Maintenance Phase - Jordan Peterson Part 1: The Carnivore Diet

Episode Date: March 1, 2022

Oops all meat: How a '50s bodybuilder, a Grateful Dead roadie and an unreadable professor accidentally launched one of America's wildest fad diets. Here's Mike's "Cancel Culture" video! Note: In our discussion of Jordan Peterson’s political correctness lecture, I made a sarcastic comment about looking “slim in this dress.” After the episode came out, we started hearing from listeners that my comment reminded them of fatphobic jokes they’d heard in the past and didn’t feel consistent with the message of the show. They were right! It was a bad joke and we've removed it from the episode. We'll be discussing this and our approach to handling feedback and editing past episodes in more detail soon. Thanks to everyone who wrote in to let us know! — MikeSupport us:Hear bonus episodes on PatreonDonate on PayPalGet Maintenance Phase T-shirts, stickers and moreLinks!Joe Rogan Experience #1070 - Jordan PetersonAtlantic article on the all-beef dietJordan Peterson, Custodian of the PatriarchyIs Jordan Peterson the stupid man's smart person?How dangerous is Jordan B. Peterson?The Intellectual We DeserveJordan Peterson & Fascist MysticismThe Pronoun WarriorJordan Peterson’s Gospel of MasculinityThe Bizarre Fad Diet Taking the Far Right by StormInside the World of the 'Bitcoin Carnivores'Human Ancestors Were Nearly All VegetariansMy carnivore diet: what I learned from eating only beef, salt and waterThe Inuit ParadoxWhy Right Wingers Are Going Crazy About MeatOwsley “The Bear” Stanley’s Active Low-Carber Forum PostsThanks to Doctor Dreamchip for our lovely theme song!Support the show

[♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ Uh, you want a tagline as in? Sure. This is how I'm gauging how fresh you're coming into this episode. What does she have for a tagline? Oh, okay. What's she working with? Uh, hi everybody and welcome to Maintenance Phase,

the podcast that is searing off Lady Gaga's meat dress and serving that and only that. Because we're talking about a carnivore. I am Michael Hobbs. I am Aubrey Gordon. And if you want to support the show, you can find us on Patreon at patreon.com slash Maintenance Faze. This month's bonus episode is an illness influencer's

spectacular. Exciting! Exciting! Also I should mention that I don't know if I'm allowed to mention stuff like this. I'm also a YouTuber now. I'm I used to make video essays and I stopped doing that and I missed it and so I just made a 20-minute long video about cancel culture that you can find on my YouTube channel, whose name I forget, but if you Google Michael Hobbs YouTube, it probably comes up. Smash that subscribe button. Smash the button.

Ah! So I was like on the fence about doing this episode. I've been doing research on this for like weeks, and I was kinda like, I don't know, like every other like lefty podcast has a Jordan Peterson episode. Every lefty journalist has their like Jordan Peterson article. And then you told me that you're coming in fresh,

that like you barely know anything about Jordan Peterson. And I was like, okay, now I'm just gonna teach I've recorded about this. Well, and I think everybody everywhere has their Jordan Peterson episode, but I get the impression that few of those really digging on the carnivore diet nonsense. True.

This podcast aims to be the filet of the podcasts. That's not Jordan Peterson. It's me. I'll beef metaphors. Yeah, you're out of Chorazcaria. Tell me, yeah, tell me what you know. Who's this Jordan Peterson guy? Give me, give me everything you know.

He's a professor of like psychology or something, right? Yep. My impression is that he's done quite a bit of work to lend some sort of legitimacy by virtue of his academic work to things like men's rights activists and quote unquote gender-critical feminists who I would just call TERFs and that he has had quite a bit to say about cancel

culture and the corrosive nature of cancel culture according to him. Most recently the thing that I did see is that he wrote a whole op-ed about how he quit his job because he was being canceled and I was like, well hang on, which one is that? I think he saw that because I was like furiously tweeting about it. I didn't see that from you. I was like, what on earth? I knew that might be right. I was like, this is a rancid flank steak of an argument.

Yes. I've been so wrapped up in like anti-bat garbage people. Oh yeah. I have really missed the, quite a few of the headlines about Jordan Peterson. You've missed all the beef grifters and I'm going to introduce you to the beef grifting environment. Beef grifters. Yeah, sounds great. What I basically wanted to do was look into the phenomenon of Jordan Peterson and also the specific ways that Jordan Peterson, I think partly inadvertently, ended up launching a new FAD diet.

I mean, I looked into this, the carnivore diet as a thing essentially did not exist before Jordan Peterson talked about it on the Joe Rogan podcast. Yeah, I mean, it didn't exist before Jordan Peterson talked about it because why wouldn't? Why on earth would anyone be like, I'm only eating, I assume it's red meats, right?

It's worse, we have a clip. Oh my God, I can't wait. Okay, so this is what happened. I stopped snoring the first week. I thought, what the hell? Then I lost seven pounds the first month. My legs were numb on the sides, that's gone. And my psoriasis disappeared. The last thing that went away for me, I was still having a

bit of a time with mood regulation, and that sucked because when I changed my diet, I wouldn't respond to antidepressants properly anymore. They weren't working. I was still really anxious in the morning up to three months ago, like horribly, and then it would get better all day. People said, well, you're under a lot of stress, and I thought, yeah, yeah, I've been under a lot of stress for like 10 years. It's like, it's a lot, but it wasn't any more stressful than helping my daughter deal with her illness. That's for sure. That, no, this is something different. And she said to me, quit eating greens. And I

thought, oh, really? Jesus, Michaela, I'm eating cucumbers, lettuce, broccoli, and chicken and beef. It's like, I have to cut out the god damn greens. It's like I have to cut out the goddamn greens. It's like, try it for a month. Okay, within a week I was 25% less anxious in the morning, within two weeks, 75% and I've been better every single day. Here's the coolest thing. I've had gum disease since I was 25. It's gone.

It's like what the hell? And you've done no blood work. So you don't know what your lipid profile is. Right, no, I'll get that done again when I go back to my vitamins. You can't take any vitamins. No, I eat beef and salt and water. That's it.

And I never cheat ever. Not even a little bit. No soda, no wine. I drink club soda. I'm curious about this. I'm very curious. Anything about my triad. Yeah, me too. Club soda. I'm curious about this. I'm very curious. And I think I might try it. This is like the reverse version of the SuperSize Me Recap.

Yeah. Do you know what I mean? It's like the good news version. This is the same, like numbness on the side of your legs. The old joke is what do you get when you play a country song backwards? You get your house back, you get your wife back, you get your car back. That's right wife back, you get your car back.

And this is like the same thing. It's like he's getting his gums back, he's getting his legs back, his sleep back. I mean, it is truly wild to talk about someone only eating. Did he say beef? It literally just beef. Only beef.

He's very careful throughout this interview to say, you know, it's an end of one, I'm not recommending this for anybody else. You know, I'm not a medical doctor, don't listen to me, I'm in a unique circumstances. So to his credit, he's not necessarily boosting this. Right, he's contextualizing. Yes, but then there's an actual question

of whether you can describe results like this without implicitly promoting something. Yeah, I think that's right. And I also think like, look, man, if you weren't there to promote it, you wouldn't really be talking about it. And he does the thing where he's like, I'm not recommending it to anybody else,

but I've had people talk to me about it and like, I've never heard of anybody having a bad experience. Right, he often follows that up immediately with this sort of qualifier of, you know, I'm not telling you you should do it, but the results for me have been really amazing. Again, it's still promoting it. It's just kind of promoting it with caveats, right?

So that's kind of where this episode is going to end up. Oh, are we gonna do a record scratch? You're probably wondering how I got here. We're doing a little freeze frame at the beginning. We're gonna go buy love this. I'm very excited about it. So we're gonna do a little background on Jordan Peterson himself.

I wanna kind of establish who this guy is and why his pretty weird advice is considered credible. So he's born in 1962 in Edmonton, Alberta. He grows up in Fairview, which is a small town. His mom is a librarian. His dad is a schoolteacher. He seems to have a fairly typical kind of middle class, leave it to beaver style upbringing, it seems. Right. In semiotics, you would call it a hegemonic upbringing. He has a hegemonic upbringing, at least as described by him. He says that he starts struggling with depression

and anxiety at age 13. At one point, I mean, he says that the depression is so severe, he says, it imagine that you wake up and you remember that all of your family was killed in a horrible accident yesterday. Holy shit. That's how he feels when he wakes up every day.

That's awful. It's awful. And it seems like a lot of his adolescence and his younger adult years are characterized by him struggling to understand what's going on with his own mental and physical health. He says that he tries politics to deal with it. He joins some kind of center left political slash socialist

political organizations as a kid. He tries religion, he tries getting into the church. Nothing really works. In college, he says he has like this crippling and posture syndrome. He has this idea that he's kind of acting. He's kind of sleepwalking through his life and he's playing this role of a person, but he's not really connected to his own actions. He's in this kind of like half-dissociated state. During the period he seems to find comfort in biological certainty. He starts to formulate this theory of the world that there's there's ideology, there's people who see things through a lens of their

own personal experiences and their own beliefs. This is what he hates about the socialists that he goes to college with and there's also people who react to the world as it is. So he starts to take a lot of comfort in what he describes as like a biological realities. Like there is truth in the universe. In his first book he says, I discovered that beliefs make the world in a very real way, that beliefs are the world in a more than metaphysical sense. This discovery has not turned me into a moral relativist, however, quite the contrary. I become convinced that the world that is belief is orderly, that there are universal moral absolutes. I believe that individuals and societies who flout these absolutes in ignorance or in

willful opposition are doomed to misery and eventual dissolution. To borrow a phrase from a podcaster whose work I enjoyed, this is all just the sound of red flags flapping the wind. Just any time someone says to me, like, I believe in moral absolutes, I'm like, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, I know I know that like other people are driven by ideology, but not me. Totally, and also like, what I hear them saying is,

if there's nuance here, I'm uninterested in it. If there are solutions here, I don't want to know. All I want to know is this person did a thing that I think is absolutely categorically wrong and there's no more to discuss here. You, you sound like one of the SJWs that he will later own in numerous YouTube videos. I'm really. Oh, I'm fully preparing to get owned real hard You sound like one of the SJWs that he will later own in numerous YouTube videos, Aubrey.

Oh, I'm fully preparing to get owned real hard, as just a humorless feminist. Really, I'm about to get totally fucking owned by George Beakers. I mean, I think to me what he's describing is the process of becoming a conservative. Yeah. We've talked a lot on the show about how formerly fat people are oftentimes the most fat phobic. In this very interesting, I think, human process where you think that if you have overcome something,

it is therefore overcomable. And so other people who refused to overcome it are weak. A lot of his work academically is about this dichotomy, or what I consider to be a false dichotomy, but the dichotomy that he keeps raising between chaos and order. He's someone who considered that his life and his mind was really chaotic and he was able to impose order on it.

And one of the ways that he feels like he was able to tame his chaotic mind was through the order of a universe where absolutes exist. That was something that he found really comforting and what he tries to do throughout his career is impose that on other people. Which 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? Right. What that doesn't take into account is, do you have resources that other people don't have? Right.

There 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. And also just like, what if people are just different from you? Yeah! Like not even like demographically, but just like, what if just like people tried that and it doesn't work?

That's what it's worth. Yeah, what if somebody has a kind of depression and anxiety that responds to something other than yours does? That's not a good possibility. So, you know, this is me kind of projecting onto this. This is me creating my own interpretation. Obviously, I don't think that he's explicitly saying that like I am building my world view for my own personal experience, but I think that that's something that all of us obviously

do. But I think that especially straight white hegemonic dudes are not really trained to like see that that is what they are doing right like I am applying my personal experience to the world. I am making that the basis of my worldview men are not told that like this is the process they are going through. They are told that the process they're going through is like the process of seeking truth. Yeah that makes sense that makes sense. So this part is really boring. This is like the Wikipedia stuff. He goes to grad school. He does his PhD.

He becomes a psychology professor at Harvard for five years. And then he gets a post in 1998 at the University of Toronto. And somehow when he's doing all of this academic work, he's also seeing 20 patients a week. Whoa! He's like a very productive guy. And it seems quite prestigious. He has a lot of publications.

And I've read things by other people in his field that he's a well-respected guy in his field. This is not some crank that started to do in crankshit elsewhere. It was people in psychology were like, yeah, he's a well-respected psychologist. So what is the nature of that work? Because all that I have heard about

is the shit that seems real trolley to me. I like it when you sit on my shoulder and you look at my notes. And next to the next section of the episode around the hungry, but as a whirp, and you're like, what does this work say? Oh, you're welcome for that segue. Oh, I'm glad you asked.

So, okay, in 1999, he publishes his first book, which is called Maps of Meaning. I have heard, I don't know if this is true, but I've heard that before he becomes famous, the book only sold roughly 500 copies. Oh, wow. It's very academic. It's 602 pages long,

the version of it that I have. It is catastrophically unreadable. Oh really? Man, I have read some books for various podcasts, Aubrey. I've never read something like this terminally unmeaningful. It's absolutely incredible. So I'm Guinness and your screen grab of, you're not going to believe me, but I swear to God I'm being generous.

And like this paragraph isn't that bad. Let me open it up. Oh, it's a brick of text. Look at all of the stuff that's going on in this paragraph, right? There's like five things in italics. There's a shitload of parentheses. There's basically like something in parentheses every sentence. There's quotation marks. There are two M-dashes within a parenthetical. In a sense that has multiple other parentheticals and a semi-colon. Like it is, there are clauses on clauses on closets happening here.

I should have sent you a trigger warning. Look what it does to your body to try to understand this fucking paragraph. My eyes are bouncing around on this image file that you sense because it is so disorienting. So I'm sending you, I copy pasted this into word and I cleaned it up. Oh, did you?

It's still gibberish. This is the thing. Oh my God. Myth is not primitive proto-science. It is a qualitatively different phenomenon. Science might be considered, quote, description of the world with regards to those aspects that are consensually apprehensible. Myth can be regarded as, quote, the description of the world as it signifies. The Mythic universe is a place to act, not a place to perceive. Myth describes things in terms of their unique or shared effective valence, their value,

their motivational significance. The sky in the earth of the Sumerians are not the sky and earth of modern man, therefore. They are the great father and mother of all things. This is the cleaned up version. You know that I'm on a big writing deadline currently, that I am like hammering out pages and pages, and this is my nightmare. These are like my little nightmares of like I'll wake up in the morning

and read what I wrote the day before and it's gonna be just this. I know. The mythic universe is a place to act not to perceive like oh god trust me Trust me. It's not better in context. I've read this entire chapter and this this paragraph does not make any sense And it sounds smart like myth is not proto-science. It is different. Okay, was anyone saying that it was proto-science? Not really. So you're like, deep, sorry, I can't keep talking about this. So behind all of this stuff, he gives a million lectures. I have spent like the last six weeks trying to understand what the fuck this dude is talking about, to give him some credit behind all of this jargon

and his just like very not accurate description of various cultures myths. There's actually a very interesting insight. What he says is that human beings are responding much more to narratives than they are to science and information. We all want to think of ourselves as walking through a universe of facts, right? Like, it's going to rain today, therefore I'm going to wear a jacket, right?

We all think that that's what we're doing. But what he's saying is that narratives are much more important for how we form our understandings of the world, understandings of other people. We filter everything, including ourselves, through stories, which which I think is a genuinely profound insight. Absolutely, and it's also something that I will say from previous organizing life, it's something that's borne out by quite a bit of political research, right?

People don't generally change their minds on political issues because of the facts. They change their minds because of people's stories and because they hear other people like them say, you know, I used to think this, but now I think this. And that feels like giving them permission to change their minds. I think this is just true.

I think you've just right here. I think he is too. And I also think, I've come across this before. He's not the only person to be saying this, of course. Sure. I've seen people who've written about this that have said that metaphors are also really powerful. So if you think about a topic like immigration,

one way to present immigration is as like an invasion, right? There's people coming from the southern border, these like hordes coming into the country, right? Another way to think about immigration is like as a life raft. Like there's people out there that need help and we're inviting them in and we're going to help them. So Jordan Peterson is the worst imaginable messenger

for this particular point, but underneath all of this prose, he is actually making some good points. And like if you do like Ninja-ass old Google searches, you're fine. He's quoted in the New York Times in like various random stories. There's an NPR article about him before

any of the sort of famous stuff happens. He shows up on panel shows in Toronto. There's an NPR article about him before any of this sort of famous stuff happens. He shows up on panel shows in Toronto. He's just someone who like he's actually building somewhat of a reputation as a public figure throughout the course of the 2000s. And in September of 2016 is when he like really gets famous. So over this fall, the Canadian government is debating something called C16,

which is an amendment to the Canadian Human Rights Act and criminal code that I cannot stress this enough, is going to add gender identity to an existing law. This is like a relatively minor update to an existing anti-discrimination law that already prohibits discrimination on the grounds of race and gender and sexual orientation. And so the Canadian government is like, well, we need to add gender identity to this. So they add this to this existing law.

It's ultimately is like not that big of a deal. Well, also, not that big of a deal in Canada. A thing we still haven't done in the United States. So I know I'm like, this is table stakes, and it's like, we haven't done it yet. Go. So on September 27th, 2016, Canada has not passed to this yet,

but they're like discussing it. Jordan Peterson posts, God help me, a three hour long lecture on YouTube about this amendment. It's called Professor Against Political Correctness. He says that the Canadian government is going to imprison you if you misgender a trans person. It's always things that really frustrates me because you don't understand the person. It's one of these things that really frustrates me because you don't understand the context. Like what about Jordan Peterson?

Like what about the broader context of what Jordan Peterson is saying? And like I sat down and watched this fucking thing. The first like five minutes, he talks about how universities are taken over by cultural marxists. He says that the only reason this law is going to get passed. I'm gonna quote him.

He says, I can't help but manifest the suspicion that it's partly because our current premiere is a lesbian in her sexual preference. I don't think it's relevant to the political discussion, except insofar as the LGBT community has become extraordinarily good at organizing themselves and has a fairly pronounced and very, very sophisticated, radical fringe. I'll tell you what, as someone who spent a lot of time organizing the LGBT community, I'm honestly pretty flattered. I know, I'm like, we aren't the organized, thank you. It's just straightforward, anti-trans conservative garbage.

He says that non-binary people don't exist. Like there's no evidence that non-binary people exist. Right, conveniently disregarding the evidence that people are telling you they're non-binary. Here say, it's all here say. Nailed 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's long debate. So the day after he publishes this lecture, it shows up in the student newspaper, and the right-wing press in Canada picks up on it. And then two days after that, the BBC comes out like a weirdly sympathetic profile. Where it's like, oh, like the professor

who questions the trans dog, or whatever. And it's like, so we've now whipped up this basically like fairly inconsequential like dude says asshole thing in a lecture. We've now kind of created a debate out of thin air out of this. Like, nothing has actually happened. Well, listen, myth is not primitive proto-science.

I think that it's... It's... As the best book I've ever read told me. It's a place to act, not to perceive, come on. You know this. It's so ridiculous. He basically becomes this public figure overnight, so within, I think it's six months. He's earning $80,000 a month on Patreon.

Holy shit! So he ends up being interviewed for various articles. There's a million profiles of him as kind of like meet the man who's like the most important thinker on the new right And you know he goes on politically incorrect. I mean within a year He does 160 city speaking to her. He's like fish He's like going around the entire country and like talking to people and some of these venues are selling out like 3,000 seats

Listen don't drag fish into this Leave the good people of fish and do anything Jordan Pearson Don't drag fish into this. I believe the good people of fish do anything to Jordan Beerson. This all kind of culminates in 2018 when all of this fame produces his first pop book, which is called 12 Rules for Life, which is based, I did not know this until I read it, but it's based on a series of Kora posts. Like you know the Q&A website? Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha I have to talk about his actual message. Like what is he saying to people, right? But then when you actually boil it down, like you actually read his book, I've listened to probably five or 10 lectures,

I've listened to every single Joe Rogan podcast, everything he's saying is just like straightforward conservative shit. People keep talking about he's like this iconoclastic challenging thinker and he's this academic and he has such like, there's a million articles scolding left-wing people and they're like, why can't left? He's listened to what he's this academic and he has such like, there's a million articles scolding left-wing people and they're like, why can't left?

He's listen to what he's saying. And like the left keeps like twisting him out of context. And then you get the context. You try to actually engage. And it's like, okay, so the gender wage gap is fake because you know, women, they leave the workforce to have babies. So like that's why they don't get paid enough.

Oh, Lordy. He says that climate change is fake, but he says it in this slightly more academic way, where it's like, oh, the way that you pull people out of poverty is through fossil fuels. We need the energy to pull Chinese people and Indian people out of poverty. So if lefties really cared about alleviating poverty, they would want us to burn as many fossil fuels as possible. It's like a slightly different spin on it, but like not really if you actually understand what the right is saying about climate change.

And also like, okay, so you're someone who like doesn't believe in any mitigation for climate change, ultimately. It's just like straight up and down conservative, punditry nonsense. Yeah, it's just like you could read this shit in the national review anytime since the 1990s. He wants to defund women's studies departments. At one point he says like, oh, I'm not sure about same-sex couples adopting, because like children really need

like a mother and a father in the home. Thanks, James Dobson. Neat. What I think really explains that all this, you know, it's 2016, this is kind of after Trump had been elected after this really bitter and horrible 2016 election, I think a lot of conservatives were looking for someone

who would like allow them to keep all of their beliefs, but also reject what had just happened. Like it was so obvious that Trump was awful. Like he's this like racist misogynist, corrupt, everything we learned during the election. And people felt kind of icky about voting for this guy, right? And the fact that he was the figurehead of conservatism. And so I think there was this huge, unscited demand

for like allow me to remain a conservative and allow me to support Donald Trump. I wanna keep all my beliefs and I wanna keep all my anxieties, but I want them to be repackaged and sold to me in like more academic language, like in be repackaged and sold to me in more academic language. Like in language that is more palatable to me, and makes me feel like I'm challenging dogmas rather than just the stuff that I already believe.

Right, I would like to support this candidate, but I don't want to be seen as one of his supporters. Exactly. I would like to support this racist, but I don't want anyone to think that I am racist. How can I do that? Make it seem intellectual. Exactly.

Make it seem like it's rooted in some kind of science or some kind of valid critique or make it seem like people who do think that supporting Donald Trump makes you racist are actually like really regressive and their resisting debate, which is part of a healthy democracy. Yeah.

All of that kind of stuff that is like, legitimates what is functionally just like discomfort with a decision that they have made. Yes, exactly. And yeah, I have nothing to add. I was just like, yeah. Yeah. So this is also, I think, a big part of his appeal.

Two conservatives is this thing that like, he's an academic and he's a little bit inscrutable. I think this is also part of his appeal to conservatives is this thing that like he's an academic and he's a little bit inscrutable. I think this is also part of the marketing, like the joke during 2017 was that his Ben and Jerry's flavor was that's not what I meant. It's very good. This is an excerpt from a very good New York Times profile of Jordan Peterson. Actually, let me send this to you. Yes, let me send this to you. Yes, let me quote. Buh, buh, buh, buh, buh.

Mr. Peterson illustrates his arguments with copious references to ancient myths, bringing up stories of witches, biblical allegories, and ancient traditions. I ask why these old stories should guide us today. Quote, it makes sense that a witch lives in a swamp. Yeah, he says, why? Right, that's right, you don't know.

It's because those things hang together at a very deep level, right? Yeah, and it makes sense that an old king lives in a desiccated tower But which is don't exist and they don't live in swamps. I say quote yeah, they do they exist They just don't exist the way you think they exist. They certainly exist You may say well dragons don't exist. It's like, yes, they do. The category predator and the category dragon are the same category. It absolutely exists. It exists absolutely more than anything else. You say, well, there's no such thing as witches. Yeah, I know what you mean, but that isn't what you think when you go see a movie about them. You can't help but fall into these categories.

There's no escape from them. Impossible to read this fucking man. So he is taking the sort of Jungian idea about archetypes. Yes. And is like trying to express it in a way that seems very literal. He's doing the thing that he always fucking does, where he says something that is like straight forwardly dumb,

like which is do exist. And then you're like, well, no, they don't, like obviously. And then he's like, oh, but they do exist because they're in myths, they exist in our heads. And it's like, oh, so you meant exist in a fucking way that nobody uses that word. Great. You meant exist in the way that means does not exist, neat.

Right, exactly. Yeah. Like, he does this all the time. I was listening to this insufferable section of one of his Joe Rogan podcasts where he's talking about, he loves to defend like natural, quote, unquote natural hierarchies. Like the existing order of society is good, right?

This is another very, very core conservative belief, right? And he's saying, you know, you can't, these hierarchies are real, that's why you can't lie your way into being successful. This is like his conclusion. And then Joe Rogan, who like, to his credit, Joe Rogan's actually like a pretty good interviewer. And Joe Rogan's like, what do you mean by that?

Didn't Donald Trump like lie his way into success? Like don't rich people pretty frequently lie their way into becoming richer? And then this goes back and forth for like five minutes. Finally, he keeps, he needles Jordan Peterson enough, that Jordan Peterson is like, well, yes, they're monetarily successful, but they're not successful in the way of having a meaningful life. They're not successful in terms of...

And it's like, right, so you meant success in a fucking fake definition that like now it's taken me five minutes Right get you to explain your ridiculous definition of this term that nobody uses Yeah, by the time you get to that point you forgotten what he said originally what his point was right in a capitalist society the defined success primarily by wealth you invoked that language and framework, and then we're like, man, if you took it that way, that's on you. Right, no, you need to be clear about what you're saying. Right, a company's never been successful selling hamburgers.

Well, what about McDonald's? No, no, no, what I meant by success was, do they have a real estate portfolio? It's like, well, that's not what success means. Sure, sure. Also, this stuff can sound kind of deep and kind of smart, right? You're like, oh, he's saying that witches do exist.

Like it's kind of a provocative idea. And then once you boil it down, all he's really saying, it's like the most banal thing. Like yeah, witches exist because there's many myths about witches. Well, yeah, that's just a really obvious thing to say, right? Or the fact that people can lie their way to monetary success, but it doesn't mean that they've

achieved some sort of self-actualization. Also pretty banal. Yeah, like sure. Yeah, okay. Then what? So much of his success is really just like taking these conservative, just bog, standard conservative views, and then like encoding them, like fucking enigma device in these like weird roundabout phrases and these like totally just disjointed sentences. And then you have to like decode them and by the time you figure out what they mean, like you feel smart.

You're like, oh, we're like vibing, we've gotten the same page, but it's like he hasn't actually said anything. Yeah, I mean, I'll say that doesn't mean you have a better argument. Right. That doesn't mean that you're making good points. It just means that you're using words that sort of like attract people's attention. I heard I forget who I'm stealing this from, but somebody said that everything he says is either false or obvious. Like that's true.

I like that one. I mean, the thing that I was gonna say is like, when you step onto TV or you put on mic on the radio or a podcast or whatever, you do have to communicate things in a way that people can understand. And if you don't, that's not actually on them. Right, exactly.

That's pretty much just on you. Okay, so we're finally at the point of the episode where we're circling back to the carnivore diet. Okay, let's roll. He comes to the carnivore diet through his daughter, Michaela. This is actually like a pretty sad and pretty understandable story. So Michaela is diagnosed when she's seven years old with chronic juvenile rheumatoid arthritis. Oh, that's rough, man. She has her hip and her ankle replaced when she's 16. She is on seven different medications by the time she's in college.

She has severe depression. She's then taking medications for the depression. She goes to university, but she has to drop out for, you know, a combination of the physical issues and the mental issues. She says at that time she can only really be awake for like six hours a day because she has chronic fatigue. Like it's just like just a really awful story. And I think as many people do when they have these,

you know, these clusters of like interacting and complex illnesses, she has this like sense of desperation and she starts experimenting with her diet. So in 2015 she cuts out gluten and she sees like this dramatic improvement in like both her physical things and her mental things, but it's not quite enough. So that she then sort of switches to keto. It helps a little bit more, but it still feels like it's not quite enough. So that she then sort of switches to Keto. It helps a little bit more, but it still feels like it's not quite enough. And then she's surfing the internet, and she comes across a woman named Charlene Anderson, a woman who claims that she cured her Lyme disease from an all-beef diet. And she says that she's been eating nothing but rib-eye steaks for 20 years. Makes me really nervous.

So, Mikaela sees all this and she honestly thinks that it sounds like kind of bananas, but she's like, whatever, like I'll try it, right? You'll try anything for a couple days. And also, if you're suffering with this like awful, briar patch of various intersecting illnesses like you're fucking desperate. So she goes on this all-beef diet. According to her, everything cleared up. This is where my post on her blog in 2016. She says, everything wrong with me was diet-related. Arthritis, depression, anxiety, lower back pain, chronic fatigue, brain fog, itchy skin,

acne, tiny blisters on my knuckles, floaters, mouth ulcers, twitching at night, chronic fatigue, brain fog, itchy skin, acne, tiny blisters on my knuckles, floaters, mouth ulcers, twitching at night, night sweats, tube sensitivity, and the list goes on. Everything wrong with me was fixable. As you heard in the clip in April of 2018, this is two months before he goes on the J-Rogan podcast, she tells her dad to go on this all-beef diet and maybe it will work for him too. And so he goes on the diet, and you heard him describing, right? He got universally 100% better. Now we're going to dive into the carnivore diet itself, and the winding path that it took to Michaela Peterson's laptop.

I did a Google Trends search, but I didn't like how close to research this. I cannot express to you how niche this was. The earliest evidence of this existing that I could find was a bodybuilder in the 1950s who recommended an all-meat diet. You know, bodybuilders have a bulking and a cutting cycle and it's like 30 days of this and 90 days of that

is very regimented. Sure. So all meat diet was like one of those short term regimens. It wasn't like a lifestyle. Yeah, I mean, I can't fathom that 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.

The earliest like kind of sort of mainstream mention of this that I found was in 2006, there's something called the active low-carbor forums, which is a message board for people who are doing Atkins. It's kind of branched out now. I'm going to read this to you. This is the, this is the header at the top of its website. It says support for Atkins diet, protein powder and Neanderthin. Dice, which is paleo. That's what they call paleo now. Neanderthin, you know I love a garbage pun.

This is like next level. So in 2006, there was a guy on this forum who was apparently like a pretty prolific commenter, whose name was Ausley Stanley, who's like a legendary guy because he was a roadie for the grateful dead. Whoa. So he started posting in 2006 on these forums,

the fact that he had been living an all-meat life for 47 years. Wow. People now, like the sort of carnivore community now, has collated all of his posts, and it's 251 pages long. Oh, my god. This guy wrote like a Bible.

Yeah, he wrote a book on the internet. This is an excerpt and like this is so typical of the way that carnivore people talk about the diet. He says, it requires a powerful will and determination to change to succeed in adopting the quote-unquote extreme diet that this website is based on. Even those who are morbidly obese, as powerful a motivation as any I can imagine,

will have cravings for what I call non-food, by which I mean all vegetation and carbs, which will eventually prove irresistible. I mean, when you said eating non-foods, I was really prepared for some Michael Pollan business. Right, I didn't expect the next thing to be like vegetables. All vegetation and carbs. Jesus Christ. This is like fairly mainstream messaging among the carnivore diet people that like it's not

just like this diet works for me. Everything that isn't animal products is poison. Sorry Hindus. You've been getting mostly non-food. So good. This kind of sort of bounces around the internet, but it's like super niche. The first mainstream news coverage I can find of this, this is absurd. There's a motherboard article in 2017 called Inside the World of the Bitcoin Carnivores, which is a living fucking nightmare. Yeah, I'm just trying to think of like, what else do you put in there to make it worse? Like fire festival? It's happening at WeWork?

Great. So, this article chronicles that like this all animal product diet has become popular among Silicon Valley and like not just Silicon Valley but like a subset of Silicon Valley that is really into cryptocurrency. So there's a guy who's quoted in this article and like every other article about Bitcoin carnivores who says Bitcoin is a revolt against fiat money and an all-meat diet is a revolt against fiat food. What? What the fuck? What's he even talking about?

I mean, fiat food doesn't make any fucking sense. It's like fiat money is like government-backed money. You know, currency is like fake. Like, currency is a social construction on some level, right, if you believe in a dollar and I believe in a dollar, then we can exchange. Yeah. But then applying that to food,

like fiat food, it doesn't make any sense. It's like a nine word sentence. Boy. His metaphor just completely breaks down. I hate it. It's extremely much. He says,

the people who tell you to eat your six to 10 portions of indigestible toxic grains a day are the same kind of people who tell you central banks have to determine interest rates. Oh my God. These things have nothing in common. And also, again, you get this invocation of indigestible toxic grains.

This also just feels like it's real. It's just edging closer and closer to complaints about like globalists and like anti-semitic conspiracy theories. It gets real right wing real fast. Yeah, I bet. So I have spent a lot of time, unfortunately, in the last month looking at like the social media of various carnivore influencer dudes.

There's really only two main ones. One is this guy named Sean Baker, who used to be a licensed medical professional, like an actual doctor, but he became such an evangelist for the carnivore diet. It seems that his hospital fired him. His hospital was like, you can't just tell all your patients

to switch to an all-meat diet, dude. He can no longer practice medicine, but he's become this big influencer guy and he has like a cookbook and everything And then the other one is a guy named Paul Saladino. Both of these dudes are like super right-wing guys You know flirting with anti-vax stuff Paul Saladino. I wasn't even aware of this Paul Saladino is a Sunscreen truth or I screen, truth or. I've read a lot of his man's tweets. They're like little Bible verses. One of them says, the best way to protect your skin from the sun is by not eating

seed oils. Sunscreen is the worst way. So don't wear sunscreen. He also says, toothpaste is a scam. Liver, heart, meat equal signs, the best tooth care ever created. Yeah, good. That's good. There's also another guy that I found on YouTube. He just put out a video saying that the Canadian, this Canadian trucker protest thing is a false flag, and it's all actors. I don't know why.

We do that. Anytime we start talking about public political action or public tragedies as being actors, I get real nervous. Right, it's just very strange. And also, as we're talking about this, it is nearing lunchtime and I'm like, man, I could really go for a steak. I know, I made some ground beef for you this week.

I was like, oh, now I'm in the mood for ground beef. Yeah. That sounds good. Okay, so I want to spend most of the rest of the episode talking about some of the main myths of the Carnivore diet. So if you read the Carnivore books and you look at the Carnivore influencer accounts, you find the same three factual claims repeated a million times.

And I want to actually take these seriously. So the first myth is that plants are bad for you. This is a quote from one of the Bitcoin carnivores in a USA Today article. Plants are varying levels of toxic to humans, hence why so many of them are poisonous, and even some of the ones we can eat, such as beans, must first be carefully prepared and cooked to remove toxic proteins. Hey man, some plants are hemlock,

so all of them are probably hemlock. There's also this thing, we debunked this on one of the bonus episodes, so I'm not gonna go too deeply into it, but they keep bringing up this thing of anti-nutrients. Oh, I remember this. Do you remember this?

So my recollection, and you correct me if I'm wrong, is that anti-nutrients are like really are a part of many fruits and vegetables, and that they prevent absorption of some vitamins or minerals, but at a just an incredibly low level, yeah? Yes, there are some little elements in like beans and broccoli and some other vegetables that reduce the absorption of iron. They don't completely prevent you from absorbing any iron. They just reduce the amount of iron

that you can get from food. And 99% of them boil off like they come off when the food is cooked. So all of these anti-nutrients are basically just like a non-entity, but the carnivore people have seized on these as like, look, like plants are actually sucking the nutrients out of you. And it's like, well, they don't negate all the nutrients that fruits and vegetables have.

There's also a sort of sub-category of this is that they love to highlight quote-unquote all of the indigenous societies that have lived on an all-meat diet. So this is from an abysmal website called Diagnosis Diet. It says, to the best of my knowledge, the world has yet to produce a civilization which has eaten a vegan diet from childhood through death, whereas there are numerous examples throughout recorded history of people from a variety of cultural, ethnic, and geographical backgrounds who have lived on mainly meat diets for decades, lifetimes, generations. This for some reason is very important to the carnivore people, that there are societies

that have lived on all meat diets and have been fine. The obvious one, the one that they bring up the most is the Inuits in the far North. I looked into this expecting to debunk it, but it's actually true that the vast majority of their calories came from animal-based sources. But this is an excerpt from a Discover Magazine profile of Patricia Cochran, who's a Alaska native,

who writes about her childhood growing up there. She says, Our meat was seal and walrus, marine mammals that live in cold water and have lots of fat. We used seal oil for our cooking as a dipping sauce for food. We hunted ducks, geese, and little land birds like quail. We caught crabs and lots of fish, salmon, whitefish, tom cod, pike, and char. The elders liked stink fish, fish buried in seal bags or cans in the tundra and left to ferment. In the short, subarctic winters, the family searched for roots and greens, and best of

all from a child's point of view, wild blueberries, crowberries, or salmon berries, which my ants would mix with whipped fat to make a special treat akin to ice cream. Oh my god, I bet that's beyond. So this is a society that yes did get somewhere like 90 to 95% of the calories came for various animal products, but it's also like extremely diverse. They're having fermented foods, they're having oils, the skin of whales

is apparently very high in vitamin C, which is why these kidneys didn't have rates of scurvy. So it's like, yes, they're eating an all-meat diet, essentially, but they're doing it in a context where they've kind of evolved and adapted cultural practices around this and they're doing it in a specific way. They're not just having the same thing

over and over again, three meals a day. Well, and it's not all meat. Right, it might be mostly meat. I mean, and you could, three meals a day. Well, and it's not all meat. Right. It might be mostly meat. I mean, like, and you could frankly make a similar argument about vegetarianism and veganism, right? That there are plenty of societies where vegetarianism is a norm. That doesn't mean that because it wasn't completely vegan

by today's standards all the way all the time. Right. It's searching through history to prove your weird point about your extremely contemporary diet. It's also so fucking weird to me because you can find these debates online of like, well, you know, how many berries were they eating or like, how long was the summer growing season when you could find roots, blah, blah, blah. And it's like, what are we proving here?

The fact that there's a society at some time, and there's other examples, I always pick the same like six or seven examples of other hunter-gatherer societies that lived on an all-meat diet, it's like fine. But there's thousands of societies throughout human history, most of them were omnivorous. It's not really an argument to say that like this one society lived on this diet,

therefore it's the best diet. The fact that the Inuits did this, the only thing that proves is that it's possible for humans and humans don't instantly die living on this diet, which is like, yeah, that's kind of useful information. But it says nothing about an optimal diet. Yeah, so then what? Right.

So the second myth is that meat is like a more pure way to eat or like a cleaner way to eat. There's a lot of weird purity stuff wrapped up in this. But one of the things that's very interesting to me is that when Michaela Peterson talks about doing her version of the carnivore diet, she tells the Atlantic that when she's doing this, she allows herself to drink bourbon and vodka. What? The author of the piece is like, well, wait a minute, if this whole thing is about like clean eating, the reason it works is like, toxic, you know, gets toxins out of your system.

You then allow yourself alcohol? Well, it's a disinfectant, Mike. Right, exactly. It's very healthy. I know, so like, a lot of the sort of Silicon Valley bros talk about plants or poisonous and it's toxic, whatever. But then they also talk about how they allow themselves to drink coffee on the diet.

And like, well, coffee's a plant. Why are there these carve outs? And there's one of the carnivore influencer guys. You know, they only eat beef and salt. But he says that the salt has to be Himalayan salt. What the fuck is this? The fucking like $7 salt at the store. It feels like the bulletproof coffee stuff,

which is like put butter in your coffee, but it doesn't work unless it's grass fed. Where you're like what? Yes, why? Dude, the beef people have a weird fetish for grass fed, man. Everybody says that you have to do it with grass fed beef, or else it doesn't work. Which like I fucking looked into this, the reason why this diet quenkel works, especially for weight loss,

is because fat and protein make you feel full. Sure, this is why the Atkins diet quenkel works, this is why keto works. It's like you just feel really full if you eat like just a steak and nothing else, right? And one of the main reasons that that works is because most steaks are high in fat, right? Sure. But grass-fed beef is much lower in fat. Yeah. This was kind of the marketing of grass-fed beef originally. It was like diet beef.

So, the whole logic of the all-beef diet completely breaks down because you're going for the kind of beef that doesn't fit the parameters, like completely breaks down because you're going for the kind of beef that doesn't fit the parameters, like the biological parameters that you're actually going for. You should be looking for highest fat available. It's the same with vitamins stuff. If you look at the rhetoric of the people recommending grass-fed beef, they always point out

that grass-fed beef has two to three times more omega-3s. And this is actually true. I looked this up. There's, if you look at a hamburger patty, a normal beef patty has like 30 milligrams of omega-3s, and then a grass-fed hamburger patty has 90 milligrams of omega-3s. You look at that as like a lay person and you're like, wow, 30 versus 90. Like, that's a lot higher, obviously. Yeah.

But then what they don't give you is the broader context. So if you go look up the daily recommended allowance of omega-3s, it's 1600 milligrams. To get up to your daily allowance, you'd have to eat 20 hamburger patties. Even a grass-fed hamburger patty has less omega-3s than a single walnut. So it's like, they defend the carnivore diet patty has less omega-3s than a single walnut.

So it's like, they defend the carnivore diet on the basis of the nutrients that it has. But you're like, well, if you're interested in nutrients, then you would be eating a varied diet. Yeah, it's just, I don't know. I mean, you mentioned this in a previous episode. So I have, it's been on my mind ever since that That there is this weird ritualization, right? That is like, no, it can't just be butter, it has to be this particular kind of butter. It can't just be this, it has to be this specific, like it can't just be salt, you can't use mortons, you gotta have Himalayan pink salt,

which all sort of contributes to this thing that we've definitely talked about before on the show, which is basically like, if it doesn't work, then that's on you. Right, oh totally. Yeah. The butter was grass-fed, but not hormone-free, or it was hormone-free, but not grass-fed.

Sure. Yeah, it's so nitpicky in its sort of application currently, but when it looks for historical examples to legitimate itself, it is extremely not nitpicky. Right, I mean, right. It's very good article in The Atlantic about this diet and all the sort of social constructions that go along with it.

And he says, the beneficial effects of a compelling personal narrative that helps explain and give order to the world can be absolutely physiologically real. It's well documented that the immune system is modulated by our lifestyles, from how much we sleep and move to how well we eat and how much we drink. Most importantly, the immune system is also modulated by stress,

which tends to be a byproduct of a perceived lack of control or order. When it comes to dieting, the inherent properties of the substances ingested can be less important than the eater's conceptualization of them, as either tolerable or intolerable, good or bad. What's actually therapeutic may be the act of elimination itself. Various other debunky websites have pointed out that there are people who claim to have cured

juvenile, chronic arthritis with a vegan diet. You can see the same results, the same sorts of anecdotes of I cured this and I cured that with all kinds of different diets across time, across cultures, it's people believing in this. That is producing the health benefits, which are real, which can be very significant.

Yeah, as the placebo effect has been proven to be very effective when people genuinely believe that they're getting some kind of remedy, right? Right. It's actually very similar to Jordan Peterson's whole thing of finding order amid your own personal chaos. Like it makes sense that this is a way for people to process their own experience, especially if you're suffering from a chronic illness, right?

You've been looking your whole life for something that works. And like this is so regimented, it sort of, it feels almost medical, right? There's this pain that goes along with it, there's this monotony kind of like taking a pill. It's like your turning food into this more medical paradigm. Yeah, but it can't be that, Mike. It's gotta be.

No, it's gotta be that it's all just beef salt and water. Grass, it's grass beef. Definitely not socially influenced. It's definitely not shaped by your expectations. None of that. It's just beef. Definitely not socially influenced. It's definitely not shaped by your expectations. None of that. It's just beef, salt, water. So the final myth we're gonna debunk, this one's a little bit longer.

Carnivore people say quite frequently that meat is what made us human. This is an excerpt from the Grateful Dead guys somewhere in the 251 pages. Oh my God, delightful. He says humans were totally hunting peoples until the end of the Paleolithic age. No Paleolithic archaeological dig has ever produced any food residues from vegetables. The so-called Neanderthin and Paleo diet thus are both nonsense. True Paleolithic

people were total carnivores and ate no veggies whatsoever. In the relatively short evolutionary period since the consumption of vegetables as food, there has never been any real adaptation to such low-grade, low-energy, difficult to digest foods. Because we have no adaptation to digesting or processing vegetables, they are basically all very bad for us. So two things.

One, citation fucking needed, my guy. Also, this plays into this absolutely bizarre trope that is like, we just need to return to our roots. We just need to like eat and behave like cavemen. It's sort of the idea, right? But if you're looking for like, when have we as humanity been at our healthiest and had our longest life expectancies, it is within the last 100 years, everybody. Like, it is like historically very recent. Well, also, we're not even talking about the right

fucking species. So this drives me nuts that like this thing of meat made us human or whatever, it's actually true that two million years ago it appears homo erectus, which is like the precursor species that has now died out to humans. One of the theories is that the consumption of meat like allowed homo erectus to thrive as a species because meat has a bunch more calories because this was before cooking. There was no way to get this kind of calories out of food. So you were just like chewing like roots and stuff like we were basically like chimpanzees. Our precursor species we think only ate like two to three percent of its diet was meat.

But then once you go to much higher levels of meat, you then have the excess calories that then you can kind of pour into a larger brain. So what happened over the course of evolution was what eventually became humans, our brains expanded in size by like 300%. Like we got way bigger brains. It takes a lot more calories to have bigger brains because brains use up so much energy. So you sort of need to have more calories coming into your species. And so the explanation is that like maybe we did switch to meat eating and that allowed us to

have larger brains and also smaller guts because it's easier to digest. You don't need as many like layers of your gut to like break down root fibers and shit. So that is actually like a fairly credible theory on this. But it's like much more disputed. It's not clear that that happened. Right, it's a theory. Yeah, and it's like there's other versions of it where it might have actually been cooking that did that because when you start to cook vegetables,

like think of a raw potato versus a cooked potato, you have way more calories that are getting out of it once it's soft, you don't have to digest it as much, you can absorb more. And then the biggest thing is like, what does it mean to say that meat made us human? Right. It's like you could also say that like fire made us human. You could say that social organization cooperation made us human.

You could say basically anything made us human. It's like a totally meaningless thing to say. Well, it's also just a fundamentally weird and flawed premise to say, because there's this sort of evolutionary theory about the role of meat, it does not then follow that only eating meat would facilitate your individual health, right, in the space of one lifetime. Evolution is something that takes place over the course of centuries, millennia, the idea that you could do something that somebody thinks contributed to evolution, and that would then either facilitate your individual health or like, I don't know, make

you personally evolve, which is not how evolution works. Like, the logic just falls apart on like any level of examination. And this is also, it's so funny reading actual scientists that work on like early man and precursors to man. And they're like, what the fuck are you talking about? Like this doesn't, like this isn't even, homorectus isn't even the same species. There's nothing that implies about that theory,

A, that they were eating only meat, which makes no sense, that a species would go from roughly 3% meat consumption to 100% when there were all kinds of vegetation available that we had been eating for the entire origin of our species. Even the scientists, I found an interview, with the woman who actually proposed this meat eating hypothesis Originally, and they're like, what do you think about the paleo diet? She's like, oh, it's bullshit Like you can't even get her on board, right?

Yeah, I will say we have not gotten a ton of requests to cover the paleo diet But the ones that we have gotten are from people who study like the science of early man. Oh, I need to be like, and they're like, Will you please cover this? People are constantly talking about like we need to like behave like cavemen. We need to like do all this shit.

And there's like zero evidence. Yes. It's this weird like Western class privilege, sort of fetishization of a less developed society? It's James Cameron making Avatar. Absolutely. But it's like what I think is fascinating about this is like, okay, we should eat like our you know human precursors and sisters. This is what made us human fine.

But then when between two million years ago and now, which society should we be aiming for? There's actually really interesting articles about the adaptations that humans have had to agriculture. So there's some societies that have been drinking a lot more milk, northern Europeans have way more lactase, and they can process lactose, whereas most people in East Asia cannot process lactose. Right.

Okay, well should I be drinking milk? Is it right to be drinking milk? Well, where are your parents from and their parents and their parents? Yeah, it's not clear to me why we should be looking two million years ago to like a species that no longer exists when much more recent history is available if that's even what like the logic

that we should be looking at. Because there's tons of research on early humans and like the enzymes they had in their saliva could break down starchy tubers and stuff like that. I went down a deep rabbit hole in this stuff. It's super interesting, but it's not a credible view. A, that early ancestors should be dictating how we're eating today in general and B,

that early ancestors were eating all meat. Right, it is way the fuck easier to go pick some berries, to go find some mushrooms, to forage, than it is to track down, kill, cook, and eat an animal. So this is, okay, this is my attempt to bring us full circle. Here we go, brace yourself.

What is interesting to me about the intersection between all of these like bullshit carnivore myths that are bouncing around the internet and Jordan Peterson. Everything we've just talked about is demonstrating Jordan Peterson's one insight that people respond to narratives and not facts. All of the reasons why people do the carnivore diet, it's fucking narratives. This is what makes us human. This is a lot of weird masculinity shit. This is what makes us men.

It's all bullshit, but it's all like a story. It's a very convincing story that you tell yourself, not only about why this diet works for you, but why it is superior to all the other diets. Yeah. You just wanna connect with your sense of power and ruggedness and whatever as like a dude, and you feel disconnected from that currently.

So the idea of, like, just only beef, like man food, really resonates with that in a way that we watch your points, for example, might not. It's also funny to me that Jordan Peterson totally rejects this thing that like, you know, gender is socially constructed or race is socially constructed. He hates this shit. And he's actively socially constructing it.

Yeah. His entire career is this like perfect demonstration of how you can fall into exactly the traps that you yourself have identified. So like that's the thing that happens when you sort of go, nothing socially constructed, everything is real. Regardless of what you say and what you want to believe about the nature of gender, 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 narratives, while also shutting down anyone else's affirming narratives, right? Right. It is such a weird blatant moment of like, you're making shit up. Anyway, here's the shit that I made up. Right, and also presenting it as fact and presenting it as settled science too. Yeah. I'm like, well, look, you know, the meat's what made us human.

So look, you're saying a vegan diet works for you. I'm sorry. Like, that's just not a human way to eat. Yeah. That's an ideological argument, but you don't realize that it's an ideological argument yourself. You think that you're just stating a fact. Well, and even if you do, you're not going to say that. Right, exactly.

Like you've wrapped up too much of your political and cultural capital in and insisting that your viewpoint, it's a very convenient thing to do, to say, everyone else has biased viewpoints, but mine, it's based in science, and you cannot question it. It is this self-preserving logic that is utterly bizarre, but there is this head in the sand response

to any kind of criticism of it that's like, nope, mine is real. Mine is real and rational, mine is real. Yeah. Mine is real and rational, yours is made up and fake. So I thought that I should do a whole thing like debunking the carnivore diet and talking about studies and stuff, but it's like, do we have to debunk it? It's one food.

Like I've seen these like debunkings that are like, red meat is like linked to higher cholesterol and heart attacks and I'm like, it's one food. Broccoli is very good for you. You shouldn't go on an all broccoli diet. So the idea that we even have to do, like have to make any work to say, like don't eat nothing but rib eyes.

Can humans live if they eat nothing but rib eyes? Probably, you're like, apparently. Yeah. part of me feels like you actually have to give like fewer warnings to people Not to try this in an episode like this because the diet is so fucking to range I mean there's so many articles where like I am a writer and I'm gonna go on the all meat diet and like no one lasts longer than like five days Yeah, one poor guy from the guardian makes it three days, some different men's health, just totally fucking breaks down and quits the assignment.

People cannot do this. The final thing I wanna say about this is there's a number of side effects from this diet that are like, I don't know, back yard downstairs stuff that I don't really wanna talk about on the podcast. I mean, I'm gonna go ahead and assume you're just talking about constipation, right?

Like a zero fiber diet. There's a period of like, fountainess, not constipatedness. And then there's a period of like, yeah, because there's no fiber, then it becomes like, opposite. Yes. I do like, quietly pressing you to talk about poop.

I mean, I don't know. I'm talk about poop. I mean, what have you done to me? What are you doing? It is a particular favorite of mine. But then, I mean, there's all kinds of weird side effects of this. Sure. Medical professionals are unanimous and like don't do this diet. It's really bad news. But one of the bad newsness about it is that eating this for too long, like one food, can it seems

like change your gut bacteria and change what your body is able to absorb. After you've been on this diet for a while, you can't eat anything else. And you'll have like really bad attacks and like kind of allergic reactions. If you eat anything other than just, you know, rib-i-stakes and salt. So this is ultimately what happens to Jordan Peterson. What? Next episode, we are going to talk about how this...

Oh, it's a cliffhanger! It's a cliffhanger! God damn it, Mike! Next episode, we are going to talk about how Jordan Peterson's deviation from this diet starts a chain of events that ends up with him in a medically-induced coma in Moscow. What? Don't Google between now and then, Aubrey.

Don't go on internet. So mean to spend an entire episode being like, look at the rise of all this bullshit. Look at this dude, he's making these wild ass fucking claims about how people need to only eat beef salt and water Yeah, by the way, he's gonna get his come up and so you're gonna hear about it in two weeks. See ya Chomprey Reality is a place of myth and podcasts are a place of me fucking with you I learned. I learned from a girl like that. Thank you.