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Hey, Robert here. It's been like two months since I had LASIK and I'm still seeing 2020. All I had to do was go in for a consultation, then go in for a maybe 10 minute procedure and then my eyes have been great ever since. You know, I healed up wonderfully. It was very simple, couldn't have been a better experience. So if you want to explore LASIK plus I can't recommend it enough. They have over 20 years experience in the industry and they performed more than two million treatments right now if you want to try getting LASIK plus you can get $1000 off of your surgery when you're treated in September, that's $500. Of per eye, just visitmylasikoffer.com to schedule your free consultation. Hello, I'm Erica Kelly from the podcast Southern Fried true crime. And if you want to go from podcast fan to podcast host, do what I did and check out spreaker from iheart. I was working in accounting and hating it. Then after just 18 months of podcasting with Spreaker, I was able to quit my day job. Follow your podcasting dreams. Let's breaker handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. Hey there, it's Ebony Monet, your co-host for the San Diego Zoo's Amazing Wildlife podcast. In this special episode, we're speaking with Doctor Jane Goodall about the fascinating journey that led to her social discoveries on chimpanzees SO4-O months, the chimps ran away from me. I mean, they take one look at this peculiar white ape and disappear into the vegetation. Bing wildlife on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Podcasts I'm Robert Evans. This is behind the ********. It's it's a podcast about bad people, the worst in the world, in fact, you might say. As I say every week when I open this show, I'm Robert Evans. Did I already say that? Probably, but there's no way to tell 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. Monsterman hello there. Thank you for having me on this live podcast. So, Cody. You know that we're live, which means we're not going to be able to edit out any of your racist rants against the Swiss, OK? I mean, that's why I say them. I don't. 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 cancelled for years, but today we're doing a live episode and bring it on. Yeah. Bring it on like the Swiss spring on. Yeah, I don't actually miss me with the Swiss, let me tell you. OK, so Cody, we got a fun episode this week and 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 B Peterson. I love Jordan Peterson, who's a doctor. I was a doctor. Respect. I am very happy that you're doing this episode and that I get to partake in it. He's a. He's one of my heroes. So, yeah, you love him. Love him. Watched a lot of his speeches, lectures. I guess you'd call him sermons. One might call him. He might call them sermons. He might call them sermons. We'll talk about that. Yeah, yeah. I mean, so, you know, you know, I joke about starting a cult a lot on this show. Do you? Yeah, I do, I do. And there's, wait, they're jokes in my, they're jokes. I don't to join your cult. They're not entirely jokes because I will probably start a cold one. It's kind of my retirement plan because I don't really think 401K's are gonna be useful that far into the future. But having a cult, you know, you can always make money. 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, but he did create a cult. Like, it's a weird situation because he never like had a bunch of people move on to land and round fight, you know, federal law enforcement agencies. I guess in Canada that would be the Mounties. 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 gone completely. I was gonna say, like I didn't realize that there was still going that strong, like I don't know. Because he cause 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. I assume that there would be people still doing that, but I I haven't. I haven't delved into those spaces in a while. Yeah. So good for them. Good for them. Yeah. Yeah. It's fun. It's very fun. So we're going to. We're going to talk about Jordan B Peterson and we're going to talk about fascism. Because while I'm not sure if I would call Doctor 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. Yeah, worldwide. It's fun. I would agree with that. I actually might go a little farther than you in the label him. Yeah, I feel like we might just we might just give the whole story and then people can apply their own labels to Jordan. Elzire Peterson, before we talk about Doctor Jordan B Peterson, I'd like to talk about the Bolshevik revolution. Now, this is a topic that that Doctor Jordan B Peterson is particularly obsessed with. Multiple interviewers will note that his house 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 got a I 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 it was Marxism research. He says it a lot. Yeah. Marxism is, yeah, imagine Kermit if you if you took the brain of Joe McCarthy and shoved it into Kermit the frog, that's more or less doctor Jordan B Peterson. So back in the late 19 teens and 20s, there were a lot of people who had the same concerns about Marxism all across Western Europe. And this was a somewhat more reasonable fear than because Marxism was certainly resurgent, or at least surging in that. And fascists in particular were terribly paranoid about it and 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, Proto Nazis. Now a term began to percolate among these people called in the term was Judeo Bolshevism. And this was kind of the the word for a conspiracy that communism was being spread around the world by Jewish people. They were often compared to like a virus. Or communism that introduces it into the bloodstream of a healthy society. 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. Now, it is true that a number of, like, the first Bolsheviks were Jewish. The guys who carried out, you know, the the big 1917 revolution and in Russia. But there were also a lot of people who are not at all Jewish who were involved in making the Soviet Union be a thing, including Joseph Stalin. And also, if you actually look at the, particularly the old early history of the Soviet Union, not a great place to be Jewish, like some real bad things happened to Jewish folks then. So of course, Zaris 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 this. But if you want to like, 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 1800s, you had the Chilinski massacre, who was the largest massacre of Jewish people, probably in history until the Holocaust anyway, **** this car. So yeah, this conspiracy basically claimed that all Jewish people everywhere were engaged in a covert plan to destroy Christianity and Western civilization by bringing communism in. Like Communism is an atheistic thing like you. There's no not supposed to be any religion under, especially like the kind of communism was being pushed in this. And so the idea was, like, this is the Jews trying to kill Christianity by making everyone communist. Yeah. Ohh, I'd love. Duh. Everybody loves saying the Jews are trying to destroy Christianity. Yep. As a rule, if you're saying the Jews and anything follows after that, maybe, yeah, maybe don't. Don't say the things. That's probably not going to go well. 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, as we've talked about. Was a super progressive place. A lot of like, like unprecedented gains for LGBT people, kind of some of the first recognition of folks who are 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, yeah. You mean, you mean, you mean degenerate, Robert? You mean degenerate art? Yeah. That's what these Nazi critics would have said. And and they 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 1/3 of YouTube. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. So the term cultural Bolshevism overtook Judeo Bolshevism in this. And it was kind of like the more educated, less bigoted persons like cultural Bolshevism. They're trying to, they're trying to Bolshevism our nation by going through the arts and stuff and like taking over kids minds with their evil books and their dirty. Lectures. I always love stuff like that. Just because, sorry, it's just like, it's just art. Like, what 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, healthcare. Everyone should have that. I mean. Other things went through my mind when I yeah. So the rest is kind of unfortunately history. The Nazis were able to convince enough people that this was happening, that cultural Bolshevism was a thing and they wanted to open elections and then they destroyed democracy and then, you know, the 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 Doctor Jordan, Balthazar Peterson and I must be honest with you, we both enjoy calling him Jordan Balthazar Peterson, but that's not his middle name. The middle name is burnt. It's bumblebee. Oh, burnt. Sorry. Burnt BER NT, which is not a name I think I've seen before. He was born on June 12th, 1962 in Edmonton, AB, Canada's Texas uh. He grew up in a small town called Fairview, which was about five hours out from the city. His dad was a teacher and a vice principal. His mother, Beverly, 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 3. 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. Yeah. Yeah. No, 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. Yeah. I that is. I mean, that makes everything I know about him and what he said as a young man that. Yeah, I didn't catch that that yeah. Yeah. That's that's a great reaction to have to the death of someone else and the trauma of a neighboring country. It's like one of these days I'm going to be dead. Like, that would be appreciate people. People will think that's cool. I'm that cool. Like Bobby Kennedy. That's pretty that's pretty telling. Wouldn't it be wild if Jordan B Peterson got into politics and was then also assassinated by Sir Han Serhan? In California? Hmm. That was. I'll have a funeral like that one day. And still alive, maybe so. During B, Peterson was raised Protestant and as a young child he was sent to confirmation class, which is a weird ritual that some Christians do. I did it when I was a kid and Christian were 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 at a big ceremony thing. And like most young people who have such an experience and are 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 what argument this guy made in response. They haven't done 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 turned first to socialism and then to political science, seeking an explanation for the general social and political insanity and evil of the world, and 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 ***** ****** ** and you gotta like. You gotta, like, try to puzzle that out for yourself. Yeah. You work through it. You figure out, like, yeah, there's something about, like, I'm gonna solve the mysteries of the universe. Yeah. Is a bit more intense with Mr Peterson. Yeah, he has to. He's he's a very intense person. And the way that he frames things 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. Was the mother of the 17th Premier of Alberta, Rachel Notley, and Notley was a member of the New Democratic Party and Peterson did spent his teenage years volunteering for the NDP, which is like a Social Democratic Party. 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. Yeah. Social saying that kind of stuff and like, yeah. Yeah, now he was during this period of horacious reader, spurred on it first by the work of George Orwell. But he eventually moved on to Alexander. Solar netson, I've always pronounced it wrong, I'm sure, and Ayn Rand, which I always pronounced right and according to a profile in Toronto life quote. While he admired leaders like Ed Broadbent, who was a an NDP leader, he became disillusioned by the parties peevish functionaries. He found Orwell's the road to Wigan Pier, which he read as an undergrad at Grand Prairie Enlightening. Orwell 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, aha, 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 like to change the world and make it better for everybody? Because we're resentful? 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 an actual, like established political party and it was full of ******** which every political party is, because political parties are very easy to get disillusioned with any of that stuff by at any age. Yeah, involving yourself and I, 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, obviously where he gets wrong is like #1 the idea that socialism is changing the world by first changing other people. I think there's some ******** 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 ****** ** and unjust that need to be changed. And then, like, people can actually live their lives and and. Be decent without these horrible systems crushing them. That's how I would go. It's like, that's just that's the goal. Yeah. Yeah. Recognizing, yeah. Yeah. And it's always fascinating to me when reactionaries like Peterson, professor love for Orwell, because they inevitably misinterpret him and I I I just like, they don't know what Orwell was saying. Which is odd because Orwell is a pretty clear writer, but it happens a lot with him. Orwell was not critiquing socialism itself as much as he was criticizing the kind of intellectual lefty. Academic Politico types who spend all their time arguing over theory and never actually do anything. Oral 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, **** like, he talks about stuff like that a lot in Omasta 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 don't like Dickens. There's a good collection of essays called them all. Art is propaganda, and it's just very obvious that he cared deeply and profoundly and understood. Like working class, poor people. Just this, this the idea that, yeah, I don't know, it's frustrating how people think about Orwell sometimes. Orwell, the guy who during the 1920s said, well, if everyone kills one fascist soon this problem will be over. And then traveled to Spain to kill fascists to do that, to do exactly that. Yeah, yeah. And then got shot in the throat after killing some fascists. Anyway, I like Orwell's not a perfect guy, but really, who would read and then misinterpret. And then uses an argument for the things that are, well, didn't believe exactly. Yeah, yeah, that's the game. That's the game. The game with Georgie never write anything. Just say, yeah, just now. Just don't write anything down. Yeah. Don't talk to people. Don't talk to people. Live in a Hut with a rifle and a large dog and shoot anyone who approaches you. Just stare at your door for the rest of your life. Exactly. That's the culture I want. So Jordan's early life occurred during kind of the high point of Cold War mania, you know, he was born in like 62, obviously. So he's like living through the worst parts of the Cold War. I think a lot of people who are like our age may not know this. Like the 80s had some pretty ******* ******** Cold War paranoia. Like, that's why Red Dawn. This is the movie that it was. Yeah. So Jordan's earliest memories would have included footage from Vietnam and, like, constant anxiety over nuclear apocalypse. 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 that the world was going to suddenly end in nuclear Hellfire. And like, I I talked about this a lot, but it really messed the whole generation up pretty bad. In an understandable way. So the threat of Total War only seemed to grow more real. As Jordan grew older, he was plagued by nightmares of nuclear Hellfire for a year and a half. He says, like just yeah yeah. Horrible night dreams. Yeah. He's yeah. Gotta gotta dream problem. Which again, you can't at this point. Perfectly reasonable. Like if you grow up hearing that **** of course you can have nightmares about nuclear Hellfire. Like obviously I have beamed into your brain sometimes. Like yeah if you're yeah, there's 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. In Toronto, life cryptically writes that Jordan quote became depressed and confused about the world's and his own capacity for evil. Which is interesting. That's interesting. What? So I wanted to pop in here so just for more context as we keep going and his comment about that funeral and how he's going to have that funeral one day when he was, I believe 14 years old. He ran. He was like into politics and he ran for like, election and oh geez, I didn't run across this one. This is why you're the guest. At age 14, he became is within 13 votes of being elected vice president of the NDP. Their sort of organization there. And the quote for the the the piece is I won't be happy until an elected Prime Minister. Oh, good. OK, well, there you go. Find things to say when you're 14 years old. I mean, 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. I guess I was kind of raised conservative and he, like, jumped 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 much better to just do tons of drugs and. Hang out on mountains with my friends, and that's way healthier than getting into. 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 I'll be miserable. Yeah. It's pretty messed up. And 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 got to be a certain kind of ****** ** to think that you have the ability and like that you should be that that person. 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. I don't know. We need to. You know Bernie Sanders. It's a man who? You know, you all know the joke at home. I'm not gonna say you know he. We all know what he did. We all know what he did. So, yeah, as he grew into a young man, Peterson also grew into a young man. That is to say, he developed an appreciation for Carl Young. Come on, that was good, right? Great. There's Mint Mobile offers premium wireless starting at just 15 bucks a month. And now for the plot twist. Nope, there isn't one. Mint Mobile just has premium wireless from 15 bucks a month. There's no trapping you into a two year contract. You're opening the bill to find all these nuts fees. There's no luring you in with free subscriptions or streaming services that you'll forget to cancel and then be charged full price for. None of that. For anyone who hates their phone Bill, Mint Mobile offers premium wireless for just $15.00 a month, Mint mobile will give you the best rate. Whether you're buying one or for a family, and it meant family start at 2 lines. 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If we don't help them find ways of making a living without destroying the environment, we can't save chimps, forests or anything else. And that becomes very clear when you look at poverty around the world. If you're living in poverty, you can't afford to ask as we can. Did this product harm the environment? Was it cruel to animals like, was it factory farmed? Is it cheap because of unfair wages paid to people and so alleviating poverty? Is tremendously important. Listen to amazing wildlife on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Good young jokes like, yeah. Alright, that's really a laugh a minute this week. Yeah. So young is 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. **** it. So Peterson also started, but he like young. He has. OK, so young. There's a couple of big things about. One of them is this idea that there's like this sort of collective, kind of like a racial memory, 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 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 certain, like mythical archetypes, the hero and all this kind of stuff. Like young talks about some **** like that. Use a complicated guy. So, Peterson, Big fan of young, he also starts devouring Knecht, uh and uh, a Romanian scholar named Mercea Eliade. She's a scholar of religion. And he also starts to devouring the work of an American professor called Joseph Campbell, whose popular book on the Hero, Myth and Society had a profound cultural impact, and one that's not dissimilar to Peterson's own work. So his, like, hero with 1000 faces, I think, is the book kind of winds up inspiring every single Disney movie that's ever been made in your lifetime. Yeah, yeah. Because, like, it's Star Wars beat for beat. It's Star Wars beat for beat. It's it's Dan, Dan Harmon 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 storytellers. Yeah. And the architects are common. I think the, the, the real thing that resonates with people is like just the arc of that basic story. You want to think the different thing. You try to get the thing you want, you think you actually need and you sacrifice a thing, you change and so on and so forth. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And and and Joseph Campbell. It's an important work of scholarship. Campbell's also problematic as **** 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 the, the 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 Mishra did that for us in a 2018 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 like, why the Nazis? Into expeditions out to the Himalayas and stuff which a lot of people don't know about that and read about the on Air Bay on your own time. Or maybe we'll do an episode about it. It's wacky ****. I'm going to quote from that Pankaj Mishra article quote. A range of intellectual entrepreneurs, from Theosophists and vendors of Asian spirituality like Viva Canada and Desi Suzuki, to scholars of Asia like Arthur Whaley and fascist ideologues like Julius Evola, who is Steve Bannon's favorite philosopher, set up stalls in the new marketplace of ideas. WB Yates, adjusting Indian philosophy to the needs of the Celtic Revival, pontificated on the ancient self. Young spun his own variations on this evidently ancestral and conscious, such conceptually foggy categories as spirit and intuition acquired. Broad currency, Peterson's favorite words being in chaos, started to appear in capital letters. Which he also is how he also tends to refer to them. Like, yeah, these, these writers and these intellectual strains are both huge parts of everything Peterson writes today. And they were also big parts of kind of the intellectual Stew that starts cooking in Europe, really. And like, it starts before World War One, but it really gets going in the 20s. 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 ******* air and people pick some of it up, a decent number of these philosophers and academics. We're not fascists. But their work influenced Hitler List ideas of like racial community, which is not all that different from kind of Young's concept of of collective unconscious. There's similarities at least, and Arian Mystic beliefs quote by the early 20th century ethnic, racial, chauvinist everywhere Hindu supremacists in India as well as and we talked about that in our our episode on I forget the the Hindu fascist lady as well as Catholic ultranet. Yeah, as well as Catholic ultra nationalist in France. We're offering visions who uprooted peoples of a rooted organic society. In which hierarchies and values had been stable. As Carla Poe points out in new religions and the Nazis 2005, political cultists would typically mix pieces of yogic 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 help nourish new mythologies of would be totalitarian regimes. And obviously, like Darwinism plays a lot of in this, which is. Yeah yeah. So clearly and again I'm yeah. But taking, sorry, it's like taking like these sort of spiritual ideas and combining them with, like, biological things. And just like, yeah, Peter Peterson does this a lot of just like, he does. He reads, he reads everything, and he has a habit of taking everything he reads and putting it all together, which is, you know, syncretism is is another kind of hallmark that echoes that of fascism. And it is one of those things, all these thinkers, all of these ideological strains are not inherently fascist, just as Darwinism like most people today, except Darwinian evolution. Basically true. And are not fascists, right. But like, it had a huge impact on Hitler. And you do have to like, I think that intelligent people can understand both of those things. Yeah. That's where it's like, just like, like the like Darwinism where it's like, this is a thing that is it. Yeah. It's. It's not a thing that we need to like force or do or like ascribe to or like, yeah, it just happens around. It just happens. He has a bad habit of like. Prescriptive versus like normative claims and like, well, there, yeah, this is this he. Therefore we should have to do this. Yes. Jordan Peterson. Yeah. Yeah. And we'll, we'll be, we'll be most of these both of these episodes will be about his ideas, right. And like what the things he believes and says. Now, I I just got over saying because I want to 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 they're fascist. That said, a lot of the writers Peterson specifically loves got real fashy during this. Marcia Eliad, who's that? Romanian scholar allied herself. She yeah. Fashion as ****. Mercea Eliade, who's that Romanian scholar, allied herself with the Romanian Iron Guard who were Romanian Nazis. Right. Like, these are the people who like that they're Nazis. Carl Young wrote about the Arian soul and unfortunately the Jewish psyche. And he was initially, he was initially very sympathetic. Yeah, neither of those are good. And he was initially sympathetic to 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. Oh yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. I mean, you can. Yeah. Like there are lots of quotes of Peterson talking about Trump where it's like, oh, Umm, you know, you know what it is. But you're. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. 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 1000 faces. Became a hit and he was being like interviewed by every TV station and whatnot in contemporary America. Like, again, he had a very Jordan Peterson like arc to his career and once he gained prominence, he would regularly drop lines like Marxist philosophy is overtaking the University in America. I did not enjoy that at all, FYI. I really doing. I'm actually kind of doing a Ben Shapiro voice there. Yeah, I didn't. I can't say Marxist without thinking of Ben. Yeah, these Marxists everywhere around me. Now, it's unfair that I do that for Ben because Joseph Campbell was profoundly anti-Semitic. He hated Jewish. That at all. I just want. And he hated black people. I'm sorry, just I hate 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, 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 is kind of kept secret, chances are that they're very related. And fuel each other. Yeah. He's he was, he was super racist as ****. 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 hero with 1000 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. So I'm not saying let's exercise these guys from our intellectual history, but like, Campbell was basically a Nazi, right? But yeah, but like, if you, if you, if you read. In his work and then write Star Wars you're not a Nazi. Yes George Lucas. In fact I would go so far as to say doesn't like Nazis. Pretty anti Nazi guy. It's kind of doesn't Star Wars. Yeah yeah despite his his magic blood religion that he put in his movies. But you know he's 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 is fascism. Ohh yeah it's the one. It's the the problem with the prequels is it's a great idea that this bad. Yeah, he just needed an editor. Speaking of Speaking of editors, I don't know where. 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 I was gonna tell you that Raytheon, our sponsor, makes the missile guidance chips that that make the targeting of school buses possible. Oh, So what? Where can I where can I Park School buses now? Yeah, kind of. I want to, I would love to help or get like a promo code for for for these chips. Well, yeah, if you actually type in promo code Yemen, you can get a discount of 15% on your next missile guidance systems. Thanks to our sponsors, Raytheon. OK, 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 of the world that we barely understand. This has gone on far too long. Far too. Let's hear from Raytheon now. So? So you sold me. We're back. Ah, OK. So yeah, Campbell's 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 and archetypes also wound up having Nazi adjacent beliefs like. A lot of the people who started codifying those lines of thought and 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 feel drawn in similar directions. And these are the folks that Jordan Peterson found himself pulled towards 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 graduate terms. He eventually became a doctor. And during his time in college, he came to grapple with his romantic feelings for a childhood friend, Tammy Roberts. Uh, Jordan and Tammy grew up on the same St They 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 save the guy. It seems like he he's like deeply devoted to his wife and she to him. It's unfortunate that some of the things that they're devoted to together, but I guess that's good for him. He he fell in love, so Peterson proposed to her. Repeatedly before the two married in 1989, Tammy later recalled. I thought, if I don't marry Jordan, I'm not going to know what he does with his life, and he's going to be an interesting person. She was not incorrect in that he is an interesting guy, not incorrect, very interesting person. I wouldn't marry him to know what happens to him personally, but you would not marry Doctor Jordan B Peterson. Well, Cody, then you might be too biased to participate in this episode any longer. So can we get Tammy on the line? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So next in Jordan Peterson's life. According to the magazine Toronto Life quote, their first child, Michaela, was born in 1992. The family moved to Boston, where Peterson took a job at Harvard, then head. 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 1998, Peterson was offered a tenure track position at the University of Toronto and the family. Will return to Canada. At UFT he was 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 Brophy, 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, 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 2018, 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 article piece. Good piece. Good piece. Good piece. Yeah. Very fascinating. 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 and the pedigree that included a PhD from McGill and a five year stint at Harvard as an assistant professor. We did not 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 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, Schiff grew to deeply like Peterson and he pushed for him to receive regular promotions and raises. When Peterson renovated his house, Schiff put 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 really clear from this article that Professor Schiff deeply enjoyed Peterson's company and respected him tremendously as a man and 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. Schiff laments that he did not give sufficient concern to some of Jordan's teaching tactics. Quote, as the undergraduate chair I read 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 many of Jordan's lectures to see for myself. Remarkably, the 50 students always showed up at 9:00 AM and were held in rapt attention for an hour. Jordan was a captivating lecturer, 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 is 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 not control himself. He was a preacher more than a teacher. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Yeah. I mean, he's like, that's a dead on when you watch one of his lectures. It does seem like that. Like I yeah, like I said earlier, it's less speeches, less lectures. It's more sermons. Umm. Yep, he does. And yeah, 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 yeah, puts them all together and and pushes that idea. It's like really easily distilled down to the lobster example, I think. Where he's like, Oh yeah, the world should be like this because of over here, 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 the way it should be, it's, you know, one of the things I think that 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 300 and or 180 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 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 be examining every aspect of your beliefs because otherwise you go ******* crazy. Sometimes you just be like, yeah, you know, it's fine. Like, but you should always be finding yourselves, yourself challenged by things, which is different from saying everybody needs to be debating. About things, because some things should be debated, but you should always be like seeking out things that like challenge or complicate your understanding of the world, because the world's complicated. Anyway, so whether or not Preacher is a fair description, Jordan grew obsessed with belief and particularly why people believe things. And most particularly like why people who had supported terrible regimes, fascist and communist totalitarian regimes that killed a lot of people, why they believed so strongly in the things that they were doing, which is obviously like I think is a great thing to to to investigate. That's my whole life too, draws people to authoritarianism and things like exactly in 1999. He published his first book, maps of meaning, a dense 600 page academic treatise on the architecture of belief, which is a great term. He's a decent titler. Yeah, maps of meaning shows a campbellian fascination with the hero myth and the the things that cultures tend to find heroic, as well as a great deal of younger and interest in like a kind of sort of collective racial and consciousness and the reoccurring influence of myth and tradition in human society. The book also evinced an obsession 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 it at Bay by the maintenance of social order. The reign of order is insufficient. However, because order itself becomes overbearing and deadly if allowed, unregulated, or permanent expression, the actions of the hero constitute an antidote to the deadly 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 Peterson. So maps of meaning include some fascinating insight into Jordan's own life, and I'm going, I'm going to 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 traced 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 ward off 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 he's a he's very verbose, but he is a very deliberate speaker. Yeah, he is. He's a great speaker. Like, 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, very good at his captivating. Yeah, absolutely make a great preacher. Yeah, he would make a great preacher talk, 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 of I think some sort, had a hard time defining Peterson's book as 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 sizable number who disagree with that statement. Doctor Paul Taggart, a Canadian philosopher and cognitive scientist, wrote this about the book in Psychology Today. Its emphasis on religious myth and heroic individuals provides a poor blueprint for understanding the origins of totalitarianism and an even poorer guide to overcoming its evils. And and Doctor Taggart described maps of meaning as murky in 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, which is like the sense of yeah, it's less meandering and disjointed than it's video, than his videotaped lectures. So yeah, yeah. A little muddy. You kind of like, it's a little hard to parse. It's hard to parse and 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 be like, he could have cut a couple 100 pages out. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Very dense and long. Yeah. Now, Doctor Taggart condensed the book's main arguments into four points. And these are what he thinks that Peterson is getting in the book. And he's smarter than I am. #1 myths are culturally universal. #2 myths are the psychological. Origin of morality #3 myths are the philosophical basis for morality and #4 myth based morality grounds political judgments about totalitarian states. 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. 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 also disagree with the statement that they're culturally universal, which Doctor Taggart will disagree with too. But we'll talk about that in a bit later, OK? Yeah, there's a lot of because like, it's just very like. Forceful and certain there's no, yes. Like a lot of things, Jordan. Yeah says even are just like, well, OK that that kind of relates to this, but it it's not like a universal rule. It's not the way the world is. Yeah, he's got it often seems like he's trying to like, create a religion or like, create like a worldview that 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. Is familiar with and ignoring all of the different myths and cultures that actually disagree with a lot of what he's saying and then just saying no, every culture basically believes this stuff. Yeah, he mean he means what the culture, even though he doesn't necessarily know that he means that. Yeah. Now, it's perhaps not surprising that according to Professor Schiff, who's again the guy his mind, his old mentor who came to worry, you know, very much about his influence. It's perhaps not surprising that this guy says Peterson's personality grew more intense as the years Mint Mobile offers premium wireless starting at just 15 bucks a month. And now for the plot twist. Nope, there isn't one. Mint Mobile just has premium wireless from 15 bucks a month. There's no trapping you into a two year contract. 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Hey, it's Rick Schwartz, one of your hosts for San Diego Zoo's Amazing Wildlife podcast. In this special episode, we sit down with Doctor Jane Goodall to hear her inspiring thoughts on how we can create a better future for humans, animals and the environment. Anything, particularly young children out into nature so that they can experience it and take time off from this virtual world of being always on your cell phones and so on. And get the feel of nature so that you come to be fascinated, then you come to want to understand it, and then you come to love it, and at that point you want to protect it. And then we'll come to the sort of healthy world that I envision as a good future for us. And the rest of life on this planet. Listen to amazing wildlife on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Grew by darker and angrier now Peterson student reviews were always exceptional and he earned a position on EU of T's 10 year track. But he also showed peculiar signs of non academic ambitions. Jordan 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 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 mini 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, 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? So little staff person. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Getting, getting all again. It's the mysticism. It's the spirituality. It's the like the the deeper stuff that seems. Yeah. It can't be as simple as like, yeah, no, you know, outlining your goals and and talking, you know, outlining some aspects of your past and think about what you want your future to be can be helpful if you're kind of in like a confused or muddled state. No, no. You're in a dream state and something inside you comes up like, OK, yeah, it's like, yeah, you're you talk to the universe like, well, no, you. Just like you assess your life and you try to like, we all do it right, like I 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 10,000 students have gone through this program, that it decreased dropout rates by 25% and raised GPA's by 20%. I've seen no verification of these numbers outside of Jordan B Peterson himself, and as far as I'm aware he never put his self authoring suite up to any kind of rigorous outside testing. We'll say that an awful lot of people who've 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 Peterson has to say. But that said, a lot of people say it's great. One customer wrote that, in her view, the program allowed you to 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 Ranieri cult. We also did episodes on talk a lot about integrations. Anyway, I always find that a little weird, but yeah, it was it. Also, it only costs like 15 bucks. So I I would not want to be like saying that he was doing the same thing Scientology was doing because it seems like a pretty affordable thing, right? Yeah, yeah, but that does that always strikes me as a little weird. And I found another review on a site called the Deep Dish that explains the attitude Peterson's $15 course conveys. And this is by someone who took it. Quote, When the oxygen mask drops down on an airplane, you better fasten yours before you. Way to be a hero, because people who've passed out from hypoxia are not known for being particularly useful. We've all heard the safety briefing 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 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 you're playing depressurizes, you should put on your own oxygen mask first because you will be unconscious and unable to help people. Yeah. But I think generalizing this because this is a big thing, Peterson says. You have to fix yourself before you help other people. And I disagree with that profoundly. And I think that a better comparison would be to think like an EMT thing. So if you arrive on the scene and as an emergency in the as an EMT, 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 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 safe first so that I'm not making the problem worse, but the whole thing I'm doing is attempting to actually. Provide aid to people, right. Anyway, I think that's a more useful. Yeah. If you're trying to mean, yeah, it's his game. It's what I mean, it's reductive. It's called his game. But like, that's that analogy. He takes these situations in these analogies and these these little examples and then. Says that this is how all of society is. Yeah, and that's like really a huge leap and pretty irresponsible. It's it's the lobster thing. But also like, I don't know if you if you're a person who's like, what if everybody was able to go to the doctor without having to pay, like copays and premiums and all that ********. That doesn't mean that the person suggesting that needs to live a perfect life and have all of their problems fixed out that like, this, this example. Is so wrong and misleading. It's and and it it things like that. 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, you have to take care of yourself first, otherwise you'll 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 yeah. But no, it's it's kind of a microcosm of the way he thinks, which is like, find one, like, kind one example that if you deliver it well in a speech will sound really compelling to people. Because you're comparing it to something in the real world. But like, if you think about it for more than a couple of seconds, you realize like, well, that actually can't be generalized to any. Yeah, that like, 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, well, come on, man. Yeah. So in this course, this self authoring suite, 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. And obviously it's not bad advice to tell people to take care of themselves. You should take care of yourself. Yeah, but Jordan being Jordan, he immediately takes things beyond simple self-care. The Self authoring suite represents the first salvo in 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 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, I'm speaking pretty literally, Oh yeah, his, his, some of his diagrams in that book are something to behold. Yeah. So the way Peterson frames things, though, is very seems very reasonable. If your life feels out of control, you focus fix first on taking care of small, immediate needs and goals. And this builds your confidence. And it'll help you, you deal with larger and larger things and help you order your own minds that you can accomplish greater tasks. Something sinister in that, in fact, I'd say it's good advice, but the focus on chaos and on life is a constant battle between order and 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. A very funny profile because I think Nellie 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, people wouldn't be human anymore. They'd be something else. They'd be transhuman 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, Jordan. We don't really do that so much anymore. Now we're like, they're rocks full of explosives and we should get away when they. Yeah, like. We build things out unbelievable. And like, also, like, look at society and how it's like, why do you think that women are categorized like that in your mind? Who is? Who's doing the categorize? Greek goddess of discord was heiress and therefore chaos is always feminine. Yeah, right. Like, like men are order and women are chaos. Women have a regular menstrual cycle. That's pretty ******* ordered. Whereas men were largely responsible for the partitioning of Poland, which was pretty chaotic. Pretty chaotic. There's this. There's 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. And be like, no, women are order, you ******* **** ****. And yeah, he like, yeah, he can't. He can't. 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 wanna know what's not frustrating Cody, though? I would, yes, I would like to know that actually is this fantastic transition to ads that Roberts about to do. Robert yeah. Fruits. Ohh. Wow. Nailed it. Sad. I liked it. I did not. We're back. Back before we move on, I was just quoting from that Nellie Bowles New York Times article, and I I think it's really funny 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 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 chaos. My beautiful it's frustratingly beautiful is what it is like. You don't have to be this stressed out all the time. You know, Mr Peterson, this isn't. This doesn't need to be your life. He could, he considered. One of his big issues is that he thinks that I'm the current guy in charge of Canada is basically like a a quasi Marxist. And it's like, actually, if you look at it, Canada's basically one gigantic mining and natural gas company with like a social safety net strapped to it so that people don't notice that it exists primarily to extract resources from the world. It's the furthest thing from Marxism possible. It just has a good healthcare system. But like, let's not yeah, it's also like, Peterson's not going to get on that. Yeah. Mr Mr Bumblebee, I I gotta I gotta point out also like his whole thing of like if you change this if you change that what is it? Is it is it is it at now you're a transhuman 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 and 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 on from this and I don't think you would say that the reality is if you were to take like. Anyone from 500 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 ******* brains. It would like, yeah, the world would make no sense. The air would taste different. Yeah, yeah. They wouldn't be able to understand people speaking what is essentially their language because our our idioms have changed so much. Like it would be a nightmare for them because people are changed deeply every couple of generations. Culture changes constantly. And, like, deal with describing is like, ******* baby. Yeah, yeah. It's like so, yeah. It's good stuff now. When one reads a lot of Peterson's interviews, they get the sense that Jordan 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 we'll 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 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, he got good at making people believe what he said. 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 dedicated Communists I know would find weird. Like, it's so weird the amount. There is so weird. 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, 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? Yeah, it's so bleak. All of your walls are men shooting each other and hoisting red flags. Like, of course you think Marxism is coming for you. Yeah, it's wild. And also, like, just, like the, the, the, the motive behind doing that. It's like, if you're interested, if you're, like, fascinated by, like, the history of. Nazism. Because you wanna, like, find out what they think and, like, fight it if you wanna fight not. You're not gonna put me. Yeah, right. You're not gonna put Nazi **** everywhere. I have no Nazi propaganda on my walls, Cody. Yeah, that's normal. That I I'm glad. And like, I do have one reproduction Vermont 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 going to *******. The coat's not the problem. Nobody hates the Nazis because their coats were good. Yeah, there was not a coach problem. Doesn't have a swat. Look on it. It's just a coat. Anyway, so, uh, Peterson grew increasingly, uh, also, like during this kind of. Where he's becoming darker and more weird and radical, Professor Schiff 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 shaman himself. He did all of that with the same great fervor and commitment. Yeah, choosing me also a little bit appropriative. I don't know. You know, Doctor Peterson also struggled with depression. Now, this had 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. 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. So it must have been pretty. He must been pretty unpleasant to be around. Pretty? Yeah. It sounds like it sounds like an issue. Yeah, he's already intense. Like, he's already pretty pretty difficult to hang with. Yeah. 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. With the demons in his head seemed to have a noteworthy impact on his personality. Professor Schiff writes that as the years went on quote, 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 rarely challenged him. He overwhelmed challenges with volumes of information that were hard to process and evaluate. He was more forceful than I and he had a much quicker mind. Also again evocative of what I saw in the classroom. I 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, maybe that was great for a professor. Yeah. I'm going to say not great for a priest either. Not great. It's not just not. Not great. Yeah, just not great. 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'd gotten in trouble at work over her resistance to political correctness. Talk at work. And I'm gonna quote from the New York Times here. He says one patient had to be part of a long e-mail 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 these buzzwords and she was subjected to. She sent me the e-mail chain 30 emails about whether or not the flip chart was acceptable, Mr Peterson says. So he was radicalized, he says, because the radical left wants to eliminate hierarchies, which he says are the natural order of the world. Now, it's a bit of a jump from, I'll grant you that 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, yeah, yes, that's probably other. There are other examples that I won't say because we're not going to say that. But like, 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 his stuff is like, come on man, what is? 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 whether or not a specific term is offensive, means that you want to eliminate. Hierarchies. Like, I'm gonna guarantee you whatever person like this radical left boss was actually probably like more or less a Democrat who really supported a hierarchical Democratic Party and stuff and was just overly worried about political process. Also, like, he's talked about it's, I don't know if we're going to get into this more, but like, he has talked about feeling boxed in and like, have the code is like, you know, everyone sort of claims that I'm some sort of right winger, but it couldn't be farther from the truth. He denies that he's like right wing. But his yeah, 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 the definitionally, like, that's what that's your right wing. Yeah, it it stuff like that. Whenever I hear stuff like that, like, pings me is like, oh, you're you're just lying. Yeah, you're too. You're too smart to to not know that. That's ridiculous. And we'll talk about it because 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. Yes. The classical liberal, I'm sure. Oh yes. Yeah. So in 2014. Doctor Peterson took his 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, 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 200 statements from safe spaces are necessary to promote diversity of perspective and feathered headdresses should be banned at music festivals to police brutality. It's 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 totaling more than 1300 respondents. According to Toronto life, Peterson and Brophy concluded that political correctness exists in two forms, which they call PC egalitarianism and PC authoritarianism. Simply put, PC egalitarians, or classic liberals who advocate for more democratic governance and equality, PC authoritarians are, according to Brophy, the ones now relabelled as social justice warriors. Both share a high degree of compassion. Extreme compassion, they believe, can lead to difficulty assessing right from wrong. It can also mean the forgiveness of all failures and transgressions by people viewed as vulnerable. Any personality trait to an extreme as pathological, Brophy 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 would say that if it if people, what I would say is if people feel like they need safe spaces in the school for whatever reason, I'm fine with them having that 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. They'd say, Oh yeah, people need that. Why not? Like, there's plenty of room in the campus. Yeah. Let's have it. Sure. Yeah. Saying it's like, I feel safe talking about a thing, and there doesn't seem to be any sort of room for that. In in the like, it seems like the questionnaire is kind of designed to get people to respond in an authoritarian way. Like, feathered headdresses should be banned at music festivals. Should they be banned? I wouldn't say they should be banned. Is it ****** ** for, like, like, white kids to, like, wear Native American headdresses? Oh yeah, that's that's messed up. They shouldn't do that. Banned. Yeah. The music. Like, you know, I don't know when I'm gonna say that. Like, the second thing will not. Yeah. Most will not be like, Oh yeah. Ban them. Ban them everywhere. Yeah. That is. That is written to elicit the kind of result that he wants. And, like, I spend a lot of time reading, like, especially on Twitter, like, indigenous folks talking 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. Yeah. We need to write on pointing that. Like, that's. No. Yeah, they're trying to explain like why it's offensive, which is different from saying ban it at music festivals. It's explaining these things and like, why? Why? Why do people want to say space? Why do they, why does this? Why does this not saying, like, we need to write laws to require them or like we need to ban X or Y? It's also interesting to explain to people why this is messed up. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The quote about like the they have too much compassion and like are prone too much to forgiveness or something. Yes, we'll yeah. OK, that's a big through line in his W we're obsessed with. Counseling people. 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 interesting good relation between that hardness, yeah, so the article goes on to note that like most psychologists in his field doctor. Peterson believes there are 5 major personality traits extroversion agreeableness 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 ******* nonsense like that. You can you can separate **** 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. Maybe. Maybe it's kind of dumb. That said, yeah, I find a lot of what's written about all this to be lowkey terrifying. Like this quote from Toronto life, these traits have both biological and cultural origins, and, as Peterson is fond of saying, the biological factors maximize in 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. No, this is all dressed up. And again, I'm not saying this is what I saw psychologists believe. So I don't think that's true. Jordan Peterson and his yeah, I think he's a little outside the norm there. Yeah, this is what bell curve ************* believe, 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 **** where you talk about how black IQ was inherently lower. And if you start talking about that **** you wind up having the kind of questions about whole races that lead to real bad things going down. Yeah, he's got. Sounds like you stuff. Yeah a lot of mall and you kind of things and that's that's something that I think she's never really addressed of like if he doesn't leave this and this and this and this what's the next thing what's the logical result to this way of thinking he will always say like 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. I conclusion that's kind of different from the thing that you're saying. Yeah. Yeah. And like how to deal with the there's a one of the worst things I think he talks about is about IQ and how because the military doesn't let people in the military under a certain IQ. That, yeah, that they cannot function in society. They cannot contribute to society because we don't let them in the military. And he said so. These two claims, he says therefore that's the most horrifying thing I've ever heard. He doesn't go further than that. He doesn't explain why, but he talks about how if we, if they can't contribute to society, citation needed that and we can't pay them, like universal basic income thing like that doesn't work either. Again, citation needed therefore. And then trailing off, yeah, yeah, we need to gas them in trucks. Like, what do you do, what do you do with these people? It's just like, yeah, these, like, X is true even though it's not. Why? It's true even though it's not. Therefore, you figure out the Z for yourself. I'm not going to say it. It's clear, as with everything, that Jordan Peterson's wrong about that. He has no real experience with people who have, you know, what you would call like, IQ's lower than that threshold. I, 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. But also who were physically healthy and who were perfectly capable of doing like we would get them. We 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 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 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 to find a way for them to be a part of society and be around and and and live with and contribute with everyone else. And because there's no reason that they shouldn't. Yeah, exactly. And because they can't join the environment 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 is also ridiculous. It's also ****** ** yes, but also like saying that people need to have a job to contribute to society. But also, like in, like, comparing people, like, you can't get into the military, therefore it. X&Y, you know, wasn't allowed in the military. The President of the United States, we had bones, bone spurs cutting. Yeah. And I don't see Peterson talking about how if you have bone spurs and you can't, you know, it's it's like everything he says. It's just like a wild, disgusting sort of approach to how humans are. Yeah, I don't. I don't like it. Hi. So in 2016 Canada started to debate over a bill C-16 that would expand the country's human rights law by adding gender identity and gender expression to the list of things employers in the government can't discriminate against. This would have meant that college professors like Doctor 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 or like people. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, all the things that you don't want people to be discriminated. 1st to like so they can live their ******* lives, yes. But to Doctor Peterson, the thought that he might be forced to refer to someone by their chosen pronoun, even if he didn't like that they'd chosen that pronoun. That's all that mattered. That's all this law was in. Jordan 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 tended to see as 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 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 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 is 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, it's 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, you just being * ****. 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 ****** to you personally for no good reason, because that's bad and you shouldn't do that to students. It's not OK kind of makes you 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. College is like you have the right as an adult. As a 35 year old PhD, you have the right to date a 19 year old, absolutely. Legally, you have that right. As a 35 year old college professor, if you date a 19 year old student, you will probably get in trouble because we've decided that makes for a bad learning environment. Sense. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I don't think he would be OK. 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, yeah, that rule. But whatever. It's nice. 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&A sessions, online courses, and even monthly one-on-one, counseling with a man himself who was soon making like 80 grand a month like crazy. Money on this very, very successful, 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 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 stagnated into law. They're implementing a social construction, just 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 ****** because they're trans or nonbinary. It's a very basic thing. It's 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 * **** and it's ******* up the ability of you to 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 a educational environment and you're trying to teach me something or be my colleague and you're calling me **** **** and I'm like, actually, could you call me by my name? And you're like, no, your name is Butch. OK, Cody, now you're bringing up a personal issue you and I have had at work, and I thought we talked with HR about this, and my behavior was above reproach. 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, OK? Fired. Well, I'm gonna start a Patreon and I will contribute $80,000 to that. Thank you. So so we can talk about this one-on-one. So C-16 passed this Canadian anti discrimination thing. It's now law in Canada and things are fine. It hasn't destroyed freedom of speech. To name a person who's been like arrested for this. It's canada's. In broadly better shape than the United States. Uh, the problems they have aren't because of this law, you know? Right. Not causing, yeah. Again, like the penalty for like, someone, like a teacher using someone's pronouns, like, refusing to use someone's pronouns is like a fine. It's essentially a traffic infraction. It's kind of how they treat it. And obviously this has had, like, the fact that everything's fine has had a no impact on Jordan Peterson, 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 asked 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, which is not your decision to make. Jordan. Oh my God, Jordan. 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 ****** ** and none of my *** **** business. Yeah, you'd rightfully get in trouble for that. It's the same thing. Yeah. It's all. Yeah. He's so myopic. Yeah. But he won't. He won't. 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 him about, like, the gay Wedding Cake bakery issue, and he compared it to the civil rights movement. And then Jordan Peterson on camera was like, oh, I guess maybe I was wrong. About that. And he sort of, like, realized how fool, like, foolish he was being. Yeah. And then never, we never heard from it again. Never 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. Yeah. So he continued to repeat it when he was not. He responded that it might depend on how they asked, would you like the same thing Ben Shapiro says, right. Like, because actually, if you're a person, you just generally choose not to be ******. The people immediately around you because it makes life harder for no good *** **** reason. Yeah, it's frustrating. Real, real simple and frustrating. Yeah, it depends on how they ask God. What a unbelief. Like, can't even say, yeah. Yeah. Can't even, can't even just confirm. Like, yeah, of course, because I'm a decent person. And it's extra frustrating because in a bunch of his writing, Peterson does talk about the fact that cultures obviously 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 OK during one of his 2016 debates. Pearson 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 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 going to get a lot, but like they and 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 long list of pronouns that, like, people are really 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. Right. 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. That's the one that's gonna get like, well, no. Then you'll be corrected and then you, like, alter your behavior slightly. 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. All that matters is that when someone says, hey, this is how I prefer to be like that. OK, fine. Yeah, absolutely. Like, yeah, just don't. Easy, easy. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's it's so easy. Yeah. 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. And 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, and Jordan Peterson is not willing to do that now. The thing I find most worrying about him, and most potentially dangerous, is his obsession with whether or not other people are healthy. This is really the big issue with Jordan Peterson. 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 incel related terrorist attacks. In 2018, an involuntary celibate man named Alec Minassian rented a van and drove it into a crowded sidewalk. He killed 10 people and wounded 14 more, and I think most of his victims were women, which was his goal in a Facebook post he made prior to his shooting, Minassian wrote. Private recruit manasian infantry 00010, wishing to speak to Sergeant Fourchan, please. The Incel Rebellion has already begun. We will overthrow all the Chads and Stacy's all hail the supreme gentleman, Elliot Rodger, 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 radicalization. I make money from it, like it quoted by ******* 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 than certain narcotics. And to me, as a guy who studies this for a living, manasian post makes a few things very clear. One of them is that he was radicalized in a community of similarly inclined people somewhere on 4 Chan. So he 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, 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, or at least he doesn't admit to knowing much about it because he's never published anything. Event 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 such attacks, which, given his attitudes towards other government mandated things I find interesting. I'm going to quote from the New York Times here. Violent attacks are what happened when men do not have partners, Mr Peterson says. And 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 is 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 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 Times 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 she calls equality of outcomes. Their efforts to equalize society. He usually calls them pathological. They're evil. He agrees that this is inconsistent. But preventing hordes of single men from violence, he believes is necessary for the stability of society. Enforced monogamy helps neutralize that. A lot of a lot. There's a lot there. Didn't he walked us back and was like, why didn't mean, like, literally a law? I just mean, like, culturally we should, like, generally, like, support monogamy and, like, have, 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 are propaganda about it or whatever it is. Yeah, you know, it's wild, Cody. I spent, I don't have 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. Yeah, that's. And you know what? I have a lot of friends who are 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 because it's bad to murder people. Yeah, it's bad because it's wrong. All you need. It's very it's very easy to yeah to not commit mass murder and like if people are committing mass murder, but 99% of people who are, you know, single and and don't have kids don't commit mass murder. Maybe the thing that's causing the mass murder isn't the fact that they're single, but instead other factors like radicalization within communities that are inherently toxic and push people towards violence and are perhaps artificially accelerated and. And and publicized by certain, like, algorithmic realities that cause, yeah, 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 attacks. 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, like a feedback loop also. Like, yeah. 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 should like work on themselves and like be socialized and like you know, 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 ****** ** about it, like, and it just the the the worst part of it is this idea that personal responsibility matters to these people, up until people have a problem with something 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. Like, **** you people, yeah, that's that's where I land. Yeah. No, no authoritarian lesbianism 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 says is the cause of all evil in the world. But he doesn't recognize that he does. 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. He he really like if you go through his 12 rules for life, he does not. Follow a single one of them now. New. OK, so. That's the episode Cody. You want to tell people where they can find you on the internet.com, Cody, don't worry. There's Part 2, Internet Part 2. Yeah. There will be a second part of this. Thank you good talk more because I've got so much more to say. I've been saving it because I didn't wanna. Ohhh yeah, my name is Cody and you can find me online on Twitter. Doctor, Mr Cody use the Google him on the accounts. I've got a show called some more news on YouTube. We've got a Patreon if you like. Support us in a podcast. But even more news I do another podcast called worst year ever with the host of this show and my Co host of the other show. And they got to donate to Cody's Patreon. It'll be. Great Treon episodes over, Boone swish. Hello, I'm Erica Kelly from the podcast Southern Fried True crime, and if you want to go from podcast fan to podcast host, do what I did and check out spreaker from iheart. I was working in accounting and hating it. Then after just 18 months of podcasting with Spreaker, I was able to quit my day job. Follow your podcasting dreams. 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