He's very curious if you think the crazy professor phenomenon happened to Jordan Peterson and Brett Weinstein. That's right. That's right. All right. So there's no way I'm going to get in trouble talking about this topic, right? No, you'll be fine. So first of all, I forgot that I had called this phenomenon crazy professor phenomenon.

I don't know if that's a fair name, but for people who didn't hear me talk about that before, it was the idea that if you people like really smart people in academia, when they leave academia are more prone than the average person to end up in more eccentric or conspiratorial or like way out of the mainstream type of views.

And my argument was is because the fact you're in academic academia in the first place means that they typically have high octane minds. They're used to this idea that they're smarter than a lot of people and can figure things out that other people can't. But in academia, you have so many other minds pushing back on you.

It's hard to get too weird, right? Because people you also respect and fear intellectually are going to be like, that's nonsense. I'm not going to put all my money in the gold, et cetera. When you leave academia, you lose that feedback buffer. And so you're much more likely to end up in weird places because you're intellectually confident and you're intellectually curious, but you don't have the dampers.

So Jeffrey's asking, do I think that happened to Jordan Peterson or Brett Weinstein? I think it's Weinstein, right? Or Weinstein. I think it's Weinstein, like Einstein. If I'm getting that wrong, Brett, big apologies. So in his case, I think some of that might have happened. So if people don't know, Brett and his wife, Heather Herring, I believe, they were in academia.

They were biologists, did a lot of stuff on evolutionary theory. They're at Evergreen University, which is I think a state university, a public university in Oregon or Washington state. It's very progressive, has these very progressive educational models where you, I don't quite get how it works, but the classes are done in a sort of like really interesting kind of unusual way.

And they got into like some sort of cancellation issue there. And it really got out of control where like students were roaming the campus looking for them and maybe even like physically threatening them. But long story short, they had to leave, they left academia. And so I think it's a mixed bag.

Again, I don't know a ton about them. I know they have a new book out that sort of seems completely mainstream. It has to do about what you can learn from evolutionary theory and the history of our species about modern life, like sort of down the middle. But I do think Brett went to some weird places with COVID during the pandemic that felt a little bit like this phenomenon when I'd sample in a show here and there where there's just like a lot of confidence on something that was very much out of the mainstream and did not in the end turn out to be at all really kind of right.

There was a lot of this sort of confident out of the mainstream, a couple of places like that he felt. So I think that's probably a great example of that effect in action is because it's this very smart guy and Heather's very smart. And so it completely makes sense in their minds that we can kind of see something that's not widely recognized now.

So maybe that's an example of it. Jordan Peterson, I think it's a much harder case. It's much harder to assess here. So the Peterson had been on my radar for a long time before he became a big public figure, because again, when I would do student advice, I would occasionally hear from students who would talk about Dr.

Peterson, especially students who were like first generation college students, students of color found a lot out of a lot good in his work. He's like a mentor like figure for a lot, a lot of people. And so it was kind of on my radar. He's a weird character. Like the thing to understand about Jordan Peterson that I think not a lot of people in just the non-academic world understand is that he's a, he's an unusual character.

He came out of what was like essentially the Canadian version of like West Texas, right? The sort of ranch country in the middle of Canada, a very cold kind of rough place comes out of there. So with no really a leader academic background and is like a, an incandescent star within academia.

I mean, he goes, he ends up at Harvard as a young professor where he's tenured in the psychology department. Harvard does not tenure from within very often in psychology. I mean, he was like a, this guy was seen as this bright star, you Toronto bottom away, right? Like, come, we're going to make you an offer.

You can't refuse. So he was like a superstar academic who had came out of nowhere, like not at all of an environment where you would expect to have, have a mind like that. So he was sort of this, I think that's often missed. I think for those who dislike him, it's more comfortable, this idea that he's, it's sort of like a grifter type guy.

That's the sort of like spouting off wisdom and, and you know, like obviously me as a reporter, much smarter than this guy. No, he was an incandescent star, like sort of out of the ranches of Canada. But from what I understand, it's, it's hard to talk about this phenomenon with him because he always was sort of a loner and a little bit eccentric, even when he was in academia.

I think because of this unusual background, he came, got out of, and this is secondhand, but I think he was again, already didn't really care about what the feedback was from colleagues or whatever. I don't know if that's true, but I I've heard some things like that. So it's hard to say, you know, when he left academia and then, then of course you have this other confusing factor, confounding factor of the huge celebrity and the huge detraction that occurred when he became a public figure, the warping effect of that on someone has to be so powerful that it's going to swamp out any signal we're going to get about just, well, when he left academia, he may be without this type of cognitive structure and feedback, maybe got a little bit more eccentric.

How could we separate that signal from the crushing, completely unbearable, completely unusual worldwide phenomenon and attacks? I mean, that had to have such a bigger impact on his life, his mental life than the changing his context of being academia or not that, that, that must swamp out that signal.

So because of those two confounding factors, I can't tell what change leaving academia had on Peterson. So to summarize, he already was really iconoclastic and eccentric when he was in academia. And two, there's too many other things happened to him right when he left the, I can't pull apart.

I can't pull apart those pieces. So there you go. Though I don't like crazy professor phenomenon. I don't think that's a good title. I should, I didn't realize I called it that before. I'll have to come up with a better title, but again, it's very consistent though. Folks who leave academia, they usually have a lot of medical breakthroughs.

They get become masters of finances. Like I can understand the financial system. And to get, and I don't want to go off on this, but like also like media criticism becomes a big thing. Because again, if you're like Brett Weinstein, you're a really smart guy and you get kind of resentful against some reporters.

You're like, I'm just smarter than you and you annoy me. And like, then you get really angry at the media and it's a, it's a whole interesting thing. So if I ever left Georgetown, Jesse, you'd have to stop me from becoming like very conspiratorial and offering a lot of medical advice and financial advice and just attacking the media all the time.

Though we'd probably get more subscribers. So (upbeat music)