By David Futrelle
In addition to being terrible, Canadian fussbudget paleothinker Jordan Peterson is just plain fucking weird, especially when it comes to his diet. You’ve probably heard about his all-meat diet ( The Atlantic goes into great detail about it here).
But have you heard what happens when he drinks apple cider? In the video below, he tells Joe Rogan that when he drank apple cider after going on his all-meat diet it “produced an overwhelming sense of impending doom” and kept him awake for 25 days.
As in, literally no sleep for a month. Which is literally impossible. While one young Frenchman with a rare disorder managed to survive on only a few minutes of sleep a night for several months, no one has ever gone completely without sleep for 25 days in the history of our species; that’s more than twice the world record. Which you’d think that Peterson, as a professor of psychology, would know.
Anyway, the video (below) is only a minute and a half, and it will CHANGE YOUR LIFE.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MfoKwQ2Cw6A
“The Day I met Sam Harris was the worst day of my life…..Not because I talked to Sam.”
That part cracks me up.
The video linked here was possibly made after consuming that cider. It’s actually, really real and it’s the most hilariously awful thing I’ve seen in a while.
(explainer: as part of a funding drive for a film called “No safe spaces”, donors can have their name featured in this inspiring clip. $200 will get you a Twitter follow from Adam Carolla or Dennis Prager, whew).
If you’re a Twittering Mammoth, I’d strongly recommend following @zei_nabq for stuff on Jordles and the IDW in general. That’s where I first heard about the Cider of Dooooooooom.
They’re a goldmine. Much like our Dear Leader David F. does with the manosphere, they sort through the mountains of interviews and articles, and tweet the best stuff, saving the rest of us the time and the sheer agony.
Also, Peter Coffin recently did a great thread reporting on the financial ties and connections among JP and friends. Very interesting details.
I mean, as a clinical psychologist, the third day in a row when he wasn’t sleeping he should have known to take his butt to the hospital because that’s a great sign of a manic episode. Or at least in retrospect he should be concerned.
So either this is a thing that never happened or he is the worst psychologist on the planet lacking any personal insight.
My money is on both, frankly.
(Now I want to make some mulled non-alcoholic cider though. Yum.)
@Marshmallow Stacey Maximal:
That’s like one of the flagship characteristics of patriarchy/toxic male ego. Every single word out of a man’s mouth is rational, objective fact, simply by virtue of coming out of the mouth of a man. Because men are rational and objective. Because biotrufsthsthshfsssstop crITIsiZING me i’M raTIONAL!!!11!
@Robert:
Doesn’t surprise me. It’s pretty obvious they’re less about self-help than they are about making others feel inferior and/or shitty. They confuse the temporary adrenaline rush they get from flaming somebody out for watching less than all 239,098 bazillion hours of you-know-whose videos before daring to criticize The Master with actual happiness, I think.
So. In addition to being a quack with no idea about anything, really, Peterson can’t handle his booze.
Why am I not surprised.
This is the lobsterkin equivalent of “You really should read the Sequences.”
I’m not sure I think Peterson’s worldview is irreligious. He may make appeals to science but he is basically a conservative Christian self help guru.
I am so embarrassed that I used to listen to Loveline with him and Drew Pinsky every night when I was a teenager in the nineties.
They are the worst.
I dunno. Given his Kermit voice and apparent lack of need for sleep, I’m still not 100% sure he’s not a Muppet.
Someone slip him some cider, quick.
Jordan Peterson feeling impending doom sounds fun.
Someone’s a bit self-important. Sense of impending doom indeed. That made me giggle-snort.
But then when I thought about it, I felt uncomfortable for laughing at the situation because it sounds like he’s talking about a symptom of depression, not of drinking juice. I notice he didn’t say 25 consecutive days without sleep, and before my mother went on anti-depressants she was getting about half the sleep she normally did (not 1/6, mind you, so even if he was depressed – I can’t Internet-diagnose, I don’t know – he’s probably exaggerating). For a while she could only sleep every second night. And that just made the depression worse. She was hospitalized for a month because a) the sleeping problems/negative thoughts persisted and b) she thought she was going to die soon, which was taken as an indirect suicidal impulse.
That was back in 2014 and she’s doing much better now. I don’t know why being reminded of the not-sleeping thing is stressing me out. 🙁 It probably has nothing to do with Ponderous Peterson.
And “sense of impending doom” could be because “sense of impending mushy poop” is an indignity that Ponderous J cannot admit to. I agree with the others that if the drink wasn’t alcoholic, and was what our household calls “old-fashioned apple juice,” then he prooooobably got diarrhea from having more fibre than he was used to (the brownish apple juice includes more of the fruit fibres than the light-coloured stuff that filters them out). WHY AM I THINKING ABOUT THIS SO HARD.
@Kevin R:
Actually, that’s exactly the sort of person I’d expect to do that. An ordinarily religious crank would start yet another boring old splinter sect of Christianity or similarly, like David Koresh or Jim Jones, then spectacularly self-destruct in like fashion. It’s the irreligious cranks who come up with stuff like Xenu and body thetans and wind up starting something as entertainingly kooky as Scientology.
On top of which, at one point Hubbard explicitly admitted he made it into a church purely for the cynical purpose of obtaining tax-exempt status. Irreligious indeed.
There’s a terrible hereditary disease called Fatal Familial Insomnia (FFI), where the brain loses the ability to fall asleep. The strongest sedatives, such as barbiturates, are useless, and even detrimental. Fortunately, it’s an extremely rare disease. There’s no treatment and no cure. Death occurs in something like 6 to 18 months. Before death, though, panic attacks, delirium, and losing touch with reality will occur.
RE: Apple cider. I was 12 when I had the non-alcoholic stuff for the first time. I loved, loved, loved it, to the point where I polished off a half-gallon of it by myself. The resulting heartburn wouldn’t let me sleep.
Mulled non-alcoholic apple cider is the best! Makes me think of the many Christmases I spent back in northern California!
And I’m really not sorry for dissing lobster fraud dude. The fact he’s full of it comes through loud and clear, even when he’s not talking about impending doom from a record-setting number of sleepless nights.
Hey, I have an overwhelming sense of impending doom when I eat something that sets my IBS off, right before I dash for the bathroom.
Yup. He actually wanted to buy a church and act as its pastor, so he’s far from irreligious. But I get the distinct impression that he wants the religion to be centred all around him, him, HIM. Hence the huckster-psychologist gig, instead of just going to theological school in the first place and slogging it out trying to find a congregation that won’t impoverish him.
Same. The Poops of Doom are certainly a real thing for us irritable owls. But the sense of impending doom tends to lift after I finally manage to get off the toilet, certain that no more diarrhea is coming. And after that, I’m just exhaustipated. But I know better than to ascribe an existential crisis to what is merely a digestive one.
I’m assuming it’s the UK folks who’ve never heard of non-alcoholic cider? It’s basically apple juice with your traditional fall spices (unfortunately now known as pumpkin spice). I think most people drink it hot? I don’t like apple juice, so I generally avoid cider. I did make apple cider caramels once, though, those were good.
@wwth
Same! However, I saw the seeds of assholery in Corolla even then: I remember when he asked a female caller her proportions (which had nothing to do with her question) and she said she was 130lbs and 5’7″ (similar to myself at that time) and he basically told her she was fat. I’m sure I missed some other red flags, but basically I’m not all surprised he turned out to be a horrible anti-SJW, unfunny loser.
Re sleep, I’m pretty sure the longest confirmed period of time with no sleep at all is ”only” eleven days – this is an area where you can’t trust self reports, since people with insomnia frequently have short bursts of sleep without realizing.
Re his degree, there are multiple real-life examples of people who got a legit degree and did legit academic work, only to gradually evolve into quacks of some kind. It’s lamentable but not that strange. Being a quack inventing the theories you like instead of doing hard research appeals more to some people, and obviously being the kind of cult leader Peterson is now strokes his ego in a way being a real academic won’t.
epitome of incomprehensibility says:
Such as night terrors. Per the Wik-ster:
– “Night terror, also known as sleep terror, is a sleep disorder, causing feelings of terror or dread…”
– “Low blood sugar is associated with both pediatric and adult night terrors.”
– “[Adult] night terrors can occur each night if the sufferer does not eat a proper diet….”
This disease where people stop sleeping is so scarey and sad.
I found this article, but content warning. it’s sad.
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20160118-the-tragic-fate-of-the-people-who-stop-sleeping
I think he’s said that he has suffered from depression, but was much better on the all meat diet. But now as his body has gotten used to only meat, it can tolerate anything else even less than before, so if he eats something else he doesn’t just get his old problems back but his old problems times a hundred. (I read this interview but now I’m just pulling from memory, too lazy to look it up.)
I still call bullshit on the idea that a little cider could have that much of an effect purely biologically, without being helped by some serious placebo shit.
OT (but kinda on topic, considering what got JP famous), but I ran across this thread on Twitter and wanted to share it.
https://twitter.com/ScienceVet2/status/1035246030500061184?s=19
It’s a detailed thread talking about how biological sex in humans is better expressed as a bimodal distribution (a type of spectrum) rather than as a binary (or even ternary if you make intersex a third sex). I figured it could be useful next time a TERF comes around and tries to say something about “biological female”. And it’s also an interesting read with lots of info that might be new to you even if you already know a lot about biological sex.
I think it’s silly to say intersex is a third sex because there are so many different kinds of intersex – which also is evidence that sex is a spectrum.