flying around in their private jets deciding how to do that, eating steak. That’s right. Of course. Of course. Oh yeah. So you are a conspiracy theorist, fundamentally. Well, I mean, I fundamentally reject the word theorist. I don’t think it’s a theory. I think that they’re, they’re open about their collaboration. And so. Yeah. Well, that’s so interesting, because we have Antifa, right? And at the same time, we have actual fascism and everything that Antifa attacks has nothing to do with the actual fascism. That’s right. So it’s so there’s another great cosmic joke for you. Yeah. The antifascists are supporting a gigantic conglomeration of governments and large banks and industry. Is it all working together? Pharmaceutical companies and legacy media. Isn’t that fantastic? It’s really, it’s really, it’s really. Cosmic jokes are piling up. Yeah. Well, I’ve been posting pictures of evil clowns lately and people think they’re wondering what the hell I’m up to, you know, which form of insanity has now gripped me. It’s like, I realized that Satan is an evil clown. Right. I started to understand that, you know, when, when I, when I encountered the sign that was over Auschwitz, because the sign that was over Auschwitz was Arbeck mecht frey, which means work will make you free. Right. It’s like, I thought, that’s a joke. Then I thought, who would tell a joke in Auschwitz? Himmler. Right. Well, yeah, but who’s the, who’s the spirit behind Himmler, right? Who’s the great cosmic joker? And then also, mutual assured destruction, right? The acronym for years was MAD. I thought, oh, that’s a joke too. Yeah. Right. So all these jokes, you know, and then I watched the death of Stalin. Have you seen that? No. Oh, it’s great. It’s a movie about, I’ve heard about, oh, it’s so great because it’s, it says it, it portrays the brutal reality of the Soviet Union. There are terrible, murderous, raping, catastrophic things going on in the background of the movie nonstop. And then there’s these five jokers, one of whom is Stalin and the rest of his evil crew. And they are like, they’re bumbling parodies, right? Everything’s a parody. And I realized that after really thinking about that, thinking about that motif of the joker and the clown, which has become so prevalent in modern culture, I thought, I see, see, when things become totalitarian, they turn into a parody, right? Like, Gillian Mulvaney is a parody. And what’s happening to women’s sports is a parody. And what North Face is doing with their advertising is a parody. And it’s like, oh, yes, that’s right. Satan is an evil clown. Yeah. Well, what did Marcuse write in 69? So he wrote in Essay on Liberation that it’s crucial that the resistance, meaning them, the radicals, take on the form. He said that the clownish forms that so irritate the establishment, it must become an antinomian revolution. Right. Everything upside down. Everything upside down. Everything becomes. And then so Judith Butler talks about the politics of parody. You give this kind of despair. Oh, I didn’t know any of that had been actually laid out in a strategy. Yeah. Politics of parody, the clownish forms that irritate the establishment. I remember reading this because, of course, clown world is the meme on the internet. They call it the clown world. And I’m reading Marcuse and I stumbled on this, take on the clownish forms. It’s like, oh my God, clown world was a plan. The only thing about the evil clowns is they’re not funny. That’s the big problem. They’re not funny. No, they’re not funny. That’s right. They’re not funny at all. It’s not funny at all. Right. And so, and that’s quite interesting too, because one of the things you see about the totalitarian left is they really hate comedians. They love parody, but they hate comedy. That’s right. Right. Right. And it’s got to be parody of the darkest form. Yeah. It’s always dark or almost intentionally stupid or destructive. Yeah. Every time. Every time. Grotesque, frequently grotesque. Yeah. Frequently monstrous. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It’s never funny. Okay. So how do you know you’re not just crazy? I ask myself that a lot too. And I don’t know that I have a really great answer for that. Is your wife sane? She seems to be pretty sane. She’s very grounded. Okay. Well, that’s helpful. And she still likes you. She’s very much likes me and she is very convinced that I’m not crazy. So. Okay. And she has a pretty good read. So then you could have a folly ado, right? You could both be crazy. Do you have friends? It’s a few. Yeah. Are they sane? Some of them, some of them not maybe. I don’t know. It’s a weird world we occupy, but yeah, most of them are. Most of them are. Well, that’s one of the ways you can check, you want to have people around you, especially if you’re playing in this abysmal realm, let’s say, you bloody well want to have people around you who will give you the straight story. Give you the straight story. You’ll get demented and bent out of shape. You know, what did Nietzsche say about the abyss? Right. You stare into it and it stares back. That’s right. That’s right. Right. And if you fight with monstrous forms, you have to be very careful that you don’t become monstrous yourself. Right. And I don’t think you can do that yourself. I think you have to have people around who are going tapping you into shape. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, keep the humility up and the gratitude. Well, humility is absolutely central. This has become kind of my main issue. I speak often with Christian audiences, but also political audiences and it just, what unites this kind of broadly secular resistance and then to the woke and then the very religious and the truly religious are humble before God and the rest of them are humble before. Right. And the truly religious are prideful. True. Right. You know the Canadian government announced Pride season. Yeah. Yeah, because, you know, Pride parade isn’t enough. Pride day isn’t enough. Pride week, well, that’s not enough. Pride month, well, that’s not enough either. Pride season. Pride all year. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’ve seen this. It’s so interesting to see the worship of pride. It’s like, well, that isn’t what we mean. It’s like, yeah, I think that’s what you mean. It looks like what you mean. Since that’s what you say or the words, that’s what the words you say mean. God only knows what you mean. You might not mean anything, but the words you say mean something, just like equity means something. And hey, we’re going over to the Daily Wire Plus side now. So if you’re interested in that, head over there, give some consideration to supporting them if you like what they’re doing. And yeah, well, thanks again, James. Very good talking with you. Yeah. Hello, everyone. I would encourage you to continue listening to my conversation with my guest on dailywireplus.com.