Behind the Bastards - Part One: We Watch More of Jordan Peterson's New Show

Episode Date: January 3, 2023

Robert and Cody sit down to talk Jordan Peterson's new incomprehensible tv series.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Yeah, I mean, Cody, I agree entirely. It's like the world we live in we've come to realize is careening towards disaster. And we have very little say in actually arresting that disaster. And the elites that have brought us here have entrenched their power so deeply that people can't even conceive of a world without a boot on their neck. So we all just kind of grasp for the artifacts of our childhood for those last moments before we realized how deep the problems were.

And that's got us all stuck in this kind of endless cycle of worshiping the dead remnants of our youth. Anyway, how are you doing today? Oh, aside from that, all that stuff. I couldn't be, well, it could be better, but you know, I'm doing all right. Have you enjoyed Andor? I've enjoyed the few that I've been able to sit down and watch. It's good. It's good.

A plus, well, so far. A, A, so far. A plus, I hear. I think I've watched through all of it and it's quite good. Yeah. Everything about it is correct in terms of what should be done with franchise. Yes, yes. It's this thing I've been saying where like the reason the first Star Wars movies were great is that George Lucas, everyone around him,

including his ex-wife, who was the editor on those three movies and one of Oscars and stuff, great film editor, were like, George has consistently 20% of a great idea. And if you can cut the other 80% out of it and replace it with like something vaguely reasonable and not not unhinged, then you get pretty darn good movies. And then for the prequels, he just got let off the leash and there was a lot of nonsense. And Andor seems to have taken that like core of stuff that was cool about the prequels. And anyway, this is behind the ballastries. Also just like a cohesive vision, which I think obviously the sequels didn't have.

Not good in my opinion. Yeah, no. One of the only I think positives of the prequels is that at least the vision was cohesive. Yes. They all like look the same. They were trying to do the same kind of thing. They felt like a thing. Yeah.

Exactly. So that's I think a positive for Andor, but also just like it's just written well. It's written extremely well. Writers are doing a good job writing like scenes and lines and there's scenes in it, at least in the first few that I've watched where I've been like, that didn't have to be in the Star Wars universe. Like that was just a scene. That was a good scene between two people who happened to like have like, you know,

laser guns on their hips. Yeah. They've done a really good job of like, there's a lot of evil in the show, but a majority of the actors are self interested, but not actively malicious, even when they're contributing to terribly malicious systems, which is a shows a nuanced understanding of how evil actually occurs.

Most often in the real world that I appreciate. Yeah. Yeah. There's a lot of just consideration and thought that seems to have got into it. Yeah. Not a whole lot of the Boba Fett's of the world. I think have Boba's feet done. Yeah.

The Boba Fett's didn't quite nail it. I haven't seen a second of that show. I actually think they're all they're all perfectly fun. As long as it's got fucking Pedro Pascal and I'll keep watching. Oh yeah, for sure. By the way, Pedro, what's up? This is behind the bastards podcast about bad people. We are taking another easy week by going through episode two season one.

You say easy. Dragons, monsters and men, the Jordan Peterson series in which he sits in a comfortable chair and just kind of talks. Like I don't look when people say he seems like he's off his meds. That that often can be an offensive statement, but he does seem like he's off his meds. Or like on the wrong meds. Or on the wrong meds or hasn't been medicated for the right thing.

Either way, whatever is going on with Jordan Peterson's drug use, it's not right. Yeah. Fix your drug use, Jordan. So, episode two after our Game of Thrones-esque opening. I forgot about that. Oh yeah. No, Sophie, why don't you play us a clip of that, bad boy? Sure.

Let's go. Let's just remind everybody. Oh my God. Oh, I like I blocked this out. I know, this is what they spent almost as much money on as fucking Jordan Peterson himself. It's like a fucking video game loading. And then it's so good. After this, I should be clicking continue and then like hitting a windigo with an axe.

But yeah, episode two opens with the title card Arm Yourself on a red background. And then we're back to Jordan with his like hands together, looking at his fingers just kind of like awkwardly and shit. It's such a funny transition. It's certainly funny. It's like just sudden. It's like, I can't even say they didn't do it on purpose knowing how funny it was, but also they didn't. Because there have to be a few people at the Daily Wire who like know it's bullshit and know how stupid and silly all this is, but are just like, I got to get, you know, paycheck. And I just I don't care.

But maybe tweak it a little, make it funny. There are so many extra pieces of furniture behind him. There is a chair behind him. And a couch and stools. Again, this I would love to have a library like this. I think that that it's very nice looking. But there's more chairs back here. I think I count one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. It looks like an ideal salon like intellectual workplace where it's like kind of there's a little bit almost of like an industrial vibe.

You can see like bricks in the background. Like maybe it was like a storage or like a hanger or a big garage, but they've they've put in a bunch of nice bookshelves and nice furnitures and wood paneling. There's like maybe a little bar table in the back left corner where Jordan Peterson can have a single sip of cider and not sleep for 30 days. Yeah, but there's legitimately like at least 10 chairs visible in this. Well, Jordan Peterson has a lot of people over to discuss his ideas like that your evil uncle is never to be argued with even when he's the Catholic Church and molesting children. Anyway, whatever. It's maybe it's like in honor of like, you know, the fallen philosophers of old. Yeah.

That's the noses chair behind him. Emmanuel Kant over there in the corner with that like one wiry uncomfortable looking one fucking. Yeah. Yeah. Sort of an empty chairs at empty tables. Yeah. High digger probably in that like back corner next to all the cleaning bottles. It looks like anyway.

So once the episode opens, Peterson immediately starts talking about how men are becoming wusses. Men becoming more passive. Yes, it appears that in some sense they are. They're becoming more passive in that they're bailing out of society. They boys don't do as well in school pretty much from day one. They're less likely to enroll in university. They're more likely to drop out. They're less likely to graduate.

They're withdrawing. And there is evidence that I think is quite compelling. Perhaps this is most advanced in Japan and South Korea, but which have very low birth rates that men, young men are even bailing out of the sexual game. Even even if it's solitary, there's there's some indication that young men aren't even masturbating as much as they used to. Wait a second. Wait a second. I thought that it was like in this crowd, it was good to not masturbate. Yeah, it's he's inconsistent about that.

I think he's he'll bring. Yeah, I don't actually know if because Jordan Peterson, I don't think is like hard into the nofap stuff, but he's also pretty hard into the incel stuff, which is related to nofap. And like, you know, anti like, I mean, he's you don't have to look at pornography, the masturbate, but I know he's anti pornography. So like, he's like, many, many to jerk it more. Like what's going on here? I have to point out so that he brings up a bunch of claims here, like that men are going graduating high school and college less, right? Now, as this isn't he is less wrong than he normally is in this statement.

But also as with everything he says, he's still wrong. There's an Atlantic article that I found in literally like six seconds. It notes quote education experts and historians are remotely surprised women in the United States have earned more bachelor's degrees than men every year since the mid 1980s. Every year, in other words, that I've been alive and that both of us have been alive. This particular gender gap hasn't been breaking news for about 40 years, but the imbalance reveals a genuine shift in how men participate in education, the economy and society. So number one, this has been going on for decades. This is not a recent thing. This is about half a century, but also currently right now men are going enrolling in college and finishing college more than they were a decade ago.

Yeah, in 1970, men accounted for 57 percent of college and college university students. So it's like, you know, it's complicated. Yeah, people there's like a number of theories as to why but this has been going on for a long time. A lot of it has to do with the fact that many of the jobs that men seek don't require a college degree like trade jobs. Another has to do with the fact that women are increasingly seeking education because like it's gotten a lot easier for them to do so in the last half a century. Some of it has to do with the fact that men are much more likely to be incarcerated than women. Like it's there's a bunch of theoretical reasons for it, but it's also not an entirely like linear process. Like it's not just that men have been dipping and in fact over the last decade, there's been some rises in men at least attending college.

So again, Jordan Peterson takes like his take is taking like what is an actual half century long tradition, boiling out all of the actual facts around it and claiming it's something that's very recently happening when it that's not actually the way things are going. Also, Peterson specifically has a whole lot of problems with just like academia and universities in general. And most people at the Daily Wire, like most prominent figures at the Daily Wire tell you to not go to college. Yes, like that is a big movement in that entire crowd now is like don't go to college. And if you do pretend like you're learning something and lies, you get the degree, but like they support not going. So what's going on there? Yeah.

Yeah, it's and it's like I'm not ever going to tell people to go to college because I also think it's a gigantic grift. Oh, sure. Anyway, Jordan is let's say let's say he is partially right in that there is a long term trend of men declining in higher education, but also largely wrong because he ignores all of the different reasons and the length of time at which that's been occurring. Right. To make it look like it's it's the cause. It's being caused by our new woke world. It's a sort of deal.

Well, number one, men have a lot of jobs that don't require college degrees. Men are imprisoned at a lot higher rate. Women have suddenly gotten a lot more freedom and have been going to college in an attempt to like shore up and get equal weight. To get anything that even approaches an equal wage, they have to get more of an education than men do. Like there's a whole bunch of reasons for it. And also the fact and I feel like this is left out of that Atlantic article that increasingly people are realizing that a lot of higher education is a gigantic con. Anyway, which they agree with.

So yeah, let's move on from the college stuff because we can also talk about masturbation. So unlike birth rates, masturbation, like knowing how often people masturbate is dependent upon self reporting, right? Birth rates are objective. You can know are the amount of babies, you know, are that people are having is raising or lowering, right? That's something that it's very easy to get data on because as a general rule, the government is informed when a baby. Yeah, definitely easier to determine than when people are doing a solo activity in the privacy. In order to know the rate at which people are masturbating, you would have to build like a perfect digital panopticon to keep track of everyone's come. A panopticum, if you will, which I do support creating, but that's a separate episode that you and I will do that in the future.

So yeah, I found one survey of 1,040 Americans on masturbation habits published by Dr. Evan Goldstein of bespoke surgical. The language he uses certainly doesn't make it seem as if his evidence suggests that masturbation is less common today. Here's how his little article opens. According to Thomas Lacker's 2003 book, Solitary Sex, A Cultural History of Masturbation, masturbation as we know it was invented in 1713. By that he meant that while masturbation may have always existed, may probably doesn't belong in there. Yeah, there's a lot of work being done by that word man. It was only in the early 18th century that the phenomenon was named a new disease, creating a quote,

nearly universal engine for generating guilt, shame and anxiety. And I do think that is a worthwhile point that like people have always masturbated, but the modern concept of masturbation was developed as a clinical term to shame people for masturbating, right? Now bespoke surgical is some sort of like medical clinic run for profit and I question their data as I always do when a for-profit clinic releases a survey. That said, what they're claiming their survey shows doesn't seem particularly weird. Quote, we wanted to know how often Americans masturbate. Overall, the answer is about 12 times a month on average. This number is consistent when considering just heterosexual people,

but was slightly higher for homosexual respondents who reported masturbating 14.2 times per month. And I might suggest that like rather than there actually being a gap between straight people and queer people in masturbation, queer people are just like more honest about their... I also suspect everybody might be underestimating the amount of... Although that's like 14 times isn't like weird. That's a reasonable, I would say that seems like a pretty reasonable average. Obviously people are going to have more, people are going to have less, but yeah, that data does not like set off alarm bells in my head. I'm not shocked by whether that number is too high or too low.

So that obviously does not give us any longitudinal data. Peterson is saying that men are masturbating less as sort of evidence that men are in decline. And obviously that data does not show whether or not that's happening at all. I did find a study by Tenga Company, which is a sexual health and wellness business that makes sex toys. So again, you're never going to find a good study on this that's like done by a perfect scientific source. Again, until our startup gets off the ground. Until the Panopticum is created, yes. They did what their press release calls the, quote, world's largest masturbation study involving 13,000 participants.

It did not actually say anything at all interesting about masturbation, but it did note this. The survey, which asked Americans to evaluate which characteristics they believe men in their country value, found approximately 90% of Americans think men value traditionally manly traits, like physical strength, aggression and assertiveness and being the main breadwinner. However, when asking men what they actually value, the results found that men are more comfortable talking about their feelings and connecting with others and less comfortable being aggressive than Americans realize. 88% of men claim to be in touch with their emotions, but only 54% of Americans think this is important to men in their country. 77% are comfortable talking about their feelings or personal challenges with others, but only 51% of Americans surveyed think this is true of American men. I find that really interesting actually. I also find that interesting.

Yeah, that when people are asked, hey, how do men feel about talking about their feelings, they're like, they hate it. And when you ask men, they're like, actually, that's very important to me and I do it all the time. Yeah, I mean, that's like, you know what, not exactly that framing, but like what people say quite often is how important it is for me to be able to do that and not feel like the other, those respondents who are like, oh, yeah, they don't like that. And like, which feeds into the idea that they shouldn't like that, right? Yeah. Yeah, and I, in general, I found this survey interesting, not so much about masturbation, although there's one really interesting part, which is that it found that Americans underestimate how often people masturbate consistently by nine to 10%. Wait, underestimate? Yeah, underestimate. Okay.

People estimate that groups like that, that their peers masturbate about nine to 10% less than those that groups self reports masturbate, right? Interesting. Which I might account for Dr. Peterson's belief in this area. So let's listen on. Next, he goes into a rant about how evil progressives are trying to make boys believe they're bad people for being masculine. The purest manifestation of the destructive human force that's demolishing our beloved Earth. You know, if you tell that from the time they're young, especially if they're actually ethical people, then, well, why wouldn't they be demoralized? Obviously, the right response to that, if it's true, is to be demoralized.

But it's a pack of lies right from the bottom up to the highest levels of abstraction. Talk to a man named Mary. And again, number one, this is just like a very basic misstating of what people who talk about the patriarchy are claiming. When people say like the patriarchy is destroying the world, what they're saying is that this like deeply hierarchical system that praises the accumulation of wealth and power, largely by men in a male dominated society, is killing the world, is leading to like unhinged resource extraction, and like the thoughtless exploitation of an environment that cannot handle endless growth. And that both kind of the excesses of capitalism and the excesses of a society in which like men are encouraged to be violent and like aggressive and seek the domination of their opponents, that is a problem, rather than that men are a problem.

The issue is not men, the issue is a system that has grown up around incentivizing men to act like sociopaths. That's the issue. Yeah, he's done this before too. This is actually one of the topics that made him cry some time recently. And it's interesting partially because a lot of stuff Peterson says could be characterized as being like demoralizing to groups of people. Yeah, like who cares what you believe, you don't believe anything, you're 16. Yeah. Ashley Jordan, many of most of the things that have happened in the world that have like changed the destiny of nations have been because a lot of teenagers believed things very strongly.

But also like it's because the framing is trying to do is like, yeah, there's this and all everything's going to be destroyed. So of course, you're demoralized. But the part is leaving out is that most people who criticize aspects of society or how the earth is going acknowledge that we can do something about it and should and it would be good if we did something about it. But his whole ideology is based off of not doing anything about society. So to him, it is demoralizing more so because he's like, well, then there's nothing to do about it. So what would you turn to despair? Well, no, you don't have to turn to despair. You could turn to like changing the way things are done.

I don't think we're going to do that, Cody. But what I think we are going to do is have us a little ad break. Oh, yes. See if the evil uncle that is our sponsors will slay the dragon of us not owning enough things anyway. It's the mark of the old crone, you see. Speaking of old crones, that would be a good name for like a bourbon. That I was going to say, perfect. Cody, you come over into my salon where I have a dozen chairs and several large bookcases and I say, Mr. Johnson, good to see you.

Would you like perhaps we can share a dram of old crone and crone and talk about spinosa? Yeah. Are you saying this because it sounds a lot off a lot like old crow? I feel like we're just might not hold some old crow. That's what I'm doing. Anyway, here's our ads. Here are the ads. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations.

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All right, we're back. So, outside of what we just talked about, I think one of the things that's interesting about that last bit of what Peterson was saying is that like, it's bad to make young men feel as if the domination of the society by small groups of extremely hierarchical males is bad because that makes them demonized for being male. When he says that, what he's saying is that those traditional patriarchal values are necessary for young men and that demonizing that behavior causes a crisis of manhood. So, while I think most of the people who talk about the patriarchy are saying that this is bad for men and women and we need to end it for the good of everybody, he is saying that if you demonize this patriarchal domination of society, you're inherently demonizing men because they cannot be separated from it. They are incapable of living any other way, which I actually find as a man is pretty offensive. But also, hearing that makes me think about another thing I read in that sex toy company study.

Quote, about 91% of respondents interested in male partners said their ideal man is in touch with his and others emotions, is comfortable discussing mental health 90% and talking about sex 88%, caring of social issues 86% and comfortable interacting with people of all sexual orientations 83%. Compared to this ideal man, the same respondents said their current male partners are much less likely to have these traits, 12% less on average. The survey revealed men are already moving in this direction with many benefits to being a man who feels more, including a better relationship with their partner. The emotional connection with partners is 20% better on average. More self and body confidence, 63% of men who feel more have high levels of self confidence versus 54% of other men. This means they are 8% more likely to think they have a beautiful body.

Overall, higher levels of happiness, 45% of men who feel more strongly agree that they are happy with their lives versus 29% of other men. A better sex life, the quality and frequency of their sex, masturbation and orgasms are 20% better on average than other men. They are also 18% more sexually satisfied with their partners. Better overall health, 89% of men who feel more say they have good overall health versus 81% of other men. They are also 11% more likely to belong to a gym. Comprehensively, being thoughtful and in touch with your emotions and open-minded to people of other genders and orientations and caring of your partner makes you a comprehensively happier person. More likely to have sex, not just more likely to have sex and masturbation, more likely to go to the gym to take care of your own body to self-report being healthy. They didn't say this in the study that you just recited, but if I were to distill it down, being more in touch with your feelings and open-minded emotions and projecting these ideas we are talking about will lead you to be more likely to clean your room.

Yeah, I think it's more than that. I think a big part of it is that embracing the attitudes that Peterson has, which is that life is this struggle and you have to be the master of everyone and everything around you and that doing anything else is going to make you unfulfilled and miserable, is what makes you unfulfilled and miserable and caring about other people and listening to them and being agreeable and loving, is what makes you happy and also makes you more powerful both in a physical sense and in an emotional sense. And he's even said things along those lines before too. Yeah. His whole deal is sort of talking out both sides of his mouth in different clips. You can find him talking about what you just said in other clips and talk about depression before and how a good way to get out of that funk is to focus on other people and helping other people. But he can't reconcile a lot of these sort of disparate thoughts that he has.

Nope. So that's pretty cool. We're barely two minutes into the episode and Jordan Peterson's entire theory of the world has already been demolished by a company that makes vibrators, which I think is pretty funny. Let's see what we can learn next. He brings up his friend Marion Tupi, author of books with and he just says like my friend Marion Tupi, you know, and starts talking about this person's ideas. Marion Tupi is the author of books with titles like 10 global trends every smart person should know and super abundance the story of population growth innovation and human flourishing on an infinitely bountiful planet. In the context of this guy, Peterson brings up Paul Ehrlich, who is Ehrlich is the guy who like made this bet about certain he was a he was a Malthusian, right? He was a guy being like the world overpopulation is coming a bunch.

There's going to be a resource crunch and he made a bet about a bunch of resources running out that was wrong, right? That's the gist of Paul Ehrlich. This happened in like the 80s and the right wing has never shut up about it as a reason to doubt that climate change is real and that a bunch of other problems are real. So Peterson contrasts Ehrlich and Malthusians like him who are pessimistic with optimists like his friend Marion Tupi and he describes Tupi as a perfectly objective thinker and analyst. Yeah, Sophie, can you play that clip? Marion Tupi and his co-author analyzed historical data looking at the relationship between population expansion and abundance, which is a positive relationship in that as there have been more people born since there have been more smart and competent people born, which is a necessary consequence of that. We've got richer, not poorer and the Malthusians say, yeah, well, you know, the other shoe will drop eventually. It's like, yeah, specify your timeframe, buddy, you don't get to have an infinite expanse to prove your hypothesis correct.

It's like, okay, hold up there, Jordan. Since you have asked us to specify a timeframe, perhaps we should look into how your friend Marion's predictions have held up from, let's say, 2015. Marion Tupi's been writing stuff for a while. And that is, I would say most people would agree that from 2015 to 2022, most things have gotten worse around the world, right? Food is more expensive. Gas is more expensive. There's a massive land war in Ukraine. The consequences of climate change have gotten more disastrous.

Wildfires have gotten worse all around the world. We've had the biggest ones in the history of both the American West and Australia, just to name a couple of places in the very recent past. So I think most people, even if you're not scared of like Trump and Bolsonaro and fucking the rise of all of these authoritarians around the world, would agree. Things have broadly gotten worse for a lot of people since 2015. It just so happens that Marion Tupi is not, as Peterson says, an objective analyst of data, but a right-wing crank. He works for the Cato Institute. And his big thing is arguing that infinite wealth can be extracted from the planet and everything will continue to get inevitably better if we just keep extracting. He's part of a whole team of think tank grifters.

And in servicing this end, he's been a regular contributor at Quillette, a far-right website who also publishes defenses of phrenology and national review. It was at the latter that he published a June 2015 article titled, Pope Francis' Unwarranted Gloom. And I'm going to quote from that now. The Pope, as the independent sums up in the encyclical, asserts that the world's poorest are the biggest victims of a web of environmental, human, financial, and ethical degradation that puts the entire planet at risk. And a verse that warming caused by the enormous consumption of some rich countries has repercussions in the poorest places on Earth, especially in Africa, where the increase in temperature, compliant with drought, has had disastrous effects on the performance of crops. Now, everything the Pope says there is absolutely true. And all of those facts have been proven absolutely true over the last seven years.

Every single thing he said is undeniably, objectively, factually true. We are currently dealing with widespread crop failures this year and unprecedented surges in food prices. In 2015, Marion Tupi wrote, quote, and this is him talking about the Pope. His views on anthropogenic global warming will be hotly debated, but his gloom is unwarranted. Well, good news, Marion. The debate is over. 2018 brought Africa's hottest measured temperature on record, 124.3 degrees in Algeria. And in 2021, more than 400 weather stations around the world beat their all-time heat records.

There's a ton that Tupi is wrong about here. He makes a big point about how poverty has declined. And in 2015, those numbers worldwide were looking pretty good. It did look like poverty was declining very rapidly around the world. But people who actually honestly analyzed the data, including Pope Francis, were able to see just a little bit ahead. And that a warming world with things like widespread crop failures and brutal pandemics was going to, like, lead to a decline in what gains capitalism had brought people over the last 20 years or so. After COVID-19, the global poverty rate surged from 7.8 to 9.1%,

wiping out at least four years of progress towards ending extreme poverty. So, like, again, this guy who Peterson's claim is Tupi, all these Malthusians, these people who are talking about how the world's heading towards resource crunches, are wrong because they never specify their time frame. So, like, what they're saying isn't falsifiable. But Tupi has presented falsifiable claims about the state of the world, and they've all been falsified, right? Like, his friend has been wrong.

And because he's been writing for seven years, we can see the things he's been wrong about. He's talking about how, like, Pope Francis, it's debatable as to whether or not Francis is right about, you know, Africa warming and this having a disastrous impact on the poor. Well, we're now in 2022, and it's not debatable anymore. Yeah, maybe, exactly. Marion was fucking wrong. Anyway, Peterson next pivots back to crowing about Paul Ehrlich. And Tupi has extended that work to a basket of 50 commodities, and has demonstrated now that

each child born produces seven times as much wealth as they consume. So, enough with, there are too many people on the planet and, you know, human beings are a destructive force and all male will is nothing but a cancer on the planet and part of the oppressive patriarchy. It's like, that's all. There isn't a shred of evidence for any of that except... Oh. Yeah.

He loves talking like that. He does. All he is doing here, it's worth noting, so Marion Tupi is a media person. He has a bunch of videos, particularly on YouTube. He goes on podcasts all the time. And all he's saying is like a longer version of what Peterson's saying, right? That the more people who were born and the more people who, like, the more that we extract from the earth, the wealthier everyone will get, that this is like a fact of reality

that cannot be questioned. And again, it's like you're living through him being wrong. We're experiencing it every day of our lives in 2022. I mean, aside from like the general misrepresentation of a lot of the points being made by other people, it is just interesting seeing him get so angry about, yeah, things that like, because he filmed this in 2022, I assume. Yes. Yes.

At which point it is very obvious that the stuff that Marion Tupi was writing in 2015 was completely wrong. Yeah. And I'm not personally in the camp of overpopulation is a problem. The problem is not overpopulation. It's overconsumption by wealthy countries. Right. And allocation of resources and things like that. So I'm not like, ah, don't have babies, degrowth, like that kind of thing.

But like this other stuff that he's saying is also wrong. Yes. It's one of those things. He's making kind of the same arguments that I think Matthew Iglesias is the guy who's like, we need to have a billion Americans. Yeah. It's like, no, we don't actually, like, I don't believe overpopulation is the problem, but we certainly don't need to expand the population of wealthy countries or the population in general.

Like, there's plenty of people. Yeah. It's, it's fine. It's fine. Even like eight billion is a good number. Yeah. Even like the, the, we don't need to talk a whole lot about birth rates and stuff, but no, every time it comes up, I'm always just like, OK, but like, is it going to go down

to zero? Yeah. And then there'd be no people. Is that what you think is going to happen? Like, no, it's just people are number one. There's like less need to have multiple children and it's broadly good when the birth rate does slow down, especially since it leads, like, there's been a bunch of benefits to the fact that people no longer are having in the West, like 12 child families, including

the fact that like kids get more attention from their parents and are seen less as like a disposable commodity, which they often were early in history. I don't know. It's cool. I think the thing that the thing that Tupi is saying that like I find offensive is that this is a line of art and there's a lot of guys whose whole job is making this argument that everything is getting better and that everyone who has complaints about the world and who sees things as like on a really dark course is just irrational and not looking

at the actual facts. And what these arguments are geared towards is convincing a centrist middle class that the everything will get back to whatever they used to consider normal. The world will recover entirely from covid climate change will get fixed by some as of yet unseen scientific innovation and neoliberal capitalism will continue to increase the value extracted from the earth every year forever. It is the do you don't have to worry or change anything argument, right? Yes.

Yes. Yeah, it's it's that's I mean his whole thing is don't do anything. Yeah, it'll work itself out. Peterson likes this argument and a lot of the people who to push this argument are actually like more on the liberal side of things. But Jordan Peterson likes to use this argument because he he has this kind of paying glossy and belief that everything is the best that it could be and is getting better. Like Peterson uses this argument.

This like paying glossy and belief that everything is the best it could be in getting better to argue that masculine capitalist wealth seeking is altruism, right? That's why he finds this useful and I want to play another clip here too. So not only are we not governed by the satanic expression of power dooming us to a kind of authoritarian hell, what we're properly governed by is something like the spirit of voluntary play. And so that's all good. That's all necessary to know for young men because they're taught so often that their ambition

is somehow intrinsically corrupt. And the best thing they could do is just, you know, slough off into a corner and maybe die without making too much noise. I had a friend who committed suicide really because he believed that took him like 20 years to die. It was pretty painful to watch, but he definitely believed all that. Yeah, the real joy of watching Peterson is that he'll just sort of veer off and like say shit like this.

And of course, we don't know anything like he says this happens over 20 years. Was he talking about like a guy with a substance to be abuse disorder? Right. That's what I'm thinking he's talking about. Yeah. Because he's not like, yeah, 20, like it sounds like, yeah, 20 years of like depression, right? Yeah, yeah. And he was depressed because there are massive unsolved problems that the rich are like burning

money in order to make it basically either illegal or impossible for people to solve. Peterson's job is to reinforce those people and try to convince folks for another year or two that they don't need to take any action to stop the oil and gas companies and other wealthy interests from pilfering the world as it falls apart around us and they retreat to their fucking bunkers. Like that's literally his entire job. Yeah, everything is fine. Ignore the warning signs for another year.

That's why he exists. That's why they fund. That's why oil and gas billionaires are funding this guy. That's why they're throwing so much money at him to do this. Yeah. And he does it by like some very unclear anecdote. And it's interesting because the people arguing everything is getting better. That's an argument that works for like the Obama style neoliberals because it's like,

look, this the system we just need to tweak it around the edges. This is fundamentally good. And what we're doing is good. And Peterson is taking and saying like, because everything is getting better and because we live in a society dominated by capitalist hierarchical men, being that kind of person is altruism. Like being a billionaire who, for example, buys a company, fires 75% of the people there, loads it with debt and then crashes it is good because you're, you know, that kind of behavior

makes the world better. Obviously men like that have been in charge since forever. So since they are in charge and the world's gotten better, they're altruists. It's the same sort of line of thinking he and like a lot of like, like evolutionary biologists. Yeah. It's like evolutionary psychology sort of thing where it's like, well, because we're here today and alive, every single step of evolution was good.

Yeah. Like the capital G. And we should preserve it, right? It worked then like millions of years ago. Therefore we need to preserve it. And this is again, this is always the idea. This is always the actual ideology of the people who are in power. This is why Voltaire in fucking Candide, I brought up Pengloss.

Like he is mocking this idea that like the Pengloss is this like philosopher guy who's saying like, this is the best of all possible worlds and everything that happens and it is like the best that can possibly be, which is if you're in charge, always the way in which you want people to feel. Like that's all Jordan Peterson is is fucking Pengloss with a pyramid rules. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, we should probably roll the ads.

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

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That's very funny. Same guy, same outfit. Same outfit, yeah. So anyway, here's Jordan Peterson being wrong again. Awesome. Companies, it is, well, men who quell themselves to that degree also suffer the shadow problem, which is all the unlived life, ambition, aggression within them, sexual desire. That just goes underground and then, well, that's, that's what accounts in part for these

explosive violent crimes. Certainly it counts for a lot of gang crime because gang crime that's been established beyond a shadow of a doubt is all status jockeying. Now, so for one thing, he's saying that like because men are being told to like deny their natural kind of like aggressive status seeking natures. That's what's leading these explosions of violence, which is interesting because the United States is even with the recent surge we saw after COVID-19, less violent than it has been at basically any point in the lifetimes of anybody alive right now.

Like when I was born in the late 1980s, the United States was vastly more violent than it is today, almost in every single part of the country. So why, why would that be Jordan? Why would that be if we've also gotten more woke over time? I don't know, maybe just whatever. All of these things that he takes as evidence of a sick culture, lower birth rates, increased understanding and rejection of patriarchy, more open minded and emotionally connected men, these things have all occurred as violence has declined in the United States.

And this is true even accounting for the increases in violence that some place has experienced after COVID-19 and I'm going to quote from a New York Times article this August. Crime, murder and mass shootings have dominated headlines this year, just over the weekend a shooting in Cincinnati wounded nine people and another in Detroit killed one and wounded four. But the full crime data tells a different story. Nationwide, shootings are down 4% this year compared to the same time last year. In big cities, murders are down 3%. If the decrease in murders continues for the rest of 22, 22, this will be the first year

since 2018 in which they fell in the United States. Again, this is also like there's a lot to blame the media on because if you graph how common shootings are in this country versus how commonly they're covered in the United States, coverage of shootings has soared massively while shootings have more or less stayed stable in most of the country and slightly declined in a lot of places. And this is because like if it bleeds, it leads, right? This has led people to believe erently that the United States is much more violent than it actually is right now. Again, this is like a massive continuing problem, right?

That as over the last 30 years, violence has declined. People have believed that cities have gotten more... Like you talk to a conservative in fucking Ohio about New York City and they'll be like, well, yeah, it's really dangerous. Like it's this crime-drenched hellhole. No, New York City is safer than virtually 100% of rural America. Exactly. Yeah, it sounds like Peterson's a victim of the woke media.

Yes, it does sound like he's a victim of the woke media. In the early 1990s, the U.S. averaged around 10 murders per 100,000 people. In the Obama years, that dropped to a little more than four. And even though things have ticked up after COVID, they still topped out at around seven per 100,000, and that is now declining again. That's a significant drop. Yeah, again, we were just talking about like paying loss and stuff, but the change in the commonness of violence and murder in the United States since the early 1990s is stunning.

It is a massive decline. Yeah, it's interesting that the one thing... He could be right about that one thing, but he chooses to be wrong about that one thing and everything else. Yeah, because if it's true that we are much less violent than we used to be, even given like how much attention shootings get in the media today, then the argument is that maybe like, oh, perhaps like all of these things that have changed about like encouraging men to talk about their feelings

and accept other people and accept different sexual orientations and a wider understanding of gender. Maybe all of that actually like helped. I mean, maybe it's just getting the lead out of gasoline, but maybe that other stuff like it sure didn't hurt. Yeah, it did not hurt, but he would probably reject that too, because he doesn't want to change anything about like environmental factors that affect you, because environment means everything. Yeah. He's such a little wiener.

Yeah, so from here, Peterson claims that women are inherently interested in men based on the amount of resources that they have or are likely to generate. You know, women often get a bad rap, especially from people in the manosphere, so-called, for being hypergamous, which means mating across and social economic hierarchies, because women have a preference for men, young women who are about four years older than them, who are as well off or better off than they are. And it's a female calibration mechanism

to remediate the inequality placed on women in relationship to pregnancy and infant care. So woman takes a vicious hit in terms of productivity when she becomes pregnant and has a- How are you doing there, Sophie? I'm immediately updating my dating profile. I'm sorry, are you exactly four years older than me? I do wonder if the fact that women prefer men four years older than them has anything to do with that, like, the older you get, the less likely you are to take Jordan Peterson seriously.

The more likely you are to be more in touch with your feelings, maybe you've matured a little bit and are a better partner. I don't know, like, that's- What's his point? I don't know. It's such a transactional way of looking at relationships. Women prefer older men because they earn more and have more money, and women know that they're going to take a financial hit by having a child

because it reduces their productivity. People don't think like that, Jordan. Like, people do not go out into the world and decide to have, like, a child and go, well, then I need to get a man who has an additional four years of earnings so that his savings can, like, make up for the loss in productivity that I'm going to suffer for having this child. I mean, some people might. I'm sure it's not a zero number, but, like, I know a lot of people who have had kids

and none of them thought that much about it. Mostly, they just get pregnant and decide, I guess I'm going to have a kid because it feels like a good time to do it. Yeah, figure it out. No, no, no. Not us ladies, four years older than us. I'm sorry, where are you? Okay, I must dot the T at, okay, great.

We'll not go on a date unless you've met all these qualifications because I might need to take your money so I may have a child. Yeah, that'll... It makes perfect sense. Classic girl stuff. Yeah, that's totally how I think about things. Gosh, yeah. I mean, it's a really toxic...

You get this because he's kind of laying it out as if this is just completely reasonable and uncontroversial, but the actual argument he's making is that women are incapable of love. Well, that's just a fact, Robert. That is like the insult thing of women are hypergamous because it's a resource thing and that's the thing that they're thinking about is maximizing their resources. Right, and as opposed to the connection that one hopes to have with another person. Again, the reason why most people have kids is that they really want to fuck another person

and then they get pregnant and decide, I guess I'm having a kid now. Look, that's not going to describe 100% of cases, but most of the people I know are like, well, yeah, I was with this guy or this lady and we had sex and then there was a pregnancy and we decided, I guess now's the time. I think historically, that's most pregnancies. Sort of apply a person's value and it's so weirdly harmful because he's sort of excusing this behavior and saying,

this is how it is and this is how it should be. Therefore, you need to do this and this and this to get this high on his little hierarchy. It just puts so much value on just money. That's the value that he's trying to focus on as opposed to all the other values that people look for when looking for a partner. I don't know, weird. Unpleasant way to look at things. Yeah, I find it unpleasant, but you know what I do find pleasant, Cody?

The next thing you're going to say. I find your pluggables deeply pleasant, Cody. Thank you so much. I love it when you plug things. I love to plug things. Can I say, nothing gets me harder? You can say it. Thank you.

Say it again. I did. I have. I will continue to. Yeah, you will. I'm going to plug so hard. Whatever. Anything.

Any hole. All right. Enough of that. Thank you, Cody. And I have things on the Internet. You can Google me. Cody Johnston is the name. Got a show on YouTube called Some More News and a podcast called Even More News

and patreon.com slash Some More News is where you can support us for those things. Wow. And furthermore, that's it. Love that. Wow. Brave, courageous. Check out my band, The Hot Shapes. They're awesome.

Wait, you have a band? Yeah, we don't technically have songs available yet, but we will. Probably by the time this airs, actually. Cool. It's called The Hot Shapes. Now, Cody, tell me this. When you say a band, what kind of music do you play? Is it ska?

It's not ska, unfortunately. And yet you think it's music. Interesting. Interesting. Subjective. Subjectively music. I don't know that I agree with that. The first non-ska band.

Sorry to say. They finally did it. They created music that wasn't ska. We did it. The bastards did it. Somebody ring the bell and tell the mighty, mighty Boss Tones that their great burden has been lifted. You are free, Boss Tones. You're free.

Go make another album about George Floyd. Wait. Oh, God. Wait, what? Oh, did you not hear that? Oh, Cody. It was one of the worst things anyone's ever done. Yeah.

Wait. You need to listen to that in the break between when we record episodes. And when we come back to part two, we will start by you talking about your reaction to that mighty, mighty Boss Tones song. Oh, God. Oh, yeah. Oh, Cody. It's unbelievable. Anyway, that's been part one.

We'll see you again on Thursday. Go with Christ. Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com. Or check us out on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. 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 Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. No country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Two death sentences in a life without parole.

My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.