Part One: The Jordan Peterson Episode

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
M PAD casts. I'm Robert Evans. This is Behind the Bastards.
It's a podcast about bad people, the worst in the world.
In fact, you might say, as I say every week
when I opened this show, I'm Robert Evans. Did I
already say that? Probably, but there's no way to tell

(00:21):
because I can't go back and listen to the audio
I'm recording. It's being beamed live directly into your ears.
And my guest for this live audio experience that is
absolutely authentically live is Cody Johnstone. Hello there, thank you
for having me on this live podcast. M H. Now, Cody,
you know that we're live, which means we're not going

(00:43):
to be able to edit out any of your racist
rants against the Swiss. Okay, I mean that's why I
say them. I don't, I don't. I don't rant about
that so people cannot hear it. We have been protecting
Cody from getting Swiss canceled for years, but today we're
doing a live episode and bring it on. Bring it
on like the Swiss spring one just missed me with

(01:06):
the Swiss. Let me tell you. Okay, So, Cody, we
got a fun episode this week in a special episode
that I brought you on for because I know that
you're a huge fan of the guy we're going to
be talking about this week. Doctor fans doctor. He's a doctor,
Jordan's B. Peterson. I love Jordan Peterson, who's a doctor.

(01:32):
I respect. Um. I am very happy that you're doing
this episode and that I get to partake in it. Um.
He's a He's one of my heroes. So yeah, you
love him. I love him. Uh. Watched a lot of
his speeches lectures. I guess you'd call him sermons. One

(01:53):
might call him. He might call them sermons. He might
call them sermons. We'll talk about that. Uh yeah, yeah,
I mean so you know, you know I joke about
starting a cult a lot on this show. Yeah, I do.
I do. And there's jokes, the jokes to join your cult,

(02:14):
they're not entirely jokes because I will probably start a
cult one It's kind of my retirement plan because I
don't really think four O one ks are going to
be useful that far into the future. But having a cult,
you know, you always make money what I call yeah,
absolutely cash in on people. And that's why we're talking
about Jordan B. Peterson today, because he's not a cult
leader in the traditional sense, um, but he did create

(02:36):
a cult. Like it's a weird situation because he never
like had a bunch of people move on to land
and wound fight you know, federal law enforcement agencies. I
guess in Canada that would be the mount he's But
he still does have a cult, and they, if you like,
go to their little spaces on Reddit and stuff, like,
they are still they are completely devoted to this man
and his ideas, even though spoilers his life has got
completely I was gonna say, like, I didn't realize that

(03:00):
they was still going that strong, Like I don't because
because he disappeared, because because things are crumbling for him,
because his life has been shattered by his own Yes, yes, yeah,
but but yeah, I thought I might assume that there
there would be people that's still doing that, but I haven't.
I haven't delved into the spaces in a while. Yeah,
So good for them, Good for them. Yeah, Yeah, it's fun,

(03:22):
It's very fun. So we're gonna we're gonna talk about
Jordan B. Peterson, um, and we're going to talk about fascism.
Because while I'm not sure if I would call Dr
Jordan B. Peterson a fascist, I would say he's one
of the most insidious platformers of a specific strain of
ideology that feeds into the fascist movement in the United
States worldwide. It's fun. I would agree with that. I

(03:44):
I actually might go a little farther than you. Um
and yeah to label him. Um yeah. I feel like
we might just we might just give the whole story
and then people can apply their own labels to Jordan's
Alhazara Peterson. Before we talk about Dr Jordan B. Peterson,
I'd like to talk about the Bolshevik evolution. Now, this
is a topic that that Dr Jordan B. Peterson is
particularly obsessed with. Multiple interviewers will note that his house

(04:07):
is absolutely filled with Soviet propaganda, much of it from
like the early eras of that regime, and when questioned
about it, he'll generally explain it as a sort of
know your enemy deal, like you know, you've gotta I
want to understand Marxists, and then he'll say something like
Marxism is resurgent in a haunted voice, which he said
to a journalist from the New York Times, I think

(04:28):
it was. He says it a lot. Yeah, Marxist. Yeah,
imagine kermit. Uh if you if you took the brain
of Joe McCarthy and shoved it into Kermit the frog.
That's more or less Dr Jordan B. Peterson. So back
in the late nineteen teens and twenties, there were a
lot of people who had the same concerns about Marxism
all across Western Europe. And this was a somewhat more

(04:50):
reasonable fear then, because Marxism was certainly resurgeon or at
least surging in that period. Um and Fascists in particular
were terribly paranoid about it. Were the only ones. Obviously
a lot of reasons to be concerned about the Soviet state,
but there was some, shall we say, unreasonable paranoia about
everything from the left, from folks who were, you know,

(05:12):
proto Nazis. Now a term began to percolate among these
people called in the term was Judeo Bolshevism, and this
was kind of the word for a conspiracy that Communism
was being spread around the world by Jewish people. They
were often compared to like a virus for communism that
introduces it into the blood stream of a healthy society.

(05:32):
Um and that was kind of the strain of thought
that led to the Holocaust. At least one of them.
You know, a lot of stuff like the Holocaust. Yeah,
but that was a big part of it. Um. Now,
it is true that a number of like the first
Bolsheviks were Jewish, the guys who carried out, you know,
the big nineteen seventeen revolution in Russia. Um, but there
were also a lot of people who are not at
all Jewish who are involved in making the Soviet Union
be a thing, including Joseph Stalin. And also if you

(05:57):
actually look at the particularly the early history of the
Soviet Union, not a great place to be Jewish, Like
some real bad things happened to Jewish folks then so um,
of course Czaris Russia also a terrible place to be Jewish,
I would say that, yeah, anyway, I mean historically many many,
many places. Yeah, basically everywhere actually, Like but if you

(06:18):
want to like people sometimes overstate how bad the USSR
was for Jewish people, to make it look like it
was like a specific thing with communism, whereas like the
reality is is under the czar and like the late
eighteen hundreds you had the Chelnitski massacre, who was the
largest massacre of Jewish people probably in history until the Holocaust. Anyway,
fun the czar. So yeah, this conspiracy basically claimed that

(06:41):
all Jewish people everywhere were engaged in a covert plan
to destroy Christianity and Western civilization by bringing communism, and
like communism is an atheistic thing, like there's no not
supposed to be any religion under especially like the kind
of communism was being pushed in this period, and so
the idea was, like, this is the Jews trying to
kill Christianity communist. Yeah, I loved everybody loves saying that

(07:05):
the Jews are trying to destroy Christianity. Yea. As a rule,
if you're saying the Jews and anything follows after that,
maybe yeah, yeah, maybe that's probably not yeah yeah. As
the Nazi movement picked up steam, Nazi writers and media
critics gained popularity in German culture, and they really like
they were kind of enraged by this. You know. Weimar Germany,

(07:25):
as we've talked about, was a super progressive place, a
lot of like like unprecedented gains for LGBT people, um,
kind of some of the first recognition of folks who
were like non binary, and also just like a crazy
amount of art and of course a decent amount of
that art was pornographic because like people, people be having fun. Uh,
I mean, do you mean you mean degenerate Robert you
mean art? Yeah, that's what these Nazi critics would have said.

(07:49):
And and they went further. They claimed that like all
of this art, a lot of which was you know,
queer in orientation, was somehow tied to communism and it
was part of a plot to weaken German culture to
allow a left wing takeover. If this seems familiar, it's
because you can hear the exact same thing if you
turn on like a third of YouTube. Oh yeah, So

(08:10):
the term cultural Bolshevism overtook judaeo Bolshevism in this period,
and it was kind of like the more educated, less
bigoted persons like cultural Bolshevism. They're trying to they're trying
to Bolshevize our nation by going through the arts and
stuff and like taking over kids minds with their evil
books and their dirty pictures and stuff like that. Just
because sorry, it's just like it's just art. Like what

(08:33):
do you like? What do you think art is? It's
like I don't know, whatever, It's fine. I mean I
know that when I saw Guernica, I suddenly was like, oh,
health care, everyone should have that. I mean, other things
went through my mind when I yeah. So the rest

(08:53):
is kind of unfortunately history. The Nazis were able to
convince enough people that this was happening, that cultural Bolshevist
was a thing, uh, and they won open elections, and
then they destroyed democracy and then you know, Holocaust and such.
Not a not a good story, but a well known
one at this point. So keep all of that in
mind as we start our tale of Dr Jordan Balthazar Peterson.

(09:16):
And I must be honest with you, we both enjoy
calling him Jordan Balthasar Peterson, but that's not his middle name.
His middle name is Burnt. It's Bumblebee. Oh sorry, Burnt
b E r in t, which is not a name
I think I've seen before. He was born on June twelfth,
nineteen sixty two, in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada's Texas Uh. He
grew up in a small town called Fairview, which was

(09:37):
about five hours out from the city. His dad was
a teacher in a vice principle. His mother, Beverley, was
a librarian at a nearby college. Jordan was the oldest
of three kids, and if he can be believed he
started reading at age three. Um, and he was like
a big, big book nerd, which I do believe. He's
very clearly has spent a lot of time reading books
and not so much time interacting with human beings. Uh. Yeah,

(10:01):
I know. He's he's a he's a reader. He's a reader.
That one So one of his earliest memories was watching
the enormous state funeral for Bobby Kennedy, and he recalls
that he thought, I'll have a funeral like that one day.
Oh my goodness, I that is I mean, everything I
know about him and what he said as a young

(10:22):
man that I didn't catch that that Oh yeah, that's
That's a great reaction to have to the death of
someone else in the trauma of a neighboring country. It's like,
one of these days, I'm gonna be dead like that. People.
People will think that's cool. I'm that cool like Kennedy.
That's pretty Uh, that's pretty telling. Wouldn't it be wild

(10:45):
if Jordan B. Peterson got into politics and was then
also assassinated by Sir Hans sir Han in California that
one day is still alive. Maybe, So Jordan B. Peterson
was raised Protestant, and as a young child he was
sent to confirmation class, which is a weird ritual that
some Christians who I did it when I was a

(11:05):
kid and Christian, where you like study the Bible with
an overly enthusiastic youth group leader who tells you that
Gandhi is probably in Hell, and then you pass a
test and you get baptized by the priest in a
big ceremony thing. Uh. And like most young people who
have such an experience and our our readers, Jordan was
left with questions. He pressed his teacher about the literal
truth of biblical creation stories. Now I'm not sure exactly

(11:26):
what argument this guy made in response. I haven't found
it written down anywhere, but Peterson found it unconvincing, and
he suspected the teacher didn't really believe the argument himself.
And I'm gonna quote now from a write up in
The New Yorker. In Maps of Meaning, which is his
first book, we'll talk about it later, he remembered his
reaction religion was for the ignorant, weak, and superstitious. He wrote,
I stopped attending church and joined the modern world. He

(11:47):
turned first to socialism and then to political science, seeking
an explanation for the general social and political insanity and
evil of the world, in each time finding himself unsatisfied. Now,
a lot of smart pretty much any intelligent person and
most people, Yeah, pretty much any person is going to
like at some point be like, oh boy, ship's fucked up,

(12:07):
and you gotta like you gotta like try to puzzle
that out for yourself. Way you figure out, like, yeah, um,
there's something about like I'm going to solve the mysteries
of the universe. Yeah, is a bit uh more intense
with Mr Peterson, Yeah, he has to. He's he's a
very intense person and the way that he frames things

(12:28):
is always intense. That will become very obvious as we
go along. So he says that he was a socialist,
and yeah, maybe like his time as a socialist was like,
so he had this librarian when he was in school
who was the mother of the seventeenth Premier of Alberta,
Rachel not Ley um and not Lee was a member
of the New Democratic Party, and Peterson did spend his
teenage years volunteering for the NDP, which is like a

(12:49):
social democratic party. Um, so a socialist in that sense,
like he was not like a radical communist or anything.
He was like kind of like a probably Bernie Sanders
ish saying stuff and like yeah, well, um now he
was during this period of voracious leader, spurred on it
first by the work of George Orwell, but he eventually
moved on to Alexander uh Sola Nitzen. Um, I'm always

(13:13):
pronounced it wrong. I'm sure an iron rand, which I
always pronounced right. And according to a profile in Toronto
Life quote, while he admired leaders like Ed Broadbent, who
was an m DP leader, he became disillusioned by the
party's peevish functionaries. He found Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pierre,
which he read as an undergrad at Grand Prairie Enlightening.

(13:33):
Or Well did a political psychological analysis of the motivations
of the intellectual, tweed wearing middle class socialist and concluded
that people like that didn't like the poor, They just
hated the rich. I thought, ah ha, that's it. It's resentment.
Anyone who set out to change the world by first
changing other people was suspicious. Ah is that why we'd

(13:56):
like to change the world and make it better for everybody?
Because we're resented? Full is that why. Yeah. I mean
there's a number of things going on there. One of
them is understandable, which is that like he got involved
with a an actual, like established political party and it
was full of assholes, which every political party is, because
political parties are disillusioned with any of that stuff by yourself.

(14:19):
And I think he's probably right that a lot of
these kind of like intellectual, professional left wing politicos didn't
like the poor and didn't spend any time around them.
They just hated rich people, and like, yeah, that of course, yes,
like um obviously, um. Where he gets wrong is like
number one, the idea that socialism is changing the world
by first changing other people. I think there's some assholes

(14:39):
who say that, but I think most of us would say, like, no, no, no,
people are fine. It's these systems that are incredibly corrupt
and fucked up and unjust that need to be changed.
And then like people can actually live their lives and
and be decent um without these horrible systems crushing them.
That's how I would go. It's like the yeah, yeah, yeah.

(15:04):
And it's always fascinating to me when reactionaries like Peterson
Professor love for orwell because they inevitably misinterpret him. And
I just like they don't know what Orwell was saying. Um,
which is odd because Orwell is a pretty clear writer.
But it happens a lot with him. Um. Orwell was
not critiquing socialism itself as much as he was criticizing
the kind of intellectual lefty academic politico types who spent

(15:26):
all their time arguing over theory and never actually do anything.
Or was a committed socialist his entire life, and he
was profoundly working class. You read any of his work, like,
not just his like like ship like um, he talks
about stuff like that a lot in um uh homage
to Catalonia, but like also like a lot of his
essays and book reviews, like he wrote a bunch of
reviews of Charles Dickens that are fascinating even if you

(15:47):
don't like Dickens. There's a good collection of essays called
them all art is Propaganda. Um. And it's just very
obvious that he cared deeply and profoundly and understood like
working class poor people. Um. Just this this the idea
that Yeah, I don't know, it's frustrating how people think
about or Well sometimes or Well, the guy who during
the nineteen twenties said well, if everyone kills one fascist,

(16:11):
soon this problem will be over, and then traveled to
Spain to kill fascists to do that, to exactly that. Yeah, yeah,
and then got shot in the throat after killing some fascists. Anyway,
I like Orwell, um, not a perfect guy, but really
good to read and then misinterpret and then uses an
argument for things that are well didn't believe exactly. Yeah,

(16:31):
that's the game. That's the that's the game with Georgie.
Never write anything, just don't write anything down. Yeah, don't
write things, don't talk to people, live in a hut
with a rifle and a large dog, and shoot anyone
who approaches you. Stare at your door for the rest
of your life. That's the culture I want. Um. So
Jordan's early life occurred during kind of the high point

(16:53):
of Cold War mania. You know, he was born in
like sixty two obviously, so he's like living through the
worst parts of the Cold War. And I think a
lot of people who are like our age may not
know this. Like, the eighties had some pretty fucking hardcore
Cold War paranoia. Like that's why Red Dawn was the
movie that it was Um, yeah, so Jordan's earliest memories
would have included footage from Vietnam and like constant anxiety

(17:15):
over nuclear apocalypse. Um, he's not all that much younger
than my dad, And like my dad grew up I know,
with a lot of he's talked about it, like a
lot of like really realistic fear as a child. But
the world was going to suddenly end in nuclear hell fire. Um,
And like I talked about this a lot, but it
really messed the whole generation up pretty bad. Um in
an understandable way. So the threat of total war only

(17:37):
seemed to grow more real as Jordan grew older. He
was plagued by nightmares of nuclear hell fire for a
year and a half. He says, like, just yea horrible
night dreams. He's gotta gott a dream problem, which again
you can't at this point perfectly reasonable, Like if you
grew up hearing that should, of course and have nightmares
about nuclear health fire. Like obviously, sometimes if you're there's

(18:01):
existential threat constantly, then you're going to have it on
your mind pretty constantly. Yeah, it's a kind of PTSD
to be honest. Um. In Toronto Life cryptically writes the
Jordan quote became depressed and confused about the world's and
his own capacity for evil, which is interesting. That's interesting.
Uh So I wanted to pop in here, so just

(18:23):
for more context as we can keep going. Um. And
his comment about that funeral and how he's going to
have that funeral one day. Um. When he was I
believe fourteen years old. Um, he ran he was like
into politics and he ran um for uh like election. Um.
And I didn't run across this one. This is why

(18:45):
you're the guest. Uh. Aged fourteen, he became within thirteen
votes of being elected vice president of the n DP,
their sort of organization there. Um. And the quote for
the piece is I won't be happy until an elected
prime minister. Oh good, okay, well there you go. Fine
things to say when you're fourteen years old. I mean,

(19:05):
nothing to worry about there. I grew up not all
that differently from Jordan Peterson in a different era, but
like super bookish, super nerdy. Um. I guess I was
kind of raised conservative and he like trumped into it.
But like I had those same like dreams of getting
into politics and they're the dreams of an unhealthy young person.
And as I got older, I realized that it was

(19:27):
much better to just do tons of drugs and hang
out on mountains with my friends. Uh, and that that's
a way healthier thing than getting just like the pressure
of like I won't be happy until I'm so powerful. Yeah,
the idea that like there, I can't be happy unless
I'm the prime minister. I have to be the top
boy in the country otherwise. Yeah, it's pretty much. And

(19:49):
like any anyone that like seeks like I want to
be the president that kind of thing later on in life,
like that's you gotta be a certain kind of fund
up to think that you have the ability and like
that you should be that that. Yeah, it's a reasonable
thing as a kid to be like I'm going to
be the president one day. And then as you grow
older and understand what that means, I think reasonable people
come to the conclusion of, like, no, no, no, we

(20:10):
need to you know, Bernie Sanders, it's a man. Um
you know, you all know the joke at home. I'm
not gonna say we all know what he did. We
all know what he did, so um. Yeah. As he
grew into a young man, Peterson also grew into a
young man that is to say he developed an appreciation

(20:32):
for Carl Young. That was good, right right? Yeah, Uh,
it's really a laugh a minute this week. Yeah. So
Young is uh the inventor of the term collective unconsciousness,
or at least the concept basically. I think he sometimes
called it. I don't know, I'm not a great young expert.
Suck it. Uh. So Peterson also started but he like Young,

(20:55):
he has Okay, so Young, there's a couple of big
things abou him. One of them is this idea that
there's this sort of collective kind of like a racial
memory um which yes, does feed into some of the
things the Nazis we're talking about, and so did Young.
We'll talk about that in a bit. And also these
ideas that there's like these archetypes in human civilization, like
this like inherent power of myth that humans are bound by,
and there's like something almost kind of supernaturally powerful about

(21:19):
certain like mythal archetypes, the hero and all this kind
of stuff. Like Young talks about some ship like that.
He's a complicated guy. Um So Peterson big fan of Young.
He also starts devouring Nietzsche uh and a Romanian scholar
named Mercea Eliad she's a scholar of religion. Um. And
he also starts to devouring the work of an American

(21:40):
professor called Joseph Campbell, whose popular book on the hero
myth and society had a profound cultural impact and one
that's not dis similar to Peterson's own work. So his
like Hero with the Thousand Faces, I think is the book, um,
kind of winds up inspiring every single Disney movie that's
ever been made in your lifetime. U. Yeah, because like
it's Star Wars beat for beat, it's Star Wars beat

(22:01):
for Beat, It's it's Dan Dan Harmon's story circle. And
it's like there's a lot of there's obviously a lot
that Campbell got right, because he's correct about things that
resonate with people. There's a reason that all these very
successful stories. Yeah, and the archives are common. I think
the real thing that resonates with people is like just
the arc of that basic story. You one of the
things are a different thing. You try to get the

(22:23):
thing you wanting you actually need, and you sacrifice a thing,
you change and so on and so forth. Um. Yeah, yeah,
and and and Joseph Campbell, it's an important work of scholarship.
Campbell is also problematic as funk, which we'll talk about
in a little bit. So these are like the people
who Peterson starts to devour and like they start to
influence his mind. Like this is like what creates the

(22:44):
mentality the mind that Jordan Peterson has as an adult. Now,
when we talk about the writers and philosophers who started
to form like the core of his growing ideological development,
we would be remiss if we didn't discuss at some
length what kind of things those writers wound up supporting
and believing themselves, because I don't think a lot of
people know this. Yeah. Now, thankfully a writer named Pankaj

(23:06):
Mishra did that for us in a two thousand eighteen
article for The New York Review of Books titled Jordan
Peterson and Fascist Mysticism. Now, Pankaj makes a note of
some of the things we've talked about in other episodes
of this show, how the rise of fascism in Europe
happened alongside the rise of esoteric spiritual movements like theosophy
and anthroposophy, which we did an episode of, and like
a weird fascination with Asian mysticism, which is kind of

(23:28):
like why the Nazis sent expeditions out to the Himalayas
and stuff which a lot of people don't know about that.
You can read about that on an air bay on
your own time, or maybe we'll do an episode about it.
It's wacky shit. Um I'm gonna quote from that Pankaj
Mishra article quote a range of intellectual entrepreneurs, from theosophists
and venders of Asian spirituality like Vivi Kannada and DZ
Suzuki too, scholars of Asia like Arthur Whaley, and fascist

(23:51):
idealogues like Julius A. Vola, who is Steve Bannon's favorite philosopher,
set up stalls in the new marketplace of ideas. W. B.
Yates Um adjusting Indian plosophy to the needs of the
Celtic revival pontificated on the ancient self. Young spun his
own variations on this evidently ancestral unconscious. Such conceptually foggy
categories as spirit and intuition acquired broad currency. Peterson's favorite

(24:13):
words being in chaos, started to appear in capital letters,
which he also is how he also tends to refer
ums like yeah, these these writers in these intellectual strains
are both huge parts of everything Peterson writes today. And
there were also big parts of kind of the intellectual
stew that starts cooking in Europe really in like it
starts before World War One, but it really gets going

(24:34):
in the twenties. Um. And these have a big impact
on the development of fascism. Now some of them is coincidental.
Fascism is happening at the same time, so of course
like this is in the fucking air, and people pick
some of it up. A decent number of these philosophers
and academics were not fascists, but their work influenced Hitlerist
ideas of like racial community, which is not all that
different from kind of Young's concept of of collective unconscious.

(24:56):
There's similarities at least an aryan mystic beliefs um quote
by the early twentieth century, ethnic racial chauvinists everywhere, Hindu
supremacists in India as well as we talked about that
in our our episode on I Forget the Hindu fascist
Lady um as well as Catholic ultra yeah, as well
as Catholic ultra nationalists in France. We're offering visions who
uprooted people of a rooted, organic society in which hierarchies

(25:18):
and values had been stable. As Carla Poe points out
in New Religions and the Nazis two thousand five, political
cultists would typically mix pieces of yoga and Abrahamic religions
with popular notions of science, or rather pseudoscience, such as
concepts of race, eugenics, or evolution. It was this opportunistic
amalgam of ideas that helped nourish new mythologies of would

(25:39):
be totalitarian regimes. And obviously, like Darwinism plays a lot
of in this which so clearly again I'm yeah, and
when I'm taking sorry, like taking like these sort of
spiritual ideas and combining them with like biological things. And
just like Peter Peterson does this a lot of just
like he he reads, he reads everything, yeah, and he

(26:00):
has a habit of taking everything he reads and putting
it all together, which is you know, syncretism is um
as another kind of hallmark that echoes set of fascism
um and it is one of those things. All these thinkers,
all of these ideological strains are not inherently fascists, just
as Darwinism, like most people today, except Darwinian evolution is
basically true and are not fascists, right, but like it

(26:21):
had a huge impact on Hitler, and you do have to,
like I think it intelligent people can understand both of
those things. Um yeah, that like things where it's like
just like like the like Darwinism where it's like this
is a thing that is it's uh, it's not a
thing that we need to like force or do or
like ascribe to or like yeah, it just happy around.

(26:44):
It just happens. Uh. He has a bad habit of
like prescriptive versus like normative claims and like, well there,
this is this, we should have to do this, yes, Jordan,
Yeah yeah, and we'll will be will be most of
these both of these episodes will be about his ideas, right,
and like what the things he believes and says, Um
now I just got over saying because I want to

(27:05):
be very clear here, like if you like some of
these thinkers, if you're if you've been inspired by them,
I'm not saying you're a fascist or their fascist. That said.
A lot of the writers Peterson specifically loves, got real
fashi during this period. Mercia Elliott, who's that Romanian scholar herself,
She fasci as fuck. Mercia Elliott, who's that Romanian scholar

(27:28):
allied herself with the Romanian Iron Guard who were Romanian Nazis, right, like,
these are the people who like their Nazis. Carl Young
wrote about the Aryan soul and unfortunately the Jewish psyche um,
and he was initially was initially very sympathy. Yeah, neither
of those are good. And he was initially sympathetic to

(27:48):
the Nazi Party. Now he changed his mind, and he
did change his mind pretty early on, but he was
very sympathy, like he got drawn along for a little
while there. Yeah that makes sense. I mean you can,
like there are lots of quotes of Peterson talking about
Trump where it's like, uh, you know, you know what
it is, but you're yeah, yeah, yeah, well yeah yeah.

(28:12):
Joseph Campbell obviously came around later, and he never he
was not an open supporter of like a Nazi movement.
But once his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces
became a hit and he was being interviewed by every
TV station and whatnot in contemporary America. Like again, he
had a very Jordan Peterson like ark to his career,
and once he gained prominence, he would regularly drop lines
like Marxist philosophy has overtaken the university in America. I

(28:35):
did not enjoy that at all. Y I'm doing I'm
actually kind of doing a Ben Shapiro voice there. Yeah,
I didn't, Like, I can't say Marxist without thinking of
been Yeah, Maists everywhere around me. Now, it's unfair that
I do that for Ben, because, um, Joseph Campbell was
profoundly anti Semitic. I just wanted he hated black people,

(28:59):
just super racist, super anti semitic, like Campbell and Campbell
kind of kept a little on that a bit, but like, oh,
when you like, he was a guy who hated Marxism
and also hated Jewish people, and you do get the
feeling that, like he kind of agreed with that Nazi
idea that Jewish people spread Marxism, right right. I mean,
if you have both of those and one has kind
of kept secret, chances are that they're very related and

(29:21):
fuel each other. Yeah, he's he was. He was super
racist as fuck. Um, And yeah, obviously Campbell's racism doesn't
mean there's nothing we can learn from him, because you
kind of have to, especially if you if you're interested
in storytelling, you kind of have to read the here
with a thousand faces, even if you disagree with it,
because there's a lot of people who do and say
that like, no, he gets a lot of like, but
you still it's just it's that important of a work.

(29:42):
So I'm not saying, let's exercise these guys from our
intellectual history. But like Campbell was basically a Nazi, right yeah,
but like if you, if you, if you read his
work and then write Star Wars, you're not a yes, yes,
George Lucas, In fact, I would go so fast to
say doesn't like nazis pretty anti Nazi guy. It's stars

(30:03):
despite his his magic blood religion that he put in
his movies. But he's got some problematic aspects. But I
think it's pretty clear even in the Prequels that George
Lucas is saying, Hey, you know what's bad as fascism?
Oh yeah, it's the one. It's the problem with the
prequels is it's a great idea that it's bad. Yeah,

(30:23):
he just needed an editor. Um. Speaking of speaking of editors,
I don't know, speaking of editors, I don't know. You know, Cody,
let's talk about something else for just a second. How
do you feel about school buses full of kids. I
hope they get to school and home from school. Oh see,
I thought you were going to say you hope that
they get hit by hellfire missiles from the sky. And

(30:45):
I was going to tell you that Raytheon, our sponsor,
makes the missile guidance chips that that make the targeting
of school buses possible. Oh so where can school buses now? Yeah?
Kind of wanna. I would love to help or get
like a promo code for for for these chips. Well yeah,

(31:05):
if you actually type in promo code Yemen, you can
get a discount on your next missile guidance systems thanks
to our sponsors, Raytheon. Okay, so I will be able
to afford this with the promo code. Oh absolutely. Raytheon's
goal is making it possible for regular people like you
and me to fire missiles at school buses and parts

(31:28):
of the world that we barely understand. This has gone
on far too long. Let's hear from Raytheon now. So
so you sold me, We're back? Okay, So yeah, Campbell's

(31:48):
racism doesn't mean we shouldn't learn stuff from him. Just
like the fact that young dabbled in Nazism doesn't mean
that he's not worth studying as an intellectual. Carl Young
had said a lot of stuff that's really interesting, and
I know a lot of people are fans of him,
so I'm not again like anyway, The point is that
an awful lot of the guys who find themselves writing
at length about stuff like ancestral memories and archetypes also

(32:09):
wound up having Nazi adjacent beliefs, Like a lot of
the people who started codifying those lines of thought in
human philosophy also wound up being really drawn to the Nazis.
And that's something we should keep in mind when other
people have similar few drawn in similar directions. And these
are the folks that Jordan Peterson found himself pulled towards

(32:30):
as a young man, and that's worth noting now. Young adult,
Jordan Peterson gravitated to clinical psychology. He went to or
psychology whatever. He went to McGill University for his undergraduate
and his graduate terms. He eventually became a doctor um
and during his time in college he came to grapple
with his romantic feelings for a childhood friend, Tammy Roberts.
Jordan and Tammy grew up on the same street. They

(32:50):
went to prom together. He invited her to Montreal for
Canadian Thanksgiving one year while he was in college, and
the two hit it off romantically. They moved in together,
and like whatever else you can say of the guy,
it seems like he's like deeply devoted to his wife
and she to him. Um, it's unfortunately some of the
things that they're devoted to together, but I guess that's
good for him. He he fell in love. Um So

(33:11):
Peterson proposed to her repeatedly before the two married in
nineteen eighty nine. Tammy later recalled, I thought, if I
don't marry Jordan's I'm not going to know what he
does with his life, and he's going to be an
interesting person. Um. She was not incorrect in that he
is an interesting guy, very interesting person. I wouldn't marry
him to know what happens to him personally, But you

(33:32):
would not marry Dr Jordan B. Peterson. Well, Cody, then
you might be too biased to participate in this episode
any longer. So if you get Tammy on the line,
yeah yeah, yeah, so uh next in Jordan Peterson's life.
According to the magazine Toronto Life quote, their first child, Michaela,
was born in nineteen ninety two. The family moved to Boston,

(33:53):
where Peterson took a job at Harvard then had then
Tammy had Julian. Peterson taught psych at Harvard for six years.
When Michaela was seven, she was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis
and started showing signs of depression. Tammy, who had become
an artist and massage therapist, put her career on hold
to care for her daughter. In Peterson was offered a
tenure track position at the University of Toronto and the
family returned to Canada. At u f T he was

(34:15):
a swashbuckling, beloved professor. Students regarded him as a kind
of guru for people just figuring out who they were
and what they wanted to be. He offered a seductive
bulwark of certainty. There are perhaps one or two professors
you'll run into during her your career who completely capture
and captivate you, says Christine Brothie, one of Peterson's current
grad students, and he was one of them. Now, that
Toronto Life article is really interesting and I think quite good,

(34:37):
but it's summary of Peterson's early career path is only
broadly accurate. It does leave some things out and we're
fortunate that. In two thousand eighteen, University of Toronto professor
Bernard Schiff wrote an op ed for The Star. Its
title is I was Jordan Peterson's strongest supporter. Now I
think he's dangerous. We'll be referring to this article the
number of times yeah, yeah, important articles, Yeah, very felt

(35:00):
stating yeah in fascinating and in his article Bernard gives
us an inside look at how Jordan came to teach
at the University of Toronto. Quote. I met Jordan Peterson
when he came to the University of Toronto to be
interviewed for an assistant professorship in the Department of Psychology.
His CV was impeccable, with terrific references in a pedigree
that included a PhD from McGill and a five year
stint at Harvard As an assistant professor. We did not

(35:22):
share research interests, but it was clear that his work
was solid. My colleagues on the search committee were skeptical.
They felt he was too eccentric, but somehow I prevailed.
Several committee members now remind me that they agreed to
hire him because they were tired of hearing me shout
over them. I pushed for him because he was a
divergent thinker, self educated in the humanities, intellectually, flamboyant, bold, energetic,

(35:42):
and confident, bordering on arrogant. I thought he would bring
a new excitement, along with new ideas to our department.
Professor Schiff, who was then nearing retirement, took Jordan under
his wing for the last three years of his career
as a full time professor. Now Shift grew too deeply
like Peterson, and he pushed for him to receive regular
promotion and raises. When Peterson renovated his house, Shift put

(36:03):
Jordan and his family up in his own home. Quote.
We had meals together in the evening and long colorful
conversations there. Away from campus, I saw a man who
was devoted to his wife and his children, who were
lovely and gentle and for whom I still feel affection.
He was attentive and thoughtful, stern and kind, playful and warm.
His wife, Tammy, appeared to be the keel, the ballast,
and the rudder, and Jordan ran the ship. Now it's

(36:25):
really clear from this article that Professor Shift deeply enjoyed
Peterson's company and respected him tremendously as a man an
a professor, and unfortunately, Shift feels this now blinded him
to some of the less savory aspects of Peterson's personality
which had started to emerge in this period. Shift laments
that he did not give sufficient concern to some of
Jordan's teaching tactics. Quote as the undergraduate chair, I read

(36:47):
all teaching reviews. His work, for the most part excellent
and included eyebrow raising comments such as this course has
changed my life. One student, however, hated the course because
he did not like delivered truths. Curious, I attended me
of Jordan's lectures to see for myself. Remarkably, the fifty
students always showed up at nine am and were held
in rapt attention for an hour. Jordan was a captivating lecturer,

(37:09):
electric and eclectic, cherry picking from neuroscience, mythology, psychology, philosophy,
the Bible, and popular culture. The class loved him, but
as reported by that astute student, Jordan presented conjecture as
statement of fact. I expressed my concern to him about
this a number of times, and each time Jordan agreed.
He acknowledged the danger of such practices, but then continued
to do it again and again, as if he could

(37:31):
not control himself. He was a preacher more than a teacher.
Mm hmmmm mm hmmm mm hmm. Yeah, I mean he's
like that's uh dead on. Um. When you watch one
of his lectures, it does seem like that, Like yeah,
like I said it earlier, it's less speeches, less lectures,
it's more sermons. Um. Yep, he does uh and yeah,

(37:56):
choosing the everything. He looks at everything, and he just
like sort of picks what fits what he wants to
say is true and then puts them all together and
and pushes that idea. Um. It's like really easily to
still down to the lobster example. I think, um, where
he's like, oh, yeah, the world should be like this

(38:17):
because of over here. Um. But does it a lot
with like yeah, taking like this religious thing and then
this this biological thing and then this thing from pop
culture and then just tells you the way things are,
the way things are yep, and should be it should be.
It's you know, one of the things I think that

(38:38):
happens with Peterson, And I think it's I I see
it in myself and have to fight against it regularly.
If you grow up believing one thing and then make
a complete or one eighty degree turn to something else
as a young adult, there's a tendency that you have
to fight against to believe. Well, maybe I don't have

(38:58):
to question the things I believe now because I already questioned,
Like I already overturned my entire belief system so clearly,
like I found truth. And that can lead you to
cherry pick things that only confirm the things that you've
come to believe, when when the reality is and no
one's perfect at this right, Like, and we all choose
to not examine certain things just because you can't always

(39:19):
be examining every aspect of your beliefs because otherwise you
go fucking crazy. Sometimes you just would be like, yeah,
you know, it's fine, Like, but you should always be
finding yourselves yourself challenged by things, which is is different
from saying everybody needs to be debating about things, because
some things should be debated, um, but you should always
be like seeking out things that like challenge or complicate

(39:40):
your understanding of the world, um, because the world's complicated. Um. Anyway,
So whether or not Preacher is a fair description. Jordan
grew obsessed with belief, in particularly why people believe things,
and most particularly like why people who had supported terrible regimes,
fascist and communist, totalitary and regimes that killed a lot

(40:01):
of people, why they believed so strongly in the things
that they were doing. Um, which is obviously, like I think,
is a great thing to to to investigate. That's my
whole life, to draw people to authoritarian exactly. Uh. In
nineteen nine he published his first book, Maps of Meaning,
a dense, six page academic treatise on the architecture of belief,

(40:22):
which is a great term. Um, he's a decent titler,
and yeah. Maps of Meaning shows a Cambellian fascination with
the hero myth and the things that cultures tend to
find heroic, as well as a great deal of younging
and interest in like a kind of sort of collective
racial un consciousness and the reoccurring influence of myth and
tradition in human society. The book also evinced an obsession

(40:44):
with the ideas of order and chaos. I'm going to
read a quote from it here. Terrible chaotic forces lurk
behind the facade of the normal world. These forces are
kept at bay by the maintenance of social order. The
reign of order is insufficient, however, because order itself becomes
overbearing in deadly if allowed unregulated or permanent expression. The
actions of the hero constitute an antidote to the deadly

(41:06):
forces of chaos and to the tyranny of order. The
hero creates order from chaos and reconstructs the order when
necessary that order, when necessary. His actions simultaneously ensure that
novelty remains tolerable and that security remains flexible. Maps of
Meaning Jordan B. Peterson. So Maps of Meaning includes some

(41:26):
fascinating insight into Jordan's own life and I'm gonna I'm
gonna quote from a write up in The New Yorker. Here,
Peterson has a way of making even the mildest pronouncement
sound like the dying declaration of a political prisoner. In
Maps of Meaning, he traces this sense of urgency to
a feeling of fraudulence that overcame him in college. When
he started to speak, he would hear a voice telling him,
you don't believe that. That isn't true. To word off

(41:46):
mental breakdown, he resolved not to say anything unless he
was sure he believed it this practice calmed the inner voice,
and in time it shaped his rhetorical style, which is
forceful but careful. Yeah. I mean that's you can see him.
He's a he's very verbose, but he is a very
deliberate speaker. Yeah he is. He's a great speaker, like

(42:07):
just objectively, like I'm like you and I are both
people who talk for a living. Like, he's objectively good
at public speaking, captivating. Yeah, absolutely make a great preacher. Yeah,
he would make a great preacher. Let's talk about that later.
So the book was well received by a number of
professional smart people. One reviewer I read, who was a psychologist,
if I think some sort had a hard time defining

(42:28):
Peterson's books a work of like sociology or psychology or
like neuroscience or whatever. But he recommended it to people,
and this was not a universal opinion. So I want
to note a lot of professional people in and around
Peterson's field think this is a great book. There's also
a sizeable number who disagree with that statement. Dr Paul Taggart,
a Canadian philosopher and cognitive scientist, wrote this about the
book in Psychology Today, its emphasis on religious myth and

(42:51):
heroic individuals provides a poor blueprint for understanding the origins
of totalitarianism and an even poorer guide to overcoming its evils.
Um and Dr Taggart described Maps of Meaning as murky
and the sense that it was dark and gloomy, with
frequent emphasis on suffering rather than on the joys of love, work,
and play. The book is also murky in the second sense,

(43:12):
which is like the sense of yeah, it's less meandering
and disjointed than its video than his videotape lectures. So yeahah,
it's a little money kind of like, it's a little
hard to parse, it's hard to parson follow. People will
like it's very dense, it takes a lot of reading.
Some people say that because it's so brilliant, and some
people will be like, he could have cut a couple
of hundred pages out. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now. Dr Taggart

(43:37):
condensed the book's main arguments into four points. Um and
these are what he thinks that Peterson is getting out
in the book, and he's smarter than I am. Uh.
Number one myths are culturally universal. Number two myths are
the psychological origin of morality. Number three myths are the
philosophical basis for morality and number four, myth based morality

(43:58):
grounds political judgments about salitarian states. UM. So you can
see some things to argue with there and some things
like I would certainly agree that myth based morality grounds
political judgments about totalitarian states. UM. I would also say
that like, I don't think myths are the psychological origin
of morality or the philosophical basis for morality. I think
they do influence a lot of people's morality. I would

(44:19):
also disagree with the statement that their culturally universal, which
Dr Taggart will disagree with two. But we'll talk about
that in a bit later. Okay, Yeah, there's a lot
of because like it's just very like it's forceful and certain.
There's no yes, Like a lot of things that Jordan's
yea even are just like well okay that that kind
of relates to this, but it's not like a universal rule.

(44:41):
It's not the way the world is. Yeah, He's often
seems like he's trying to create a religion or like
create like a worldview it explains everything, and he's basing
it on these myths, and he's basing it on a
specific subset of myths from a specific chunk of the
world that happens to be the chunk of the world
he's familiar with, ignoring all of the different myths and

(45:03):
cultures that actually disagree with a lot of what he's saying,
and then just saying no, every culture basically believes this stuff.
Yeah culture, even though he doesn't. Yeah. Now, it's perhaps
not surprising that, according to Professor Schiff, who's again the
guy his meant, his old mentor who came to worry
you know, very much about his influence. It's it's perhaps
not surprising that this guy, says, Peterson's personality grew more

(45:26):
intense as the years grew by darker and angrier. Now.
Peterson's student reviews were always exceptional, and he earned a
position on the u f t's tenure track, but he
also showed peculiar signs of non academic ambitions. Jordan's started
a clinical practice, which is fine, but his experiences there
inspired him to create a series of neuropsychological tests, basically
personality tests to predict academic and corporate performance. This led

(45:50):
him to create a product called the Self Authoring Suite,
an online self help program that he sold access to.
Toronto Life notes that the program was quote designed to
walk participants through creating a sort of many autobiography than
writing what they want their futures to be. Like Tammy,
his wife served as a guinea pig. I outlined eight
goals that I had no idea I was going to outline,
she says. But it puts you in a dream state,

(46:11):
and when you write your goals they come from somewhere
inside you that you hadn't scripted. I told him this
would be the most important thing he ever did. That's
a little weird, right, yeah, yeah, yeah, well again, it's
the mysticism, it's the spirituality. It's like the the deeper
stuff than seems. Yeah, it can't be as simple as

(46:33):
like yeah, no, you know, outlining your goals and talking,
you know, outlining some aspects of your past and thinking
about what you want your future to be can be
helpful if you're kind of in like a confused or
a modeled state. No, no, you're in a dream state
and something inside you comes up like okay, yeah, it's
like yeah, you talked to the universe. It's like, well, no,
you just like you assess your life and you try
to get like we all do it right, Like I

(46:54):
do it When I'm running like a couple of times
a week. I don't go into a dream state, like
it is helpful to like cut out distractions and like.
But anyway, whatever. Peterson says that about ten thousand students
have gone through this program, that it decreased dropout rates
by and raised g p as by. I've seen no
verification of these numbers outside of Jordan's b Peterson himself.
Uh and as far as I'm aware, he never put

(47:15):
his self authoring sweet up to any kind of rigorous
outside testing. I will say that an awful lot of
people who have used it rave about it. You can
find tons of very positive reviews, and in fact it's
hard to find negative ones, probably because the kind of
people who buy it are people who are already into
what Jordan be Peterson has to say. But that's said,
a lot of people say it's great. Um. One customer
wrote that in her view, the program allowed you to

(47:37):
identify the different personalities within yourself that often conflicted and
to integrate them into a new and better person, which
I do found a little worrying because a lot of
scientology and also if you watch the new show about Nexium,
the Keith rawneeri cult, who we also did episodes on
and talk a lot about integrations. Anyway, I always find
that a little weird, but it was it Also, it
only costs like fifteen bucks, so I would not want

(47:58):
to be like saying that he was doing same thing
scientology was doing because it seems like a pretty affordable thing. Yeah,
but that does that always strikes me a little weird.
Um And I found another review on a site called
the Deep Dish that explains the attitude uh Joson's fifteen
dollar course conveys. And this is by someone who took it. Quote,
when the oxygen mask drops down on an airplane, you

(48:18):
better fasten yours before you try to be a hero,
because people who have passed out from hypoxia are not
known for being particularly useful. We've all heard the safety
breathing so many times that it bores us to tears,
but we don't always apply this principle to life. More broadly,
if you want to do good in the world, you
have to put your own house in order first. In
his clinical practice, Peterson has observed that many people don't
actually have psychological problems, they have problems in living. That's

(48:41):
a meaningless statement, like a completely meaningless statement. But I
do want to get into what this guy says about
like oxygen masks, because obviously, yes, if if if your
plane depressurizes, you should put on your own oxygen mask
first because you will be unconscious and unable to help people.
But I think generalizing this because this is a big
thing readers and says you have to fix yourself before
you help other people, and I disagree with that profoundly,

(49:05):
um and I think that a better comparison would be
to think like an e m T thing. So if
you arrive on the seamen as an emergency in the
as an e MT, and they'll tell you this in training,
your first priority is your own safety, not because you
matter more than anyone else because but because if you
get hurt, then all you've done is make the problem worse.
And what that means it doesn't mean you don't help,
but it does mean that, like, oh, there's a car
crash that involved a power line, I need to make

(49:26):
sure that I'm not going to like get electrocuted, Like
I need to make sure this is actually safe for
me to enter, Otherwise I'm making the situation worse. But
my goal is still to get in there and help people.
I just have to make certain that I am physically
say first that I'm not making the problem worse. But
the whole thing I'm doing is attempting to actually provide
aid to people. Right, Um, anyway, I think that's a

(49:48):
more useful Yeah, it's his game, It's what I mean.
This reductive is called his game. But like that's that analogy.
He takes these situations and these analogies and these these
little examples and then uh says that this is how
all of society is. Um. And that's like really a

(50:11):
huge leap and pretty irresponsible. It's it's the lobster thing. Um.
But also like I don't know if you if you're
a person who's like, uh, what if everybody was able
to go to the doctor, um having to pay like
copas and premiums and all that bullshit. Um, that doesn't
mean that the person suggesting that needs to live a
perfect life and have all their problems fixed out that

(50:33):
like this this example is uh so wrong and misleading.
It's uh and and it things like that UH point
me more towards like, oh, well that's insidious. What he's
doing is insidious, and it would be one thing if
he was like, there's different kinds of emergencies. Some of
them are like you know, when an airplane depressurizes and
you have to take care of yourself first otherwise you'll

(50:55):
be unconscious. Other others are like a fire in a house,
and if you're a firefighter, you might have to endanger
yourself in order to do your job, because that's sometimes
what we do. And like, yeah, it's but no, it's
it's kind of a microcosm of the way he thinks,
which is like find one like kind of one example
that if you deliver it well in a speech, will
sound really compelling to people because you're comparing it to

(51:16):
something in the real world. Um, but like if you
think about it for more than a couple of seconds,
realized like, well, that actually can't be generalized anything. So
you can't you can't like try to improve society unless
you're perfect, which is impossible. Like who who can claim that, yeah,
that they that they are they have nothing left to
work on with themselves or anything like that. It's like

(51:38):
come on, man, Yeah. So in this course this self authoring,
sweet Peterson explains that his time as a clinical psychologist
has taught him to start client sessions by asking a
series of questions about a patient's family, physical health, friends,
drug use, etcetera. If his clients are having issues in
any of these key areas, they cannot be thriving psychologically.
This is the origin of his famous clean your Room line.

(51:59):
And obviously it's not bad advice to tell people to
take care of themselves. You should take care of yourself,
but Jordan, being Jordan's, he immediately takes things beyond simple
self care. The self authoring suite represents the first salvo
and what I think we could call Jordan Peterson's War
on Chaos quote. The way Peterson sees it, there's a
constant struggle between chaos and order within society and within

(52:20):
each individual. Even if you don't believe this literally, it's
a useful metaphor. To make yourself strong and focused. You
have to do battle with the dragons of chaos. Of course,
dragons are big and scary, so you better start out small.
Peterson talks a lot about fighting dragons, and he does
actually will sometimes say like, no, I'm speaking pretty literally.
Oh yeah, his his some of his diagrams in that

(52:41):
book are something too. Yeah. So the way Peterson frames things, though,
is very seems very reasonable. If your life feels out
of control, you focus fixed first on taking care of small,
immediate needs and goals, and this build your confidence and
it will help you you deal with larger and larger
things and help you order your own minds that you
can accomplish greater tasks. Nothing sinister in that. In fact,

(53:02):
I'd say it's good advice, um. But the focus on
chaos and on life is a constant battle between ordering chaos.
That seems kind of sinister to me, especially given what
Jordan B. Peterson thinks about chaos, because in his mind,
it is an inherently feminine trait see New York Times.
Writer Nellie Bowles talked to Jordan about this during a
deep and very good profile she wrote on The Man,

(53:23):
a very funny profile because I think Nelly has his number,
And when she questioned him about chaos being a feminine trait,
he responded, you know, you can say, well, isn't it
unfortunate that chaos is represented by the feminine? Well, it
might be unfortunate, but it doesn't matter because that's how
it's represented. It's been represented like that forever, and there
are reasons for it. You can't change it. It's not possible.
This is underneath everything, and if you change those basic categories,

(53:44):
people wouldn't be human anymore. They'd be something else, they'd
be trans human or something. We wouldn't be able to
talk to these new creatures, to which I say, a
lot of people used to worship volcanoes Jordans. We don't
really do that so much anymore. Now. We're like, they're wrong, explosive,
and we should get away when they like unbelievable, and

(54:05):
like also like look at society. How it's like, why
do you think that women are categorized like that? In
your mind? Who is who becoming? The Goddess of Discord
was heiress and therefore chaos is always feminine? Yeah, right, Like, uh,
like men are order and women are chaos. Women have
a regular menstrual cycle, that's pretty funny, ordered, uh, whereas

(54:26):
men were largely responsible for the partitioning of Poland, which
was pretty chaotic. Chaotic. There's just like so many examples,
and like you can look and like this is Jordan's
game that he won't let anybody else play. I can
look at lobsters and say, lobsters do this because of
the resources. Therefore, society has to be measured like that.
I can point to women menstruating uh and be like, no,

(54:47):
women are order, you fucking dumb ship, and he like, yeah,
he can't. He can't uh fathom that because in his
mind there's no nuance unless it's him. I don't know.
It's very frustrating. What a weird frustrating man. Do you
want to know what's not frustrating Cody though, I yes,
I would like to know that. Actually, is this fantastic

(55:09):
transition to ads that Robert's about to do. Robert, yeah,
oh wow. I'm sad I liked it. I did not.
We're bad before we move on. I was just quoting

(55:31):
from that Nellie Bowels um uh New York Times article,
and I think it's really funny um because there's lines
in it like Marxism is resurgent. Mr Peterson says, looking
ashen and stricken, I say, it seems unnecessarily stressful to
live like this, He tells me. Life is stressful, like

(55:51):
she she her interpretation seems to be like you are
deeply miserable, and it's because of these horrible things you
believe and you seem they don't seem to be making
you happy. And Jordan B. Peterson is incapable of understanding
or taking seriously what she's saying because she's a woman
and that's an agent of case beautiful. It's frustratingly beautiful. Um, yeah,

(56:13):
you don't have to be this stressed out, Mr Peterson.
This isn't it doesn't need to be your life. He
can he considered one of his big issues is that
he thinks that I'm the current guy in trage of
Canada is basically like a quasi Marxist. It's like, actually,
if you look at it, Canada is basically one gigantic
mining and natural gas company with like a social safetiness

(56:36):
strap to it so that people don't notice that it
exists primarily to extract resources from the world. Um, it's
the furthest thing from marxis impossible. It just has a
good health care system. But like, let's not Yeah, also
like Peterson is not going to get it on that,
Mr Mr Bumblebee, I I gotta I gotta point out
also like his whole thing of like if you change this,

(56:57):
if you change that, what is it is? It? Is? It?
Is it? Now? You're a trans human or what it's like, well,
you're you're you're like you're what you're doing is you're
fighting against the idea of evolution like like did like
when when humans got to where we are, was that like, oh,
you did it, You're perfect. Never change never, never move

(57:18):
on from this. And I don't think you would say
that the realities if you were to take like anyone
from five years ago and put them in the modern world,
they would probably die of an embolism, shrieking in horror
at the sight of concrete, like just because the amount
of it would be so baffling to their fucking brains.
It would like the world would make no sense, the
error would taste different. Yeah, they wouldn't be able to

(57:40):
understand people speaking what is essentially their language because our
idioms have changed so much, Like it would be a
nightmare for them, because people are changed deeply every couple
of generation. Culture changes constantly, and like like deal with
describing is like fucking baby, yeah yeah, so yeah, uh

(58:02):
it's good stuff. Um. Now, when one reads a lot
of Peterson's interviews, they get the sense that Jordan's spent
the bulk of his career studying humanity for tips on
how to reach and influence people. I don't know the
degree to which this was a conscious choice that he made,
but he did it. And in his second book, which
will discuss later, Peterson writes that during his time as
a psychologist, he worked with a client diagnosed with paranoia.
He learned that paranoid patients were quote almost uncanny in

(58:23):
their ability to detect mixed motives, judgment, and falsehood. This
inspired him to become even more committed to saying only
what he meant. You have to listen very carefully and
to tell the truth if you're going to get a
paranoid person to open up to you. He quickly realized
that this basic tactic worked on the broader population, which
helps explain why so many of his students treated him
like a preacher. Over years and years of rigorously studying belief,

(58:45):
he got good at making people believe what he said.
Um Now, outside of work, in his own life, Jordan's
home came to showcase a growing fascination with authoritarianism. He
collected Soviet and Communist propaganda and he covered his walls
with it to an extent that I think even the
most dead a cadd communists I know would find weird.
Like it's so weird. The amount there is so weird.

(59:06):
It's too much of any decoration to be Yeah, it's
a and like that's you know, and he's the kind
of guy who'd like you'd think would be like, oh, well,
your environment affects like your mood and things like that,
and like how do you live in that space? It's
so all of your walls are men shooting each other
and hoisting red flags, like of course you think Marxism
is coming for Yeah, it's wild. And also like just

(59:28):
like the motive behind doing that. It's like if you're interesting,
if you're like fascinated by like the history of Nazism
because you want to like find out what they think
and like fight it. If you want to fight. You're
not like me, right, You're not gonna put Nazi ship everywhere.
I have no Nazi propaganda on my walls, Cody, Yeah,
that's normal that I'm glad. Like I do have one

(59:50):
reproduction wer Mocht coat because it's a solid coat, but
I only wear it when I'm hiking alone. Anyway, it's
a good coat. Look, I'm not gonna sucking the coats.
Not the problem. Nobody hates the Nazis because their coats
were good. Yeah, there was a problem. Doesn't have a
squat stick on it. It's just a coat anyway. So uh.
Peterson grew increasingly also, like during this kind of period

(01:00:12):
where he's becoming darker and more weird and radical, Professor
Schift notes that he grew increasingly interested in fringe health treatments. Quote.
He was preoccupied with alternative health treatments, including fighting off
the signs of aging as they appear on the skin,
and one time even shamanic healing practices, where, to my
great surprise and distress, he chose to be the shame
in himself. He did all of that with the same

(01:00:32):
great fervor and commitments appropriative. I don't know, you know. Uh.
Dr Peterson also struggled with depression. Now this has been
a lifelong battle for him, dating back to his youthful
nightmares about atomic annihilation. But despite growing wiser and more successful,
and despite his supportive family and his insights into the
human mind, he could not rest his mind away from darkness.

(01:00:56):
He described it as like being impaled quote by a dead,
black and frozen tree. Now we don't have tremendous detail
about his family life, but however, this impacted his behavior.
His wife eventually threatened to leave him if he didn't
take antidepressants, and he eventually agreed to do so. Um,
so it must have been pretty He must have been
pretty unpleasant to be around. Sounds sounds it sounds. Yeah,

(01:01:21):
he's already intense, Like he's already pretty pretty difficult to
hang with. Yeah, so the pills came with side effects.
Jordan felt sluggish. He found himself collapsing into sleep for
hours at a time. Somehow, he still managed to keep
up his prodigious rate of productivity, but the demons in
his head seemed to have a noteworthy impact on his personality.
Professor Schiff writes that as the years went on, quote,

(01:01:42):
his interest in political issues became more apparent. We disagreed
about most things, but I don't ask of my friends
that we agree. What was off putting was his tendency
to be categorical about his positions, reminiscent of his lectures
where he presented personal theories as absolute truths. I really
challenged him. He overwhelmed challenges with volumes of information that
we're hard to process and evaluate. He was more forceful

(01:02:02):
than I and he had a much quicker mind, also
again evocative of what I saw in the classroom. He
sometimes appeared to be in the thrall of his ideas
and would not or could not constrain himself and self
monitor what he was saying. Yeah, I mean I was
right for a professor. Yeah, I'm gonna say not great
for a priest either. And that's not just like not great, yeah,

(01:02:24):
just not great. Uh. Now. The chief political the chief
political issue that came to increasingly dominate Jordan Peterson's life
and concern was the idea and a fear about political correctness.
This seems to have started with one of his clients
that his his psychology practice who had gotten in trouble
at work over her resistance to political correctness. Talk at work,
and I'm gonna uote from the New York Times here

(01:02:45):
he says one patient had to be part of a
long email chain over whether the term flip chart could
be used in the workplace, since the word flip is
a pejorative for Filipino. She had a radical left boss
who was really concerned with equality and equality of outcome
and all these things, and diversity and inclusivity and all
the buzzwords and she was subjected to She sent me
the email chain thirty emails about whether or not the
flip chart was acceptable. Mr Peterson says, so he was radicalized.

(01:03:07):
He says, because the radical left wants to eliminate hierarchies,
which he says are the natural order of the world.
It's a bit of a jump from I'll grant you
that's people are like concerned about calling something a flip
chart kind of dumb because the word flip has a
long series of meanings that have nothing to do with
racism towards Filipinos. If it were like yeah, like whatever, yes, yes,

(01:03:27):
that's there are other examples, uh that I won't say
because we're not I'm not gonna say that. Um, but
like it's it's just a term. It's a word. It's
got many, many meanings. And to jump from that silly,
like arguably silly thing to the Marxists are trying to
like destabilize the world and like all of his all

(01:03:49):
stuff is like come on, man, yeah, and the idea,
I mean, I actually do want to eliminate hierarchies, but
just the idea that because like you're maybe over concerned about,
uh whether or not a specific term is offensive means
that you want to eliminate all hierarchies, like I'm gonna
guarantee you whatever. Person like this radical left boss was

(01:04:11):
actually probably like more or less a Democrat who really
supported a hierarchical Democratic party and stuff and was just
overly worried about police. Also, like he's talked about it's
I don't know if we're gonna get into this more,
but like he has talked about feeling boxed in, and
like I believe the qutea is like I said, you know,
everyone sort of claims that I'm some sort of right winger,

(01:04:33):
but it couldn't BeO farthest from the truth. He denies
that he's like right wing um, but his his primary
thing is being obsessed with hierarchies and reinforcing those hierarchies.
That's like the definition of it. Yeah, that's the thing
he loves most. It's like definitely definitionally, like that's what
that's your right wing? Is it? Stuff like that. Whenever
hear stuff like that, like prings me' is like, oh,

(01:04:55):
you're you're just lying. Yeah, you're too You're too smart
to not know that. That's ridiculous. Well, and we'll talk
about it, because he he has a lot of vested
interest in defining himself as someone who's in like the middle,
even though he's again very right wing. And there's a
reason he's doing that, classical liberal. I'm sure, Oh yes, yeah.
So in two thousand and fourteen, Dr Peterson took his

(01:05:17):
growing frustration with political correctness and finally applied his famous
academic rigor to the issue. He carried out a study
which he conducted with graduate student Christine Brophy, who we
heard from a little earlier. Um and this study was
initially about the relationship between political belief and personality. It turned, however,
into a study of so called politically correct people. Peterson
and Brophy developed a list of two hundred statements from

(01:05:39):
safe spaces are necessary to promote diversity of perspective and
feathered headdresses should be banned at music festivals to police
brutality is racial in nature. Now they use these questions
to develop a questionnaire they could use to quiz people
about how much they agreed with each statement. They questioned
two groups of people, eventually totally more respondents. According to
Toronto Life, Peterson and Brophy can included that political correctness

(01:06:01):
exists in two forms, which they call PC egalitarianism and
PC authoritarianism. Simply put, PC egalitarians are classic liberals who
advocate for more democratic governance and equality. PC authoritarians are
According to Brophy, the ones now relabeled as social justice warriors,
both share a high degree of compassion. Extreme compassion, they
believe can lead to difficulty assessing right from wrong. It

(01:06:21):
can also mean the forgiveness of all failures and transgressions
by people viewed as vulnerable any personality trait to an
extreme as pathological Prophy says. Now, I'm not a psychologist,
but I do have some issues with some of the
questions that they're listing here. For example, safe spaces are
necessary to promote diversity of perspective. I don't know that
I would agree to any particular level with that. I

(01:06:42):
would say that if if people. What I would say is,
if people feel like they need safe spaces in a
school for whatever reason, I'm fine with them having that, uh,
and and that if they find it valuable, sure, like
why not? And I think most people are kind of
in that. I don't think most people who don't have
an issue with like the idea of a safe space
on campus, would say they're necessary to promote diversity of perspective.

(01:07:04):
They'd say, oh yeah, people need that. Why not, like
it's putting the room in the campus. Yeah, let's have
a Yeah, things like I feel safe talking about a
thing and there doesn't seem to be any sort of
room for that in in the quit Like it seems
like the questionnaire is kind of designed to get people
to respond in an authoritarian way, like feathered head dresses
should be banned at music festivals? Should they be banned?
I wouldn't say they should be banned. Is it fucked

(01:07:25):
up for like like white kids to like wear Native
American head dresses? Oh? Yeah, that's that's messed up. They
shouldn't do that. Banned Yeah, music, Like I'm not gonna
say that. Like the second thing will not Yeah, most
will not be like oh yeah, banned them, banned them everywhere?
That is that is written to elicit the kind of
result that he wants. And like, I spend a lot
of time reading, especially on Twitter, like indigenous folks talking

(01:07:48):
about stuff like this and why they find it offensive,
and all of them are saying like yeah, or like
they tend to be saying like, don't do this, it's
messed up. They're not saying it should be you should
get kicked out of a music festival. We need to
write at that and like that. Yeah, they're trying to explain,
like why it's offensive, which is different from saying bandon
at music festivals. Um, it's explaining these things and like

(01:08:09):
why why why do people want to say space? Why
do that? Why do is this? What is this not
saying like we need to write laws to require them,
or like we need to plan X or why. Um,
it's also it's explained to people why this is messed up? Yeah. Yeah.
The quote about like the they have too much compassion
and like are prone too much to forgiveness or something? Yes,
well yeah, okay, that's a big WS were obsessed with

(01:08:31):
canceling people. Yeah. Yeah, We'll talk a lot about Jordan B.
Peterson and what he thinks about compassion and how it's
bad and how that might relate to some things other
groups of people have said in the past before doing
very bad things that Jordan B. Peterson claims to know
about and want to prevent. It's interesting relation between that hardness. Yeah.

(01:08:52):
So the article goes on to note that, like most
psychologists in his field, Dr Peterson believes there are five
major personality traits extra version, agree bullness, openness, conscientiousness, and neuroticism.
These traits are supposed to be universal across different cultures.
All of this sounds problematic as hell and really dumb
to me. I'm not a psychologist. I have trouble believing
that that's true because that all seems like fucking nonsense,

(01:09:13):
like that you can you can separate ship out like that, Like,
but I don't know. I don't like this stuff anyway.
So maybe I'm just an idiot. But I think that
sounds dumb as hell. If that's something all psychologists believe,
maybe psychology is kind of stupid. Yeah, maybe it's kind
of dumb. Um that said, yeah, I find a lot
of what's written about all this to be low key terrifying,
like this quote from Toronto Life. These traits have both

(01:09:36):
biological and cultural origins, and, as Peterson is fond of saying,
the biological factors maximizing places like Scandinavia that have strenuously
tried to flatten out the cultural differences. Biology is therefore,
in a sense destiny. No matter how much people may
want to deny it. Now, this is all a dressed
And again I'm not saying this is what I saw
a psychologists believe, because I don't think that's true. I

(01:09:59):
think this is what George Peterson is. Yeah, I think
he's a little outside the norm there. Yeah, this is
what Bell Curve motherfucker's believe. Um. And it's all dressed
up in pop psych terms and academic verbiage. But Peterson's
right on the urge of arguing about biological essentialism. He
is arguing that this is the same strain of thought
that leads to like the Bell Curve ship, where you
talk about how Black Eye Q was inherently lower and

(01:10:20):
if you start talking about that ship, you wind up
having the kind of questions about whole races that lead
to real bad things going down. Yeah, he's got tons
of stuff, Yeah, a lot of malling new kind of things.
And that's that's the thing that I think he's never
really addressed of, Like if he doesn't dive this and
this and this and this, what's the next thing? What's

(01:10:40):
the logical result to this way of thinking? He will
always say like no, no, no, Like I think people
are like I don't think there's any intelligence difference, and
like men and women and stuff like that. But like
then he will make arguments where like but this leads
you to a conclusion that's kind of different from the
thing that you're saying. Yeah, and like how to deal

(01:11:01):
with there's a Uh one of the worst things I
think he talks about. It's about i Q and how
because the military doesn't let people in the military under
a certain i Q that yea, that they cannot function
in society. They cannot contribute to society because we don't

(01:11:23):
let them in the military. Uh. And he said, so
these two claims, he says, Therefore, that's the most horrifying
thing I've ever heard. Um. He doesn't go further than that.
He hasn't explained why. But he talks about how if
we if they can't contribute to society citation needed. Uh,
and we can't pay them like universal basic income thing
like that doesn't work either again citation needed Therefore, and

(01:11:47):
then trailing off, yeah, yeah, we need to gas them
in trust, Like what do you do? What do you
do with these people? Um, it's just like these like
X is true, even though it's not why it is
even though it's not. Therefore you figure out the Z
for yourself. It's clear, as with everything that Jordan Peterson
is wrong about that he has no real experience with
people who have you know, what you would call like

(01:12:10):
I cues lower than that threshold. Again, I worked in
this field. I worked with particularly a number of kids
with Down syndrome who would not have been able to
join the military um, but also who were physically healthy
and who were perfectly capable of doing like we would
get them, would help them get jobs working in like
like making sandwiches and stuff like that, and they could
do things and they needed some help. They would live
in like a semi independent assisted living sort of facility

(01:12:33):
when they became adults, but they would do jobs, they
would have friends, they would contribute to society. They're perfectly capable,
Like there are there are a very small number of
people who because of a mix of like physical and
mental you know, like stuff like can't like need pretty
much total help. Like I did work with some of
those kids, but most of them. And part of the
goal of like a good program helping those people is

(01:12:55):
to find a way for them to be a part
of society and be around and and live with and
contribute with everyone else. And because there's no reason that
they should. Yeah, exactly, use they can't join the enquirement
on people of like either you contribute to society in
the way that society has decided that you contribute to it,
or you're out. Um is also ridiculous. It's also but

(01:13:17):
also saying that people need to have a job to
contribute to society. But also like like comparing people like
you can't get into the military there for X and Y,
you know, wasn't allowed in the military. The president of
the United States we had Yeah, um, and I don't
see Peterson talking about how if you have bones spurs
and you can't you know, it's it's like everything he says,

(01:13:38):
it's just like a wild, disgusting sort of approach to
how humans are. Yeah, I don't. I don't like it
now do Why So? In two thousands sixteen, Canada started
to debate over a bil C sixteen that would expand
the country's human rights law by adding gender identity and
gender expression to the list of things employers in the

(01:13:59):
government can't The scrim it against this would have meant
that college professors like Dr Peterson would have had to
refer to non binary and trans students by their preferred pronouns. Now,
obviously this was just one aspect of the law, which
would have also done stuff like, you know, help make
it harder to deny trans people apartments are like exactly, yeah,
all the things that you don't want people to be
discriminated for us so they can live their lives. Yes,

(01:14:21):
but to Dr Peterson, the thought that he might be
forced to refer to someone by their chosen pronoun um,
even if he didn't like that they'd chosen that pronoun
that's all that mattered. That's all this law was in it.
Jordan's started recording YouTube videos outlining his resistance to the law.
He attracted a following, and eventually a very massive one.
He started engaging in highly publicized debates which his followers

(01:14:42):
tended to see his him crushing and destroying his ideological enemies.
He argued that the bill was a serious infringement of
freedom of speech, and soon reached an audience of millions
of non Canadians. I'm not sure to what extent this
was purposeful, but Peterson's stand came at a perfect moment,
as the simmering culture war between right and left in
the US started to reach a boil. Soon there were

(01:15:02):
protests against Peterson. His supporters showed up to counter. There
were fights and arrests in media coverage, and you know,
we talked about George Lincoln Rockwell, like that's the best
thing for these kinds of people is media coverage and
fights and stuff. So the dean of the University of
Toronto st Peterson a letter saying that his refusal to
use people's pronouns revealed discriminatory intentions, which I would argue

(01:15:22):
was accurate. The letter went on to warn him that
the impact of your behavior runs the risk of undermining
your ability to conduct essential components of your job as
a faculty member. And like an educator, like like an educator,
like you're educating people and someone's like, please my refer
to me as she instead of he, And then he
says he, that's like a hostile learning environment. Yeah, yeah,

(01:15:43):
you just being a dick. Which is not to say
that kids shouldn't be challenged and like and and deal
with ideas that are uncomfortable in school you want to,
but it also it does mean that like one of
the basic things you should expect from a college is
that they're not going to be shitty to you personally
for no good reason, because that's bad and you shouldn't
do that to students. It's not kind of makes you

(01:16:04):
not want to go to the lecture anymore, makes you
not want to go to the lecture. It contributes to
problems of suicidal nature. Like, it's just bad and it's
not justified. And if you like, you don't have an
inherent right to be a teacher. If you're going to
be a teacher, we have the right to say you
shouldn't do certain things like hit on your students, even
if you're both adults, because it's a college colleges, Like

(01:16:25):
you have the right as an adult, as a thirty
five year old PhD. You have the right to date
a nineteen year old absolutely legally, you have that right
as a thirty five year old college professor. If you
date a nineteen year old student, you will probably get
in trouble because we've decided that makes for a bad
learning environment. Makes sense, Yeah, yeah, I don't think he

(01:16:47):
would be okay, I mean he's got other issues with that,
but like that specific thing and keeping your door open
when you have meetings with female students, and stuff. Yeah,
but whatever, whatever, So Peterson ignored the dean. He took
a sabbatical from work, and he started a Patreon where
his his new followers could pledge monthly payments in exchange
for Q and A sessions, online courses, and even monthly

(01:17:08):
one on one counseling with a man himself. He was
soon making like eighty grand a month, like crazy money
on this, very very success, very good at Patreon now.
All the while, Peterson continued to ram hard into particularly
the issue of recognizing trans people's identities from Toronto Life
to his mind, arguing that gender is a social construct
or a kind of performance, as the Ontario Human Rights

(01:17:29):
Code says, an individual subjective experience is just wrong. It's
not an alternative hypothesis, Peterson says, it's an incorrect hypothesis.
That's why the damn social justice warriors are trying to
get it in stagiated into law. They're implementing a social
constructions view of human identity into the law. No, they're
just saying, if you're going to work in one of
these public fields, you don't get to treat people shitty

(01:17:51):
because their trans are non binary. It's a very basic thing.
You don't even have to believe. You can believe that
transgender people are unhealthy and mentally ill and still call
them by their preferred pronouns because it doesn't matter what
we think privately about each other. If you're going to
work in a public thing like that, there's certain basic
things you shouldn't do because it's just it's being a
dick and it's fucking up the ability of you to

(01:18:12):
do your job. Yeah, it's common it's common sense and
common decency. It's if I if we're in a working environment,
or like us, an educational environment and you're trying to
teach me something or be my colleague and you're calling
me butt shit and I'm like, actually, could you call
me by my name? And you're like, no, your name
is butch okay, Cody. Now you're bringing up a personal

(01:18:32):
issue you and I have had at work, and I
thought we talked with HR about this and my behavior
was above approach. Well, HR didn't solve the problem, and
we're here now so we can This is live and
this is why I came on today to confront you
about this. Fired. Well, I'm going to start a Patreon
and I will contribute eighty dollars to that. Thank you, so,

(01:18:55):
so we can talk about this one on one UM
So C sixteen passed this Canadian antidiscrimination thing. It's now
law in Canada, and things are fine. It hasn't destroyed.
Freedom of speakings are fine. Name of person who's been
like arrested for this. It's Canada's in broadly better shape
than the United States. The problems they have aren't because

(01:19:18):
of this law. Right again, like the penalty for like
someone like a teacher using someone's pronouns, like refusing to
use someone's pronouns as like a fine. Um, it's essentially
a traffic in fraction. Is kind of how they treat
it um. And obviously this has had Like the fact
that everything's fine has had no impact on Jordan Peterson,

(01:19:38):
who went right on yelling about trans people for their
made up pronouns and has made that like made that
a cornerstone of his career and is increasingly popular YouTube lectures.
He urged his fans to treat trans and non binary
people as confused or deluded. When one person, after a
public lecture, acts him why he would not use non
binary pronouns, he stated, I don't believe that using your
pronouns will do you any good in the long run,

(01:19:58):
which is not your decision to make. Jordan, Oh, my god,
Jordan is not. I don't. I don't. I I have
been an employer. I have hired people, some of them
have been religious. I don't believe that going to church
does you any good. But you know what, if I
were to be discriminatory about them because they go to
church and I don't care for church, I would rightfully
get in trouble because that's fucked up and none of

(01:20:19):
my goddamn business. Yeah, rightfully get in trouble for that.
It's the same thing. It's all so uh, my opic. Yeah,
but he won't want but he won't like change. It
won't change his mind that any of these things don't
add up, or that it hasn't like affected anybody. It's
the same thing. When he was on that comedian confronted

(01:20:41):
him about like the gay wedding cake bakery issue, and
he compared it to the civil rights movement, and then
Jordan Peterson on camer was like, oh, I guess maybe
I was wrong about that, Um, And he sort of
like realized how fool like foolish he was being. Um.
And then never we ever heard from it again, never

(01:21:01):
heard of it again. He did not actually change his
mind or approach at all. No, he just got realized
that he couldn't actually make a good argument against it,
so he continued to repeat it when he was not
arguing and was instead lecturing to a room of people
who would never question him. Yep ye. In the follow
up questions during that same lecture, another student asked if

(01:21:21):
without C. Sixteen, he'd be willing to use pronouns like
they and them if a transgender person asked him to.
He responded that it might depend on how they asked,
which is like the same thing Ben Shapiro says, right, like,
because actually, if you're a person, you just generally choose
not to be shitty to the people immediately around you
because it makes life harder for no good goddamn reason. Um. Yeah,
it's frustrating, real, real simple and frustrating. Yeah, it depends

(01:21:45):
on how they asked. God, what a unbelievable I can't
even say yeah, I can't even can't even just confirm
like yeah, of course, because I'm a decent person. It's
extra frustrating because in a in a bunch of his writing,
Peterson does talk about the fact that cultures obe evolve
and change over time. He's written about this at length,
and he's also admitted that cultural understanding of gender and
like pronoun usage might change, and that that would be okay.

(01:22:09):
During one of his two thousand sixty debates, Peterson admitted,
if our society comes to some sort of consensus over
the next while about how we'll solve the pronoun problem,
and that becomes part of popular parlance, and it seems
to solve the problem properly without sacrificing the distinction between
singular and plural, and without requiring me to memorize an
impossible list of an indefinite number of pronouns that I
would be willing to reconsider my position. And again, part

(01:22:29):
of this is, like he like, there's always this. There
are some people who have like suggested what I think
are probably kind of linguistically non kind of dead ends,
like Z, which is like I don't think you're gonna
get love, but like they in them number one already
perfectly acceptable to use either a singular and plural or whatever,
and like there's not there's just not an indefinite, interminably

(01:22:49):
long list of pronouns that like people are really or
like they're just saying, like, yeah, don't don't call me,
Like if I say, don't call me this, like try
to remember to call me the thing that that that
I identify with. Like, and it's also not even like
people always assume like if you if you say something
accidentally or like you don't know, like that's that's it.

(01:23:11):
That's the one that's gonna get it, like, well know,
then you'll be corrected and then you like alter your
behavior slately. Yeah, and it it doesn't even matter if
you really get it, because I like to be entirely honest,
Like I've read a lot of stuff about gender nonconforming
stuff that I haven't understood, But all that matters is
that when someone says, hey, this is how I prefer
to be like that, Okay, fine, yeah, absolutely, Like yeah,
just don't easy easy yeah yeah, yeah, it's it's so easy. Yeah,

(01:23:36):
it's very very simple. Really. So yeah. Peterson's real issue
here is that in his mind, being trans or non
binary or anything that's not like male female, any of
this stuff is unhealthy. In his conception of the world,
order is masculine, and chaos is feminine and if it
turns out that a whole bunch of people aren't really either,
then the cosmology of his mental universe might have to change,

(01:23:57):
and Jordan Peterson is not willing to do that now.
The thing I find most worrying about him, and most
potentially dangerous, is this obsession with whether or not other
people are healthy. This is really the big issue with
Jordan Peterson um It consumes him, and it leads him
to attack people who make choices that don't fit his
definition of healthy. A great example of this in action
would be Peterson's reaction to the rise of in cell

(01:24:18):
related terrorist attacks. In two thousand eighteen, and in voluntary
celibate man named Alec Menascian rented a van and drove
it into a crowded sidewalk. He killed ten people and
wounded fourteen more, and I think most of his victims
were women, which was his goal. In a Facebook post
he made prior to his shooting, Manasseian wrote private recruit
Menassey in infantry zero zero zero one zero, wishing to
speak to Sergeant four chand please, the Insell rebellion has

(01:24:41):
already begun. We will overthrow all the Chads and Stacy's
all hail the supreme gentleman Elliott Roger, and he killed
a bunch of people. Now this is interesting to me
because I I am actually, like, like a recognized expert
in online radicals. I make money from it, like it
quoted by fucking like a lot like this is the
thing that I study like it's the only thing that
I actually have any degree of meaningful expertise and other

(01:25:02):
than certain narcotics um and to me, as a guy
who studies this for a living, Menascians, post make us
a few things very clear. One of them is that
he was radicalized in a community of similarly inclined people
somewhere on four chance his radicalization occurred as part of
a community that was self radicalizing. Two he was directly
inspired by the example of another involuntary celibate terrorist, Elliott Roger,

(01:25:25):
who was like the first one of them to shoot
a bunch of people. And three he sees his actions
as something akin to military service and defense of a cause. Right,
those things are very clear from that post, which tells
you a lot about this man and how he became
radicalized towards violence. A very useful piece of data if
you actually care about what causes people to carry out
attacks like this. Jordan Peterson doesn't know much about radical

(01:25:47):
or at least he doesn't admit to knowing much about it,
because he's never published anything relevant on in cells or
on terrorism in general. But when he was asked about this,
he still felt the need to propose sweeping government mandated
changes in civilization in order to stop to such attacks, which,
given his attitudes towards other government mandated things, I find interesting.
I'm gonna quote from the New York Times here violent
attacks or what happened when men do not have partners?

(01:26:09):
Mr Peterson says, in society needs to work to make
sure those men are married. He was angry at God
because women were rejecting him. Mr Peterson says, of the
Toronto killer, the cure for that has enforced monogamy. That's
actually why monogamy emerges. Mr Peterson does not pause when
he says this enforced monogamy is to him, simply a
rational solution. Otherwise women will only go for the most
high status men, he explains, and that couldn't make either

(01:26:31):
gender happy. In the end. Half the men fail, he says,
meaning they don't procreate and no one cares about the
men who fail. I laugh because it is absurd. This
is the New York Torms Times reporter. You're laughing about them,
he says, giving me a disappointed look. That's because you're female.
But aside from interventions that would redistribute sex, Mr Peterson
is staunchly against what he calls equality of outcomes or

(01:26:51):
efforts to equalize society. He usually calls them pathological. They're evil.
He agrees that this is inconsistent for preventing hordes of
single men from violence. He believes necessary for the stability
of society. Enforced monogamy helps neutralize that. M a lot
of a lot. There's a lot there, didn't He walked
this back and was like, why didn't mean like literally

(01:27:11):
a law. I just mean like culturally we should like
generally like support monogamy and like like but again, even
that is like, yeah, you're saying that society should change,
whether or not it's by a law or just by
culturally we support this and our vocal about it or
do like campaigns or propaganda about it or whatever it is. Uh, yeah,
I know what's wild, Cody. I spent I don't have

(01:27:34):
any kids, and I spent a decent chunk of my
my early adulthood single, I also had access to firearms
and I didn't shoot anybody. You know why, because that's
bad to do that. And you know what, I have
a lot of friends who were men and not dating
women and not don't have kids, and you know what
they don't do is murder a bunch of people people

(01:27:56):
because it's bad to murder people. Yeah, it's bad because
it's wrong. Um, that's all you need. It's very it's
very easy, yeah, yeah, to not commit mass murder. And like,
if people are committing mass murder, but people who are
you know, single and and don't have kids don't commit

(01:28:16):
mass murder, maybe the thing that's causing the mass murder
isn't the fact that they're single. Butt instead other factors
like radicalization within communities that are inherently toxic and push
people towards violence, and are perhaps artificially accelerated and um
and and publicized by certain like algorithmic realities that cause Yeah,

(01:28:37):
maybe maybe the issue is more in the thing that
this person does and everyone else who is single doesn't do,
and this person and other people who are in these
same communities carry out terrorist attacks and other people who
aren't dating anybody, don't carry out terrorist acts. Maybe we
should care about this community that they're in. Maybe the
community is the problem. Maybe it's the environment that they
keep going back to, um like a feedback loop. Also

(01:28:59):
like yeah, his his approach to it is So it's
bizarre too, because it's like, no, you're you're just do
the clean your room advice. Yeah, like that's the that's
the advice. Like well, yeah, like guys would like work
on themselves and like be socialized and like uh, you know,

(01:29:19):
get get a new skill, become desirable and these sort
of things instead of wallowing in it and these like
sad online extreme groups. It's there's a lot that's fucked
up about it, like and it's just the worst part
of it is this idea that personal responsibility matters to
these people up until people have a problem with something

(01:29:42):
like that that they also find weird, and then it
doesn't matter that like you're supposed to people are supposed
to be free and personal responsibility is supposed to matter.
Like let's ban this thing that I personally think is
kind of weird. Um, like fuck you people, Yeah, that's
that's where I land. Um Yeah, no, no, authoritarian unless

(01:30:03):
unless chaos is creeping in my idea of whatever chaos
might be. Yeah, yeah, chaos is stuff I don't like
in order is stuff that I already like. So I
don't need to change at all. The world needs to
change in order for me to be happy, which is
the thing that Jordan's says is the cause of all
evil in the world. But he doesn't recognize that he does.

(01:30:23):
It's wild, yeah, because like he's like, well, yeah, don't
don't try to change the world unless you've like perfected
yourself and fixed up your own stuff. He's a mess,
so like what is maybe he should stop doing it
too if he really like, if you go through his
twelve rules for life, he does not follow a single
one of them. No new Okay, so that's the episode. Cody,

(01:30:50):
you want to tell people where they can find you
on the internet dot com where there's part two Internet
Part two. Yeah, there will be a second part of
this good talking so much more to say. I've been
saving it. Yeah, my name is Cody and you can
find me online on Twitter Dr Mr Cody, who's the

(01:31:13):
google him on the accounts. I've got a show called
some More News on YouTube. We've got a Patreon if
you let's support us in a podcast called even More News.
I do another podcast called Worst Year Ever with the
host of this show and my co host of the
other shown Cody's Patreon. It'll be great. Treon m episodes

(01:31:34):
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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Part One: The Jordan Peterson Episode