Behind the Bastards - Part Two: The Jordan Peterson Episode

Episode Date: October 22, 2020

Robert is joined again by Cody Johnston to continue to discuss Jordan Peterson. 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 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. Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, the show where Cody and I just finished laughing about Herman Cain. Not because there's anything funny about a death from COVID-19, but because the Cain Gang, which are the people who have taken over this deathman's Twitter account, tweeted out an article from HermanCain.com that said, Resume life is normal. Over 6,500 scientists in health professionals.

Anyway, it's very fun. They're going strong. Cain Gang going strong. Because the guy they're named after cannot resume life as normal because COVID killed him. I don't know. The article says it's fine. So conflicting reports, one from a ghost and one from the ghost's friends. Well, this is probably a bad way to open a podcast about Jordan Peterson, another victim of COVID-19. But we'll talk about that in a little bit. Is he?

Yeah, he got it. Did you not know that? Did I miss that? Oh, Cody, we're going to have fun in this episode. This is part two of our Jordan B. Peterson episode. Cody Johnston is my guest. Hello. Some more news. There's also a podcast of a similar name. My former coworker had cracked the man who invented the drive system for the Abrams tank.

You're not going to list the podcast you do together. You're just not going to do that. He's going in order. I cannot confirm or deny that. So Dr. Jordan Peterson picked a good time to reveal himself as the philosophy daddy of the new right. 2017 was a great year for his brand. Trump was president. New conversations about Western chauvinism were cracking into the mainstream thanks to the alt-right and groups like the Proud Boys.

And Jordan Peterson was among the most popular and highly paid speakers in the country. He's super fucking rich. Oh, yeah. That 2017 was like his golden year. He was doing so good. 2018 was a bit better. And then things got a lot worse. So he was polite and brain enough that he could avoid being lumped in with every liberals new boogeyman at the time.

The alt-right while still radicalizing and funneling new members into the alt-right. Some perceptive writers critiqued him for this. My personal favorite being the McLean's writer who declared him the stupid person smart person. Yeah. Yeah. Now that a lot of I mean a lot of that describes a lot of people in the that does describe a lot of right. I want to quote from that article. To be clear, Jordan Peterson is not a neo-Nazi, but there's a reason he's as popular as he is on the alt-right.

You'll never hear him use the phrase, we must secure a future for our white children. What you will hear is him say that while there does appear to be a causal relationship between empowering women and economic growth, we have to consider whether this is good for society because the birth rate is plummeting. That's a quote from Jordan Peterson. Yes, it is. Yep. He doesn't call for a white ethno-state, but he does retweet daily collar articles with opening lines like, yet again, an American city is being torn apart by black rioters.

He has dedicated two and a half hour long YouTube videos to identity politics and the Marxist lie of white privilege. I can't say Marxist lie and not to a Ben Shapiro voice. Marxist lie! Yeah, yeah. It's just where I go. It requires a voice every time. Whenever I say Antifa, I do that now too. Antifa!

Yeah. It's just how it is these days. Yeah. So, Jordan himself was careful to define himself as a classic British liberal. This is not an uncommon line for people to take when they hate things like trans rights, but want to couch their bigotry in an appreciation for debate. You'll never hear hate speech out of Jordan Peterson's mouth, but he will be happy to explain to you in his audience of millions that marginalized groups are infantilized

by identity politics and their offense at the racism of his white consumers is part of a culture of victimhood. Again, no racial slurs, but he will explain to you why it's wrong for people to be offended by racial slurs, essentially. Oh, yeah. It's why he'll explain, like, here's why it's wrong to be offended by this, or here's why it's natural to, like, fear people, fear the other and things. He's tweeted, he once tweeted an article about the dangers of diversity and how diversity is bad. Oh, yeah. And that article was by Steve Saylor from V-Dare. Oh, V-Dare!

Yeah, literally a guy who invented something called the Saylor strategy, which was what Trump's strategy was, basically, like, go to the disaffected, like, white, aggrieved white Americans and play that game. And in the article, he cited a study about how, like, yeah, if you have diversity, it causes, like, some, you know, tension between the different groups, and he cites that in the article. He doesn't mention the part of the study that points out that, but in the long run, it improves economy and social status. Like, over time, diversity improves society. It's just, at the beginning, you know, people are tribal and it causes some strife. Yeah, there's some shit.

So it's always interesting whenever Peterson will share something like that that goes out of its way to not include part of a study that is antithetical to what they're trying to prove. He's a good guy. Studious. Studious man. Good tweets. Good tort. God damn.

Okay, so Peterson's repeated jabs at identity politics are extremely funny in light of the ways that he's attempted to co-opt Indigenous identity for his own crude benefit. Did you know about this, Cody? Did you know about Jordan Peterson's claims that he's been inducted into an Indigenous crime? I remember this. Yeah. Give it to me. In 2018, old tweets of Peterson surfaced wherein he told some sort of joke about an Indian bartender.

That's a quote from him. Senator Murray Sinclair, who's a Canadian senator, so like not a real senator, but you know what I'm saying. That was a Canadian joke, not an Indigenous person's joke. I'm making fun of Canadians. There you go. Senator Murray Sinclair, who's one of Canada's relatively few Indigenous or First Nations senators, got angry because Peterson was furthering stereotypes about drunken Native Americans. That goes back a long way.

He also got kind of angry because it's pretty shitty to call Indigenous people Indians. We shouldn't do that. There's, I think, different terms that certain people prefer, but no one seems to like Indian. Let's not use that one. One of Jordan's friends defended him by pointing at the guy he had sent the tweet to. Defended him by pointing out that the joke that they were telling about this Indian bartender was about a real incident with a quote self-identified Indian bartender who had duped Peterson's friend out of a bottle of bourbon the night before Peterson was set to become an honorary member of the Kwakawa tribe.

Now, all of this, I'm trying to get it right. I looked it up in everything. I don't normally do that, but yeah. All of this, her wits seemed to suggest, was evidence that Peterson was not biased against Native Americans, which is a statement that Peterson liked and seconded on Twitter. So Peterson has repeatedly brought up the fact that he was inducted into the Kwakawa tribe in order to defend himself from allegations of racism. In 2017, when a commenter on Facebook suggested that he was a Klansman,

so this guy on Facebook is like, basically, you're in the KKK. Peterson responded, if by KKK you mean Kwakawa, of whose nation I am a member. That's not how it works, Jordan. Yeah, very, very good. Now, a reporter from a Canadian online magazine, The Walrus, dug into this and he found that Peterson also claimed on the jacket of his book, 12 Rules for Life, that he had been inducted into the coastal Pacific Kwakawa tribe. The reality of the situation, as The Walrus found, was very different.

There is a Kwakawa artist named Charles Joseph, and numerous interviewers will note that Peterson's house is full of Joseph's work, and we don't know what Peterson did for Charles Joseph, but it was something really incredible and that Charles Joseph was deeply impacted by. It was something meaningful enough that Charles Joseph performed a special ritual to induct Jordan Peterson into his family, and as a result, he considers Jordan Peterson to be a brother. This is obviously a huge honor, and it seems it's very clear that Jordan did something incredible to help Charles.

But as The Walrus dug, they found out that both Charles Joseph and the Kwakawa tribe disagree with Peterson's claims that he's been inducted into the tribe because he was not. He was inducted into Charles Joseph's family, but not into the tribe itself. It's a very different thing, and it's a very important distinction. It's a personal thing, yeah. Peterson kind of claiming that he's a part of this tribe in order to deflect allegations of racism is a kind of dishonesty. I find particularly off-putting, because the real story is perfectly honorable.

You helped this man out to such a degree that he inducted you into his family, and that's something to be proud of. That's a great story, yeah. It's not what he's saying, and especially in terms of what he's using the fake story to try to prove. Yeah. It's the kind of thing, were he to respond to someone calling him racist with, well actually, this one indigenous person I know, I did something so good for him that he inducted me into his family,

that would sound kind of gross and weird, and it wouldn't be nearly a snappy saying, I'm a member of the Kwakawa tribe, so how could I be racist? One of them makes a better debate point, and also the more honest version makes it clear like, hey dude, it seems like you might be kind of like cashing in on this. Right, yeah, you're using this thing to prove this other thing. It doesn't prove it anyway,

but also it's weird that you're using this to prove it. Yeah. Now, the reality is that Jordan Peterson is someone who regularly traffics in a kind of intellectual quasi-bigotry, masquerading his intellectual curiosity. Some of his best lines include, the idea that women are where a press throughout history is an appalling theory, and Islamophobia is a word created by fascists and used by cowards to manipulate morons. White privileges a Marxist lie,

and believing that gender identity is subjective is as bad as claiming that the world is flat. Oh, is it? Yeah, that's good. That's good. That's a lot of stuff from good old Jordan. The IQ stuff is wild. Yeah. And very, very relented.

He, um... Yeah, I'm not convinced by Jordan Peterson being inducted. Jordan B Peterson. Fake inducted into a real tribe. It's weird. Not as compelling as he thinks it is. No. Now, like Joseph Campbell, who we talked about in our first episode,

Jordan Peterson's primary focus seems to have been Marxism, and it seems like this probably started because he considered his fellow professors to have been Marxist, and that kind of... He generalized his frustration with these specific people who disagreed with him, because he hates it when you disagree with him, into a broader fear that Marxists worldwide were in the process of conquering every aspect of Western civilization. Peterson tended to use the term postmodern neo-Marxism or cultural Marxism to essentially refer to the same idea.

With the fall of the USSR, Marxists lost the war with capitalism, so they decided they had to sneak into the education system and brainwash children's heads with, in Peterson's words, vicious, untenable, and anti-human ideas. That's how I would describe some of his ideas. One anti-human idea in Jordan's reckoning is that a college professor might get in trouble if he specifically refused to refer to a trans person by their chosen pronouns out of spites. That's anti-human. Anti-human.

Yeah. Oh my God, Jordan. Yeah. It's literally the opposite. We all have things that frustrate us in society. These can be reasonable or not. I'm angry that every time I want to just drink one or two beers or a fifth of vodka while driving my forerunner through a trailer park and firing out of the window with an AK-47,

people get really angry and the police show up. I find that anti-human, but I understand that part of living in society is that you take certain actions or don't take certain actions because everyone agrees things work better when you're not shooting up trailer parks drunkenly in your forerunner all the time. Yes, they do. That's society. That's human. That's the way society will be until I win my congressional campaign.

Dear God. And introduce the drunk driving and trailer parks while firing out the window bill, which I really think is good. Openly a cult. Vote for me. I'm a cult. Yeah. Yeah.

So in a battle with stakes as high as the survival of Western civilization, Dr. Peterson is willing to justify fighting dirty. He calls ideas he disagrees with in debates, silly, ridiculous, absurd, insane. Debates are described as combat and his followers seem to respond well to this. In a few seconds of searching, it took no time at all. I found videos titled Jordan Peterson destroys Islam in 15 seconds. More than two million views. Jordan Peterson destroying feminists, a compilation video with 349,000 views

and watch angry Jordan Peterson get up and destroy a student who tried to smear him. 741,000 views. Now, the fundamentally combative nature of the debates Peterson prefers to engage him. Let him to tell Camille Paglia in a 2017 interview. If you're talking to a man who wouldn't fight with you under any circumstances whatsoever, then you're talking to someone for whom you have absolutely no respect. He went on to explain that he has more trouble dealing with crazy women because he cannot hit them.

I remember that. How can you argue with someone if you can't hit them? Exactly. If you don't, if you don't. It's also like this is wild because he's also the kind of guy who'd be like, well, don't punch a Nazi, right? Yeah. Yeah.

Antifa is bad because they punch Nazis. They don't respect anyone who won't fight. Exactly. He's consistently inconsistent. It's a beautiful thing. And all of that might make you think that Dr. Jordan Balthazar Peterson might be less of a free speech buff than he appears to be. The Guardian even notes, quote,

Peterson's commitment to unfettered free speech is questionable. Once you believe in a powerful and maligned conspiracy, you start to justify extreme measures. Last July, he announced plans to launch a website that would help students and parents identify and avoid corrupt courses with postmodern content. Within five years, he hoped this would starve postmodern neo-Marxist cult classes into oblivion. Peterson shelved the plan after a backlash,

acknowledging that it might add excessively to current polarization. Who could have predicted that blacklisting fellow professors might exacerbate polarization? Apparently not the most influential public intellectual in the Western world. Yeah. Yeah, he likes suing people, too. He loves suing people. He, uh, maybe, like, it's just, like, imagine what he would say if anyone else did the same thing about him

or the things that he says. Just imagine what his response would be to that. And, like, the idea that he needed a backlash to be like, oh, maybe this would, maybe this would cause some problems. Yep. Maybe. Maybe. Maybe.

So, Jordan made buckets of money in 2017, but his depression and his persistent feelings of imminent doom continued to follow him. He told the Ottawa citizen, quote, in a sensible world, I would have got my 15 minutes of fame. I feel like I'm surfing a giant wave, and it could come crashing down and wipe me out, or I could write it and continue.

All of those options are equally plausible. Keep that in mind, too. Now, meanwhile, people who had befriended, supported, and aided Jordan throughout his career increasingly felt frightened and betrayed by the path he was taking. His old mentor, Professor Schiff, wrote that things between them grew heated after Peterson's famous opposition to C-16, quote, this is from Professor Schiff.

I have a trans daughter, but that was hardly an issue compared to what I felt was a betrayal of my trust and confidence in him. It was an abuse of the trust that comes with his professorial position, which I had fought for to have misrepresented gender science by dismissing the evidence that the relationship of gender to biology is not absolute and to have made the claim that he could be jailed when at worst he could be fined. In his defense, Jordan told me that if he refused to pay the fine,

he could go to jail. That is not the same as being jailed for what you say, but it did ennoble him as a would-be martyr in the defense of free speech. Yeah, it did, and he knows it. A lot of his behavior in 2016, 2017, 2018 is, it becomes very clear, like we talked about earlier in the previous episode about his sort of, whether it was intentional or not, research into what influences people and how to get people on board with something, with an idea,

with an ideology, with belief, the capital B, belief. How and why do people believe and what brings people to believe in authoritarianism? Yeah, he knows what he's doing. He knows exactly what he's doing. Yeah, he knows a lot of things that he pretends to not know. It's wild, even just like watching clips of him talk about different things in similar ways. You can find a few clips of him talking on various podcasts about Hitler specifically

and the rise of Hitler. Sometimes he rationalizes it as like, well, if you have this chaos, you look for somebody to bring order and make sense of that. And it could be viewed as like Hitler apologia, but I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and just say he is explaining what people were feeling during the rise of Nazi Germany. He has a whole video on like, you would have been a Nazi. And like people, if you were there, you probably would have been a Nazi.

That's how the culture and society works. And I don't think Jordan Peterson is a Nazi. He definitely would have been one. Also, yeah, most people weren't Nazis until the Nazi, like even when the Nazis were in power, Nazi party membership was not everybody. Yeah. Like, yeah, Jordan is, I don't know. I do the same thing.

The episode that's running the week that we're recording this is largely about how normal people became Nazis and how they, the scariest thing about it is that a lot of people who were not monsters, supported the Nazi party because of a lot of really uncomfortable realities of the human condition. I think there's a responsible way and an irresponsible way to talk about that. The responsible way is to try to inform people of the dangers in their own thinking and the dangers in just sort of like people's desire for safety and stability

that can lead them to support at least tacitly terrible things and being like, well, you would have supported the Nazis. So like, why are you judgmental about Nazis? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And he even has, in contrast, you can hear him talk about Trump a little bit in 2017,

2018, and in describing the appeal of Donald Trump, it is indistinguishable from him talking about Hitler in terms of the chaos and the order and the things that people want and their fears and how Trump is capitalizing on that. But he doesn't ever make that connection. He's never, he presents it as positive and not something to be concerned about. He's never really criticized Donald Trump for any of those reasons while at the same time, whenever talking about Hitler being the exact same way,

you could replace the names and it would still be, it would sound the same. Now, Cody, you know who won't apologize for the rise of fascism? Do they make beautiful, beautiful weapons? Oh, well, Raytheon, no, of course not. Raytheon would never apologize for anything. That's why you buy Raytheon products. Raytheon, never apologize. Never apologize.

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

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

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

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

And kind of like that writer with the Guardian we quoted earlier, Schiff is particularly concerned with Peterson's conditional support of free speech. He knows Peterson well and he began to see some pretty flashy tendencies from his former friend. Chief among them were Peterson's relentless focus on transgender and gender non-conforming people. And here's something that's basically what you said earlier, Cody. Jordan has studied and understands authoritarian demagogic leaders. They know how to attract a following. In an interview with Ethan Klein in an H3 podcast, Jordan describes how such leaders learn to repeat those things which make the crowd roar and not repeat those things that do not. The crowd roared the first time Jordan opposed the so-called transgender agenda.

Perhaps they would roar again, whether it made sense or not. But why transgender in the first place? In that same interview, Jordan cites Carl Jung, who talked about the effectiveness of powerful emotional oratorical skills to tap into the collective unconscious of a people and into their anger resentment, fear of chaos and need for order. He talked about how those demagogic leaders led by acting out the dark desires of the mob. Yep. Yeah. Cool. Got him.

Got him. Yeah. I mean, that's it. When you just a little delving in, you really see what he's doing. Yeah. Not hard. Not hard. Not super complicated.

In 2018, a massive douche canoe named Eric Weinstein first used the term intellectual dark web on Sam Harris' Waking Up podcast. Now, the official intellectual dark web website lists him as a vanguard of the IDW alongside Dr. Jordan Peterson. Interestingly, it calls Eric a left-wing person, which is fun because he's the managing director of Teal Capital. Teal Capital? Why is he never addressed that? No one ever brings it up. It's wild that he can still make that claim. Yeah.

Unbelievable. What is funny is that while Peterson himself doesn't like to identify as right-wing, the intellectual dark web website does identify him as right-wing because like a whole part of its whole thing is that these guys are people who come from every side of the political spectrum. Exactly. Yes. I'll read you how the website describes the men of the intellectual dark web. They all share two distinct and now uncommon qualities.

First, they are willing to disagree fiercely but talk civilly about nearly every meaningful subject worthy of public discourse, religion, abortion, gender identity, race, immigration, the nature of consciousness. Many of the opinions they hold on such topics can sometimes be in contrast with the orthodox opinion of their respective tribe. Second, they are intellectually honest and thus resist parroting what's politically convenient or politically correct. Notable to not on that list of things worth discussing is economics. Oh, that's weird. That's funny. Yeah. Yeah.

We've got religion, abortion, gender identity, race, immigration, the nature of consciousness, all the things that are worth talking about. Those are all the things. Not economics because all of these people are rich as shit. And because that's the thing they agree on. Oh my God, this list of people is really depressing. It's awesome. It fucking rules, dude.

So, yeah, later in 2018, New York Times editor Barry Weiss published a fawning article on this set titled Meet the Renegades of the Intellectual Dark Web. Oh, fuck. Beautiful. It's beautiful. Those photos of them in the woods, man. I will argue, sit alone in your own room and read the title of that New York Times article to yourself while looking at the picture that leads the article. And tell me that you don't for a second inhabit the mental space of a high school bully who just wants to dunk someone's head in a toilet.

Like just do it. Try it. Do your best to not feel it's impossible. Good luck. Godspeed. Because my God. Oh my God, that photo. Do another one.

Take another photo. I know. It's amazing. Did you have like one shot left? My goodness. Yeah. It's a bad article about people I hate. In some cases, people I personally hate because Claire Lemons on there and Claire Lehman basically said it was okay that really wonderful people like Jason Wilson of The Guardian, who's one of the best reporters in the entire country, deserve to have death threats put against him because Claire Lehman sucks.

She's the editor. Yeah, she's awful. She's trashed. Um, you can read the article if you want, but the fact that nearly all these guys have only grown less relevant in the last two years ought to say something. But during the first half of the Trump regime, Jordan B. Peterson never found a culture war he wouldn't throw some bullets towards. When James Damor, the Google engineer, was filed for writing about the company's ideological echo chamber, Peterson spoke out in his defense. He repeatedly brought the engineer up in debates as evidence that talk about discrimination of marginalized groups who's overblown and white men were the real victims. In part on the strength of his endorsement by Peterson and other IDW types, James Damor filed a lawsuit against Google.

He dropped it earlier this year with the exact nature of the resolution unknown. Harmeet Dillon, I think, was the lawyer in charge of that case who also threatened me with a lawsuit for telling the truth about Andy Noe, which is that he's a giant piece of shit in a grifter. I ignored the lawsuit. Fuck it. Like he never did anything because it was it's a thing that lawyers do sometimes if they're shady where they like throw out bullshit, cease and desist. Just try to stop speech they don't like because people think that there's actually legal weight behind those things. Generally isn't. Fuck them.

Fuck them. Yeah. So it's worth noting that there were basically no stories about James Damor from like 2018 up until the case was dropped earlier this year. The only other article I found mentioning him recently was a telegraph article about how a bunch of Silicon Valley firms were hiring white supremacy consultants to avoid bringing people like Damor on in the future, which is funny because Harmeet Dillon was like, oh, this case is really going to make him think twice before they do this again. And what it actually made them do is be like, oh, we actually need to hire people to make sure we're not hiring white supremacists. This seems to be a problem. Yes.

It's very funny. That's very funny. Little joys. It's the little things. It's the little things in life you treasure. On January 16th, 2018, Jordan Balthazar Peterson published his second book, 12 rules for life and antidote to chaos. Unlike the sprawling and complex maps of meaning, 12 rules is short pointed and targeted directly at insecure men. Peterson writes, men have to toughen up.

Men demand it and women want it. His first rule is stand up straight with your shoulders back. And of course, that's not a bad thing. Good posture is perfectly healthy. Most of us could stand to have better posture. Absolutely. Most of his rules are not inherently unreasonable. And in fact, part of what he did in this book was write out something that basically anyone could read through and be like, oh yeah, pretty reasonable stuff.

It is a standard self-help book. It is general advice. Believe in yourself. There's some sinister shit under the surface, which we'll talk about. But I want to summarize the main points he makes, the main rules for life. A Psychology Today article written by the same PhD who reviewed maps of meaning. We quoted from that earlier and we'll quote from it in a little bit too. Summarizes the surface content of 12 rules for life thusly.

Stand up for yourself. Take care of yourself. Make friends. Don't compare yourself to others. Mind your children. Set your house in order. Pursue meaning. Tell the truth.

Listen to people. Be precise. Give children freedom and enjoy pets. Oh, thank you. Day up. I don't disagree with any of that. Fine enough. Mind your children.

Give your children freedom. Yeah, you got to do both. You got to do both. Interesting thing about the mind your children is that the real rule is don't let your child do anything that makes you dislike them. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway.

Yeah, yeah. That review continues. Part of Peterson's appeal comes through lively stories from the Bible. Fairy tales, his personal life and his practice as a clinical psychologist. All benign enough again. But it's when you read into the book that fucked up shit starts to bubble up. Like the line, consciousness is symbolically masculine and has been since the beginning of time. And also the soul of the individual eternally hungers for the heroism of genuine being.

Now, I don't know how that line reads to normies. But it seems pretty flashy to me. And also to Pankaj Mishra, who wrote that article about fascist mysticism and Jordan Peterson for the New York review of books. Pankaj writes that Peterson basically positions his book as an answer to the crisis facing Western civilization. In quote, Peterson diagnosis this crisis as a loss of faith and old verities. In the West, he writes, we have been withdrawing from our tradition, religion and even nation-centered cultures. Peterson offers to alleviate the resulting desperation of meaninglessness with a return to ancient wisdom. It is possible to avoid nihilism, he asserts, and to find sufficient meaning in individual consciousness and experience with the help of the great myths and religious stories of the past.

Following Carl Jung, Peterson identifies archetypes in myths, dreams and religions, which have apparently defined truths of the human condition since the beginning of time. Culture, one of his typical arguments goes, is symbolically archetypally mythically male. And this is why resistance to male dominance is unnatural. Men represent order and chaos, the unknown, is symbolically associated with the feminine. Now, reading all that. Reading all of this made me think back to that first Psychology Today review, the one that focused on maps of meaning. Quote, the assumption of the cultural universality of myths is important for Peterson because he wants mythology to provide the basis for the psychological, philosophical and political understanding of morality. But his evidence for the generality of such myths is limited to the tradition that runs from Mesopotamia through Judaism to Christianity, with occasional references to Buddhism.

Counter examples to cultural universality are abundant, such as the Piraha people of Brazil who have no creation myths or interest in beliefs that go beyond personal experience. The Iroquois people of North America do have myths about creation and other aspects of the world, but they do not follow the father-mother-son motif that Peterson thinks is universal. Chinese mythology includes many gods, but no indication of the heroic son that Peterson overgeneralizes from Christianity. So, again, Peterson would never be so crude to, like a proud boy, declare that West is best or advocate for open white supremacy, because that would be risking his following in his money. Instead, he declares that the myths he uses to base his moral system that he thinks everyone should follow in the whole world, that those myths are universal to all cultures, while deliberately excluding any discussion of cultures whose myths don't support his beliefs. It's a kind of internal ideological, ethnic cleansing, and Jordan B. Peterson is very good at it. In interviews, Dr. Peterson is clear that fascism and authoritarianism is bad. At the same time, he regularly reinforces the arguments made by fascists and authoritarians in his work from the New York Review of Books.

Those embattled against political correctness on university campuses will heartily endorse Peterson's claim that there are whole disciplines and universities forthrightly hostile towards men. Islamophobes will take heart from his speculation that feminists avoid criticizing Islam because they unconsciously long for masculine dominance. Libertarians will cheer Peterson's glorification of the individual striver in his stern message to the left behinds. Maybe it's not the world that's at fault. Maybe it's you. You failed to make the mark. The demagogues of our age don't read much, but as they ruthlessly crack down on refugees and immigrants, they can derive much philosophical backup from Peterson's sub-chapter headings. Compassion is a vice, and toughen up, you weasel. That's all there. He's really skilled at not saying it. Not saying quite. He gets you there. He's laying the foundation. Yeah, and that article on Peterson and fascist mysticism gets into what's problematic about stuff like compassion as a vice and toughen up, you weasel.

Problematic beyond what you might initially assume. Peterson rails today against softness, arguing that men have been pushed too hard to feminize. In his best-selling book Degeneration, the Zionist critic Max Nordau amplified more than a century before Peterson the fear that empires and nations of the West are populated by the weak will, the effeminate and the degenerate. The French philosopher Georges Sorel identified myth as the necessary antidote to decadence and spur to rejuvenation. An intellectual inspiration to fascist across Europe, Sorel was particularly nostalgic about the patriarchal systems of ancient Israel and Greece. It was against this eerily familiar background, a revolt against the modern world, as the title of Avola's 1934 book put it, that demagogues emerged so quickly in 20th century Europe and managed to exalt national and racial myths as the true source of individual and collective health. The drastic individual makeover demanded by the visionaries turned out to require a mass coerced retreat from failed liberal modernity into an idealized traditional realm of myth and ritual.

That all scan to you, Cody? Yeah, that all scans real, real well. Yeah. Yeah. It's a, huh, huh, huh, huh. Uh, there's a, there's just a lot there that he doesn't. Yeah, it's like, it's this, I mean, it's the cause of rejection of modernity and it's like, it's contempt for the weak is what it really comes down to. Like contempt for and resentment of what you perceive as weakness or weak people, weak types of people, weak ways of thinking.

And, uh, again, it's not like on its face, you're not like, that's fascism, but like you just like a little dig a little deeper, scratch a little bit or like go a little further to what it like, what's the next step? What's the last like extrapolate for a bit? What do you think should happen then? Also, side note, I think his weird thing about, uh, we need to get back to like what all the Marxists were getting away from nation center. Cultures. Do you think like maybe part of just like the natural reason that we're getting away from nation centered cultures is because like the internet connects people instantly across the globe and like we as humans are like evolving across the like it's. Yeah, maybe if you have a bunch of friends who like, because of some weird lines on a map, can't ever visit you or you can't visit them. Maybe you start to be like, oh, huh.

It seems like a bad idea. Maybe we should do something else. Maybe the best idea for how we organize the world wasn't thought up like hundreds of years ago. Yeah. Maybe there's a better thing than nations. Yeah. Like, yeah. What about not nations?

What about horizontal methods of social organization that avoid vesting unreasonable powers in individual human beings who are never fit to wield it? I don't know. Sorry. I'm just. You're anti-heracle. I'm anti-human. Yeah. Yeah, it's anti-human for sure.

It's anti-human. Urging us to be more connected and equal across the globe is anti-human. Very good. Yes. Fundamentally. Which is why I'm very pro-robot and why my entire house is nothing but Amazon Alexa's and a filthy mattress. Now, in maps of meeting, Jordan Peterson analyzed a number of authoritarian regimes and totalitarian crimes. He came away with the conclusion that the heroic individual was the only way to avoid such horrors.

On page 313, he notes, The hero rejects identification with the group as the ideal of life, preferring to follow the dictates of his conscience and his heart. His identification with meaning and his refusal to sacrifice meaning for security renders existence acceptable despite its tragedy. And on page 483, The predicated upon belief in the paramount divinity of the individual allows paramount interest to flourish and to serve as the power that opposes the tyranny of culture and the terror of nature. It's really, it's just like really good obfuscating. Yeah. What he's saying with this language.

I think I've mentioned this before. It's fake profundity. I wish you wrote a novel. Yeah. It's fake profundity to convince people that anything you're not, you don't personally like is an assault on you. But anything you want to do, if someone tries to stop you, it means that they're, they're bad. Tyranny of culture or whatever. Yeah.

You know who likes cults of heroism? Nazis. Nazis. Yeah. Yeah. That's the one. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, and it's also worth noting that not only does Nazi or fascism in particular, as Umberto Eco noted, have an obsession with the cult of the hero. But also the story of fascism's rise in Europe is the story of a lot of individual heroic people who failed to stop Nazism from happening. You can say the same thing for the horrible crimes committed in, you know, the USSR and Malishina. There were a lot of decent individual heroic people who were like, this is a bad idea. We shouldn't do this. And they didn't get their way because individuals have very limited power. And perhaps if people in, say, Weimar Germany had been less obsessed with their own personal lives and their own personal political opinions with cleaning their room, so to speak. And perhaps if more of them had been willing to get out on the street and organize together and physically resist, perhaps then Nazism would not have risen the way that it did.

Perhaps. Perhaps. Um, counterpoint, the idea of consciousness within our, and then he trails off and then we, we give him money, right? That's how it works. Yeah, exactly. Peterson views totalitarianism as a spiritual problem. According to psychology today, he contends that it is the result of neglecting the moral tradition rooted in Christianity. The best way to resolve this problem is spiritual based on the divinity of the individual.

For Peterson, the solution to totalitarianism is a combination of religion and individualism. Now, I happen to find this fascinating when you juxtapose it with a passage from another wonderful book about Peterson in The New Yorker. It notes, or another wonderful article about Peterson in The New Yorker. It notes, Peterson seems to view Trump by contrast as a symptom of modern problems rather than a cause of them. He suggests that Trump's rise was unfortunate but inevitable. Part of the same process he writes as the rise of the far right politicians in Europe. If men are pushed too hard to feminize, he warns they will become more and more interested in harsh fascist political ideology. Peterson sometimes asks audiences to view him as an alternative to political excesses on both sides.

During an interview on BBC Radio 5, he said, Sure, it is the cause of some problems, but yes, it's the cause of a lot of our problems these days and exacerbates a lot of our problems. But society was suffering for a lot of reasons and that's what strong men do. They demagogue, they come in, they say, I can fix all your problems. But the way Jordan talks about it, it's justifying it. His prescription is not, oh yeah, this inequality or this or people's material needs or anything like that. It's like, oh yeah, Trump was inevitable and he's going to bring order to the chaos. Because all these people are victims and they need a man to come in and solve their problems and bring order to that chaos.

It's like another guy he's talked about in the exact same way or another option. We could go to Mr. Peterson and see what he wants us to do and just listen to him and his every word. There's a little interview. I forget who was interviewing him. He's asked about his fans and his responses. I don't have fans. And he doesn't finish it. He doesn't finish his thought, but he does have followers.

Yes, he does. That is the word he was alluding to. Yep, yep, yep. I may have to create a countercult to deal with his cult. Sophie. Robert. Sophie, can we look into how many people I have to have worshipping my words in order to buy an arms export license and create some sort of... We should talk about this offline.

Sure. But I think we should maybe loop the fine folks at Raytheon in on that call. It's worth looking into for sure. Yeah, this will be great. I'm going to get that land in Idaho too. So Peterson talks a good game about the horrors of Nazism, but his rhetoric very often turns worryingly close to the exact same shit Nazi seems to say about in the 20s and 30s. For example, liberals, he says, are always talking about the importance of compassion, and yet there's nothing more horrible for children and developing people than an excess of compassion. This horror, he says, is embodied in the figure of the Freudian devouring mother. As an example, he cites Ursula to see which from the Little Mermaid.

Oh, he loves Disney. Oh, he loves how Disney is destroying. And it's never like the real like, yeah, Disney's like this media conglomerate. They own everything and that's bad. But it's always like it's propaganda to tell you that your daughter can do what she wants. It's more to me, his obsession with how compassion is bad and how softness is a problem in society. Because, yeah, it's familiar if you read a fuckload of Hitler's speeches, because one of Hitler's favorite words was hardness and how people German men needed to be harder. Like Germany needed to raise up a generation that was as hard as Kruppstahl, which is like a specific kind of steel made by a German weapons manufacturer. Hitler thought that German men were going to need to be as hard to steal if they were going to steer their nation back from the brink of despair because it was going to require them to do unpleasant things. I want to quote now from an article in the Journal of Central European History by Thomas Kuhn.

The article's title is Protein Masculinity, Hegemonic Masculinity, Soldiers in the Third Reich. Hegemonic Masculinity in Nazi Germany, as well as in many militarized societies around the globe, meant physical, emotional and moral hardness. The ideal man embodied by the soldier was tough and aggressive in control of his body, mind and psyche. He did not hesitate to sacrifice life and limb on behalf of the fatherland or to subordinate his individuality under the command of a conformist group of comrades. Whereas many scholars have already stressed these features of Hegemonic Masculinity, this article argues that the act of soldiering provided men with a male identity that was ultimately not defined by the repudiation but rather integration of what was and is often coded as feminine. In the social practice of male interaction, diversity and flexibility were needed, thus allowing for the display of femininely coded behavior like affection, tenderness, empathy, caring and tolerance towards emotional breakdowns and moments of weakness in their midst. Thanks to its inclusive nature, such Protein Masculinity enabled different types of soldiermen to establish male identities. It also allowed them to switch among different emotional and moral states without losing their manliness.

Yet this was true only if the predominance of hardness was respected. Eventually, Protein Masculinity integrated diverse men in diverse emotional and moral conditions into a fighting unit, and in the case of the Third Reich, into a genocidal society. So this idea that they had to reject femininity but also feminine traits or traits they considered feminine were inherent aspects of the people they needed to make into soldiers. So the thing that was most important for the Nazis was to develop this idea of hardness and you could break down, you could be emotional, you could cry, you could be like fucked up by the violent act you were committing. As long as you exhibited that hardness, that was all that mattered because the essence of masculinity was a willingness to do hard things as specified by brutality. To do it anyway, even though you're going to have that reaction to it, but you still do it and you can still keep doing it. Which is why there's actually quite a few stories about men shooting thousands of Jewish people to death and weeping while they did it, but they still did it. They still did it. They're hard. They're hard enough.

Hard men. I'm proud of us for saying hardness this many times and not making an erection joke, Cody. I think we did a great job. I think we're still doing a really good job and referencing that we didn't do it doesn't count as doing it. It does not. The kind of heroism that we exhibited there should be celebrated. Yeah, we deserve credit for that. Do you want to know how you should celebrate, Robert? You know what will make erection jokes while quoting Hitler's speeches? That's exactly what I was going to say. The products and services that support this podcast. Fantastic.

I can't wait to hear both of those things said by them. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI, sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse.

And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not on the gun badass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down.

It's 1991 and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left offending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole.

My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus, it's all made up? Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. So Jordan Peterson is just a teacher. You know, he's a lecturer, he's an author. And one might argue that it's silly to keep harping on what an obvious fascist the dude is given his distance from any kind of actual power. But according to Professor Schiff, Dr. Peterson has in fact seriously considered getting into politics and grabbing power.

He seriously investigated the possibility of running for leadership of the Federal Conservative Party of Canada. While he was discouraged in pursuing this by influential friends, he did stick his hand into Canadian politics, pushing party leader Andrew Scheer to propose that university funding be cut by 25% until politically correct schools were reigned in. Well, weirdo. Yeah, might not be free speech if you're doing that, I'd say. In 2019, he went to DC where he lectured Congress about bipartisanship, which again might sound great if you don't remember the weird shit Peterson's been saying about wanting to save people from both political extremes via his weird quasi-christian sort of fascine mystical morality bullshit.

It's like a little questionable, maybe. It's frustrating to have to know everything the man's written and said to really approach everything he does with like, well, okay, you do this, but also... Yeah, I think it's fine to just see what experts in his field have said and also to analyze a lot of the things that he's said, but not all of them because that's an unreasonable bar to hold someone to before critiquing them. Well, once he got famous, obviously, he started thinking about getting into politics, and maybe he'll try to do that someday, but before he got famous and politics seemed like a less realistic career choice for him, he was still veering in a distinctly unsettling direction and going away from traditional academia, which had never really been his bag.

From Professor Schiff's article, quote, Several years ago, Jordan Peterson told me he wanted to buy a church. This was long before he became known as the most influential public intellectual in the Western world, as he was described in the pages of The New York Times a few months ago. It was before he was fancy to be a truth-telling sage who inspired legions and the author of one of the best-selling books in the world this year. He was just my colleague and friend. I assumed that this was for a new home.

There was a trend in Toronto of converting religious spaces, vacant because of their dwindling congregations, into stylish lofts, but he corrected me. He wanted to establish a church, he said, in which he would deliver sermons every Sunday. Now, Professor Schiff knows Peterson better and has known him longer than I would say any members of the intellectual dark web to be certain, and then most people. By late 2018, Schiff was worried enough about his friend that he published this article,

which was clearly a very painful decision for him to make. Again, he let this guy live in his house for like six months. Yeah. Yeah. Fought for him to get all these promotions. Yeah. You fought for him to get money and promote. Yeah, like was a very dedicated friend.

Professionally and personally. And you can, if you read the article, which I recommend, it's clearly a, was a painful article for him to write. And he went through a lot of long arguments with Jordan first, trying to turn him away from what she've considered an increasingly frightening path. You don't understand. I am willing to lose everything, my home, my job, et cetera, because I believe in this. And then he said with the intensity he's now famous for,

Bernie, Tammy had a dream and sometimes her dreams are prophetic. She dreamed that it was five minutes to midnight. That was our last conversation. He was playing out the ideas that appeared in his first book. The social order is coming apart. He's on the edge of chaos. He is the prophet and the would be martyr. Jordan would be our savior.

I think he believes that. I am so happy we finally got here. I've been holding on to this for so long. I know. I know. All right, let it loose, man. It's just beautiful. It's my favorite thing about him.

It's my favorite fact that nobody seems to know. This is like something that like when you explain, like when you describe this to them, they're like, oh, wait, why does anybody take this man seriously? Yeah. He wanted to buy a church to give weekly sermons to people and believes that his wife has prophetic dreams about the end of the world and that he is the man that is going to save the world.

He thinks that there are illusions to it in maps of meaning where he's the guy who's going to like save the world. But he literally said that he thinks that he is that because his wife has prophetic dreams. It's wild. I'm so happy we finally got here. It all makes sense. I am too pretty.

What that little bitch makes sense. It's all. Yeah. He sees himself as, I don't know, some sort of almost supernatural leader who is maybe like like like on a on a on a a subconscious like apocle level welded to a people. I don't know. You might call it like a leader principle that like whatever.

Like it represents like the like the like spirit of a nation sort of like this sort of like. Yeah. Yeah. Like he bodies the will of a people in his in his in his living soul and thus anything he thinks has to be the correct way for things to go because he's speaking through the supernatural like like reality of he's speaking deep truth of people.

Yeah. Yeah. Universal truths. Yes. Oh God. All right. Yeah. I've been itching them.

So I have this relief. I just feel relief now. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I just want to tell you guys briefly what path Jordan B. Peterson was on as 2019 dawned what he was going to do next in

his career. It's possible his ambitions wouldn't have gone much beyond motivational talks and self help books. But Professor shift does not seem to think this was the case. That's why he wrote this article quote what I am seeing now is a darker, angrier Jordan than the man I knew in Karen Heller's recent profile in the Washington Post. He is candid about his long history of depression.

Depression is an awful illness. It is a cognitive disorder that casts a dark shadow over everything. It's nasty and brutish may very well not be an idea but a description of his experience which became for him the truth. But this next statement from Heller's article is heartbreaking. You have an evil heart like the person next to you. She quotes him as telling a soul out crowd.

Kids are not innately good and neither are you. Ew. Yeah. Man. That is. Yeah. Bleak. Yeah.

Like it is very bleak and it's one of those things that like if you think too much about it you might not analyze it because like it's one thing to say kids aren't inherently good because nothing is no one's inherently good. But people aren't inherently evil either. They're inherently self-oriented and that takes some like personal growth to escape to the degree that's necessary to participate in a functional society.

Sure. But not evil. Yeah. That's real intense. That's real. Yeah. Yeah. I mean it shows that he's kind of selling something.

Yeah. It sure does. I didn't ever know the next act Jordan B. Peterson had planned because his own life seems to have encountered this a disruption since then. Oh boy. Chaos you might say has triumphed over his internal order. Chaos descends upon Jordan Bumble B. Peterson.

Chaos in the form of his daughter Mikaela. God. So the first sign that something was off was probably when he went on Joe Rogan's show to let everyone know that he had embraced his daughter Mikaela's all meat diet. See Mikaela suffered from rheumatoid arthritis and it was severe enough that she had to have her right hip and ankle replaced at age 17.

And then she started like so in order to combat that and her fatigue and her cystic acne like she started taking cutting all of her all of everything but meat out of her diet and eventually like when she after some experimentation wound up figuring out that like all of her problems were solved by eating nothing but meat and salt and sparkling water. Yep. And so she began promoting that as a health cure for everybody

and selling one-on-one consultations much like her dad had done for people who were having trouble with her all meat diet. And then Jordan Peterson goes on Joe Rogan and he's like I've been doing this and quote I lost 50 pounds. My appetite has probably fallen by 70%. I don't get blood sugar dysregulation problems. I need way less sleep.

He claimed that his depression and anxiety were gone that his mind was sharp and my gum disease is gone like what the hell. Yeah. I agree Jordan. What the hell. He also told everybody that one time he had a cider and it made him not sleep for like two months and when people pointed out that it was impossible to do that he was like well I guess

you know obviously I slept at points but like it wasn't well and like dude cider isn't gonna like Jordan. Yeah. What is it like an unavoidable like sense of dread he described it as I think. Yeah. You have severe anxiety and depression and you blamed it on a single drink of cider.

And like yeah and also like just claiming claiming like he literally like he claimed that he did not sleep. It wasn't like oh I had trouble sleeping or this or that's like no I did not sleep which is not what happened. No it's not. I wasn't there but that's not what happened. It's definitely not what happened because you'd die. Yeah.

Because you would have died. You would die. You'd be a dead guy. You'd be a dead person. You'd be a Herman Cain type. You'd be a Cain type and Michaela would be tweeting from your account about how you should only eat meat. It's great.

She might be. Drink cider. Drink cider. So yeah Peterson's health problems first surfaced in 2019 and this is when his family announced that he had like gone to rehab in upstate New York. Michaela claimed that he'd been prescribed clonazepam which is a benzo in 2017 which was due to a severe autoimmune reaction

to food which might have been like that cider thing. I don't really know. And his dose was increased after his wife was diagnosed with very severe kidney cancer in April of 2019 and obviously that's an incredibly stressful thing to do and if your guy was already prone to anxiety and depression your beloved wife getting diagnosed with a very serious cancer is going to fuck you up.

It's kind of like ruin you for a while. Like obviously like any person would be in the same thing but and so Jordan went on medication for it and it became a problem for him and he wound up having withdrawal symptoms and he will claim that he was only ever sort of like chemically addicted to it because he didn't really understand what it would do to him and he went to rehab. It didn't work.

Obviously like this as kind of in a video that she later published Michaela and Jordan noted how like bad that being you know diagnosed as having a drug addiction would be for her dad's brand because you know he talks about how you've got to like that's a weakness that you can rid from yourself. But yeah kind of messed up that that happened. Yeah. Yeah.

But also at the same time it's like yeah like it's okay to appear I get quote unquote weak and like struggle like yeah. If you're not a person who I advocates the things that Jordan Peterson advocates then you could be like oh yeah I mean dude like your fucking wife got cancer of course like they like some shit like that's the most normal thing in the world that like you develop a problem like of course no shame dude like deal with your like like we're supportive of you we care about

obviously this is a hard time but that's not help you. Yeah. No it's not what he subscribes to it's not what he tells people that they need to do otherwise they're failing or whatever. Exactly. I mean the same thing with his his rule about don't ever let your child do something that displeases you or whatever and like Michaela is like dating like a like literally a pickup

artist. She's dating a pickup artist who believed that he is inhabited by a demon named Igor. Yep. We'll talk about Michaela's relationship and just a spell. Oh thank goodness okay I apologize. So a lot of bad things continued to happen to Peterson by August or September like 2019 he was in bad enough shape

that his family was like more worried about him than his wife who was dying of cancer. He tried to quit cold turkey a couple of times and that had not worked and if you try to quit a drug addiction and like it doesn't work out it kind of makes it harder to quit in the future detox is harder as a result of that and stuff. So he was in a really bad situation and like he also may have had some like very rare kind of reactions to clonazapam

that like aren't common but anyway he was he was like all fucked up and he was also couldn't get off of this medicine and Michaela developed who for some reason was in charge of his health care at this point even though she's a not competent to really do much of anything I would argue based on her advocation of eating nothing but meat and salt. She wound up in charge and she decided that they needed a medical treatment or medical specialists who had the guts

to detox in cold turkey in a place where doctors quote aren't influenced by the pharmaceutical companies. So she traveled to Russia where they did a very unrecommended process where they basically gave him a medical induced coma in order to quit him cold turkey which is not a good idea. He had to be on a breathing machine. He got pneumonia.

It was just like this horribly traumatic physical process that probably did permanent damage to his brain because it's bad for you. Yeah, it's bad to do that. Yeah, it seems like like people try to avoid being in comas and doing that kind of thing generally. But you know, good luck. Yeah, it doesn't seem to have been great.

And yeah, obviously Michaela has like blamed all of this on Western medicine, blames the pneumonia on the North American hospital. And it's, yeah. I thought Wes was best. That's weird. Yeah, in the words of the New Republic, Michaela is essentially weaving her own hero's journey into her father's

ordeal, one in which she brought him to a far-flung clinic that had the guts to do what Western doctors wouldn't. It's a tale that burnishes her brand as a wellness influencer and shoves aside awkward questions about whether the treatment harmed Peterson. And shortly after that article came out, the news broke that she'd taken them both to Serbia to go to clubs during the COVID shutdown with her husband and had given her dad

COVID-19 and he had gotten very sick. And he's probably alive still. But the pictures that he's been in recently don't look good. He's not well. He's not well. He's not looking great. He does seem to still be alive. He does seem to still be alive.

Maybe he'll recover enough to come back and do his thing again, but he hasn't yet. He hasn't yet. I've been sort of curious about it too. I've been like waiting because it's like, yeah, he's going through a really hard time and like all this stuff. And part of me is like, okay, so after about a year, he will reemerge and it'll be some, it'll be like a

spiritual awakening or reinvigoration, some sort of thing. Like I always felt like this will be used to sort of push the cult stuff and like his position and people's view of him as the sort of savior. I don't know if that's still going to happen because it does seem like he just keeps getting sick and sick and sick for real reasons. Yeah.

The hard thing is like, is he actually going to get better or has he like been permanently damaged in such a way that he won't be able to continue doing the stuff that he was doing? Like I just don't think we really know. Yeah. There's no, yeah. I can't, I can't tell. It was always like a worry in the back of my mind, but now it's

like, I have no idea how he's doing or if, yeah, what his daughter is going to try to do to him next. Yep. Yep. Something who her pickup artist boyfriend. Yeah, I wanted to read a quote from her that she wrote about her and her pickup artist husband. Beautiful.

Life is complicated. When Andre and I met, we argued about Stalin all night. I think he's been brainwashed. He disagrees and accuses me of the same. He told me he had to immigrate after the wall fell and his family had to start again in Canada. He told me he'd been shot at as a kid. He has black belts.

He practiced his sword work. He scared me. He told me he had a demon inside him named Igor. It didn't seem like a joke. He didn't. It wasn't like anyone I'd met and I didn't know what to make of it. I got pregnant with Scarlett after eight months of dating the

strange Russian man. It was terrifying. We decided to have her. I couldn't bear any other thought. And we got married despite intense pressure from his family. They think I'm a cult leader, smiley face with a halo. We separated about a year after Scarlett was born. It was awful.

It was me really. I ran. And of course she's back together with him now and they gave their dad or her dad. COVID from, from clubbing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

It's just a wild place. Yeah. Wild times for the Petersons. You can find on YouTube, you can find him in a lecture talking about how pickup artists are psychopaths. Yeah. If you want to check that out. But, but his brain might not be functional anymore because of

all of the horrible damage his daughter did to it because he couldn't bear the thought of just like going through the kind of detox treatment that, that other people do. Like it's Jordan Peterson. So he had to go through some like weird Russian thing. Like he couldn't, he couldn't just like go to a thing and be like, yeah, I have a problem. Like, and I can't deal with it on my own.

I need other people's help. Like, no, I need. Right. It's a weird, it's like a weird like conflict too because like there's parts like I don't, I don't want to go the western way and like, I don't want to go and say, I need help. Could you help me? How do I like fight this?

He's going like the self induced coma in a way is like, I'm doing it myself. But, but like it's not, it's like you're, you're not doing it yourself. You're not, you're not standing up straight. You're not keep, you're not doing the posture thing. You're not cleaning your own room. You're letting other people do it.

I don't know. There's a weird conflict there with his, his views. That's not unexpected with him. So I'm not, I don't know why I'm surprised. It's just everything he does is very interesting. Yep. And in contrast with his book based off of him answering questions on Cora.

It's good stuff. Well, that's our episode, Cody. Jordan B Peterson is, I don't know, hard to say where he is, but not in a great place, but he's also not doing the stuff he was doing before that I don't like. So whatever. It's real. Yeah.

Real mixed bag there. I would say. Yeah. I wish him well. Um, generally because I wish generally everybody well. Yeah. Compassion is important as we discussed. Yeah.

I wish that his daughter would not no longer have any say over his healthcare because she seems bad at it. Yeah. She's very clearly like damaging to, to him. Yeah. Yeah. Not, not safe. Her feminine chaos has shattered his order.

Yeah. Yes. Exactly. Yeah. He gave, he gave, he gave her his order and she, she asked him to give her his order. You know, a little bit of it from the beginning, and then he gave her the order.

Yeah. And it's not like, not helpful, hands that he's in right now. But also. And then, yeah, it's, he's not doing the thing. I hope part of this is like, if he stops doing, if he gets better, maybe,

maybe he'll stop doing this stuff. Yeah. After getting better. I don't know. Um, I, I do think he'll, I do think it like, yeah, he's probably going to buy that church still. Yeah.

Maybe he'll, yeah. And he'll be this, I just wanted him to write a novel, so we can all see the things that he really believes without the opposite of just getting language. Yeah, let's have him write a novel, like every public figure should be forced to do. Yes, exactly.

So, you got anything to plug, Cody? Maps of meaning. I would like to promote the Chaos Dragon, which is another word for women, my right, fellas? No, you can find me on Twitter. Sophie's shaking her head, but I was doing a Peterson bit. I should have done the voice.

I'm sorry. You can find me on Twitter, I'm Dr. Mr. Cootie, and on the other socials, I've got a show called Some More News on YouTube, and the podcast called Even More News. I also co-host with Robert and my other co-host, Katie Stoll, Worst Your Ever, on IHR Radio, and I also would like to promote the first episode

of this, listen to the first episode before you listen to this one. Great call. It's over now. Well, that's kind of an extremist point, but okay, Cody, you know, go off. I think you should listen to whatever in whatever order. In fact, just randomly cue up random audio

from the entire human history of recording things and never know what you're going to listen to. That's the best way to listen. Some real chaotic, womanly energy there. Wow, you're such a visionary, Robert, I just don't know. Thank you. I hope you start some sort of like organization where people can follow your every word unquestionably.

Yeah, no, it'll be great. And we'll get Raytheon on the phone, and I submit them. I do have them on speed dial at this point because they call so much, you know. Yeah, it's important. I mean, it's important because I don't know, you all probably agree with this.

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