Behind the Bastards - Part One: Robert and Cody Watch Jordan B. Peterson's New TV Show

Episode Date: November 1, 2022

Robert is joined by Cody Johnston to discuss Jordan Peterson's new TV series, 'Dragons, Monsters & Men.'See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's abusive? My friendship with Cody! I'm Robert Evans, host of Behind the Bastards, a podcast about terrible people with my good friend Cody Johnston. Cody, how are you doing? Hello there, I'm spectacular. I couldn't be better and I won't be judging from...

No. The little I know about what we're gonna talk about. You're gonna have a terrible day today, Cody. Cody, you are the host of some more news and the co-host of the podcast with a similar but not exactly the same name. YouTube sensation, it would be fair to say. Oh, absolutely. And my friend of many years. Cody, you're familiar with the concept of love languages?

I am. Yeah, it's this idea that different people express love in different ways. And a major part of having a healthy relationship is understanding the way that the people in your life express love and communicating to them the way that you do so that you don't misunderstand each other and you appreciate when the other person tries to share with you the way they feel. And I've come to recognize over the years, Cody, that you and I have a particular love language. It started a couple of years ago when you began telling me about Dr. Jordan B. Peterson. That all culminated in me putting together like a three-hour podcast series about the life of Dr. Jordan B. Peterson.

And then a couple of years later, you put together a three-hour video about everything Jordan Peterson has ever said and done. And I just watched that, Cody. And now I am about to sit down with you and I am about to share as part of my love language some more about Jordan B. Peterson. This is what we call romance. Yeah, this is. And there's nothing pure. So thank you. I receive.

I believe I started this by saying, Cody, I love you. I'm sorry. Instantly apologetic as soon as I popped on. Cody, you know, Mr. Peterson, Dr. Mr. Peterson. And you know, I'm sure that he has recently started a new television show, a hit new TV show. Everybody's talking about it on the Daily Wire. Can we call it a TV show? Yeah, yeah, it's like a show.

It's like a show. It has the. It's like a show is a great description. Well, like it's a show for sure. Like it contains the totemic sigils that were associated as being like a television show. So like if you were like the things that like the the the representative artifacts that signify that something is a TV show are present in this thing, which is not a TV show. It's on the Daily Wire's website. Not even Daily Wire Plus on their website.

Or is it? Well, yeah, you have to have whatever their streaming account is. I don't know. Cody, I'm not going to tell you how I got this show. I you don't need to. It's OK. I understand. It's called Dragons, Monsters and Men. Boring. That's classic.

I know, I know. I think how there's any chance at all that like the name was picked in part because they're like, well, the new Game of Thrones and the new Lord of the Rings shows. 100 percent. I think so because the intro. It's going to say that like. So watch the new Lord of the Rings show, Cody. I haven't seen it yet. It's pretty good. I like it.

But the intro of it is very clearly doing a Game of Thrones. Yeah, like they that kind of like where it's sort of a kind of abstract representation using like symbols and stuff and whatever. Sure. It's fine. I but they're doing the same thing in Dragons, Monsters and Men to open the series. Yeah. Well, so for listeners, a screen is being shared with me and the first frame of this show is on screen. And I instantly believe you and agree with you and like it's not even it's not even a letter I'm looking at.

I'm looking at the shape of a part of a letter from the intro. Yeah. Yeah, they're doing Game of Thrones. Yeah, they're all smoky and dusty and like, yeah. Let's just let's play the start of this. And you at home will hear it and then we'll kind of describe what we're seeing after you heard it. But I think both are valuable. Cody, I'm sorry.

I love you. It's okay. I'm probably not starting yet, Sophie. Oh. Wait. Cody. What? Hey now.

They can't do this. Come on. All right. All right. All right. Let's let's pause it and talk about it. And then is it just him at a chair? It's just him in a chair.

But so, so, so what we see in that intro is like a bunch of they kind of look like Stone Age glyphs, a mix of like stuff that might be runic shapes. I'm not a runes expert. Maybe they're actual runes. But like fake runes and like a video game, you know, you gotta collect the runes, you know, there's like animal glyphs. There's like an arrow that's going up like progress and then turns down probably because the liberals started doing a gender. Yeah. The rune for wokeness.

Yeah. The woke rune. God. And then when you heard that ching and then that a bunch of fire blew on the screen. It did. Followed by the logo, dragons, monsters and men. Dragons are your challenges. Monsters are the demons.

You have to slay and man. Wow. It's like you've spent dozens of hours watching Dr. Jordan Peterson talk about his ideas. It's just like basic symbolism and shit. All right. Yeah, it is. It is, Cody. It is kind of.

I think Jordan Peterson would have been a really inspirational, like sixth grade creative writing teacher. 100 percent. I've always thought like, hey, man, go out, write a book. Not your weird books. Write a novel. Write a fiction book. And like use all your ideas and your archetypes and your symbolism and say a story that you think should be told with all those ideas.

And then maybe people will finally see what you believe. I think something different is going to happen, Cody. I agree. So the episode one is titled, What Makes a Man? And once the title crawl finishes were presented with Jordan Peterson wearing a nice fitted blue suit and sitting in a leather armchair in a library. There's a large like hourglass style clock that's about four feet behind him. And what's interesting to me is how all the production value and intensity they've tried

to build up at the start of the episode dissipates the instant Jordan starts talking. And I'm going to have Sophie click play to display that. I can't. I'm sorry, Cody. I love you. There are multiple. Let's say competence and authority multiple, especially in a sophisticated society. And so you're fortunate if you're good at one or two things, most of the ways you could

be competent and generous, you're just not that good at. So first of all, I would say don't be too disheartened, especially if you're young. Pause it. Pause it. So I listeners, what's just happened on screen is that obviously you can hear him talking. It's just him sitting in the chair. And after like 20 seconds, the screen splits and we watch a close up of his face next to a slightly further outshot of his face, both at the same time.

It's really off putting and disconcerting. It's because they know, they know what they've done. They know it's really boring. They threw God knows how much money at this guy, like millions of dollars, I assume. Probably millions of dollars. That's why he literally said this out loud in one of his videos. Like, yeah, they gave me a lot of money and more power to him. Go for it.

So they know what they've done, but ultimately, and the Daily Wire Plus wants to be the programming. They want to anti-woke the TV that you don't get on HBO, which we secretly love, that kind of thing. And so they've thrown all this money at it, but ultimately what they bought was Jordan Peterson doing his lectures, which is just a guy on stage. That's it. So they have to make it seem somewhat like cinematic or exciting or visually interesting at all.

And so they have two cameras follow him and do a split screen. Cody, Cody, I'm going to give you a spoiler at a certain point. There's going to be three. I was like, well, at a certain point, they do like reenactments or like they feel like no, a third. No, it is never anything with Jordan Peterson on screen. Okay, here's my slight feedback here. So he's worked very hard.

The hair is perfectly slicked back. He's chosen the coat. Why is his tie crooked and why is his shirt wrinkled? Two notes. Those were my two notes. You've clearly tried super hard to have this like put together image, but yet your shirt is wrinkled and your tie is crooked. What is happening?

Also, what is that tie? They didn't. I'm just going to say, I don't want to. Benzo shakes. Possibly the Benzo shakes. I'm just going to say it's the Benzo shakes. Glass houses and so on. I wear a very crumpled suit and tie on my show.

I do not own a suit or tie. On purpose. But you look fabulous, Cody. Thank you so much. This man does not. Well, he seems like the kind of guy who'd be like, well, no, iron my shirt before my big show. My nicest outfit is an open hoodie with a Bart Simpson Gulf War commemorative t-shirt. I mean, clearly.

It spells Saddam Hussein Huskens. He's put a lot of effort into it. Like he's gone through the trouble of calling up Gavin Newsub and being like, what hair gel do you use? And using all the hair gel. But yet, crooked tie wrinkled shirt. Just very interesting to note. Shall we continue, Robert? Also, Sophie, real quick, get used to the hands.

He does not stop doing the little magic fingers. He loves the little magic fingers. Spirit fingers, if you will. As much money as I'm sure they're spending on this. And for all the production value that existed in the first 28 seconds. Which is going to be the most exciting thing we see today. It's I think the episodes. I don't even think there's scripts to these.

Like you said, it's just like they filmed a lecture. This isn't I've seen his lectures and they are normally like he's wrong about things. But he knows how to give a competent lecture, right? Where he like builds to a point. And yeah, there's a journey as an impact on the audience. That's why he's been successful. That's not what we're having here. There's no nothing he's building to.

He is just sitting in a chair and kind of talking almost aimlessly. Yeah, I want just listen to this. Great. I will. So my prediction. So this seems like what you're describing is like, you know, you've you've written a lot about him. I recently released a three hour video about him. In doing so, you have to watch a lot of YouTube videos of him.

And in doing that, your algorithm gets completely fucked. And so if you're like scrolling like YouTube shorts or something, here's like, oh, here's this 50 second clip of Jordan Peterson on a podcast rambling about whatever. And it seems like that's what this experience will be. Just like scrolling through these like 50 second clips of him like random thought about this. I can say this about monsters and then just sort of like, yeah, go. Yeah, they just kind of sat down and let him go and you can kind of see in the editing. And then gradually how the offscreen questions are kind of directing him that I think they recognize they made a mistake about 10 minutes into this. But I want to play you the next set of clips here.

Excellent. Sorry, Cody, I love you. What should I do? And part of the problem is the question, what should I do with my life is not a very good question because it's sort of like. Tell me about everything. It's just too much. What do you do with your life? Well, all you say you do many things.

Okay, what are those things? Because I don't know what to do. Incredible advice. What other people do that appear to give their lives significance and meaning. And this is bears on the issue of responsibility. Well, most people want to have or do have an intimate partner. So if you don't have one. The screen is split so you can see his hands from the side.

Well, you don't work on that by going to find the person that's right for you. It's like, who the hell are you and what makes you think that even if you found the person that was right for you, they wouldn't take one look at you and run away screaming. What? Why does he talk like this? I don't know. Can he just... Because he's like circling really banal advice.

But he can't get to it. In the roughly a minute that we played, 50ish seconds. The actual point he has made is that life includes a lot of things and you shouldn't try to find someone to fall in love with. Right. Like life is complicated. You got to narrow down your goals and like... Like the point he's... The broader point he's making is that like young men shouldn't seek to find someone to complete them.

They should become the person that like is, you know, which is fine advice. That's good advice. Focus on yourself. Right. Of course. But at the same time, because also he talks like really contradictory too because he's saying it as if like, well, why do you want to like find an intimate partner who's like right for you? Well, what makes you think that they're going to like you?

So like he's talking about it in this dismissive way where it's like, don't even try. Yeah. And then he's coming back to you need to work on yourself before you do that in order to what? Because ultimately what he's saying is work on yourself in order to be of value to a partner. So he's still encouraging this end goal. He's just saying like, yeah, take some time and do work on yourself. Yeah. Just such a weird way to say these things.

It's it's it's pointlessly long and after me and during for a little while longer, Peterson announces that the primary thing that young men have going for them is youth and possibility, which is what sets them apart from the olds who have money and the ability to wear nice suits while seated in a library funded by oil and gas billionaire investments, but don't have as much energy or as much time. Peterson makes the claim that if you're young and poor, you still have an unbelievable source of wealth because you're young. And obviously no one would change being young for being decrepit and rich.

Now this seems to ignore that an awful lot of rich people are in excellent shape and stay that way for a long time because it's very easy to eat well and seek medical care if you have money. I see. Good good stuff, Jordan. He's done this before about like wealth and stuff where it's like, oh, you know, everybody has problems, you know, it's not richer. You're richer, you're poor, you know, you're richer or poor, you know, everybody gets sick. It's like, yeah, but but how do you what do you do if you get sick and what do you do if you get sick and you're rich?

Like it's so it's like people looking at Keanu, who is like pushing 60 and being like, wow, he looks incredible. And I'm sure Keanu Reeves. The first thing he would say is, yeah, because I have tens of millions of dollars. Yeah, exactly. It's like that video of Rob Mack on describing his how he got in shape. It's like, yeah, it's impossible. If you have unlimited money, then it's very easy. You don't spend time with anybody and you have to do.

Yeah, silly. It very silly. Now, most of what Peterson is trying to get out here is like his normal 12 rules for life. Shit just not at all very well organized. And it's certainly not yet offensive advice, although he's ignoring things in a way that is kind of offensive. But it's true that if you're young and healthy, that is worth a lot, right? Youth and health are very valuable things. Time is valuable.

Of course. Like, again, yeah, it's like this thing he does where it's like what you're saying, like if you shave everything away. Yeah, it's a fine point that a lot of people make on like Airbnb art. Exactly. But he couches it and it's like monsters and dragons and men. It's like, well, you're just sitting in it. He said nothing that he said that's right is something you couldn't find on the wall of an Airbnb in Glendale, California. Exactly.

Yeah, exactly. And it's funny because he starts at this like very basic point that like, yes, youth and health are valuable. But like a lot of his platitudes in this episode, it starts to spin out like tires losing traction and mud. And it's very funny to listen to. Sophie, I'm going to have you play this next clip. Are you good at anything? And if the answer to that is no, well, how about you start practicing being good at something? Pick one thing.

Well, what? Well, not nothing. Pick something. Maybe it's a video game. Truly sage advice, Dr. Peterson. Talk like a guy who's ever talked to a person before. This is also and I have to say this is and I'll probably have to point this out every 30 seconds. This is something he says all the time in every interview he's ever been in being asked about advice for people.

This like pick something and do it. I've heard it 90 different times in 90 different interviews in 90 different like Alpha Brain Academy clip on YouTube. Why did they give this guy so much money for this show? Yes. Acquiring skills is useful in life. It's just like bizarre. Of course. Yeah.

So he goes on to say that getting good at anything helps you learn how to get good at other things, which is true, but not in a way that really means anything. Like if you get good at a video game, which he actually suggests here, that probably won't actually help you get good at endurance running. Even though you could like boil it down, be like, well, both require you to do something over and over again until you get better at it. But like playing video games is pleasurable and physically not difficult on your body, whereas distance running is really difficult on your body and makes you uncomfortable for extended periods of time. And so the fact that you got good at a video game probably won't help you with your endurance running. Not that there aren't people who are good at both, but the fact that like skills are not universally applicable. Right. They necessarily lead to the other and like running, you know, running might make you better at a video game because like exercise like is good for your brain and like your focus and attention and things.

And that's what you need when you play a video game. If you play a video game, it might help you with like pattern recognition and certain things like that. But like you can't just like pick two things and say, do this and you'll get better at the other. Yeah, it's also like I think there's actually a fundamental flaw in the logic that like learning how to get good at one thing means you'll get good at other things. Because as a general rule, the things that people get best at first are the things that they're like inclined towards because of basic interest. And an awful lot of actual success is getting good at things that you're not inclined to, but you need to build up some level of confidence in because like a lot of life is just kind of unpleasant. You've got to do things you don't like and get good at them so you can do them well and get them over with. Exactly.

Like if you love basketball and you hate numbers, the fact that the skills that made you good at basketball might not make you good at paying your taxes, which is why people who become professional sports players generally hire professional accountants, right? Yeah. But whatever. Anyway, continue Jordan Peterson. So the next thing he goes into is he talks about how he, when he was a young man, the thing that he became good at first was washing dishes, which I don't know that he actually did this, but he's claiming this because it makes him seem like a man of the people. He has claimed this before as well.

I am not certain he ever did this job, but a lot of people do. So let's just hear him out. And so what else do you have to do to be a good dishwasher? Learn the techniques. Stay on your toes. Volunteer to work when other people don't show up. Show an interest in learning to cook. Get along with the waitresses.

Maybe get along with the customers. Act like an adult. And all of that's excellent practice for all sorts of things you're going to do later. Now, Cody, you know, have you known a lot of people who did dishwashing specifically, not just like their job included dishwashing, but like people who have worked in restaurants and like I've done dishwashing and I've known many dishwashers at the job. Cody, is it not? Would you say generally accepted as good advice that you keep the dishwashers the fuck away from the customers? Oh, yeah.

I mean, we don't need that. But also you keep the dishwashers happy and like you sure it's like chefs. You don't want the chef to talk to the customer. Yeah, you go in the room. You get sweaty. You turn on your music, whatever it is. You do a lot of cocaine in the bathroom. Like it's fine.

I don't know. It's like not like, it depends on the restaurant too, you know. Yeah, they're everywhere's different. If there's like very friendly like customer relations between like workers and customers, that's fine. It's a weird thing to plop in there. I think he's just trying to, he's trying to give, he's trying to give general life advice, which he always does that everybody could give and make it specific to this one example, which is what he does all the time, right? He's like, yeah, it's good to like get to know this person and this type of person and go out in the world and do this. And he's just using dishwashing as an example.

Yeah, he's generally using it as an example. And I mean, as a jet, like, yeah, whatever. I don't think the dishwashers want to talk to the customers. No, no, like part, a big part of managing any successful enterprise where there are customers is limiting who has to deal with customers because that's the thing that sucks the most, right? Because they're the worst people in the world. Like the last part, like you, you, you want as many people as possible to not have to talk to the customers directly because fuck those. Yeah, exactly. And I just, well, so quick note, if we're, if listeners, if we're listening to a clip and suddenly you hear like a snicker or a laugh, a little shortle,

it might be because of what he's saying. If you think what he's saying is funny, it's probably because they just did the split screen thing again. And it's so jarring and off-putting and it surprises me every time because why are they doing it? It's so weird. It seems like they're doing it at random. There's no rhyme or reason to it. It's just like, well, we need to do the split screen thing again. And I can't wait for it to be three Peterson's sunscreen at once.

Now, Cody, a lot of evidence shows that of all of the jobs in the United States, the highest level of substance abuse is pretty much working in a restaurant, particularly like working in the back of a restaurant. Like those are, as Anthony Bourdain very, very eloquently wrote about, like that's just a pretty durable fact. Yeah. I think front of the restaurant is cocaine. Back of the restaurant is all drugs. Yeah. And I'm going to be honest with you.

The only reason I might believe that Jordan Peterson did what he said, and he claims he went from being a dishwasher to a short order cook, is that I can't imagine him sitting in the back of a restaurant doing lines of a variety of benzos and stimulants and, you know, whatever, whatever he could get his hands on. Look at the man. Look at that. Look at that shirt. Tell me, tell me that man hasn't tried to straighten the lines in a rain-naked painting. I can't tell you that. Oh, good guy.

Oh, Dr. Jordan Peterson. Anyway, he's on the verge of sounding like a normal person here until we get to this line. You know, it's not intellectual work and that you're not dealing with abstractions, although it can still be complex. That's why we don't have dishwashing robots, by the way. No. Cody. Quick quiz. Good, sir.

Do we in fact have dishwashing robots? Yeah, I feel like maybe if you just cut off the word robot. Yeah. We stopped, we didn't use the word robot for it, but we have washing machines and dishwashers. I feel like almost everyone listening has a machine that washes dishes. You know, not all places have dishwashers, but everybody knows that they exist. Yeah. Again, obviously the point he's making is that, like, yeah, if you're, even with all that machines can do, if you're, like, running a professional restaurant, you're going to have someone whose job is keeping the dishes clean because machines can't do everything.

Right. You run the dishwasher and you're like, oh, the dishwasher didn't work. Yeah. I got to use my human hands that have certain ways they can move and they can get in there and clean better. It's so funny because, like, the most famous labor-saving device on the planet is dishwashers. Like, it's as if, you know, if we didn't know that clearly Game of Thrones fan, it was, like, the only TV show this man has seen is The Jetsons and, like, he's piercing everything off of Rosie the Robot. I mean. Yeah, it's like there's Flintstones and then there's Jetsons and there's, like, nothing in between.

Yeah, there's nothing in between. But even the Flintstones had, like, dishwashing, like, wet birds and stuff, right? Mm-hmm. They should have called this show Flintstones, Jetsons, and Scooby-Doo. And Scooby-Doo's. Or, I guess, what would... No, they could have just done head or just done drag and tails. Drag and tails.

If we ever get that big Exxon sponsorship to fund this podcast and I become a millionaire, I'm going to pay Jordan Peterson a fortune to watch old episodes of Scooby-Doo where they have the Harlem Globetrotters on and, like, weep over the Jungian profundity of Sweet Kyle, Sweet Lyle, whatever his fucking name was. Oh, that's a waste of money. He'll do that for free. He'll do that for free. He loves doing that shit. So, Peter said, what do you think about the time the Harlem Globetrotters solved the mystery of Old Man McGregor's haunted Airbnb? I don't know, whatever.

Well, Old Man McGregor has nothing, right? He's this sort of this dragon inside you and you have to, you unmask it and it turns out it's yourself because we are all our own dragons. This font is garbage, by the way. You did much better on that than I do. It upsets me. What an awful font they chose. It's a step above Paprius, but not much. Not really.

I'm sorry. What did you just call that font? Thank you, Sophie. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. What? What did you choose? Was referring to the Papyrus font. I don't even think this is a step above that, though. I don't either.

I think this is worse. It's got these weird, like, cuts in it. It's trying to seem very royal, but also has a weird slime thing going to it. I don't know. And the slime is for the curves of letters, but only O's and G's. And it's like a little slug? Yeah. I don't understand it.

There's some slime to it. It's not that exciting to listen to people describe fonts, but this is the one. The E is too easy to mistake for an F at distance. I agree. Because the bottom is too thin. Too thin. Anyway, whatever. Fuck this font.

Fuck this font. Robert, it is time for you to do an ad break. You know who will fuck a font? Oh, for sure. They'll get their dick right in there. In fact, every time you buy one of the products sponsored on this show, our sponsors purchase irreplaceable ancient Egyptian Papyrus and then have sex with it. That's a guarantee.

I'm so glad you learned how to pronounce that word. With every purchase you make irreplaceable human knowledge is lost forever. We promise that and nothing else. I hope it's another gold ad. Me too. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what?

They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns.

He's a shark. And not in the good and bad ass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC.

What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost.

This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price.

Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Oh, we're back. Boy, I sure feel like the library of Alexandria was just burned for my own sexual gratification. How about you, Cody? I was going to describe it exactly like that. Wow. Wow. It's like we're united by epigenetic collective unconsciousness. That's where this all ends.

Anyway, whatever. Oh, yeah. By the way, we believe everything Jordan Peterson believes. After Peterson goes on another vamps for a little while, he says very little of substance and mostly just asks rhetorical questions about self-improvement stuff like, can you improve your relationship with your father? Can you educate yourself? And then we get this very odd moment.

All right. Yeah. The draw of temptation, drug and alcohol use in particular, sexual temptation as well. Oh, do you do anything that's remote? Oh. Cody, how would you describe that little, play that again, Sophie? Play it again, please. How would you describe that little, when he says, oh, he does this like, it's almost like

a computer buffering, like his, the thing that he said, just sort of like caused a fucking hard drive, skip in his little brain. Yeah. All right. One more time. The draw of temptation, drug and alcohol use in particular, sexual temptation as well. Oh, do you do anything that's remote? He like, he says, he says, sexual temptation and then casts his eyes down.

There's almost a little shiffer across his body as he goes, oh, it's very weird. He's such an odd speaker. It's fascinating to watch. I mean, I'm sure it's made him millions of dollars because there is something that like, you just, I spent too long watching this and just going, the fuck is, what are you doing? What are you trying to get across here? It's cryptic. Yeah.

Anyway. That's how he does it. So what does he land on? Can you resist temptation or not? He never really finishes. He just glitches. And then from this point, he starts to get angrier and almost abusive. Yes.

Oh, he's doing it. Yeah. I remember a political party. Do you go to church? You know, I don't go to church because, you know, their beliefs don't match mine. It's like, who the hell cares about your beliefs? You're like 16. You don't even have beliefs.

And if you think it's like, you're right and the Catholic church is wrong. Well, good luck with that attitude. And that is interesting. The church, for example, or a political party doesn't need repair because all institutions are always falling apart and corrupt. That's a story as old as time. That's the evil uncle. But good. You have time to do it.

We'll fix it up. Wait a second. Wait. Did he say fix it up? Go fix it up. I thought you're not allowed to do that. Yeah. Well, that's exact.

None of this makes any sense because number one, are you saying that like people should just, like you have to join a church, which he's clearly saying, but also you shouldn't criticize it. But also instead of leaving it, if it doesn't match with your beliefs, you should change it. But also you don't have beliefs. And it's like, okay. Even if you disagree, don't what are you going to change it to because you don't believe anything. And what are you saying people should do? Are you saying that like they should all become Catholics or that you should just join whatever church is closest and not question it,

but fix it if it doesn't align with your beliefs, but you can't have beliefs yet because you're just a kid. It's, it's nonsense. It's nonsense. Like it's, it's, it's just like there's nothing useful in that mess of what a contradictory. It's also just a ball of all of the things to pick as an organization that you shouldn't criticize. Unreal. Wrong. The Catholic Church.

Catholic Church. Yeah. Sure. Incredible. Yeah. Thanks, Jordan. I also love his, it's one of his ticks where he, he like says a thing and sometimes it's like some ridiculous statement. Sometimes it's a completely reasonable thing.

And he's like, well, you know, good luck with that. He just sort of like dismisses it as though like that's the argument. For example, it seems like after the Catholic Church systemically sexually trafficked and abused children and pushed for theocratic laws in Ireland that got huge numbers of women killed and maimed as a result of things like ectopic pregnancies. I wish people in very large numbers left the church and things are better. Well, you know, that's the evil uncle, right? Right. The evil uncle is like your evil uncle, the Catholic priest.

Yeah. I mean, not far off, but like, so when do you, because his whole thing is like, don't, are you, so you're like, you're 16, you have no beliefs. So go to any church and if it disagrees with you, then you should change it. But also you're not allowed to want to change anything unless your like life is perfect and like in perfect order. So you're, it's not yet because you're 16. So like, don't do anything. Don't leave your house, I guess, but do to go to church that you don't believe in. Most consistently frustrating to be about Peterson is he does shit like drop like evil uncle.

And he does it in such a way as he's like, he's trying to impress you with by naming these archetypes and like referencing them. Memorize categories. Exactly. And it's there's for an example of kind of like how to do this and not be a complete, I don't know, some people will disagree with this. But like what he's doing is not fundamentally all that different. If you sit down and listen to Dan Harmon talk about like the story circle, which is basically him taking the fucking hero's journey and putting it into a way that you can pretty easily turn into scripts, right? That's all it is.

It's not like distills it down to six steps or eight steps instead of 22 or whatever. Dan Harmon plenty of things to criticize about the man. But all he's actually he's not trying to say there's any sort of like psychic resonance with that. He's being like, this is a very simple replicable bit way to tell a story in a way that that people can can grasp onto. Right. There's a reason it's successful. And people like stories that have this. Yeah.

You do the change. And then, yeah. Peterson is that rather than the evil uncle just like being a thing that's in some movies and TV shows because it's easy. I don't know. It's something that people tend to like grasp on to. It's just kind of an easy way to tell a story. Right. Like it's a scar in the Lion King.

It's not a complex story. There's not a ton going on there, but it works. Like, but Peterson is taking it as if and because this is like a trope that is broadly functional in storytelling that is meant for a popular audience. It is indicative of something fundamental to human nature. Right. As opposed to like, you know, first of all, if you see a pattern, we humans love to see patterns and we do undo emphasis and importance on patterns, even if they're it's not like a significant pattern. But like what he's talking about most of the time in this respect is like just stereotypes.

Yeah. Like if you take, like you said, like the Lion King or Hamlet or whatever. So Scar, the evil uncle, if Scar had a kid, Mufasa, the kind uncle archetype, like it's literally like it's just these interchangeable things. The qualities described in like, he's like, oh, the the crone make it a man and you change the name. And it's like, I don't know. Yeah. All of this can work. And it's like helpful for people in situations like certain sites like all of these archetypes that he treats as if they're like something sacred written into the back of the human soul are just shortcuts to like very easily putting together a fucking script for like a popular like specifically for a popular fucking movie.

That's like most of the modern adaptations of this shit. Like it's not none of this is like none of this is particularly resonant. And you can tell that for a fact that the stories that are like most popular are often the ones that that break some of these rules. Like they're not actually fundamental to good storytelling. They're just simple. Yeah. Yeah. It's not it's not necessarily going to be the most compelling or interesting story if you use all these archetypes or this like pattern.

Because it's most stories. They're training wheels. They're training wheels. If you're starting out writing stories or if you're getting lost in the weeds, it can be an easy way to like get something put together and then you can do a better thing next time. But I don't know, whatever. I get frustrated when people talk about fucking archetypes like this. Also when you're talking about like this and like applying it to like elements like fundamental like institutions and elements of society where it's like you these are different conversations. Yeah.

Fucking the evil uncle is a bad guy and a script because a script needs a bad guy because conflict is fun. The Catholic Church is bad because they raped a bunch of kids and covered it up. And that's a reason why maybe you would not believe anything else they have to say. Right. Like maybe it stems from certain aspects of their core beliefs. I don't know. Exactly. Yeah.

Maybe there's fundamental things about the structure of an organization like the Catholic Church that are abusive. But Jordan Peterson fucking loves hierarchy. Right. And just like the inevitability of everything. Right. Yeah. Like if an institution is corrupt, it's because all institutions become corrupt. Like ultimately, it's not a problem with anything about the institution.

Yes, corruption. That happens. Yeah. Except for in my institutions that I like. Right. So the next section of the video asks Peterson to define what makes a man. And this is the first point at which I think someone like put together like maybe after the first 10 minutes of this were recorded, which probably took three days. Somebody like jotted down some fucking notes into something resembling a script to try to put a scaffolding on this motherfucker.

Right. Here we go. Yeah. Definition. What am I a biologist? But as it happens, I am a biologist. No, you're not. No.

Yeah. No, you're not. I felt like you were going to have a reaction to that. He is absolutely not a fucking biologist. Oh my God. You can say that you like, I like, oh my God. It's like a physicist wouldn't say I'm a biologist because you like know a lot about biology. Yeah.

It's it's very frustrating because like, yes, theoretically, like he has a PhD in clinical psychology. There are clinical psychologists who do biology, right? Because some of them are do neuroscience, right? There are elements of it. Exactly. That's a kind of biology, but that's not what he does. That's not what he does. And that's not that's just not how people in the scientific community talk.

Yeah. Like he says this about everything. Like it's if you it's fun. He would say like he would say if he's describing like what the Pareto principle as it like it relates to black holes. Or whatever. He would literally say I'm an astrophysicist. No, no, no, no, no, no. You maybe you know about astrophysics and you have like knowledge in that field, but no like actual like reasonable, like respectable

scientists would just make a claim like that. There's a while he said that out loud. You go in your three hour video about Dr. Jordan Peterson about how he's fundamentally wrong about lobsters and the shit he says about like neurotransmitters and lobsters. He's wrong about a lot of important things, including that time he went cold turkey off of Benzos by going to some weird clinic in Russia and nearly got himself killed. Yeah. But I want to stick to stuff that he claims that he makes in the video to prove that he's if he is a biologist.

Totally. Yeah. He's a really biologist. Let's see if you are. Let's see if you are. So I want to sorry, I just have to like give him a little like in good faith, you know, reasonable doubt. Yeah. Some people's talk in this way, like what you're saying, you're not saying I'm a biologist just like I believe in biology.

Yeah. And I have knowledge of it and I approach things from a biologist perspective is what he's trying to say. But that but he wasn't precise in his speech. He's not at all precise in his speech. And he's also about to be really wrong because after this, he goes on a little rant about how some people are charitable, but they're not hardworking or practical. So they just wind up giving away other people's money and that's bad. What he's he says that the ideal thing to be the essence of masculinity.

In fact, this is what he because he's again, this section is where he's trying to define a man. He says that the essence of masculinity is productive generosity, which seems to he seems to define as actually being a dick. Because he doesn't think that like generosity means being good to people. He thinks it's like it's this weirder concept about how well sometimes generosity is like being mean and withholding resources from people who are going to squander them. Right. And as he's doing this, he attacks the concept of agreeableness. And I want to play you this this part of the episode Cody, because this is we can nail into some science here. Yeah, we're getting into it.

Basically, an empathy dimension has no correlation whatsoever with success in enterprise, business, creative domains. In fact, among managers, agreeableness looks like it's slightly negatively correlated with success because hyper agreeable managers can't say no. They can't discipline their employees. They can't set limits and they're susceptible to manipulation. So well, Cody, that sounds like something that's falsifiable. Right. That is a that is a true or a false statement that he just made. We can actually dig into research. Yeah, it seems like you could look that up.

Yeah. And it turns out we're really lucky here. There was a massive meta analysis of studies published on quote agreeableness on it and its consequences just this year. Researchers Michael Wilmot and Dennis Ones analyzed 3,900 studies involving 1.9 million participants. So pretty big meta analysis, right? And they concluded, quote, Overall, the trait the trait has effects in a desirable direction for 93% of variables. Wow. Professor Wilmot seemed adamant that not only is Peterson wrong about the value of agreeableness, he's specifically wrong about its impact on leaders, quote. Michael Wilmot, assistant professor of management at the University of Arkansas in a university release said, quote,

Agreeableness is the personality trait primarily concerned with helping people and building positive relationships, which is not lost on organizational leaders. Taken altogether, the interaction among things became clear. Professor Wilmot concludes agreeableness was marked by work investment, but this energy was best affected at helping or cooperating with others. In other words, teamwork. So just he's exactly wrong. And it took 30 seconds to find. Yeah, they looked at these like thousands of studies involving nearly 2 million people. And it turns out being agreeable really works well in teams.

And I don't know, Cody, you and I have both worked on teams. You know, what's great is not working with assholes. Oh, yeah. We don't like that. It's not fun. It makes it unpleasant and you don't want to. One of the most important things in particularly like comedy, like sketch comedy, whatever is like, yes, and just fundamentally being agreeable. It's not like trying to shut down a joke.

It's trying to expand it, you know. Yeah, agree plus. Yeah, agree plus, right? Yeah. Because that that works pretty well. People people it tends to make for things that are funny. Wow, that's fascinating that people like working like people who are easy to work with. Yeah, I love this.

And I really appreciate that you instantly look this up because he does this all the time. He'll say like, I've read the literature and it's this way. And then you look it up and it's not that way. Or he'll make these broad claims about these sort of things. And it's also stuff where it's like, you are a psychologist. That is your field. And you're making these claims and I just looked it up and you're wrong. It's alarming that this man is in this fine leather chair.

It is. It is. And it is a nice looking leather chair. I have to say this whole library, whoever they have directing, putting the set decorations together, they made a they made a very welcoming looking library behind. Oh yeah, one million for the library, four million. I don't believe he's read any of those books, but it's a nice looking library. He skimmed them for a few words that he could say to reinforce his point.

Yeah. So Jordan's view of masculinity doesn't leave much room for teamwork. It becomes quickly clear that he doesn't see management as a thing people do in specific instances to help groups accomplish tasks. And instead he sees management as how a healthy man looks at every relationship in his life. And I mean management the way that like a leader in an organization manages. And Sophie, let's play that next clip. Time. And then you should be responsible for and productive for as many people as you can manage.

And so that might be first, your intimate partner, your wife, second, your, your parents, your siblings, your, your children. Maybe your children primarily, although, you know, there's a trade off there with your wife. So again, the split screen is just joy. Very funny every time. Why? Next, he says that you should seek to manage your community and local government if it's possible at all. And it's become it's pretty clear. I think at this point that his version of masculinity is nothing but control. And it's a specific sort of control that's motivated by self-hatred and you get glimpses.

I don't think Peterson's even really super aware of it, but you get glimpses of the centrality of self-hatred to his concept of masculinity and these little gaps and cracks like this one here. Going all that responsibility, if you can, in a sense that's both productive and generous, that gives you something to do. Justify your miserable life to yourself and everyone else. And you need to do that. It, it orients you solidly in the world if you do that. And it gives you a dragon to fight, a real one. And that's where the gold is. So as everyone has known forever.

Oh my God. Oh my God. Robert, Robert, can we do an ad break right now just so that there's a gold ad, please? I know where the gold is. If you want to know where else the gold is, check out the sponsors for this podcast, which apparently include this, this random gold scam company. Oh, wonderful. Fucking buy the gold and give it to a dragon so you can fight it. Yeah, and then take the gold back and then it's yours again. Yeah.

During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced cigar smoking man who drives a silver hearse.

And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And on the gun badass way. And nasty sharks. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space.

And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science.

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Ah, we're back. So I think all of that's really fucking silly. Yeah, it is.

He talks about that a lot. It's very bad advice about being a person. Yeah, he always comes back to like, and like, you know, there are ways to say this and discuss this, like life is suffering and life is miserable and you suck and everything's bad. But you need to find, you need to create a purpose is what he's talking about oftentimes. We're talking about what masculinity is, right? Right. Managing. Which is productive generosity, which means managing every single being a being a hierarchical centralized leader of every aspect of your life and every relationship that you're involved with. And then once you're in control, you should go seek out dragons to fight using presumably other people to do a lot of the fighting.

Oh, yeah, you send them off to get the dragon so you can get the gold. It's yeah, he's always circles. It's weird because he also like, he dismisses this idea that certain things in society are about like power. Like, oh, they say it's about powers like, no, it's not. It's about this. It's about biology or like, how men have these fucking like, you know, genes or whatever. But ultimately, he's just, but then he comes back to this. Like, yeah, you need like, this control to do this. How do you do that?

Well, you need to have the power to do that. He just always comes back to just like, ultimately, I'd be a strong man. We need being a man as being like a dictator in your life. Yeah, and it's interesting because like, obviously, Jordan's the kind of guy who like worships these quote unquote traditional like kind of militarist values and hierarchy in that sense. But if you actually look at like what makes the best, the most functional military hierarchies on the planet, they all are based around the idea that you should have a really strong non commissioned officer core. And this is certainly a kind of strict hierarchy, but it's a hierarchy that is in a lot of ways less centralized than the kind of pyramidal hierarchy that Jordan P. Peter's it's based around the idea that you should actually have a lot of little leaders that are invested in a great degree of autonomy and whose expertise is respected. And oftentimes, like if you have a unit like a platoon, you have an officer who's technically in charge and then you have an in CEO who is technically under him, but who is generally recognized as actually being more expert in a lot of ways.

And both of them like take on different tasks and that's necessary for actually effectively leading a unit through combat because it's talking about working together. Yeah, I'm talking about like working together. Oh, that's weird. Yeah, it's it's all these these ideas. And it requires a great deal and effective functioning effectively as a unit in any kind of like strenuous or dangerous situation does at times require there being a person who is saying like do this and do that because sometimes that's necessary when you're trying to accomplish goals under stress. But the thing that requires most of all is like mutual respect and an understanding of people's talents and an ability to give subordinates autonomy, because organizations that don't do those things can survive if there's not a danger being put on them. If there's not like a threat, but if you're actually being threatened, you want as much intelligence to be available from the organization as possible and you only get that by giving people the ability to act with a degree of autonomy.

That doesn't sound very productively generous of you, though. Yeah, we could talk a lot about like the Ukrainian military versus the Russian one, but let's move on. So his next question is, oh, actually, this kind of ties into that. How should you arm yourself? And the answer that Peterson gives is a humanities education, which is interesting to me. That is interesting. Yeah. And he thinks that he kind of defines a good education, the humanities is reading great men and to his credit, he says great women too. He's actually pretty careful about that in that. So I'll give you I'll give you a thumbs up. Yeah, only took eight fucking years. Yeah.

So after this, we get an extended rant about how if you either lie or you just say things you don't fully believe in, like if you alter your own beliefs to like write an essay to get a good grade for a teacher to impress someone, then you're letting someone else control and speak for you, which is kind of like basically letting a demonic spirit run your body. This is interesting for two reasons, actually. One is that he says this all the time. Yeah, this is another one of another one like thing where it's like, why does this show exist? This is just everything you've ever said in your like your books and stuff. But also Ben Shapiro has literally said the opposite. Like he his advice to his advice to people at school is to do what he did, which is just regurgitate everything. Professor said pretend that he believes it so that he can like pass the grade. And that's I'm never going to say it's about Ben Shapiro, but like that's a valuable life skill. Like sometimes you're going to get pulled over by a cop and you're going to need the light of that police officer so that you don't suffer consequences that will fuck your life up, right? Sometimes perhaps you're trying to get on an airplane and you have a bag that's over the limit and being able to like lie about it and convince someone not to weigh it is a useful life skill because then you don't you're not out $50. Sometimes you sit down with someone who's maybe kind of a crazy asshole and it's just the easiest thing and the safest thing to not engage with them over some of the things that they're saying. It's not, you know, I'm not saying don't engage with racists, but a lot of people are just assholes in ways that it's like, I don't need it. You don't need to argue with it. Yeah, why do we need to get into this?

Sometimes you just be like, OK, OK, let's in the interaction and smile at them. That's a useful life skill. People who are able to do those things, who are able to understand how to, I don't need to be totally honest right now. Also, I can just in the interaction and I want to do that in a pleasant way. So I'm just going to pretend like I don't think this person is dumb as shit, right? Like that's fine. But his his sort of assumption, I think, and maybe he's changed his mind sense is that like if you keep if you do that and you do it like more than a few times, you'll start believing the things that you're that you're allowing to be said. I don't know, Cody, I've lied to a lot of cops about having weed in the car and I've never thought that my car back in the day didn't have weed in it and didn't deserve to have weed in it. Exactly. Anyway, whatever. The good thing about this rant is that it gives us another little moment of accidental honesty from Dr. Peterson. I think, well, God, that was a miserable life. I manipulated everybody. They were so damn stupid. They were sucked in by it. They're all contemptible. Everyone does it, you know, which they don't, by the way. And so that's a pathway to bitterness. Pathway to bitterness, huh? Pathway to bitterness. He kind of I feel like he's talking about himself there. I'm just going to say it. Are you saying that Peterson often comes off as a bitter old man? Yeah, I think he's a bitter old man and I think he's bitter because the only thing he's done with his life is manipulate people.

And he says, again, he talks a lot about how there's no difference between the spirit of manipulation taking you over and demonic possession. And he says the only thing that stopped him from being canceled is that he's a fundamentally honest person, which is fun because Jordan got famous for claiming that Canadian Bill C-16 was going to force people to use gender neutral pronouns for non-binary and transgender identities and legally punish them if they didn't. The people were going to be literally thrown into prison. He gave a lot of interviews saying like, I think some of the things that I say in my lectures now might be illegal. I think they might even be sufficient for me to be brought before the Ontario Human Rights Commission under their amended hate speech laws. This has never happened. Nothing like this has ever happened in Canada to Dr. Peterson or to anyone else. He was completely full of shit. He knew what he was doing. The first video he shared about that topic was like professor against political correctness. He knew exactly what he was doing. And it's like if you actually talk to any of the Canadian legal experts about what this law meant and what the actual... Because there is a threshold at which hate speech is criminal in Canada and the threshold is pretty high. You would have to be literally advocating for genocide.

You would be having to try to incite a genocide, which, number one, none of whatever you want to say, his comments back then did not cross that line. And apparently no one's has because no one's been prosecuted for this. There's been no criminal cases as a result of this. I might argue that perhaps there should have been, but whatever. So Peterson veers from this into an unhinged dissection of sleeping beauty. He's got an old school Disney fixation. I'm just going to have Sophie play. Yeah, he really does. Well, because they're the old stories, right? They're fairy tales. The evil uncle, you know. The ones that are exactly.

Anyway, here's Jordan Peterson. So what can you arm yourself with? You know, in sleeping beauty, when the prince, he's entrapped in the castle by Maleficent, who's the ultimate edible mother. She transforms herself into a dragon, which everyone seems to just take as a matter of course, because of course the evil witch transforms herself into a dragon. But why we think that's logical is a deep question, an archetypal question. But anyways, he's armed with the sword of truth. And I believe it's the shield of virtue, but the sword of truth.

And that's, it's a corny trope in some sense, but it's not corny at all, because how could falsehood prevail against truth? How could that possibly be the case? If what is true reflects what is real, how can what is unreal prevail against what is real? And so, you know. I love when he does stuff like that. And then he's like, and so, and he's like, wait, what was I talking about? What makes any fucking sense at all?

First off, Jordan, we accept it when the witch turns into a dragon, because it is a fantasy cartoon, and she's a witch. So even though witches don't always turn into dragons in movies, in fact, usually don't in movies with witches. We're all like, yeah, whatever. Like, she just did a bunch of fucking gobbledygoot magic. It's fine. Like, there's fucking-

But also, like, even just like, okay, yeah, she's doing magic and stuff. Oh, she turns into a dragon, she's deceiving, whether it's like her true form or she's turning into a dragon deceiving him. I've got the sort of truth. Like, he was right the first time. Yeah, it's a little corny trope. It's a little on the nose. It's like, he's just, he's taking this like visual metaphor or like this imagery and being like, wow.

Yeah, truth is important. Like, it's just like- Yeah, it's like if Jordan Peterson watched Happy Gilmore and was talking about the scene where he does a Subway ad and he's like, we accept the Subway ad because somehow fundamentally there's something about human beings that make them want to sell $5 sandwiches. No, we accept the Subway ad because there was a lot of advertising and movies at the time

and it was clearly a joke about that. Anyway, whatever. It's Dr. Peterson. I watched Happy Gilmore recently. Holds up. Fine film. Quite good film. You know, weirdly enough, Shooter McGavin is the same as the Fed from The Iron Giant.

Oh, oh, I did know that. Same actor. Yeah, same actor. Anyway, so it's all, it's all good. His entire argument here just rests on like this very ridiculous tautology. If what is true reflects what is real, how can what is unreal prevail over what is real? Well, I don't know. If you lie and you get a crowd of people to believe a man committed a crime that he didn't commit

and then you get them to lynch that man so you can take his stuff, it seems like what is unreal can prevail over what is real and does so regularly. Well, right. Like look at like his, any like historical record, like, yeah, it happens all the time. Constantly works. What are you talking about? Constantly works. One of the most successful strategies in all of history.

Because also, because he'll, and he'll, because he talks about these things too. He talks about like, like different regimes and their propaganda and how effective it is. And like, it's talked about Nazi, well, he talks about Nazi Germany. For a positive example of this. I know. There's whole families of people who exist because at some point someone was asked, are you hiding a Jewish family in your house?

And they said no. Like, turns out. But how, but how, but did they not have the sort of truth? Like, no, they were good at lying. And that's an important life skill. Anyway, one thing. Like, yeah, it's, it's, it's very fun because a lot of like, not only is this stupid, this is advice that is almost tailor made to create failures of people.

Listen to this portion where he complains that people who do the writing they're assigned by their teachers just to get a grade are like inherently breaking some sort of moral law. Wait. Okay. Yeah. Check this out. Why write? Well, maybe you're writing about something important.

And if you're not, then it's just a lie. The whole enterprise. So write about something important. Why do you want to write? Well, so that you can think that's what you're doing when you're writing revelation. Here's some ideas I have. You do your research. Here's some ideas I have.

I'll get them down. Then I'll edit the idea. So I only keep the best ideas. Well, now I know how to think about that. Now I know how to perceive that. Now I know how to act on that. Well, now you know how to perceive an act in relationship to something difficult. Well, that's why you learn to write is so you can think.

And you know, everyone says to their children, think before you act. Well, why? So you can not do stupid things. So why? So you don't do stupid things. Why not do stupid things? Stupid things, perhaps, like getting addicted to Benzos while eating nothing but red meat for months and then letting your daughter take you to a weird Russian clinic where you do

a cold turkey detox, so dangerous it nearly kills you, leaves you in a coma and results in you becoming a broken shell of a man who cries at random during podcast interviews. And can't sleep for 30 days after drinking a sip of cider. Like it's like a lot of people just do essays because they need to get the grade because they're paying like $1100 to take this fucking class. Also, like there are a lot of ways that like to learn how to think and like different processes and again, like pattern recognition and all these sort of like logic and reasoning and what not oftentimes learning to write is to it's not to think it's to communicate your

thoughts. Yeah. It is what he's really trying to say. Also, this is like a thing he said. Again, it's another one of those like, heard this 90 times from this guy. Yeah. But. It's just like, Jordan, if being a good writer meant you were a good thinker, then writers

would be famous for being well adjusted people with healthy habits rather than like the most comprehensively broken career field in the entirety of the arts and sciences. Like name a famous writer and then name what they're famous for outside of their books. And it's probably the fact that their life is a disaster. Right. And like it's not that. Which is not to say that you need to have a disaster of a life to be a writer. It's just to say that writing well does not mean you know how to think well.

Right. Again, you can communicate your thoughts that you're having. You have these. Orson Scott Card, beautiful writer, dog shit opinions about the world. Also, I love this idea that like, if you watch the video, he's using his hands a lot and talking about you write it and then it's this big long thing and then you edit it down to just the best ideas. I don't know if anyone listening has seen maps of meaning.

I don't think it had an editor code. There's like thousand page diagram of a dragon. Yeah. So I don't know. Maybe you should write more to learn how to think better. But it's like you're learning how to put forth an argument, not necessarily how to. No. And that's that's the thing that he says, right?

Like that he's actually saying here, which is that like the goal of writing is to like make an argument to convince somebody about the way you think rather than just trying to like explain a thing or describe a thing. It's about like everything else for Jordan. It's about domination. So if you play that play this next clip, right? So why right? How about so you can take your place in the world?

Not so you can please the teacher and be some obedient like lap dog. You need to know how to think and speak so you can lead and think and conceptualize and and entranced. He does the thing again where you can see his like he just kind of goes away for a second there when he says and entranced. And it's I would say pretty unsettling. Yeah. Well, like that because again, it's like entranced entrancing implies deception.

Yeah. Which seems contradictory to what he's trying to say, but yeah, it's it's the what he what he makes clear in this next clip is that yeah, writing is just a tool for domination because that's the actual only task worth achieving to Jordan. Penn is mightier than the sword. It's there's no comparison. The sword, you know, yeah, fair enough. And you want to be careful of someone who wields the sword, but you wield the pen in

a mighty manner, nothing stops you ever. That's assuming, too, that you're oriented, you know, in some noble manner. He does use the word oriented like a lot. Yeah. It's it sounds smarter to him than like facing or directed or whatever. Like, yeah, I don't know. It's just like, why do we need so many words to say the phrase that he already said? He said he said the common phrase, the pen is mightier than the sword.

And then he like started to talk about it for a long time. I was like, I don't need that. I have the phrase. Yeah. And it's also again, it's it's one of I love the pen is mightier than the sword is like a fucking because it's useless, right? It's a completely useless statement because no, the pen is not mightier than the sword. The argument is like the actual thing that is true is that like, well, ideas can cause

like titanic shifts and can get lots of people killed and can be sort of the the the beginning point, the wellspring of a tremendous amount of power, right? And ideas can be written down and often are and that's true. But like the fact that like the Nazis wrote a lot of books and propaganda that was instrumental in them gaining power didn't mean that like their ability to beat the shit out of and shoot people wasn't also instrumental in gaining part of it. And a lot of people who did that weren't convinced because of like writing or propaganda, but because they wanted power and wealth and saw this is the best way to get it.

And like we're acting out of crave and self interest and kind of an in tandem thing. Again, just saying the pen is mightier than the sword is a meaningless statement. Well, also, he's not because he's not talking about that, right? Because he's he had to he had to qualify with like, well, as long as it's oriented towards like moral good or wherever you phrased it. Yeah. So he's not even talking about like in his view, like bad guys with a pen. No.

So what's it's all this qualification seems unnecessary. It's fucking trash, Cody, and it's trash that we're going to let sit for today and finish this episode up when we come back in part two of this. He talks so much about too many things and nothing at all. And he looks, I don't know. Kermit, the frog, I do like that where we've got it where we've got it paused right now. There's like a little you can see a little waddle starting to form on the side of his neck.

Like I'm seeing double for Peterson's just just like a frog's pouch. So I don't know. Maybe Dr. Jordan Peterson is a lizard man. Let's see if David Ike has an opinion on that, Cody, anything to pluck all the time every day. Um, you know, my name is Cody Johnston. Like you said, the top some more news, even more news. Go Google it.

We got three hours on this guy. We're talking about Cody is a character. Your name is Cody Johnson. Has anyone ever called Johnston? Sorry. Has anyone ever called you sea jizzle? No. Well, technically, yes, because you just did.

There we go. Episodes over. Oh, good. In The Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests.

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