Decoding the Gurus - Recoding Jordan Peterson: Think again, Sunshine!

Episode Date: July 24, 2022

Matt and Chris are back in the headspace of the Alchemical Lemon, Jordan Peterson, with what was supposed to be a shorter format decoding episode. You can judge for yourself how well that worked out!Nevertheless, this is still a 'recoding' episode of a previously decoded guru. For those interested, Jordan was covered way back in Episode 3 and jointly with Bret Weinstein in Episode 18. It seemed about time to dip back into the ineffable well of the undisputed master of metaphors given that he seems to have revived his old Agenda Insight persona (minus the Fedora).This time we find Jordan in a foul mood delivering some stern advice to the Christian Churches on how to attract and recruit young men. He's been on a bit of a roll recently (since joining the Daily Wire) and thus far has delivered unsolicited 'messages' to Christians, Muslims, and CEOs. The mind boggles at how much advice he will have provided and to how many groups before the year is out!So join the decoders for a (theoretically) condensed decoding of a paradigmatic modern guru on the rampage. Think we are kidding? Think again sunshine. Listen... NOW! Do it, before it is too late.LinksPeterson's Message to Christian ChurchesOur original episodes on Peterson: Episode 3 & Episode 18Take down of Peterson's apologetic video on the war in Ukraine by Ukrainian Toronto TelevisionAn ex-fan's perspective on Jordan's trajectory from Rebel WisdomLex Fridman with Tim Kennedy in Ukraine (Instagram)Glenn Greenwald promoting Alex's War' DocumentaryYour Gurometer Ratings!If you want to play along you can add your own scores for Jordan or any of our previous gurus here:Rate the Gurus websiteAnd if you want to check the collected results:Gurometer Results

Hello and welcome to Decoding the Gurus, the podcast where an anthropologist and a psychologist decode and sometimes recode some of the greatest minds the world has to offer. I'm Professor Matt Brown and with me is the Pinocchio to my Geppetto associate professor, Chris Kavanagh. Hello, Chris. Hello, Chris. Hello, Matt. I'm very impressed with your ability to think on the fly,

add in that notice about recoding as if it was just natural. Waters off a duck's back. That's it. Water off a duck's back. That's how that expression is usually said. But yes. So what's this about recoding, Matt? What are you talking about?

Well, it's funny you should ask. It's very funny because it was you that just told me that we're going to call this a recoding episode. So it's odd that you would ask me that. Look at you destroying the illusion, peeling back the podcasting curtain. But that's okay. on go on no it is indeed a recoding episode because we're going back to some of the greatest hits revisiting jordan peterson in this case because sometimes chris you know they keep doing things even after we cover them they lack the good grace to just go away and preserve themselves in amber they keep

talking they keep releasing things and sometimes we can't resist. We have to dig back in. Yeah, and we've talked about the possibility of recovering old gurus that we looked at. And one of the other things that we have been discussing recently is the possibility of releasing shorter, more condensed episodes

looking at specific techniques or short-form content. And this kills two birds with one stone, because what will possibly happen today is that you will have a shorter, focused episode on a short piece of content. This is like a 10- minute piece of content from Jordan that we're looking at, and it is highlighting his evolution. So we initially covered him way back in I think our third or fourth episode. And we might talk about how he's evolved from that as we go through the things here. But yeah, this is, you're not going to get the usual

40 minute intro banter. We're going to leap into things and leap out. This is a test episode really for a new Shudder bite-sized format. It doesn't mean the other longer decodings are going away, but just that, you know, we're evolving.

We're like the gurus. We're playing around. We're like the gurus. We're playing around. We're rotating chips. I feel good about it psychologically. It feels like there's less pressure. Like you can look at something small, offer whatever thoughts you might have, and then just walk away. And it doesn't have to be a monumental thing. So we'll see how it goes. Yeah. I promise you, I really promise, I won't sidetrack us for that long. But I just have to note something that's been going on in the gurus sphere that I've noticed recently. And we've been discussing amongst ourselves and with the listeners as well, the possibility of doing this episode comparing

InfoWars, Alex Jones's network to what's going on in the Dark Horse and Brett Weinstein's podcast and how there's really strong parallels there in the content and the kind of rhetoric. And similar to that, I've noticed increasing amounts of crossovers between the kind of traditional conspiracy gurus and or, you alternative health like rfk jr anti-vaccine advocates alex jones david ike types and the secular gurus that caught our attention and the most recent examples of this are that glenn greenwald is doing a Q&A to promote a documentary about Alex Jones. Alex Jones has been on this channel hyping up the documentary. So that suggests it's not going to be a critical evaluation, but a puff piece.

And it's by a director who has a history of making sympathetic portrayals of maligned communities, if you will. But I looked at some comments that she's made in interviews and she basically argued things like Curtis Yarvin is not really right wing and so on. So again, it's clear what you're going to get here, but just like Glenn Greenwald promoting an Alex Jones documentary is probably not something that I think people would have had on their bingo card like five years ago. As you know, we're in the process of writing an article about some of this stuff. And one of the patterns that's become clear as we've been writing stuff down is that these gurus

sort of fall into two categories. Like there's the ones which kind of stay the same and they arguably weren't that bad to begin with they might well you know have some centrist or right-wing sympathies they might be somewhat heterodox and be skeptical of whatever but you know they seem kind of normal and then there's this other breed which have these conspiratorial innings in particular and they just seem to spiral don't they the trajectories are quite different. And Glenn Greenwald, maybe it's hindsight, but it seems like the seeds were there. I don't know.

Yeah, I was never a fan of Glenn Greenwald, including with the Snowden leaks, like what Snowden released was important information, but the Glenn Greenwald's particular role in that seems largely just simply as a result of, you know, being the right person there to receive that information and kind of overstated because of that. But in any case, it's more, whatever you think of him, this overlapping world of the more widely recognized conspiracy theorists. I mean, there's always been the connection with Alex Jones and Joe Rogan. Joe Rogan has always been conspiracy theorist friendly. But it just seems to be becoming a wider trend and it's perhaps, I think, linked to the greater receptivity in the mainstream right to conspiracy theories, especially after the Trump presidency. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, I think that's right. I think that's right. Yeah. And I noticed that Lex Fridman, who we recently covered, there was an Instagram photo of him with Tim Kennedy. Tim Kennedy's an MMA fighter or ex-MMA fighter, but he's also a complete conspiracy theorist, like right-wing loon type. And they were, the image was being presented as they're both there helping to sort things out in Ukraine, you know, work out when the situation gets there, these are the kind of people you want in your country. And it's just like, ah, and it was retweeted. I think it might've been Mike Sarnovich that was retweeting that. So that's whyweeting that. So that's why I came across.

And it's just like, there's a lot of, yeah, connective tissue around that, even amongst, you know, the seemingly bland naive figures in that ecosystem. They're, they're only ever like a small degree of separation between hosting Alex Jones for a marathon conspiracy session. I guess you're right. Well, a lot of this is kind of tangentially related to Jordan Peterson and the stuff we're going to cover today, because I think the common denominator there is that magnetic attraction to the hot button stuff that is attracting everyone's attention at the moment. You know, and conspiracy theories and whether it were COVID and anti-vaccination stuff,

or it could be the anti-woke outrage or whatever. But that magnetic attraction to the hot button issues that is almost guaranteed to make a splash and get a lot of attention, that seems to be the common denominator. to make a splash and get a lot of attention. That seems to be the common denominator. All right. So what we're looking at today is a video put out by Jordan Peterson on the Daily Wire media channel called Message to the Christian Churches. And the Daily Wire is Ben Shapiro's online media network. And Jordan Peterson has now been signed by them. I think almost immediately after his Twitter ban, I'm sure it was in the works for a long time, but he released his kind of response to that outrage on the Daily Wire as his opening salvo. And that was a

particularly unhinged and melodramatic response, but it subsequently emerged as we'll show in these clips that it wasn't just that topic, you know, him being personally targeted for a penalty on Twitter that caused that this seems to be the delivery style that he's going for with his content there, this, this kind of stern uncle sitting cross-legged and in a nice reading room lecturing the young people today about what they are getting wrong and what society needs to do to put things right. Yeah, that's definitely the tone. And would you say, Chris, it's that Jordan Peterson has sort of entered a new phase?

Like there was a phase there where he was back, but he was recovering from his illness and he was clearly a bit disheveled and not all there. But he seems to have pulled himself up by his bootstraps and put on the three-piece suit and he's back, baby. bootstraps and put on the three-piece suit and he's he's back baby yeah i'm i'm curious about that because yes i will say that these videos and the kind of you know what we'll look at the content but the eloquence at which he speaks is not that different to pre-coma jordan and that is different from like his long- form podcasts which he released after coming back which were more stilted and displayed an emotional fragility which seemed more pronounced than before

but I kind of wonder is this the result of better editing and shorter selected clips like reading from a script or that kind of thing or is it that he actually has recovered just from the the ill effects of his treatment in russia and i don't know i guess we'll i'd say yeah i'd say a little from column a little from column b i was going to mention the same thing actually which is that these released episodes like the one we're covering are much shorter as you you said, and they're also clearly edited. So the production values are high. It's a bit different from him getting on his computer at home and just meandering away for two or three hours like we do. It's been produced.

It was actually something that David Fuller in his piece that he released charting his disenchantment with Jordan Peterson's trajectory. He highlighted this change from the kind of scrappy recording his lectures in his home office to high production values as a conservative commentator on the Daily Wire. And that as Dave had seen it, this was him betraying, you know, the original promise that he offered. From my perspective, you asked Matt, like, is this a new phase? I think it's a new phase, but I have to say that I always, from the first moment I started to listen to Jordan Peterson's content,

one struck me were like two things. One was the amount of religious references in it and the overt Christian aspects of it, which seemed to me to go not noted enough at the time because it felt like a huge aspect of me. And secondly, how clearly conservative And secondly, how clearly conservative and kind of traditionalist he was in his outlook. And that included skepticism about global warming and a whole bunch of-esque and dramatic, conservative commentator. But I think it's just a more pronounced version of what he was always offering. It's people overuse this phrase, but talking about like mask off. But I think he's offering much the same message he has. offering much the same message he has he's just being more confrontational about it um and yeah yeah no i totally agree with you i only meant that it's like a new phase in his personal life

that he's gathered himself together and he's now back at the back at the coalface doing what he did before it's slightly different in tone he's like you say, he's got more of the like fire and brimstone, stern preacher about him, as we'll hear. Yeah, yeah. So maybe we should move to a couple of the clips. So the way he opens it, and I've seen other videos where he opens it in the same way.

I think he might be doing this for every video that he releases from now on. But let's hear the humble Jordan Peterson, how he begins the video. Hi all. It is, of course, completely presumptuous of me to dare to write and broadcast a video entitled Message to the Christian Churches. But I'm going to do it anyway, because I have something to say and because that something needs to be said. You heard the title swoop right there. But I feel that that faux humility at the start of like, you know, how presumptuous of me to dare offer my opinion on this topic. It's belayed almost immediately in the video by his referencing of how successful

his content is and how popular it is and, you know, how many Christians and Muslims and people of all stripes gather important messages from what he's released. I took a risk and rented out a theater in Toronto on the off chance that there might be an audience for what might be described as a psychological approach to our ancient stories. And lo and behold, and miracle of miracles, there was. I completed 15 or so lectures walking through the first biblical book,

sold out the theater, and attracted surprisingly millions of viewers, Christians, Jews, Muslims, and atheists. That's right. That's simply a device, obviously. He is presumptuous. That's right. That's simply a device, obviously. He is presumptuous. There's nothing wrong with being presumptuous. I mean, his whole brand is based on telling people what to do and how they should live their lives and why they're wrong about X, Y, and Z. So that's fine. But as you say, even though it's titled Message to the Christian Churches, most of it is dedicated to other things. Like, as you said, the first part of it is dedicated to him talking about how important his career has been and how much influence he's had. And then a large part of the next part is just like what's wrong with society

and how the woke and the Marxists and the postmodernists are basically evil. So it takes him a little while to get around to actually giving some advice to the Christian churches. It does, but I think it's like a setup because to get around to actually giving some advice to the Christian churches. It does, but I think it's like a setup because it's a one-two punch. Like the first half of the video was him highlighting why in particular his message is received so well by young men. saying, and you Christian churches have an opportunity to follow my technique and to pull these young rudderless men into your orbit, which is like quite a sinister message in a way.

You know, it's, I mean, we'll get to it, but let's hear him, how he introduces that. And the majority of those who watched online were young men. That is not a phenomenon that can be easily accounted for. But let me try. Now, in the West, because of the weight of historical guilt that is upon us, a variant of the sense of original sin in a very real sense, and because of a very real attempt by those possessed by what might be described as unhelpful ideas to weaponize that guilt, our young people face a demoralization that is perhaps unparalleled. This is particularly

true of young men. So the missing context there at the start was he was saying how surprising that lectures on the Bible would be of interest to young men in particular, right? And then all of the rest of it. So, yeah. So according to Jordan Peterson and his worldview, well, everybody, but young men in particular are beset by these left wing ideologies that are based on guilt and nihilism. And these give young men no path towards guidelines in how to be a good person and how to live a good life. Yeah. There's a little bit as well, but I don't really understand where the mystery is because producing self-help content oriented towards men on YouTube gets you a following amongst young men. Like where's the mystery there?

Like if you take his biblical lessons as separate from that, well, I guess I suppose the traditional view is those that would be interested in biblical analysis and stuff would be old bearded theologians, not like young hip dudes online. Right. But like that's belaying the fact that there has been like a resurgent interest in traditionalism and religiosity amongst in particular young men and the right leaning amongst that set oh where which comes first is is probably a question but yeah yeah there are

yeah i mean there are a lot of you know christians people growing up from a conservative background in the united states and other countries like Australia. And there are like these, you know, less so in Australia, but there are still revivalist type modern, there's this modern resurgence in that brand of Christianity. And even though it's a large element, a subculture, I suppose, which is feeling somewhat disenchanted with the modern world. So, you know, I guess it makes sense. If you want to give some point to Jordan Peterson, I think there is an aspect to it where if the dominant culture in your liberal enclave is secular and, you know, broadly liberal leaning,

the way to rebel is to seek out something different from that, right? And that might be looking for more conservative social values and like a traditional religious outlook. This is like a pattern that's very familiar. If your society is predominantly religious, the way to rebel is to seek out secular you know rock culture or something like that right rebellious teens will look for ways to annoy parents and authority figures and whatever way you know is available to them yeah and young people consume self-help material i think a lot more than than older people so anyway it's no great mystery that's fine but that that's his setup and take us through what happens after that okay so he sets out that there are three accusations leveled at society in large but young men in particular and and here's what he opens up by

saying when in grade school boys are admon shamed, and controlled in a very similar manner by those who think that play is unnecessary, particularly if it's competitive, and who value a docile, harmless obedience above all, shades of Dolores Umbridge. Following all that, because that's not enough, even when pursued assiduously for total demoralization, is the inculcation of an extremely damaging ideology, which essentially consists of three accusations. Okay, so one point to note there, Matt, I just have to check. Do you know who Dolores Umbridge is? I just have to check. Do you know who Dolores Umbridge is? Yes, yes. From that storybook.

She was the terrible headmistress of a school in a book. Harry Potter. Yeah. So Jordan Peterson. Oh, no. I was getting mixed up with another, with a different one. Oh, I think, were you thinking of the one in like the Roald Dahl book? Yeah, I was thinking of the Roald Dahl character. Yeah.

Yeah. Maybe, maybe there's, there's like an echo there in that archetype. But in any case, it's just interesting to me throughout this content that a lot of the references that Peterson draws on are, you know, contemporary pop culture. on our contemporary pop culture. And this is in keeping with the way that he likes to delve deep into Disney movies and this kind of thing. But yeah, so the archetype that he drew from there is in the Harry Potter franchise, just interesting.

Yeah, as opposed to the Bible, say, giving a message to all the Christians. But yeah, the other thing you could hear there is his enunciation, his tone in this, which is pretty similar, and it is more recent material. But there's a real note of venom in his voice, isn't it? Like he sort of spits the words out. spits the words out yeah and he also you know the another thing which you hear echoed from the last content we looked at is like the kind of jonathan height view that now children are not allowed to play boys are told rough and tumble is like not acceptable and i again i just feel so skeptical about how that actually comes in like i'm I'm not saying that you don't encounter things

in the most progressive lefty spaces or maybe some material in schools, which is discouraging of that kind of play. But like, it just, it feels so dramatically overstated. Still, I bet you if you go into a toy shop, you will find tons of toy guns and swords like in the content oriented towards boys and that like they talk as if it's illegal yeah i know i mean that stood out to me too chris which is like like listening to it trying to listen to it charitably every point that is made is kind of

in reference to this extreme version of leftism that i'm sure exists in some way shape or form in some places in the universe but it all the time it does feel like it's getting built up into being much, much bigger than it actually is. Like he casts it as like young men in particular are being demoralized and are being inculcated with just nothing but shame and given a worldview that is total nihilism. And, you know i look outside my window i mean go you know it's just it's like you know i have to take it on faith that okay that's happening somewhere but like i live i live across the the road from the school it's over the back fence and the kids at lunchtime it's a madhouse it's a monkey house over there they're running around screaming yelling acting like kids have always acted so you know maybe maybe jordan peterson is exaggerating a little bit yeah and the i don't

know like what tends to happen when this is presented right is people will cite articles in the new york times or like you know when we were talking to sam harris he mentioned Or like, you know, when we were talking to Sam Harris, he mentioned what's being taught at the elite schools in Manhattan or whatever. And I don't doubt that's the case. I don't think it's hard to find people, find articles in The Guardian that are annoying or that kind of thing. My issue is the presentation that this is now the dominant accepted narrative across like all schools and the West in Western society, not like elite progressive schools in the richest parts of America, which is a very different claim. Yeah, it's a very different claim. Yeah, so he's setting up the thing I think you're going to play next, which is these three ways in which leftists are, I guess, yeah, three ways in which they're accusing young men of being the West, is best construed as an oppressive patriarchy, motivated by the desire, willingness, and ability to use power, defined as the compulsion

of others against their will, to attain what are purely selfish and self-serving ends. This is true at every level of analysis. This is true at every level of analysis. Marriage is akin to slavery, friendship to exploitation, political disagreement to war, and business arrangements to deception and theft. And this is true not only of the current social arrangements that characterize our culture, particularly in the West, but also the fundamental reality of history itself. Okay, so the number one is that human culture is oppressive. All of human culture. I think if you let him waffle on enough, he would argue that there is a valorization of

non-Western cultures, which doesn't suffer from this. But in this version, it's just that all analysis of society and history is essentially negatively violenced. There's no celebration of achievement. It's all about exploitation and oppression. it's all about exploitation and oppression yeah so just to be super clear this is jordan peterson's framing of the west or civilization and where it's gone wrong and it's and it's gone wrong in having adopting this this very leftist view of things in which everything is oppression essentially and you know i'm going to try to throw him a bone again but also illustrate where i think is the problem here like i use twitter so do you i was i've i've read twitter threads and they sometimes they start off quite well but it could be something about you know

health or some random thing about whatever all right and then the thread devolves into patriarchy and colonialism and oppression and somehow this random thing is linked back to that right so i'm going to grant jordan peterson this right if you look you can find people with quite quite strong ideological views who who are sometimes guilty of linking connecting everything to this kind of narrative but again i would say to jordan peterson he should be careful not to confuse some person on twitter as you said some hyper-progressive educational institution with everything like i don't think it is broadly reflective of the general population. Yeah, and like you say, there are strands of academia and political thought

which focus on those aspects to the exclusion of all else and do have like a myopic tendency and often like a conspiratorial bent to them as well. You can perfectly criticize those and you can also, you could talk about the value of, you know, reconsidering, looking critically at hagiographic accounts and so on, right? But

so if you take the moderate version of it, of saying that, like, purely focusing on the negative aspects of history is misrepresentative and similarly, but just the same as having a history that only celebrates the, you know, the achievements of an individual society or type of people, right? That's also misleading. So, yeah, so that's the first pillar anyway, that human culture is not painted as oppressive in the West. And next we get...

Number two, human activity, particularly that undertaken in the West, is fundamentally a planet despoiling enterprise. The human race is a threat to the ecological utopia that existed before us, and that could hypothetically exist in our absence. We might well be construed even as a cancer that threatens the very viability of the complex systems that make up the ecosystem of the earth that shelters and supports us. We are facing a Malthusian catastrophe of overpopulation and biosphere degradation. And we have to place extreme limits on our wants, even our needs, so that survival itself, even in a much reduced form, can be guaranteed.

I just want to say I really liked the Soto voice, even our needs, after the wants. auto voice, even our needs after the once. The delivery is so dramatic. The, you know, every sentence is dialed up, like on the spinal tap dial, he's up at 12 for like drama level. It doesn't go up to 12, Chris, it goes up to 11, but I know what you're saying.

I know that's the point, I know. Yeah, I mean, well, actually on this point, this is where he's most clearly wrong. Surely. Like the human race is a danger, is a menace to other species. Like there were a lot more species around before we really got going with industrial revolutions and stuff.

What he's doing here is basically arguing that the most extreme elements of extinction rebellion right the ones who yeah like basically adopt an agent smith style approach the humanity that they're representative of like what the dominant view in the west is and again like no yeah it it is not but the the moderate version of that is much harder to fight against, right? And that's why he doesn't, because like the moderate version is that humans have had documented destructive impacts on the environment and that we're facing climate change, which could

prove very damaging to future people and our current societies. And we are seeing that. And habitat destruction is going on and you are seeing a big loss in biodiversity and that's a shame. And loss in soil quality is the Great Barrier Reef near where I live is in serious danger. And yeah, like you said, there's this trick of taking this extreme position. Like there are people out there, right, who's, you know, anti-natalist people who say we shouldn't, nobody should have children. There are people who want, who think the human race should go extinct.

And there are people that are, you know, extremists in environmentalism, just like in anything else. And it is a trick to make out that that sliver, that sliver of a sliver of public opinion is the dominant paradigm. Like, I'm a hardcore environmentalist and that's just not true. And you don't endorse that. I don't endorse anything. Agent Smith was not presented as a hero, like, you know, the kind of speaking truth to power, right? Like the whole point of the Beatrix is that he, he has a point about like the destructive

capacity of humans is right. But like the solution that, you know, you're a cancer on the earth that needs to be destroyed. That's why he's the villain of the piece, not the hero. And this speaks to the fact that Jordan Peterson, long term, sometimes people like to present him as if he's a techno optimist. And he is in the sense that he kind of imagines that it will all be technological innovation, which solves that. And I too believe that will be a big part of how these issues are

addressed. But the other component which people try to downplay is that he's a climate change skeptic. He promotes outlier opinions. He does things like, despite claiming to have read 200 books on climate change, which is a childish claim in itself. But he will then say, you know, share an article from the Daily Mail about like the cold weather causing doubts about, you know, whether climate change models are accurate. And you're just like, that is not the thing which is done by somebody that has a sophisticated grasp of the topic. Yeah. So yeah, that's right his his real views are far more i mean on one hand he's he's caricaturing the

environmentalist movement it's not an obscure you know fringe movement anymore you know it's a it's a it's a mainstream concern up there with the economy and defense even in a lot of right wing you know, like. Yeah, it circles. So that's the bit that really annoys me. Like it's fine to have different views than myself say on, do you want to save the pandas or the wombats and so on? Okay, fine. But they actively misinterpret and don't want to admit about the actual scientific data that supports the various concerns. I think they misportray things.

I'm not speaking very well today, but they misrepresent things in a way that really annoys me. That's the word. Yeah, I said version, so we're both doing that. Okay, so the last accusation then, and I have some things to say about this, so let's play it. then and I have some things to say about this so let's play it. Number three. The prime contributor both to the tyranny that makes up the oppressive patriarchy and structures all of our social interactions past and present and the unforgivable despoiling of our beloved mother earth is damnable male ambition competitive and dominating power mad selfishitative, raping and pillaging. You might think that I'm overstating the case. Think again, sunshine.

That last line, that last line, you know, just Jordan Peterson was previously caricatured by Tan Nahasi Coates in a comic as the Red Skull, a villain in the villain in the Captain America novels. And he was complaining about that caricature, right? Because they presented the Red Skull as like doing a dramatic version of Jordan Peterson's ideology. was like doing a dramatic like a version of jordan peterson's ideology and i i don't know like what he was complaining about because his delivery is very much now like who says think again sunshine like that's a i don't know with like a 1970s british cop drama or something like well that's on brand fame like you know this is the guy who likes to say bucko yeah so but you know isn't it isn't it illustration of the theme that we seem to see

with these gurus is some of them become like caricatures of themselves as they evolve they have that style that you know in this case it's this authoritative you know fire breathing authoritarian older uncle type thing, giving you stern advice, he's kind of realized that works for him. And he's leaning into the stereotype of himself more and more as time goes by. And we've seen it in, say, Brett Weinstein, who is so elaborate now in his shtick. It started off as a reasonable portrayal of very thoughtful academic, but it sort of evolved into like a supernormal stimuli. You know, it's so it's exaggerated. He should be like tapping his glasses on the ridge of his nose and stuff.

Yeah, he should have a pince-nez. But the other thing that I'm going to criticize Jordan for just structurally is he said that he was going to give these three accusations, right? But the actual way it is, is that the first two are the accusations and the third is the purported cause, right? The explanation for the previous two accusations. accusations because he's saying the the the like human culture being oppressive and human activity destroying the planet it is caused by by men i know and it's not really a third thing i know i noticed that too because he mentions men in the first two you know men are the ones who are doing the oppressing ambitious men are the ones who destroy the world and then he goes the third thing is that it's all blamed on men and so no that's not a third thing okay and so they will turn now to like a bit more how he elaborates

this point but you know you were talking about the style and people you know becoming caricatures and one thing that we noticed in the previous coverage we did of jordan peterson was like, this elaborate metaphors that he creates and also his tendency to go off on the tangent in the middle of a sentence and kind of roam around before coming back to the point, right? And I just want you to bear that in mind as I play this next clip. Let's see if you can hear any of that. We in the West are facing an all-out assault at the deepest levels on what that old joker Jacques Derrida deemed the fell logo-centric conceptual structure of civilization itself. To take that apart, that's a society centered on the encouraging, adventurous, masculine spirit, and that privileges that hated word of all things, the divine logos.

And what should we worship and celebrate properly other than that, deconstructionists? The words of that mass murderer Karl Marx? So because there are actually asides in the speech, right, where he's like, you know, what should we worship other than that? And that heated concept and blah, blah, blah. Like, it's kind of like

a running commentary on his own like highly verbose prose and it's again Matt this notion that what the mainstream opinion is

is that we venerate the words of Karl Marx as an alternative to the theocentric logos of presumably Christianity and the other Abrahamic Oh and masculinity don't forget masculinity the theocentric logos of presumably Christianity and the other Abrahamic... Oh, and masculinity.

Don't forget masculinity. But how about Nilo? Is that not an option? That's not on the board there? No, no, he knows what leftists want. Look, yeah, I mean, like you said, it's asides within asides within asides. So it gives you a headache to follow

what he's saying a little bit if you're trying to figure out the point that he's making because he does nest in those asides and then he's made it a rejoinder to his own aside. Yeah. And you actually forget where did he start? What was he originally getting at? Well, we pointed out in this previous content that he used

to do well i think he still does it but he has this tendency to do like a mime caricature of the side that he's opposing right and he presents them as saying well well you might say oh that's just all patriarchy and blah blah and he doesn't actually quote people he just creates an extreme caricature version and then he says well, well, I'm like, no. Yeah, it's not like that. And then beats it down. And in this one, it's like he, through his asides, is creating emphasis. And you, you know, the impression it gives is that he's responding to the rejoinders,

but there's nobody offering them except him and his content. So it just, it feels like this kind of framing technique that makes it sound more convincing, but it's not actually presenting the alternative argument. It's presenting like a straw man version. Yeah. A straw man caricature. Yeah, it's quite an effective technique because if you take it on board and go, yes, there really is this thing where you're trying to make everybody feel ashamed all the time and that we should all just kill ourselves because we're a cancer on the earth and just men are inherently bad and we should all become competent, then you can nod along and go, well, yes, I don't like that.

So I'm agreeing with you, Jordan, because that sounds really bad. Huge if true. But apart from some characters on Twitter, I'm not sure whether these people actually exist at all. But he's stuck in there, Chris, that the good, healthy society that this evil perspective demonizes is inherently masculine. Yeah. It's, it's the adventurous, masculine, striving, conquering spirit.

And yeah, it's easy to miss, but, um, with the divine logos, which for Jordan Peterson involves, you know, as he spelled out in other content, emulating Christ, and there's a very heavy, theocentric and traditional Christian morality play attached to his ideal conception of the world. It's like kind of 1950s, the imagination of 1950s America. It is, in fact. Actually, Chris, this is a bit of an aside of our own, but it's fun. I've been reading, well, listening to on Audible, the original Foundation series by Isaac Asimov. So we both enjoyed it. We watched the TV series recently, and I read it when I was a kid. So I thought I'd reread them today. And it's good. It's not bad for a bit of classic sci-fi, but man, I mean, I'm not usually for a bit of classic sci-fi but man i mean i'm not usually

particularly a sensitive reader when it comes to that kind of you know politically incorrect social mores in old-fashioned science fiction i guess it was written in the 50s but yeah it reminds me of this because it does strike a discordant note to to the modern year because the kind of thing that Isaac Asimov is describing is kind of what Jordan Peterson is describing, right? Like all the characters are men. The women don't have any role in anything apart from to be victims or bossed around or just little side characters and they're all kind of silly and emotional and so on. And the men are all these sort of grizzled 1950s types and they're smoking cigars in the future which is another little thing that kind

of feels weird but they're all like they're all like tough like hard-boiled tough guys and it's sort of the vision of how society works even in the far distant future is that 1950s hyper masculine hyper dominating hyperive and competitive and just power-oriented thing? And yeah, Isaac Asimov sort of took that as a given, which was interesting. So anyway, I think you're right. He's just a very, very socially conservative guy. Yeah. I mean, his whole aesthetic style also represents that, but let's move on a little bit to him. He doesn't use the word, but he's basically complaining about, you know, the concept of toxic masculinity and how it's applied. So let's see if he does a good job of that.

This is not only wrong theologically, morally, psychologically, practically and scientifically. It is literally anti-true it's not a mere misstatement about the nature of reality a minor conceptual error but something that literally could not be farther from the truth and something that distant from the truth comes from a place that cannot be distinguished from hell. Okay, that's a nice example of good old-fashioned rhetoric, isn't it? Like, it sounds very analytical, doesn't it? You know, it's not merely wrong, but actually the antithesis of truth. I mean, it boils down to saying he just really, this is a place where hell, you know, this is hell. This is the devil would be saying something like this.

It's that untrue. You're just saying that you don't like it. You're just saying you don't agree with it. You can just say that. Yeah. You know, for somebody who has a habit of complaining about people being hyperbolic, you know, on the left side of the spectrum my god

man that is and also especially given jordan peterson's rather loose attachment to what the word truth refers to like he famously had multiple hours with sam harris trying to debate that truth does not actually necessarily relate to like something being you know objectively true so it's very very complicated yeah yeah no i think look this is really raising the stakes for jordan peterson in terms of his his guru status like the pseudo profound bullshit here is just really strong like he's a good speaker, especially edited like this. Very articulate. There's a whole bunch of big words and it's strung together

and it gives the impression of someone who is being truthy. Eloquent. Well, eloquent but also precise and saying something profound. But if you stop and think about it, he's just riffing. He's just saying they're wrong. He's just saying they're wrong. That's right and he's he's saying it using 50 words and big words of that for dramatic effect yeah and you know just again you could take issue with the way that toxic masculinity is used in in progressive

spaces without going to these levels, right? It's histrionic. But Chris, I guess as well as it being histrionic, it does serve a role in terms of translating whatever point he's making into that cosmic architecture that he has, which is like social justice warriors and whatever are not just wrong. It's not just a pernicious influence on society like it's literally the devil you know something that's this untrue is coming from hell yeah so

it's a sleight of hand in a couple of different ways yeah and uh so now we get i mean we already have it but now there's a more explicit pivot towards the Christian aspect of that. So let's continue on. The Christian church is there to remind people, young men included, and perhaps even first and foremost, that they have a woman to find, a garden to walk in, a family to nurture, an ark to build, a land to conquer, a ladder to heaven to build, and the utter terrible catastrophe of life to face stalwartly in truth devoted to love. So one point just to note there, I saw from your eyes that you picked it up as well. Jordan's characterization of life was the utter terrible catastrophe of life to face stalwartly. So that fits with his presentation that we saw in the earlier content, where he has this fixation on pain and suffering. and supposedly talking about the unacknowledged beauty of existence and stuff,

but really heavily fixating on the dark, oppressive components of life. There's an idea that people are fallen, and they've fallen into the terrible realm of history and self-consciousness with its knowledge of suffering and finitude and its necessity for work, which is associated with that. Because if you know that there's you and that you know that you can suffer because you're limited and that you could die, then you're cursed with work. Because even if you're okay right now, you're not like a lion who's going to go to sleep and be happy or like the zebra

beside it who won't run away when the lion is sleeping we know about the future so we're cursed to work and make sacrifices constantly that's that's our destiny let's say and it's it's an interesting thing given the rest of it which is presenting that basically you are the first person character, the main person in a glorious story that is yet unwritten. And that part as well, the language at the start where he says, you know, well, the Christian church has a message for everyone, but perhaps first and foremost to young men. And then the examples are go and find a maiden like kill a dragon build an ark right it's it's the there seems to be a rather strong emphasis on the message to young men as the potential heroes of their own stories there yeah well many would dispute some of that stuff

particularly that the church particularly has a responsibility to minister to young men over and above other demographics. I don't think many priests, ministers would say that. But I actually read an article from a conservative Christian pastor in the United States who didn't like what Jordan said here. And he spotted the same thing I did, which is that Jordan Peterson has mischaracterized what a Christian church's role here on earth is for. It's not to help young men go and slay a dragon and conquer new lands and find a maiden, all that stuff. That's Jordan Peterson sort of imposing his own thing onto the church.

I wouldn't do a very good job of presenting how churches see their mission here, but I think it's roughly on the lines of that, yes, you're in a body and it's decaying and there's this physical world, but it's there to remind you to lift your eyes to the kingdom of heaven and so on. And there's an afterlife and so on. There's this beautiful, serene eternity. That's different. That's very different from what Jordan Peterson said. I think that Jordan Peterson, like you said, is adding his interpretation on it, which is essentially that for him,

the Christian story is this narrative that if followed, provides all of the tools to become the heroic, competent male figure. And I think he would also head nod towards that. Yes, this applies to women too, but it's quite clear who the emphasis is on in his material. So he is adding that for him, the Christian mythos is not just a kind of supernatural morality play,

but the guide to being a fully realized human. And I think there are various people in different church denominations who peddle a similar message that, you know, following the Christian life is not just about your spiritual salvation, but it's actually about transforming your life here by embodying, you know, Christ-like qualities. Yeah. Yeah. Look, I mean, it's complicated, obviously. We've got lots of churches, like the, you know, modern Catholic church has got a big thing in terms of social justice,

making the world a better place and contributing to community. And, you know, all churches have generally have stuff about contributing to community and so on. But the way he's framing it, he's misrepresenting it. Like it varies, it's complicated, whatever. But Jordan Peterson's characterization of it is not quite right. Yeah, we're jumping a little bit ahead here. But I think the way that the video ends is quite relevant to this discussion. So let me just play it off.

Your churches, for God's sake, quit fighting for social justice. Quit saving the bloody planet. Attend to some souls. That's what you're supposed to do. That's your holy duty. Do it now. Before it's too late.

The hour is nigh. So, like, Jordan Peterson sees religion as kind of a, like, I think this message actually illustrates how Jordan Peterson isn't really a proper Christian. Like, amongst left-wing circles, he's seen as a Christian advocate and so on. And he is kinder, but when he's perceived from people within like an Orthodox tradition, like, you know, he's an abstracted, you know, Christian. He's got a very bespoke Jungian archetype

or symbolic kind of interpretation of it in which religion is there as a support structure for being the sort of John Wayne exhortation to young men to be all they can be. It's different from how an orthodox religious person would see it, I think. I mean, I think possibly, but there are trends in, like all traditions have lots of different strands within them and i think basically jordan channels an extremely conservative perspective like a kind of traditionalist perspective but he de-emphasizes aspects this you know the overt supernaturalist and kind of

retreats to metaphor and unclear components for that part. Yeah. Like you were saying with truth, right? Like he won't even be clear and say that he believes that God exists. He says he lives his life as though God exists. But, you know, religious apologetics are quite sophisticated and have been doing similar things for centuries, redefining the way that, you know, how you approach truth and validate things and that kind of stuff. But I think that one point I might disagree with is the notion that he's not doing justice to what a Christian or religious worldview offers, because I would argue that that last part where he reels

against social justice and saving the planet, that like in some respects, it's very hard to argue that him lecturing the churches about, you know, dropping that message when from my Catholic upbringing, you know, they taught me to bring the good news to the poor, tell prisoners that they are prisoners no more and so on. Like whatever way you look at it, there's been a huge emphasis in Christian doctrine on the salvation of souls, yes, but on justice components, right? And even institutions like the Catholic Church, where they are extremely conservative in so many ways, have also argued that it is part of the Christian faith that they have to be good stewards of the environment, right?

The current Pope made an encyclical, I think it was this Pope, about that. That's right. So exactly, like even in the medieval period, the churches were the ones who set up hospitals, right? So they were looking after people's bodies as well as their souls, right? So I don't think that the environment or poverty or disease is necessarily off limits to the church. That's completely true.

And I agree with that. And, you know, the kind of, again, the dramatic villain delivery is just, it's cringeworthy. But I guess my pushback is that there are strands of conservatism within all of these Christian traditions who would be very much on board with Jordan Peterson's view that the church shouldn't be promoting environmentalism. Oh, yeah. Should, like, be, should always stay 100 miles away from anything that looks like modern social justice endorsements. No, I agree with you. Those factions exist, right? There's so many factions across- Michael O'Fallon.

Yeah, Michael, like they exist. There's so many factions, and this is why we're struggling to characterize what churches really do. But I'm just saying that Jordan Peterson is being incoherent. If he's saying that the churches have a responsibility to help young men make their bed and contribute to a masculine, confident, conquering society, if that's their job, then you can't say that looking after sick people or worrying about poverty or the environment

is off-limits either, right? They're all social roles that aren't concerned with the afterlife or your eternal soul. Yeah. So it's like, it's contradictory, his message in many respects, because he otherwise lauds, you know, institutions and traditions for the role that they have in providing services like therapy, right? Like mental health advice in a pre-modern age and so on. But there's three clips to finish with, advice in a pre-modern age and so on but there's three clips to finish with matt and i think they all fall into the part that for me makes this video not just farcical but to some extent creepy

or like you know i'm not saying that this video in itself is is likely to have a huge impact. It's just really a bombastic conservative message. But I think that these fibs that we'll look at are part of the reason that people are right to be a little bit concerned about Jordan Peterson's potential impact on society and vulnerable populations of the internet. And Nadi is not just delivering a self-help message about stand up straight and tidy your room. And let me show you what I mean. So here's the first of them.

So join us. We'll help fix you up. And you can help fix us up. And together, we'll aim up. And here is a message to those young men skeptical about such things. What else do you have? You can abandon the churches in your cynicism and disbelief. You can say to yourself, narcissistically and solipsistically, the church does not express what I believe properly. Who cares what you believe? Why is this about you? Do you even want it to be about you? What if it was about others? What if it was about your duty to the past and to the broader community that surrounds you in the present? Okay, so before before i editorialize anything that strikes you as concerning there yeah i find it a little bit dark too and how to explain why i think

he characterizes it as being narcissistic and solipsistic and selfish to to have your own opinion about what's true and what's not, that you should just, you know, you've got nothing else, right? Unless you grab on the church, a church, and submit yourself to their doctrine, forget about whether you believe it or not. Just put it first, commit yourself to this bigger cause, then you'll have absolutely nothing. You'll just fall into the kind of nihilism that he hates. It feels kind of fash. It feels fascistic to me.

Well, I mean, so, you know, that advice could be applied to people to join any sort of group that took control over what they should be doing and give them a mission. And there's lots of groups willing to do that for people who seek them out. sort of group that took control over what they should be doing and give them a mission. And there's lots of groups willing to do that for people who seek them out. But it's particularly this part where I read it as kind of negging, right? Like if you're not somebody who has this deep sense of insecurity and that you don't matter and whatnot, then I don't think this kind of message resonates that much with you because you think, well, you know, I have my own opinions. I don't need to be told what to do. But if you're someone that's like, you know, deeply depressed, insecure about your identity or whatever,

and somebody tells you, stop obsessing about yourself, stop succeeding on what you want, like who cares? And I've got a solution for you and you can have value, right? You can be a part of this bigger system, which is bigger than you, which will give you a purpose to your life. Like, if you take it in a moderate way about stop being so self-obsessive and seek out things that will give your life meaning and instead of wallowing in self-pity, try to do service to others. But there's an older side of it, and it's in his delivery or the kind of sources that he's pointing people towards, which is essentially saying there's a solution to your weakness,

and it's to submit yourself to the authority of these traditional outlets. And your belief that your individuality matters is just like a cancer given to you by modern culture. Like if you go back, that will lead you to meaning. And yeah, it's just, it's, yeah. I have a quote for you that might help, Chris. See if you can spot where this is from. You're not special.

You're not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You're the same decaying organic matter as everything else. We're all part of the same compost heap. We're the all singing, all dancing crap of the world. Fight club. Fight club. It's the same kind of thing.

I was on board with that. It's not entirely wrong. It's just, it's the same kind of appeal. It's the same kind of message. And it's fine. Yeah, you could dedicate yourself to the Catholic Church. You could dedicate yourself to the fictional fight clubs, terrorist, anti-capitalist, liberal thing.

Or you could dedicate yourself to the Moonies or something. I mean, it's not good advice, I don't think think and i don't think it's ever good advice to tell people that don't think for yourself what you think is true or not doesn't matter just find find some people that seem to know what they're doing and submit yourself to them yeah and you know there's always the position that you can take the more moderate version, which is like modern, particularly American culture, as we often comment on the podcast, can be like too self-indulgent, too much individualistic. And there are things to criticize there, but it is the level that he takes it to and the kind of dramatic delivery and stuff that makes yeah the creepiness yeah uh filter in like like i'm with you like i liked fight club i was sympathetic to the idea of blowing up the big buildings and so on you know that i wasn't sympathetic well well more than you know yeah

well you know the anti-ikea consumer is empty kind of thing and that fetishizing your individuality and so like you can take his thing i'm basically agreeing. Like you can take his thing. I'm basically agreeing with you. You could take his thing. You're an anti-capitalist hipster, I know. No, that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that you could dial what he's saying down to 1.5. Yeah, probably 5 is fine. Yeah, and you could say that, yeah, it is a good idea to look to devote yourself to other people.

It is a good idea not to ruminate so much and think that you're this unique special snowflake whose needs and wants and things should always take first priority. Like if you dialed it right down to that, you could find a way in which it made sense, but he doesn't. He dials it up to 12.

No. And so the next clip, again, in combination with that, here's another message that he offers. What if it was incumbent upon you and vital to your health and willingness even to live to rescue your dead father from the belly of the beast where he has always resided and to restore him to life well what indeed what if have you ever considered doing that chris rescuing your dead father from the belly of the beast where he's always resided and to restore him to life?

So you got that reference, right, Matt? With a little help from you, I eventually got the reference. Do you want to tell the sweet listeners? That's Pinocchio. That's from Pinocchio. As we know, Jordan is very interested in the Pinocchio story, very emotional about it. So we've had Harry Potter, now interested in the Pinocchio story, very emotional about it. So we've had Harry Potter.

Now we've got Pinocchio. But like for me here, the issue is not the pop culture reference because, you know, all right, fine. Disney contains important life lessons and long enduring archetypes from cultural narratives or whatever. But the point is that this framing is now switched to, don't you want to be a hero? Don't you want your life to be, you know, an adventure and value full? So gone from the emphasis on you don't matter to you can become this heroic figure who battles wheels to pull your follower up from the depths and that's uh that's different but chris this is why i said it kind of sounds a little bit fash because that's the same thing right the sort of

the fascistic appeal from the olden days 1930s and 40s was you would totally submit yourself to this bigger thing completely dedicate yourself to the broader thing not think for yourself and also be a freaking hero rampage across europe you know sitting on top of a battle tank or something you know what i mean like that was the kind of messaging that was in the posters and so on. You get to be both, you know? No, agreed. And again, I think this is why people have been very critical and highlighted concerns, right? And you might regard some of the way that people have framed Jordan Peterson's effect to not take account of the positive aspects, the impact that he's had on particularly young men, right, who many of whom we'll sing of his praises. But I think you have to acknowledge this darker side to the message that he's giving, like, there is that component

to it. And you can see it in the communities that he ends up fostering and where some of their interests end up lying but anyway so yeah look i mean to explain a little bit i don't think he knows he's being fash right necessarily i think you know he feels all this stuff at this level he doesn't i think realize that that the things that are appealing to him do have those very dark resonances. For him, it's very sympathetic, you know, it's Pinocchio and stuff like that. That's also why, like, despite his constant reference to how he's a student of fascism and totalitarianism, he is completely ill-equipped to recognize that strand amongst, for example, he didn't note it at all in Stefan Molyneux when he interacted with him. He doesn't recognize it

in any of the online communities that find him an appealing figure for various reasons. He basically denies that there's any connection there. Or indeed with Orban, right? His palling around with Orban, who has very overt totalitarian tendencies, you know, such that they are receiving chastisement from free speech organizations and human rights organizations. And so it's that blindness to right leaning

fascism which is is really clear and it's it's a big component of why he receives criticism and it's justified criticism yeah that's what i'm saying like i'm not saying that he's like a secret fascist and he's secretly trying to convert people to fascism. I think he's accidentally kind of reinvented it. You know what I mean? Because out of ignorance. Just from his, he's got a gut feeling attraction to that traditionalism, to the masculinity, to devoting yourself to a higher purpose, you know, to these sort of grand things. And he's accidentally blinded into this like a freaking idiot but i mean the

other comment that i'll make here is this i mean it's more on the pseudo profound bullshit sort of thing like he ratchets straight into this metaphor about rescuing your dead father from the belly of the beast to restore him to eternal life without any explanation directly from that that previous clip that you played yeah And it makes no sense except as some kind of avant-garde poetry. And you have to decipher it. And in trying to decipher it, after you explained it to me, I was Googling it. And people ask these questions on Reddit. What is Jordan Peterson talking about when he's talking about rescuing your father from the belly of the beast? And then it's amazing. people will write essays about what they think jordan peterson was saying so that gnostic or enigmatic kind of way of speaking is

yeah it's the antithesis of clarity anyway it's it's something else it's this weird poetry when you have a large community of highly devoted highly motivated people who are hanging on your every word, it's inevitable to some extent that that will happen, right? But there are people who, through the way that they speak, encourage it and sometimes lean into it. And I think not just in this reference, which I think for Jordan is just kind of like breathing, like describing something in relation to Pinocchio. It's just like him making a reference to the Bible. But he definitely does encourage that. And, you know, his constant exhortation is,

it's complicated. My views on this are very deep and they're hard to understand. And in most occasions, they're not. You know, he spent years avoiding what he specifically meant when he was going on about the double helix being related to yeah genetics and then when he actually did explain it recently in the interview with dawkins it's just a very stupid um it's simple to understand thing where he thinks

that people's consciousness could go down and they saw the little strands of the in the helix when they took like mushrooms yeah and you could take mushrooms to perceive molecules yeah it doesn't even make sense no it doesn't because you're you don't have visual it's dumb i know so but but that's the key point isn't it like when you stick to this metaphor and it's very eloquently expressed in poetic metaphor, but it's vague. And that's what gives people the space to fill in the blanks with a whole bunch of meaning, personal meaning for them, which turns it into a kind of, you know, transcendent poetry. And this is what makes him like a real guru in the religious sense. You know, people do the same kind of fine readings of the Bible or other scriptures or utterances from prophets.

And like you say, Jordan Peterson actively encourages people to do the same thing with him. And he made a mistake. I think he probably realizes it himself. He made it a mistake to actually be clear about what he meant about the double helixes and stuff because it was much better. Something that would be like too difficult to explain. Yeah, that was much better because the explanation much better. That's something that would be too difficult to explain. Yeah, that was much better, because the explanation was terrible. So, okay, the last clip,

again, tied into the part that raised my hackles most from this conversation here, is him giving advice to the church on how they should interact with young men. Say, young men are welcome here. Print some flyers and put them in a box by the billboard. Signal the existence of those flyers with an arrow, with the words, more information about attending here.

Tell those who have never been in a church exactly what to do, how to dress, when to show up, who to contact, and most importantly, what they can do. Ask more, not less, of those you are inviting. Ask more of them than anyone ever has. Remind them who they are in the deepest sense and help them become that. So you had some of the trademark, you know, you could hear the wavering in the last couple of sentences coming in there. And that is something that many Jordan Peterson fans point to to say, well, he has this real genuine commitment to helping young men become fully actualized. And he deeply feels the pain, right? And this is why they respond to it.

And I think that's an aspect to it. But I can't help, you know, look at it from the lens of effective psychological manipulation. And essentially, he's talking about if you place extreme demands on people, and if they're accompanied by these other aspects that he's laid out in the previous clips that we were talking about, that you can rope in people, right? And he's like, don't be afraid to put extreme demands on people and kind of tell them that they they have to give more than they ever thought that they could and it's it is like you say there's there's versions of that where it's purely saying you know be willing to give people the chance to show what they're capable of but other very troubling aspect of that which is take control of of wayward people and bend them to your ideology with promises of heroicism and and there's just it's it's there and he doesn't see it at all yeah well there's a couple of comments i'd make one is that with respect to his very well-known expressions of emotional

empathy with young men, I'm a little bit cynical slightly because it's well-known, for instance, in psychology that if you want, say, for someone to tell you a secret, then what you do is you tell them very, very personal things about yourself. And this is a natural human thing to reciprocate. So, this is what confidence tricksters and stuff like that do, right? That's a standard thing. And his emotional affect in caring so much about the young men, it definitely elicits the same kind of emotional loyalty in response. So, deliberately or not, I think it works like that. The second thing I'll say is about his advice to churches, right? He flipped from two things. He started off with some very practical things, practical things like put a sign up and have

some flyers with an arrow pointing at the slides. Now, so those were concrete and they were stupid. I mean, I'm sure churches have thought of these things, right? Churches would love to get more people attending. That's what they all want to do they want to grow their congregation i'm sure they've thought longer and harder and tried harder and longer to do it putting a sign up saying young men are welcome welcome it's like the ymca already yeah it exists yeah like don't trust me jordan churches and youth organizations of all kinds have been trying to recruit for years. They've tried these things. And then the second advice he gave was all kind of what, you know, teach them how to be the real them or something or, you know, embrace their true nature.

And it was just, that's just vague bullshit, right? Like that doesn't mean much at all so it seems to be the standard thing for me is that these these guru types when when they try to be concrete like if they're talking about the dna helix or they're talking about how to practically recruit and encourage young men to go to church it's stupid all right and then everything else that yeah it's mundane and then if you look at the other stuff it's all very abstract and complicated and poetic but if there is any like core to the content it's it's something mundane or it's just meaningless well you know actually what you said made me think that in some way maybe what jordan peterson is feeling to appreciate is why what he puts on YouTube and whatnot has greater appeal than the church that

would put up a flyer is that he has effectively melded the self-help genre with the traditional Christian conservative ethos and pop culture analysis. So those three things come together in a particular appealing package for online digestion. And then when you add to that, that he's a famous culture war figure who generates outrage and whatnot, it's really like a honey trap of cognitive hooks. Whereas traditional churches they cannot necessarily apply the same hooks because the pastors are not like Jordan Peterson types and also on what they were offering is what's on the tin which is like traditional religious you know masses right mass is where if you go to Catholic or Protestant masses at least ones that are similar to I did as a child,

they don't leave you feeling like the hero that's going into Noah's or the wheel's belly, not Noah's belly. That would be a very different story. Yeah. So there's a mismatch, right? Like it's much easier for the culture war to be this appealing thing that has launched him to fame. for the culture war to be this appealing thing that has launched him to fame. Whereas if he was actually a preacher in a church teaching traditional Christianity, he wouldn't have the same resonance. He might be a popular preacher, but he wouldn't be the cultural phenomenon that he has become. Yeah, and I think this is why, if you look at the reactions from more standard, normal Christians to Jordan Peterson, it's kind of ambivalent. On one hand, they're interested because they would like to capture some of that wildfire.

But Jordan Peterson can operate with so many more degrees of freedom than they can. And he's also a, you know, like any kind of independent prophet type, he's an unknown factor. You don't know what he's going to say next. And a lot of what he does say is not orthodox. So, you know, churches have always struggled with this, orthodox organized religions. You know, prophets always pop up

who have extracted the real meaning or the real message from God or from the holy text or whatever. And they're always kind of a problem. You know, Jesus himself was a problem in that sense because they're always unorthodox. So I can understand why they're a bit ambivalent. But forget about what we think. Forget about what the churches think. It's illuminating, I think, to read the YouTube comments because, yeah, I mean, the vast majority of people disagree with us, right? Like this has got what a million views on YouTube, 13,300 comments. I haven't read all of them, but there's a lot of positive reactions, Chris, a lot of people feeling

inspired. YouTube is, you know, the comments are notorious for a reason, but I do agree that it's important to bear in mind that this kind of material has a strong resonance for a reason, but I do agree that it's important to bear in mind that this kind of material has a strong resonance for a large assortment and for people like us, it's kind of the butt of a joke, right, where it's not concerning, but it does resonate and he is popular for a reason. But I would also add to that, that I think that as he leans more into this, you know, like basically he's not really conservative and stuff, I think is going to fade and he's going to replace some of the audience that he had with the more red blood brain, kind of James Lindsay style, just partisan audience. And I heard him recently on an episode with Franz De Waal, the primatologist who I really like. And the

conversation, I think it was probably recorded a couple of months ago. And it was quite good. I mean, it had a lot of the stereotypical motifs that you might imagine German Peterson to bring up. But it was a relatively pseudo-academic discussion about sex differences and primates and so on. And I thought when I was listening to it, those opportunities for that kind of interaction are going to dry up the more that he goes into this like culture war persona firebrand, because he won't get interviews with Franz De Waal anymore at some point.. I genuinely do think that as he's increasingly associated with a brand of partisan conservatism, that he's going to alienate some of his access to the more moderate or more intellectual components.

Sure. But I think that won't hurt him because there's obviously a rich, rich vein social conservatism in the continental states no it won't impact his popularity overall but it will basically make him more and more into the cartoonish caricature and you you can see that yeah he's a bit different though from you know like a shit poster like james lindsey but what is he well i mean i think more and more he's he's showing his hand and showing what you said which is what he was all along but what that is is something very new or special about that it's it's anti-communist it's traditional christian american values red-blooded men nationalist nationalist, and yeah, just traditional. Climate skeptic.

Yeah, like that hasn't gone away. You know, as a sociological phenomena, that's been a big thing for a very long time. There's a big constituency there. So he'll naturally align with the churches, with the conservative faction. But he's, in a sense, he's migrating out of the secular guru or like disguised partisan view into just the openly conservative right-wing pundit space. And I guess my point is that, you know, as you saw on his Twitter behavior before he got himself removed and refused to delete the tweet,

he was just completely reacting to every outrage clickbait story that crossed his newsfeed. And he was very much offering, you know, inflammatory texts. Like if he stayed, he would be James Lindsay. Now, yeah, but Chris, that's the impressive thing about him. You said all this yourself, which is that, yes, he's a culture warrior, getting angry online, that kind of thing, very reactive. But at the same time, he's got the whole self-help shtick, which he's, I think, still pretty good at,

and he's combined that with the traditional Christian Protestant type stuff. So that's a very effective combination because he's got those degrees of freedom like he he can make those old-fashioned boring staid stuff he can make it sexy and appealing to a younger generation so i think he's got a winning formula there i don't know he's got much competition in that space you know know, like the old-fashioned tele-evangelists and the Bible thumpers and so on. They can't do what Jordan Peterson does. No, he's a good hire for what's-his-face Ben Shapiro,

assuming he doesn't like, you know, go on... Visit Russia again for treatment. Yeah. Shall we say? Visit Russia will become the new idiom. But yeah, so, I mean mean i think that's on the card looking at his behavior and there's there's just so much about him which is contradictory like his inability to take responsibility for the outrage that he generates or his own addictive tendencies

right yeah well actually that's one thing chris that crossed my mind as I was listening to this, you know, because he's doing what he always does, which is tell everyone what's wrong with them, how they need to change to live a better life and so on. And has he ever addressed the fact that he fucked up his own life so very badly and is just obviously demonstrably not handling the problem of living life very well compared to a couple of

nihilist you know fallen demons like us wallowing in our own croppulence you know our lives are perfect but psychologically we haven't had to visit russia recently yeah so but i i guess you know the the kind of point as well but look how influential and successful he's been because of what he does right like that's right he carries such a heavy cross that i guess the benzo what the benzos we can barely imagine the slings and arrows and the burden that he straps to his shoulders in this hellish life that he must endure but look matt we said we were gonna do a condensed little snap episode we'll cut it done we'll cut it done it'll be fine i don't think we've exactly managed that but i do think we have successfully highlighted where jordan is

from where he was and it might be interesting for people to go back and look to the older episode where we covered Jordan. We also did an episode with him and Brett after he had just reemerged. And he was much more than a kind of cautious person who actually, as you asked, Matt, he did acknowledge that he had wrecked his own life and health. That's right. But so much has happened to me that's been so strange in the last four years that I have a very difficult time making any sense of it. I can't even really think about, especially the last two years, I can't really think about

them in any consistent and comprehensive way. I mean, my family situation has been so catastrophic, and my illness, and my wife's illness. It's just been, although she recovered completely, thank God, it's just been so utterly catastrophic that my thinking about it is unbelievably fragmented. And I'm struck dumb still to some degree by all of what emerged as a consequence of me making the first videos that I made. It wasn't easy to take me out, although I've been taken out a lot,

like far more than I thought might be possible. I can't separate that exactly from intrinsic health problems, you know. It doesn't seem to. But, you know, there's always the possibility that it'll be the next one that'll work. And it's not like I have any shortage of things wrong with me. There are things wrong with me, you know. Now, whether they're ethical things or not, that's a whole different question. But like nobody has a, nobody has a, what? No one has an untrammeled conscience, that's for sure.

There was a degree of responsibility taking Dan, or seemed to be. That's what I mean. Like he's, he's gone now. Like this is the new Jordan. It's a new phase. He's back in the saddle Like he's gone now. Like this is the new Jordan. It's a new phase. He's back in the saddle firing on all cylinders. Yeah. I mean, even at that time, he was reluctant to offer opinions. COVID vaccines, right? So that like, yes, it's completely, that hesitancy is completely gone. And it may be that he just is rolling down the hill again towards the inevitable outcome.

But who knows? We'll see. rolling down the hill again towards the inevitable outcome. But who knows? We'll see. And I just think he's, people will say this is who he always was. And I kind of agree with them that the fundamental message underlying his content hasn't changed. But there are things which have changed and it's notable and people are picking up on it, right? It's why he's being clipped so widely and so on. And you can look back at his older content and like that clip with the Vice interview where he basically says,

I don't know if men and women can work together. It's an experiment. And that's the kind of thing where people were like, oh, that's out of context. But when you actually look at the context, no, that is what he was arguing. And when you take that down, the argument is, well, should we have sex-segregated workplaces? Or should we ban lipstick from the workplace,

right? Like, that's essentially what it comes down to, but it's just never expressed so clearly. And when people try to point out that, it's kind of, well, that's not being fair. That's not exactly what he said. But that is what his social conservatism ultimately has at its core. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not sure what the limits of his social conservatism is. Yeah. It's left unbounded.

Like he alludes to it and hints at it, as you say, gestures towards pretty extreme stuff. But it's left as an open question. It's a question. We don't know. We don't's a question we don't know we don't know we just don't know the amount of things we don't know it's huge so so yeah i guess you're not a fan like you were more positively inclined to him the first time we covered him i think at that time you did express some skepticism about you know the interpretations that seen him as extremely harmful and i think from this from what you've said like in in this content there's more like the kind of you know the fascist part it's much less under the surface it's like

pretty close to the surface yeah in this content Yeah, it's interesting, isn't it? Like if you read some chapters of his books like 12 Rules for Life or you listen to some of his interviews, then claims that he's like pseudo-fascist or whatever, it doesn't sound very plausible, does it? It doesn't sound plausible. But the more time you spend with him, the more you realize that all of those sort of empty spaces that he gestures towards are not good places by my lights.

Yeah, there's definitely like reason to be concerned, I think there. But, you know, there are different versions available. There are people who could read Jordan Peterson and take his self-help advice in a kind of moderate direction to correct their life. Oh, yes. I think most people do. And there are also people, I think, who will just take his message as endorsing conservatism, like social conservatism and tradition and religion and so on and not you know latent fascism no no but but to be clear that's what i think he is fundamentally right but the reason why i think it it sounds fash is because when you point people towards like unbridled social conservatism you know like

unbridled submission of yourself to this you know higher powers and so on. When you take all those things to the extreme, then we have a word for that. I don't think Jordan Peterson understands what he's doing and I don't think that most of the people that are Irish fans are a pseudo-fascist at all. I don't think they know and this is the slightly amusing part of it. I don't think most of them really understand. His associations are the reason why some people

who literally are fascists or authoritarians, white nationalists, whatever you want to call them, the fact that so many of them think John Peterson is super cool, there's a reason for that. They know. He tries to frame that they don't like him, but I think they correctly see him as somebody that provides a potential gateway drug to the harder course and you know you can view that as is that his fault or

you know there's plenty of people that they would opportunistically co-adopt in that respect but it's it's just the inability that he has to recognize much of what goes on in that space. Yeah. You know, it speaks to his limitations. Yeah. So anyway, but. Yeah, that's right. Mainly I just think it's funny that he's not really aware of what he's doing.

Yeah. I think probably one of the responses that we will get to this episode is people will say, well, we are being naive if we think that he doesn't know what he's pointing people towards and gesturing to. But I don't really buy that reading because I think, as with most people in Jordan's story, he is the hero battling against the forces of disorder and chaos and totalitarianism. So he definitely believes he is the white knight in his life story so yeah yeah yeah well well there's a saying which is what never attribute to malice what you can

attribute to incompetence incompetence well we could change that slightly never attribute to malice what you can attribute to being a narcissistic dick yeah i mean because that can go a long way i think in the guru sphere that is an idiom that travels very far so yeah well this has been enjoyable and we're we're going to at least the the slight nod that we will make towards the supposed new format is that we're not going to do the usual accoutrements before we leave. So we're just going to say, you know, note the disk. Just a mic drop.

Accord the gin. Note the disk. Accord the gin. Mic drop. I'm out. Yeah. Have a very merry evening. Yeah, yeah.

That doesn't work either. All right. We'll just say bye yeah that's why we're not Jordan Peterson ok bye bye bye bye Thank you.