Maintenance Phase

In 2019, Jordan Peterson disappeared from public life. One year later, he re-emerged with a diagnosis, a story and no self-reflection whatsoever.

Thanks to Katelyn Burns and Talia Lavin for help fact-checking this episode and Doctor Dreamchip for our lovely theme song!

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Links!

• Joe Rogan Experience #1070 - Jordan Peterson
• Why the Left Is So Afraid of Jordan Peterson
• When Your Psychologist Goes Viral: How Jordan Peterson’s Fame Affected His Private Practice
• Jordan Peterson’s Gospel of Masculinity
• The Intellectual We Deserve
• Auditing Radicalization Pathways on YouTube
• The Left’s Contempt for Jordan Peterson Is Perfectly Rational
• I was Jordan Peterson’s strongest supporter. Now I think he’s dangerous.
• Jordan Peterson: Why I am no longer a tenured professor at the University of Toronto
• Jordan Peterson & Fascist Mysticism
• Sunday Times: Unedited Interview Transcript
• Algorithmic extremism: Examining YouTube's rabbit hole of radicalization
• What is the “lite” in “alt-lite?” The discourse of white vulnerability and dominance among YouTube’s reactionaries
• Exposing Jordan Peterson’s Barrage of Revisionist Falsehoods About Hitler, the Holocaust and Nazism

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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! — Mike

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• Hear bonus episodes on Patreon
• Donate on PayPal
• Get Maintenance Phase T-shirts, stickers and more

Links!

• Joe Rogan Experience #1070 - Jordan Peterson
• Atlantic article on the all-beef diet
• Jordan Peterson, Custodian of the Patriarchy
• Is Jordan Peterson the stupid man's smart person?
• How dangerous is Jordan B. Peterson?
• The Intellectual We Deserve
• Jordan Peterson & Fascist Mysticism
• The Pronoun Warrior
• Jordan Peterson’s Gospel of Masculinity
• The Bizarre Fad Diet Taking the Far Right by Storm
• Inside the World of the 'Bitcoin Carnivores'
• Human Ancestors Were Nearly All Vegetarians
• My carnivore diet: what I learned from eating only beef, salt and water
• The Inuit Paradox
• Why Right Wingers Are Going Crazy About Meat
• Owsley “The Bear” Stanley’s Active Low-Carber Forum Posts

Thanks to Doctor Dreamchip for our lovely theme song!

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Aubrey thought she could swear less in this week’s episode. She was wrong.

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Links!

• Super Size Me Trailer
• "Super Size Me" - CBS NewsWhere's the Beef? The Challenges of Obesity Suits
• Morgan Spurlock on Sexual Misconduct Confession, 'Super Size Me 2'
• Former Employees Say Morgan Spurlock's Production Company Was 'Fratty Boys' Club'
• Food and Drug Law Journal
• “Cheeseburger Bill” protects food industry - The Lancet
• Meet the science teacher who lost 60 pounds eating nothing but McDonald's three meals a day
• Impressed by the demise of Supersize? Take a closer look

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In 2015, Belle Gibson was an Australian "eco-preneur" with a vegetarian cookbook, a blockbuster wellness app and a terminal cancer diagnosis. Today, she's one of the most hated figures in the country.

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Links!

• The Woman Who Fooled The World
• What we know about Belle Gibson
• The mystery of Belle Gibson, who claimed she cured cancer with clean living
• Friends and doctors raise doubts over 'Healing Belle' cancer claims
• Mega-blogger Belle Gibson casts doubt on her own cancer claims
• Melbourne mum Belle Gibson on taking the world by storm with her app The Whole Pantry, while fighting terminal brain cancer
• The Belle Gibson scandal: The rise of lifestyle gurus as micro-celebrities in low-trust societies 
• Belle Gibson: "My lifelong struggle with the truth"
• Catalog of Belle’s posts and timeline
• Bad Influencer: The Great Insta Con
• Cosmo: An honest account of our experience with Belle Gibson
• Julia Watson's "Breakfast, School Run, Chemo"

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Who’s that Bond villain stroking a cat and yelling at beloved public figures? It’s Karl Lagerfeld! This week, Mike and Aubrey go in on fashion’s favorite turbo troll and his fancy, joyless diet. This episode serves four.

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Links!:

• The Karl Lagerfeld Diet
• Kaiser Karl: The Life of Karl Lagerfeld
• Karl Lagerfeld: My childhood was very simple
• A Look Back at Designer Karl Lagerfeld’s Iconic Fashion Career in Photos
• Seven of Karl Lagerfeld's most iconic moments
• Karl Lagerfeld Becomes a Video-Game Character
• Karl Lagerfeld's most controversial quotes on fat women
• Karl Lagerfeld's most controversial quotes
• Karl Lagerfeld on Adele (archived)
• Karl Lagerfeld’s illustration of Adolf Hitler and Angela Merkel (archived)
• Paris is Losing it - The New York Times
• Here's What Our Nutritionist Thinks of Karl Lagerfeld's Diet
• Karl Lagerfeld: Adele 'fat' remarks taken out of context
• Karl Lagerfeld Would Marry His Cat Choupette If It Were Legal

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How America's oldest fat camp — and the inspiration for Disney’s "Heavyweights" — became the symbol of a health intervention that enjoys worldwide popularity despite no evidence that it improves anyone's health.

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Links!

• The Epic Family Feud Behind an Iconic American Weight-Loss Camp for Kids
• Two teenagers placed in foster care after weight loss plan fails
• Calls to set up fat camps for obese children in Scotland
• Childhood obesity: are new treatment centres the solution?Weight-loss Camps and Their Effect on Childhood Obesity 
• Psychosocial outcomes in a weight loss camp for overweight youth
• Inside Britain’s First Ever Residential “Fat Camp” 
• Working at Camp Shane: Employee Reviews
• Missing campers, falsified documents and other issues revealed in CT weight-loss camp investigation
• Kids Weight Loss Camp That Closed Has History of Violations
• Weighty Problems by Laura Backstrom
• The Actually Terrible Things that Happen at Fat Camp

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Matthew Walker's "Why We Sleep" was one of the most popular and acclaimed wellness books of 2017. There's just one problem: Much of it isn't true. 

Thanks to University of Ottawa Postdoctoral Fellow Dylan Smith for helping us with the research!

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Links!

• Walker's TED Talk
• Alexey's blog post: Matthew Walker's "Why We Sleep" Is Riddled with Scientific and Factual Errors
• Walker’s Response
• Trouble With TED
• Does daylight savings kill people?
• Why We Sleep: A Tale Of Institutional Failure
• Is Matthew Walker’s “Why We Sleep” Riddled with Scientific and Factual Errors?
• Up All Night: The science of sleeplessness
• Exploring the Necessity and Virtue of Sleep
• Why Do We Sleep?
• Siesta in Healthy Adults and Coronary Mortality in the General Population
• A Chronobiological Evaluation of the Acute Effects of Daylight Saving Time on Traffic Accident Risk
• Has Adult Sleep Duration Declined Over the Last 50+ Years?
• Americans Are Sleeping More, If Not Necessarily Better
• High-profile sleep researcher loses paper for duplication

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It's a sexual health episode! This week, Mike and Aubrey dive into the hotly debated medical history of vibrators and ask: who fact-checks the fact-checkers? 

Note: A previous version of this episode included language that referred to “the female downstairs,” implying both that gender is linked to genitals (it isn’t) and that vibrators were used primarily by cis women (they weren’t). We love our trans listeners and we don’t want to do anything that makes them feel excluded, so we’ve removed the sections where that language appeared. We'll be discussing this and our approach to handling feedback in more detail soon. Thanks to everyone who wrote in to let us know! — Mike


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Links!

• The Technology of Orgasm by Rachel Maines
• Buzz by Hallie Lieberman
• Signior Dildo
• Hysteria! trailer
• Vibrators had a long history as medical quackery before feminists rebranded them as sex toys
• A Failure of Academic Quality Control: The Technology of Orgasm
• How Gosnell Duncan Changed the Sex Toy Game Forever
• Victorian Doctors Didn't Treat Women With Orgasms, Say Historians 
• (Almost) Everything You Know About the Invention of the Vibrator Is Wrong

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For nearly four decades, Americans have heard a simple story about health, longevity and obesity. This week, we learn it's a little more complicated. 

Thanks to Katherine Flegal, Paul Campos, Jeff Hunger and Jason Salemi for helping us research and fact-check this episode! 

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Links!

• Katherine Flegal’s “The obesity wars and the education of a researcher”
• Walter Willett's " Evidence does not support benefit of being overweight on mortality"
• Flegal’s 2005 paper
• Flegal’s 2013 article
• Willett’s 2016 meta-analysis
• The infamous 2004 CDC paper
• Fat: A Cultural History of Obesity
• Paul Campos's "The Obesity Myth"
• Walter Willett’s Food Fight           
• The obesity research that blew up
• Flawed methods and inappropriate conclusions for health policy on overweight and obesity: The Global BMI Mortality Collaboration meta-analysis
• Does Body Mass Index Adequately Convey a Patient’s Mortality Risk?
• The Weight of Medical Authority: The Making and Unmaking of Knowledge in the Obesity Epidemic
• Obesity: An Overblown Epidemic? 
• Commentary: On ‘public health aspects of weight control’
• Obesity And Its Relation To Health And Disease
• Does Being Overweight Really Reduce Mortality?
• Individual and Aggregate Years-of-life-lost Associated With Overweight and Obesity

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At the height of her "Murder She Wrote" fame, Angela Lansbury released a home workout video full of synth music, peach jumpsuits and ~sensuality~. This week, we’re exploring the anti-Goop-ness of Angela’s fitness book and video, "Positive Moves."!  It gets a little heavy toward the end, but we promise: No one was canceled in the making of this episode. 

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Links!

• Positive Moves video on YouTube (cued up to “moving freely”)
• Positive Moves book
• What is Gaslighting? The 1944 film Gaslight is the best explainer.

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