00:10:43.120We've talked a lot on the show about how formerly fat people are oftentimes the most fatphobic
00:10:48.120in this very interesting, I think, human process where you think that if you have overcome
00:10:53.800something, it is therefore overcomable.
00:10:56.500And so other people who refuse to overcome it are weak.
00:11:00.140A lot of his work academically is about this dichotomy or what I consider to be a false
00:11:04.860dichotomy, but the dichotomy that he keeps raising between chaos and order. He's someone who
00:11:10.060considered that his life and his mind was really chaotic, and he was able to impose order on it.
00:11:15.820And one of the ways that he feels like he was able to tame his chaotic mind was through the
00:11:21.780order of a universe where absolutes exist. That was something that he found really comforting.
00:11:27.280And what he tries to do throughout his career is, you know, impose that on other people.
00:11:31.380Which I think makes sense, right? If you're like, I beat this thing back, I have a sense that I did this myself. And it was hard, but it was worth it. And everything's better. So why are you complaining about things being bad when the solution is so clear? But what that doesn't take into account is, do you have resources that other people don't have?
00:11:54.120There is like all of this stuff that gets shut out when we get into this sort of like meritocracy kind of narrative about our own personal stories.
00:12:04.640And also just like, what if people are just different from you?
00:12:06.940Like not even like demographically, but just like, what if just like people tried that and it doesn't work?
00:14:26.580Man, I have read some books for various podcasts, Aubrey. I've never read something like this terminally unmeaningful. It's absolutely incredible.
00:14:37.080So I'm going to send you a screen grab of, you're not going to believe me, but I swear to God, I'm being generous.
00:14:43.240And like this paragraph isn't that bad.
00:15:46.300It is a qualitatively different phenomenon.
00:15:49.920Science might be considered, quote, description of the world with regards to those aspects
00:15:55.160that are consensually apprehensible. Myth can be regarded as, quote, the description of the world
00:16:02.520as it signifies. The mythic universe is a place to act, not a place to perceive. Myth describes
00:16:10.300things in terms of their unique or shared effective valence, their value, their motivational
00:16:16.200significance. The sky and the earth of the Sumerians are not the sky and earth of modern man,
00:16:22.420therefore they are the great father and mother of all things this is the cleaned up version you
00:16:30.060know that i'm on a big writing deadline currently that i am like hammering out pages and pages
00:16:35.540and this is my nightmare these are like my literal nightmares of like i'll wake up in the morning and
00:16:42.220read what i wrote the day before and it's gonna be just this i know the mythic universe is a place
00:16:47.240to act not to perceive like oh god trust me trust me it's not better in context i've read this
00:16:56.140entire chapter and this this paragraph does not make any sense and it sounds smart like myth is
00:17:04.320not proto-science it is different okay was anyone saying that it was proto-science not really so
00:17:10.820you're like deep sorry i i can't keep talking about this so behind all of this stuff he gives0.92
00:17:19.240a million lectures i have spent like the last six weeks trying to understand what the fuck this dude0.90
00:17:23.040is talking about to give him some credit behind all of this jargon and his just like very not0.56
00:17:30.360accurate description of various cultures myths he there's actually a very interesting insight
00:17:36.080what he says is that human beings are responding much more to narratives than they are to science
00:17:42.980and information oh we all want to think of ourselves as walking through a universe of
00:17:47.700facts right like it's going to rain today therefore i'm going to wear a jacket right we all we all
00:17:51.540think that that's what we're doing but what he's saying is that narratives are much more important
00:17:55.760for how we form our understandings of the world understandings of other people we filter everything
00:18:01.260including ourselves through stories, which like, I think is a genuinely profound insight.
00:18:07.040Absolutely. And it's also something that I will say from previous organizing life,
00:18:11.520it's something that's borne out by quite a bit of political research, right? People don't
00:18:16.000generally change their minds on political issues because of the facts, right? They change their
00:18:20.900minds because of people's stories. And because they hear other people like them say, you know,
00:18:27.740I used to think this, but now I think this. And that feels like giving them permission to change
00:18:33.000their minds. I think this is just true. I think he's just right here. I think he is too. And I
00:18:38.040also think, you know, I've come across this before. He's not the only person to be saying
00:18:41.200this, of course. I've seen people who've written about this that have said that, you know,
00:18:44.640metaphors are also really powerful. So if you think about a topic like immigration,
00:18:49.080one way to present immigration is as like an invasion, right? There's people coming from1.00
00:18:53.340the southern border, these like hordes coming into the country, right? Another way to think
00:18:56.920about immigration is like as a life raft like there's people out there that need help and we're
00:19:00.780inviting them in and we're going to help them yeah so jordan peterson is the worst imaginable
00:19:06.020messenger for this particular point but underneath all of his prose he is actually making some good
00:19:12.900points and like if you do like ninja ass old google searches you can find he's quoted in the
00:19:18.060new york times in like various random stories there's an npr article about him before any of
00:19:22.600the sort of famous stuff happens. He shows up on panel shows in Toronto. He's just someone who like
00:19:28.960he's actually building somewhat of a reputation as a public figure throughout the course of the
00:19:34.4402000s. And in September of 2016 is when he like really gets famous. So over this fall,
00:19:45.500the Canadian government is debating something called C-16, which is an amendment to the
00:19:50.800Canadian Human Rights Act and criminal code that, I cannot stress this enough, is going to add
00:19:56.540gender identity to an existing law. This is like a relatively minor update to an existing
00:20:04.680anti-discrimination law that already prohibits discrimination on the grounds of race and gender
00:20:10.980and sexual orientation. And so the Canadian government is like, well, we need to add gender
00:20:15.240identity to this. So they add this to this existing law. It's ultimately is like not that
00:20:19.280big of a deal well also not that big of a deal in canada a thing we still haven't done in the
00:20:23.840united states so i know i'm like this is table stakes and it's like we haven't done it yet
00:20:29.020so on september 27th 2016 canada has not passed this yet but they're like discussing it
00:20:39.080jordan peterson posts god help me a three hour long lecture what on youtube about this amendment
00:20:49.180it's called professor against political correctness he says that the canadian government
00:20:57.560is going to imprison you if you misgender a trans person it's one of these things that
00:21:04.860really frustrates me because people are like oh you don't understand the context like what about
00:21:09.180jordan peterson's like what you know what about the broader context of what jordan peterson is0.80
00:21:13.160saying and like i sat down and watched this fucking thing the first like five minutes he talks about0.92
00:21:18.060how universities are taken over by cultural Marxists. He says that the only reason this law0.98
00:21:23.740is going to get passed, I'm going to quote him. He says, I can't help but manifest the suspicion
00:21:30.720that it's partly because our current premier is a lesbian in her sexual preference.
00:21:36.500I don't think it's relevant to the political discussion, except insofar as the LGBT community
00:21:41.820has become extraordinarily good at organizing themselves and has a fairly pronounced and very,
00:21:46.820very sophisticated radical fringe i'll tell you what as someone who spent a lot of time
00:21:53.320organizing the lgbt community i'm honestly pretty flattered i know i'm like we are well organized0.98
00:22:00.540thank you it's just straightforward anti-trans conservative garbage he says that non-binary0.89
00:22:06.000people don't exist like there's no evidence that non-binary people exist right conveniently0.94
00:22:10.920disregarding the evidence that people are telling you they're non-binary hearsay it's all hearsay0.99
00:22:15.640Nailed it. But then what's fascinating to me about this is, you know, he's somewhat of a media figure, but still, he's just one random professor, right? And this bill has not passed. There's kind of like nothing there, right? It's basically like random professor gives like kind of shitty lecture. But this becomes like a huge national story and like a month long debate.0.98
00:22:35.660so the day after he publishes this lecture it shows up in the student newspaper and the right
00:22:43.640wing press in canada picks up on it and then two days after that the bbc comes out like an a weirdly
00:22:50.840sympathetic profile where it's like oh like the the professor who questions the trans dogma or
00:22:56.940whatever and it's like so we've now whipped up this basically like fairly inconsequential like0.96
00:23:02.060dude says asshole thing in a lecture we've now kind of created a debate out of thin air out of0.88
00:23:07.400this like nothing has actually happened well listen myth is not primitive proto-science0.98
00:23:12.400as the best book i've ever read told me it's a place to act not to perceive come on you know this
00:23:22.440it's so ridiculous he basically like becomes this public figure overnight so within0.88
00:23:31.560i think it's six months he's earning 80 000 a month on patreon holy shit so he ends up being0.90
00:23:38.520interviewed for various articles there's a million profiles of him as kind of like meet the man who's
00:23:43.740like the most important thinker on the new right and you know he goes on politically incorrect i
00:23:48.600mean within a year he does 160 city speaking tour he's like fish he's like going around the entire
00:23:55.240country and like talking to people and some of these venues are selling out like 3 000 seats
00:23:59.420listen don't drag fish into this leave the good people of fish do anything with jordan peterson
00:24:06.800this all kind of culminates in 2018 when all of this fame produces his first pop book which is
00:24:15.600called 12 rules for life which is based i did not know this until i read it but it's based
00:24:20.720on a series of quora posts like you know the q a website0.89
00:24:25.020it's just like a bunch of like shit post advice that he gave people that he's like whipped up0.79
00:24:32.820into a book oh my god i i like really struggled with this section of the episode because i'm like0.94
00:24:39.660okay we have to talk about like his actual message right like what what is he saying to people right
00:24:44.280but then when you actually boil it down like you actually read his book i've listened to probably
00:24:49.900five or ten lectures i've listened to every single joe rogan podcast everything he's saying0.97
00:24:54.320is just like straightforward conservative shit people keep talking about he's he's like this0.97
00:24:58.280iconoclastic challenging thinker and he's this academic and he has such like there's a million0.99
00:25:03.540articles scolding left-wing people and they're like why can't lefties listen to what he's saying
00:25:08.460and like the left keeps like twisting him out of context and then you get the context you try to
00:25:14.020actually engage and it's like oh okay so the gender wage gap is fake because you know women uh they
00:25:20.600leave the workforce to have babies so like that's why they don't get paid enough oh lordy he says
00:25:25.880that climate change is fake but he says it in this like slightly more academic way where it's like
00:25:30.960oh the way that you pull people out of poverty is through fossil fuels like we need the energy to
00:25:35.640pull you know chinese people and indian people out of poverty so if lefties really cared about
00:25:39.960alleviating poverty they would want us to burn as many fossil fuels as possible it's like a slightly
00:25:46.300different spin on it but like not really if you actually understand what the right is saying about
00:25:51.260climate change and also like okay so you're someone who like doesn't believe in any mitigation
00:25:55.220for climate change ultimately it's just like straight up and down conservative punditry0.97
00:26:00.720nonsense yeah it's just like you could read this shit in the national review at any time since the0.98
00:26:06.5001990s he wants to defund women's studies departments at one point he says like oh i'm0.99
00:26:12.780not sure about same-sex couples adopting because like children really need like a mother and a
00:26:17.460father in the home. Thanks, James Dobson. Neat. What I think really explains all this, you know,
00:26:22.460it's 2016. This is kind of after Trump had been elected after this really bitter and horrible
00:26:27.5602016 election. I think a lot of conservatives were looking for someone who would like allow
00:26:33.360them to keep all of their beliefs, but also reject what had just happened. Like it was so obvious
00:26:38.480that trump was awful like he's this like racist misogynist corrupt everything we learned during0.98
00:26:43.280the election and people felt kind of icky about voting for this guy right and the fact that he was0.97
00:26:48.320the figurehead of conservatism and so i think there was this huge unstated demand for like
00:26:54.120allow me to remain a conservative and allow me to support donald trump right i want to keep all my
00:27:00.040beliefs and i want to keep all my anxieties but i want them to be repackaged and sold to me in like
00:27:04.960more academic language, like in language that is more palatable to me, and makes me feel like I'm
00:27:09.880challenging dogmas, rather than just the stuff that I already believe, right? Like, I would like
00:27:15.700to support this candidate, but I don't want to be seen as one of his supporters. Exactly. I would
00:27:20.780like to support this racist, but I don't want anyone to think that I am racist. How can I do
00:27:25.200that? Make it seem intellectual. Exactly. Make it seem like it's rooted in some kind of science or
00:27:30.420some kind of valid critique or make it seem like people who do think that supporting Donald Trump
00:27:36.360makes you racist are actually like really regressive and they're resisting debate,
00:27:41.600which is part of a healthy democracy and all of that kind of stuff that is like legitimates what
00:27:48.040is functionally just like discomfort with a decision that they have made.
00:27:51.220Yes, exactly. And yeah, I don't, I have nothing to add. I'm just like, yeah.
00:27:55.440so this is also i think a big part of his appeal to conservatives is this thing that like he's an
00:28:03.820academic and he's a little bit inscrutable i think this is also part of the marketing like the joke
00:28:09.500during 2017 was that his ben and jerry's flavor was that's not what i meant very good this is an
00:28:16.400excerpt from a very good uh new york times profile of jordan peterson actually let me send this to
00:28:21.320Yeah, send me a quote. Mr. Peterson illustrates his arguments with copious references to ancient
00:28:28.880myths, bringing up stories of witches, biblical allegories, and ancient traditions. I ask why
00:28:35.020these old stories should guide us today. Quote, it makes sense that a witch lives in a swamp.0.74
00:28:40.220Yeah, he says. Why? Right. That's right. You don't know. It's because those things hang together at
00:28:45.940a very deep level, right? Yeah. And it makes sense that an old king lives in a desiccated tower,
00:28:52.780but witches don't exist and they don't live in swamps. I say, quote, yeah, they do. They exist.
00:28:57.700They just don't exist the way you think they exist. They certainly exist. You may say, well,
00:29:02.580dragons don't exist. It's like, yes, they do. The category predator and the category dragon
00:29:08.960are the same category. It absolutely exists. It exists absolutely more than anything else.
00:29:15.940You say, well, there's no such thing as witches.
00:31:36.580what i meant by success was do they have a real estate portfolio it's like well that's not what
00:31:42.200success means sure you know sure also like this stuff can sound kind of deep and kind of smart
00:31:48.820right you're like oh he's saying that witches do exist like it's kind of a provocative idea
00:31:53.540and then once you boil it down all he's really saying it's like the most banal thing they're
00:31:58.440like yeah witches exist because there's many myths about witches well yeah that's really
00:32:01.680that's just a really obvious thing to say right or the fact that like people can lie their way
00:32:06.320a monetary success but it doesn't mean that they've achieved some sort of self-actualization
00:32:10.520also pretty banal yeah like sure yeah okay then what so much of his success is really just like
00:32:18.640taking these conservative just bog standard conservative views and then like encoding them
00:32:24.880like fucking enigma device in these like weird roundabout phrases and these like totally just0.82
00:32:31.600disjointed sentences and then you have like decode them and by the time you figure out what0.98
00:32:36.200they mean like you feel smart yeah you're like oh we're like vibing we've gotten the same page
00:32:40.640but it's like he hasn't actually said anything yeah i mean i'll say that doesn't mean you have
00:32:45.540a better argument right that doesn't mean that you're making good points it just means that
00:32:50.260you're using words that sort of like attract people's attention i heard i forget who i'm
00:32:54.840stealing this from but somebody said that everything he says is either false or obvious
00:32:59.000i like that one i mean the thing that i was going to say is like when you step onto tv or
00:33:11.160you get on mic on the radio or a podcast or whatever you do have to communicate things
00:33:16.760in a way that people can understand and if you don't that's not actually on them right exactly
00:33:21.280that's pretty much just on you okay so we're finally at the point of the episode where we're
00:33:24.660circling back to the carnivore diet okay let's roll he comes to the carnivore diet through his
00:33:33.080daughter Michaela this is actually like a pretty sad and pretty understandable story so Michaela
00:33:39.900is diagnosed when she's seven years old with chronic juvenile rheumatoid arthritis oh that's
00:33:47.820rough man she has her hip and her ankle replaced when she's 16 she is on seven different medications
00:33:56.220by the time she's in college she has severe depression she's then taking medications for
00:34:01.840the depression she goes to university but she has to drop out for you know a combination of
00:34:08.280the physical issues and the mental issues she says at that time she can only really be awake
00:34:12.980for like six hours a day because she has chronic fatigue like it's just like just a really awful
00:34:18.980story and i think as many people do when they have these you know these clusters of like
00:34:25.820interacting and complex illnesses she has this like sense of desperation and she starts experimenting
00:34:31.860with her diet so in 2015 she cuts out gluten and she sees like this dramatic improvement in like
00:34:38.760both her physical things and her mental things but it's not quite enough so that she then sort
00:34:43.640of switches to keto it helps a little bit more but it still feels like it's not quite enough
00:34:48.300and then she's surfing the internet and she comes across a woman named charlene anderson
00:34:55.040a woman who claims that she cured her lyme disease from an all beef diet and she says that she's been
00:35:03.480eating nothing but ribeye steaks for 20 years makes me really nervous so michaela sees all this
00:35:11.700and she honestly thinks that it sounds like kind of bananas but she's like whatever like i'll try
00:35:16.500it right like you'll try anything for a couple days and also if you're suffering with this like0.98
00:35:20.380awful briar patch of various intersecting illnesses like you're fucking desperate0.61
00:35:24.680so she goes on this all beef diet according to her everything cleared up this is from a post on0.99
00:35:32.560her blog in 2016 she says everything wrong with me was diet related arthritis depression anxiety
00:35:39.880lower back pain chronic fatigue brain fog itchy skin acne tiny blisters on my knuckles floaters
00:35:45.800mouth ulcers twitching at night night sweats tube sensitivity and the list goes on everything wrong
00:35:51.520with me was fixable as you heard in the clip in april of 2018 this is two months before he goes
00:35:57.400on the joe rogan podcast she tells her dad to go on this all beef diet and like maybe it will work
00:36:02.460for him too. And so he goes on the diet and like you heard him describing, right? Like he got
00:36:07.400universally 100% better. Now we're going to dive into the carnivore diet itself and the winding
00:36:15.700path that it took to Michaela Peterson's laptop. I did a Google trends search because I didn't like
00:36:23.520know how else to research this. I cannot express to you like how niche this was. The earliest
00:36:29.700evidence of this existing that i could find was a bodybuilder in the 1950s who recommended an all
00:36:37.360meat diet you know bodybuilders have a bulking and a cutting cycle and it's like you know 30 days of
00:36:43.080this and 90 days of that it's like very regimented sure the all meat diet was like one of those
00:36:47.820short-term regimens it wasn't it wasn't like a lifestyle yeah i mean i can't fathom that
00:36:55.480But certainly anyone with like a working knowledge of like sports medicine or any of that kind of stuff would be like, yeah, yeah, no, do this all the time.
00:37:03.400The earliest like kind of sort of mainstream mention of this that I found was in 2006, there's something called the Active Low Carber Forums, which is a message board for people who are doing Atkins.
00:38:35.240it requires a powerful will and determination to change to succeed in adopting the quote-unquote
00:38:40.480extreme diet that this website is based on. Even those who are morbidly obese, as powerful a
00:38:46.340motivation as any I can imagine, will have cravings for what I call non-food, by which I mean
00:38:52.900all vegetation and carbs, which will eventually prove irresistible. I mean, when you said eating
00:38:59.480non-foods I was really prepared for some Michael Pollan business right I didn't expect the next
00:39:05.840thing to be like like vegetables all vegetation and carbs Jesus Christmas this is like fairly
00:39:13.420mainstream messaging among the carnivore diet people that like it's not just like this diet0.99
00:39:18.720works for me everything that isn't animal products is poison sorry Hindus you've been eating mostly
00:39:27.260non-food so good this kind of sort of bounces around the internet but it's like super niche0.97
00:39:32.880the first mainstream news coverage i can find of this this is absurd there's a motherboard article0.93
00:39:40.640in 2017 called inside the world of the bitcoin carnivores which is a living fucking nightmare0.85
00:39:51.160yeah i'm just trying to think of like what else do you put in there to make it worse like fire0.90
00:39:54.940festival it's happening at we work great so this article chronicles that like this all animal
00:40:04.600product diet has become popular among silicon valley and like not just silicon valley but like
00:40:09.960a subset of silicon valley that is really into cryptocurrency so there's a guy who's quoted in
00:40:17.140this article and like every other article about bitcoin carnivores who says bitcoin is a revolt0.95
00:40:23.040against fiat money and an all meat diet is a revolt against fiat food what what the fuck0.97
00:40:30.200what's he even talking about i mean fiat food doesn't make any fucking sense it's like fiat0.99
00:40:35.260money is like government-backed money you know currency is like fake like currency is a social0.80
00:40:39.380construction on some level right if you believe in a dollar and i believe in a dollar then we can
00:40:42.800exchange yeah but then applying that to food like fiat food it like doesn't make any sense it's like
00:40:48.860a nine word sentence boy his metaphor just completely breaks down i hate it extremely
00:40:55.960much he says the people who tell you to eat your six to ten portions of indigestible toxic grains
00:41:02.820a day are the same kind of people who tell you central banks have to determine interest rates
00:41:09.200oh my god these things have nothing in common and also again you get this invocation of
00:41:15.900indigestible toxic grains this also just feels like it's real it's just edging closer and closer
00:41:23.340to complaints about like globalists and like anti-semitic conspiracy theories it gets real
00:41:29.940right wing real fast yeah i bet so i have spent a lot of time unfortunately in the last month
00:41:37.160looking at like the social media of various carnivore influencer dudes there's really only
00:41:41.580two main ones one is this guy named sean baker who used to be a licensed medical professional
00:41:48.060like an actual doctor but he became such an evangelist for the carnivore diet it seems
00:41:53.720that his hospital fired him his hospital was like you can't just tell all your patients to switch to
00:41:58.780an all-meat diet dude yeah he can no longer practice medicine but he's become this like big
00:42:03.120influencer guy and he has like a cookbook and everything and then the other one is a guy named
00:42:07.920Paul Saladino. Both of these dudes are like super right-wing guys, you know, flirting with anti-vax
00:42:13.880stuff. Paul Saladino, I wasn't even aware of this. Paul Saladino is a sunscreen truther.
00:42:23.300I've read a lot of his man's tweets. They're like little Bible verses. One of them says,
00:42:28.660the best way to protect your skin from the sun is by not eating seed oils. Sunscreen is the worst
00:42:34.440way good so don't wear sunscreen he also says toothpaste is a scam liver heart meat equal signs
00:42:43.020the best tooth care ever created yeah good that's good there's also another guy that i found on
00:42:50.720youtube he just put out a video saying that the canadian this canadian trucker protest thing
00:42:55.240is a false flag and it's all actors i don't know why
00:43:00.940anytime we start talking about like public political action or like public tragedies as
00:43:08.040being actors i get real nervous right it's just very strange and also as we're talking about this
00:43:16.220it is nearing lunchtime and i'm like man i could really go for a steak i know i i made some ground
00:43:21.900beef earlier this week i was like oh now i'm in the mood for ground beef yeah that's sound good
00:43:27.500Okay. So I want to spend most of the rest of the episode talking about some of the main
00:43:33.340myths of the carnivore diet. So if you read the carnivore books and you look at the carnivore
00:43:40.220influencer accounts, you find the same three factual claims repeated a million times.
00:43:47.360And I want to actually take these seriously. So the first myth is that plants are bad for you.
00:43:54.460this is a quote from one of the bitcoin carnivores in a usa today article plants are varying levels
00:44:00.560of toxic to humans hence why so many of them are poisonous and even some of the ones we can eat
00:44:05.700such as beans must first be carefully prepared and cooked to remove toxic proteins hey man
00:44:12.680some plants are hemlock so all of them are probably hemlock there's also this thing we debunked this
00:44:19.540on one of the bonus episodes i'm not gonna go too deeply into it but they keep bringing up this thing
00:44:23.680of anti-nutrients oh i remember this do you remember this so my recollection and you correct
00:44:30.540me if i'm wrong is that anti-nutrients are like really are part of many fruits and vegetables
00:44:37.140and that they prevent absorption of some vitamins or minerals but at a just an incredibly low level
00:44:47.420yeah yes there are some little elements in like beans and broccoli and some other vegetables
00:44:52.120that reduce the absorption of iron they don't completely prevent you from absorbing any iron
00:44:57.980they just reduce the amount of iron that you can get from food and 99 of them boil off like they
00:45:04.800they come off when the food is cooked so all of these anti-nutrients are basically just like a
00:45:09.400non-entity but the carnivore people have seized on these as like look like plants are actually
00:45:14.640sucking the nutrients out of you and it's like well they don't negate all the nutrients that
00:45:19.340fruits and vegetables have yeah there's also a sort of sub category of this is that they love
00:45:25.680to highlight quote-unquote all of the indigenous societies that have lived on an all-meat diet
00:45:31.680so this is from an abysmal website called diagnosis diet it says to the best of my knowledge
00:45:39.460the world has yet to produce a civilization which has eaten a vegan diet from childhood through
00:45:44.580death whereas there are numerous examples throughout recorded history of people from
00:45:48.460a variety of cultural, ethnic, and geographical backgrounds who have lived on mainly meat diets
00:45:53.660for decades, lifetimes, generations. This for some reason is like very important to the carnivore
00:45:59.800people that like there are societies that have lived on all meat diets and like have been fine.
00:46:05.560The sort of the obvious one, like the one that they bring up the most is like the Inuits in the
00:46:08.940far north. I looked into this expecting to debunk it, but it's actually like true that the vast
00:46:14.040majority of their calories came from animal-based sources. But this is an excerpt from a Discover
00:46:20.920magazine profile of Patricia Cochran, who's a Alaska native who writes about her childhood
00:46:26.080growing up there. She says, our meat was seal and walrus, marine mammals that live in cold water and
00:46:31.900have lots of fat. We used seal oil for our cooking as a dipping sauce for food. We hunted ducks,
00:46:37.700geese, and little land birds like quail. We caught crabs and lots of fish, salmon, whitefish, tomcod,
00:46:43.120pike and char the elders liked stink fish fish buried in seal bags or cans in the tundra and
00:46:48.420left to ferment in the short subarctic winters the family searched for roots and greens and best of
00:46:54.120all from a child's point of view wild blueberries crowberries or salmon berries which my aunts would
00:46:59.060mix with whipped fat to make a special treat akin to ice cream oh my god i bet that's beyond so like
00:47:05.420this is a society that yes did get somewhere like 90 to 95 percent of the calories came for various
00:47:12.420animal products but it's also like extremely diverse yeah right they're having fermented foods
00:47:17.640they're having oils the skin of whales is apparently very high in vitamin c which is why
00:47:22.920these communities didn't have rates of scurvy so it's like yes they're eating an all-meat diet
00:47:29.180essentially but like they're doing it in a context where like they've kind of evolved and like
00:47:34.200adapted cultural practices around this and they're doing it in a specific way they're not just like
00:47:39.560having the same thing over and over again three meals a day well and it's not all meat right it
00:47:44.460might be mostly meat i mean like and you could frankly make a similar argument about vegetarianism
00:47:50.120and veganism right that there are plenty of societies where vegetarianism is a norm that
00:47:55.780doesn't mean that because it wasn't completely vegan by today's standards all the way all the
00:48:00.440time right it's it's uh searching through history to prove your weird point about your extremely
00:48:07.800contemporary diet it's also so fucking weird to me because you can find these debates online of
00:48:12.060like well you know how how many berries were they eating or like how long was the summer growing
00:48:16.620season when you could find roots blah blah blah and it's like what are we proving here the fact
00:48:21.420that there's a society at some time and there's other examples i always pick the same like six
00:48:26.560or seven examples of other hunter-gatherer societies that lived on an all-meat diet it's
00:48:30.460like fine but there's thousands of societies throughout human history most of them were
00:48:37.220omnivorous it's not really an argument to say that like this one society lived on this diet0.98
00:48:43.920therefore it's the best diet yeah the fact that the inuits did this the only thing that proves
00:48:48.420is that it's like possible for humans and like humans don't instantly die living on this diet
00:48:52.560which like yeah that's kind of useful information but it says nothing about an optimal diet yeah so
00:48:57.660then what? Right. So the second myth is that meat is like a more pure way to eat or like a cleaner
00:49:06.420way to eat. There's a lot of weird purity stuff wrapped up in this. Yeah. But one of the things
00:49:11.140that's very interesting to me is that when Michaela Peterson talks about doing her version
00:49:17.040of the carnivore diet, she tells the Atlantic that when she's doing this, she allows herself
00:49:23.540to drink bourbon and vodka what the author of the piece is like well wait a minute if this whole
00:49:30.140thing is about like clean eating the reason it works is like toxic you know gets toxins out of
00:49:36.160your system yeah you then allow yourself alcohol no it's a disinfectant mike right exactly it's
00:49:42.040very healthy and also like a lot of the sort of silicon valley bros talk about you know plants
00:49:47.160are poisonous and it's toxic whatever but then they also talk about how they allow themselves
00:49:50.540to drink coffee on the diet and like well coffee's a plant why are there these carve-outs and there's
00:49:56.620one one of the carnivore influencer guys you know they only eat beef and salt but he says that the0.99
00:50:01.780salt has to be himalayan salt what the fuck is this the fucking like seven dollar salt at the0.99
00:50:07.140store it feels like the um bulletproof coffee stuff which is like put butter in your coffee0.99
00:50:13.200but it doesn't work unless it's grass-fed where you're like what yes why dude the beef people have
00:50:19.260weird fetish for grass-fed man everybody says that you have to do it with grass-fed beef or0.70
00:50:24.840else it doesn't work which like i fucking looked into this the reason why this diet quote-unquote0.80
00:50:31.220works especially for weight loss is because fat and protein make you feel full sure this is why0.88
00:50:36.580the atkins diet quote-unquote works this is why keto works it's like you just feel really full if
00:50:41.920you eat like just a steak and nothing else right and one of the main reasons that that works is
00:50:46.980because most steaks are like high in fat right sure but grass-fed beef is much lower in fat
00:50:52.700yeah like this was kind of the marketing of grass-fed beef originally it was like diet beef
00:50:57.500so the whole like the the logic of the all beef diet completely breaks down because you're going
00:51:04.180for the kind of beef that doesn't fit the parameters like the biological parameters
00:51:08.300that you're actually going for you should be looking for highest fat available it's the same
00:51:12.980with vitamins stuff if you look at the rhetoric of the people recommending grass-fed beef they
00:51:18.120always point out that grass-fed beef has two to three times more omega-3s and this is actually
00:51:25.280true i looked this up there's if you look at a hamburger patty a normal beef patty has like 30
00:51:31.160milligrams of omega-3s and then a grass-fed hamburger patty has 90 milligrams of omega-3s
00:51:36.940you look at that as like a lay person and you're like wow 30 versus 90 like that's a lot higher
00:51:41.520obviously yeah but then what they don't give you is the broader context so if you go look up the
00:51:47.280daily recommended allowance of omega-3s it's 1600 milligrams yeah to get up to your daily allowance
00:51:54.660you'd have to eat 20 hamburger patties even a grass-fed hamburger patty has less omega-3s
00:52:02.180than a single walnut so it's like they defend the carnivore diet on the basis of the nutrients that
00:52:10.220it has but you're like well if you're interested in nutrients then you would be eating a varied
00:52:16.020diet yeah it's just i don't know i mean you mentioned this in a previous episode so i have
00:52:21.680it's been on my mind ever since that like there is this weird ritualization oh yeah right that is
00:52:29.940like no it can't just be butter it has to be this particular kind of butter it can't just be this
00:52:35.880it has to be the specific like it can't just be salt you can't use mortons you got to have
00:52:40.920himalayan pink salt which all sort of contributes to this thing that we've definitely talked about
00:52:47.780before on the show which is basically like if it doesn't work then that's on you right oh totally
00:52:51.820yeah the butter was grass-fed but not hormone-free or it was hormone-free but not grass-fed yeah it's
00:52:58.360so nitpicky in its sort of application currently but when it looks for historical examples to
00:53:04.720legitimate itself. It is extremely not nitpicky. Right. I mean, there's a very good article in
00:53:10.620the Atlantic about this diet and all the sort of social constructions that go along with it.
00:53:14.320And he says, the beneficial effects of a compelling personal narrative that helps
00:53:18.480explain and give order to the world can be absolutely physiologically real. It's well
00:53:23.380documented that the immune system is modulated by our lifestyles, from how much we sleep and move
00:53:28.220to how well we eat and how much we drink. Most importantly, the immune system is also modulated
00:53:32.680by stress, which tends to be a byproduct of a perceived lack of control or order. When it comes
00:53:37.860to dieting, the inherent properties of the substances ingested can be less important than
00:53:42.380the eater's conceptualization of them as either tolerable or intolerable, good or bad. What's
00:53:48.520actually therapeutic may be the act of elimination itself. Various other debunky websites have
00:53:55.280pointed out that there are people who claim to have cured juvenile chronic arthritis with a
00:54:01.880vegan diet. You can see the same results, the same sorts of anecdotes of I cured this and I cured that
00:54:07.640with all kinds of different diets across time, across cultures. It's people believing in this
00:54:14.180that is producing the health benefits, which are real, which can be very significant.
00:54:19.500Yeah. As the placebo effect has been proven to be very effective when people genuinely
00:54:23.680believe that they're getting some kind of remedy, right?
00:54:26.660It's actually very similar to Jordan Peterson's whole thing of
00:54:29.680finding order amid your own personal chaos like it makes sense that this is a way for people to
00:54:35.700process their own experience especially if you're suffering from a chronic illness right you've been
00:54:39.000looking your whole life for something that works and like this is so regimented it sort of it feels
00:54:44.360almost medical right yeah there's this pain that goes along with it there's this monotony kind of
00:54:48.780like taking a pill it's like you're turning food into this more medical paradigm yeah but it can't
00:54:54.920be that mike it's gotta be no it's gotta be that it's all just beef salt and water grass it's grass
00:55:00.320beef definitely not socially influenced it's definitely not shaped by your expectations0.92
00:55:05.880none of that it's just beef salt water so the final myth we're gonna debunk this one's a little
00:55:11.620bit longer carnivore people say quite frequently that meat is what made us human huh this is an
00:55:17.360excerpt from the grateful dead guys somewhere in the 251 pages oh my god delightful he says
00:55:22.760humans were totally hunting peoples until the end of the paleolithic age no paleolithic
00:55:28.840archaeological dig has ever produced any food residues from vegetables the so-called neanderthin
00:55:35.200and paleo diet thus are both nonsense true paleolithic people were total carnivores
00:55:41.000and ate no veggies whatsoever in the relatively short evolutionary period since the consumption
00:55:46.320of vegetables as food there has never been any real adaptation to such low grade low energy
00:55:52.560difficult to digest foods because we have no adaptation to digesting or processing vegetables0.83
00:55:58.280they are basically all very bad for us so two things one citation fucking needed my guy also0.93
00:56:07.320this plays into this absolutely bizarre trope that is like we just need to return to our roots we0.94
00:56:15.000just need to like eat and behave like cavemen is sort of the idea right but if you're looking for
00:56:23.220like when have we as humanity been at our healthiest and had our longest life expectancies
00:56:28.980it is within the last hundred years everybody like it is like historically very recent well also0.98
00:56:35.780we're not even talking about the right fucking species so this drives me nuts that like this0.93
00:56:42.300thing of meat made us human or whatever it's actually true that two million years ago it0.98
00:56:49.320appears homo erectus which is like the precursor species that has now died out to humans one of
00:56:56.000the theories is that the consumption of meat like allowed homo erectus to thrive as a species
00:57:03.320because meat has much more calories because this was before cooking there was no way to get this
00:57:08.140kind of calories out of food so you were just like chewing like roots and stuff like we were
00:57:12.060basically like chimpanzees. Our precursor species, we think only ate like two to three percent of
00:57:18.460its diet was meat. But then once you go to much higher levels of meat, you then have the excess
00:57:24.600calories that then you can kind of pour into a larger brain. So what happened over the course
00:57:30.320of evolution was what eventually became humans, our brains expanded in size by like 300%. Like
00:57:35.780we got way bigger brains. It takes a lot more calories to have bigger brains because brains
00:57:40.080use up so much energy so you sort of need to have more calories coming into your species
00:57:45.240and so the explanation is that like maybe we did switch to meat eating and that allowed us to have
00:57:51.000larger brains and also smaller guts because it's easier to digest you don't need as many like
00:57:54.340layers of your gut to like break down root fibers and shit so that is actually like a fairly credible
00:58:00.500theory on this but it's like much more disputed it's not clear that that happened right it's a
00:58:07.220theory yeah and it's like there's other there's other versions of it where like it might have
00:58:11.760actually been cooking that did that because when you start to cook vegetables like you know think
00:58:16.060of a raw potato versus a cooked potato you have like way more calories that are getting out of it
00:58:20.280once it's soft you don't have to digest it as much you can absorb more and then the the biggest
00:58:25.960thing is like what does it mean to say that meat made us human right it's like you could also say
00:58:30.600that like fire made us human you could say that social organization cooperation made us human
00:58:35.840I mean, you could say basically anything made as human. It's like a totally meaningless thing to
00:58:40.520say. Well, it's also just a fundamentally weird and flawed premise to say, because there's this
00:58:47.220sort of evolutionary theory about the role of meat, it does not then follow that only eating meat
00:58:55.380would facilitate your individual health, right, in the space of one lifetime. Evolution is
00:59:01.700something that takes place over the course of centuries millennia right the idea that you could
00:59:08.340do something that somebody thinks contributed to evolution and that would then either facilitate
00:59:15.740your individual health or like i don't know make you personally evolve which is not how evolution
00:59:22.960works like it's just so like the logic just falls apart on like any level of examination and this
00:59:29.960is also it's so it's so funny reading actual scientists that work on like early man and0.65
00:59:34.960precursors to man and they're like what the fuck are you talking about like this doesn't
00:59:39.700like this isn't even homo erectus isn't even the same species there's there's nothing that implies0.97
00:59:44.360about that theory a that they were eating only meat which makes no sense that a species would
00:59:49.800go from like roughly three percent meat consumption to 100 when there were all kinds
00:59:55.560of like vegetation available that we had been eating for the entire origin of our species
00:59:59.760even the scientists like i found an interview with the woman who actually like proposed this
01:00:05.380meat eating hypothesis originally and they're like what do you think about the paleo diet she's0.95
01:00:09.140like oh it's bullshit like it doesn't make any sense like you can't even get her on board right
01:00:14.040yeah i will say we have not gotten a ton of requests to cover the paleo diet but the ones0.98
01:00:19.680that we have gotten are from people who study like the science of early man oh i need to email
01:00:26.900will you please cover this people are constantly talking about like we need to like behave like0.54
01:00:32.980cavemen we need to like do all this shit and there's like zero evidence yes it's this weird
01:00:38.700like western class privileged sort of fetishization of a less developed society it's james cameron0.98
01:00:46.660making avatar but it's like what i think is fascinating about this is like okay we should
01:00:53.760eat like our human precursors, ancestors. This is what made us human. Fine. But then when? Between
01:01:00.1002 million years ago and now, which society should we be aiming for? There's actually really
01:01:05.240interesting articles about the adaptations that humans have had to agriculture. So there's some
01:01:10.440societies that have been drinking a lot more milk. Northern Europeans have way more lactase and they
01:01:15.140can process lactose. Whereas like most people in East Asia cannot process lactose. Right. Okay,
01:01:20.140well should i be drinking milk is it right to be drinking milk well where where are your parents
01:01:23.500from and their parents and their parents yeah it's not clear to me why we should be looking
01:01:27.260two million years ago to like a species that no longer exists when much more recent history is
01:01:34.660available if that's even if that's even what like the logic that we should be looking at because
01:01:39.420there's tons of research on early humans and like the enzymes they had in their saliva could like
01:01:45.420break down starchy tubers and stuff like there's i went like down a deep rabbit hole in this stuff
01:01:50.760it's super interesting but it's just like it's not a credible view a that like early ancestors
01:01:57.760should be dictating how we're eating today in general and b that early ancestors were eating
01:02:02.520all meat right it is way the fuck easier to go pick some berries to go find some mushrooms to
01:02:10.340forage than it is to track down kill cook and eat an animal so this is okay this is my attempt to
01:02:19.540bring us full circle here we go brace yourself what is interesting to me about the intersection0.97
01:02:25.740between all of these like bullshit carnivore myths that are bouncing around the internet
01:02:28.820and jordan peterson everything we've just talked about is demonstrating jordan peterson's one
01:02:36.680insight that people respond to narratives and not facts all of the reasons why people do the0.92
01:02:43.020carnivore diet it's fucking narratives this is what makes us human this is there's a lot of1.00
01:02:47.620weird masculinity shit this is what makes us men it's all bullshit but it's all like a story it's1.00
01:02:52.620a very convincing story that you tell yourself not only about why this diet works for you1.00
01:02:59.220but why it is superior to all the other diets yeah you just want to connect with your sense of like
01:03:05.460power and ruggedness and whatever as like a dude and you feel disconnected from that currently
01:03:12.620so the idea of being like just only beef like man food really resonates with that
01:03:18.920yeah in a way that weight watchers points for example might not it's also funny to me that
01:03:24.220jordan peterson totally rejects this thing that like you know gender is socially constructed or0.98
01:03:28.400race is socially constructed he hates this shit and he's actively socially constructing it yeah0.98
01:03:33.220His entire career is this like perfect demonstration of how you can fall into exactly the traps that you yourself have identified.0.99
01:03:41.160So like, that's the thing that happens when you sort of go, oh, nothing socially constructed, everything is real, regardless of what you say and what you want to believe about the nature of gender or race or whatever other thing. Like it just is real. So deal with it. And what that allows for is it allows for people with a great deal of privilege to construct their own affirming narrative.
01:04:03.160while also shutting down anyone else's affirming narratives right right it is such a weird0.99
01:04:08.800blatant moment of like you're making shit up anyway here's the shit that i made up right and0.96
01:04:13.180also and also presenting it as fact and presenting it as settled science too yeah of like well look0.99
01:04:17.880you know the uh meat's what made us human so look you're saying a vegan diet works for you i'm sorry
01:04:23.280like that's just not a human way to eat yeah that's an ideological argument but you don't
01:04:27.340realize that it's an ideological argument yourself you think that you're just stating a fact well and
01:04:31.800even if you do you're not going to say that right exactly like you've wrapped up too much of your
01:04:36.260political and cultural capital in insisting that your viewpoint it's a very convenient thing to do
01:04:42.620to say oh everyone else has biased viewpoints but mine is based in science and you cannot question
01:04:50.420it right like it is this sort of self-preserving logic that is utterly bizarre but there is this
01:04:59.380kind of head in the sand response to any kind of criticism of it that's like nope mine is real
01:05:04.560yeah mine is real and rational yours is made up and fake so i thought that i should do a whole
01:05:09.460thing like debunking the carnivore diet and talking about you know studies and stuff but
01:05:14.240it's like do we have to debunk it it's one food like i i've seen i've seen these like debunkings
01:05:22.080that are like you know red meat is like linked to higher cholesterol and heart attacks and i'm like
01:05:26.800it's one food like broccoli is very good for you you shouldn't go on an all broccoli diet
01:05:33.880right so the idea that like we even have to do like have to make any work to say like don't eat
01:05:39.860nothing but ribeyes can humans live if they eat nothing but ribeyes probably or like apparently
01:05:45.060yeah i mean part of me feels like you actually have to give like fewer warnings to people
01:05:50.520not to try this in an episode like this because the diet is so fucking deranged i mean there's
01:05:56.660so many articles were like i am a writer and i'm gonna go on the all meat diet and like no one lasts0.82
01:06:02.140longer than like five days yeah one poor guy from the guardian makes it like three days like some0.71
01:06:07.500dude from men's health just like totally fucking breaks down and like quits the assignment like0.54
01:06:12.800people cannot do this yeah the final thing i want to say about this is there's like a number of side0.93
01:06:17.720effects from this diet that are like i don't remember like backyard downstairs stuff that i
01:06:22.760don't really want to talk about on the podcast i mean i'm gonna go ahead and assume you're just
01:06:26.420talking about constipation right as like a zero fiber diet there's a p well there's a period of
01:06:31.740like fountainous not constipatedness and then there's a period of like yeah because there's
01:06:37.620no fiber then it becomes like the opposite yes i do i do like quietly pressing you to talk about
01:06:44.160poop i mean i don't know why you've done this to me what are you doing it is a particular favorite
01:06:50.600of mine but then i mean there's all kinds of weird side effects of this sure medical professionals
01:06:55.280are unanimous and like don't do this diet it's really bad news but one of the bad newsnesses
01:07:01.460about it is that eating this for too long like one food can it seems like change your gut bacteria
01:07:08.680and change what your body is able to absorb after you've been on this diet for a while
01:07:14.700you can't eat anything else and you'll have like really bad attacks and like kind of allergic
01:07:21.240reactions if you eat anything other than just you know ribeye steaks and salt so this is ultimately
01:07:29.140what happens to jordan peterson what next episode we are going to talk about how it's a cliffhanger
01:07:36.660it's a cliffhanger god damn it mike next episode we are going to talk about how jordan peterson's
01:07:43.080deviation from this diet starts a chain of events that ends up with him in a medically induced coma0.59
01:07:50.660in moscow what don't google between now and then aubrey don't go on the internet so mean to spend0.91
01:07:59.080an entire episode being like look at the rise of all this bullshit look at this dude who's making0.98
01:08:04.360these wild ass fucking claims about how people need to only eat beef salt and water oh yeah by0.99
01:08:09.680the way he's gonna get his comeuppance you're gonna hear about it in two weeks see ya aubrey1.00
01:08:13.700reality is a place of myth and podcasts are a place of me fucking with you0.98