Behind the Bastards - Part One: The Jordan Peterson Episode

Episode Date: October 25, 2020

Robert is joined by Cody Johnston to discuss Jordan Peterson.FOOTNOTES: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/stephaniemlee/jordan-peterson-daughter-mikhaila-meat-carnivore-diet https://newrepublic.com/article/156829/happened-jordan-peterson https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/hot-thought/201803/jordan-petersons-murky-maps-meaning https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/03/19/jordan-peterson-and-fascist-mysticism/ https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/18/style/jordan-peterson-12-rules-for-life.html https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/feb/07/how-dangerous-is-jordan-b-peterson-the-rightwing-professor-who-hit-a-hornets-nest https://thevarsity.ca/2017/10/08/jordan-peterson-i-dont-think-that-men-can-control-crazy-women/ https://www.macleans.ca/opinion/is-jordan-peterson-the-stupid-mans-smart-person/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-profound-sadness-in-jordan-petersons-antidote-to-chaos/2018/05/09/8e1be3a4-53bd-11e8-9c91-7dab596e8252_story.html https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/03/05/jordan-petersons-gospel-of-masculinity https://web.archive.org/web/20200115120600/https://www.thestar.com/opinion/2018/05/25/i-was-jordan-petersons-strongest-supporter-now-i-think-hes-dangerous.html https://web.archive.org/web/20191017142557/https://thewalrus.ca/the-story-behind-jordan-petersons-indigenous-identity/ https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/hot-thought/201802/jordan-peterson-s-flimsy-philosophy-life?page=1 https://www.theaustralian.com.au/inquirer/the-mysterious-rise-and-fall-of-jordan-peterson/news-story/be72e5ecc722a109ec5ee9d959cd28eb Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee 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 podcast. Podcasts? I'm Robert Evans. This is Behind the Bastards.

It's a podcast about bad people, the worst in the world, in fact, you might say. As I say, every week when I 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 Johnston. Hello there. Thank you for having me on this live podcast. Now, 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.

Okay. I mean, that's why I say them. I don't rant about that so people can not hear it. We have been protecting Cody from getting Swiss canceled for years, but today we're doing a live episode. Bring it on. Bring it on like the Swiss spring on. Yeah. Miss me with the Swiss. Let me tell you. Okay. 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. I love big fans.

Doctor. Is it doctor? Jordan B. Peterson. I love Jordan Peterson. Who's a doctor? I want to show some respect. I am very happy that you're doing this episode and that I get to partake in it. He's one of my heroes. 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. I mean, so, you know, I joke about starting a cult a lot on this show. Do you? Yeah, I do. I do. Wait, they're jokes? I don't think they join your cult? They're jokes? I don't think they join your cult? They're not entirely jokes because I will probably start a cult one.

It's kind of my retirement plan because I don't really think 401Ks are going to be useful that far into the future. But having a cult, you know, you can always make money on a cult. 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 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 got completely out of the deep end. I was going to say, like, I didn't realize that it was still going that strong. Like, I don't know because he disappeared because things are crumbling for him. Yeah, his life has been shattered by his own. Yes. Yes. Yeah. But, uh, but yeah, I thought I assumed that there would be people still doing that.

But 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, uh, while I'm not sure if I would call Dr. Jordan B. Peterson a fascist, I would say he's one of the most insidious platformers of a specific strain of ideology that feeds into the fascist movement in the United States.

Yeah. Worldwide. It's fun. I would agree with that. I actually might go a little farther than you and label him. Um, yeah, I feel like we might just, we might just give the whole story and then people can apply their own labels to Jordan Balthasar Peterson. Before we talk about Dr. Jordan B. Peterson, I'd like to talk about the Bolshevik Revolution. Now, this is a topic that, that Dr. 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 to, 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 is resurgent. He says it a lot. Yeah. 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 Dr. Jordan B. Peterson. So back in the late nineteen teens and twenties, there were a lot of people who had the same concerns about Marxism all across Western Europe. And this was a somewhat more reasonable fear than because Marxism was certainly resurgent or at least surging in that period. And fascists in particular were terribly paranoid about it. 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 cult. And the term was Judeo Bolshevism. And this was kind of the word for a conspiracy that communism was being spread around the world by Jewish people. They were often compared to like a virus for communism that introduces it into the 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 big 1917 revolution in Russia. But there were also a lot of people who were 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 early history of the Soviet Union, not a great place to be Jewish. Like some real bad things happen to Jewish folks then. So, of course, Tsarist 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. 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 Tsar and like the late 1800s, you had the Chelnitsky massacre, who was the largest massacre of Jewish people probably in history until the Holocaust. Anyway, fuck the Tsar. 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 there's not supposed to be any religion under it, especially like the kind of communism was being pushed in this period. And so the idea was like, this is the Jews trying to kill Christianity by making it more communist. Yeah. Oh, they love da.

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, yeah. Maybe don't say the thing. The subject of your sentence is that it'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 unprecedented gains for LGBT people, kind of some of the first recognition of folks who were like non-binary and also just like a crazy amount of art. And of course, a decent amount of that art was pornographic because like people be having fun with the guy. You mean degenerate, Robert? You mean degenerate art? Yeah, that's what these Nazi critics would have said. And they went further, they claimed that like all of this art, a lot of which was, you know, queer in orientation was somehow tied to communism. And it was part of a plot to weaken German culture to allow a left-wing takeover.

If this seems familiar, it's because you can hear the exact same thing if you turn on like a third of YouTube. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So the term cultural Bolshevism overtook Judeo Bolshevism in this period. And it was kind of like the more educated, less bigoted persons like cultural Bolshevism. They're trying to, they're trying to Bolshevize our nation by going through the arts and stuff and like taking over kids' minds with their evil books and their dirty pictures. I always love stuff like that just because, sorry, it's just like, it's just art. Like, what do you think art is?

It's like, I don't know, whatever, it's fine. I mean, I know that when I saw Guernica, I suddenly was like, oh, health care, everyone should have that. I mean, other things went through my mind when I, yeah. So the rest 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 won open elections and then they destroyed democracy and then, you know, the Holocaust and such. Not a good story, but a well-known one at this point. So keep all of that in mind as we start our tale of Dr. Jordan, Dalthazar Peterson.

And I must be honest with you, we both enjoy calling him Jordan Dalthazar Peterson, but that's not his middle name. His middle name is Burnt. It's Bumblebee. Oh, Burnt, sorry. Burnt, B-E-R-N-T, which is not a name I think I've seen before. He was born on June 12, 1962 in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada's Texas. 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 three. 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. Yeah, no, he's a, he's a, he's a reader. He's a reader, that one.

So one of his earliest memories was watching the enormous state funeral for Bobby Kennedy. And he recalls that he thought, I'll have a funeral like that one day. Oh my goodness. I, that is, I mean, that makes everything I know about him and what he said as a young man. That I didn't catch that, that quote. Oh 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.

I'll be appreciated like that. 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 Sirhan Sirhan in California? I'll have a funeral like that one day. Is Sirhan Sirhan still alive?

Maybe. So Jordan B. Peterson was raised Protestant and as a young child, he was sent to confirmation class, which is a weird ritual that some Christians do. When I was a kid and Christian, where you like study the Bible with an overly enthusiastic youth group leader who tells you that Gandhi is probably in hell. And then you pass a test and you get baptized by the priest at a big ceremony thing. And like most young people who have such an experience and 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. I haven't found it written down anywhere, but Peterson found it unconvincing and he suspected the teacher didn't really believe the argument himself.

And I'm going to 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 in each time finding himself unsatisfied. Now, a lot of smart, pretty much any intelligent person.

And most people, yeah, pretty much any person is going to like at some point be like, oh, boy, shit's fucked up. And you got to like, you know, 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 going to solve the mysteries of the universe. Yeah, is a bit more intense with Mr. Peterson. Yeah, he has to. 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, who was the mother of the 17th premiere of Alberta, Rachel Notley. And Notley was a member of the new Democratic Party. And Peterson did spend 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 safety, that kind of stuff. And like, yeah.

And now he was during this period of a racist reader spurred on at first by the work of George Orwell. But he eventually moved on to Alexander Solanitzen. I'm always pronounced it wrong, I'm sure. And Ayn Rand, which I always pronounce right. And according to a profile in Toronto Life quote, while he admired leaders like Ed Broadbent, who was an NDP leader, he became disillusioned by the party's peevish functionaries. He found Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier, which he read as an undergrad at Grand Prairie in Lightning.

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? It's 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 assholes, which every political party is because political parties are terrible. Very easy to get disillusioned with any of that stuff at an early age involving yourself. And I think he's probably right that a lot of these kind of like intellectual, professional left-wing politicos didn't like the poor and didn't spend any time around them, they just hated rich people. And like, yeah, of course, yes, like, obviously. Where he gets wrong is like number one, the idea that socialism is changing the world by first changing other people. I think there's some assholes who say that, but I think most of us would say like, no, no, no, people are fine. There are these systems that are incredibly corrupt and fucked up and unjust that need to be changed.

And then like people can actually live their lives and be decent without these horrible systems crushing them. That's how I would go. That's the goal. Yeah, recognizing, yeah. Yeah, and it's always fascinating to me when reactionaries like Peterson profess a love for Orwell because they inevitably misinterpret him. And 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. Orwell was a committed socialist his entire life and he was profoundly working class. You read any of his work, not just his shit like, he talks about stuff like that a lot in homage to Catalonia, but also a lot of his essays and book reviews. 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 his essays called All Art is Propaganda. And it's just very obvious that he cared deeply and profoundly and understood working class poor people.

Just 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. Not a perfect guy, but really good to read and then misinterpret and then uses an argument for things that Orwell didn't believe. Exactly, yeah, that's the game.

That's the game with Georgie. Never write anything. Just don't write anything down. 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. 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, but the 80s had some pretty fucking hardcore Cold War paranoia. That's why Red Dawn was the movie that it was. Yeah, so Jordan's earliest memories would have included footage from Vietnam and 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 realistic fear as a child that the world was going to suddenly end in nuclear hellfire. And like, I talk 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 horrible nightmares.

Dreams, yeah, he's got a dream problem. Which again, you can't, at this point, perfectly reasonable. Like if you grow up hearing that shit, of course you're going to have nightmares about nuclear hellfire. Like obviously, I have nightmares about it sometimes. Yeah, if 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. And 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. Yeah. 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. Oh jeez, I didn't run across this one. This is why you're the guest. At age 14, he became, within 13 votes of being elected vice president of the NDP, there's sort of organization there, and the quote for the piece is, I won't be happy until an elected prime minister.

Oh good. Okay. Well, there you go. Fine thing to say when you're 14 years old, 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 trumped into it, but like I had those same like dreams of getting into politics. And they're the dreams of an unhealthy young person. And as I got older, I realized that it was much better to just do tons of drugs and hang out on mountains with my friends.

And that that's a way healthier thing than getting into politics. Also just like the pressure of like, I won't be happy until I'm so powerful. Yeah, the idea that like, 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 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 fucked up to think that you have the ability and like that you should be 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, no, no, no. We need to, you know, Bernie Sanders. It's a man who, you know, you all know the joke at home. 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 Jung.

That was good, right? Some good jokes. It's really a laugh a minute this week. Yeah. So Jung 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. Fuck it.

So Peterson also started, but he like, Jung's, he has, okay. So Jung, there's a couple of big things about him. 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 were talking about. And so did Jung. We'll talk about that in a bit. And also these ideas that there's like these archetypes in human civilization, like this, like inherent power of myth that humans are bound by. And there's like something almost kind of supernaturally powerful about certain like mythal archetypes, the hero and all this kind of stuff. Like Jung talks about some shit like that.

He's a complicated guy. So Peterson, big fan of Jung, he also starts devouring Nietzsche and a Romanian scholar named Mircea Eliad. She's a scholar of religion. And he also starts devouring the work of an American professor called Joseph Campbell, whose popular book on the hero myth in society had a profound cultural impact. And one that's not dissimilar to Peterson's own work. So his like hero with the thousand 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.

It's Star Wars. Beat for beat. It's Star Wars. It's Dan Harmon's story circle. And it's like there's a lot of there's obviously a lot that Campbell got right because he's correct about things that resonate with people. There's a reason that all these very successful stories. Yeah. Yeah.

And the others are common, I think the real thing that resonates with people is like just the arc of that basic story. You want a thing, you need a different thing, you try to get the thing you want, you get the thing you actually need, you sacrifice a thing, you change and so on and so forth. Stories. Yeah. Yeah. And Joseph Campbell, it's an important work of scholarship. Campbell's also problematic as fuck, 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.

This is like what creates 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. He wrote 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 sent expeditions out to the Himalayas and stuff, which a lot of people don't know about that. So if you're in an air bay on your own time or maybe we'll do an episode about it, it's wacky shit. I'm going to quote from that Pankaj Mishra article, quote, a range of intellectual entrepreneurs from theosophists and vendors of Asian spirituality like Vivekanada and DZ Suzuki to scholars of Asia like Arthur Whaley and fascist ideologues like Julius Avola, 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 unconscious, such conceptually foggy categories as spirit and intuition acquired broad currency, Peterson's favorite words being and chaos started to appear in capital letters, which he also is how he also tends to refer to them. Yeah, 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 in 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 fucking air and people pick some of it up a decent number of these philosophers and academics. They're not fascists, but their work influenced Hitlerist ideas of like racial community, which is not all that different from kind of young's concept of collective unconscious. There's similarities at least an area mystic beliefs quote by the early 20th century ethnic racial chauvinists everywhere Hindu supremacists in India as well as when we talked about that in our our episode on I forget the Hindu fascist lady, as well as Catholic ultra yeah, as well as Catholic ultra nationalist in France were 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 pseudo science such as concepts of race eugenics or evolution. It was this opportunistic amalgam of ideas that helped nourish new mythologies of would be totalitarian regimes. And obviously like Darwinism plays a lot of in this.

Oh, yeah, yeah. So clearly again. I'm yeah. It's like taking. Sorry. It's like taking like these sort of spiritual ideas and combining them with like biological things and just like Peter Peterson does this a lot of just like he reads. He reads everything. Yeah.

And he has the habit of taking everything he reads and putting it all together. Which is, you know, syncretism is another kind of hallmark that echoes that a 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 is basically true and are not fascists. Right. But like it had a huge impact on Hitler and you do have to like I think intelligent people can understand both of those things. Yeah.

Yeah, like things 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 structure. It just happens around. It just happens. He has a bad habit of like prescriptive versus like normative claims and like, well, there this is this. He'd be in Georgia. We should have to do this.

Yes. Jordan Peterson. Yeah. Both of these episodes will be about his ideas, right? And like what the things he believes and says. Now, 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 a fascist. That said, a lot of the writers Peterson specifically loves got real fashy during this period.

Marcia Eliad, who's that Romanian scholar allied herself with the Romanian iron guard who were Romanian Nazis, right? Like these are the people who like they're Nazis. Carl Jung wrote about the Aryan soul and unfortunately the Jewish psyche. And he was initially initially very simple. 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 sympathetic. Like he got drawn along for a little while.

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, you know, you know what it is. But you're. Yeah.

Yeah. We'll get. Yeah. And so Campbell obviously came around later and he never he was not an open supporter of like a Nazi movement. But once his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces became a hit and he was being 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 overtaken the university in America. I did not enjoy that at all.

I really I'm actually kind of doing a Ben Shapiro voice there. I can't say Marxist without thinking of Ben. Yeah. And by these Marxists and everywhere around me. Now it's unfair that I do that for Ben because Joseph Campbell was profoundly anti-Semitic. I did not enjoy that at all. I just want that on the record. And he hated black people.

Sorry Sophie. I hate that. Super racist, super anti-Semitic like Campbell and Campbell kind of kept a little in that a bit. But like, oh, when you like, he was a guy who hated Marxism and also hated Jewish people. And you do get the feeling that like he kind of agreed with that Nazi idea that Jewish people spread Marxism. Right. Right. I mean, if you have both of those and one is kind of kept secret, chances are that they're very related and fuel each other.

Yeah. He was he was super racist as fuck. 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 a thousand faces, even if you disagree with it because there's a lot of people who do and say that like, it's a lot of like, but you still it's just it's that important of a work. So I'm not saying let these guys from our intellectual history, but like Campbell was basically a Nazi. Right.

Yeah. But like if you if you if you read his work and then write Star Wars, you're not a 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 the point of Star Wars. Despite his his magic blood religion that he put in his movies.

But you know, 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. Oh, 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.

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 going to 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 change your mind about 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. Oh, 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 in parts of the world that we

barely understand. This has gone on far too long. Far too long. Let's hear from Raytheon now. So so you sold me. We're back. Oh, 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 Jung said a lot of stuff that's really interesting, and I know a lot of people are fans of him. So I'm not again, like anyway, the point is that an awful lot of the guys who find themselves writing at length about stuff like ancestral memories and archetypes also wound up having Nazi adjacent beliefs. Like a lot of the people who started codifying those lines of thought in human philosophy also wound up being really drawn to the Nazis. And that's something we should keep in mind when other people have similar 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 psychology, whatever. He went to McGill University for his undergraduate and his 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. Jordan and Tammy grew up on the same street. 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'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 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 Dr. 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 had then Tammy had Julian. Peterson taught psych at Harvard for six years. When Michaela was seven, she was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis and started showing signs of depression. Tammy, who had become an artist and massage therapist, put her career on hold to care for her daughter. In 1998, Peterson was offered a tenure-track position at the University of Toronto and the family returned to Canada. At U of T, 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 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 its 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 a number of times. Yeah. Yeah. Important articles. Good piece, good piece, good piece. Yeah.

Very 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 a 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. Schiff grew too 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. 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, Schiff feels this now blinded him to some of the less savory aspects of Peterson's personality, which had started to emerge in this period. Schiff laments that he did not give sufficient concern to some of Jordan's teaching tactics. As the undergraduate chair, I read all teaching reviews. His were, for the most part, excellent and included eyebrow-raising comments such as, 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 a.m. 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 as statement of fact. I expressed my concern to him about this a number of times, and each time Jordan agreed, he acknowledged the danger of such practices, but then continued to do it again and again, as if he could not control himself. He was a preacher, more than a teacher. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Yeah, I mean, he's like, that's dead on.

When you watch one of his lectures, it does seem like that. Like, yeah, like I said earlier, it's less speeches, less lectures, it's more sermons. Yep. He does, and yeah, choosing the everything. He looks at everything, and he just sort of picks what fits what he wants to say is true, and then puts them all together and pushes that idea. It's 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. He does it a lot with like, yeah, taking like this religious thing, and then 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 things should be. And one of the things I think that happens with Peterson, and I think it's, 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 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 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'll go fucking 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 investigate. Yes, very interesting. That's my whole life too. What draws people to authoritarianism and things like that. 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. Oh, yeah. And yeah, Maps of Meaning shows a Cambalian fascination with the hero myth and the things that cultures tend to find heroic, as well as a great deal of Jungian 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 events 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 at bay by the maintenance of social order.

The reign of order isn't sufficient, 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 B. Peterson. So Maps of Meaning includes some fascinating insight into Jordan's own life and I'm going to 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. Toward 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'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. Yeah, he's very good at captivating. Yeah, absolutely.

He'd make a great preacher. Yeah, he would make a great preacher. 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.

Dr. Paul Taggart, a Canadian philosopher and cognitive scientist, wrote this about the book in psychology today. It's 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 Dr. 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 videotape lecture. So yeah, yeah, it's a little muddy, 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 will be like, he could have cut a couple of hundred pages out.

Yeah, yeah. It's very dense and long. Yeah, now Dr. Taggart condensed the book's main arguments into four points. And these are what he thinks that Peterson is getting at in the book and he's smarter than I am. Number one, myths are culturally universal. Number two, myths are the psychological origin of morality. Number three, myths are the philosophical basis for morality. And number four, myth based morality grounds political judgments about totalitarian states.

So you can see some things to argue with there and some things that 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 Dr. Taggart will disagree with too. But we'll talk about that in a bit later. OK, yeah, there's a lot of like it's just very like forceful and certain. There's no yes, like a lot of things Jordan. Yeah, even are just like, well, OK, that that kind of relates to this, but it's not like a universal rule.

It's not the way the world is. Yeah, he's got it. It often seems like he's trying to like create a religion or like create like a worldview. Yeah, it explains everything. And he's basing it on these myths and he's basing it on a specific subset of myths from a specific chunk of the world that happens to be the chunk of the world he's familiar with. Ignoring all of the different myths and 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 means Western 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 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 grew by darker and angrier. Now, Peterson's student reviews were always exceptional and he earned a position on the U of T's tenure track, but he also showed peculiar signs of nonacademic ambitions. Jordan started a clinical practice, which is fine, but his experiences there inspired him to create a series of

neuro psychological 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 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 real off putting, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Getting a little, again, it's the mysticism, it's the spirituality. It's like the deeper stuff that seems. Yeah, it can't be as simple as like, yeah, no, you know, outlining your goals and talking,

you know, outlining some aspects of your past and thinking about what you want your future to be can be helpful if you're kind of in like a confused or muddled state. No, no, you're in a dream state and something inside you comes up like, okay. Yeah, it's like, yeah, you talk to the universe. It's like, well, no, you just like, you assess your life and you try to go 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 had decreased dropout rates by 25% and raised GPAs 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. I will 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 B. 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 who we also did episodes on, talk a lot about integrations. Anyway, I always find that a little weird, but it was it also it only costs like 15 bucks.

So 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. 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 try 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 and shit, because obviously, yes, if your plane depressurizes, you should put on your own oxygen mask first

because you will be unconscious and unable to help people. But I think generalizing this, because this is a big thing 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 as an emergency and 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,

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, it's not. I mean, it's his game. I mean, this reductive is called his game, but that analogy... He takes these situations and these analogies and 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 the lobster thing. But also, I don't know, if you're a person who's like, what if everybody was able to go to the doctor without having to pay copays and premiums and all that bullshit, that doesn't mean that the person suggesting that needs to live a perfect life and have all their problems fixed out. This example is so wrong and misleading.

And 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 and you have to take care of yourself first, otherwise you'll be unconscious. 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. But no, it's kind of a microcosm of the way he thinks, which is like find 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 if you think about it for more than a couple of seconds, you realize like, well, that actually can't be generalized to anybody. Yeah, so you can't try to improve society unless you're perfect,

which is impossible. Who can claim that 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, the 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, et cetera. 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. 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 speaking pretty literally. Oh, yeah. Some of his diagrams in that book are something to be holds. Amazing. Yeah.

So the way Peterson frames things, though, 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 deal with larger and larger things and help you order your own minds that you can accomplish greater tasks. Nothing sinister in that.

In fact, I'd say it's good advice. But the focus on chaos and on life as 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 this 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 didn'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. We figured the things out. Unbelievable.

And also look at society. Why do you think that women are categorized like that in your mind? Because the fucking Greek goddess of discord was Eris and therefore chaos is always feminine. Right, like men are order and women are chaos. Women have a regular menstrual cycle that's pretty fucking ordered.

Whereas men were largely responsible for the partitioning of Poland, which was pretty chaotic. Pretty chaotic. There's just like so many examples and like you can look and like this is Jordan's game that he won't let anybody else play. I can look at lobsters and say lobsters do this

because of the resources. Therefore society has to be measured like that. I can point to women menstruating and be like, no, women are order. You fucking dumb shit. And like, yeah, 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 want to know what's not frustrating Cody though? I would. Yes, I would like to know that actually. This fantastic transition to ads that Robert's about to do.

Robert. Yeah, do it. Oh, wow. Nailed it. Sad. I liked it. I did not. We're back before we move on.

I was just quoting from that Nellie Bowles New York Times article. And 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, 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 thus an agent of chaos. Yep. That's beautiful.

It's frustratingly beautiful is what it is. You don't have to be this stressed out. You know, Mr. Peterson, this isn't, this doesn't need to be your life. 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 quasi Marxist. And it's like, actually, if you look at it,

Canada is basically one gigantic mining and natural gas company with like a social safety nest 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. Jordan B. Peterson is not going to get it on that. Mr. Bumblebee, I got to point out also his whole thing of like, if you change this and if you change that, what is it? Now you're a transhuman or what? It's like, well, what you're doing is you're fighting against the idea of evolution.

Like when humans got to where we are, was that like, oh, you did it. You're perfect. Never change. Never move on from this. And I don't think he 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 site of concrete. Like just because the amount of it would be so baffling to their fucking brains. The world would make no sense. The air would taste different. Yeah. They would be able to understand people speaking what is essentially their language

because our idioms have changed so much. Like it would be a nightmare for them because people are changed deeply every couple of generations. Yeah. Culture change is constantly and like deal with it Jordan. What he's describing is like...

Fucking baby. Yeah. Yeah. 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. It's so weird. The amount there is so weird. It's too much of any decoration to be honest. Yeah. He's the kind of guy who you'd think would be like, oh, well, your environment affects your mood and things like that.

How would you live in that space? It's so bleak. All of your walls are men shooting each other and hoisting red flags. Of course you think Marxism is coming for you. Yeah, it's wild. And also, just the motive behind doing that is if you're fascinated by the history of Nazism

because you want to find out what they think and fight it, if you want to fight, you're not going to put Nazi shit everywhere. I have no Nazi propaganda on my walls, Cody. Yeah, that's normal. I'm glad. I do have one reproduction Wehrmacht 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 fucking, the coat's not the problem. Nobody hates the Nazis because their coats were good. Yeah, there was not a coat problem there. It doesn't have a swat stick on it. It's just a coat. Anyway, so Peterson grew increasingly also like during this kind of period where he's becoming darker

and more weird and radical. Professor Schiff notes that he grew increasingly interested in fringe health treatments. 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, and he was unaware 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. It's a little bit weird. Choosing me also a little bit appropriative, I don't know. You know, Dr. 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 have been pretty unpleasant to be around. That sounds pretty, yeah, it sounds like he's... It sounds like an issue. He's already intense. He's already 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, but the demons in his head seemed to have a noteworthy impact on his personality.

Professor Schiff writes that as the years went on, quote, 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, he sometimes appeared to be in the thrall of his ideas and would not or could not

constrain himself and self-monitor what he was saying. Yeah, that sounds about right. Maybe not great for a professor, yeah. I'm gonna say not great for a priest either. Not great. No, it's not. 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 at 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 email chain over whether the term flip chart could be used in the workplace, which was a pejorative for Filipino. She had a radical left boss who was really concerned with equality

and equality of outcome and all these things in diversity and inclusivity and all these buzzwords and she was subjected to. She sent me the email 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. The flip has a long series of meanings that have nothing to do with racism towards Filipinos. If we're like, yeah, whatever, yes. There are other examples

that I won't say because I'm not gonna 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, arguably silly thing to the Marxist are trying to destabilize

the world and then all of his stuff is like, come on, man. Yeah, and the idea, I actually do want to eliminate hierarchies, but just the idea that because you're maybe over-concerned about whether or not

a specific term is offensive means that you want to eliminate all hierarchies, I'm gonna guarantee you whatever person, this radical left boss was actually more or less a Democrat who really supported the hierarchical Democratic party and stuff

and was just overly worried about political progress. Also, he's talked about, I don't know if we're gonna get into this more, but he has talked about feeling boxed in and I believe the quote is like, everyone sort of claims that I'm some sort of right-winger,

but it couldn't be farthest from the truth. He denies that he's like right-wing. But his primary thing is being obsessed with hierarchies and reinforcing those hierarchies. The definition of it. Yeah, that's the thing he loves most. The definitionally,

that's your right-wing. Stuff like that, whenever I hear stuff like that, pings me. It's like, oh, you're just lying. Yeah. You're too smart 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 the middle, even though he's, again, very right-wing and there's a reason he's doing that. He's a liberal, I'm sure. Oh, yes, yeah. So in 2014, Dr. 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 the book. They said, and feathered headdresses should be banned at music festivals, too. Police brutality is racial in nature. Now, they used 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 1,300 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 are classic liberals who advocate for more democratic governance and equality.

PC authoritarians are, according to Brophy, the ones now relabeled as social justice warriors. Both share a high degree of compassion. Extreme compassion, they believe, can lead to difficulty assessing right from wrong. It 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 what I would say is, if people feel like they need safe spaces in a school for whatever reason, I'm fine with them having that 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 the idea of a safe space on campus would say they're necessary to promote diversity of perspective. They'd say, oh yeah, if people need that, why not? Just put in a room in the campus, yeah, let's have it. Sure. There doesn't seem to be any sort of room for that

in the... It seems like the questionnaire is kind of designed to get people to respond in an authoritarian way. Feathered headdressers should be banned at music festivals. Should they be banned? I wouldn't say they should be banned. Is it fucked up for white kids to wear Native American headdresses?

Oh yeah, that's messed up. They shouldn't do that. Yeah, people that think... I'm not going to say that. The second thing will not... Most will not be like, oh yeah, ban them everywhere. That is written to elicit the kind of result that he wants. And I spend a lot of time

reading, 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 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 a law ban. That's no.

They're trying to explain why it's offensive. Exactly. Which is different from saying ban it at music festivals. It's explaining these things. Why do people want to say space? Why does this, why does this? Not saying we need to write laws to require them or we need to ban X or Y.

It's also interesting that... Let's explain to people why this is messed up. Yeah. They have too much compassion and are prone too much to forgiveness or something? Yeah. That's a big three-line in his work. Because I thought that the SWU were obsessed with cancelling 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.

The relation between that. Hardness. So the article goes on to note that Dr. Peterson believes there are five major personality traits. Extraversion, 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 fucking nonsense. Like that you can separate shit out like that. 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,

the biology is kind of stupid. Maybe it's a little stupid. Maybe it's kind of dumb. That said, yeah, I find a lot of what's written about all this to be low-key terrifying like this quote from Toronto Life. These traits have both 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. Now... This is all dressed up. And again, I'm not saying this is what all psychologists believe

because I don't think that's true. I think this is what Jordan Peterson is. I think he's a little outside the norm there. Yeah. I think this is what bell curve motherfuckers 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 shit where you talk about how black IQ was inherently lower and if you start talking about that shit, you wind up having the kind of questions about whole races that lead to real bad things going down.

Yeah. He's got tons of IQ stuff. Yeah. A lot of mallin' you kind of things. And that's something that I think he's never really addressed of like if you believe 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, no. I don't think there's any intelligence difference between men and women and stuff like that. But then he will make arguments where like, but this leads you to a conclusion that's kind of different from the thing that you're saying.

Yeah. And like how to deal with, 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 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 and we can't pay them like universal basic income thing that doesn't work either. Again, citation needed. Therefore, and then trailing off.

Yeah. We need to gas them in trucks. What do you do? What do you do with these people? It's just like these like X is true even though it's not. Y is 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 IQs threshold. Again, I worked in this field. I worked with a particular 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 and we would help them get jobs working and 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 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 live with and contribute with everyone else because there's no reason that they shouldn't. Exactly. They can't join the army on

people of like either you contribute to society in the way that society's decided that you contribute to it or you're out. It's also ridiculous. Yeah. It's also fucked up. Yes. But also like people need to have a job to contribute to society. But also like comparing people like you can't get into the military

therefore X and Y. You know who wasn't allowed in the military? The president of the United States. We had bone spurs, could he? Yeah. And I don't see Peterson talking about how if you have bone spurs and you can't, you know, 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. Nope. How do I? So in 2016, Canada started to debate over a bill C16 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 Dr. Peterson would have had to refer to non-binary and trans students by their preferred pronouns. Now, obviously this was just one aspect of the law which would have also done stuff like, you know, help

make it harder to deny trans people apartments or like homelands. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. All the things that you don't want people to be discriminated for so they can live their fucking lives. Yes. But to Dr. 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 to him. 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's stand came at a perfect moment as the simmering culture war between right and left in the US started to

reach a boil. Soon there were protests against Peterson. His supporters showed up to counter. There were fights and arrests and 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

sent Peterson a letter saying that his refusal to use people's pronouns revealed discriminatory intentions which I would argue was accurate. The letter went on to warn him that the impact of your behavior runs the risk of undermining your ability to conduct essential components of your job as a faculty member. And like an educator

like it's like an educator like you're educating people and someone's like please my uh refer to me as she instead of he and then he says he that's like a hostile learning environment. Yeah. You just being a dick which is not to say that kids shouldn't be challenged and like

and deal with ideas that are uncomfortable in school. You want to but it also it does mean that like one of the basic things you should expect from a college is that they're not going to be shitty to you personally for no good reason because that's bad and you shouldn't do that to students. It's not

kind of makes you 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 like you don't have an inherent right to be a teacher if you're going to be a teacher we have the right to say you shouldn't

do certain things like hit on your students even if you're both adults because it's a college colleges like you have the right as an adult as a 35-year-old PhD you have the right to date a 19-year-old absolute 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 makes sense yeah yeah I don't think he would be okay I mean he's got other issues with that yeah but like that specific

thing and keeping your door open when you have meetings with female students and stuff yeah yeah yeah but whatever it's nice whatever so Peterson ignored the dean he took a sabbatical from work and he started a patrion where 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 he was soon making like 80 grand a month like crazy money on that very very success very good at patreon now all the while Peterson continued to ram hard into particularly the issue of recognizing trans people's identities from Toronto life

to his mind arguing that gender is a social construct or a kind of performance as the Ontario human rights 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

instagiated into law they're implementing a social constructionist view of human identity into the law no they're just saying if you're going to work in one of these public fields you don't get to treat people shitty because they're trans or non-binary it's a very basic thing

you can believe that transgender people are unhealthy and mentally ill and still call them by their preferred pronouns because it doesn't matter what we think privately about each other if you're going to work in a public thing like that there's certain basic things you shouldn't do because it's just it's being a dick

and it's fucking up the ability of you to do your job it's if I if we're in a working environment or like an educational environment and you're trying to teach me something or be my colleague and you're calling me but shit and I'm like actually could you call me by my name

and you're like no your name is but shit okay 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 they're both fired I'm gonna start a patreon and I will contribute $80,000 to that so we can talk about this one-on-one so C16 passed this

Canadian anti-discrimination thing it's now law in Canada things are fine it hasn't destroyed freedom of speech things are fine name a person who's been like arrested for this Canada's in broadly better shape than the United States the problems they have

aren't because of this law not causing a lot of 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 a cornerstone of his career in his 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 it's not I don't I have been an employer I have hired people

some of them have been religious I don't believe that going to church does you any good but you know what if I were to be discriminatory about them because they go to church and I don't care for church I would rightfully get in trouble because that's fucked up and none of my goddamn business you

you'd rightfully get in trouble for that it's the same thing it's all myopic but he won't change his mind that any of these things don't add up or that it hasn't 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 like foolish he was being 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 so he continued to repeat it when he was not arguing and was instead lecturing to a room of people who would never question him yep in a follow-up questions during that same lecture another student asked if without c16 he'd be willing to use pronouns like they and them if a transgender person

asked him to you responded that it might depend on how they asked which is like the same thing Ben Shapiro says right like because actually if you're a person you just generally choose not to be shitty to the people immediately around you because it makes life harder for no good goddamn reason yeah it's frustrating

real real simple and frustrating yeah it depends on how they asked god what a unbelief like can't even say yeah can't even just confirm like yeah of course because I'm a decent person 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 okay during one of his 2016 debates Peterson admitted if our society comes to some sort of consensus over

the next while about how we'll solve the pronoun problem and that becomes part of popular parlance and it seems to solve the problem properly without sacrificing the distinction between singular and plural and without requiring me to memorize an impossible list of an indefinite number of pronouns then 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 or like they're just saying like yeah don't don't call me like if I say don't call me this like try to remember to call me the thing

that 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 going to get like well no then you'll be corrected and then you like alter your behavior slightly yeah and 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 non conforming stuff that I haven't understood but all that matters is that when someone says hey this is how I prefer to be like that okay fine yeah absolutely like yeah just don't easy easy yeah yeah yeah I

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 in his conception of the world order is

masculine and chaos is feminine and if it turns out that a whole bunch of people aren't really either then the cosmology of his mental universe might have to change 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 in a voluntary

celibate man named Alec Minasian 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 Minasian wrote private recruit Minasian infantry 0 0 0 1 0

wishing to speak to sergeant 4chan please the incel rebellion has already begun we will overthrow all the chads and stasis all hail the supreme gentleman Elliott Roger and he killed a bunch of people now this is interesting to me because I I am actually like like a recognized expert in online radicalization

I make money from it like it quoted by fucking like a lot like this is the thing that I study like it's the only thing that I actually have any degree of meaningful expertise and other than certain narcotics and to me as a guy who studies this for a living Minasian's post make a few things very clear one of them

is that he was radicalized in the community of similarly inclined people somewhere on 4chan so his radicalization occurred as part of a community that was self radicalizing to he was directly inspired by the example of another involuntary celibate terrorist Elliott Roger 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 defensive 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 relevant on incels 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 reporter you're laughing about them he says giving me a disappointed look that's because you're female

but aside from interventions that would redistribute sex Mr. Peterson is staunchly against what he calls a quality of outcomes or efforts to equalize society he usually calls them pathological or evil he agrees that this is inconsistent for preventing hordes of single men from violence he believes is necessary for the stability of society

enforced monogamy helps neutralize that there's a lot there he walked this back and was like well I didn't mean like literally a law I just mean like culturally we should like generally like support monogamy and 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 are vocal about it or do like campaigns or propaganda about it or whatever it is 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 that's and you know what I have a lot of friends who were men and not dating women

and not don't have kids and you know what they don't do is murder a bunch of people murder people because it's bad to murder people yeah it's bad to kill wrong we don't it's all you need it's very it's very easy to

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 just do the clean your room advice

yeah like that's the advice like well yeah like guys should like work on themselves and like be socialized and like you know get a new skill become desirable and these sort of things instead of wallowing in it and these like sad online

extreme groups it's there's a lot that's fucked up about it like and it just 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 fuck you people that's where I land

yeah no no authoritarian unless chaos is creeping in my idea of whatever chaos might be 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 cause like he's like well yeah 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 really like if you go through his 12 rules for life he does not follow a single one of them no new okay so

that's the episode Cody you want to tell people where they can find you on the internet dot com Cody don't worry there's part two internet part two yeah there will be a second part of this thank goodness because I've got I have got so much more to say

I've been saving it oh yeah my name is Cody and you can find me online on twitter Dr. Mr. Cody the google on the accounts we've got a show called some more news on youtube we've got a patreon and a podcast called even more news

I do another podcast called worst year ever with the host of this show and my co-host of the other show I think that's it donate to Cody's patreon it'll be greattreeon episodes over

and swish