my therapist wouldn't encourage me to do you know the deeper more painful work well turned out there was one easy supplement that I needed to take and but all my health problems went away once I started taking grass-fed beef organ capsules all my health problems went away so two years ago I regained my life like I was hobbled by what many doctors call chronic fatigue syndrome from age 21 until age 55 and prior to 21 I also often had debilitating problems with fatigue and illness all my health problems went away just taking this one supplement so I've had this this belief in that there's a supplement out there for me you know virtually my entire life because I knew something was broken in me something wasn't working in me my life wasn't engaged it wasn't on track there was just something I was missing and I also believed that that something was out there and I just had to get a big enough audience reach enough people connect with enough people and someone would come along and suggest and so luckily I developed this great relationship with Amazon and then I think one day Amazon suggested to me grass-fed beef organ capsules within two weeks all my chronic fatigue problems went away I mean I got my life back two years ago it was such a dramatic you know life and death change in the level of my vitality and so basically I started taking grass-fed beef organ capsules and I also take cranberry extract so that I don't know how to talk about the benefits cranberry extract in the classy 19th century Victorian gentleman manner which is exactly what I'm known for so I'll just leave it there so those are basically the only supplements I take anymore I knew there was something wrong there was something wrong but that also why I was holding out for a hero that's also why I was like particularly vulnerable to a guru such as Dennis Prager why I'm vulnerable to courts why you know I did this dramatic religious conversion that there was you know a loathing inside me for who I was and a desire to transform myself to leave behind this unwanted self and to remake myself in the image of a guru or a new community there was just someone out there who could fix me and I think thousands of people have felt the same way about Dennis Prager or Reverend Sun Young Moon or I don't know maybe Eric Weinstein for some people or Jordan Peterson that a lot of people feel broken and then there's this guru type figure who comes along and they feel happier when they they listen to it like a lot of people you know experience depression then they listen to Jordan Peterson they clean their room they followed some of his basic life advice and it seemed to dramatically improve the quality of their life and so they developed this intense relationship with Jordan Peterson so I would say my yearning for a supplement solution my yearning for one easy fix for my psychological problems comes from the same you know broken place yearning for yearning for a court yearning for one easy fix right yearning for the easy way out that has characterized my life all right a little bit more here from Robert Wright talking with Mickey Cowell that was a couple of episodes ago where does he find my free my buddhism course the Coursera course you receive an reply includes a URL there are a couple things I forgot to say about the whole concatenation of the Trump indigmented Biden scandals what is what is that this portray us prosecution which ended a misdemeanor plea is how Obama knocked portray us out of the rate he was a potential rival so it just I think we underestimate underestimate the extent to which people who are president like to eliminate their rivals by charging them with failing to handle classified information correctly there's that president the second thing is the Biden sort of the scandal that the right is saying there's this whole thing is designed to ignore I thought I was over playing it because I thought well what what does the what do the Republicans have that's any different from the dossier you know the dossier was about the second information that said maybe Trump pissed on had some prostitutes pissed on a bed that Obama slept in maybe Trump was you know promised money if he'd sell out you know sell out Ukraine to the Russians or sell out various things to the Russians but it was all just just gossiping from like what people were speculating about well this is a little better than that this is allegedly they have a confidential source with a track record who has talked to the head of barisma who boasted that he'd given five million dollars to bribe the biders now uh and I think I think it's somebody who talked to that source or it is the source directly so they're quick reporting who's reporting that this source says this so this is in an fbi form that the republicans have been trying to get that the fbi won't won't release but it has let them view and it's so there are a bunch of ways there it could be bullshit it could be the kind of a reason I was bullshitting the source it could be the source is bullshitting the fbi or it could be the guy who claims to have talked to the source is bullshitting the fbi so it could all be bullshit but um it's it's a little better than the six degrees of separation of the dossier and uh they've now come up with a quick row quo they've now come up with a quo apparently they claim that biden did push for some uh some oil and gas deal that benefited barisma after he'd gotten rid of this prosecutor who wasn't really going after them but put that aside after he got the five million he did do something that they like so uh the makings of a genuine scandal are there I'm not saying it's a scandal yet but biden reacting testily anytime anybody mentions it is a not an indication of confidence you know I'm almost surprised given the amount of concern which I personally think is legitimate about uh biden's viability as a general election committee I'm almost surprised that there hasn't been more made of the barisma stuff you know by people other than uh republicans who ate biden you know well like I say I mean nobody wants to do it publicly I guess it's a problem I think this summer this summer they will do it publicly that's what kind of people will start doing it publicly yeah and the other thing is of course it casts the impeachment in a in a different light if there really was something there that trump was trying to bully so let's get into investigating it makes the impeachment look even stupider than it was so there's democrats have a lot invested in in biden being innocent of the barisma um yeah in retrospect that that impeachment really paved the way for uh not just the ukraine intervention but possibly the war in the sense that you know it accelerated the flow of weapons to ukraine and I don't think it's completely crazy to think that that was uh one of the triggering mechanisms that that's one thing to freak out now it's all of the peace it was all the interagency consensus wanted this to happen and you know how dare trump violate the interagency agency um the uh so who do you think what kinds of people do you think will that's a great point the trump impeachment uh the outrage at trump for violating the blob the foreign policy establishments perspective on we have to arm ukraine is what led you know is what put us in the position for the ukraine war don't start speaking out this summer and I'm not someone who thinks that the personality of the presidency really makes that huge of a difference but I do believe that if trump had won in 2020 we would not have the ukraine war and the ukraine war of course has raised the possibility of a catastrophic nuclear exchange above trivial levels right the ukraine war is an unforced disaster probably 10 times worse than the invasion of iraq in 2003 it's a monumental disaster and it would not have happened if trump had been reelected so the the personality of the leader does count for something usually the structure counts for the most but occasionally the personality has some role are you just think like like organs like the new york times will start publishing i think back to the i think back to the edwards scandal the people who leaked onto john edwards was having an affair with the woman real hunter were not republican they weren't people on the right they were all democrats who were worried that edwards was going to get the nomination and then the scandal was going to come out and he was going to lose so he had to knock him out now before he got the nomination and uh that's those same sort of people are going to make the same calculation about biden especially that i think the scandal is real and they're going to come forward so any reporter who is worth assault and a lot of them with the edwards scandal were not uh would take them up on this i would think that you know the wall street journal has a bunch of reporters who have already chased under the uh under the being squelched by the editors at the top so i think there are a bunch of real reporters at the wall street journal that will do it and they're also you know there are dozens of excellent reporters who don't have jobs anymore because they've been laid off you know they got they got nothing better to do than to take up this date so i mean how far can substand get you or something like this well see more harsh manage to start off the the uh pipeline story uh i guess it's been out of his control but he did that from a it's not looking so great for his thesis but um i mean and now that's looking more and more like the ukrainians did it but um yeah well yeah i know you're right if you're seeing more harsh and you know you got a big a very vocal and sizable constituency on your side it can happen so yeah it's not crazy um tell me when is the last date you think like some major uh democrat could declare that they're in the race and it could matter i mean so the first primary is what like when is it when is the iowa caucus in december or january end of january or sometime in january sorry the new hamster is like i mean i guess the beginning of the february or the end of january i do think we could look it up in a situation like this we got so many doubts about the leon candidate i can imagine a candidate catching fire pretty fast well bobby kennedy didn't declare it as lyndon johnson till after they didn't have the primary obviously uh things have changed though right and he got traction pretty fast um yeah you think they got to be easier to wait till the last minute now because everything was faster so uh i would say you don't have to do it you know it's it would be possible to do it after they're gonna have to primary if i didn't do it badly that's that's still my template okay i know maybe it's about that bob yeah but yeah but you need a lot more money these days i mean supposedly i guess who knows free media and potential in principle you can have free media for a lot of guys i think money is overrated organization is sort of not overrated but uh i think you can you know you have to have a party in a laptop you can organize pretty quickly i i want i want to look at very hard very hard crossfire because you finished third in iowa all of a sudden people said okay he's the guy to go to start no i really want a viable alternative to biden uh by end of summer you know bobby kennedy's so far doing better than i thought i don't know how many people in that 20 who support him in fact you heard him talk or how big a liability the voice will be you do get used to it i was just very disappointed that he hadn't moved on at least in terms of what he says publicly from kennedy as a he didn't seem to be you know he didn't seem to be living in the modern era he's reliving the bobby kennedy campaign of 1968 uh and he is very thanks for a great speech but it's not what people are looking for now he can he he is uh he focuses on the kennedy past to to a considerable extent i mean he can go on and on about how his uncle jfk would have in fact pulled us out of vietnam and he claimed that he claimed that underogan that his uncle had the jfk had signed a document pulling us out of vietnam right did we know that a few days i'd never heard that before you would think facts like that he'd have right i mean charlie peters at the west of monthly always used to say that kennedy had confided in people that he was going to pull out of vietnam but not that he actually signed a document saying it now so i'm i'm i'm very i was very surprised when he said that i don't know what was he was he saying he was going to pull out after the 64 election was that it no i think it was pulled out then i don't think it was well he was less he yeah so bobby kennedy junior strikes me as reckless as very much a mixed bag but uh someone who's probably momentarily compelling it's hard to think of him being a serious presidential candidate right uh robert right mickey calz also talked on friday night about uh has tucker carlson undergone a psychotic break because tucker just has increasingly over the past year or two said things that are absolutely absurd tucker's jumped on the the ufo bandwagon here's mickey america your roads suck there are jersey barriers everywhere he's right about that there aren't jersey barriers everywhere and nobody seems to feel any urge or imperative to take them down so jersey barriers are the issue tucker wins but uh it's very similar but it's this crude money thing and the problem the problems of america aren't going to be solved so we have the 113 billion we're spending on ukraine spent on what tucker wants it spent the problems are deep and cultural and they do not involve money they involve the family they involve society being pulled apart uh and uh and tucker knows that okay he's smart enough to know he's dumbing himself down okay robert kennedy i think is not smart enough to know he's but he's he says the same pitch with the money and it's all economistic he's not smart enough to know that that doesn't work i think that's the difference between well in other words he does not agree with you on certain parts of ideology that's what you mean by not smart enough because he doesn't agree with mickey correct okay i just want to be clear that would be mickey's definition of spark yeah um so uh on so you finally watch the first episode of the point is kennedy is a true believer and i don't think tucker is well yeah i'm not sure how true a believer he is i've always been suspicious of that on for on foreign policy but uh the um but but you agree with the first episode you finally watch the first episode of the tucker thing you agree it was a little worse the first three episodes but there's a fourth one now there's a fourth one that i haven't seen but there's three you're ahead of me you're ahead of me but back to the first one didn't he seem a little unhinged i mean we we revisited the him begging to be called an anti-semite part last week uh and he really was he was begging for it i don't know he said that zealinsky was friends with black rock is that necessarily anti-semitic i mean i thought it was the part where he called him rat like sweaty shifty but he makes persecutor of christians i think you put it all together it's only a 10 minute show mickey when you pack all that into a 10 minute show come on i guess he's smart enough to know the resonance between all those things i think but uh but um you know he makes fun of linsey graham's looks too i mean he's a luxus you know what can i say um but actually the main thing you said the most important part was what you said before that he's smart enough to know but look at least he didn't spend all his time on that there was the part where he said we know we now know that the government is concealing the cadavers of space aliens well it's very interesting i i had read an article that didn't mention that they had this whistleblower who seemed very credible say we've recovered vessels of the aliens but he didn't mention cadavers and do you think they would and that's because this guy this whistleblower mentioned the cadavers in a later interview uh with with some website um and then you uh so so our our my uh my follower a little hey little mickey here uh was right in in in pointing this out to us uh that so the and that does detract from the guy's credibility i mean not only you know because it it sort of it's it's inherently less uh rational for the aliens to send uh actual aliens as opposed to you know probes right so it's just if you believe if you're right we don't expect the anal probe so um the it's a bai right it's like it would be chat gpt if he said they were concealing the cadavers of gpt that would be one thing because that presumably it'd be a we now know that before a civilization gets to a point where it can send spacecraft off to other solar systems the ai is already running the show right so anyway i do do we know that i mean i'm kind of i'm half kidding but not entirely anyway here's a crazy here's a crazy idea what if the aliens in fact are two tier have a two tiered race system they're the real aliens who are like super so i used to loathe robert right and i don't like how he interrupts all the time i don't like many of his mannerisms i have developed a strange new respect for for robert right and uh open question if aliens came to earth would you have sex with an alien like just something to tell you mates about they said hey what's what's going on what's new you could say oh yeah i had no full-on sex with an alien last night for smart and big and blobby and they don't travel but they have a race of servants who are sort of miniature who they put in the crafts kind of like they're or what are just avatars they're just defects of the actual alien still makes no sense because the ai presumably would run the spaceship just as well as the actual aliens that are there uh to to stay with certitude something that he's not certain about uh this is this is kind of really going out on a limb we're talking alien could average here so what i i think it's a trivial side this is not like saying russia blew up the dam this is this is which has about an equal probability of being true i would say but this is what we're saying russia blew up the dam is much more relevant to today's politics and ufo's you except for this you sent me to this crazy guy trey uh who has a long series about how there's a an interlocking conspiracy of all these theories with it with theosophists and uh you know and uh ufo people and eight people who believe that there's a ascended elite that knows all these things and all these all these conspiracy conspiracy sort of all part they all buy into all the conspiracies and they're all part of interlocking web and the result is a threat to democracy that's the part that i don't think that guy is much more paranoid than any of the paranoia he's writing about i have a repost i have a devastating repost but why don't we save it to the no let's let's let's have the devastating reply we're on the top okay i just forwarded you an email that had been forwarded to me that had that thread but but uh the i mean i didn't like study up on the guy but i read his thread enough to know what was interesting to me and he and he wasn't and you're overstating and he wasn't oh there's a vast conspiracy he was saying two things i mean the main thing to me was he's a guy who had kept track and i think this part is reliable of people who had been on this ufo bandwagon for a long time right and they included the so everyone who's believing in ufo is just strikes me really poor epistemics bro like really poor level of evidence it's almost all based upon uh video or pictures that could be have have other explanations or fakes or someone's you know firsthand experience so i'm very much on the skeptical side with regard to ufo two people who uh two of the three people who wrote the original new york times piece that brought all this stuff back to life years several years ago now that piece i think was solid because they also threw a lean cooper uh like that now it wasn't solid that's absurd like a pentagon correspondent something on that case so she was with that she was part of the byline right and i think the shit was solid and i'm not saying it wouldn't have been without her but those those are i didn't realize like when we first heard about this whistleblower it's like and the and the piece about him is written by two former new york times people okay well now i we know they've been on the ufo bandwagon for a long time which i didn't really realize that was what was interesting to me and that's my that's that was the only reason i forwarded that thread then i didn't go on to say no he did go on to say it is a trope in various kinds of anti-government rhetoric i forget if you said on the right or left or both that you know they're concealing shit from us and the ufo saying uh stuff works yeah just because new york times reporters are taking ufo seriously doesn't make ufo's a serious consideration right new york times reporters are often completely out to lunch tender that well and i think he's right about that tucker's a perfect example he's a perfect example well if you believe in one conspiracy you're more likely to believe in another conspiracy i agree if you're an anti-vaxxer if you're believing ufo's you're more likely to believe that the vaccines are a plot by the drug companies that i understand that it's when he says and therefore they're a grave threat to democracy that's so i saw my old friend josh randall i was doing a stream friday evening with denis dale just before shabbat and just before i left the stream josh randall stopped by i haven't you know had him on any of my streams he left after i was a bit of a jerk to him what a year or two years ago and i subsequently privately apologized to to josh for being a jerk but uh you know another stalwart of the show who's like washed his hands and moved on it's like uh and it doesn't doesn't want to be part of the show anymore but it was you know great to have a little bit of interaction with josh randall friday evening and i was saying that uh you know much of conservatism is based on a con of chilling supplements and josh randall had a great response well what about the left and pharmaceuticals so establishment conservatism and the center and the left are you know largely underwritten by pharmaceutical companies my answer to josh would be that pharmaceuticals far more regulated than supplements so supplements you can you know you can make far wider clay claims on a much you know weaker basis of evidence than you can with with pharmaceuticals but certainly many pharmaceuticals have been approved and are being promoted and being prescribed in a ways that are bad for people so it seems to me that right now if i had to weigh things up i kind of 50 50 but it seems to me that supplements are more of a con game right now in america than pharmaceuticals but i'm very open to being wrong here he does say that he does say that read the whole threat and therefore they're a great threat to democracy so he goes off the deep there and uh what what he doesn't say is is this whistleblower that's part of and let's say hello to elliott blatt what's going on bro how's it going elliot blessings to elliot blatt who can't hear me i just heard an uh-oh from elliot whistleblower that talker talked about who seems so credible he does talk about cadavers is he a theosophist who also believes in drug conspiracy part of this best network theosophistic thing is wild you know if i understand theosophistic if i'm not mixing it up with something else it was this guy uh you know the the uh what is this there's the wall door schools and the other kind of stoner he was anti-apositive he replaced theosophy with a man centered view which was anti-apositive i believe oh he's but he's in the theosophy lineage yeah he's a spin-off yeah i think yeah so the wall door schools part of that you know the the wall door schools give like part of their philosophy is that you should give very young children the dolls they play with like two years old three-year-old should not elliot blatt what's going on bro oh all right i couldn't hear you last time luke uh i don't know if i'm on my end of year and sorry blessings blessings early blessings yeah this is started early great opportunity i woke up to see steven leaving so um my bad had a nice restful sleep oh lucky so uh so luke i uh i uh had a little journey yesterday i went to uh the outskirts you know i got outside of the metro bubble you know yeah uh just to see what life was like you know i had a birthday party to go to beautiful and it's alien bro it's weird out there it's a different culture out there man uh we got problems but what do you mean get specific did i lose you again i'm i'm here but i'm not hearing anything okay sorry um oh boy hang on hang on um okay speakers all right sure blessings oh wait wait wait um microphone let me see uh huh huh huh huh huh um um this is on this is on my end so microphone that's right and then did you hear that music playing uh speakers testing microphone i don't know why okay i'm coming through the the audience can hear me the audience can hear me but elliott can't so i don't know what's what's going on there sorry about that uh try to come back elliot if you can i have faces they should not have faces okay they have a bunch of weird beliefs um but anyway it was a weird it's a weird group to include in this vast conspiracy anyway we were talking about tucker yes he's a fucking no okay we'll talk about you bought the ufo cool right yes oh i don't know if he has i don't give him that much respect my point is just that when i said it's not like saying the russians blew up the dam uh it's another that doesn't convince people that you're crazy right this convinces people he's crazy even though i think it's just uh reckless opportunism or something you know that this guy we were talking to on twitter that you mentioned uh did say and he was a tucker fan he said i thought he i think he's had a psychotic break after watching the first episode and and i don't think he has but but i think it was it was weird enough for non-crazy people to say is he having a psychotic way you want all things looking weird the weird zealinsky shit it is weird ufo cadavers that's fucking weird it is it's a lot we're doing the stuff he was writing for the daily caller and it wasn't exactly that he was restrained by the editors of daily caller since he owned and ran the daily caller uh he had nobody was restraining him and yet his pieces were very respectable and nuanced and this is all very unsubtle and a little crazier and you wonder if i think he is being cynical about it but uh the ufo thing i think he actually believes because um the government has been more open about ufo than it has been before so there's a there's a trend there's a trend there yeah sure and there's interesting suggested that i this david fravor pilot he's interesting but um what is to me is tucker he's sort of enforced by getting fired to uh carve an alternative to cable news and his latest uh latest episode which i didn't see is all about how cable news is doomed so presumably he is the wave of the future and he might also decide the same thing about political parties you know we have these two parties they're doomed nine for a third alternative i'm just saying there would be a harmonic convergence of his entire worldview if he either supported a third party run for president or mounted one himself goes for the alien vote that's what i mean this is nuts if you're if you're well it depends if you just want to pick up seven percent and cause a ruckus as an independent swing the election sure go go alien um the uh okay i think that's uh enough from that show how to tell a critic from a troll this is andrea with bangs and uh chris cavernor and christian pastor paul vander clay and it is almost certainly the key is when i hear like any discussion about this topic in um the the kind of i i'm not saying that you're a part of the secret system but i tend to refer you know the kind of sense making sphere um and i a lot of discussion of religion is around the the ritualistic the community the you know traditional symbolic interpretation but one more time with elliott blatt what's going on bro all right how about now i can hear you nothing clear how about me i can it's nothing but love all the way around bro nope i spoke too soon no we can hear you we can hear you bro oh i'm gone i heard you for a split second then you're gone luke give your story bro yeah earth to luke earth to luke come and luke your story give give your story bro yeah i'll hang on for a few more seconds here no just you were there and then you were gone so hey i don't believe it's on my end okay all right ten nine eight seven six i grew up and i calculate i'm very familiar with those positive aspects of religion i'm also very familiar all right next time luke will have to negative impacts of religious institutions and communities and their ability to suppress oppress and to damage people and and in many occasions it's it's actually the religious institutions and religious people that betrayed in a in a sense the belief that people had in those things and that's not a small aspect right and it kind of i i sometimes feel like there's a kind of unnecessary uh like barrier drawn between religious and and non-religious whereas the vast majority of religious and normal religious people i know are you know they're getting along in the world they're they're looking for meaning they're looking for stuff that they value but they they recognize that there are good and bad things and that applies to as much religion as public health measures and and tradeoffs and and i'm i'm kind of i react quite strongly to things that i perceive as suggesting that um if you lack the the religious impulse that there's something fundamentally missing or that you know your your life is you're you're denying in essence that you actually are religious because everybody fundamentally is and and i see that as like a sort of implicit thing that materialism sucks the life and meaning out of the world and that we want to re-inject the the spiritual and the metaphysical but but in that contrast and this way i would say through your face or you asked and you know how i'm i'm why i'm uh i would distinguish myself from the new years and part is because actually study religion where lots of the new years don't um but the the the other part is that i i don't think that inherent conflict has to exist like i i think tolerance and and uh like a willingness to recognize that people can draw meanings from different you know like secular or religious meaning structures is is beneficial and i'm that's why i'm like i'm quite reactive to things which are are presenting a secular word as fundamentally like cold and alienating and void of of meaning because i i don't think i think that presents that ends up in discussion with higher i think i agree with chris calvinoy here meaning primarily comes from relationships that should primarily come from your family your extended family your friends and community if he is able to be moral without you know a a religious structure to keep them on the street and narrow and i think all of those questions have been like discussed and answered in in hundreds of years of debates between atheists and religious people so in in i guess in part that's a whole bunch of things but that's that's partly um my reaction to that fall is that i i think it is you're completely right that we should take seriously the the attachments and social ones and and you know you could frame it in other languages you suggest like it you know the experience of the new minutes the the like it's read the core or or being touched by the holy spirit or that that's your commitment to the sangha or whatever it might be but um in while acknowledging that i'm i'm not sure that i agree that my secular worldview requires like kind of uh that that's a metaphysical reality that i can't comprehend because i feel like i comprehend it okay and that i understand people that value it i don't personally believe in the metaphysical aspects of it but you know that's it doesn't feel that mysterious to me that that exists in human given the kind of social beings that we are okay i paul i want you to take it but but i have a little quick something just to to be clear regarding the empty desert scape of secular materialism um it's not just so this is andre with bangs she's religious i believe she's a christian and she's she's one of these lovely female commentators who seems like a just a lovely lovely person but when she speaks they're just rivers of words that just don't mean anything so i'll just play a little excerpt secular materialism there's absolutely christian materialism like which i didn't mean to do what the hell is christian materialism like christianity is a supernatural religion and she reminds me of alex cashoota babble in but did when i joined twitter and talked to a bunch of scientists about science the church of twitter meaning there so so it's not it's not just it's not just secular like it's it's she talks and she talks but she says nothing sad um i mean if you add if you say have a specific well what about lived experience regarding the aboriginal way of like seeing science and like like their lived experiences that back of the turtle or like i don't know there's a lot of back of the turtle like myths but but regardless okay that's not what i'm meaning for lived experience like i i take lived experiences seriously give me examples and i'll see how okay you take lived experience seriously in in what context all right if you're if you're married to someone you need to take their lived experience seriously if you have strong friendships you need to you know at least treat your your friends lived experience with with some respect but if you're trying to ascertain truth about the wider world there are various individuals lived experience doesn't mean anything oh seriously i can't take them depending on what it is in this subject i think that um science has given us the ability to my son has diabetes and type one he is 11 and has had it since he was four thank you science thank you the canadian guy who can't remember his name who came up with penicillin like thank you for thank you for that insulin oh sorry better get this straight mom are you sure you're son has diabetes and you know what you're talking about yeah i just said the wrong just inject them what's there my i inject him with whatever the pharmacy gives me and it's the right thing okay well that was my lived experience that was a little bit off for that moment um but no but like so i i yes i understand scientific method um helping us medically like such amazing like so many lives are saved because of the scientific method um that's the most front of my brain example like is it true well like what's what's true you know like looking at a story who's the hero and what he well okay sorry i'm i'm bringing up more things than i took too long so all i just blather on and uh you had a question about walkness and then walkism yeah so i was kind of curious just about you know the uh the emphasis yeah so both religious people and the work right similarly come from claims about their own lived experience and how these claims should be treated as sacred and should not be subject to skeptical criticism this on on you know lived experience and and the kind of reductionist nature of of science and secularist worldviews the the other group that i hear apart from religious people who advance that critique often is postmodern kind of scholars right they and i i'm just curious to the extent to which on that particular point not you know all the broader stuff that you you agree or is it like is there something that's distinctive that uh from the critique that you would have that that diverges from that because you don't understand is often critique that he signs remarkably postmodern why really against both modern people there's a lot of post-modernity in jordan it depends what you mean right it depends what such and such is right that's something that's very common so i'm just curious about in that respect to what extent there's there's overlap on those points or or whether it's it's like you know it's just a parallel evolution and there isn't actually point of contact still not sure what you're asking but i'll try and answer okay there's plenty of post-modernity in me too i think i think so if you want to sort of see this see this long term i see this very much within a religious frame so part of why the part of what during the renaissance you have this this real fascination with sources and literary sources i mean europe certain parts of europe start going crazy looking for greek manuscripts and so on and so forth harassment of course um is is finding you know at this point you know if everybody's learning greek people are learning hebrew and then they're looking at gerome's vulgate and they begin to recognize that hey wait a minute um i mean today today a contemporary biblical scholar might accuse uh gerome of writing a paraphrase because if you look at see so what i do with my filter the school for class for examples i put different english texts by next to each other and i have a sense of the nature of this translation that gerome is filling in a lot of the space in the you know in the just that the late antiquity filling a lot of the space so that all of the doctrines are nicely there for the people reading the vulgate for the people reading this latin text and come the renaissance because of all the texts that have sort of been unearthed because of the crusades now suddenly people have access to better greek texts and some hebrew texts and they're learning hebrew from jews and so erasmus takes another printing presses there so erasmus is you know lining up the vulgate and some you know some greek texts and having notes on the side basically critiquing gerome and saying you know hey wait a minute um what's gerome is doing something funny with the text and of course as erasmus is writing luther is reading and a lot of people have accused erasmus of laying the egg that luther hatches so luther of course is reading this and he's following with erasmus erasmus winds up staying faithful catholic luther of course he's got his own things going on in northern germany sort of following yon hus and starts making some noise wanting a little bit of a discussion and the catholic church is reactive they kick back luther's luther's kind of like jordan peterson is that if you push him you know he gets reactive fast and so luther keeps amping up luther's prince doesn't want him um getting burned at the stake like yon hus so he protects him but luther very much believed that you know if we could get that you really have sort of the sources of science in this way in a religious sense that if we can get the best text and if we can apply reason to it then everybody will see the world in the same way this is luther's big idea and to luther's dismay it doesn't happen that way you know carl stad um zwingley the anabaptist i mean all hell breaks luther in northern europe and nobody quite knows what to do but the printing press is there the genies out of the bottle by the way the generation before the new world was discovered so suddenly everybody wants to figure out well how can we all get on the same page again and so the idea really because they've sort of been infused with a lot of classics aerostyle has been found suddenly it's well let's see empiricism and reason you know these two ideas what we can see down below here you know i see a cat you see a cat we all see a cat we all call it a cat that's a cat so and then reason and so basically at the beginning of modernity where we're all trying to be on the same page with with you know with with the stuff that we find here i've got a can of will and enimance given to me by a very strange jew um and so and that's hopefully the way we can kind of i'll be on the same page i'll be in the same world and galile of course is measuring things and we're all trying to get in the same world and that holds for a good long time that we can maybe with these things we can all stay on the same page of course religion continues to adapt and religion becomes a very modernist thing and well we have the text and the text is going to be sort of the thing we can all agree on for the most part we'll argue about interpretations but and of course the religious institutions continue to bear weight but you know go up and down during the modern period well of course in post-modernity people sort of get to the end modernity really sort of reaches its peak at the end of 19th beginning of the 20th century and people begin to realize that yeah we all sort of have access to the same the same reason and empiricism more or less but people are sure jigging them in other ways that are pretty significant for the way these civilizations are founded and so now you know you begin to get this critique this narrative critique and say well people are okay somehow managed to stay in Toronto I started listening to it it's like he's no evangelical and okay was a Jungian so so he's talking here a christian pastor Paul van der clay talking about his experience with Jordan Peterson that's strange to begin with I didn't know much about Jung so then I made a video about him and then I start getting these emails from people oh this is strange so I start talking to people I'm a pastor so I talked to them about their life and many of the conversations are in private and so they're very transparent and they got nothing to lose you know they don't know me anything I don't know them and I begin talking to dozens even hundreds of these people and I discover that the vast majority of these people number one were men we're giving Jordan Peterson's audience that's not a surprise but the really strange thing about him was that many of them were depressed and many of them basically told me by listening to Jordan's biblical series the depression lifted and I'm not talking about someone who's just feeling a little blue I'm talking about people that I mean medically when I'd listen to what they were describing they definitely would have been diagnosed with depression all of the things that they're doing and they and they're basically telling me I listened to enough Jordan Peterson and you know what I clean my darn room and I began to bathe I began to eat better I began to exercise I began to prioritize getting out of my room and then I started doing these meetups and so then they start coming at least the local ones who start coming to my church and now we're starting to have you know in person conversations now this is an extremely strange thing that watching those videos would have the effect on people and it's a it's an obvious effect can I because I can see it that their lives are improving on all and I had the same sort of experience with Dennis Prager as my you know virtual father virtual friend having a parasocial relationship with this radio talk show host like it felt like a lifeline during a dark period of my life sorts of scales that that I can value and and secular people could value it and that led me to the question what on earth is going on and and that led me of course to Peugeot was a friend of his Peugeot was another religious guy so we were talking about that stuff and then for vacay and the meeting crisis because well what words to what words to describe to these guys and when I talk to these guys I mean one guy I remember he had been religious you know the the Sam Harris stuff the new atheist stuff just sort of blew apart his worldview and then he he gets together with a woman and she gets pregnant and you know better marry or maybe so he gets married to her and then one day and then you know they have this kid there's two there's two-year-old running around and he says to himself if I listen to Sam Harris what why do I love this two-year-old so much now he was a smart guy most people I deal with are smart people they've they've got college degrees a lot of them work in tech he said it's more than just a biologically predisposed to care for my offspring yeah I get that but I just have a sense there's something more and I think it's right in that space that as a pastor I listen to this and I say oh this is interesting how does this connect to my two worlds and and for me that's what this has that's what this journey has been on because part of me knew that after a while now some of them are going to sort of get lift off because they've improved some things in their body and they're not going to be as depressed they're eating better they're having better relationships they're they've got a schedule they're sleeping better etc etc so physiologically you could say yep they've gotten lift off they're doing well but for a lot of them I knew that Jordan Peterson was on the status rocket and we're going to be talking about social wars stuff and all this so if your life isn't working you know obviously you need to do something different all right if you fail doing the same thing again and again and again right it's probably a good idea to try something different you know even follow some advice from an online guru but are the changes permanent are the changes permanently positive all right do you get connected to good people do you get reconnected to reality stuff and for me as a pastor I said they probably need a community of people who can be around them to give them some support now some of them have not yeah I think most people definitely need community if you don't have family you gotta have community it's not good for men to be alone gone religious some of them have gone orthodox some of them have gone back to catholic church some of them I'm one guy in my need up return to his seek roots so it's been very complex but for me I don't I'm not skeptical about postmodernity I think it is sort of an end stage of modernity and I think a lot of the science has driven us to the fact that the world is a lot more complicated than John Locke could have imagined and especially when we're dealing with it socially so postmodern simply means that no one narrative is sufficient to explain life and so some people they get their life turned around by narratives fun by Tony Robbins or Dennis Prager or Jordan Peterson and it helps for a while but usually unless you get connected to real people and create a real family or real community right these positive changes don't last you add other kinds of transformation and I'm in the business of transformation as is John Brevake and in some ways um you know my relationship with John Brevake and the transformations he's seeing and the tools that's a very complex relationship I have with John even with Jonathan Peugeot to a degree because a lot of people are joining the orthodox church um I really celebrate when people join the orthodox church because hey they're part of the Christian family do I have ideas about orthodoxy sure but you know we'll let that we'll let that go for now but this but I'm absolutely down with you in terms of I see people leave Christianity leave the church leave their wives leave their families leave their husbands I see people transforming all over the place so the other guest here aside from the pastor is Chris Cavanaugh who is one of the two academics behind the podcast decoding the gurus lately that's I think we're in a phase right now where a lot of people are transforming a lot of people they're discovering this they're discovering that they're going to Tony Robbins and immediately one of the first things that they say this is an upgrade boy I'll tell you ever since I left Christianity not afraid of demons I don't worry about hell I have my Sunday mornings back um I no longer have sort of a domineering sexual ethic I have to satisfy I don't have to worry about Jesus talking about less than the flesh or less than my eyes I mean boy talk about liberation this is surely an upgrade yeah so on an empirical basis definitely seems like some people's lives demonstrably benefit at least for a time from leaving Christianity leaving Judaism leaving Islam and then particularly if people get married and have a family they often start coming back to organize religion and traditional ways of organizing community I totally get that I can feel the pressure of Christian discipleship on me but I see these momentary transformations as fairly small things and what's different from let's say a pastor for I'm sure for many people having an adulterous fair you know it seems like a positive transformation of their life they have excitement and joy and pleasure and happiness and dreams and they feel like they're really living and I'm sure the initial stages of an adulterous fair are absolutely rapturous but is it a sustainable happiness that comes from it from let's say a therapist this therapist look at these people in a little small box and well-being is sort of their gauge and you know and so a therapist might tell you leave that sack of dirt you're married to and get out there and have a better life okay as a pastor I'm seeing people in the wild and I'm seeing people for long periods of time and I'm seeing them in connection with their spouse and their kids and their parents and their jobs and so for me these heuristics are very interesting because when you walk with people over decades you begin to you begin to have wonderings about the you begin to evaluate these transformations and you say now yeah you don't you're not under the Christian sexual ethic anymore you got your Sunday mornings back you no longer have the kind of death anxiety you had before but these other death anxieties come in because now suddenly you have to get all of the good stuff between zero and eight and that's it and then you begin to notice that well now there's a certain amount of yolo you only live once boy you know if I'm going to get this all in I got to get this all in and maybe you know I sure hope my kids are going to be okay if I divorce that jerk but they'll be alright they'll get therapy and you just watch this systematically and so what happens is that your your evaluative frame is far larger in terms of these transformative experiences and it's not only far larger in terms of their lives it begins to get intergenerational because actually their participation in church is going to impact their number of sex partners and their fidelity with their spouse and their relationship with their children and and yeah I think he's touching on some good points here more than religion necessarily shaping your sex life the type of sex life that you seek is going to shape whether you're religious or not if you want to have a lot of sexual partners you're not likely to be religious or stay religious if you want to settle down be monogamous and build a family that tends to work out much better if you're part of a religious community so perhaps more than religion shapes your sex life your goals and your actions with regard to your sex life will shape whether or not you're religious and when you watch this multi-generationally especially after you're talking to people and someone comes into your office and you hear about their parents divorce and then you hear about their mother's boyfriends and then you hear about the fact that you know they had to go to kind of a crappy so I dated this woman she grew up orthodox and then about age when she was about four her parents became swingers and one day she walks in and like her mother's you know in bed with another man soon thereafter her parents divorce she grows up in Manhattan half the time living with her father who's just out there banging amazon blondes and she told me hell is growing up you know with very thin war between you and your father you know begging a whole variety of of women so the the the parent gets to have the thrills and the chills of sexual experimentation but it frequently comes at an enormous price to the children be school if they went to college at all because they didn't have any money because that and mom split up and then you start listening to these in multiple levels so my juristic is pretty broad in terms of well-being and whereas on one hand people might imagine that as a pastor I'm like yeah you know real tribal I want you in this box and I want you to act in this box in a certain way I see people who have deconstruct deconstructed from Christianity I think probably good thing they did probably good thing they did and I actually yeah if you are an empiricist you can't claim that people who leave your religion you know always have a diminished quality of life some people leave your religion and they seem to obviously have an improved quality of life tend to be happier and finer people actually think that maybe 10 or 20 years from now they're probably going to come back to their faith and they will likely have a stronger healthier some way sadder faith because of their deconstruction than they would have had if they had just sort of white knuckled it in the institution and so you know and that's part of the reason I that's me like why but from my point of view that video is an example of like a uh an uh an approach to pattern spotting heuristics which finds expression not just in like kind of Jonathan's analysis of 666 but also in negative 40 years so talking about Jonathan Pazio's video on the number 666 which in Christian numerology is the mark of the the beast numerology which is a particular Q and on follower who who just acts like a numbers or in the Da Vinci code or in any number of other and you would see those as like separate in depth and complexity I imagine in my case I see them as a continuum of the same heuristic and so I'm criticizing heuristic but with a specific example and it is mean to do it to Jonathan specifically but I I judge from his content that he is quite open about you know being critical about specific things that he doesn't agree with it doesn't like so he put the content out and I commented on it that's my my kind of view on it it's I I do not intend it to be like that therefore everyone has to agree in my interpretation or that I expect that he will like my engagement with his content I know he will not like my engagement with his content and I I kind of like factor that in but I could approach it in a much more empathetic and nice way and various people would say that's the better thing to do Chris you know you catch more was right yeah but my nature is such that this I am the same person in life as I am online and offline and I'm a kind of argumentative annoying person it's it's it is you know you can ask Matt the co-host it's the way I'm I'm not saying I couldn't be different I could I I'm not saying there's no way for me not to do that okay let's say hello to Elliot Vlad Elliot what's going on man uh we still can't now we can't hear Elliot hey look can you hear me now I'm at my computer yep yep I can hear you now bro hello yes oh this is terrible you can't hear me okay all right are we here yep we're here bro we're live now I can hear you I can hear you bro how about now say something yes I'm here I can hear you we can all hear you I can hear you this is ridiculous okay I'll start another google meet and no no no no no just do it tomorrow we'll do it tomorrow are you winding down anyway I'm not sure oh okay wait if you can hear me so I can hear you now okay we're fixed okay great great sorry go for it all right okay so anyway um so yesterday I went to the hinterlands California fairfield you know fairfield it's about halfway between Sacramento and San Francisco yes it's where things get very flat you know sort of uh it's sort of on the outskirts of both cities it's sort of the midpoint and it's quite hot it's flat um and so through I mean I have a birthday party to show go to and some it started at five but somehow I sort of remembered it as being starting at two so I sort of got there three hours early and I had to sort of kill three hours uh in the middle of the uh Sacramento Delta you know mess balance I would say and um it's weird man so I went to I thought I needed a new pair of shoes right I have I haven't got a new pair of sneakers in like three years so I figured it's time so I go to the mall in fairfield and I find a shoe store I go on the side of a shoe store and um I would say this it's it's this very Wakanda rich you know and and people are just you know yelling at each other at top volume you know freaking at each other and uh give me that size though I want this size I want that size you know and then you got any more of these in the back and blah blah you know on and on this is alien territory for me now I feel these aren't tucker aliens these are social aliens it's it was such a light low IQ scene uh and I said now I understand why New Luke does Amazon yeah and it's it was rough so I ended up scoring a pair of shoes for 20 bucks right uh I always go to the you know here's a little tip for you Luke always go to the clearance rack because you can usually find something for like 20 percent of the price you know so I got myself a nice 20 dollar pair of shoes and then I left but I still had plenty of time to kill so I just start ambling around the mall like I've never you know I haven't been to the mall a long time so I'm walking up and down the mall and then I uh I end up buying some socks you know I'm sort of picking off little errands when I'm trying to kill some time so I get a pair of socks uh at JCPenney you know so I got a bag full of shoes I got a bag full of socks and then I'm leaving feeling feeling like I'd go for a walk with my new shoes and my new socks I'd kill some more time by just leaving the mall donning my shoes donning my socks and just going for a walk so on the way I'm walking I'm retracing my steps through the mall and so I'm walking one way and then walking towards me is this whole fine lengths of what appear to be Somalians you know and they're very vivacious Luke and like I had this just thinking about all those Twitter videos that I'd seen I like I just had this shot of fear that just went through my body you know like oh no is this how I'm gonna meet my end you know because they were I wouldn't say they were charging at me but they sort of like spread out like a like a like an alien army and they were marching towards me and uh I really thought it was it it was just like a momentary flash but this is what being online will do you know it was perfectly innocuous thing but I I created this you know June end time scenario in my mind now has that ever happened to you yeah of course and it makes a difference were they were they in three-piece suits no no no they were uh they were they were dressed in you know the day's fashion all the crap that you see at the mall they somehow managed to acquire which is like you sort of have to start to wonder like where does this money come from because I never see these people working well were they carrying were they carrying bibles no so they weren't coming from a bible study no that doesn't appear so they were they were telling them all volumes of Shakespeare in their hands no no break nothing break not because if they were wearing three-piece suits carrying volumes of Shakespeare and discussing the tempest like I would not feel fear yeah but they were dressed like the type of people I often see committing crime then I would feel fear so it depends on the dress they're demeanor yeah now but this is true for all adolescents when they sort of hang up there's the sort of like you know this vivacious spontaneous energy that they have that you know you you think you know it could sort of spiral into violence you know but there was a certain ethnographic component that sort of doubled the ante you know if there were if there were Somali women in their 70s I suspect that you would not have received that shot of fear say ethnic what if there were Somali women in there oh no no right right right right right so it's no more natural and healthy to be more aware of young men of any race compared to say old women yes absolutely absolutely um but anyway so this is like part one of the story so file that one away so part two as now I still have a you know another two hours to kill before this birthday party so I'm going to you know I'm going to go character with my plan of putting on the shoes driving across going to the waterfront it's sort of the back bay you know there's like marshland and maybe there's a nature trail there I'd go for a walk for some more time so on the way through I remember that I need to I need to get gas and I need to get some fuel injector cleaner and I need to get some motor oil so this is another errand I can sort of take off my list so I I go to a Napa I go to a Napa auto parts store right and I go inside and there's a nice black gentleman at the at the cashier and this time I'm sorry wow you know this is great so I I ask him a bunch of questions about motor oil you know the the 10w30 versus the 10w40 and as car gets older do you use a 10w40 and he just starts peeling off all this information it's like he knew everything he was like clicking all the boxes this was like a uh incredibly good satisfying customer service interaction and I'm like wow and you know he sort of carry himself like I think he was probably ex-military yeah and he you know he's a court of so you know ex-military guys they sort of comport themselves in a certain way you know you can sort of tell that they were ex-military right yeah and uh and like wow this is great I've got some really useful information respectful polite courteous this is this is a nice nice experience maybe we're not all loomed right so I got there I got the motor oil I get the fuel injector cleaner I got a bunch of new information to look into you know and so that was good so so then I leave and that killed about 30 minutes total right so I'm down through like 90 minutes to kill before this birthday party so I find this little downtown area near where the birthday party is and there's like a Juneteenth celebration going on right remember that new holiday that was just created yeah yeah I'm so excited bro yeah like it was uh imagine my luck you know yeah and I'm looking I see like you can see from the distance is all these things set up these um what do they call you know those pop-ups I'm blanking the word pop-up displays and then there's music playing and then there's you know so I find a place to park I start milling through the uh the Juneteenth celebration music look it's this rap you know it's like it's like a different world I can't understand it I can't I can't even be in the presence of it like I it's so bad it's so hard to listen to and it's uh uh I'm thinking this is so bad it must be a parody right you know like yeah they're not really doing this for enjoyment they're mocking it you know and I was trying to sort of see if I could uh appreciate it at that level but it turned out it was sincere if people were clapping and but for the wrong reason they think we really enjoy it so anyway I can only bear about 10 minutes of that right and then uh so I find my way to the waterfront go for a walk you know kill some more time but eventually uh comes time for the party right I get there and then you know we go into this house so these are like San Francisco expats that have been forced out of the city and they've moved to the hinterlands they've bought property rather than uh you know renting and so they have this big I mean from a from a apartment dwellers perspective it's a huge place right multiple rooms living room dining room you know multiple bathrooms upstairs downstairs like you know a real house you know so uh so the whole thing is party there and I'm sort of in awe of all the real estate because if this place in San Francisco would be like five million dollars right and you know I was sort of in awe and then slowly but surely all these people start filing in you know these are all urbanites uh uh you know mostly from Berkeley you know and uh well dressed and educated and uh you know just normal nice Berkeley normals start filing in and there's there's orders and there's a dining table and uh it's just polite conversation etc you know it's that one of those things this whole sort of urban experience managed to sort of recreate itself in the hinterlands you know and so there's lots of chit chat a lot of idle chit chat about music and wine and oh I'm going to this winery and that winery oh I love Pinot noir you know it's kind of crap and I'm just kind of nodding along and listening and that and then I sort of strike up a conversation with this woman who's from Berkeley and just typical liberal and um but we were sort of talking about the decline of San Francisco which has now have been really precipitous and everybody's talking about it because it's done it's unmistakable and I'm just sort of trying to poke and prod I'm just sort of trying to get their analysis of what's going on you know uh just trying to see if the different people's different gifts have any like purchase yep in this community and of course it didn't but so I said well what do you think we should do you know so basically I had several of these types of conversations with different people throughout the evening and then I always sort of would end it with well what do you think we should do and universally the answer was I don't know I don't know but that they they had no idea and I think what their idea was to do is what these people have done which is get the hell out of the city so that's my story okay so here's my my feedback I would if I were in a mall with a lot of Somali teen males who addressed in in the same way that I see a lot of people committing crimes dressing I would get the heck out of there I would not go to a Juneteenth celebration I'd probably like read a book first find or you know go for a walk away from the the Juneteenth uh young Somali or you know any any young men who addressed like the people I see committing astronomical rates of crime I would certainly say the the heck away but here's my thought I think this points out the need for vouch nationalism you should not be able to congregate in a mall as a teenage male unless you've got like 10 adults who are willing to sign off and bear the price for your behavior what do you think vouch nationalism now I agree my fist is in the air my fist okay vouch nationalism now vouch nationalism tomorrow vouch nationalism forever yeah I missed one part of the story so while in the mall I couldn't help my nose and my mother noticed this like 30 years ago and she said she said in the moment of inspired genius she said Americans always seem to have a cup in their hand you know and if you're in the mall you notice this everybody just has this giant soft drink in their hand as if it's a permanent part of their being you know you can't just shop and then eat you need to eat whilst shopping you can't like you there's this constant intake of calories going on in America and it's so apparent in the mall you know and the obesity just one after the other each one fatter than the next you know it was so depressing and I'm sort of muttering to myself I'm looking about how disgusting this is and then I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror and I'm like oh I gotta give I gotta go for a walk bro so where do you get the power though to do the things that you need to do to get to where you want to go power yes it's a matter of power bro like it's it takes power do the things you need to do to get to where you want to go are you talking like spiritually talking anything power like the power to eat right to exercise to do all the things that you need to do to secure the life that you want it takes power for some people that's god power for some people it's guru power for other people it's just internally generated power other people but is that working like are you able to internally generate the power that you need to do the things you need to do to get the life that you want to have because I don't I don't have that internal power I need other people I need community I need spirituality I need gurus or inspiration or 12 step or psychology like I need a whole bunch of other things outside of myself because what's going on inside of me is not enough for me to get to where I want to go but what about for you I'd have to say it's internally generated in fact I spent a lot of time thinking I'm socializing and this is what Luke says I should do and meanwhile I'm thinking I just love to be if I could just be alone I could just skip this party I was thinking about ways of skipping the party like like finding like a nice gracious way to get out you know and I just couldn't do it I couldn't find one right it meant would mean having to tell a whopper of a lie and I just didn't feel like I should do that so I actually get out from solid so we're different we're different how painful would things have to get before you came to the conclusion that your internally generated power was not getting the job done well okay while I was in the month when the mall while I was in the mall and just sort of taking in the spectacles before me at all sides at all corners of the compass I'm thinking I actually started having suicidal ideation you know I'm like who would want to just what's left I don't want to be in this society I don't want to be part of this like I don't want to be a millionaire and this is what I get you know this is the this is the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow looking at this just milk a lot of people who experience suicidal ideation for them that would be the point at which they realize that something's really wrong with their life and that they need they need help well but then okay so but then as soon as I set foot outside that mall those feelings just disappeared and I just started chuckling myself so was it real suicidal ideation I don't think so so how would you need to live in with twice as much pain as you have right now before you tried something different yeah I would have to at least double because people don't change until the pain of what they're doing now exceeds the expected pain of changing people don't do anything now unless the pain that they're currently experiencing exceeds what they expect the pain to be if they make a change right we do what is least painful so if changing becomes less painful we change if not changing is less painful we don't change oh that's right that's right yeah sure I agree so you were on a self-improvement kick of you know eating right exercise about three weeks ago you're telling me about this losing weight yeah how is that how is that progressive well I keep it's been bad because I keep getting knocked off my routine right for one reason or another like even the shoes like my shoes have finally worn it out to the point where you know they're like all the padding is gone and it's scraping against my heel and just the pain so it limited the amount of distance I could walk so I you know I got off of that reason uh work a lot of work demands lately so that you know in the in the past I would have like I would get up at six and go out for a walk at six in the morning but now I just get up at six or seven to start working so um and that that's unfortunately got me off the routine again so I do have a problem keeping routines for more than three or four weeks and then they seem to dissipate and all it takes is one disruption and then it's sort of back to ground zero yeah so you need the external world to be a certain way for you to be okay exactly yes I did yes I did yes it helps it helps now I make decisions right the external world is definitely an influence I wouldn't say it's not but I participate in my own you know failing to maintain a routine you know I'm not I'm not good I can't there are people who have adversity in external life and still maintain a team so I can't like necessarily use that as a crutch saying that the world is difficult but it definitely is an influence so there's some some time indifference going on you're putting off what needs to be done you know using your time to support your own vision and to further your own goals yeah you know yeah and then there's some perhaps idea deflection that you're compulsively rejecting ideas that could expand your life or career and increase your profitability I probably do that but I'm open to I feel like I'm open to ideas um but the thing is it's like you have a pretty established routine right yes and one and a certain portion of it works for you right so for me to come in and say Luke well you should change this aspect of your routine and you say no no I've got my own is that really idea deflection or is it just now I'm gonna stick with what works if you're giving me a good idea and I'm deflecting it then it's idea deflection oh if I can't hear your idea because it's so threatening to my sense of self that's you know severe idea deflection right so you may suggest that I buy sheets with a high apply and if they would they would significantly enhance the quality of my life but I'm too insecure to accept that kind of suggestion from you then I have intense idea deflection going on you know it's still sleeping on plastic are you I I like to keep my room warm so I don't use any sheets any blankets I just usually sleep on the floor with uh with a wedge to elevate myself for the sleep apnea and the pillow and then I wear sweats and if it's if the temperature drops below 70 degrees I just put on a very light uh long sleeve t-shirt so you don't use a blanket you just use a blanket I don't use sheets it's just that's just me and sweats and the floor yeah that's bizarre look here's what the Chinese say cold head warm feet you got to keep your feet warm but you have to keep your head cool so I think you I think there you go you have sleeping problems you're doing it all wrong my dude thanks bro I'm trying to be open to this suggestion so I don't don't enact idea deflection yeah I know but seriously your head needs to be cold all that that immense your head Luke that brain of yours you know it's like this atomic reactor that's just generating heat all day long you got to let it cool off and I mean physically cool off so you have one of those cooling pills I don't like I like I like what I got anything that I'd add is um a woman I'm sure there are a lot of women out there who would appreciate you know a nice comfortable floor oh yeah a pillow yeah nice warm comfy temperatures so they don't have to be bothered by sheets or blankets or padding yeah nice polyester shag carpet oh man that was pretty sweet dreams are made up so did you did you watch the history speaks versus Mike Enoch debate on the Holocaust I got home I saw it on Twitter and I tamed in for a minute and like it was about it was about 10 p.m. which is late it's like almost midnight basketball time for me and I'm like it's like I don't want to think about the Holocaust at 10 p.m. so I just stopped I didn't listen to it is it is it worth watching I haven't listened to it so I but I can't believe you didn't want to learn about the Holocaust at 10 p.m. yeah it feels like I don't know it's past six years has been just Holocaust all day long uh no but I I am I am impressed with Enoch's competitor there if you guys name the guy on your show Matt history speaks yeah Matt yeah he's definitely a very it's definitely a very nice fellow yeah and I am I watched like the first five minutes I was just impressed with how he conducted itself so I asked even James like what is excessive masturbation and he said next question so Stephen James was afraid to go there he seemed distinctly uncomfortable with talking about his masturbation life on the show but you are someone who is at ease with who you are you're at ease with reality you're at ease with other people like where is the fine line between excessive masturbation and the correct amount of masturbation um as long as you're not on uh a meet-up call at work zoom call yeah once you're uh if you're on a zoom call and you just can't wait you have a problem what if you're rubbing the skin off your penis so that it's bleeding is that is that bad asking for a friend I think you need to stop before blood for bleeding yeah that's also another it's another warning against wanking to bleeding you know I'm old school Luke I I'm not part of this generation so I you know I'm around I remember manual stick shifts Luke I remember um cassette tapes you know there's just certain lines he just didn't cross powerful I know uh so how long were you talking to Stephen I literally tuned in I saw that you started streaming at 7am Pacific which is well when I stopped streaming I've got to do a deep carpet cleaning like move a lot of stuff out and move you know stuff back in like vacuum the carpet and then use the carpet cleaner thing that I bought so we're talking like minimum of two hours of work fair dink and work once I stop streaming so I'm thinking about streaming for like seven hours you're really really dreading this yeah I mean I thought right now I'd have a Sheila who'd do this for me yeah but she's like no I need a Serta I need a Serta no Serta or no deal would you do that would you buy a bed would you buy a proper bed it's that no no no it's so bourgeois I am I am someone who's constantly breaking boundaries bro I don't want to be shackled with these bourgeois conceptions of bedding you know who is it that said the uh hatred of the middle class is the beginning of all virtue do you I don't know if I said I think it was one of these leftist Marxist types which is not a quote I agree with it but I think it's a music I got a friend who's an orthodox Jew says that I don't want to buy a bed because I feel too guilty taking a woman to bed and so I solved my conscience by only taking her to floor so you have you have you have withheld from us this little tidbit of your life the fact that you sleep on the floor uh for all these years Luke you don't feel a little guilty no I mean how come I didn't know that this is a performance earlier this is not the real Luke board this is a you know people don't get to know me by doing a show this is a performance like the the real stuff that goes on in my life I keep private and sacred you know with a few exceptions okay so finally the floor sleeping you decided I'm gonna I'm gonna sell part of my soul for the show but I just sell all of my soul willy nilly just like you know every live stream just sell my whole soul and try to monetize it like no I keep most of it back I protect it okay because some of us would think that you just let it all lying out as it were that's a performance bro no I see no I see um all right well Luke uh it's been fun but I'm gonna see my next journey my step on my journey okay it was it was real though it's been okay okay bless us Australia England day end of day three of their first test test match at edge baston I think we can all remember where we were in 2005 where England just barely hung on to win by two runs in one of the top five most thrilling test matches of all time England won that Asher series but I identify with cricket bowlers you know who catch the batter just you know leg before wicket and then they turn to the amp and they just go how's that that that's that's what I feel like when I do a live stream how's that but it's just like yeah I arguing on the internet and and being like sarcastic and stuff are kind of if it turned off a whole lot of people and I felt I was being too cruel I I wouldn't do it but I I don't think that I'm I'm too cruel but I do listen to feedback you know that's the same that's the same thing you critiqued the change that you perceive in Twitter with Elon Musk you the critique you had is that since Elon Musk took over Twitter is more reactive less productive and then you're basically doing the same thing that's what I hear you saying and basically saying you like doing it so I'm saying yo yo yo but and what I'm saying is like in in the case for me and the way that you know online things I there's the concept of like the beer pros and stuff right and people that have been involved in internet to be at some forums and stuff that's kind of my my personality now if you are the owner of a social media company and you tweak the algorithm to promote like a you know partisan polemical content and outreach via that's a completely different thing and it is also like a whole bunch of social media companies have already done that and we kind of know where it goes so I don't begrudge people to use social media in the way that they want you just have to deal you know you have to deal with the consequences of whatever you way you choose to interact but the algorithm changes that I think Elon has brought has you know it depends how you interact with Twitter but there's a lot of videos of people being hit by trains or buses people fighting in CCTV footage and like on the 4u tab and that before it was like you know prevented from like kind of trending in general tabs but I think Elon prioritizes that that will get reactions and it's the same reason you put it on an act that way on Twitter that's basically what you just told me no no so I think it's a bit different because like what I'm trying to say is like I don't I think that being harshly critical can provoke you know can provoke responses in people I know that and that's exactly what reactivity in Twitter is designed to do provoke responses because the goal of social media is engagement but that's the difference because the goal so if I wanted that then my your your interpretation would be my goal is to get a pleasure and to get him to react and to get in the future no no that's not your goal no you're good about that that's not your goal yeah my goal is to criticize the specific like thing which I see as the like critical but not not in the sense of like because I want to drive engagement and and create a feud right no I know but but see I hear two things one of things is I would say we don't have enough time to get into this but you're essentially trying to fight a religious war or a spiritual war because it's a it's a it's basically a culture war that you're engaging in and you know you've got ideas of size and that's absolutely normal we sort of binary the world good bad and from there that I wouldn't say binary because like the model is that the thing that I don't have is that everyone's perspective is equally valid like it's equally fine to say Russia is being no no right you have a moral universe that you're engaging in and you're trying to push the moral universe more towards the good and resist evil that's what you're doing I get that I don't deny that but I guess that bit that I'm trying to just check that if you deny is like there is a reality right like that in events like Russia and that kind of thing so there are people that think that Ukraine is the aggressor and that there it's a denazification approach okay yeah so I I'm a moral realist now whether I can touch with all the moral reality that's another question whether I'm right on it that's another question but I'm a moral realist and so what you're saying is yeah so a moral realist is someone who believes that there is a morality that exists outside of the individual's head and so thinking about this I realized that I am a moral realist who conducts his show as though I am most of the time as though I'm not a moral realist so I conduct the show as you know different people have different gifts different understandings of what's right and wrong and the only way you can get to some kind of transcendent you know supposedly objective standard of morality is if you make a leap of faith and I don't argue about faith on the show so I live my life in part by faith you know I believe in God I believe in orthodox Judaism I believe that God's the the force behind the Torah so I live my life as a moral realist but I conduct the show as though I'm not a moral realist so maybe I'm deluding myself somewhere but that's how I understand things one hand what you're trying to do is push you know push towards the the correct towards the good by um by being and and you're an argumentative person so you're taking your argumentative nature and your moral orientation and you're going to twitter and you are doing that yeah yeah yeah that's yeah yeah yeah and your your critique of twitter since mosque I personally haven't noticed much of any difference but we all experience it depending because it's a social media platform I'm not gonna argue that one depends on each of the feeds yeah it's sort of like there's this area of town that's really nice and it's very quiet and the streets seem to be okay that would say let's say a twitter under an ideal situation and then there's twitter where you know sort of the the regime that the mayor is is just kind of liking to provoke um excitement and drama by pitting people together so that'd be bad twitter and good pitter and in either twitter you go out and start night fights so I don't know how it's a moral value to start a night fight in a good neighborhood and then blame the bad mayor for having a night fight environment so that would be in the case of like what you you know I think that would like would make it clear is that you and I would agree that like the targeting of the the dead parents the children uh the parents of dead children is something that can be criticized harshly in a night fight way and it isn't the same as somebody else going out in a night fight way to advocate that we should target the parents of children I would argue that if I want so talking about alex jones chris cavern also says alex jones is beyond the pale for encouraging the targeting of the sandy hook parents right after that mass shooting in sandy hook alex jones said it was a sigh up and he essentially encouraged his followers to make life miserable for the poor parents who'd had their children murdered at the sandy hook elementary school want to get someone to stop doing something bad well I'm not a pacifist so I do believe in beliefs in military etc etc but in terms of personal engagement generally speaking if I want to actually get in touch with the person I would rather have some moral transformation than which person it depends on the person and and you know I'm not about to try to build a relationship with alex jones it's not going to happen right and so the my target is not pageau if I I'm not trying to trans necessarily you're attacking the spirit of numerology that's out there in the culture the practice I would say but yes the spirit if you prefer but but yes the like a potentially generally not that harmful thing but overall I think something which like it isn't a great heuristic to follow so yeah but I I think I do take the point for that the uh like there is an approach which is you know more in line with the kind of thing that you're emphasizing and which I think Andrea responds to and and I think there's there's good psychology research about you know on an individual level that you you will convince more people by being a lot more empathetic and you know like considerate to their their worldview um like if if that's what you want to achieve that might be the more effective way to do it right like for everyone to be more like a social worker than like you know it's getting a harsh critique is never enjoyable right um but I I would say that there is enough variation in the world and in my inbox that the kind of way that I critique people is not entirely ineffective at reaching people and maybe is part of the you know the kind of tapestry that it exists for critical content but I but I okay I think a good discussion there between Chris Kavanaugh who is secular who's an atheist and a materialist and a christian pastor just a little bit more from Robert Wright here talking with Mickey Kaus from you know how to break this to you Mickey but I have lost that love and feeling we can talk about that um be home uh I there is a lot of fervor on the democratic side for this thing called the popular vote compact basically says you know we're sick of losing the uh losing the electoral vote after we win the popular vote although one time John Kerry almost won the electoral vote after losing the popular vote so he can work both ways usually it works for against the democrats so they want to substitute the popular vote understandable there are all sorts of arguments why you should have a popular vote we should have an electoral vote probably the popular votes you know more democratic but it's not in the constitution so they say well we'll have states pledge to cast their electors for the winner of the popular vote and as soon as we get 270 or however many electoral votes you need worth of states it will go into effect and then we will in effect have a popular vote election because uh you know uh you know because the popular vote winner will win the electoral college too and it's a way it's an attempt to jury rig the system on top of the constitution to give it something the constitution doesn't have the problem is we've had our we've had it drummed into our heads since the uh Trump election that we you know states have to have to cast their electoral votes for the winner of their primaries they can't counterman the state electors they can't send a separate state slate that they like and this totally violates that principle it also sort of violates uh I think it probably violates the revision to the electoral count act maybe not uh but uh it just it's it's too clever by half and it it sort of the you know state electors would say well if the liberals want us to cast the vote ignore the state's voters and cast votes for this person who won the popular vote you know why can we ignore the electors and cast a vote for whoever the federal society wants to be president I mean you know if we have an independent power to do that let's let's let's do it our way it's just that in the left seems completely oblivious to this power I don't know if it's exactly hi I think that's an excellent critique there by Mickey Kals right uh history speaks Matt Cockerel debated Mikey not Friday night on Holocaust in Iowa and Matt a PhD student in history at London School of Economics he was impaired on the horns of a dilemma because he really wanted to have this debate with Mike Enoch on the other hand Mike Enoch sensed how badly Matt wanted this debate so Mike Enoch started pushing back with all sorts of demands that Matt found outrageous so here's a conversation between uh Matt Cockerel and uh Veronica and frankly behavior which I haven't encountered in any of the other three people I've debated on Holocaust now Jim Rosoli, Thomas Dalton, Arshalor uh none of them were bitches about um formats and of them were filibustering all were pretty easy to arrange a format with and try to get out of other obligations and lie constantly and so Mike really is actually giving other deniers a bad name funny as that is to say so yeah let me just talk about how we got here and then Veronica I'm gonna have you pull up a couple of the things I emailed you just as evidence for some of the stuff I'm talking about okay so way back in 2020 way way way back you know we're all different people back right especially Veronica but no we're all different people back in this different world uh we agreed all four people agreed uh I agreed and so here's some context I did a lot of shows with Mike Enoch and Eric Stryker and I think they all were quite cordial there was no yelling so Friday night you know Matt and Mike would just degenerate into yelling at each other and I think I haven't seen the Friday night show of Matt versus Mike Enoch but I think just from my own interactions with Matt that I suspect that he played a role in this so I respect Matt I like Matt and he sometimes triggers me because I find him often you know rude and condescending because he'll just frequently interject you know moral judgments into conversations where I don't believe the conversations are enhanced by his moral judgments you might say oh you know I heard an old stream where you described something as degenerate and you know I I want you to know that I don't call that against you right so there's nothing like pronouncing moral judgments to really inhibit and infuriate someone that you're having a conversation with also if you're frequently interrupting someone that also tends to infuriate people so those are just some some thoughts on what may have played a role in the degeneration of the Matt Cockerel, Mike Enoch debate Friday night and Avi Biderman agreed to debate Mike Enoch and Eric Stryker and Holocaust denial and then in 2021 we sent our the agreement was we're going to both send our information and we did that so we sent our information in uh 2021 and then at that point Mike and Stryker quit the debate because they were really upset over a moderator or host that was Jewish supposedly or radically political and I agreed to change the debate change the moderator I was like that was dumb because I didn't think the moderator was going to do anything but I'm like okay whatever if that's the big hang up and Avi did not agree so it ended up that our 2v2 change into 1v1 Mike Enoch and I and I just said okay Mike I've sent that information this is back in September 2021 send me your stuff whenever you can right and since then we've had a year and a half of dodging combined more than a year and a half dodging combined with excuses and lies constantly to his audience I've debated since September 2021 three people in Holocaust denial unless martial law was before at least two and maybe three I don't remember exactly when martial law debate was and the bike has continued to lay delay delay and um let's pull up the first article I sent your number on a coffee will share the screen and pull up number one the sub-stack okay here it is yeah okay I'll just leave it there Lawrence Connor says I should uh stop streaming get to cleaning my floor Lawrence I mean you can't stand me man but you know what keeps bringing you back to uh this show just uh just I'm curious why you keep coming back terrific uh podcast embraced the the void by left-wing academic philosopher and what what was the about section here embrace the the void contact uh uh forgetting the name of the host but anyway let me play a little bit from latest episode released June 9th the language of terrorism with Chris Cavanaugh all right and and like even me right you know I'm a very minor person but I've been the only people have offered me money to do stuff are like uh weird right when leaning stuff so yeah that's I think they're weird uh academic activities yeah just just like stuff which I actually wouldn't mind doing except then I'm kind of like well but I don't want to accept money to do that and I yeah just listed alongside certain other individuals exactly yes correct yeah right you're afraid of guilt by association because you're a coward I understand uh let's talk about the papers yeah one other thing Aaron one other thing this possibly might not be right but some like kind of supplement chilling I guess this relates to that whole right hosted by Aaron Rubinowitz left-wing philosopher thing I guess I you know I would cast Hooperman and uh uh Lex Friedman a little bit in a slight so talking about Andrew Hooperman at Stanford University the separate sphere um but sure the just seems a slight more tolerance towards chilling things but I don't know that could be just I'm not exposed enough to left-wing content to see what they're chilling um I bet they're chilling naturalism stuff that is basically the same thing just probably packaged differently and you know like slightly different uh vibes um yeah they're definitely chilling power sociality like the you know all of I mean with Hassan Avi and a whole bunch of people the the kind of point is often made that they are millionaires living in mansions while uh like the crying capitalist systems which you know I'm not saying I'm I am aware of the little guy popping out of the well um saying you know the right curious but but I but I do think there is something or that guy right yeah I do think there's something of a potential contradiction there when you're running you know Edie Feusen there's something from your podcast per month um yeah I that's capitalistically you're very successful right right um okay I have more thoughts there but we'll save them for bonus stuff I want to talk so much your papers before in a time and I might say your papers you are the second author which I assume just means you did the editing uh which is relatively accurate yeah pretty much accurate right taking credit for it looks like a woman's work I think in this case Julia Ebbner who I should probably get on to actually explain these things at some point you should she's very good yeah she's a researcher of extremism for quite a long time but but actually interesting trajectory because started out as you know working in NGOs and and kind of research think tanky kind of stuff but now I has just uh completed or is in the process of completing her PhD and she is my I'm one of her supervisors so it's getting credit for her work because you're a supervisor I understand that's it yeah I just provide the annoying feedback constantly yeah so you shared these with me and they are definitely in my wheelhouse the titles of the two papers that you shared were the QAnon security threat a linguistic fusion based violence risk assessment and is there a language of terrorists comparative manifesto analysis I tried to parse these but they're really dense with like woke verbiage about woke verbiage yeah you've got all this stuff about high prevalence of linguistic identity fusion which obviously is just critical theory nonsense um so I'm going to try to parse for me like what's going on with this there's no language concept here don't be smirking me and there's no critical theory well well so the one one thing I can't speak to is like Julia is applying a model a theoretical model um about radicalization extremism which I've worked on quite a lot in my ritual work and which my uh my kind of boss my phd supervisor Harvey Whitehouse is the is the person who developed that and so she's applying that model which we've been working on for quite a while to uh this material so the model infrastructure yeah so identity fusion is you know psychologists like to study group bonding and these kind of things and they like to come up with terms and and develop skills right self report or other types of skills where they measure concepts and then they apply it to the specific um psychological term that they come up with and and then all their psychologists use it and they reach citations right and they carve up the messy qualitative world into like quantitative artificial categories but so identity fusion is one of those um and it's it's contra it proso contra position to social identity very group identification um I there's some various reasons that people have proposed why these are different types of like bonding and why it's significant but the the kind of key aspects that I think are worth um considering and apply even if you don't really buy the actual you know distinctions between these two broad categories of group bonding are that identity fusion is supposed to be where there's strong relational ties towards a group uh so instead of like a depersonalized categorical type membership where you you don't feel attached to you know it's more the group that you're attached to like a a religious group right like if you imagine you don't know all the only as a catholic or something right yeah like that kind of thing or it works for company right and the way that example came to mind when I was yeah and and and also an important aspect is in the traditional social identity uh theory model there's this thing called functional antagonism which is about basically humans are made up of all different uh like social and personal identities right and broadly speaking when a social identity is activated your personal identity goes down so in if you are for example uh Aaron with your friends and family talking you're Aaron right and your idiosyncratic habits are of interest and whatnot if you're Aaron in Japan you're an exemplar of an American and you will be kind of presented in that way I think this is a sophisticated and important point in in other words as I understand it the weaker your personal identity all right the more labile your identity the more you are incentivized to get rid of an unwanted self and to dissolve yourself in a group this is developed in much more depth by Eric Hoffer in his classic work the true true believer so if you're a true believer you want to get rid of your unwanted self dissolve yourself into a group and then you are much more liable to do all sorts of you know nasty or self sacrificial or extreme things that you would not do when you're just an individual that you know you're speaking for Americans or whatever you might be become more stereotyped or if you're at a football match and you are you know the other people are supporting the rival team that's the identity which is more salient than that context so all these are saying that like there's a kind of hydraulic relation right so our identities vary depending on context all right at at work I may primarily have one identity when I'm hanging out with a certain group of friends I may primarily identify as a writer when I hang out with other friends my primary identity will be that of an orthodox Jew in another context my primary identity will be that of an Alexander technique teacher so the situation often determines which of our identities is preeminent and an implication of it it would be including for things like group violence right that personal identity can dissolve to some extent in highly social identity salient context so you could be more violent yeah I understand just so as I understand what you're describing these aren't like it's either this or that theories it's like these are two different models for how sometimes there's a relationship between identity and individuals is that right so yes so I kind of mix things in there but why I just described that functional antagonism principle is right classical social identity theory right and that's the kind of so so like broadly speaking those psychological it seems like you're describing are one kind of person to group identity where it's not about interpersonal connections with other individuals so much as a subsuming of personal identity into a group identity you're Nazis you're you know your your Catholics in the broad sense versus you know like if you have your Irish Catholics who like are Catholic because they are closely connected to a family or community or something and and the identity goes via those interpersonal relations that's the thing that y'all are focused on is that right so identity fusion where this is distinctive from this is essentially saying that there are plenty of group context and and like strong group bonds where personal and group identity are kind of synergistically activated and self-reinforcing such that you are interpersonally connected to individuals in the group or potentially the group in a relational way you know like personalifying the group but like but that interpersonal relational style bonds are important and your personal identity remains salient as well as the group identity and the important distinction here would be like if you're like if your group is attacked it is like your personal identity being packed and vice versa if you're attacked you can like transpose that onto the group is being attacked so that doesn't happen in the classic social model in the social identity theory it is more more described as like if you're highly identified your personal identity goes down right so like if the if the group is being attacked that's not necessarily directly uh like an attack on your personal identity unless you're like something more like a one-directional like you know if someone attacks the Nazi party then they're attacking every individual but we don't care about the individual's identity it is it is like that it's just this like there's just this weird quirk about like personal activation it's kind of like psychologists you know doing studies where they tried to make social or personal identity salient and then say if you threaten a group identity does it cause a stronger reaction if you have this kind of body or whatever and the way they're measured is like you're using you know verbal scales or in particular fusion is often associated with this variation of the inclusion of self and other scale which is like these two circles and you you know say which one represents your relationship with the group to them overlapping and being like assumed um yeah and i want to get into the methods in these studies a little bit because i'm curious about how that works and what you think like we can really derive from this um but let's just say broadly speaking just to help people feel grounded in sort of practically what you're describing because like i want to make sure that people are getting a sense of what this looks like for human psychology on the ground what does it look like in terms of you know behavioral things that you're checking for here what are you what are you concerned might be the case if it's true that you know there's a bunch of this um linguistic identity fusion running around in Q and on yes so this is the issue so the um the the model proposed by Harvey Whitehouse the anthropologist at Oxford is that when you have this strong relational type of bonding you know identity fusion or just you know some form of relational bonding with a group and you have a perceived external threat um uh and ideally when you have a group which endorses violent action right this is important as well like what group values are activated then you have like a potent uh tinderbox for extreme pro group action now if your group has group values which are like the extreme pro group action they sacrifice your life to do humanitarian work right like white helmet kind of stuff in in Syria this can be very good right like because you are willing to lay down your life for a cause and to you know help help people out uh when there's like a crisis situation um however if there are uh like endorsements of violent action this kind of bonding is uh proposed to be particularly likely to lead to people uh performing violent actions not just endorsing them but actually conducting them whereas compared to the classic model yeah and the argument is that the the classic model it's not that it can never lead to violence there's plenty of occasions where people are like highly ideologically committed to a group and and you know are willing to perform actions or um like uh be individuated in in a group scenario and perform violence but it's more that that can also occur where people will ideologically endorse violence but not be willing to do it right and and the argument is that identity fusion is the better driver or this kind of relational group bonding is a better group driver and predictor of like actual uh violent action yeah i have two questions one is that curious if you could give any like clear-cut case examples where you're like this is very strongly driven by this kind of identity fusion this particular violent action and i also came to mind is is there a connection to the particular kind of playbook of like in-person cult you know like identity fusion yeah like high identity fusion and like and that drives you know behavior within those communities more strongly yeah so like it's not just the particular model proposed by like harvey whitehouse that makes this argument like if you take scottier during the anthropologist he also emphasizes right that what um the kind of potent combination is a a devotion to secret values which you could see as the ideological component right secret values that being values that you won't trade for any amount of money and you kind of regard as you know beyond negotiation that palestine is uh the land of the palestinians for example right um then but the other side of that he talks about this this kind of release intensely relational connection with other people and a kind of you know band of brothers or that kind of thing and so when you look at people say the 9-11 terrorists right there there is the aspect where they're committed to the jihad right and to attack so jonathan height would talk about this being ties bind and blind once you get tied to a particular community or to sacred values right you'll both feel a strong sense of connection but you'll also become blind to certain things like america for it's perceived crimes um and uh they're in on al-qaeda ideology however they're also arranged in cells where they are small closely net group of people with strong relational ties who you know self-reinforced and this model you see very often even when you have a bigger organization or you might have like a terrorist uh you know an international terrorist organization often organized into these smaller cells for the the groups that are going to perform attacks or that kind of thing so okay there's not it's not that there's no exception to this you do get people who do things on their own or you know um are kind of forced into it because of circumstances like for example an alternative would be oh yeah I don't know this is actually an alternative maybe in a way um supports this but like the kamikaze pilots in japan are often presented as like these uh you know brainwashed fanatics who were willing happy to die for the emperor but we know from their dairies and from records about the training that they um endured and letters that they sent that you know there was no option really like the the way it was presented was this is the correct thing to do and yes they were indoctrinated you know for the education system but also they felt a very strong obligation to their family and if they don't do it someone else in their you know regiment or whatever is going to take part in it so it that creates that like is that because people really you know want to sacrifice their life or is that more you know the kind of uh like a and a structural system that forces people to sacrifice their life but still in there is this important thing about you know relational high speed to family yeah so much of what we think of as being individual oh you know I'm this way or I'm that way or I think this I do this because I believe it's right so much of what we think is coming from an individual is really something that we've learned and that we pick up from the community around us from from our family and friends and extended community play or to like fellow soldiers so I think models that don't play that aspect are often missing an important component and in in the case with these there's there's actually three papers there's one more um with Julia that is looking at uh so we kind one of the papers is looking at these 15 manifestos um oh sorry it's in the third my apologies um you know the third one the third one there's two of them that go together so oh my god we did have an academic paper here that is looking at various manifestos including mine comp they know that if people just delve even a little bit into mine comp they can completely lose their minds they can get fired from prestigious positions in life they can give up you know some six-figure job and end up you know driving for uber very dangerous stuff two of them are focused on these manifestos and we basically did like a content analysis of the manifestos looking at these uh like kind of linguistic categories or linguistic markers for a whole bunch of different things including identity fusion including social identification with the group but but also you know dehumanizing language uh conspiracy beliefs so yeah I want to get into your methods um because I think it's helpful to be able to understand kind of how the sausage gets made a little bit um otherwise it just sounds like hand waving and making claims um but I want to bait this so talking about dehumanizing language is there any you know a substantial number of people who doesn't who don't frequently use dehumanizing language I mean the most liberal most left-wing the most pro diversity people will still refer to vast swaths of humanity as absolute rubbish right the the complex and diverse nature of humanity is too much for almost all of us and so we may have an in-group based on our family on our race on our ethnicity on our religion on our belief system on our geography on our profession it's almost a human imperative to find all sorts of ways of just dismissing the humanity of vast swaths of the of the world so that we can you know be better situated to deal with the complicated nature of reality we just don't want to engage with so many outgroups and this seems to be just as prevalent on the left as the right took a little bit more because I think it seems to be intuitively helped you know check my logic on this but if what y'all are saying is accurate right we have this question in America in particular right now but generally about stochastic terrorism that you know your alex jones's of the world say certain things and those there's a there's a decent chance that those so stochastic means random infrequent behaviors those claims turn into behaviors by certain listeners right um what seems like you're saying is if you look at two communities and one of them has this much higher rate of linguistic identity fusion representing a kind of relational connections within the you know the um but smaller communities that those individuals if their ideology is attached like you said to a broader you know alex jones kind of narrative they're going to be at higher risk it seems like of actually taking terrorist actions for example is that the concern yeah so I think the kind in in Harvey's model the the kind of three factors that are emphasized as the presence of identity fusion existential threat uh like a perceived existential threat and a group condoning like violent actions right so there there is the ideological um component so I know how ruthless I get when I'm running late to an important appointment uh so I know how ruthless I will get if my you know in group is under attack under threat so I think this is just pretty much pervasive people become much more in group identifying much more racist you know much more suspicious of outsiders the more stress they feel the more of a threat that they feel of it but so if so if the 2024 election in the united states for example is conducted under an atmosphere of you know great internal or external threat of you know decreasing sense of safety in the public square then that would play to republicans advantage because conservatives tend to pull much higher with regard to uh tough foreign policy and tough attitudes towards law enforcement and punishing criminals on the other hand if we're relatively prosperous and feeling safe in 2024 that will appeal to democrats who will provide you know social welfare spending and have much more soothing things to say about outgroups so the more right wing you are the more likely you might have negative feelings and suspicions about outgroups the more liberal and left you are the more open you're likely to be to outgroups if you have those three things together that that is a potentially more dangerous set of catalysts than uh other factors which are also important like things like martyrdom narratives or justification of violence or sorry or uh dehumanization like these kind of things so there's there's a whole bunch of you know there's a lot of work on what kind of things drive people I think the more stress you're under the more of a threat you feel the more likely you are to use dehumanizing language and thinking to engage in violent actions or to even or endorse violent actions which are different right that's because there's a lot more people that endorse violent actions than actually engage in them and the it's not like you oh I forgot to talk to alia alia blad about this but he's often looking for oral candy so can a moderate podcast ever be as compelling as entertaining can it grab you and move you nearly as much as a more extreme podcast right people with moderate views in politics religion all right they frequently get you know more of a charge more of a sense of excitement more sense of fulfillment from listening to perspectives that are far more extreme than their own and most people for example don't endorse terrorism but uh many people have sympathy for terrorists if the terrorism is being conducted on behalf of their ingrate want people to be endorsing violence and to you know dehumanizing the right group but but if you can only if the goal is to stop you know violence from happening you want to know what is the the most likely people to engage in violence and that's kind of um what we're interested in looking at like is it possible to identify um like higher risk there's a couple of tempting threads to pull on there but I do want to hear a little bit about methods first and then I'm going to like try to cause you to say inappropriate things um what how does this work you know I like in your methods descriptions right we get a bit of like coding of these things I'm not sure that like I think coding is probably a term people might understand intuitively but like do you want to give some sense of how how your approach works and what level of confidence you come away with that this is tracking something out there in reality yeah so so like I said in two of the papers and they're really connected there's a uh 15 manifestos that are examined and this includes like 12 which are ideologically extreme um and things like Dylan Roof's manifesto Brent and Tyrant the Christchurch shooter's manifesto uh Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf right the classics the classics and my god how dangerous is that they're analyzing Mein Kampf even to to look at that that document is to you know risk losing your soul Elliott Blatt says I don't necessarily seek out extreme content but these days the more radical analysis seems to better describe reality but my question was is it as easy for a moderate podcast to be compelling compared to a more extreme podcast is it as easy for a moderate podcast to provide an emotional charge as a more extreme podcast so it would seem to me there's 10 times more difficult for a moderate podcast to provide that emotional charge in that compelling sense that often comes with the more extreme content three moderate comparison uh manifestos or speeches right Simon Simon the Bovier the second sex Martin Luther King I have a dream speech Greta Thunberg our house is on fire um so these what well like so they're ideologically uh activated but in terms of uh like violent sacrifice ideologically extreme like the comparison group matters right Anders Brevik Elliot Rogers okay okay there's a lot of cute people and I haven't been speech I'll give you that yeah so um so anyway there's a lot there's a large amount okay I found my notes from earlier when you're looking for oral a u r a l excitement is it easier to find that with an extreme podcast rather than a moderate one I know that I have an unhealthy addiction to excitement I find it a lot easier to get excited about more extreme stuff now didn't ass apply sing about I can't get excited oh they even they even did they did a song I mean every profound thought has been encapsulated in ass apply song have ever since feeling now would take my life into a year ago you say you love me again I cannot say what I cannot do is being too long without someone how could you let me sink this far away from you now you're here wondering why you can't get near I can't get excited can't get excited there's a thousand things to do I can't do anything with you I can't get excited can't get excited you can see me look right through I don't feel like I used to I can't get excited of text there right and and then the question is okay so how to look at it and there's a lot of different ways that you can look at it you could you could do it qualitatively just read them all detect themes and and kind of character okay a friend says if you like ideas when that leads you to extremities because that is what is novel so I'm always excited about some idea and they change week to week day to day month to month year to year because I'm not married I don't have a family so I'm probably you know more vulnerable to my changing intellectual forms of excitement I'm to the extent I'm ideological I to the extent I'm intellectual I'm an intellectual what is it I don't want to what's that David Lee Roth song oh I'm an intellectual jiggler like I'm always falling in love with some new pretty exciting idea but ultimately staying staying loyal to none to none if you prefer thinking in terms of your family your people your interests you won't necessarily be perhaps as radical if you're interested in people you might get immune to a degree from fringe ideas yeah so I think if you're connected to your family friends community you're much less likely to be extreme and antisocial the rise you know qualitatively what yeah what what what you see there and and you can you can also see if people detect the seam so Elliott Black completely resonates with that air supply song I can't get excited pretty much you know summarizes this this feeling of unwee which has washed over him at times Elliott says a moderate podcast seems like wallpaper pleasant but ultimately uninteresting that's why you need to go for the more extreme stuff like embrace the void with Aaron Rabinowitz the left-wing atheist philosopher here talking with another left-wing atheist Chris Cavanaugh themes right so it one thing which you might want to do with content analysis is give people a set of categories and then ask them to code material into that categories you can code for the absence of presence of it or you can you know see which category they put stuff into and and you could do that with relevant experts or you could do this with coders that you tree in on your like naive coders so to speak not experts but people who you give your coding river to and say for code this material and then you can look do they agree with each other right the high reliable is the coding amongst say compared between experts and non-experts and indeed we did this so we did Julia I should say primarily did the qualitative assessment of the manifestos and and then recruited experts to code like material selected from that to see if they identified the same categories and and then non-experts 20 odd non-experts and compare their codings with the ones that already there so that's one set of analyses which is I think in the paper that you looked at and then we also did so do you think America is ready to overcome its overphobia and I like to you know a gay man like Tim Scott or Cory Booker a president of the United States statistical analysis like feeding into a you know a kind of that analysis software the linguistic codes that we have and the full text and then asking it to categorize the content the relative portions in the different content and then you know also taking out the stuff which it has categorized and checking but is this coherent that it's like like reasonable things in those categories so for folks who want to understand how science works I'm remembering the dm conversation now that we had where you were like how do I describe any of this in my text like what words would you use what things would you block out like how many strings of slurs would you include in your peer review materials yeah there's a lot and so yeah because of this question how would you phrase this there's a lot of slurs right especially so the one this is not so we did this with manifestos but then we also looked at a kind of logs of conversations chat logs or discord text logs for various different q and on and yeah have any n words have any k words you know how many racial slurs would you include in your peer reviewed academic article on the language of terrorism groups you're all fair enough to you know yeah so so there's a lot of stuff in there that isn't um you know particularly nice a lot of slurs and and whatnot and so if you're describing what you would count as like you know derogatory slurs or outgrip dehumanization you have to use the language that they usually have to represent it somewhere um but the question is like do you put it in the paper how many stars do you put in the paper you know the uh so yeah that was just about like is it bad to like hide that stuff is it better like is it whitewashing if you put it in the appendix should it be and there are certain slurs which seem like more acceptable or you feel less there's a word you can't say that's the worst word yeah yeah so you know that then you're like it's well but we can't exclude it for one group and then allow the slurs for other groups so yeah it's that that was that was uh an issue um and we went with that we would provide warnings and then represent that right and we'll see sure why did you uh well we all the scientific evidence against their efficacy yeah well merely i would say a little bit ours covering that they say sure we're going to pass a neoliberal shell course i know you're doing it so you don't get sued yeah so so that's what we did i mean i would say as well just one note here is that i personally i my co-authors might disagree with this but like i regard uh the whatever particular theoretical model that you're arguing for or that you know you do the analysis and you say well these factors seem to be uh like more recurrent or whatever i'm actually like pretty agnostic about which model is the best like if people run a whole bunch of analysis with additional datasets and they find out that it's other predictors which are more commonly associated right or you add in other linguistic corpuses and the things that we highlighted actually turn out to be like less significant i'm perfectly fine with that i my general thing is that science and efforts especially to quantify and triangulate things it just has to be transparent it has to be you have to put all of the stuff out so that other people can apply the analyses and i would like to see for example um more tests done with material that is ideologically strong but not uh regarded as like harmful right because i say kinship language i think you would find that kind of thing in a lot of uh you know groups that people have no issue with uh including you know like human rights organizations and stuff so or just religious groups that um right well all communities are running on it to some degree like that's the basic hardware like a basic software of a community is interpersonal rela