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- [00:00]
Matthew Remsky
Best thing that's ever happened to you financially.
- [00:02]
Julian Walker
Go easy.
- [00:03]
Matthew Remsky
Sold my car on Carvana. Amazing offer, really. I hit 200 on the scratcher. Did the scratcher come to your house and hand you a check? No. How many scratchers did you hit to get that? I hit a button on Carvana.com once. Okay, that's fair. It's like the lottery, except you always win. Not like the lottery at all, actually. Exactly. Inexplicably good offers worth bragging about. Sell your car today on Carvana. Pickup fees may apply.
- [00:34]
Derek Barris
Welcome to the I Can't Sleep podcast with Benjamin Boster. If you're tired of sleepless nights, you'll love the I Can't Sleep podcast. I help quiet your mind by reading random articles from across the web to bore you to sleep with my soothing voice. Each episode provides enough interesting content to hold your attention and then your mind lets you drift off. Find it wherever you get your podcasts. That's I Can't Sleep with Benjamin Boster. Hey everyone. Welcome to Conspirituality where we investigate the intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience and authoritarian extremism. I'm Derek Barris.
- [01:47]
Matthew Remsky
I'm Matthew Remsky.
- [01:49]
Julian Walker
I'm Julian Walker.
- [01:49]
Derek Barris
You can find us on Instagram and threads at Conspirituality Pod, as well as individually on Blue Sky. You can access all of our episodes ad free, plus our Monday bonus episodes on patreon@patreon.com conspiracy spirituality. You can also access our Monday bonus episodes via Apple Subscriptions. As independent media creators who are able to do this work because of patron support, we really appreciate if you can help us out there.
- [02:26]
Julian Walker
Conspirituality317 Jordan Peterson is back after a hiatus due to, well, a lot of problems. He's up for regular posting on his social media channels. We're going to take a look at what's happened over the last year or so of his absence, followed by his influence in the so called manosphere podcast world. Then Matthew will offer a different perspective on podcasting that's making waves. The Dominican Sisters open Mic.
- [03:03]
Jordan Peterson
You want peace so you never fight.
- [03:06]
Matthew Remsky
You have peace.
- [03:07]
Jordan Peterson
Peace is hard to have. You can have the facade of peace, which just means. What does it mean? Does it mean you never stand up for yourself? That's not peace, that's capitulation. You could present that to yourself and the world as the kind of self sacrificing self denial that in principle is moral and Christian. But that's all just lie. It's a lie. I want peace. I won't enter into any conflict. That's not peace. That's not a desire. It's just cowardice. And the best way to camouflage your cowardice is with a moral facade.
- [03:40]
Julian Walker
That is the unfortunately unmistakable voice of Jordan Peterson promoting here a lecture course available on his Peterson Academy website. It's titled Nietzsche Further down the Rabbit
- [03:51]
Derek Barris
hole, proving that absence does not make the heart grow.
- [03:56]
Julian Walker
Finder.
- [03:57]
Matthew Remsky
It's also being released with an accompanying video game. That's. That was music from the boss fights actually. But wait a minute. What is this current? This is coming out of some vault somewhere. Was it a time release capsule? Like is this from his hospital bed? What's going on?
- [04:13]
Julian Walker
The impression that I have is that there these courses have been pre recorded quite some time ago on a pretty like high production, you know, timeline.
- [04:22]
Jordan Peterson
Yeah.
- [04:23]
Julian Walker
And now they're being promoted and even the promos are pre recorded. I don't think in the last year or so he's been able to do this kind of performance. It looks like these are two pre recorded promotional reels on his 9 million follower strong Instagram in which he's in the characteristic three piece pinstripe suit and tie presenting on this white artificial soundstage in front of a small studio audience that are sitting there nicely dressed on their folding chairs and sandwiched in between these two. We just played one of the clips, but there are two of them. Sandwiched in between are these two black screen posts that feature only audio and captions of his weak voice explaining his recent absence and the current state of his health.
- [05:10]
Matthew Remsky
You know, the pinstripe suit and tie could, they could probably make a pajama set out of that. That would be like, you know, for recovery from the hospital bed. They could probably do it.
- [05:22]
Julian Walker
Yeah.
- [05:23]
Derek Barris
This is all sadly part of a new content drive that Peterson embarked on. But let's backtrack to his absence blissfully. Jordan Peterson remains silent for over a year. And I don't mean to demean his health problems, just to be clear. I don't ever demean anyone's health problems, but I am demeaning him here in this episode. His quiet withdrawal from public appearances in May 2025 turned into a prolonged medical ordeal involving a rare neurological disorder, a bout of sepsis and pneumonia that landed him in int of care. Following his last public appearance, his daughter Michaela announced that her father was taking some time off everything due to a flare up of chronic inflammatory response syndrome, sirs, which is a controversial diagnosis associated with mold exposure. Julian, we've talked about the mold exposure diagnoses before because I used to live in la. You live there? They've been quite popular in that area.
- [06:29]
Julian Walker
Yeah. I mean, this is true in a way. I think cities like LA and maybe especially LA are the leading edge of novel diagnostic and treatment protocols that sort of blur the line between medical science and alternative approaches in the name of being integrative. Right. So we've seen this with trends like organ cleansing. So everything must come back to the fact that your liver just needs to be cleansed and then gluten intolerance. For a while, everyone was saying, oh, yeah, I think I'm gluten intolerant. I think that's what's going on here. It's, it's, it's the thing. If I can just get rid of the gluten, everything's going to work perfectly. And then there are these discredited ways that I was exposed. Exposed to because of having Lyme disease, of diagnosing and treating that condition, often using live blood cell analysis, which is complete pseudoscience. Nonsense. Sirs, is this controversial concept like C S that Peterson says that he has. It's only really accepted amongst functional, integrative or naturopathic practitioners. And I looked into it as based on the work of Dr. Richie Shoemaker, who claims that certain genetically predisposed people have a hard time recover, recovering from, and then fully detoxing certain pathogens that have affected them, like Lyme or other bacteria like mold and algae, apparently, and that these people then go on to develop systemic inflammatory illness. And Shoemaker has a theory of how all of this works. And of course, he's got a unique protocol for treating it. And, you know, who's to say? This may turn out to be supported by evidence one day, but as of this moment, it's. It is totally in the camp of fringe medicine.
- [08:06]
Derek Barris
Peterson then was hospitalized with pneumonia and sepsis and spent nearly a month in intensive care where family members described him as being near death. One report says the sepsis arose as a complication during an ICU stay in Switzerland following an intubation and was reportedly unrelated to stem cell treatment. But I'm going to question that at this point.
- [08:30]
Matthew Remsky
You know, one of the things in this story that kind of occurs to me is that, like, he's a world traveler through his lecture circuits and, you know, when he was really active, he. He'd be in London this week and then he'd be in. I don't know, he'd be in southern France the next week and Then he'd be back in the States and in Australia and whatever. And the. But in the sickness arc it is he is touring sort of, you know, clinics in different countries. Like he's, it's, it's, it's just one hospital stay after another and it's hard
- [08:59]
Julian Walker
to keep up with them.
- [09:00]
Matthew Remsky
It is, yeah.
- [09:01]
Derek Barris
We'll have more tour report on very soon, but all we really have to go on through all this is Peterson family accounts, though mostly relayed by Michaela, his daughter. She says he suffered from akathisia, a disorder marked by intense inner restlessness and physical distress. And it was a bad recurrence, apparently from a chronic problem.
- [09:24]
Julian Walker
She, from time to time will go on her social media, especially her YouTube channel, to give updates to, you know, people who want to know how her dad is doing. And this is from April 18th.
- [09:34]
Alex Schwartz
Dad's been suffering from an old neurological injury that's more recently been causing akathisia. Akathisia is the worst thing I've ever seen anyone go through. That sounds dramatic, but it's true. We talked about it in 2020 and 2021 when he experienced it after clonazepam injured him. I had a very brief experience with akathisia, with symptoms that were extremely horrifying, but not as severe as his when I went through antidepressant withdrawal from lexpro. Psych med injuries and psych meds as a whole should be considered a national emergency given one in six Americans, or possibly more depending on the stat is on one of these medications and long term use appears to cause mitochondrial dysfunction that manifests as a neurological injury. This recent flare up that started last August was likely due to the stress of both of his parents, my grandparents dying last year, moving countries, selling his home and mold exposures which was enough to trigger a recurrence of neurological symptoms.
- [10:33]
Julian Walker
Yeah, I mean what's, what's wild about this to me is that two of our major beats are, are coming together, right? We have the Jordan Peterson manosphere, kind of right, right wing, anti trans, like, like drumming up this sort of charismatic propagandist energy. And then we have this pseudoscience piece where the deeper we go down the rabbit hole, to use his phrase about n, we find that there. It's also speculative. It's like everyone's trying to figure out what's going on with Jordan and he's going to every, every clinic he can find and trying every alternative thing. And then it, I, I look at it and I start to feel like how much of this is self created by all of these different interventions and alternative approaches.
- [11:23]
Derek Barris
There is a whole lot of things for one diagnosis in there and that's, that's part of the problem. Very often illnesses have multi, multiple reasons for them happening. But when you start throwing all of them out and then saying, oh, it was the mold, oh wait, no, it was a psych injury due to the medications, then that's when we specifically start to see the crossover into what we've covered for so many years, you know, between where the wellness world slips into the sort of right wing philosophy. The Petersons have long discussed Jordan's use of benzodiazepines. As someone formerly on a benzo myself, Xanax, I understand they can certainly make some people dependent on, on them. So I'm going to take him at his word about his struggles with them because they are very powerful and people have a lot of problems with them. His dependence reportedly led him to another stop on the, on the tourist tour, Matthew, to Russia, where doctors placed him in a medically induced coma using propofol in an attempt to let him sleep through withdrawal. Then it gets really murky to me because the whole idea of the withdrawal was to be off the, off of these medications. Then Jordan spent several months a clinic in Belgrade purported to specialize in neurological restoration, where he was given a cocktail of sedatives, antidepressants, antidepressants and opiates. So he's right back on the psych meds as part of a tapering after he supposedly withdraw. So I'm really confused by that sequence of events. Michaela said her father seemed stoned, but at least he started to relax in her words. Apparently this relaxation was over a decade in the making, following not just extensive pharmacological dependence, but a very weird diet protocol. So to get into that, we need to backtrack again.
- [13:13]
Julian Walker
Yeah, and I just want to second what you said earlier, Derek, which is that we're, we're not here to, to denigrate Peterson for his health struggles. I mean, clearly there's stuff going on with him and he seems like he's in that percentage of people who suffers from perhaps a cluster of conditions that, that can be hard to diagnose and treat. And so a lot of times these folks end up going through the, the sort of pseud hamster wheel of like trying all of these different things. Right.
- [13:42]
Matthew Remsky
You know, I approve of both of you being so careful about separating out these two things, but I just want to note that we're kind of talking about Jordan Peterson, the Icon. Right. In one sense. And then Jordan Peterson's body in another sense. We're giving you a lot more respect to the latter. It's almost as if it's worthy. It's worthy. And the person suffering the conditions, you know, whoever that is, you know that, you know, this is somebody who deserves care and you know, know all of this stuff. But it's, it's almost as if the conditions themselves are getting more respect than the guy.
- [14:17]
Julian Walker
Yeah, yeah. I mean, the reason that I want to make sure and do that is because I know we'll have listeners who resonate with some of what he's gone through where they're just like, yeah, this, this shit can be really difficult. And, and go on and on and on through endless chapters of attempting to find hope and, you know, often just being disappointed.
- [14:36]
Derek Barris
And I often try to separate out between the usefulness of pharmacological intervention and Big Pharma. The industry, and this is where I agree with activists, is that these drugs, like Xanax for example, which I was on, was, was approved by the FDA on four week data, which is not a lot of data to really know. And most of these medications are not given tapering protocols by the pharmaceutical industry or by professionals. And so people, when they want to get off them, are really left to themselves. I've interviewed a number of, in my previous podcast about that problem. So I do feel a sense of responsibility to be like, this is a real issue now, Jordan. Putting everything on that or mold exposure is a different question. And that's sort of what we're trying to suss out here.
- [15:24]
Julian Walker
Yeah, yeah. And to me, the whole story reads like someone who is continuously trying off label alternative combinations of things and dosages in a way where it's like, yeah, no shit, that, that could get you into worse trouble. It's there. Is it like I'm going to go and get into a coma to detox from Benz and then I'm going to go into another situation where I'm on all kinds of other drugs. Wait, I thought you said it was a psych med injury. Like this is. This is all very wild. So we are backtracking though, because in 2016, right around the time he was coming to prominence, he said in a joint TV interview with Michaela that he suffered from an autoimmune condition which led to hair loss, eye inflammation, fatigue, gum disease and depression. Sounds awful. And that to remedy it he was following a mostly carnivore diet with just a few specific vegetables. And for her part, there's a family thing here, which does perhaps point to some genetic predisposition. Michaela experienced a rare form of juvenile rheumatoid arthritis and she was following the same diet as dad to treat this. And they would later then make public statements about transitioning to eating only meat, salt and water because the greens were still maybe somehow giving them some of the inflammatory reactions. It's like, oh, you didn't think it was the lack of nutrients. You thought you have to take one more nutrient away to make this work better. So then they called, this is the, here's the opportunism. They called the meat, salt and water diet, the lion diet. And Michaela goes on to promote her own coaching program, which she's still doing to this day, I believe on social media through videos and podcast interviews where she will help you get onto the lion diet and kind of stick with it. And I don't know what, have nice recipes or something.
- [17:10]
Alex Schwartz
You only eat steak for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Do you even cook it in butter or anything? No.
- [17:16]
Julian Walker
You've been eating this way for seven years.
- [17:19]
Alex Schwartz
8. And you call this the lion diet? I did a very restrictive paleo diet. So a lot of meat, all meats, lot of green vegetables and like a tiny bit of fruit. That really transformed my health until I stopped taking psychiatric medications and that blew up all of the sensitivities I had before. And that's when I eventually went to meat and I went to just meat because I realized that the higher carb foods were not making me feel good. And then I was eating meat and lettuce and greens for like a year year and I still wasn't feeling good. I had some arthritis. I had a baby. I'll just go down to all meat because I know meat isn't giving me flare ups. And then when I tried to reintroduce foods, I tried it six weeks, I tried olives in olive oil that were like preservative free. And I was like, olives are a health food. So this will be fine. Huge flare up. Mostly neurological. So severe depression. Guess I'm just gonna eat meat. I felt better than I'd ever felt my entire life.
- [18:10]
Julian Walker
This is the populism of self experimentation and medical hypothesis.
- [18:15]
Jordan Peterson
Right?
- [18:15]
Julian Walker
It's like it's got to be this. I'm going to try that and then I'm going to do. That's Michaela on your favorite Friend of the pod, Derek, Alex Clark's Culture Apothecary podcast.
- [18:26]
Derek Barris
She's engaged now. I'm so happy for her.
- [18:28]
Julian Walker
Oh, that's wonderful.
- [18:29]
Matthew Remsky
What to like, Lion King or something or what's that guy name? What's that guy's name? Liver King. Is he still alive? No, he's married. Sorry.
- [18:36]
Derek Barris
No, no, she's. She's marrying a soy boy barista. Which is, which is an interesting pivot for a strong right wing person. Yeah, there's, there's. Mallory did some great work on, on that.
- [18:47]
Julian Walker
Interesting, interesting. So another thing that she goes into detail on in that particular interview is how after restricting her diet severely, even eating olives, as she said, or grain free, egg free, banana, almond muffins would cause massive inflammatory responses. So clearly she's tracking this all very carefully. She describes experiencing mildly psychotic side effects from taking SSRIs. Like, she says she would look at her person, it would have teeth. Now, all of this is just rough. I mean, I feel for this whole family. So this is to echo what we've been saying so far. It's a tough road.
- [19:23]
Matthew Remsky
Yeah. I hate to be the guy, but I also just want to say that the only reason that we know anything about Jordan Peterson is because he's a fucking liar. And in 2016, he comes to prominence complaining about this bill before Canadian Parliament to include trans people who's protected class against harassment. And he goes to the Senate and he says, this will force me to speak in ways that I don't want to speak. And every legal expert in the entire country says, no, you're wrong. That's not what the law says. That's not what's going to happen. That's not how it can be prosecuted. It's really about sustained harassment using, you know, bad pronouns or dead names or things like that. And if you avoid doing that, you'll be fine. And he knew that. He knew that and he carried forward anyway. And so I, I mean, if they were any other family. Yes, very. You know, I can, I can feel for all of the suffering there, but also, I'm not sure how reliable they are as narrators.
- [20:24]
Julian Walker
Yeah. And it's. But it's not just that he's a liar, Right. It's that he is a charismatic, idiosyncratically dressed, attention hungry liar.
- [20:34]
Matthew Remsky
Yeah, yeah.
- [20:35]
Derek Barris
You know, you read the list. Egg free, grain free. And the one thing, as someone who also suffered from an eating disorder, I will say when I listen people like this, the complete joylessness of the experience of eating that comes out in, in what they're saying, it just sounds like such a slog. And if people are truly allergic to foods and can't Eat them, that's one thing. But the way that they present food, it's just eating, communing, it's just, it should be at least at times a joyful celebration shared with others. And they just completely ruin that. In terms of the lion diet diet, you know, no clinical trials have ever confirmed if its efficacy, to be clear, which apparently is because big food and big Pharma won't fund the trials. Something, something as they always go on to say, so fans of it have to cite personal success stories and uncontrolled surveys. It's all vibes based stuff. I mean the diet eliminates fiber entirely. And all the Maha people who are like, oh, we need this, we need food dies out, whatever, something like 90% of Americans don't get enough fiber in their diet, which is an actual problem we know of. And so along with the plant compounds they're not eating in the lion diet, which are tied to reduced disease risk, they're really setting themselves up for things like inflammation, which is apparently driving a lot of Jordan's problems. Plus, the International Agency for Research on Cancer classifies red meat as prob. Probably carcinogenic and processed meat. Meat as A known carcinogen. A2A 2025 study of over 542,000 women found red and processed meat were among the only dietary factors linked to higher colorectal cancer risk.
- [22:24]
Julian Walker
Wow.
- [22:25]
Derek Barris
You know, just so those oncologists can get you hooked on chemotherapy back in reality, all meat diets increase your risk of elevated LDL cholesterol, nutrient deficiencies, gut microbiome disruption and elevated tmao, a compound linked cardiovascular disease risk. As with any diet, people sometimes feel better at first. This could be from no longer eating something that was not beneficial, consuming fewer calories or receiving nutrients you might have been missing. Time is the factor here though. Carnivore diets are not sustainable and your physiology will catch up to you. But with the Petersons, magically, it just so happens to work for them and anyone on their coaching downline.
- [23:09]
Matthew Remsky
I guess I missed heard you say elevated tmao. I thought you actually meant elevated tmi, which is also obviously a broad side effect.
- [23:24]
Julian Walker
So in addition to this extreme food restriction. Oh, and the other thing I wanted to add here too, Derek, is you were listing out why you might feel better. I mean, I think part of why, when people, and I know this from experience and from being in this community for a long time, part of why people believe they're feeling better is they're doing such extreme things that require so much like effort that there's also that, that kind of placebo aspect of it. We're like, wow, yeah, everything that's going on right now must be really good. I'm having a cleansing effect. I'm feel I have more energy. Oh, my God, it's amazing. And, you know, it all, it all kind of gets. There's a psychological motivation to interpret everything as the magic bullet of the new diet.
- [24:06]
Jordan Peterson
Right.
- [24:06]
Julian Walker
There's something going on here which I already flagged, which is a kind of voluntary nutrient deficiency as well, as well as, like, not getting any fiber. He's also acted a lot of other desperate measures. Like his daughter has described him having a violent reaction to eating only meat and greens, which then led to him being prescribed a benzodiazepine. And apparently his dosage increased Eightfold over the next four years, partly due to his anxiety about his wife Tammy's kidney cancer diagnosis.
- [24:39]
Derek Barris
And as the first clip hinted, everything becomes really blurred with all this stuff. You got family problems, work stresses, drug uses, peptides, stem cells, all meat diets. It's impossible to really pinpoint what causes what. As I've covered often on this podcast, peptides are usually created on the black market in China, where purity levels can be super low and filler ingredients abound. Then you throw in stem cell injections, which are largely not clinically Val, and all of these things are having an effect in his body. And despite what wellness influencers like to claim, it's not always good. And we have no idea whether or not it's good. And this leads to the Brian Johnson problem, who we're going to discuss in next week's episode when Mallory DeMille returns. When you pump your body with unproven and often untested chemicals, it's impossible to identify what's doing what. Michaela has denied that peptides or stem cells played any role in her father's illness. But how can she prove that? While it's absolutely true that psychiatric medications can lead to tardive, Aisia, the NIH reports that it's rare for any case to last more than six months. So either Jordan is an extreme outlier or a combination of things caused his disease. Personally, I'd want to know what that was and not to default to just blaming one thing.
- [26:06]
Julian Walker
Yeah, so the way that just came to me to say this is that you're an N of one, right? You're only experimenting on yourself, but the confounding variation variables are exponentially increased because you're doing so, especially if you're Brian Johnson. So many things at the same time. The whole thing is just a mess.
- [26:20]
Derek Barris
Yeah, Brian, you know, when he was going through his mushroom trips a few months ago, talked about measuring 200 biomarkers. That's completely useless from a clinical perspective. You can't actually get reliable data when you're just throwing that many things into the mix. All of this brings us to the present presence. Present on June 21, Jordan posted the following on his social media account I'm
- [26:44]
Matthew Remsky
pleased to let you know that we're going to release a lecture a week from my extensive tour archive, beginning this Sunday and then repeating every Sunday after that. This allows me to do something interesting and useful while I'm otherwise incapacitated. My health is such at the moment that I can't really return to podcasting or public lecturing, but we recorded these with the express intention of preparing them for release, and we've all determined that this is a very good time to do that.
- [27:13]
Derek Barris
The lectures would appeal to longtime fans of his early YouTube work, he said, calling it a return to my roots. In the next segment, we're going to look at just what that means.
- [27:33]
Julian Walker
We've got a very different kind of sponsor for this episode. The Jordan 1 Harbinger Show, a podcast you should definitely check out since you're a fan of high quality, fascinating podcasts. Hosted by interesting people, the show covers a wide range of topics through weekly interviews with heavy hitting guests, and there are a ton of episodes you'll find interesting. Since you're a fan of this show, I'd recommend our listeners check it out. We have a fair amount of overlap. You know, Jordan recently did an episode on Remote Viewing and How the US Government Spent Millions of Dollars on this ESP pseudoscience. You might also look up an episode called Saving Bro's Soul from Alt Right Rabbit Hole. Anyway, you can't go wrong with adding the Jordan Harbinger show to your rotation. It's incredibly interesting. There's never a dull show. Search for the Jordan Harbinger Show. That's H A R B as in Boy I N as in Nancy G E R on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcast podcasts.
- [28:30]
Matthew Remsky
I'm Nomi Fry.
- [28:31]
Julian Walker
I'm Vincent Cunningham.
- [28:32]
Alex Schwartz
I'm Alex Schwartz, and we are Critics
- [28:34]
Julian Walker
at Large, a podcast from the New Yorker.
- [28:36]
Alex Schwartz
Guys, what do we do on the show every week?
- [28:38]
Matthew Remsky
We look into the startling maw of
- [28:40]
Julian Walker
our culture and try to figure something out.
- [28:42]
Alex Schwartz
That's right, we take something that's going on in the culture now. Maybe it's a movie. Maybe it's a book, maybe it's just kind of a trend and we expand
- [28:50]
Julian Walker
it across culture as kind of a pattern or a template.
- [28:54]
Alex Schwartz
Join us on Critics at Link Large from the New Yorker. New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow wherever you get your podcasts.
- [29:00]
Julian Walker
What a long, strange trip this is turning out to be for Jordan B. Peterson. We've covered him at least 10 times, but for anyone who wants a lightning fast refresher, he's gone from being a Harvard and University of Toronto professor with a longtime psychotherapy practice to becoming a hero of the manosphere and Culture War Brew podcast scene, speaking to auditoriums packed with adoring younger men off the back of his 12 Rules for Life Beth bestseller. Having posted popular psych lectures and found time to take a bold attention grabbing stand against trans people, as you mentioned, Matthew and their tyranny of the compelled pronoun. He built a YouTube channel with 9 million subscribers and had Patreon supporters paying him $80,000 a month until 2018 when he quit Patreon on principle over their censorship of racist accounts. Then in 2022 he joined Ben Shapiro's Daily Wire and at this point I felt like Peterson went totally mask off in in the years since, he's revealed himself to have an increasingly fragile, emotionally volatile, politically enraged Dr. Hyde behind his stand up straight and clean your room, Dr. Jekyll. That's actually Ms. It's Mr. Hyde and Dr. Jekyll, right?
- [30:17]
Derek Barris
With his return, Peterson's Facebook posting has been prolific. I mean hourly one video clip and then followed by a pithy quote like
- [30:26]
Julian Walker
Embrace responsibility, gain purpose. You're giving up what's often nothing more than juvenile hedonism to pursue something of much greater significance.
- [30:37]
Derek Barris
I I just love people who quote themselves and then sign it off. It's just no ego there. Given our discussion during segment one, this recent podcast clip really jumped out at me. Julian, you're going to recognize the interviewer immediately, but wait to hear Jordan's response to his Galaxy Brain claims.
- [30:56]
Matthew Remsky
We know very little about the way the actually works. You know, I'm constantly struck by the fact that our narrative about medicine proceeds from an entirely false premise, which is that we know a great deal about the body and have all of these useful interventions. What we have is a lot of interventions where sometimes we know what one of their effects is. We very rarely understand why the spectrum of collateral consequences are what they are, and all of these systems are linked together and nobody is tracking the long term implications of anything. So we have this sort of obsessive focus on the things that you can detect on very short timescales and almost a studied ignorance of what the same pharmaceuticals or procedures do to us long term.
- [31:44]
Jordan Peterson
Right?
- [31:44]
Matthew Remsky
And we then I suspect if you
- [31:46]
Jordan Peterson
did these statistics properly, that medicine, independent of public health, kills more people than it say.
- [31:53]
Derek Barris
So there you have Bret Weinstein basically making the same argument I did in segment one, just switch out pharmaceuticals with other pharmaceuticals like peptides and stem cells. But Jordan, like so many wellness influencers we cover, likes to pretend that peptides and stem cells, which are manufactured and sold by the pharmaceutical industry, aren't actually pharmaceuticals. And there's Jordan making the bold assertion that medicine is killing people. While we know he refuses to accept all those natural interventions he pumped into his body most definitely did not have a detrimental effect. Stunning that someone who claims to be so reflective and honest with evidence can't wr recognize his inability to turn the mirror around. Yet as you mentioned, Julian Peterson became a central figure in manosphere discourse. Bland dictums like stand up straight with your shoulders back from his 12 Rules for Life were taking as a parenting call to arms. Two of those other rules are specific to raising kids, as well as this old school Republican pull yourself up by the bootstraps ethos for young men. Except the last, which I can't actually disagree with, which is this is an outlier in the book Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street. The old softy let his emotional side out when he wasn't screaming about the biological truths of men and women. Speaking of, here's an old clip that he also shared from his professing days that made its way into this tranche of recent releases. This is rather fitting, given that it's coming from a boomer about what women apparently don't understand about men.
- [33:38]
Jordan Peterson
The image of fear, perfection to motivate themselves. And that's exactly right. That's precisely what they do. You see that in the Tom Sawyer story. So Tom sawyer is about 12 years old and he's still hanging around with his friends like Huck Finn. And this girl moves across the street, Becky, and she comes out and he's struck by her. For the first time in his life, something's changed. And the first thing he does is hop up on a picket fence and show off and balance in front of her. And he's saying, well, look at me, look at me. He's like the male bowerbird building something beautiful so the female will approve of it. And it's motivation. And that's something that I think modern women don't really understand about men. They don't understand that at least to the degree that males are uncorrupted and not better because of being rejected. They're doing everything they can to kneel before the eternal image of the feminine and try to make themselves worthy. That's the chivalry story, right? That's what you should encourage in your partner.
- [34:35]
Julian Walker
That's fascinating because he made such a quick deceptive move from a kind of showing off, look at how great I am notion that coming out of a kind of, you know, very, very low level evolutionary psychology analysis into being being this humble servant who's just worshiping the feminine, right?
- [34:55]
Matthew Remsky
And either way, in either of those two forks, what is absent and impossible for this guy and his mindset is to just be a person with the person that you are interested in being a friend with. There has to be either this, it's either showing off or deference. But it's not going to be about sharing or communication or you know, investigating interests or. It's just so stressful. It is so stressful.
- [35:27]
Derek Barris
There's common sentiment that I hear from friends when I share certain malfluencer videos that men work out for other men, not for women, even though they think it's for women. While women are broad and diverse in their tastes. To be clear, in my experience, it's not the boy jumping up and showing off that's attractive. It's to your point, Matthew. It's the boy who is around the girl that matters, who listens to them, who treats them as equals and is interested in follow up questions and what they're saying. Do they take interest in their, in their interests, not only demand that she be interested in his when he's jumping up on the fence. And these are often treated as actual attractive attributes by women. The buffoon standing on the fence yelling mesmerizes other boys for the most part, which is where the link between Boomer and Gen Z is made. Here we're going to look at looks maxing because it feels like the young boys are listening to old Peterson lectures. The obsessive focus over physical appearance isn't necessarily unattractive to women, but the motivation for doing it and the validation they seek is thought to be for other young men. And this isn't just me saying this. This all flips Peterson's claim on its head. And this is covered by journalist Ryan Cahill. He writes in Dazed, the age old
- [36:48]
Matthew Remsky
concept of sizing up other men in the locker room showers has bled out into wider male existence and despite an insistence that these beauty standards are what is needed to attract and date women, it's more often a male gaze rather than a female one that's driving the ideals, as was seen in the debate over whether oily Muirs looked better before or after his 12 week gym transformation. I missed that one, I guess.
- [37:14]
Derek Barris
I think it's Ollie, but oily, if you've seen photos of them, actually makes sense.
- [37:18]
Matthew Remsky
Oh, sorry, yeah, obviously I haven't seen him.
- [37:21]
Derek Barris
I think this matters for the type of content that the manosphere pumps out. If Peterson were to reframe his claim so that Tom realized he was a bower bird for Huck, at least he'd be honest about his motivations and better understand why he was doing what he does. But the belief that he's doing it for opposite sex can have damaging downstream effects. This exact thing was the topic of a 2025 study on looks maxing that was entitled When Help is Harm, Health, Lookism and Self Improvement in the Manosphere. The synopsis of their findings are worth considering it in full. In full and the open access study is included in the show notes if you want to read it. But Julian, can you can you synopsize here for us?
- [38:06]
Julian Walker
Our study develops concepts, analyzes the performance of gender and health, and articulates the consequences of self improvement practices in the manosphere. First, we argue that users apply a hegemonic masculine gaze as they critique one another's bodies example in relation to height or musculature. This gaze demeans body shames and humiliates users under the auspices of objective masculine advice. Second, we demonstrate how ratings are tied to self improvement and health or medical interventions such as mewing, which is pushing the tongue against the roof of the mouth to achieve a more masculine jaw, and surgeries, for example leg lengthening. Third, despite being positioned as a support community, we contend that the looks maxing community subjects men to masculine demoralization by denigrating users appearances and encouraging them to cope. Complete suicide. As we conclude, the community buttresses hegemonic masculinity and male supremacy while harming the health of men and boys who participate.
- [39:14]
Derek Barris
I read it. I think it was a V fair investigative article into leg lengthening a few years ago. Just brutal. I don't understand. I. I just don't get it. It's. It's absolutely torturous. But in terms of the study, I find it a bit ironic that Jordan opens that clip with the idea that men are striving for female perfection as if affection isn't and hasn't always been a motivation. I've covered something similar in my episodes on eating disorders. For every 20 women who seek help for one, only one man does. Yet both men and women suffer from eating disorders at nearly equal rates. The pressures on women in our society are better understood though. But we shouldn't pretend that self consciousness and self criticism is a gendered fear phenomenon. I recently read about a study about the cleanliness of homes. Both men and women judge women more harshly on how clean their house is, and they also both give men a break. This persists across couples who live together, and if a man or woman lives alone, there are all sorts of unconscious ways we judge that have resulted from generations of social norms, even if in reality both men and women should be responsible for the cleanliness of where they live live. And so I have to wonder about how far the manosphere is going to push it in the direction of their errant beliefs. And this really came to light last week when it came out that Connor Murphy, a 32 year old fitness influencer and looks maxer who died by drowning in Thailand was injecting gold into his body. He believed that deep state actors were gatekeeping the mineral from the population and that he would achieve special powers if he injured suggested it. And so he did. His body became discolored, he ran around his neighborhood screaming and when the police chased him to try to calm him down, he ran into a lake and died. This is all being related by fellow looks Maxer clavicular sharing the news from another looks maxer and close friend of Connor's named Andrew Jennick. And as sad as historically story is, I can't help but notice the parallels to Peterson's own passion for mythology. The Greek God sounding names the young men give themselves, the centuries old alchemical quest ingesting gold for powers and underneath it all, the fragile neurosis of existence that drive men to think and perform in such a way as to be mythologized by other men. And it makes me wonder now in moving forward as the manosphere morphs into something else but similar through the generation generations, what's going to break that spell?
- [42:00]
Matthew Remsky
Well for a start, more socialist policies given the survivalist competition at the foundation of so much of this stuff. But also it is Peterson. But it's also kind of like mutant comic book character territory as well, right? Like taking on special powers through the ingestion of poison and so on and imagining some sort of of new body or self coming out of that. It's incredible stuff.
- [42:27]
Julian Walker
Yeah. And in terms of Greek mythology. This is all narcissists. This is all getting entranced by your own reflection in the river and how to make that reflection more pleasing in a way that is sort of, in some very small sense supported by evidence around hierarchies that have to do with physical appearance and attributes. But those things are just what might get you in the door. Being more attractive than the person next to you is one. One thing. But then what are you going to talk about once. Once. Once the woman is interested. Right. And vice versa. What are you going to talk about once the man is interested? And how do you actually form intimacy? None of this is part of it. And that's why it's also predatory and demoralizing to most people who participate in it, because it's all just a kind of justification for dog eat dog hierarchical competition. It's gross. And in terms of your question, Derek, like, where does this stuff end? I think there has to be some kind of viable ground, psychologically intelligent alternative to how we teach boys to feel better about themselves and to. To actualize their desires for, you know, for connection, for one thing, and for success.
- [43:42]
Derek Barris
Yeah. Another place to look though, might be the arts. There is a recent New York Times op ed written by Baylor professor of Medieval Literature, Dr. Sebastian Langdell. He talks about his own Journey into Menosphere podcast during his own attempt to get healthier. He discuss the hollowness and even anti health advice given by Peter Attia, Andrew Huberman, Tim Ferriss and Brian Johnson. Before finding actual good advice by artists in this expert. He cites two writers that I love.
- [44:14]
Matthew Remsky
The novelist Laura Van Den Berg turned to boxing to combat destructive anxiety patterns. Two hours a night, she says she sleeps, writes and lives better. And I spoke with the poet Hanif Abdurqib about how running radically changed his life. It was about stress relief and managing clinical depression. He said he logs an immense number of miles each day and even started helping a friend train for a marathon, matching her long runs up to 20 miles with no intention of running the marathon himself. In a recent interview with Haruki Murakami, the singer, Harry Styles credited Mr. Murakami's book on running with freeing him from the idea that music had been an unhealthy profession and I had to be this tortured soul instead. Being healthy makes you able to be an artist for a long time.
- [45:02]
Derek Barris
I have to say, if you have not read Hanif Abdurraqib's book, that's a love letter to Tribe Called Quest. Just one of the most fantastic memoirs I've read Langdell notes how these people care about the artists. He's talking about feeling alive in their bodies, sleeping well and having the stamina to do meaningful work. I too learned from another one of my favorite memoirs, which was Murakami's memoir about running, which has nothing to do with getting ripped or being optimized. As a former jazz club owner, heavy drinker and cigarette smoker, he just wanted to feel better and be able to write. So he transformed himself, started running ultra marathons and that completely changed his life. It's wonderful book and this is all a manosphere I can actually get down down with. Take away all the pretensions and unrealistic demands and you find something much more realistic for the rest of us.
- [46:10]
Matthew Remsky
Okay, One factor we haven't mentioned that might be impacting Jordan Peterson's resurrection again is the proximity of Catholic Jesus to his family and professional docket. In March of 2024, his wife Tammy was confirmed Catholic at an Easter Mass here in Toronto at Holy Rosary Church and Jordan called it a miraculous thing to see. Although he was went on to be cagey about whether he was going to convert himself, he said, I loved my wife from the moment I laid eyes on her when I was a kid. Since she's pursued her efforts at enlightening herself more thoroughly, she's much more who she is now. The Catholic fascination has a number of intersections and networks and roots. Since 20, Peterson's been a regular guest on the MAGA Bishop Robert Barron's Word on Fire platform, with Barron citing Peterson favorably to the US Bishops as a model for reaching disaffected young nuns. As in nun, you know, no categorization for spirituality or religion. But as we've seen, Jordan has been in the belly of the whale or the limestone tomb since about May of last year 2020. And one hypothesis I have is that he is being summoned forth by the power and grace of Nun Girl Summer because at some point around February this clip from the Dominican Sisters Open Mic podcast went viral.
- [47:37]
Alex Schwartz
Do you have a favorite game at the moment?
- [47:40]
Matthew Remsky
My all time favorite. This is an outdoor game but in
- [47:42]
Julian Walker
the summer is when we're all home
- [47:43]
Alex Schwartz
together is playing Ultimate Princess Sister and you are so good at that.
- [47:47]
Julian Walker
I'm a huge ultimate sir.
- [47:49]
Matthew Remsky
And you also are.
- [47:52]
Derek Barris
We just need to know.
- [47:53]
Matthew Remsky
You're so fast.
- [47:55]
Alex Schwartz
I'm usually on defense.
- [47:57]
Derek Barris
I'm trying to defend against people like you.
- [47:59]
Matthew Remsky
I can't.
- [48:00]
Alex Schwartz
Okay, full disclosure everyone since your Miriam likes to chat when she plays Ultimate Free My secret weapon. I know.
- [48:06]
Jordan Peterson
I just.
- [48:07]
Matthew Remsky
I just Put it out there.
- [48:10]
Alex Schwartz
When you're out on the field and
- [48:11]
Matthew Remsky
the action's far away, just strike up a conversation with.
- [48:14]
Alex Schwartz
It's your secret ploy. I'm on to you.
- [48:18]
Matthew Remsky
So that's host Sister Miriam gassing up Sister Mary Bethany about her ultimate Frisbee skills. Sister Miriam is a Canadian born science teacher who entered the order in 2006. She also likes biking. California born Sister Mary Bethany joined in 2013. She'd been an early childhood teacher. She's now studying towards a theology master's degree. And their order, which now counts about 155 members, is called the Dominican Sisters of Mary, Mother of the Eucharist. It was founded in 1999, 1997 by four sisters who left the Dominican Sisters of St. Cecilia in Nashville, Tennessee and they're now based in Ann Arbor, Michigan in a $25 million mother house with a full media studio. Put a pin in that. Which has quickly become the envy of U.S. religious orders. They don't themselves indulge in influencing. However, they have a lay staff that manages distribution and reports the shocking news of their huge engagement engagement back to them. So unlike with the Peterson platform, I think they're very disengaged with the actual logistics and you know, the, the, the, the monetary stuff with regard to their social media empire.
- [49:28]
Derek Barris
I'm having real generational cognitive dissonance because it must be the California one with the vocal fry. And I can't get my great aunt, who is a Catholic nun, her voice out of my head because that was my only relationship to having Catholic nuns. And so listening to them, that was, that was quite a moment. Yeah.
- [49:46]
Matthew Remsky
You know, there's a lot of, has gone around the Internet. There's been a lot of sort of hometown and family connections that people have made. Like I knew somebody like that or I went to school with these nuns. And so people are making sort of these familial connections all the time. And that's part of a bit of the buzz I think that's around this stuff. But part of the viral surge of the ultimate Frisbee clip followed a comment on the original stream from Vivian Wilson. Now, I've been told that Vivian doesn't like to be referred to as Elon Musk's daughter, but that's, you know, why we know about her. So Vivian Wilson stands on her own, doesn't have anything to do with Elon anymore, but that's who she is. And she said that she was low key, obsessed with the nuns. And so I want you to put a pin in that, because that's interesting. And I have to say that I was low key obsessed as well, because at first blush, open mic feels like the anti manosphere. Two sisters, white robes, black habits, in a curated slate blue living room that could also be kind of like a boutique hotel lobby. There's a decorative faux plant. There's no iconography, there's no crucifix, there's nothing austere. I guess in some of the videos you could see like an orthodox Madonna in the background, but very muted. It's warm and tasteful. It's very wellness and lifestyle cocktail coded. But I think it's the habits that stop the scroll and if you pause, you just get this continuous earful of these women loving each other's company and seemingly at ease in the world. And I think that it's everything that Jordan Peterson couldn't do with his reactionary political content. Like he couldn't make it fun. So those are the clips, however, and I'm going to get to the long form content, content. But before I do, I'll just say that I know this scene a little bit from my own childhood because I had a great aunt. Her name was Sister Marie Fridelis, and she belonged to an order called the Immaculate Heart of Mary, also in Michigan, but in Monroe. This is about 40 miles down the road from Ann Arbor. And they also had a huge mother house that was really well appointed. The chapel was, was marble. The guest rooms were really, you know, bright and cheerful. There was a, you know, a warm refectory where everybody ate together. When I visited her there, there was this uncanny sense of entering a parallel world. She was an world expert botanist, and her fellow sisters all had teaching or research or medical jobs. And so this whole network of very professional and accomplished women who had rejected marriage in the 1950s all the way through to the 70s and had retreated to this convent to pursue a life of freedom, but also trade offs, you know, women living very usual but also unusual lives. And, you know, while everybody has stories about crabby nuns in school, for the most part, you know, there was this gracious, welcoming and smiling vibe throughout the entire place when I visited. And this is what I remember when I see these clips, because the podcasting happens, sisters strike that chord. And the media has picked up on this too. So the New York Times glazed their unrelenting positivity in an article from late March 2026 under the headline, don't call them nuns, they're podcasters. They were on NBC's Today Show, Australia's Sunrise show. And then the Catholic outlet Alatea followed with similar coverage in the following week. Weeks. These are glowing reviews that note their pathbreaking discipline that the sisters follow precise regimes that don't involve cold plunges and smoothies. They've given up their personal phones and individual social media. I don't know if you guys can hear the resonance now between the programs that are on offer here in the convent and the things that are, you know, the products of the solopreneur wellness influencers. But there's a real overlap there. But it's coded differently. And the framing is countercultural, tech, tech light and somehow neutral, politically neutral, as though they're just living their best lives in some separate timeline. Cold is the headline. And they reported the numbers that there's a more than 3,500% increase in Spotify listeners to open mic between February and late June of 2026. About 84% of listeners are Millenn and Gen Z. The piece frames this explicitly as a young audience phenomenon and not a broad, you know, or older skewing kind of fad. Cosmopolitan uses the phrase Nun Girl Summer as a direct counter trend to Hot girl summer from 2019. Megan thee, stallion. And the sisters are popular, you know, are said to be popular as a kind, kind of, I don't know, outgrowth of burnout from dating apps or romance fatigue and a turn towards, you know, celibacy and quiet, intentional singlehood amongst young women.
- [55:13]
Julian Walker
I mean, that's interesting. It sounds like a. It sounds like a feature writer, you know, spinning a lot of yarn to try to reflect on this. Obviously inspired and captivated by it. I also looked it up. It's. The growth is obviously exponential and amazing, but I think that it's more noteworthy because of the. Because of them, right, because of the nuns. Because it's. I think they're roughly at around 400,000 downloads a month or something.
- [55:38]
Matthew Remsky
Yeah, yeah, that's a lot.
- [55:40]
Julian Walker
It's a lot.
- [55:41]
Matthew Remsky
It's a lot.
- [55:41]
Julian Walker
Yeah.
- [55:42]
Matthew Remsky
I've watched and listened to a lot of their material at this point, and I'm going to paint a picture in two layers. On the surface level, I can see how these mainstream press articles, you know, really went for the presentation of something old but modernized. That speaks to a lot of key anxieties, you know, with the disembodiment of online life in the foreground. So Instagram for these nuns is. Is kind of like this one way window into mostly non digital lives where you can listen to them talk for hours about the pleasures of communal living, centered around feelings of interior freedom. They have a daily liturgy, they have their jobs in the world, but they also have games, nights, trivia nights, Frisbee basketball. Their religious devotion hasn't excluded them from the world of science, but rather animated it with enthusiasm and mystery. And we'll see some of the problems that that raises in a bit. But they're also, you know, armed with this upfront critique of consumer capitalism that runs on what they see as the erosion of self control through advertising and manufactured body dissatisfaction. So you can put a pin in that as well. There's also what I would describe as a kind of, I don't know, soft communist politics to it. Before you look too closely, these are women who call each other sister constantly. They've collectivized their resources and their labor under the ideal of spiritual motherhood, and they're doing caregiving jobs outside of the domestic order, where most of that labor would be invisible. They're watching each other and celebrating each other, do their shared work. And as, as far as I can tell, none of the members have kids or prior marriages. So we're really talking about lifelong vocations from fairly early ages. You know, by contrast, the other, you know, some other famous monastics in the culture, like Pema Chodron, you know, they enter religious life usually by leaving their families behind, you know, like the Buddha did. Now, the issue of money is also discussed with a kind of serene and God will provide shrug. They rely on providence, they say, which means benefactors. They consider their property held in common. But I found in total that this emphasis on all of this surface stuff was, was a little bit hollow. And the fact that none of the news coverage looked at the long form content in any substantial way, that was very unsatisfying. You know, the, the sisters seemed to be catching all of this uncritical praise from Instagram feminists because of these articles, because of the clips. And so I took the 24 episode transcripts from YouTube and I analyzed them for the obvious issues, asking these questions like, do the speakers express any struggle in reconciling science and religion? Do any of the speakers express discontent with their lower status in the church as women? Do the speakers talk about politics or political systems at all? Do the speakers discuss feminism? Do the speakers mention anything about contemporary American politics, about Trump or about ice?
- [59:00]
Julian Walker
Do they mention anything about the trade off of having to be celibate in order to live a life of devotion to God?
- [59:08]
Matthew Remsky
Not really. They'll talk about having been chosen by God as a bride or having committed themselves to God but there's no sense of trade off there. No. And the question of whether or not they become biological mothers or not or biological parents is really subsumed into this notion of we become spiritual mothers to all of humanity. Right. So none of the answers to these questions are surprising. Like every answer is. Is no except for the political systems one where there's a whole episode on the Soviet Union. So I'll get to that.
- [59:45]
Julian Walker
Wow.
- [59:45]
Matthew Remsky
Also not surprising is the fact that anti woke educational interventions are their primary product and they are the gateway to understanding their implicit politics. And so I would like the feature writers at, you know, New York Times and everywhere else to listen up because think you missed the thrust of what this order is up to by not listening to the very first episode. And their main sort of deal, what they want to do with their primary product in the world, is to politely shit talk the wokeism of social emotional learning and to provide an alternative to it. Bringing the neuroscience with the virtue is our response to these secular social emotional learning programs that are out there, that are making their way into some Catholic schools or have made their way in there. Which comes back to this, the philosophy of this affirmation that we were talking about where we be, where children are being taught to depend upon themselves, which is dangerous. We know that.
- [60:52]
Julian Walker
You know, as opposed to being helped to grow under that, that grace of baptism.
- [60:58]
Alex Schwartz
Yeah.
- [60:59]
Jordan Peterson
And respond.
- [60:59]
Derek Barris
Yeah.
- [61:00]
Matthew Remsky
And responding to the graces, you know, responding to the graces of baptism, which is where we've been infused with the gifts of the Holy Spirit. We've been infused with the theological virtues and then living out the, the cardinal virtues. And I think in teaching, you know, we want to teach the. Have the teachers have this glimpse into this. In this interior classroom or invisible classroom.
- [61:25]
Julian Walker
Wow, this is, this is fascinating. And I was just the whole time I'm hearing that, I'm thinking if you pitched her voice down just like one whole step, it's very much the Peterson register and, and, and combination of like fry and tone.
- [61:40]
Matthew Remsky
Well, you'd also have to like jump up the anxiety and the insistence because, I mean, just a very. I mean, that's. This. The whole vibe is very peaceful. That's suspicious. Sister John Dominic, one of the founders of the order. And what she's talking about is how social emotional learning is creating these deficits of self reliance in today's children. And this program is invading Catholic schools. And that's a big problem. She's talking with somebody named Dr. Karen Villa, who's a clinical neuropsychologist in Private practice in Michigan. And Dr. Villa works with the order on their educational materials. And so, you know, she's talking about how social emotional learning, this is her first complaint, right, is that it teaches children to depend on themselves, which is kind of strange because it's called social emotional learning. And, you know, there's this strange way in which Catholic poetry enters this realm of. Of neuropsychology. The brain becomes an invisible classroom. You know, something like there's a numinous space. So I'll say a little bit more about how these concepts meld together. But this first episode in their archive, it's called Education and neuroscience. And so Dr. Villa is a guest. And then there's also a guy named Dr. Brett Sackeld, who's a theologian from Regina. What we find out is that, you know, they're all very much against social emotional learning. And that should make some red flags go up, because social emotional learning has been a prime target of people like Christopher ruffo since about 2021. This is from an article on that.
- [63:28]
Julian Walker
Mr. Ruffo stated that while social emotional learning sounds positive and uncontroversial in theory, in practice it serves as a delivery mechanism for radical pedagogies such as critical race theory and gen deconstructionism. Of course it does.
- [63:44]
Matthew Remsky
Right.
- [63:45]
Julian Walker
The intention of social emotional learning, he continued, is to soften children at an emotional level, reinterpret their normative behavior as an expression of their repression, whiteness, or internalized racism, and then rewire their behavior according to the dictates of left wing ideology. I'm sorry, I couldn't resist putting my own. My own emphasis on this bullshit.
- [64:10]
Matthew Remsky
Yeah, so. So that's Chris Ruffo. But here's the official def from the nonprofit educational research Institute. It's called Casel Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning. So this is the field's founding, its most widely cited organization. It defines SEL as the process through which all young people and adults acquire and apply the knowledge, skills and attitudes to develop healthy identities, manage emotions and achieve personal and collective goals, feel and show empathy for others, establish and maintain supportive relationships, and make responsible and caring teams decisions. What lies they're telling. So where Chris Ruffo goes, Moms for Liberty and Parents Defending Education follow. And these organizations have made social emotional learning a national organizing target. They frame it as a Trojan horse for teaching gender identity and systemic oppression content to children without parental consent. Now, slamming social emotional learning is also on Jordan Peterson's docket as well. When he interviewed, for instance, Logan Lansing, who's the co author with Michael o' Fallon of a book called Queering of the American Child on his podcast. This is a book organized around the notion that social emotional learning is a Trojan horse. But I think what starts to become clear is that the Dominican sisters are actually the real Trojan horse here, because what do they add to the conversation? They add a single letter because what they have developed is what, what they call Catholic social emotional learning in programs called Raised in Grace and Secure in Grace, which they described as, you know, an authentically Christian viewpoint on the subject that integrates Catholic faith with modern neuroscience. So they have a. Yeah, they have a 2025 annual fund letter that explicitly foregrounds Secure in Grace as a headline Achievement to donors. Our newest program offering a Catholic answer to social emotional learning. And I'm thinking about my great aunt here who is like a world class scientist in botany and thinking about how I'm not aware that that generation of nuns who were all inspired by like Vatican II and liberation theology and Catholic social teaching, whether they ever had the instinct that they would use science in a culture war context, I'm sure it was there, there, but that just seems so far apart from what they were up to. They were just working in the world and then they had this home that they shared together. So, you know, the question of how these folks integrate Catholicism and neuroscience is pretty interesting because they'll use terms like faith to, you know, describe the holding neurological environment or container, which is kind of a New Agey word that allows the child, child to access their higher cognitive functions. They use the concept of neuroplasticity to explain how children can have their brains rewired for the Catholic virtues. They describe confession as a neuropsychological repair for the rupture of sin, which can lead to more secure attachment. And so I think they're basically doing Catholic biohacking optimization, wellness, super pseudoscience. That might sound more elegant maybe to me than a lot of what we cover, but that might just be my own, like Catholic social emotional learning from childhood talking. I don't know. One of the coolest things, however, that Catholic social emotional learning can help children's brains with is to grow the neural pathways that will tell them that trans people don't exist. And that's what Dr. Karen Villa, low key suggests at close to the end of the episode.
- [68:01]
Derek Barris
I think TikTok was essentially responsible for kind of transgender movement, right? And, you know, creating a generation that had been manipulated to think about gender in this very relative way. That's the quote I Just have to say I'm. I'm almost done reading Jeffrey Eugen's Middlesex right now. It was written in 2002. Great book, amazing book. It was based on his frustration with study from the early 80s or a report from the early. It is on transgender people and intersex people specifically. So the idea that TikTok is responsible for people talking about transgender is just, just incredible.
- [68:42]
Matthew Remsky
Well, I think she's actually saying that, that TikTok is responsible for the social contagion. That's. That's what I think she's leaving out of that. Which brings me back to Vivian Wilson helping these sisters go viral by talking about how she's low key, obsessed with him. Like no shade on Vivian, because I think the clips are that effective. Like on TikTok, TikTok, it's easy to be confused, especially with how bright and cheerful they are. But I also have to say I think it's really funny that, you know, a lot of the senior sisters, like Sister John, have adopted the names of men saints. And I think that means that the Lord moves in mysterious ways. So episode one is the only episode where Sister John is the host. And I think they felt that wasn't the best choice and they subbed in Sister Miriam. And Sister Miriam is a great choice because she's magnetically fun and curious and, you know, all of the gender essentialism, anti feminism, anti abortion stuff is smoothed over with anecdotes about trivia nights and how Sister Elizabeth John, which is a kind of non binary ordination name, I guess, still loves to listen to rock and roll. And so they don't bring up trans politics directly again that I saw, but they do content themselves with feminine genius and masculine genius lingo from John Paul II that, you know, really treats binary complementary gender roles as revealed truth. So that dates back to the 80s. Now, going forward in the content, what the sisters are on about is much more evident through which they leave out. And, you know, that's really any real world references that would indicate that it's not the 1980s. So there are warm references to Pope Leo and his wise guidance on AI, in their view, but it does feel like Ronald Reagan is still president. There's no references to Leo's engagement with the Trump government. The most extended political content in the archive comes through an interview with Sister Maria Gemma, who spent some months as a graduate student in international relations in Moscow in 1991 as the Soviet Union was collapsing. And she discusses the state repression of her order, the desecration of churches, the evil emanating from the Lubyanka building, she walked past to get to Mass, which is all fair enough, very real experiences. But it does show that for open mic, historical communism is safe territory for moral clarity. While everything happening outside the window doesn't really get noticed that I've seen, because it's good to point out that they are recording in Ann Arbor from February of this year, during which time their entire town is mobilizing and marching against. Against ice. Those marches are accompanied by local rabbis and Protestant clerics. It's also good to point out that their focus is a choice. There's actually a different Dominican congregation, the Sinsinawa Dominicans, who are based the next state over in Wisconsin, who are directly and prominently involved in ICE related advocacy in Minneapolis. So these are Dominican sisters that have been present at ICE enforcement sites, helping families, families and guardianship with guardianship paperwork. And if you look up the Sinsinawa order, you don't get photos of young nuns laughing and flowing habits. You get photos of women at the tail end of my great aunt's generations, older women in civilian clothes sitting on panels at conferences on anti racism or standing shoulder to shoulder in the vegetable garden as though it's 1995 and they're getting ready to go to the Michigan Women's Musical Festival. I think what's happening is that those older Generations of Vatican 2 Religious are Aging out. They're spending their assets on elder care, while the real recruitment juice is flowing through the traditionalist organizations. As I said, the Dominicans of Ann Arbor raised 25 million for their mother house, and their media studio is stacked with gear. And so these, these viral clips produced by savvy laypeople who monitor the comments and their inboxes and make sure the recruitment requests go to the right departments. They've been very successful in concealing this conservative politics, which should be obvious to anybody thinking about who Catholic nuns are, but who might be fooled by the aesthetics of simplicity, wholesomeness, fun and liberation that have a bunch of heavy strings attached. Because no matter how much they love each other, no matter how well functioning the convent is, no matter how much community service they do, they have signed up for a lifelong career of telling other women that they are not equal to men in ministry, that they do not have the right to control their own bodies. And I personally believe that's a life of class betrayal. Like, I imagine you could live that life while ignoring that stuff, but that doesn't seem like it would honor the virtue of self reflection in monastic life. But, you know, maybe the best thing just to think about Jordan again is that Michaela could bring him to Ann Arbor to let him soak in their rigid views. Maybe that would be, you know, really salutary for him, you know, that he would be able to, you know, take in the balm of their good vibes, you know, and their views at the same time. But he's never really had the, the good vibes part.
- [74:21]
Julian Walker
It can't work any worse than anything else he's tried.
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Matthew Remsky
Yeah, right. Granger knows when you're a procurement manager
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Alex Schwartz
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