Speaker 1: M PAD casts. I'm Robert Evans. This is Behind the Bastards.
Speaker 1: It's a podcast about bad people, the worst in the world.
Speaker 1: In fact, you might say, as I say every week
Speaker 1: when I opened this show, I'm Robert Evans. Did I
Speaker 1: already say that? Probably, but there's no way to tell
Speaker 1: because I can't go back and listen to the audio
Speaker 1: I'm recording. It's being beamed live directly into your ears.
Speaker 1: And my guest for this live audio experience that is
Speaker 1: absolutely authentically live is Cody Johnstone. Hello there, thank you
Speaker 1: for having me on this live podcast. M H. Now, Cody,
Speaker 1: you know that we're live, which means we're not going
Speaker 1: to be able to edit out any of your racist
Speaker 1: rants against the Swiss. Okay, I mean that's why I
Speaker 1: say them. I don't, I don't. I don't rant about
Speaker 1: that so people cannot hear it. We have been protecting
Speaker 1: Cody from getting Swiss canceled for years, but today we're
Speaker 1: doing a live episode and bring it on. Bring it
Speaker 1: on like the Swiss spring one just missed me with
Speaker 1: the Swiss. Let me tell you. Okay, So, Cody, we
Speaker 1: got a fun episode this week in a special episode
Speaker 1: that I brought you on for because I know that
Speaker 1: you're a huge fan of the guy we're going to
Speaker 1: be talking about this week. Doctor fans doctor. He's a doctor,
Speaker 1: Jordan's B. Peterson. I love Jordan Peterson, who's a doctor.
Speaker 1: I respect. Um. I am very happy that you're doing
Speaker 1: this episode and that I get to partake in it. Um.
Speaker 1: He's a He's one of my heroes. So yeah, you
Speaker 1: love him. I love him. Uh. Watched a lot of
Speaker 1: his speeches lectures. I guess you'd call him sermons. One
Speaker 1: might call him. He might call them sermons. He might
Speaker 1: call them sermons. We'll talk about that. Uh yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean so you know, you know I joke about
Speaker 1: starting a cult a lot on this show. Yeah, I do.
Speaker 1: I do. And there's jokes, the jokes to join your cult,
Speaker 1: they're not entirely jokes because I will probably start a
Speaker 1: cult one It's kind of my retirement plan because I
Speaker 1: don't really think four O one ks are going to
Speaker 1: be useful that far into the future. But having a cult,
Speaker 1: you know, you always make money what I call yeah,
Speaker 1: absolutely cash in on people. And that's why we're talking
Speaker 1: about Jordan B. Peterson today, because he's not a cult
Speaker 1: leader in the traditional sense, um, but he did create
Speaker 1: a cult. Like it's a weird situation because he never
Speaker 1: like had a bunch of people move on to land
Speaker 1: and wound fight you know, federal law enforcement agencies. I
Speaker 1: guess in Canada that would be the mount he's But
Speaker 1: he still does have a cult, and they, if you like,
Speaker 1: go to their little spaces on Reddit and stuff, like,
Speaker 1: they are still they are completely devoted to this man
Speaker 1: and his ideas, even though spoilers his life has got
Speaker 1: completely I was gonna say, like, I didn't realize that
Speaker 1: they was still going that strong, Like I don't because
Speaker 1: because he disappeared, because because things are crumbling for him,
Speaker 1: because his life has been shattered by his own Yes, yes, yeah,
Speaker 1: but but yeah, I thought I might assume that there
Speaker 1: there would be people that's still doing that, but I haven't.
Speaker 1: I haven't delved into the spaces in a while. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So good for them, Good for them. Yeah, Yeah, it's fun,
Speaker 1: It's very fun. So we're gonna we're gonna talk about
Speaker 1: Jordan B. Peterson, um, and we're going to talk about fascism.
Speaker 1: Because while I'm not sure if I would call Dr
Speaker 1: Jordan B. Peterson a fascist, I would say he's one
Speaker 1: of the most insidious platformers of a specific strain of
Speaker 1: ideology that feeds into the fascist movement in the United
Speaker 1: States worldwide. It's fun. I would agree with that. I
Speaker 1: I actually might go a little farther than you. Um
Speaker 1: and yeah to label him. Um yeah. I feel like
Speaker 1: we might just we might just give the whole story
Speaker 1: and then people can apply their own labels to Jordan's
Speaker 1: Alhazara Peterson. Before we talk about Dr Jordan B. Peterson,
Speaker 1: I'd like to talk about the Bolshevik evolution. Now, this
Speaker 1: is a topic that that Dr Jordan B. Peterson is
Speaker 1: particularly obsessed with. Multiple interviewers will note that his house
Speaker 1: is absolutely filled with Soviet propaganda, much of it from
Speaker 1: like the early eras of that regime, and when questioned
Speaker 1: about it, he'll generally explain it as a sort of
Speaker 1: know your enemy deal, like you know, you've gotta I
Speaker 1: want to understand Marxists, and then he'll say something like
Speaker 1: Marxism is resurgent in a haunted voice, which he said
Speaker 1: to a journalist from the New York Times, I think
Speaker 1: it was. He says it a lot. Yeah, Marxist. Yeah,
Speaker 1: imagine kermit. Uh if you if you took the brain
Speaker 1: of Joe McCarthy and shoved it into Kermit the frog.
Speaker 1: That's more or less Dr Jordan B. Peterson. So back
Speaker 1: in the late nineteen teens and twenties, there were a
Speaker 1: lot of people who had the same concerns about Marxism
Speaker 1: all across Western Europe. And this was a somewhat more
Speaker 1: reasonable fear then, because Marxism was certainly resurgeon or at
Speaker 1: least surging in that period. Um and Fascists in particular
Speaker 1: were terribly paranoid about it. Were the only ones. Obviously
Speaker 1: a lot of reasons to be concerned about the Soviet state,
Speaker 1: but there was some, shall we say, unreasonable paranoia about
Speaker 1: everything from the left, from folks who were, you know,
Speaker 1: proto Nazis. Now a term began to percolate among these
Speaker 1: people called in the term was Judeo Bolshevism, and this
Speaker 1: was kind of the word for a conspiracy that Communism
Speaker 1: was being spread around the world by Jewish people. They
Speaker 1: were often compared to like a virus for communism that
Speaker 1: introduces it into the blood stream of a healthy society.
Speaker 1: Um and that was kind of the strain of thought
Speaker 1: that led to the Holocaust. At least one of them.
Speaker 1: You know, a lot of stuff like the Holocaust. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but that was a big part of it. Um. Now,
Speaker 1: it is true that a number of like the first
Speaker 1: Bolsheviks were Jewish, the guys who carried out, you know,
Speaker 1: the big nineteen seventeen revolution in Russia. Um, but there
Speaker 1: were also a lot of people who are not at
Speaker 1: all Jewish who are involved in making the Soviet Union
Speaker 1: be a thing, including Joseph Stalin. And also if you
Speaker 1: actually look at the particularly the early history of the
Speaker 1: Soviet Union, not a great place to be Jewish, Like
Speaker 1: some real bad things happened to Jewish folks then so um,
Speaker 1: of course Czaris Russia also a terrible place to be Jewish,
Speaker 1: I would say that, yeah, anyway, I mean historically many many,
Speaker 1: many places. Yeah, basically everywhere actually, Like but if you
Speaker 1: want to like people sometimes overstate how bad the USSR
Speaker 1: was for Jewish people, to make it look like it
Speaker 1: was like a specific thing with communism, whereas like the
Speaker 1: reality is is under the czar and like the late
Speaker 1: eighteen hundreds you had the Chelnitski massacre, who was the
Speaker 1: largest massacre of Jewish people probably in history until the Holocaust. Anyway,
Speaker 1: fun the czar. So yeah, this conspiracy basically claimed that
Speaker 1: all Jewish people everywhere were engaged in a covert plan
Speaker 1: to destroy Christianity and Western civilization by bringing communism, and
Speaker 1: like communism is an atheistic thing, like there's no not
Speaker 1: supposed to be any religion under especially like the kind
Speaker 1: of communism was being pushed in this period, and so
Speaker 1: the idea was, like, this is the Jews trying to
Speaker 1: kill Christianity communist. Yeah, I loved everybody loves saying that
Speaker 1: the Jews are trying to destroy Christianity. Yea. As a rule,
Speaker 1: if you're saying the Jews and anything follows after that,
Speaker 1: maybe yeah, yeah, maybe that's probably not yeah yeah. As
Speaker 1: the Nazi movement picked up steam, Nazi writers and media
Speaker 1: critics gained popularity in German culture, and they really like
Speaker 1: they were kind of enraged by this. You know. Weimar Germany,
Speaker 1: as we've talked about, was a super progressive place, a
Speaker 1: lot of like like unprecedented gains for LGBT people, um,
Speaker 1: kind of some of the first recognition of folks who
Speaker 1: were like non binary, and also just like a crazy
Speaker 1: amount of art and of course a decent amount of
Speaker 1: that art was pornographic because like people, people be having fun. Uh,
Speaker 1: I mean, do you mean you mean degenerate Robert you
Speaker 1: mean art? Yeah, that's what these Nazi critics would have said.
Speaker 1: And and they went further. They claimed that like all
Speaker 1: of this art, a lot of which was you know,
Speaker 1: queer in orientation, was somehow tied to communism and it
Speaker 1: was part of a plot to weaken German culture to
Speaker 1: allow a left wing takeover. If this seems familiar, it's
Speaker 1: because you can hear the exact same thing if you
Speaker 1: turn on like a third of YouTube. Oh yeah, So
Speaker 1: the term cultural Bolshevism overtook judaeo Bolshevism in this period,
Speaker 1: and it was kind of like the more educated, less
Speaker 1: bigoted persons like cultural Bolshevism. They're trying to they're trying
Speaker 1: to Bolshevize our nation by going through the arts and
Speaker 1: stuff and like taking over kids minds with their evil
Speaker 1: books and their dirty pictures and stuff like that. Just
Speaker 1: because sorry, it's just like it's just art. Like what
Speaker 1: do you like? What do you think art is? It's
Speaker 1: like I don't know, whatever, It's fine. I mean I
Speaker 1: know that when I saw Guernica, I suddenly was like, oh,
Speaker 1: health care, everyone should have that. I mean, other things
Speaker 1: went through my mind when I yeah. So the rest
Speaker 1: is kind of unfortunately history. The Nazis were able to
Speaker 1: convince enough people that this was happening, that cultural Bolshevist
Speaker 1: was a thing, uh, and they won open elections, and
Speaker 1: then they destroyed democracy and then you know, Holocaust and such.
Speaker 1: Not a not a good story, but a well known
Speaker 1: one at this point. So keep all of that in
Speaker 1: mind as we start our tale of Dr Jordan Balthazar Peterson.
Speaker 1: And I must be honest with you, we both enjoy
Speaker 1: calling him Jordan Balthasar Peterson, but that's not his middle name.
Speaker 1: His middle name is Burnt. It's Bumblebee. Oh sorry, Burnt
Speaker 1: b E r in t, which is not a name
Speaker 1: I think I've seen before. He was born on June twelfth,
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty two, in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada's Texas Uh. He
Speaker 1: grew up in a small town called Fairview, which was
Speaker 1: about five hours out from the city. His dad was
Speaker 1: a teacher in a vice principle. His mother, Beverley, was
Speaker 1: a librarian at a nearby college. Jordan was the oldest
Speaker 1: of three kids, and if he can be believed he
Speaker 1: started reading at age three. Um, and he was like
Speaker 1: a big, big book nerd, which I do believe. He's
Speaker 1: very clearly has spent a lot of time reading books
Speaker 1: and not so much time interacting with human beings. Uh. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I know. He's he's a he's a reader. He's a reader.
Speaker 1: That one So one of his earliest memories was watching
Speaker 1: the enormous state funeral for Bobby Kennedy, and he recalls
Speaker 1: that he thought, I'll have a funeral like that one day.
Speaker 1: Oh my goodness, I that is I mean, everything I
Speaker 1: know about him and what he said as a young
Speaker 1: man that I didn't catch that that Oh yeah, that's
Speaker 1: That's a great reaction to have to the death of
Speaker 1: someone else in the trauma of a neighboring country. It's like,
Speaker 1: one of these days, I'm gonna be dead like that. People.
Speaker 1: People will think that's cool. I'm that cool like Kennedy.
Speaker 1: That's pretty Uh, that's pretty telling. Wouldn't it be wild
Speaker 1: if Jordan B. Peterson got into politics and was then
Speaker 1: also assassinated by Sir Hans sir Han in California that
Speaker 1: one day is still alive. Maybe, So Jordan B. Peterson
Speaker 1: was raised Protestant, and as a young child he was
Speaker 1: sent to confirmation class, which is a weird ritual that
Speaker 1: some Christians who I did it when I was a
Speaker 1: kid and Christian, where you like study the Bible with
Speaker 1: an overly enthusiastic youth group leader who tells you that
Speaker 1: Gandhi is probably in Hell, and then you pass a
Speaker 1: test and you get baptized by the priest in a
Speaker 1: big ceremony thing. Uh. And like most young people who
Speaker 1: have such an experience and our our readers, Jordan was
Speaker 1: left with questions. He pressed his teacher about the literal
Speaker 1: truth of biblical creation stories. Now I'm not sure exactly
Speaker 1: what argument this guy made in response. I haven't found
Speaker 1: it written down anywhere, but Peterson found it unconvincing, and
Speaker 1: he suspected the teacher didn't really believe the argument himself.
Speaker 1: And I'm gonna quote now from a write up in
Speaker 1: The New Yorker. In Maps of Meaning, which is his
Speaker 1: first book, we'll talk about it later, he remembered his
Speaker 1: reaction religion was for the ignorant, weak, and superstitious. He wrote,
Speaker 1: I stopped attending church and joined the modern world. He
Speaker 1: turned first to socialism and then to political science, seeking
Speaker 1: an explanation for the general social and political insanity and
Speaker 1: evil of the world, in each time finding himself unsatisfied. Now,
Speaker 1: a lot of smart pretty much any intelligent person and
Speaker 1: most people, Yeah, pretty much any person is going to
Speaker 1: like at some point be like, oh boy, ship's fucked up,
Speaker 1: and you gotta like you gotta like try to puzzle
Speaker 1: that out for yourself. Way you figure out, like, yeah, um,
Speaker 1: there's something about like I'm going to solve the mysteries
Speaker 1: of the universe. Yeah, is a bit uh more intense
Speaker 1: with Mr Peterson, Yeah, he has to. He's he's a
Speaker 1: very intense person and the way that he frames things
Speaker 1: is always intense. That will become very obvious as we
Speaker 1: go along. So he says that he was a socialist,
Speaker 1: and yeah, maybe like his time as a socialist was like,
Speaker 1: so he had this librarian when he was in school
Speaker 1: who was the mother of the seventeenth Premier of Alberta,
Speaker 1: Rachel not Ley um and not Lee was a member
Speaker 1: of the New Democratic Party, and Peterson did spend his
Speaker 1: teenage years volunteering for the NDP, which is like a
Speaker 1: social democratic party. Um, so a socialist in that sense,
Speaker 1: like he was not like a radical communist or anything.
Speaker 1: He was like kind of like a probably Bernie Sanders
Speaker 1: ish saying stuff and like yeah, well, um now he
Speaker 1: was during this period of voracious leader, spurred on it
Speaker 1: first by the work of George Orwell, but he eventually
Speaker 1: moved on to Alexander uh Sola Nitzen. Um, I'm always
Speaker 1: pronounced it wrong. I'm sure an iron rand, which I
Speaker 1: always pronounced right. And according to a profile in Toronto
Speaker 1: Life quote, while he admired leaders like Ed Broadbent, who
Speaker 1: was an m DP leader, he became disillusioned by the
Speaker 1: party's peevish functionaries. He found Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pierre,
Speaker 1: which he read as an undergrad at Grand Prairie Enlightening.
Speaker 1: Or Well did a political psychological analysis of the motivations
Speaker 1: of the intellectual, tweed wearing middle class socialist and concluded
Speaker 1: that people like that didn't like the poor, They just
Speaker 1: hated the rich. I thought, ah ha, that's it. It's resentment.
Speaker 1: Anyone who set out to change the world by first
Speaker 1: changing other people was suspicious. Ah is that why we'd
Speaker 1: like to change the world and make it better for everybody?
Speaker 1: Because we're resented? Full is that why. Yeah. I mean
Speaker 1: there's a number of things going on there. One of
Speaker 1: them is understandable, which is that like he got involved
Speaker 1: with a an actual, like established political party and it
Speaker 1: was full of assholes, which every political party is, because
Speaker 1: political parties are disillusioned with any of that stuff by yourself.
Speaker 1: And I think he's probably right that a lot of
Speaker 1: these kind of like intellectual, professional left wing politicos didn't
Speaker 1: like the poor and didn't spend any time around them.
Speaker 1: They just hated rich people, and like, yeah, that of course, yes,
Speaker 1: like um obviously, um. Where he gets wrong is like
Speaker 1: number one, the idea that socialism is changing the world
Speaker 1: by first changing other people. I think there's some assholes
Speaker 1: who say that, but I think most of us would say, like, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: people are fine. It's these systems that are incredibly corrupt
Speaker 1: and fucked up and unjust that need to be changed.
Speaker 1: And then like people can actually live their lives and
Speaker 1: and be decent um without these horrible systems crushing them.
Speaker 1: That's how I would go. It's like the yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: And it's always fascinating to me when reactionaries like Peterson
Speaker 1: Professor love for orwell because they inevitably misinterpret him. And
Speaker 1: I just like they don't know what Orwell was saying. Um,
Speaker 1: which is odd because Orwell is a pretty clear writer.
Speaker 1: But it happens a lot with him. Um. Orwell was
Speaker 1: not critiquing socialism itself as much as he was criticizing
Speaker 1: the kind of intellectual lefty academic politico types who spent
Speaker 1: all their time arguing over theory and never actually do anything.
Speaker 1: Or was a committed socialist his entire life, and he
Speaker 1: was profoundly working class. You read any of his work, like,
Speaker 1: not just his like like ship like um, he talks
Speaker 1: about stuff like that a lot in um uh homage
Speaker 1: to Catalonia, but like also like a lot of his
Speaker 1: essays and book reviews, like he wrote a bunch of
Speaker 1: reviews of Charles Dickens that are fascinating even if you
Speaker 1: don't like Dickens. There's a good collection of essays called
Speaker 1: them all art is Propaganda. Um. And it's just very
Speaker 1: obvious that he cared deeply and profoundly and understood like
Speaker 1: working class poor people. Um. Just this this the idea
Speaker 1: that Yeah, I don't know, it's frustrating how people think
Speaker 1: about or Well sometimes or Well, the guy who during
Speaker 1: the nineteen twenties said well, if everyone kills one fascist,
Speaker 1: soon this problem will be over, and then traveled to
Speaker 1: Spain to kill fascists to do that, to exactly that. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: and then got shot in the throat after killing some fascists. Anyway,
Speaker 1: I like Orwell, um, not a perfect guy, but really
Speaker 1: good to read and then misinterpret and then uses an
Speaker 1: argument for things that are well didn't believe exactly. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's the game. That's the that's the game with Georgie.
Speaker 1: Never write anything, just don't write anything down. Yeah, don't
Speaker 1: write things, don't talk to people, live in a hut
Speaker 1: with a rifle and a large dog, and shoot anyone
Speaker 1: who approaches you. Stare at your door for the rest
Speaker 1: of your life. That's the culture I want. Um. So
Speaker 1: Jordan's early life occurred during kind of the high point
Speaker 1: of Cold War mania. You know, he was born in
Speaker 1: like sixty two obviously, so he's like living through the
Speaker 1: worst parts of the Cold War. And I think a
Speaker 1: lot of people who are like our age may not
Speaker 1: know this. Like, the eighties had some pretty fucking hardcore
Speaker 1: Cold War paranoia. Like that's why Red Dawn was the
Speaker 1: movie that it was Um, yeah, so Jordan's earliest memories
Speaker 1: would have included footage from Vietnam and like constant anxiety
Speaker 1: over nuclear apocalypse. Um, he's not all that much younger
Speaker 1: than my dad, And like my dad grew up I know,
Speaker 1: with a lot of he's talked about it, like a
Speaker 1: lot of like really realistic fear as a child. But
Speaker 1: the world was going to suddenly end in nuclear hell fire. Um,
Speaker 1: And like I talked about this a lot, but it
Speaker 1: really messed the whole generation up pretty bad. Um in
Speaker 1: an understandable way. So the threat of total war only
Speaker 1: seemed to grow more real as Jordan grew older. He
Speaker 1: was plagued by nightmares of nuclear hell fire for a
Speaker 1: year and a half. He says, like, just yea horrible
Speaker 1: night dreams. He's gotta gott a dream problem, which again
Speaker 1: you can't at this point perfectly reasonable, Like if you
Speaker 1: grew up hearing that should, of course and have nightmares
Speaker 1: about nuclear health fire. Like obviously, sometimes if you're there's
Speaker 1: existential threat constantly, then you're going to have it on
Speaker 1: your mind pretty constantly. Yeah, it's a kind of PTSD
Speaker 1: to be honest. Um. In Toronto Life cryptically writes the
Speaker 1: Jordan quote became depressed and confused about the world's and
Speaker 1: his own capacity for evil, which is interesting. That's interesting.
Speaker 1: Uh So I wanted to pop in here, so just
Speaker 1: for more context as we can keep going. Um. And
Speaker 1: his comment about that funeral and how he's going to
Speaker 1: have that funeral one day. Um. When he was I
Speaker 1: believe fourteen years old. Um, he ran he was like
Speaker 1: into politics and he ran um for uh like election. Um.
Speaker 1: And I didn't run across this one. This is why
Speaker 1: you're the guest. Uh. Aged fourteen, he became within thirteen
Speaker 1: votes of being elected vice president of the n DP,
Speaker 1: their sort of organization there. Um. And the quote for
Speaker 1: the piece is I won't be happy until an elected
Speaker 1: prime minister. Oh good, okay, well there you go. Fine
Speaker 1: things to say when you're fourteen years old. I mean,
Speaker 1: nothing to worry about there. I grew up not all
Speaker 1: that differently from Jordan Peterson in a different era, but
Speaker 1: like super bookish, super nerdy. Um. I guess I was
Speaker 1: kind of raised conservative and he like trumped into it.
Speaker 1: But like I had those same like dreams of getting
Speaker 1: into politics and they're the dreams of an unhealthy young person.
Speaker 1: And as I got older, I realized that it was
Speaker 1: much better to just do tons of drugs and hang
Speaker 1: out on mountains with my friends. Uh, and that that's
Speaker 1: a way healthier thing than getting just like the pressure
Speaker 1: of like I won't be happy until I'm so powerful. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the idea that like there, I can't be happy unless
Speaker 1: I'm the prime minister. I have to be the top
Speaker 1: boy in the country otherwise. Yeah, it's pretty much. And
Speaker 1: like any anyone that like seeks like I want to
Speaker 1: be the president that kind of thing later on in life,
Speaker 1: like that's you gotta be a certain kind of fund
Speaker 1: up to think that you have the ability and like
Speaker 1: that you should be that that. Yeah, it's a reasonable
Speaker 1: thing as a kid to be like I'm going to
Speaker 1: be the president one day. And then as you grow
Speaker 1: older and understand what that means, I think reasonable people
Speaker 1: come to the conclusion of, like, no, no, no, we
Speaker 1: need to you know, Bernie Sanders, it's a man. Um
Speaker 1: you know, you all know the joke at home. I'm
Speaker 1: not gonna say we all know what he did. We
Speaker 1: all know what he did, so um. Yeah. As he
Speaker 1: grew into a young man, Peterson also grew into a
Speaker 1: young man that is to say he developed an appreciation
Speaker 1: for Carl Young. That was good, right right? Yeah, Uh,
Speaker 1: it's really a laugh a minute this week. Yeah. So
Speaker 1: Young is uh the inventor of the term collective unconsciousness,
Speaker 1: or at least the concept basically. I think he sometimes
Speaker 1: called it. I don't know, I'm not a great young expert.
Speaker 1: Suck it. Uh. So Peterson also started but he like Young,
Speaker 1: he has Okay, so Young, there's a couple of big
Speaker 1: things abou him. One of them is this idea that
Speaker 1: there's this sort of collective kind of like a racial
Speaker 1: memory um which yes, does feed into some of the
Speaker 1: things the Nazis we're talking about, and so did Young.
Speaker 1: We'll talk about that in a bit. And also these
Speaker 1: ideas that there's like these archetypes in human civilization, like
Speaker 1: this like inherent power of myth that humans are bound by,
Speaker 1: and there's like something almost kind of supernaturally powerful about
Speaker 1: certain like mythal archetypes, the hero and all this kind
Speaker 1: of stuff. Like Young talks about some ship like that.
Speaker 1: He's a complicated guy. Um So Peterson big fan of Young.
Speaker 1: He also starts devouring Nietzsche uh and a Romanian scholar
Speaker 1: named Mercea Eliad she's a scholar of religion. Um. And
Speaker 1: he also starts to devouring the work of an American
Speaker 1: professor called Joseph Campbell, whose popular book on the hero
Speaker 1: myth and society had a profound cultural impact and one
Speaker 1: that's not dis similar to Peterson's own work. So his
Speaker 1: like Hero with the Thousand Faces, I think is the book, um,
Speaker 1: kind of winds up inspiring every single Disney movie that's
Speaker 1: ever been made in your lifetime. U. Yeah, because like
Speaker 1: it's Star Wars beat for beat, it's Star Wars beat
Speaker 1: for Beat, It's it's Dan Dan Harmon's story circle. And
Speaker 1: it's like there's a lot of there's obviously a lot
Speaker 1: that Campbell got right, because he's correct about things that
Speaker 1: resonate with people. There's a reason that all these very
Speaker 1: successful stories. Yeah, and the archives are common. I think
Speaker 1: the real thing that resonates with people is like just
Speaker 1: the arc of that basic story. You one of the
Speaker 1: things are a different thing. You try to get the
Speaker 1: thing you wanting you actually need, and you sacrifice a thing,
Speaker 1: you change and so on and so forth. Um. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: and and and Joseph Campbell, it's an important work of scholarship.
Speaker 1: Campbell is also problematic as funk, which we'll talk about
Speaker 1: in a little bit. So these are like the people
Speaker 1: who Peterson starts to devour and like they start to
Speaker 1: influence his mind. Like this is like what creates the
Speaker 1: mentality the mind that Jordan Peterson has as an adult. Now,
Speaker 1: when we talk about the writers and philosophers who started
Speaker 1: to form like the core of his growing ideological development,
Speaker 1: we would be remiss if we didn't discuss at some
Speaker 1: length what kind of things those writers wound up supporting
Speaker 1: and believing themselves, because I don't think a lot of
Speaker 1: people know this. Yeah. Now, thankfully a writer named Pankaj
Speaker 1: Mishra did that for us in a two thousand eighteen
Speaker 1: article for The New York Review of Books titled Jordan
Speaker 1: Peterson and Fascist Mysticism. Now, Pankaj makes a note of
Speaker 1: some of the things we've talked about in other episodes
Speaker 1: of this show, how the rise of fascism in Europe
Speaker 1: happened alongside the rise of esoteric spiritual movements like theosophy
Speaker 1: and anthroposophy, which we did an episode of, and like
Speaker 1: a weird fascination with Asian mysticism, which is kind of
Speaker 1: like why the Nazis sent expeditions out to the Himalayas
Speaker 1: and stuff which a lot of people don't know about that.
Speaker 1: You can read about that on an air bay on
Speaker 1: your own time, or maybe we'll do an episode about it.
Speaker 1: It's wacky shit. Um I'm gonna quote from that Pankaj
Speaker 1: Mishra article quote a range of intellectual entrepreneurs, from theosophists
Speaker 1: and venders of Asian spirituality like Vivi Kannada and DZ
Speaker 1: Suzuki too, scholars of Asia like Arthur Whaley, and fascist
Speaker 1: idealogues like Julius A. Vola, who is Steve Bannon's favorite philosopher,
Speaker 1: set up stalls in the new marketplace of ideas. W. B.
Speaker 1: Yates Um adjusting Indian plosophy to the needs of the
Speaker 1: Celtic revival pontificated on the ancient self. Young spun his
Speaker 1: own variations on this evidently ancestral unconscious. Such conceptually foggy
Speaker 1: categories as spirit and intuition acquired broad currency. Peterson's favorite
Speaker 1: words being in chaos, started to appear in capital letters,
Speaker 1: which he also is how he also tends to refer
Speaker 1: ums like yeah, these these writers in these intellectual strains
Speaker 1: are both huge parts of everything Peterson writes today. And
Speaker 1: there were also big parts of kind of the intellectual
Speaker 1: stew that starts cooking in Europe really in like it
Speaker 1: starts before World War One, but it really gets going
Speaker 1: in the twenties. Um. And these have a big impact
Speaker 1: on the development of fascism. Now some of them is coincidental.
Speaker 1: Fascism is happening at the same time, so of course
Speaker 1: like this is in the fucking air, and people pick
Speaker 1: some of it up. A decent number of these philosophers
Speaker 1: and academics were not fascists, but their work influenced Hitlerist
Speaker 1: ideas of like racial community, which is not all that
Speaker 1: different from kind of Young's concept of of collective unconscious.
Speaker 1: There's similarities at least an aryan mystic beliefs um quote
Speaker 1: by the early twentieth century, ethnic racial chauvinists everywhere, Hindu
Speaker 1: supremacists in India as well as we talked about that
Speaker 1: in our our episode on I Forget the Hindu fascist
Speaker 1: Lady um as well as Catholic ultra yeah, as well
Speaker 1: as Catholic ultra nationalists in France. We're offering visions who
Speaker 1: uprooted people of a rooted, organic society in which hierarchies
Speaker 1: and values had been stable. As Carla Poe points out
Speaker 1: in New Religions and the Nazis two thousand five, political
Speaker 1: cultists would typically mix pieces of yoga and Abrahamic religions
Speaker 1: with popular notions of science, or rather pseudoscience, such as
Speaker 1: concepts of race, eugenics, or evolution. It was this opportunistic
Speaker 1: amalgam of ideas that helped nourish new mythologies of would
Speaker 1: be totalitarian regimes. And obviously, like Darwinism plays a lot
Speaker 1: of in this which so clearly again I'm yeah, and
Speaker 1: when I'm taking sorry, like taking like these sort of
Speaker 1: spiritual ideas and combining them with like biological things. And
Speaker 1: just like Peter Peterson does this a lot of just
Speaker 1: like he he reads, he reads everything, yeah, and he
Speaker 1: has a habit of taking everything he reads and putting
Speaker 1: it all together, which is you know, syncretism is um
Speaker 1: as another kind of hallmark that echoes set of fascism
Speaker 1: um and it is one of those things. All these thinkers,
Speaker 1: all of these ideological strains are not inherently fascists, just
Speaker 1: as Darwinism, like most people today, except Darwinian evolution is
Speaker 1: basically true and are not fascists, right, but like it
Speaker 1: had a huge impact on Hitler, and you do have to,
Speaker 1: like I think it intelligent people can understand both of
Speaker 1: those things. Um yeah, that like things where it's like
Speaker 1: just like like the like Darwinism where it's like this
Speaker 1: is a thing that is it's uh, it's not a
Speaker 1: thing that we need to like force or do or
Speaker 1: like ascribe to or like yeah, it just happy around.
Speaker 1: It just happens. Uh. He has a bad habit of
Speaker 1: like prescriptive versus like normative claims and like, well there,
Speaker 1: this is this, we should have to do this, yes, Jordan,
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, and we'll will be will be most of
Speaker 1: these both of these episodes will be about his ideas, right,
Speaker 1: and like what the things he believes and says, Um
Speaker 1: now I just got over saying because I want to
Speaker 1: be very clear here, like if you like some of
Speaker 1: these thinkers, if you're if you've been inspired by them,
Speaker 1: I'm not saying you're a fascist or their fascist. That said.
Speaker 1: A lot of the writers Peterson specifically loves, got real
Speaker 1: fashi during this period. Mercia Elliott, who's that Romanian scholar herself,
Speaker 1: She fasci as fuck. Mercia Elliott, who's that Romanian scholar
Speaker 1: allied herself with the Romanian Iron Guard who were Romanian Nazis, right, like,
Speaker 1: these are the people who like their Nazis. Carl Young
Speaker 1: wrote about the Aryan soul and unfortunately the Jewish psyche um,
Speaker 1: and he was initially was initially very sympathy. Yeah, neither
Speaker 1: of those are good. And he was initially sympathetic to
Speaker 1: the Nazi Party. Now he changed his mind, and he
Speaker 1: did change his mind pretty early on, but he was
Speaker 1: very sympathy, like he got drawn along for a little
Speaker 1: while there. Yeah that makes sense. I mean you can,
Speaker 1: like there are lots of quotes of Peterson talking about
Speaker 1: Trump where it's like, uh, you know, you know what
Speaker 1: it is, but you're yeah, yeah, yeah, well yeah yeah.
Speaker 1: Joseph Campbell obviously came around later, and he never he
Speaker 1: was not an open supporter of like a Nazi movement.
Speaker 1: But once his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces
Speaker 1: became a hit and he was being interviewed by every
Speaker 1: TV station and whatnot in contemporary America. Like again, he
Speaker 1: had a very Jordan Peterson like ark to his career,
Speaker 1: and once he gained prominence, he would regularly drop lines
Speaker 1: like Marxist philosophy has overtaken the university in America. I
Speaker 1: did not enjoy that at all. Y I'm doing I'm
Speaker 1: actually kind of doing a Ben Shapiro voice there. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I didn't, Like, I can't say Marxist without thinking of
Speaker 1: been Yeah, Maists everywhere around me. Now, it's unfair that
Speaker 1: I do that for Ben, because, um, Joseph Campbell was
Speaker 1: profoundly anti Semitic. I just wanted he hated black people,
Speaker 1: just super racist, super anti semitic, like Campbell and Campbell
Speaker 1: kind of kept a little on that a bit, but like, oh,
Speaker 1: when you like, he was a guy who hated Marxism
Speaker 1: and also hated Jewish people, and you do get the
Speaker 1: feeling that, like he kind of agreed with that Nazi
Speaker 1: idea that Jewish people spread Marxism, right right. I mean,
Speaker 1: if you have both of those and one has kind
Speaker 1: of kept secret, chances are that they're very related and
Speaker 1: fuel each other. Yeah, he's he was. He was super
Speaker 1: racist as fuck. Um, And yeah, obviously Campbell's racism doesn't
Speaker 1: mean there's nothing we can learn from him, because you
Speaker 1: kind of have to, especially if you if you're interested
Speaker 1: in storytelling, you kind of have to read the here
Speaker 1: with a thousand faces, even if you disagree with it,
Speaker 1: because there's a lot of people who do and say
Speaker 1: that like, no, he gets a lot of like, but
Speaker 1: you still it's just it's that important of a work.
Speaker 1: So I'm not saying, let's exercise these guys from our
Speaker 1: intellectual history. But like Campbell was basically a Nazi, right yeah,
Speaker 1: but like if you, if you, if you read his
Speaker 1: work and then write Star Wars, you're not a yes, yes,
Speaker 1: George Lucas, In fact, I would go so fast to
Speaker 1: say doesn't like nazis pretty anti Nazi guy. It's stars
Speaker 1: despite his his magic blood religion that he put in
Speaker 1: his movies. But he's got some problematic aspects. But I
Speaker 1: think it's pretty clear even in the Prequels that George
Speaker 1: Lucas is saying, Hey, you know what's bad as fascism?
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, it's the one. It's the problem with the
Speaker 1: prequels is it's a great idea that it's bad. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he just needed an editor. Um. Speaking of speaking of editors,
Speaker 1: I don't know, speaking of editors, I don't know. You know, Cody,
Speaker 1: let's talk about something else for just a second. How
Speaker 1: do you feel about school buses full of kids. I
Speaker 1: hope they get to school and home from school. Oh see,
Speaker 1: I thought you were going to say you hope that
Speaker 1: they get hit by hellfire missiles from the sky. And
Speaker 1: I was going to tell you that Raytheon, our sponsor,
Speaker 1: makes the missile guidance chips that that make the targeting
Speaker 1: of school buses possible. Oh so where can school buses now? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Kind of wanna. I would love to help or get
Speaker 1: like a promo code for for for these chips. Well yeah,
Speaker 1: if you actually type in promo code Yemen, you can
Speaker 1: get a discount on your next missile guidance systems thanks
Speaker 1: to our sponsors, Raytheon. Okay, so I will be able
Speaker 1: to afford this with the promo code. Oh absolutely. Raytheon's
Speaker 1: goal is making it possible for regular people like you
Speaker 1: and me to fire missiles at school buses and parts
Speaker 1: of the world that we barely understand. This has gone
Speaker 1: on far too long. Let's hear from Raytheon now. So
Speaker 1: so you sold me, We're back? Okay, So yeah, Campbell's
Speaker 1: racism doesn't mean we shouldn't learn stuff from him. Just
Speaker 1: like the fact that young dabbled in Nazism doesn't mean
Speaker 1: that he's not worth studying as an intellectual. Carl Young
Speaker 1: had said a lot of stuff that's really interesting, and
Speaker 1: I know a lot of people are fans of him,
Speaker 1: so I'm not again like anyway, The point is that
Speaker 1: an awful lot of the guys who find themselves writing
Speaker 1: at length about stuff like ancestral memories and archetypes also
Speaker 1: wound up having Nazi adjacent beliefs, Like a lot of
Speaker 1: the people who started codifying those lines of thought in
Speaker 1: human philosophy also wound up being really drawn to the Nazis.
Speaker 1: And that's something we should keep in mind when other
Speaker 1: people have similar few drawn in similar directions. And these
Speaker 1: are the folks that Jordan Peterson found himself pulled towards
Speaker 1: as a young man, and that's worth noting now. Young adult,
Speaker 1: Jordan Peterson gravitated to clinical psychology. He went to or
Speaker 1: psychology whatever. He went to McGill University for his undergraduate
Speaker 1: and his graduate terms. He eventually became a doctor um
Speaker 1: and during his time in college he came to grapple
Speaker 1: with his romantic feelings for a childhood friend, Tammy Roberts.
Speaker 1: Jordan and Tammy grew up on the same street. They
Speaker 1: went to prom together. He invited her to Montreal for
Speaker 1: Canadian Thanksgiving one year while he was in college, and
Speaker 1: the two hit it off romantically. They moved in together,
Speaker 1: and like whatever else you can say of the guy,
Speaker 1: it seems like he's like deeply devoted to his wife
Speaker 1: and she to him. Um, it's unfortunately some of the
Speaker 1: things that they're devoted to together, but I guess that's
Speaker 1: good for him. He he fell in love. Um So
Speaker 1: Peterson proposed to her repeatedly before the two married in
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty nine. Tammy later recalled, I thought, if I
Speaker 1: don't marry Jordan's I'm not going to know what he
Speaker 1: does with his life, and he's going to be an
Speaker 1: interesting person. Um. She was not incorrect in that he
Speaker 1: is an interesting guy, very interesting person. I wouldn't marry
Speaker 1: him to know what happens to him personally, But you
Speaker 1: would not marry Dr Jordan B. Peterson. Well, Cody, then
Speaker 1: you might be too biased to participate in this episode
Speaker 1: any longer. So if you get Tammy on the line,
Speaker 1: yeah yeah, yeah, so uh next in Jordan Peterson's life.
Speaker 1: According to the magazine Toronto Life quote, their first child, Michaela,
Speaker 1: was born in nineteen ninety two. The family moved to Boston,
Speaker 1: where Peterson took a job at Harvard then had then
Speaker 1: Tammy had Julian. Peterson taught psych at Harvard for six years.
Speaker 1: When Michaela was seven, she was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis
Speaker 1: and started showing signs of depression. Tammy, who had become
Speaker 1: an artist and massage therapist, put her career on hold
Speaker 1: to care for her daughter. In Peterson was offered a
Speaker 1: tenure track position at the University of Toronto and the
Speaker 1: family returned to Canada. At u f T he was
Speaker 1: a swashbuckling, beloved professor. Students regarded him as a kind
Speaker 1: of guru for people just figuring out who they were
Speaker 1: and what they wanted to be. He offered a seductive
Speaker 1: bulwark of certainty. There are perhaps one or two professors
Speaker 1: you'll run into during her your career who completely capture
Speaker 1: and captivate you, says Christine Brothie, one of Peterson's current
Speaker 1: grad students, and he was one of them. Now, that
Speaker 1: Toronto Life article is really interesting and I think quite good,
Speaker 1: but it's summary of Peterson's early career path is only
Speaker 1: broadly accurate. It does leave some things out and we're
Speaker 1: fortunate that. In two thousand eighteen, University of Toronto professor
Speaker 1: Bernard Schiff wrote an op ed for The Star. Its
Speaker 1: title is I was Jordan Peterson's strongest supporter. Now I
Speaker 1: think he's dangerous. We'll be referring to this article the
Speaker 1: number of times yeah, yeah, important articles, Yeah, very felt
Speaker 1: stating yeah in fascinating and in his article Bernard gives
Speaker 1: us an inside look at how Jordan came to teach
Speaker 1: at the University of Toronto. Quote. I met Jordan Peterson
Speaker 1: when he came to the University of Toronto to be
Speaker 1: interviewed for an assistant professorship in the Department of Psychology.
Speaker 1: His CV was impeccable, with terrific references in a pedigree
Speaker 1: that included a PhD from McGill and a five year
Speaker 1: stint at Harvard As an assistant professor. We did not
Speaker 1: share research interests, but it was clear that his work
Speaker 1: was solid. My colleagues on the search committee were skeptical.
Speaker 1: They felt he was too eccentric, but somehow I prevailed.
Speaker 1: Several committee members now remind me that they agreed to
Speaker 1: hire him because they were tired of hearing me shout
Speaker 1: over them. I pushed for him because he was a
Speaker 1: divergent thinker, self educated in the humanities, intellectually, flamboyant, bold, energetic,
Speaker 1: and confident, bordering on arrogant. I thought he would bring
Speaker 1: a new excitement, along with new ideas to our department.
Speaker 1: Professor Schiff, who was then nearing retirement, took Jordan under
Speaker 1: his wing for the last three years of his career
Speaker 1: as a full time professor. Now Shift grew too deeply
Speaker 1: like Peterson, and he pushed for him to receive regular
Speaker 1: promotion and raises. When Peterson renovated his house, Shift put
Speaker 1: Jordan and his family up in his own home. Quote.
Speaker 1: We had meals together in the evening and long colorful
Speaker 1: conversations there. Away from campus, I saw a man who
Speaker 1: was devoted to his wife and his children, who were
Speaker 1: lovely and gentle and for whom I still feel affection.
Speaker 1: He was attentive and thoughtful, stern and kind, playful and warm.
Speaker 1: His wife, Tammy, appeared to be the keel, the ballast,
Speaker 1: and the rudder, and Jordan ran the ship. Now it's
Speaker 1: really clear from this article that Professor Shift deeply enjoyed
Speaker 1: Peterson's company and respected him tremendously as a man an
Speaker 1: a professor, and unfortunately, Shift feels this now blinded him
Speaker 1: to some of the less savory aspects of Peterson's personality
Speaker 1: which had started to emerge in this period. Shift laments
Speaker 1: that he did not give sufficient concern to some of
Speaker 1: Jordan's teaching tactics. Quote as the undergraduate chair, I read
Speaker 1: all teaching reviews. His work, for the most part excellent
Speaker 1: and included eyebrow raising comments such as this course has
Speaker 1: changed my life. One student, however, hated the course because
Speaker 1: he did not like delivered truths. Curious, I attended me
Speaker 1: of Jordan's lectures to see for myself. Remarkably, the fifty
Speaker 1: students always showed up at nine am and were held
Speaker 1: in rapt attention for an hour. Jordan was a captivating lecturer,
Speaker 1: electric and eclectic, cherry picking from neuroscience, mythology, psychology, philosophy,
Speaker 1: the Bible, and popular culture. The class loved him, but
Speaker 1: as reported by that astute student, Jordan presented conjecture as
Speaker 1: statement of fact. I expressed my concern to him about
Speaker 1: this a number of times, and each time Jordan agreed.
Speaker 1: He acknowledged the danger of such practices, but then continued
Speaker 1: to do it again and again, as if he could
Speaker 1: not control himself. He was a preacher more than a teacher.
Speaker 1: Mm hmmmm mm hmmm mm hmm. Yeah, I mean he's
Speaker 1: like that's uh dead on. Um. When you watch one
Speaker 1: of his lectures, it does seem like that, Like yeah,
Speaker 1: like I said it earlier, it's less speeches, less lectures,
Speaker 1: it's more sermons. Um. Yep, he does uh and yeah,
Speaker 1: choosing the everything. He looks at everything, and he just
Speaker 1: like sort of picks what fits what he wants to
Speaker 1: say is true and then puts them all together and
Speaker 1: and pushes that idea. Um. It's like really easily to
Speaker 1: still down to the lobster example. I think, um, where
Speaker 1: he's like, oh, yeah, the world should be like this
Speaker 1: because of over here. Um. But does it a lot
Speaker 1: with like yeah, taking like this religious thing and then
Speaker 1: this this biological thing and then this thing from pop
Speaker 1: culture and then just tells you the way things are,
Speaker 1: the way things are yep, and should be it should be.
Speaker 1: It's you know, one of the things I think that
Speaker 1: happens with Peterson, And I think it's I I see
Speaker 1: it in myself and have to fight against it regularly.
Speaker 1: If you grow up believing one thing and then make
Speaker 1: a complete or one eighty degree turn to something else
Speaker 1: as a young adult, there's a tendency that you have
Speaker 1: to fight against to believe. Well, maybe I don't have
Speaker 1: to question the things I believe now because I already questioned,
Speaker 1: Like I already overturned my entire belief system so clearly,
Speaker 1: like I found truth. And that can lead you to
Speaker 1: cherry pick things that only confirm the things that you've
Speaker 1: come to believe, when when the reality is and no
Speaker 1: one's perfect at this right, Like, and we all choose
Speaker 1: to not examine certain things just because you can't always
Speaker 1: be examining every aspect of your beliefs because otherwise you
Speaker 1: go fucking crazy. Sometimes you just would be like, yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, it's fine, Like, but you should always be
Speaker 1: finding yourselves yourself challenged by things, which is is different
Speaker 1: from saying everybody needs to be debating about things, because
Speaker 1: some things should be debated, um, but you should always
Speaker 1: be like seeking out things that like challenge or complicate
Speaker 1: your understanding of the world, um, because the world's complicated. Um. Anyway,
Speaker 1: So whether or not Preacher is a fair description. Jordan
Speaker 1: grew obsessed with belief, in particularly why people believe things,
Speaker 1: and most particularly like why people who had supported terrible regimes,
Speaker 1: fascist and communist, totalitary and regimes that killed a lot
Speaker 1: of people, why they believed so strongly in the things
Speaker 1: that they were doing. Um, which is obviously, like I think,
Speaker 1: is a great thing to to to investigate. That's my
Speaker 1: whole life, to draw people to authoritarian exactly. Uh. In
Speaker 1: nineteen nine he published his first book, Maps of Meaning,
Speaker 1: a dense, six page academic treatise on the architecture of belief,
Speaker 1: which is a great term. Um, he's a decent titler,
Speaker 1: and yeah. Maps of Meaning shows a Cambellian fascination with
Speaker 1: the hero myth and the things that cultures tend to
Speaker 1: find heroic, as well as a great deal of younging
Speaker 1: and interest in like a kind of sort of collective
Speaker 1: racial un consciousness and the reoccurring influence of myth and
Speaker 1: tradition in human society. The book also evinced an obsession
Speaker 1: with the ideas of order and chaos. I'm going to
Speaker 1: read a quote from it here. Terrible chaotic forces lurk
Speaker 1: behind the facade of the normal world. These forces are
Speaker 1: kept at bay by the maintenance of social order. The
Speaker 1: reign of order is insufficient, however, because order itself becomes
Speaker 1: overbearing in deadly if allowed unregulated or permanent expression. The
Speaker 1: actions of the hero constitute an antidote to the deadly
Speaker 1: forces of chaos and to the tyranny of order. The
Speaker 1: hero creates order from chaos and reconstructs the order when
Speaker 1: necessary that order, when necessary. His actions simultaneously ensure that
Speaker 1: novelty remains tolerable and that security remains flexible. Maps of
Speaker 1: Meaning Jordan B. Peterson. So Maps of Meaning includes some
Speaker 1: fascinating insight into Jordan's own life and I'm gonna I'm
Speaker 1: gonna quote from a write up in The New Yorker. Here,
Speaker 1: Peterson has a way of making even the mildest pronouncement
Speaker 1: sound like the dying declaration of a political prisoner. In
Speaker 1: Maps of Meaning, he traces this sense of urgency to
Speaker 1: a feeling of fraudulence that overcame him in college. When
Speaker 1: he started to speak, he would hear a voice telling him,
Speaker 1: you don't believe that. That isn't true. To word off
Speaker 1: mental breakdown, he resolved not to say anything unless he
Speaker 1: was sure he believed it this practice calmed the inner voice,
Speaker 1: and in time it shaped his rhetorical style, which is
Speaker 1: forceful but careful. Yeah. I mean that's you can see him.
Speaker 1: He's a he's very verbose, but he is a very
Speaker 1: deliberate speaker. Yeah he is. He's a great speaker, like
Speaker 1: just objectively, like I'm like you and I are both
Speaker 1: people who talk for a living. Like, he's objectively good
Speaker 1: at public speaking, captivating. Yeah, absolutely make a great preacher. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he would make a great preacher. Let's talk about that later.
Speaker 1: So the book was well received by a number of
Speaker 1: professional smart people. One reviewer I read, who was a psychologist,
Speaker 1: if I think some sort had a hard time defining
Speaker 1: Peterson's books a work of like sociology or psychology or
Speaker 1: like neuroscience or whatever. But he recommended it to people,
Speaker 1: and this was not a universal opinion. So I want
Speaker 1: to note a lot of professional people in and around
Speaker 1: Peterson's field think this is a great book. There's also
Speaker 1: a sizeable number who disagree with that statement. Dr Paul Taggart,
Speaker 1: a Canadian philosopher and cognitive scientist, wrote this about the
Speaker 1: book in Psychology Today, its emphasis on religious myth and
Speaker 1: heroic individuals provides a poor blueprint for understanding the origins
Speaker 1: of totalitarianism and an even poorer guide to overcoming its evils.
Speaker 1: Um and Dr Taggart described Maps of Meaning as murky
Speaker 1: and the sense that it was dark and gloomy, with
Speaker 1: frequent emphasis on suffering rather than on the joys of love, work,
Speaker 1: and play. The book is also murky in the second sense,
Speaker 1: which is like the sense of yeah, it's less meandering
Speaker 1: and disjointed than its video than his videotape lectures. So yeahah,
Speaker 1: it's a little money kind of like, it's a little
Speaker 1: hard to parse, it's hard to parson follow. People will
Speaker 1: like it's very dense, it takes a lot of reading.
Speaker 1: Some people say that because it's so brilliant, and some
Speaker 1: people will be like, he could have cut a couple
Speaker 1: of hundred pages out. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now. Dr Taggart
Speaker 1: condensed the book's main arguments into four points. Um and
Speaker 1: these are what he thinks that Peterson is getting out
Speaker 1: in the book, and he's smarter than I am. Uh.
Speaker 1: Number one myths are culturally universal. Number two myths are
Speaker 1: the psychological origin of morality. Number three myths are the
Speaker 1: philosophical basis for morality and number four, myth based morality
Speaker 1: grounds political judgments about salitarian states. UM. So you can
Speaker 1: see some things to argue with there and some things
Speaker 1: like I would certainly agree that myth based morality grounds
Speaker 1: political judgments about totalitarian states. UM. I would also say
Speaker 1: that like, I don't think myths are the psychological origin
Speaker 1: of morality or the philosophical basis for morality. I think
Speaker 1: they do influence a lot of people's morality. I would
Speaker 1: also disagree with the statement that their culturally universal, which
Speaker 1: Dr Taggart will disagree with two. But we'll talk about
Speaker 1: that in a bit later. Okay, Yeah, there's a lot
Speaker 1: of because like it's just very like it's forceful and certain.
Speaker 1: There's no yes, Like a lot of things that Jordan's
Speaker 1: yea even are just like well okay that that kind
Speaker 1: of relates to this, but it's not like a universal rule.
Speaker 1: It's not the way the world is. Yeah, He's often
Speaker 1: seems like he's trying to create a religion or like
Speaker 1: create like a worldview it explains everything, and he's basing
Speaker 1: it on these myths, and he's basing it on a
Speaker 1: specific subset of myths from a specific chunk of the
Speaker 1: world that happens to be the chunk of the world
Speaker 1: he's familiar with, ignoring all of the different myths and
Speaker 1: cultures that actually disagree with a lot of what he's saying,
Speaker 1: and then just saying no, every culture basically believes this stuff.
Speaker 1: Yeah culture, even though he doesn't. Yeah. Now, it's perhaps
Speaker 1: not surprising that, according to Professor Schiff, who's again the
Speaker 1: guy his meant, his old mentor who came to worry
Speaker 1: you know, very much about his influence. It's it's perhaps
Speaker 1: not surprising that this guy, says, Peterson's personality grew more
Speaker 1: intense as the years grew by darker and angrier. Now.
Speaker 1: Peterson's student reviews were always exceptional, and he earned a
Speaker 1: position on the u f t's tenure track, but he
Speaker 1: also showed peculiar signs of non academic ambitions. Jordan's started
Speaker 1: a clinical practice, which is fine, but his experiences there
Speaker 1: inspired him to create a series of neuropsychological tests, basically
Speaker 1: personality tests to predict academic and corporate performance. This led
Speaker 1: him to create a product called the Self Authoring Suite,
Speaker 1: an online self help program that he sold access to.
Speaker 1: Toronto Life notes that the program was quote designed to
Speaker 1: walk participants through creating a sort of many autobiography than
Speaker 1: writing what they want their futures to be. Like Tammy,
Speaker 1: his wife served as a guinea pig. I outlined eight
Speaker 1: goals that I had no idea I was going to outline,
Speaker 1: she says. But it puts you in a dream state,
Speaker 1: and when you write your goals they come from somewhere
Speaker 1: inside you that you hadn't scripted. I told him this
Speaker 1: would be the most important thing he ever did. That's
Speaker 1: a little weird, right, yeah, yeah, yeah, well again, it's
Speaker 1: the mysticism, it's the spirituality. It's like the the deeper
Speaker 1: stuff than seems. Yeah, it can't be as simple as
Speaker 1: like yeah, no, you know, outlining your goals and talking,
Speaker 1: you know, outlining some aspects of your past and thinking
Speaker 1: about what you want your future to be can be
Speaker 1: helpful if you're kind of in like a confused or
Speaker 1: a modeled state. No, no, you're in a dream state
Speaker 1: and something inside you comes up like okay, yeah, it's
Speaker 1: like yeah, you talked to the universe. It's like, well, no,
Speaker 1: you just like you assess your life and you try
Speaker 1: to get like we all do it right, Like I
Speaker 1: do it When I'm running like a couple of times
Speaker 1: a week. I don't go into a dream state, like
Speaker 1: it is helpful to like cut out distractions and like.
Speaker 1: But anyway, whatever. Peterson says that about ten thousand students
Speaker 1: have gone through this program, that it decreased dropout rates
Speaker 1: by and raised g p as by. I've seen no
Speaker 1: verification of these numbers outside of Jordan's b Peterson himself.
Speaker 1: Uh and as far as I'm aware, he never put
Speaker 1: his self authoring sweet up to any kind of rigorous
Speaker 1: outside testing. I will say that an awful lot of
Speaker 1: people who have used it rave about it. You can
Speaker 1: find tons of very positive reviews, and in fact it's
Speaker 1: hard to find negative ones, probably because the kind of
Speaker 1: people who buy it are people who are already into
Speaker 1: what Jordan be Peterson has to say. But that's said,
Speaker 1: a lot of people say it's great. Um. One customer
Speaker 1: wrote that in her view, the program allowed you to
Speaker 1: identify the different personalities within yourself that often conflicted and
Speaker 1: to integrate them into a new and better person, which
Speaker 1: I do found a little worrying because a lot of
Speaker 1: scientology and also if you watch the new show about Nexium,
Speaker 1: the Keith rawneeri cult, who we also did episodes on
Speaker 1: and talk a lot about integrations. Anyway, I always find
Speaker 1: that a little weird, but it was it Also, it
Speaker 1: only costs like fifteen bucks, so I would not want
Speaker 1: to be like saying that he was doing same thing
Speaker 1: scientology was doing because it seems like a pretty affordable thing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but that does that always strikes me a little weird.
Speaker 1: Um And I found another review on a site called
Speaker 1: the Deep Dish that explains the attitude uh Joson's fifteen
Speaker 1: dollar course conveys. And this is by someone who took it. Quote,
Speaker 1: when the oxygen mask drops down on an airplane, you
Speaker 1: better fasten yours before you try to be a hero,
Speaker 1: because people who have passed out from hypoxia are not
Speaker 1: known for being particularly useful. We've all heard the safety
Speaker 1: breathing so many times that it bores us to tears,
Speaker 1: but we don't always apply this principle to life. More broadly,
Speaker 1: if you want to do good in the world, you
Speaker 1: have to put your own house in order first. In
Speaker 1: his clinical practice, Peterson has observed that many people don't
Speaker 1: actually have psychological problems, they have problems in living. That's
Speaker 1: a meaningless statement, like a completely meaningless statement. But I
Speaker 1: do want to get into what this guy says about
Speaker 1: like oxygen masks, because obviously, yes, if if if your
Speaker 1: plane depressurizes, you should put on your own oxygen mask
Speaker 1: first because you will be unconscious and unable to help people.
Speaker 1: But I think generalizing this because this is a big
Speaker 1: thing readers and says you have to fix yourself before
Speaker 1: you help other people, and I disagree with that profoundly,
Speaker 1: um and I think that a better comparison would be
Speaker 1: to think like an e m T thing. So if
Speaker 1: you arrive on the seamen as an emergency in the
Speaker 1: as an e MT, and they'll tell you this in training,
Speaker 1: your first priority is your own safety, not because you
Speaker 1: matter more than anyone else because but because if you
Speaker 1: get hurt, then all you've done is make the problem worse.
Speaker 1: And what that means it doesn't mean you don't help,
Speaker 1: but it does mean that, like, oh, there's a car
Speaker 1: crash that involved a power line, I need to make
Speaker 1: sure that I'm not going to like get electrocuted, Like
Speaker 1: I need to make sure this is actually safe for
Speaker 1: me to enter, Otherwise I'm making the situation worse. But
Speaker 1: my goal is still to get in there and help people.
Speaker 1: I just have to make certain that I am physically
Speaker 1: say first that I'm not making the problem worse. But
Speaker 1: the whole thing I'm doing is attempting to actually provide
Speaker 1: aid to people. Right, Um, anyway, I think that's a
Speaker 1: more useful Yeah, it's his game, It's what I mean.
Speaker 1: This reductive is called his game. But like that's that analogy.
Speaker 1: He takes these situations and these analogies and these these
Speaker 1: little examples and then uh says that this is how
Speaker 1: all of society is. Um. And that's like really a
Speaker 1: huge leap and pretty irresponsible. It's it's the lobster thing. Um.
Speaker 1: But also like I don't know if you if you're
Speaker 1: a person who's like, uh, what if everybody was able
Speaker 1: to go to the doctor, um having to pay like
Speaker 1: copas and premiums and all that bullshit. Um, that doesn't
Speaker 1: mean that the person suggesting that needs to live a
Speaker 1: perfect life and have all their problems fixed out that
Speaker 1: like this this example is uh so wrong and misleading.
Speaker 1: It's uh and and it things like that UH point
Speaker 1: me more towards like, oh, well that's insidious. What he's
Speaker 1: doing is insidious, and it would be one thing if
Speaker 1: he was like, there's different kinds of emergencies. Some of
Speaker 1: them are like you know, when an airplane depressurizes and
Speaker 1: you have to take care of yourself first otherwise you'll
Speaker 1: be unconscious. Other others are like a fire in a house,
Speaker 1: and if you're a firefighter, you might have to endanger
Speaker 1: yourself in order to do your job, because that's sometimes
Speaker 1: what we do. And like, yeah, it's but no, it's
Speaker 1: it's kind of a microcosm of the way he thinks,
Speaker 1: which is like find one like kind of one example
Speaker 1: that if you deliver it well in a speech, will
Speaker 1: sound really compelling to people because you're comparing it to
Speaker 1: something in the real world. Um, but like if you
Speaker 1: think about it for more than a couple of seconds,
Speaker 1: realized like, well, that actually can't be generalized anything. So
Speaker 1: you can't you can't like try to improve society unless
Speaker 1: you're perfect, which is impossible. Like who who can claim that, yeah,
Speaker 1: that they that they are they have nothing left to
Speaker 1: work on with themselves or anything like that. It's like
Speaker 1: come on, man, Yeah. So in this course this self authoring,
Speaker 1: sweet Peterson explains that his time as a clinical psychologist
Speaker 1: has taught him to start client sessions by asking a
Speaker 1: series of questions about a patient's family, physical health, friends,
Speaker 1: drug use, etcetera. If his clients are having issues in
Speaker 1: any of these key areas, they cannot be thriving psychologically.
Speaker 1: This is the origin of his famous clean your Room line.
Speaker 1: And obviously it's not bad advice to tell people to
Speaker 1: take care of themselves. You should take care of yourself,
Speaker 1: but Jordan, being Jordan's, he immediately takes things beyond simple
Speaker 1: self care. The self authoring suite represents the first salvo
Speaker 1: and what I think we could call Jordan Peterson's War
Speaker 1: on Chaos quote. The way Peterson sees it, there's a
Speaker 1: constant struggle between chaos and order within society and within
Speaker 1: each individual. Even if you don't believe this literally, it's
Speaker 1: a useful metaphor. To make yourself strong and focused. You
Speaker 1: have to do battle with the dragons of chaos. Of course,
Speaker 1: dragons are big and scary, so you better start out small.
Speaker 1: Peterson talks a lot about fighting dragons, and he does
Speaker 1: actually will sometimes say like, no, I'm speaking pretty literally.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, his his some of his diagrams in that
Speaker 1: book are something too. Yeah. So the way Peterson frames things, though,
Speaker 1: is very seems very reasonable. If your life feels out
Speaker 1: of control, you focus fixed first on taking care of small,
Speaker 1: immediate needs and goals, and this build your confidence and
Speaker 1: it will help you you deal with larger and larger
Speaker 1: things and help you order your own minds that you
Speaker 1: can accomplish greater tasks. Nothing sinister in that. In fact,
Speaker 1: I'd say it's good advice, um. But the focus on
Speaker 1: chaos and on life is a constant battle between ordering chaos.
Speaker 1: That seems kind of sinister to me, especially given what
Speaker 1: Jordan B. Peterson thinks about chaos, because in his mind,
Speaker 1: it is an inherently feminine trait see New York Times.
Speaker 1: Writer Nellie Bowles talked to Jordan about this during a
Speaker 1: deep and very good profile she wrote on The Man,
Speaker 1: a very funny profile because I think Nelly has his number,
Speaker 1: And when she questioned him about chaos being a feminine trait,
Speaker 1: he responded, you know, you can say, well, isn't it
Speaker 1: unfortunate that chaos is represented by the feminine? Well, it
Speaker 1: might be unfortunate, but it doesn't matter because that's how
Speaker 1: it's represented. It's been represented like that forever, and there
Speaker 1: are reasons for it. You can't change it. It's not possible.
Speaker 1: This is underneath everything, and if you change those basic categories,
Speaker 1: people wouldn't be human anymore. They'd be something else, they'd
Speaker 1: be trans human or something. We wouldn't be able to
Speaker 1: talk to these new creatures, to which I say, a
Speaker 1: lot of people used to worship volcanoes Jordans. We don't
Speaker 1: really do that so much anymore. Now. We're like, they're wrong, explosive,
Speaker 1: and we should get away when they like unbelievable, and
Speaker 1: like also like look at society. How it's like, why
Speaker 1: do you think that women are categorized like that? In
Speaker 1: your mind? Who is who becoming? The Goddess of Discord
Speaker 1: was heiress and therefore chaos is always feminine? Yeah, right, Like, uh,
Speaker 1: like men are order and women are chaos. Women have
Speaker 1: a regular menstrual cycle, that's pretty funny, ordered, uh, whereas
Speaker 1: men were largely responsible for the partitioning of Poland, which
Speaker 1: was pretty chaotic. Chaotic. There's just like so many examples,
Speaker 1: and like you can look and like this is Jordan's
Speaker 1: game that he won't let anybody else play. I can
Speaker 1: look at lobsters and say, lobsters do this because of
Speaker 1: the resources. Therefore, society has to be measured like that.
Speaker 1: I can point to women menstruating uh and be like, no,
Speaker 1: women are order, you fucking dumb ship, and he like, yeah,
Speaker 1: he can't. He can't uh fathom that because in his
Speaker 1: mind there's no nuance unless it's him. I don't know.
Speaker 1: It's very frustrating. What a weird frustrating man. Do you
Speaker 1: want to know what's not frustrating Cody though, I yes,
Speaker 1: I would like to know that. Actually, is this fantastic
Speaker 1: transition to ads that Robert's about to do. Robert, yeah,
Speaker 1: oh wow. I'm sad I liked it. I did not.
Speaker 1: We're bad before we move on. I was just quoting
Speaker 1: from that Nellie Bowels um uh New York Times article,
Speaker 1: and I think it's really funny um because there's lines
Speaker 1: in it like Marxism is resurgent. Mr Peterson says, looking
Speaker 1: ashen and stricken, I say, it seems unnecessarily stressful to
Speaker 1: live like this, He tells me. Life is stressful, like
Speaker 1: she she her interpretation seems to be like you are
Speaker 1: deeply miserable, and it's because of these horrible things you
Speaker 1: believe and you seem they don't seem to be making
Speaker 1: you happy. And Jordan B. Peterson is incapable of understanding
Speaker 1: or taking seriously what she's saying because she's a woman
Speaker 1: and that's an agent of case beautiful. It's frustratingly beautiful. Um, yeah,
Speaker 1: you don't have to be this stressed out, Mr Peterson.
Speaker 1: This isn't it doesn't need to be your life. He
Speaker 1: can he considered one of his big issues is that
Speaker 1: he thinks that I'm the current guy in trage of
Speaker 1: Canada is basically like a quasi Marxist. It's like, actually,
Speaker 1: if you look at it, Canada is basically one gigantic
Speaker 1: mining and natural gas company with like a social safetiness
Speaker 1: strap to it so that people don't notice that it
Speaker 1: exists primarily to extract resources from the world. Um, it's
Speaker 1: the furthest thing from marxis impossible. It just has a
Speaker 1: good health care system. But like, let's not Yeah, also
Speaker 1: like Peterson is not going to get it on that,
Speaker 1: Mr Mr Bumblebee, I I gotta I gotta point out
Speaker 1: also like his whole thing of like if you change this,
Speaker 1: if you change that, what is it is? It? Is? It?
Speaker 1: Is it? Now? You're a trans human or what it's like, well,
Speaker 1: you're you're you're like you're what you're doing is you're
Speaker 1: fighting against the idea of evolution like like did like
Speaker 1: when when humans got to where we are, was that like, oh,
Speaker 1: you did it, You're perfect. Never change never, never move
Speaker 1: on from this. And I don't think you would say
Speaker 1: that the realities if you were to take like anyone
Speaker 1: from five years ago and put them in the modern world,
Speaker 1: they would probably die of an embolism, shrieking in horror
Speaker 1: at the sight of concrete, like just because the amount
Speaker 1: of it would be so baffling to their fucking brains.
Speaker 1: It would like the world would make no sense, the
Speaker 1: error would taste different. Yeah, they wouldn't be able to
Speaker 1: understand people speaking what is essentially their language because our
Speaker 1: idioms have changed so much, Like it would be a
Speaker 1: nightmare for them, because people are changed deeply every couple
Speaker 1: of generation. Culture changes constantly, and like like deal with
Speaker 1: describing is like fucking baby, yeah yeah, so yeah, uh
Speaker 1: it's good stuff. Um. Now, when one reads a lot
Speaker 1: of Peterson's interviews, they get the sense that Jordan's spent
Speaker 1: the bulk of his career studying humanity for tips on
Speaker 1: how to reach and influence people. I don't know the
Speaker 1: degree to which this was a conscious choice that he made,
Speaker 1: but he did it. And in his second book, which
Speaker 1: will discuss later, Peterson writes that during his time as
Speaker 1: a psychologist, he worked with a client diagnosed with paranoia.
Speaker 1: He learned that paranoid patients were quote almost uncanny in
Speaker 1: their ability to detect mixed motives, judgment, and falsehood. This
Speaker 1: inspired him to become even more committed to saying only
Speaker 1: what he meant. You have to listen very carefully and
Speaker 1: to tell the truth if you're going to get a
Speaker 1: paranoid person to open up to you. He quickly realized
Speaker 1: that this basic tactic worked on the broader population, which
Speaker 1: helps explain why so many of his students treated him
Speaker 1: like a preacher. Over years and years of rigorously studying belief,
Speaker 1: he got good at making people believe what he said.
Speaker 1: Um Now, outside of work, in his own life, Jordan's
Speaker 1: home came to showcase a growing fascination with authoritarianism. He
Speaker 1: collected Soviet and Communist propaganda and he covered his walls
Speaker 1: with it to an extent that I think even the
Speaker 1: most dead a cadd communists I know would find weird.
Speaker 1: Like it's so weird. The amount there is so weird.
Speaker 1: It's too much of any decoration to be Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: a and like that's you know, and he's the kind
Speaker 1: of guy who'd like you'd think would be like, oh, well,
Speaker 1: your environment affects like your mood and things like that,
Speaker 1: and like how do you live in that space? It's
Speaker 1: so all of your walls are men shooting each other
Speaker 1: and hoisting red flags, like of course you think Marxism
Speaker 1: is coming for Yeah, it's wild. And also like just
Speaker 1: like the motive behind doing that. It's like if you're interesting,
Speaker 1: if you're like fascinated by like the history of Nazism
Speaker 1: because you want to like find out what they think
Speaker 1: and like fight it. If you want to fight. You're
Speaker 1: not like me, right, You're not gonna put Nazi ship everywhere.
Speaker 1: I have no Nazi propaganda on my walls, Cody, Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's normal that I'm glad. Like I do have one
Speaker 1: reproduction wer Mocht coat because it's a solid coat, but
Speaker 1: I only wear it when I'm hiking alone. Anyway, it's
Speaker 1: a good coat. Look, I'm not gonna sucking the coats.
Speaker 1: Not the problem. Nobody hates the Nazis because their coats
Speaker 1: were good. Yeah, there was a problem. Doesn't have a
Speaker 1: squat stick on it. It's just a coat anyway. So uh.
Speaker 1: Peterson grew increasingly also, like during this kind of period
Speaker 1: where he's becoming darker and more weird and radical, Professor
Speaker 1: Schift notes that he grew increasingly interested in fringe health treatments. Quote.
Speaker 1: He was preoccupied with alternative health treatments, including fighting off
Speaker 1: the signs of aging as they appear on the skin,
Speaker 1: and one time even shamanic healing practices, where, to my
Speaker 1: great surprise and distress, he chose to be the shame
Speaker 1: in himself. He did all of that with the same
Speaker 1: great fervor and commitments appropriative. I don't know, you know. Uh.
Speaker 1: Dr Peterson also struggled with depression. Now this has been
Speaker 1: a lifelong battle for him, dating back to his youthful
Speaker 1: nightmares about atomic annihilation. But despite growing wiser and more successful,
Speaker 1: and despite his supportive family and his insights into the
Speaker 1: human mind, he could not rest his mind away from darkness.
Speaker 1: He described it as like being impaled quote by a dead,
Speaker 1: black and frozen tree. Now we don't have tremendous detail
Speaker 1: about his family life, but however, this impacted his behavior.
Speaker 1: His wife eventually threatened to leave him if he didn't
Speaker 1: take antidepressants, and he eventually agreed to do so. Um,
Speaker 1: so it must have been pretty He must have been
Speaker 1: pretty unpleasant to be around. Sounds sounds it sounds. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he's already intense, Like he's already pretty pretty difficult to
Speaker 1: hang with. Yeah, so the pills came with side effects.
Speaker 1: Jordan felt sluggish. He found himself collapsing into sleep for
Speaker 1: hours at a time. Somehow, he still managed to keep
Speaker 1: up his prodigious rate of productivity, but the demons in
Speaker 1: his head seemed to have a noteworthy impact on his personality.
Speaker 1: Professor Schiff writes that as the years went on, quote,
Speaker 1: his interest in political issues became more apparent. We disagreed
Speaker 1: about most things, but I don't ask of my friends
Speaker 1: that we agree. What was off putting was his tendency
Speaker 1: to be categorical about his positions, reminiscent of his lectures
Speaker 1: where he presented personal theories as absolute truths. I really
Speaker 1: challenged him. He overwhelmed challenges with volumes of information that
Speaker 1: we're hard to process and evaluate. He was more forceful
Speaker 1: than I and he had a much quicker mind, also
Speaker 1: again evocative of what I saw in the classroom. He
Speaker 1: sometimes appeared to be in the thrall of his ideas
Speaker 1: and would not or could not constrain himself and self
Speaker 1: monitor what he was saying. Yeah, I mean I was
Speaker 1: right for a professor. Yeah, I'm gonna say not great
Speaker 1: for a priest either. And that's not just like not great, yeah,
Speaker 1: just not great. Uh. Now. The chief political the chief
Speaker 1: political issue that came to increasingly dominate Jordan Peterson's life
Speaker 1: and concern was the idea and a fear about political correctness.
Speaker 1: This seems to have started with one of his clients
Speaker 1: that his his psychology practice who had gotten in trouble
Speaker 1: at work over her resistance to political correctness. Talk at work,
Speaker 1: and I'm gonna uote from the New York Times here
Speaker 1: he says one patient had to be part of a
Speaker 1: long email chain over whether the term flip chart could
Speaker 1: be used in the workplace, since the word flip is
Speaker 1: a pejorative for Filipino. She had a radical left boss
Speaker 1: who was really concerned with equality and equality of outcome
Speaker 1: and all these things, and diversity and inclusivity and all
Speaker 1: the buzzwords and she was subjected to She sent me
Speaker 1: the email chain thirty emails about whether or not the
Speaker 1: flip chart was acceptable. Mr Peterson says, so he was radicalized.
Speaker 1: He says, because the radical left wants to eliminate hierarchies,
Speaker 1: which he says are the natural order of the world.
Speaker 1: It's a bit of a jump from I'll grant you
Speaker 1: that's people are like concerned about calling something a flip
Speaker 1: chart kind of dumb because the word flip has a
Speaker 1: long series of meanings that have nothing to do with
Speaker 1: racism towards Filipinos. If it were like yeah, like whatever, yes, yes,
Speaker 1: that's there are other examples, uh that I won't say
Speaker 1: because we're not I'm not gonna say that. Um, but
Speaker 1: like it's it's just a term. It's a word. It's
Speaker 1: got many, many meanings. And to jump from that silly,
Speaker 1: like arguably silly thing to the Marxists are trying to
Speaker 1: like destabilize the world and like all of his all
Speaker 1: stuff is like come on, man, yeah, and the idea,
Speaker 1: I mean, I actually do want to eliminate hierarchies, but
Speaker 1: just the idea that because like you're maybe over concerned about,
Speaker 1: uh whether or not a specific term is offensive means
Speaker 1: that you want to eliminate all hierarchies, like I'm gonna
Speaker 1: guarantee you whatever. Person like this radical left boss was
Speaker 1: actually probably like more or less a Democrat who really
Speaker 1: supported a hierarchical Democratic party and stuff and was just
Speaker 1: overly worried about police. Also, like he's talked about it's
Speaker 1: I don't know if we're gonna get into this more,
Speaker 1: but like he has talked about feeling boxed in, and
Speaker 1: like I believe the qutea is like I said, you know,
Speaker 1: everyone sort of claims that I'm some sort of right winger,
Speaker 1: but it couldn't BeO farthest from the truth. He denies
Speaker 1: that he's like right wing um, but his his primary
Speaker 1: thing is being obsessed with hierarchies and reinforcing those hierarchies.
Speaker 1: That's like the definition of it. Yeah, that's the thing
Speaker 1: he loves most. It's like definitely definitionally, like that's what
Speaker 1: that's your right wing? Is it? Stuff like that. Whenever
Speaker 1: hear stuff like that, like prings me' is like, oh,
Speaker 1: you're you're just lying. Yeah, you're too You're too smart
Speaker 1: to not know that. That's ridiculous. Well, and we'll talk
Speaker 1: about it, because he he has a lot of vested
Speaker 1: interest in defining himself as someone who's in like the middle,
Speaker 1: even though he's again very right wing. And there's a
Speaker 1: reason he's doing that, classical liberal. I'm sure, Oh yes, yeah.
Speaker 1: So in two thousand and fourteen, Dr Peterson took his
Speaker 1: growing frustration with political correctness and finally applied his famous
Speaker 1: academic rigor to the issue. He carried out a study
Speaker 1: which he conducted with graduate student Christine Brophy, who we
Speaker 1: heard from a little earlier. Um and this study was
Speaker 1: initially about the relationship between political belief and personality. It turned, however,
Speaker 1: into a study of so called politically correct people. Peterson
Speaker 1: and Brophy developed a list of two hundred statements from
Speaker 1: safe spaces are necessary to promote diversity of perspective and
Speaker 1: feathered headdresses should be banned at music festivals to police
Speaker 1: brutality is racial in nature. Now they use these questions
Speaker 1: to develop a questionnaire they could use to quiz people
Speaker 1: about how much they agreed with each statement. They questioned
Speaker 1: two groups of people, eventually totally more respondents. According to
Speaker 1: Toronto Life, Peterson and Brophy can included that political correctness
Speaker 1: exists in two forms, which they call PC egalitarianism and
Speaker 1: PC authoritarianism. Simply put, PC egalitarians are classic liberals who
Speaker 1: advocate for more democratic governance and equality. PC authoritarians are
Speaker 1: According to Brophy, the ones now relabeled as social justice warriors,
Speaker 1: both share a high degree of compassion. Extreme compassion, they
Speaker 1: believe can lead to difficulty assessing right from wrong. It
Speaker 1: can also mean the forgiveness of all failures and transgressions
Speaker 1: by people viewed as vulnerable any personality trait to an
Speaker 1: extreme as pathological Prophy says. Now, I'm not a psychologist,
Speaker 1: but I do have some issues with some of the
Speaker 1: questions that they're listing here. For example, safe spaces are
Speaker 1: necessary to promote diversity of perspective. I don't know that
Speaker 1: I would agree to any particular level with that. I
Speaker 1: would say that if if people. What I would say is,
Speaker 1: if people feel like they need safe spaces in a
Speaker 1: school for whatever reason, I'm fine with them having that, uh,
Speaker 1: and and that if they find it valuable, sure, like
Speaker 1: why not? And I think most people are kind of
Speaker 1: in that. I don't think most people who don't have
Speaker 1: an issue with like the idea of a safe space
Speaker 1: on campus, would say they're necessary to promote diversity of perspective.
Speaker 1: They'd say, oh yeah, people need that. Why not, like
Speaker 1: it's putting the room in the campus. Yeah, let's have
Speaker 1: a Yeah, things like I feel safe talking about a
Speaker 1: thing and there doesn't seem to be any sort of
Speaker 1: room for that in in the quit Like it seems
Speaker 1: like the questionnaire is kind of designed to get people
Speaker 1: to respond in an authoritarian way, like feathered head dresses
Speaker 1: should be banned at music festivals? Should they be banned?
Speaker 1: I wouldn't say they should be banned. Is it fucked
Speaker 1: up for like like white kids to like wear Native
Speaker 1: American head dresses? Oh? Yeah, that's that's messed up. They
Speaker 1: shouldn't do that. Banned Yeah, music, Like I'm not gonna
Speaker 1: say that. Like the second thing will not Yeah, most
Speaker 1: will not be like oh yeah, banned them, banned them everywhere?
Speaker 1: That is that is written to elicit the kind of
Speaker 1: result that he wants. And like, I spend a lot
Speaker 1: of time reading, especially on Twitter, like indigenous folks talking
Speaker 1: about stuff like this and why they find it offensive,
Speaker 1: and all of them are saying like yeah, or like
Speaker 1: they tend to be saying like, don't do this, it's
Speaker 1: messed up. They're not saying it should be you should
Speaker 1: get kicked out of a music festival. We need to
Speaker 1: write at that and like that. Yeah, they're trying to explain,
Speaker 1: like why it's offensive, which is different from saying bandon
Speaker 1: at music festivals. Um, it's explaining these things and like
Speaker 1: why why why do people want to say space? Why
Speaker 1: do that? Why do is this? What is this not
Speaker 1: saying like we need to write laws to require them,
Speaker 1: or like we need to plan X or why. Um,
Speaker 1: it's also it's explained to people why this is messed up? Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: The quote about like the they have too much compassion
Speaker 1: and like are prone too much to forgiveness or something? Yes,
Speaker 1: well yeah, okay, that's a big WS were obsessed with
Speaker 1: canceling people. Yeah. Yeah, We'll talk a lot about Jordan B.
Speaker 1: Peterson and what he thinks about compassion and how it's
Speaker 1: bad and how that might relate to some things other
Speaker 1: groups of people have said in the past before doing
Speaker 1: very bad things that Jordan B. Peterson claims to know
Speaker 1: about and want to prevent. It's interesting relation between that hardness. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So the article goes on to note that, like most
Speaker 1: psychologists in his field, Dr Peterson believes there are five
Speaker 1: major personality traits extra version, agree bullness, openness, conscientiousness, and neuroticism.
Speaker 1: These traits are supposed to be universal across different cultures.
Speaker 1: All of this sounds problematic as hell and really dumb
Speaker 1: to me. I'm not a psychologist. I have trouble believing
Speaker 1: that that's true because that all seems like fucking nonsense,
Speaker 1: like that you can you can separate ship out like that, Like,
Speaker 1: but I don't know. I don't like this stuff anyway.
Speaker 1: So maybe I'm just an idiot. But I think that
Speaker 1: sounds dumb as hell. If that's something all psychologists believe,
Speaker 1: maybe psychology is kind of stupid. Yeah, maybe it's kind
Speaker 1: of dumb. Um that said, yeah, I find a lot
Speaker 1: of what's written about all this to be low key terrifying,
Speaker 1: like this quote from Toronto Life. These traits have both
Speaker 1: biological and cultural origins, and, as Peterson is fond of saying,
Speaker 1: the biological factors maximizing places like Scandinavia that have strenuously
Speaker 1: tried to flatten out the cultural differences. Biology is therefore,
Speaker 1: in a sense destiny. No matter how much people may
Speaker 1: want to deny it. Now, this is all a dressed
Speaker 1: And again I'm not saying this is what I saw
Speaker 1: a psychologists believe, because I don't think that's true. I
Speaker 1: think this is what George Peterson is. Yeah, I think
Speaker 1: he's a little outside the norm there. Yeah, this is
Speaker 1: what Bell Curve motherfucker's believe. Um. And it's all dressed
Speaker 1: up in pop psych terms and academic verbiage. But Peterson's
Speaker 1: right on the urge of arguing about biological essentialism. He
Speaker 1: is arguing that this is the same strain of thought
Speaker 1: that leads to like the Bell Curve ship, where you
Speaker 1: talk about how Black Eye Q was inherently lower and
Speaker 1: if you start talking about that ship, you wind up
Speaker 1: having the kind of questions about whole races that lead
Speaker 1: to real bad things going down. Yeah, he's got tons
Speaker 1: of stuff, Yeah, a lot of malling new kind of things.
Speaker 1: And that's that's the thing that I think he's never
Speaker 1: really addressed of, Like if he doesn't dive this and
Speaker 1: this and this and this, what's the next thing? What's
Speaker 1: the logical result to this way of thinking? He will
Speaker 1: always say like no, no, no, Like I think people
Speaker 1: are like I don't think there's any intelligence difference, and
Speaker 1: like men and women and stuff like that. But like
Speaker 1: then he will make arguments where like but this leads
Speaker 1: you to a conclusion that's kind of different from the
Speaker 1: thing that you're saying. Yeah, and like how to deal
Speaker 1: with there's a Uh one of the worst things I
Speaker 1: think he talks about. It's about i Q and how
Speaker 1: because the military doesn't let people in the military under
Speaker 1: a certain i Q that yea, that they cannot function
Speaker 1: in society. They cannot contribute to society because we don't
Speaker 1: let them in the military. Uh. And he said, so
Speaker 1: these two claims, he says, Therefore, that's the most horrifying
Speaker 1: thing I've ever heard. Um. He doesn't go further than that.
Speaker 1: He hasn't explained why. But he talks about how if
Speaker 1: we if they can't contribute to society citation needed. Uh,
Speaker 1: and we can't pay them like universal basic income thing
Speaker 1: like that doesn't work either again citation needed Therefore, and
Speaker 1: then trailing off, yeah, yeah, we need to gas them
Speaker 1: in trust, Like what do you do? What do you
Speaker 1: do with these people? Um, it's just like these like
Speaker 1: X is true, even though it's not why it is
Speaker 1: even though it's not. Therefore you figure out the Z
Speaker 1: for yourself. It's clear, as with everything that Jordan Peterson
Speaker 1: is wrong about that he has no real experience with
Speaker 1: people who have you know, what you would call like
Speaker 1: I cues lower than that threshold. Again, I worked in
Speaker 1: this field. I worked with particularly a number of kids
Speaker 1: with Down syndrome who would not have been able to
Speaker 1: join the military um, but also who were physically healthy
Speaker 1: and who were perfectly capable of doing like we would
Speaker 1: get them, would help them get jobs working in like
Speaker 1: like making sandwiches and stuff like that, and they could
Speaker 1: do things and they needed some help. They would live
Speaker 1: in like a semi independent assisted living sort of facility
Speaker 1: when they became adults, but they would do jobs, they
Speaker 1: would have friends, they would contribute to society. They're perfectly capable,
Speaker 1: Like there are there are a very small number of
Speaker 1: people who because of a mix of like physical and
Speaker 1: mental you know, like stuff like can't like need pretty
Speaker 1: much total help. Like I did work with some of
Speaker 1: those kids, but most of them. And part of the
Speaker 1: goal of like a good program helping those people is
Speaker 1: to find a way for them to be a part
Speaker 1: of society and be around and and live with and
Speaker 1: contribute with everyone else. And because there's no reason that
Speaker 1: they should. Yeah, exactly, use they can't join the enquirement
Speaker 1: on people of like either you contribute to society in
Speaker 1: the way that society has decided that you contribute to it,
Speaker 1: or you're out. Um is also ridiculous. It's also but
Speaker 1: also saying that people need to have a job to
Speaker 1: contribute to society. But also like like comparing people like
Speaker 1: you can't get into the military there for X and Y,
Speaker 1: you know, wasn't allowed in the military. The president of
Speaker 1: the United States we had Yeah, um, and I don't
Speaker 1: see Peterson talking about how if you have bones spurs
Speaker 1: and you can't you know, it's it's like everything he says,
Speaker 1: it's just like a wild, disgusting sort of approach to
Speaker 1: how humans are. Yeah, I don't. I don't like it
Speaker 1: now do Why So? In two thousands sixteen, Canada started
Speaker 1: to debate over a bil C sixteen that would expand
Speaker 1: the country's human rights law by adding gender identity and
Speaker 1: gender expression to the list of things employers in the
Speaker 1: government can't The scrim it against this would have meant
Speaker 1: that college professors like Dr Peterson would have had to
Speaker 1: refer to non binary and trans students by their preferred pronouns. Now,
Speaker 1: obviously this was just one aspect of the law, which
Speaker 1: would have also done stuff like, you know, help make
Speaker 1: it harder to deny trans people apartments are like exactly, yeah,
Speaker 1: all the things that you don't want people to be
Speaker 1: discriminated for us so they can live their lives. Yes,
Speaker 1: but to Dr Peterson, the thought that he might be
Speaker 1: forced to refer to someone by their chosen pronoun um,
Speaker 1: even if he didn't like that they'd chosen that pronoun
Speaker 1: that's all that mattered. That's all this law was in it.
Speaker 1: Jordan's started recording YouTube videos outlining his resistance to the law.
Speaker 1: He attracted a following, and eventually a very massive one.
Speaker 1: He started engaging in highly publicized debates which his followers
Speaker 1: tended to see his him crushing and destroying his ideological enemies.
Speaker 1: He argued that the bill was a serious infringement of
Speaker 1: freedom of speech, and soon reached an audience of millions
Speaker 1: of non Canadians. I'm not sure to what extent this
Speaker 1: was purposeful, but Peterson's stand came at a perfect moment,
Speaker 1: as the simmering culture war between right and left in
Speaker 1: the US started to reach a boil. Soon there were
Speaker 1: protests against Peterson. His supporters showed up to counter. There
Speaker 1: were fights and arrests in media coverage, and you know,
Speaker 1: we talked about George Lincoln Rockwell, like that's the best
Speaker 1: thing for these kinds of people is media coverage and
Speaker 1: fights and stuff. So the dean of the University of
Speaker 1: Toronto st Peterson a letter saying that his refusal to
Speaker 1: use people's pronouns revealed discriminatory intentions, which I would argue
Speaker 1: was accurate. The letter went on to warn him that
Speaker 1: the impact of your behavior runs the risk of undermining
Speaker 1: your ability to conduct essential components of your job as
Speaker 1: a faculty member. And like an educator, like like an educator,
Speaker 1: like you're educating people and someone's like, please my refer
Speaker 1: to me as she instead of he, And then he
Speaker 1: says he, that's like a hostile learning environment. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: you just being a dick. Which is not to say
Speaker 1: that kids shouldn't be challenged and like and and deal
Speaker 1: with ideas that are uncomfortable in school you want to,
Speaker 1: but it also it does mean that like one of
Speaker 1: the basic things you should expect from a college is
Speaker 1: that they're not going to be shitty to you personally
Speaker 1: for no good reason, because that's bad and you shouldn't
Speaker 1: do that to students. It's not kind of makes you
Speaker 1: not want to go to the lecture anymore, makes you
Speaker 1: not want to go to the lecture. It contributes to
Speaker 1: problems of suicidal nature. Like, it's just bad and it's
Speaker 1: not justified. And if you like, you don't have an
Speaker 1: inherent right to be a teacher. If you're going to
Speaker 1: be a teacher, we have the right to say you
Speaker 1: shouldn't do certain things like hit on your students, even
Speaker 1: if you're both adults, because it's a college colleges, Like
Speaker 1: you have the right as an adult, as a thirty
Speaker 1: five year old PhD. You have the right to date
Speaker 1: a nineteen year old absolutely legally, you have that right
Speaker 1: as a thirty five year old college professor. If you
Speaker 1: date a nineteen year old student, you will probably get
Speaker 1: in trouble because we've decided that makes for a bad
Speaker 1: learning environment. Makes sense, Yeah, yeah, I don't think he
Speaker 1: would be okay, I mean he's got other issues with that,
Speaker 1: but like that specific thing and keeping your door open
Speaker 1: when you have meetings with female students, and stuff. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but whatever, whatever, So Peterson ignored the dean. He took
Speaker 1: a sabbatical from work, and he started a Patreon where
Speaker 1: his his new followers could pledge monthly payments in exchange
Speaker 1: for Q and A sessions, online courses, and even monthly
Speaker 1: one on one counseling with a man himself. He was
Speaker 1: soon making like eighty grand a month, like crazy money
Speaker 1: on this, very very success, very good at Patreon now.
Speaker 1: All the while, Peterson continued to ram hard into particularly
Speaker 1: the issue of recognizing trans people's identities from Toronto Life
Speaker 1: to his mind, arguing that gender is a social construct
Speaker 1: or a kind of performance, as the Ontario Human Rights
Speaker 1: Code says, an individual subjective experience is just wrong. It's
Speaker 1: not an alternative hypothesis, Peterson says, it's an incorrect hypothesis.
Speaker 1: That's why the damn social justice warriors are trying to
Speaker 1: get it in stagiated into law. They're implementing a social
Speaker 1: constructions view of human identity into the law. No, they're
Speaker 1: just saying, if you're going to work in one of
Speaker 1: these public fields, you don't get to treat people shitty
Speaker 1: because their trans are non binary. It's a very basic thing.
Speaker 1: You don't even have to believe. You can believe that
Speaker 1: transgender people are unhealthy and mentally ill and still call
Speaker 1: them by their preferred pronouns because it doesn't matter what
Speaker 1: we think privately about each other. If you're going to
Speaker 1: work in a public thing like that, there's certain basic
Speaker 1: things you shouldn't do because it's just it's being a
Speaker 1: dick and it's fucking up the ability of you to
Speaker 1: do your job. Yeah, it's common it's common sense and
Speaker 1: common decency. It's if I if we're in a working environment,
Speaker 1: or like us, an educational environment and you're trying to
Speaker 1: teach me something or be my colleague and you're calling
Speaker 1: me butt shit and I'm like, actually, could you call
Speaker 1: me by my name? And you're like, no, your name
Speaker 1: is butch okay, Cody. Now you're bringing up a personal
Speaker 1: issue you and I have had at work, and I
Speaker 1: thought we talked with HR about this and my behavior
Speaker 1: was above approach. Well, HR didn't solve the problem, and
Speaker 1: we're here now so we can This is live and
Speaker 1: this is why I came on today to confront you
Speaker 1: about this. Fired. Well, I'm going to start a Patreon
Speaker 1: and I will contribute eighty dollars to that. Thank you, so,
Speaker 1: so we can talk about this one on one UM
Speaker 1: So C sixteen passed this Canadian antidiscrimination thing. It's now
Speaker 1: law in Canada, and things are fine. It hasn't destroyed.
Speaker 1: Freedom of speakings are fine. Name of person who's been
Speaker 1: like arrested for this. It's Canada's in broadly better shape
Speaker 1: than the United States. The problems they have aren't because
Speaker 1: of this law. Right again, like the penalty for like
Speaker 1: someone like a teacher using someone's pronouns, like refusing to
Speaker 1: use someone's pronouns as like a fine. Um, it's essentially
Speaker 1: a traffic in fraction. Is kind of how they treat
Speaker 1: it um. And obviously this has had Like the fact
Speaker 1: that everything's fine has had no impact on Jordan Peterson,
Speaker 1: who went right on yelling about trans people for their
Speaker 1: made up pronouns and has made that like made that
Speaker 1: a cornerstone of his career and is increasingly popular YouTube lectures.
Speaker 1: He urged his fans to treat trans and non binary
Speaker 1: people as confused or deluded. When one person, after a
Speaker 1: public lecture, acts him why he would not use non
Speaker 1: binary pronouns, he stated, I don't believe that using your
Speaker 1: pronouns will do you any good in the long run,
Speaker 1: which is not your decision to make. Jordan, Oh, my god,
Speaker 1: Jordan is not. I don't. I don't. I I have
Speaker 1: been an employer. I have hired people, some of them
Speaker 1: have been religious. I don't believe that going to church
Speaker 1: does you any good. But you know what, if I
Speaker 1: were to be discriminatory about them because they go to
Speaker 1: church and I don't care for church, I would rightfully
Speaker 1: get in trouble because that's fucked up and none of
Speaker 1: my goddamn business. Yeah, rightfully get in trouble for that.
Speaker 1: It's the same thing. It's all so uh, my opic. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but he won't want but he won't like change. It
Speaker 1: won't change his mind that any of these things don't
Speaker 1: add up, or that it hasn't like affected anybody. It's
Speaker 1: the same thing. When he was on that comedian confronted
Speaker 1: him about like the gay wedding cake bakery issue, and
Speaker 1: he compared it to the civil rights movement, and then
Speaker 1: Jordan Peterson on camer was like, oh, I guess maybe
Speaker 1: I was wrong about that, Um, And he sort of
Speaker 1: like realized how fool like foolish he was being. Um.
Speaker 1: And then never we ever heard from it again, never
Speaker 1: heard of it again. He did not actually change his
Speaker 1: mind or approach at all. No, he just got realized
Speaker 1: that he couldn't actually make a good argument against it,
Speaker 1: so he continued to repeat it when he was not
Speaker 1: arguing and was instead lecturing to a room of people
Speaker 1: who would never question him. Yep ye. In the follow
Speaker 1: up questions during that same lecture, another student asked if
Speaker 1: without C. Sixteen, he'd be willing to use pronouns like
Speaker 1: they and them if a transgender person asked him to.
Speaker 1: He responded that it might depend on how they asked,
Speaker 1: which is like the same thing Ben Shapiro says, right, like,
Speaker 1: because actually, if you're a person, you just generally choose
Speaker 1: not to be shitty to the people immediately around you
Speaker 1: because it makes life harder for no good goddamn reason. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's frustrating, real, real simple and frustrating. Yeah, it depends
Speaker 1: on how they asked. God, what a unbelievable I can't
Speaker 1: even say yeah, I can't even can't even just confirm
Speaker 1: like yeah, of course, because I'm a decent person. It's
Speaker 1: extra frustrating because in a in a bunch of his writing,
Speaker 1: Peterson does talk about the fact that cultures obe evolve
Speaker 1: and change over time. He's written about this at length,
Speaker 1: and he's also admitted that cultural understanding of gender and
Speaker 1: like pronoun usage might change, and that that would be okay.
Speaker 1: During one of his two thousand sixty debates, Peterson admitted,
Speaker 1: if our society comes to some sort of consensus over
Speaker 1: the next while about how we'll solve the pronoun problem,
Speaker 1: and that becomes part of popular parlance, and it seems
Speaker 1: to solve the problem properly without sacrificing the distinction between
Speaker 1: singular and plural, and without requiring me to memorize an
Speaker 1: impossible list of an indefinite number of pronouns that I
Speaker 1: would be willing to reconsider my position. And again, part
Speaker 1: of this is, like he like, there's always this. There
Speaker 1: are some people who have like suggested what I think
Speaker 1: are probably kind of linguistically non kind of dead ends,
Speaker 1: like Z, which is like I don't think you're gonna
Speaker 1: get love, but like they in them number one already
Speaker 1: perfectly acceptable to use either a singular and plural or whatever,
Speaker 1: and like there's not there's just not an indefinite, interminably
Speaker 1: long list of pronouns that like people are really or
Speaker 1: like they're just saying, like, yeah, don't don't call me,
Speaker 1: Like if I say, don't call me this, like try
Speaker 1: to remember to call me the thing that that that
Speaker 1: I identify with. Like, and it's also not even like
Speaker 1: people always assume like if you if you say something
Speaker 1: accidentally or like you don't know, like that's that's it.
Speaker 1: That's the one that's gonna get it, like, well know,
Speaker 1: then you'll be corrected and then you like alter your
Speaker 1: behavior slately. Yeah, and it it doesn't even matter if
Speaker 1: you really get it, because I like to be entirely honest,
Speaker 1: Like I've read a lot of stuff about gender nonconforming
Speaker 1: stuff that I haven't understood, But all that matters is
Speaker 1: that when someone says, hey, this is how I prefer
Speaker 1: to be like that, Okay, fine, yeah, absolutely, Like yeah,
Speaker 1: just don't easy easy yeah yeah, yeah, it's it's so easy. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's very very simple. Really. So yeah. Peterson's real issue
Speaker 1: here is that in his mind, being trans or non
Speaker 1: binary or anything that's not like male female, any of
Speaker 1: this stuff is unhealthy. In his conception of the world,
Speaker 1: order is masculine, and chaos is feminine and if it
Speaker 1: turns out that a whole bunch of people aren't really either,
Speaker 1: then the cosmology of his mental universe might have to change,
Speaker 1: and Jordan Peterson is not willing to do that now.
Speaker 1: The thing I find most worrying about him, and most
Speaker 1: potentially dangerous, is this obsession with whether or not other
Speaker 1: people are healthy. This is really the big issue with
Speaker 1: Jordan Peterson um It consumes him, and it leads him
Speaker 1: to attack people who make choices that don't fit his
Speaker 1: definition of healthy. A great example of this in action
Speaker 1: would be Peterson's reaction to the rise of in cell
Speaker 1: related terrorist attacks. In two thousand eighteen, and in voluntary
Speaker 1: celibate man named Alec Menascian rented a van and drove
Speaker 1: it into a crowded sidewalk. He killed ten people and
Speaker 1: wounded fourteen more, and I think most of his victims
Speaker 1: were women, which was his goal. In a Facebook post
Speaker 1: he made prior to his shooting, Manasseian wrote private recruit
Speaker 1: Menassey in infantry zero zero zero one zero, wishing to
Speaker 1: speak to Sergeant four chand please, the Insell rebellion has
Speaker 1: already begun. We will overthrow all the Chads and Stacy's
Speaker 1: all hail the supreme gentleman Elliott Roger, and he killed
Speaker 1: a bunch of people. Now this is interesting to me
Speaker 1: because I I am actually, like, like a recognized expert
Speaker 1: in online radicals. I make money from it, like it
Speaker 1: quoted by fucking like a lot like this is the
Speaker 1: thing that I study like it's the only thing that
Speaker 1: I actually have any degree of meaningful expertise and other
Speaker 1: than certain narcotics um and to me, as a guy
Speaker 1: who studies this for a living, Menascians, post make us
Speaker 1: a few things very clear. One of them is that
Speaker 1: he was radicalized in a community of similarly inclined people
Speaker 1: somewhere on four chance his radicalization occurred as part of
Speaker 1: a community that was self radicalizing. Two he was directly
Speaker 1: inspired by the example of another involuntary celibate terrorist, Elliott Roger,
Speaker 1: who was like the first one of them to shoot
Speaker 1: a bunch of people. And three he sees his actions
Speaker 1: as something akin to military service and defense of a cause. Right,
Speaker 1: those things are very clear from that post, which tells
Speaker 1: you a lot about this man and how he became
Speaker 1: radicalized towards violence. A very useful piece of data if
Speaker 1: you actually care about what causes people to carry out
Speaker 1: attacks like this. Jordan Peterson doesn't know much about radical
Speaker 1: or at least he doesn't admit to knowing much about it,
Speaker 1: because he's never published anything relevant on in cells or
Speaker 1: on terrorism in general. But when he was asked about this,
Speaker 1: he still felt the need to propose sweeping government mandated
Speaker 1: changes in civilization in order to stop to such attacks, which,
Speaker 1: given his attitudes towards other government mandated things, I find interesting.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna quote from the New York Times here violent
Speaker 1: attacks or what happened when men do not have partners?
Speaker 1: Mr Peterson says, in society needs to work to make
Speaker 1: sure those men are married. He was angry at God
Speaker 1: because women were rejecting him. Mr Peterson says, of the
Speaker 1: Toronto killer, the cure for that has enforced monogamy. That's
Speaker 1: actually why monogamy emerges. Mr Peterson does not pause when
Speaker 1: he says this enforced monogamy is to him, simply a
Speaker 1: rational solution. Otherwise women will only go for the most
Speaker 1: high status men, he explains, and that couldn't make either
Speaker 1: gender happy. In the end. Half the men fail, he says,
Speaker 1: meaning they don't procreate and no one cares about the
Speaker 1: men who fail. I laugh because it is absurd. This
Speaker 1: is the New York Torms Times reporter. You're laughing about them,
Speaker 1: he says, giving me a disappointed look. That's because you're female.
Speaker 1: But aside from interventions that would redistribute sex, Mr Peterson
Speaker 1: is staunchly against what he calls equality of outcomes or
Speaker 1: efforts to equalize society. He usually calls them pathological. They're evil.
Speaker 1: He agrees that this is inconsistent for preventing hordes of
Speaker 1: single men from violence. He believes necessary for the stability
Speaker 1: of society. Enforced monogamy helps neutralize that. M a lot
Speaker 1: of a lot. There's a lot there, didn't He walked
Speaker 1: this back and was like, why didn't mean like literally
Speaker 1: a law. I just mean like culturally we should like
Speaker 1: generally like support monogamy and like like but again, even
Speaker 1: that is like, yeah, you're saying that society should change,
Speaker 1: whether or not it's by a law or just by
Speaker 1: culturally we support this and our vocal about it or
Speaker 1: do like campaigns or propaganda about it or whatever it is. Uh, yeah,
Speaker 1: I know what's wild, Cody. I spent I don't have
Speaker 1: any kids, and I spent a decent chunk of my
Speaker 1: my early adulthood single, I also had access to firearms
Speaker 1: and I didn't shoot anybody. You know why, because that's
Speaker 1: bad to do that. And you know what, I have
Speaker 1: a lot of friends who were men and not dating
Speaker 1: women and not don't have kids, and you know what
Speaker 1: they don't do is murder a bunch of people people
Speaker 1: because it's bad to murder people. Yeah, it's bad because
Speaker 1: it's wrong. Um, that's all you need. It's very it's
Speaker 1: very easy, yeah, yeah, to not commit mass murder. And like,
Speaker 1: if people are committing mass murder, but people who are
Speaker 1: you know, single and and don't have kids don't commit
Speaker 1: mass murder, maybe the thing that's causing the mass murder
Speaker 1: isn't the fact that they're single. Butt instead other factors
Speaker 1: like radicalization within communities that are inherently toxic and push
Speaker 1: people towards violence, and are perhaps artificially accelerated and um
Speaker 1: and and publicized by certain like algorithmic realities that cause Yeah,
Speaker 1: maybe maybe the issue is more in the thing that
Speaker 1: this person does and everyone else who is single doesn't do,
Speaker 1: and this person and other people who are in these
Speaker 1: same communities carry out terrorist attacks and other people who
Speaker 1: aren't dating anybody, don't carry out terrorist acts. Maybe we
Speaker 1: should care about this community that they're in. Maybe the
Speaker 1: community is the problem. Maybe it's the environment that they
Speaker 1: keep going back to, um like a feedback loop. Also
Speaker 1: like yeah, his his approach to it is So it's
Speaker 1: bizarre too, because it's like, no, you're you're just do
Speaker 1: the clean your room advice. Yeah, like that's the that's
Speaker 1: the advice. Like well, yeah, like guys would like work
Speaker 1: on themselves and like be socialized and like uh, you know,
Speaker 1: get get a new skill, become desirable and these sort
Speaker 1: of things instead of wallowing in it and these like
Speaker 1: sad online extreme groups. It's there's a lot that's fucked
Speaker 1: up about it, like and it's just the worst part
Speaker 1: of it is this idea that personal responsibility matters to
Speaker 1: these people up until people have a problem with something
Speaker 1: like that that they also find weird, and then it
Speaker 1: doesn't matter that like you're supposed to people are supposed
Speaker 1: to be free and personal responsibility is supposed to matter.
Speaker 1: Like let's ban this thing that I personally think is
Speaker 1: kind of weird. Um, like fuck you people, Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: that's where I land. Um Yeah, no, no, authoritarian unless
Speaker 1: unless chaos is creeping in my idea of whatever chaos
Speaker 1: might be. Yeah, yeah, chaos is stuff I don't like
Speaker 1: in order is stuff that I already like. So I
Speaker 1: don't need to change at all. The world needs to
Speaker 1: change in order for me to be happy, which is
Speaker 1: the thing that Jordan's says is the cause of all
Speaker 1: evil in the world. But he doesn't recognize that he does.
Speaker 1: It's wild, yeah, because like he's like, well, yeah, don't
Speaker 1: don't try to change the world unless you've like perfected
Speaker 1: yourself and fixed up your own stuff. He's a mess,
Speaker 1: so like what is maybe he should stop doing it
Speaker 1: too if he really like, if you go through his
Speaker 1: twelve rules for life, he does not follow a single
Speaker 1: one of them. No new Okay, so that's the episode. Cody,
Speaker 1: you want to tell people where they can find you
Speaker 1: on the internet dot com where there's part two Internet
Speaker 1: Part two. Yeah, there will be a second part of
Speaker 1: this good talking so much more to say. I've been
Speaker 1: saving it. Yeah, my name is Cody and you can
Speaker 1: find me online on Twitter Dr Mr Cody, who's the
Speaker 1: google him on the accounts. I've got a show called
Speaker 1: some More News on YouTube. We've got a Patreon if
Speaker 1: you let's support us in a podcast called even More News.
Speaker 1: I do another podcast called Worst Year Ever with the
Speaker 1: host of this show and my co host of the
Speaker 1: other shown Cody's Patreon. It'll be great. Treon m episodes
Speaker 1: over Swish