Jordan Peterson, dubbed the "philosophy daddy of the new right," radicalized alt-right figures through rhetoric promoting white ethnostates while denying explicit neo-Nazi ties. Critics argue his work reinforces fascist arguments by framing compassion as a vice and male dominance as natural, paralleling historical figures like Max Nordau. Despite claims of spiritual solutions to totalitarianism, his controversial views on pronouns, diversity, and the Kwakwakawak tribe sparked backlash over alleged dishonesty. Compounding these issues, Peterson contracted COVID-19 from his daughter Michaela after a medically induced coma in Russia, revealing personal struggles that contrast with his public persona of individual heroism against postmodern Marxism. Ultimately, the episode suggests his influence stems from a dangerous blend of self-help advice and authoritarian ideology that equates disagreement with combat. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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The Secret World of Roald Dahl00:02:51
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Readers, Katie's finalists, publicists.
We have an incredible new episode this week for you guys.
We have our girl Hillary Duff in here, and we can't wait for you to hear this episode.
They put on Lindsay McGuire at 2 a.m. video on demand.
This guy's playing.
2 a.m.
2 a.m.
Whatever time it is.
Lizzie McGuire and I'm watching.
Wild bad way.
It was like a first closet moment for me where I was like, you're like, I don't feel like she's hot like the rest of them.
No, no, no.
I was like, she's beautiful.
I'm appreciating her in a different way than these boys are.
I'm not like...
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Hi, I'm Iris Palmer, host of the Against All Odds podcast.
Every week, I'm sitting down with exceptional people who have broken barriers even when the odds were stacked against them.
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You know the taquero from the Bad Bunny halftime show?
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Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, the show where Cody and I just finished laughing about Herman Kane.
Not because there's anything funny about a death from COVID-19, but because the Kane gang, the Kane gang, which are the people who have taken over this dea man's Twitter account, tweeted out an article from HermanKane.com that said, resume life as normal.
Over 6,500 scientists and health professionals, yada, yada.
Anyway, it's very Kang Gang going strong.
Peterson's Dishonest Tribe Claim00:14:36
Because the guy they're named after cannot resume life as normal because COVID killed him.
I don't know.
The article says fine.
So conflicting reports.
One from a ghost and one from the ghost's friends.
So.
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.
Also, a podcast of a similar name.
My former co-worker had cracked the man who invented the drive system for the API.
You're not going to list the podcast you do together.
You're just not going to do that.
He's going in again.
He's going in order.
I cannot.
I can't 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.
It is, he's super fucking rich.
He guesses.
Oh, yeah.
2017 was like his golden year.
He was doing so good.
Skyrocketing.
2018 was a bit better, and then things got a lot worse.
So he was polite and urban enough that he could avoid being lumped in with every liberal's 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.
That describes a lot of people in the vlogosphere.
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, a Gold Pro.
Yep.
He doesn't call for a white ethnostate, but he does retweet daily caller 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.
I'm sorry.
Yeah.
It's just where I go.
It requires a voice every time.
Whenever I say Antifa, I do that now too.
It's like Antifa.
Yeah.
It's just how it is.
It's 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 and 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 and 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, like feel 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 VDARE, who VDARE.
Yeah, literally a guy who invented something called the Sailor 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 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, people are tribal and it causes some strife.
Yeah, there's some shit.
So it's just always interesting whenever a 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 twort.
God damn it.
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 tribe?
I remember this.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, 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.
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's like a, goes back a long way.
And he also got kind of angry because it's pretty shitty to call Indigenous people Indians.
Shouldn't do that.
There's, I think, different terms that kind of people, certain people prefer, but no one seems to like Indian.
Yeah.
Let's not, 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 Quakwakawak tribe.
Now, all of this, I'm trying to get it right.
I looked it up and everything.
I don't normally do that, but yeah.
All of this, Hurwitz seemed to suggest, was evidence that Peterson was not biased against Native Americans, which is a statement that Peterson like liked and seconded on Twitter.
So Peterson has repeatedly brought up the fact that he was inducted into the Kwakwakawak 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, you're basically, you're in the KKK, Peterson responded, if by KKK, you mean Kwakwakawak, 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 Kwakwakawak tribe.
The reality of the situation, as the Walrus found, was very different.
There is a Kwakwakawak 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 like that he, that, that Charles Joseph, like 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'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 Kwakwakawak 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.
Thing and it's a very important personal thing, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, um, and it's 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.
Like, you helped this man out to such a degree that he inducted you into his family in a special, like, that's a that's something that's absolutely, yeah, yeah, but he's not what he's saying, and especially like in terms of like what he's using the fake story to try to prove, yeah.
Uh, it's the kind of thing, were he to respond to someone calling him racist with, well, actually, this one indigenous person I know, like, I did something so good for him that he inducted me into his family.
That would sound kind of like gross and weird, and like you were kind of like, and it wouldn't be nearly as snappy as saying, I'm a member of the Kwakwakawak tribe, so like, how could I be racist?
Like, one of them makes a better debate point, and also the more honest version makes it clear, like, hey, dude, you seems like you might be kind of like cashing in on this, right?
Yeah, you're using this thing to like prove uh, this other thing, yeah, 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 as intellectual curiosity.
Some of his best lines include: the idea that women are oppressed throughout history is an appalling theory, and Islamophobia is a word created by fascists and used by cowards to manipulate morons.
White privilege is a Marxist lie, and believing that gender identity is subjective is as bad as claiming that the world is flat.
Oh, is it?
It's as bad as that.
Okay, that's good.
That's good.
That's a lot of stuff from good old Jordan.
The IQ stuff is wild.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Very and very related.
He, yeah, not, I'm not convinced by Jordan Peterson being a 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 like brainwash children's heads with, in Peterson's words, vicious, untenable, and anti-human ideas.
It'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 like the opposite.
It's literally the opposite.
Like, 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.
Like, I find that anti-human.
But I understand that, like, I, you know, part of living in society is that you, you, 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 society.
That's humans.
That's human.
That's the way society will be until I win my congressional campaign.
Dear God.
Yeah.
And introduce the drunk driving in trailer parks while firing out the window bill.
Openly, openly a cult.
Vote for me.
I'm a cult.
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 2 million views.
Jordan Peterson destroying feminists, a compilation video with 349,000 views, and watch angry Jordan Peterson get up and destroy student who tried to smear him.
741,000 views.
Now, the fundamentally combative nature of the debates Peterson prefers to engage him led 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 sound.
How can you argue with someone if you can't?
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.
Well, yeah, Antifa's bad because they punch Nazis.
Also, I 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 malign 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.
Explaining Nazi Germany Rise00:05:21
Yeah, he likes suing people too.
He does.
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.
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 C16.
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.
And it, yeah, he knows what he's doing.
He knows exactly what he's doing.
He knows.
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.
It's 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.
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 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 can 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.
Never Apologize for Success00:03:48
Here's some other rats.
I went and sat on the little ottoman in front of him.
Hi, Dad.
And just when I said that, my mom comes out of the kitchen and she says, I have some cookies and milk.
This is badass convict.
Right.
Just finished five.
I'm going to have cookies and milk.
Yeah, mom.
On the Ceno Show podcast, each episode invites you into a raw, unfiltered conversations about recovery, resilience, and redemption.
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It's Financial Literacy Month, and the podcast Eating Wall Broke is bringing real conversations about money, growth, and building your future.
This month, hear from top streamer Zoe Spencer and venture capitalist Lakeisha Landrum Pierre as they share their journeys from starting out to leveling up.
If I'm outside with my parents and they're seeing all these people come up to me for pictures, it's like, what?
Today now, obviously, it's like 100%.
They believe everything, but at first it was just like, you got to go get a real job.
There's an economic component to communities thriving.
If there's not enough money and entrepreneurship happening in communities, they fail.
And what I mean by fellows, they don't have money to pay for food.
They cannot feed their kids.
They do not have homes.
Communities don't work unless there's money flowing through them.
Listen to Eating Wall Broke from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
Hi, I'm Bob Pittman, chairman and CEO of iHeartMedia, and I'm kicking off a brand new season of my podcast, Math and Magic, Stories from the Frontiers of Marketing.
Math and Magic takes you behind the scenes of the biggest businesses and industries while sharing insights from the smartest minds in marketing.
I'm talking to leaders from the entertainment industry to finance and everywhere in between.
This season on Math and Magic, I'm talking to CEO of Liquid Death, Mike Cesario, financier and public health advocate Mike Milken, take-to interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick.
If you're unable to take meaningful creative risk and therefore run the risk of making horrible creative mistakes, then you can't play in this business.
Sesame Street CEO Sherry Weston and our own chief business officer Lisa Coffey.
Making consumers see the value of the human voice and to have that guaranteed human promise behind it really makes it rise to the top.
Listen to Math and Magic, stories from the frontiers of marketing on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
When you listen to podcasts about AI and tech and the future of humanity, the hosts always act like they know what they're talking about and they are experts at everything.
Here at the Nick Dick and Pole Show, we're not afraid to make mistakes.
What Koogler did that I think was so unique, he's the writer director.
Who do you think he is?
I don't know.
You meet the like the president?
You think it goes the president?
You think Canada has a president?
You think China has a president?
Leslie Prussia.
God, I love that thing.
I use it all the time.
I wrap it in a blanket and sing to it at like.
It's like the old Polish saying, not my monkeys, not my circus.
James Damor White Supremacy Case00:06:16
Yep.
It was a good one.
I like that saying.
It is an actual Polish saying.
It is an actual Polish saying.
Better version of Play Stupid Games, Win Stupid Prizes.
Yes.
Which, by the way, wasn't Taylor Swift who said that for the first time.
I actually, I thought it was.
I got that wrong.
Listen to the Nick Dick and Paul Show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
We're back.
Ah, yes.
So now, we were talking about Schiff, 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 fashy 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.
Yeah.
Cool.
Got him.
Got him.
Yeah.
I mean, that's, yeah, that's it.
It's 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's 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 Kappa.
Why has he never, he never addressed that?
No one ever brings it up.
It's wild that he can still make that claim.
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 that not on that list of things worth discussing is economics.
Oh, that's weird.
That's funny.
Yeah.
You know, we've got religion, abortion, gender identity, race, immigration, the nature of consciousness, all the things that are worth talking about.
That's it.
Those are all the things.
Not economics, because all of these people are rich as shit.
And they, 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.
It's beautiful.
It's beautiful.
Those folks 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 that it's good luck.
Godspeed.
Because my God.
Oh my God, that photo.
Take another one.
Take another photo.
No, it's amazing.
Did you have like one shot left?
My goodness.
It's a bad article about people I hate.
In some cases, people I personally hate because Claire Lehman's 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 trash.
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 was overblown, and white men were the real victims.
In part on the strength of his endorsement by Peterson and other IDW types, James Damore filed a lawsuit against Google.
He dropped it earlier this year with the exact nature of the resolution unknown.
Harmeet Dylan, I think, was the lawyer in charge of that case, who also threatened me with a lawsuit for telling the truth about Andy No, 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 a thing that lawyers do sometimes if they're shady where they like throw out bullshit cease and desist to 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.
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 Dylan was like, oh, this case is really going to make them 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.
Internal Ideological Ethnic Cleansing00:15:00
It's very fun.
That's very funny.
Oh, the little joys.
It's 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: An 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, and 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 help book.
It is general advice.
Believe in yourself.
Clean rooms.
Shit like that.
There's some shit, 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, they good.
I don't disagree with any of that.
It's all fine enough.
Mind your children.
Give your children freedom.
Well, 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.
Yes.
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 Normie's, but it seems pretty fashy 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.
Quote, Peterson diagnoses this crisis as a loss of faith in 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.
Quote, 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, it's just reading all that.
Nah, it's fuck it.
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.
Counterexamples 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 and 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.
Quote, 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 and 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, yeah, yep, yep, it's all there.
He's really skilled at not saying it, not saying quite, not, it gets you a little, it 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 is a vice and tough it up, you weasel.
Problematic beyond what you might initially assume.
Quote: 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-willed, 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 fascists 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 Ebola'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?
That all scans real, real well.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's a, huh, hmm, hmm.
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 concept 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 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, like, what's the next step?
What's the let's like extrapolate for a bit?
What do you think should happen then?
Also, side note, I think his weird thing about we need to get back to, like, what all the Marxists were getting away from nation-centered 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, this seems like a bad idea.
Maybe we should do something.
Yeah, we should do something else.
Maybe the best idea for how we organize the world wasn't uh, thought up, like hundreds of years ago by a bunch of people.
There's a better thing than nations yeah like yeah, what?
Imagine, 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?
Yeah yeah, it's anti-human, for sure it's anti-human.
Urging us to be more connected and equal uh, 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 Alexas 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, a society 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.
He's really good at obfuscating what he's saying with his language.
I think I've mentioned this a few of our wishy novel.
Yeah.
It's fake profundity to convince people that anything 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 bad.
Syrian culture or whatever.
You know who likes cults of heroism?
Nazis.
Nazis.
Yeah.
I mean, and it's also worth noting that not only does Nazi, or fascism in particular, as Umberto Echo 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 Maoist China.
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 rooms, 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.
Counterpoint the idea of consciousness within our.
And then he trails off and then we give him money, right?
That's what we're talking about.
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, I've had thousands of letters from people who were tempted by the blandishments of the radical right, who have moved towards the reasonable center as a consequence of watching my videos.
But he typically sees liberals or leftists or postmodernists as aggressors, which leads him, rather ironically, to frame some of those on the radical right as victims.
Yeah, yeah, he does do that.
It's interesting because there's, I mean, I don't think it's controversial to say that Donald Trump and the rise of Trump is a symptom of society's problems as opposed to the cause of them.
Sure.
It is the cause of some problems, but yes.
Oh, yeah.
It's definitely the cause of like a lot of our problems these days and exacerbates a lot of our problems.
Like society was suffering for a lot of reasons.
And that's what strong men do.
They demagogue, they come in and they say, I can solve, I can fix all your problems.
But the way Jordan talks about it, it's justifying it.
It's not like his prescription is not, oh, yeah, like this inequality or like this or like 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.
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 sort of listen to him and his every word.
There's a fun little interview.
I forget who was interviewing him.
He's asked about his fans.
And his response is, I don't have fans.
And he doesn't finish it.
He hasn't finished his thought, but he does have followers.
Yes, he does.
That is the word he was alluding to.
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 worshiping my words in order to buy like an arms export license and I don't know, create some sort of...
We should talk about this offline.
Sure.
But I do, I think we should get maybe loop to find folks at Raytheon and on that call.
It's worth looking into.
Sure, sure.
Yeah, this will be great.
Gonna 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 Nazis used to say back 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.
Hegemonic Masculinity and Hardness00:03:23
This horror, he says, is embodied in the figure of the Freudian devouring mother.
As an example, he cites Ursula, the sea witch for 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 speeches, because one of Hitler's favorite words was hardness and how people, German men needed to be harder, how like Germany needed to raise up a generation that was as hard as Krufstahl, which is like a specific kind of steel maker.
Yeah.
Now, Hitler thought that German men were going to need to be as hard as steel 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 Protean 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 protean masculinity enabled different types of soldier men 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, Protean masculinity integrated diverse men in diverse emotional and moral conditions into a fighting unit.
And in the case of the Third Reich, into a gendicidal society.
So this idea that like 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 acts 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, right?
Like that's...
To do it anyway, even though you're going to have that reaction to it, but you still do it and you still keep doing it.
Which is why there's actually quite a few stories about men like shooting thousands of Jewish people to death and like weeping while they did it.
But like they still did it.
They still did it.
Yeah.
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.
Hard Men Weeping While Killing00:04:36
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.
I just think the kind of heroism that we exhibited there should be celebrated.
Yeah, we deserve credit for that.
So I don't 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.
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Fantastic.
I can't wait to hear both of those things said by them.
I went and sat on the little ottoman in front of him.
I said, hi, dad.
And just when I said that, my mom comes out of the kitchen and she says, I have some cookies and milk.
This is badass convict.
Right.
Just finished five.
I'm going to have cookies and milk.
Yeah, mom.
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If I'm outside with my parents and they see all these people come up to me for pitches, it's like, what?
Today now, obviously, it's like 100%.
They believe everything.
But at first, it was just like, you got to go get a real job.
There's an economic component to communities thriving.
If there's not enough money and entrepreneurship happening in communities, they fail.
And what I mean by fail is they don't have money to pay for food.
They cannot feed their kids.
They do not have homes.
Communities don't work unless there's money flowing through them.
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What Koogler did that I think was so unique?
He's the writer director.
Who do you think he is?
I don't know.
You meet the like the president?
You think English the president?
You think Canada has a president?
You think China has a president?
The law proves that.
God, I love that thing.
I use it all the time.
I wrap it in a blanket and sing to it at night.
It's like the old Polish saying, not my monkeys, not my circus.
Yep.
It was a good one.
I like that saying.
It is an actual Polish saying.
It is an actual Polish saying.
Better version of play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
Yes.
Which, by the way, wasn't Taylor Swift who said that for the first time.
I actually, I thought it was.
I got that wrong.
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Brainwashed by Life Experience00:15:27
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 reined in.
Well, weirdo.
Yeah, might not be free speech if you're doing that, I'd say.
In 2000, yeah.
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 fashion mystical morality bullshit.
It's like a little questionable, maybe.
It's frustrating to have to know like everything the man's written and said to really like 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.
Yeah.
So 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 fancied 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 assume 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 than 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'd let this guy live in his house for like six months.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Fought for him to get all these promotions.
Like they were like.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You fought for him to get money and promote.
Yeah.
Like was a very dedicated friend.
Professionally and personally.
Yes.
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 Schiff 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.
We're 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.
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?
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 allusions to it in Maps of Meaning, where he's the guy who's going to save the world.
But he literally said that he thinks that he is that because his wife has prophetic dreams.
It's why I'm so happy we finally got here.
It all makes sense once you like what that little bit.
It all makes sense.
It's all.
Yeah.
He sees himself as, I don't know, some sort of almost supernatural leader who's maybe like on a on a on a subconscious like epochal level welded to a people.
I don't know.
You might call it like a leader principle that like anyway, whatever.
Like man, like it represents like the like the like spirit of a nation sort of like this sort of like yeah yeah like he embodies 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 truths of a people exactly universal truths yes Uh-huh.
Oh, God.
All right.
Like, oh, I have an itching.
I'm sorry.
This relief.
I just feel relief now.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I don't know precisely 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 Schiff 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.
His view of life as 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 bleak.
Yeah.
Like it is very bleak.
And it's one of those things that, like, if you don't think too much about it, you might not analyze it.
Because 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.
Now, we may never know the next act Jordan B. Peterson had planned because his own life seems to have encountered a disruption since then.
Chaos, you might say, has triumphed over his internal Bumblebee Peterson.
Chaos in the form of his daughter, Michaela.
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 Michaela's all-meat diet.
See, Michaela 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 then 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.
It'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 Kane type.
You'd be a Herman Kane type, and Michaela would be tweeting from your account about how you should only eat meat.
It's great.
She might drink cider, drink cider.
So, yeah, Peterson's health problems first surfaced in 2019.
And this is when his family announced that he had 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 you're a guy who's already prone to anxiety and depression, your beloved wife getting diagnosed with a very serious cancer is going to fuck you up.
It's going to like ruin you for a while.
Like, obviously, like, any person would be in the same thing.
But, um, and so Jordan went on medication for it.
Um, 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.
Um, and he went to rehab.
It didn't work.
Obviously, like, this, uh, 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.
Um, because you know, he talks about how you've got to like that, that's a weakness that you can rid from yourself.
Um, but yeah, uh, kind of messed up that that happened, yeah.
Um, but also at the same time, it's like, yeah, like it's okay to appear, I get quote, yeah, but weak and like struggle.
Like, yeah, if you're not a person who 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, 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 you.
Obviously, this is a hard time.
But that's not.
Yeah.
No, it's not we, 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, same thing with his rule about don't ever let your child do something that displeases you or whatever.
And like, Michaela's like dating like a like literally a pickup artist.
She's dating the pickup artist who believe 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 of 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 clonazepam 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 not competent to really do much of anything person, 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 a medical specialist who had the guts to detox him 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 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 a 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 planet 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 re-emerge and it'll be some, it'll be like a spiritual awakening, 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 this 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.
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's going to try to do to him next.
Yep.
Yep.
Something.
Her pickup artist boyfriend.
Weird Conflict with Daughter00:07:14
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 practices 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 clubbing.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, that's great.
That's just all.
It's just a wild place.
It's 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 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 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 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 want, I don't want to go the Western way, and like, I don't want to go and say, I need help.
Can you help me?
How do I like fight this?
Um, he's going like the self-induced coma in a way is like I'm doing it myself.
Uh, 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 keeping, 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 uh his use.
That's not uh unexpected with him.
So 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 Korra.
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, a real mixed bag there.
I would say, yeah.
I wish him well, generally, because I wish generally everybody well.
Yeah.
Compassion is important to be discussed.
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 him.
Yeah.
And not her feminine chaos has shattered his order.
Exactly.
Yeah.
He gave her his order and she brought chaos to him.
Yeah.
Chaotic, not helpful hands that he's in right now.
But also, and then, yeah, he's not doing the thing.
I hope part of me is like, if he stops doing, if he gets better, maybe, maybe he'll stop doing this stuff.
Yeah, maybe.
After getting better.
I don't know.
I do think he'll.
I do think, like, yeah, he's probably going to buy that church still.
Yeah.
Maybe he'll.
Yeah.
Maybe he'll be the church guy.
I just want him to write a novel so we can all see the things that he really believes without the obstacle 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.
Okay.
I would like to promote the Chaos Dragon, which is another word for women.
Am I 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 on Dr. Mr. Cody.
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 year ever on IR 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.
That's kind of an extremist point, but okay, Cody.
Go off.
I think you should listen to whatever in whatever order.
In fact, just randomly queue 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.
Some real chaotic womanly energy there.
Wow, you're such a visionary, Robert.
I just don't know.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Help you start some sort of like organization where people can follow your every word on question.
Yeah, no, it'll be great.
And we'll, um, you know, we'll get Raytheon on the phone.
And I do have them on speed dial at this point because they call somebody.
Yeah.
You know.
Yeah, that's it's important.
I mean, it's important because I don't know, you all probably agree with this.
It's not very controversial to say these days.
Every American family needs one of the fine Lynx armored personnel carriers made by Raytheon to enable both troops to deploy into the battlefield and enact a maximum of deadly force upon their enemies and enable you to deploy to the Walmart and enact a maximum amount of deadly force upon your enemies.
Raytheon enables all of that with its wonderful products.
And their savings.
What a savings.
Yes, go to Raytheon.com/slash BTB and enter promo code.
I don't care very much about international arms embargoes.
And you'll get 15% off your next Lynx armored personnel vehicle or your next Hellfire missile guidance system.
That means they're affordable now.
Ridiculous.
That 15% really makes it this.
Really going to make all sense.
Is the episode over?
I'm very tired.
Yes.
It's very dumb.
Great job, guys.
You guys are amazing.
Readers, Katie's finalists, publicists.
We have an incredible new episode this week for you guys.
We have our girl Hillary Duff in here, and we can't wait for you to hear this episode.
They put on Lizzie McGuire 2 a.m. video on Demand This Guy's 2 a.m. 2 a.m. whatever time it is.
Lizzie McGuire and I'm like wild bats you were with you.
It was like a first like closet moment for me where I was like, they're like, I don't feel like she's hot like the rest of them.
No, no, no.
I was like, she's beautiful, but I'm appreciating her in a different way than these boys are.
I'm not like.
Appreciating Her Differently00:01:49
Listen to Las Culturalistas on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
You know the famous author Roald Dahl.
He thought up Willy Wonka and the BFG.
But did you know he was a spy?
Neither did I. You can hear all about his wildlife story in the podcast, The Secret World of Roald Dahl.
All episodes are out now.
Was this before he wrote his stories?
It must have been.
What?
Okay, I don't think that's true.
I'm telling you, I was a spy.
Binge all 10 episodes of The Secret World of Roald Dahl now on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hi, I'm Iris Palmer, host of the Against All Odds podcast.
Every week, I'm sitting down with exceptional people who have broken barriers even when the odds were stacked against them.
Like Chef Victor Villa of VS Tacos.
You know the taquero from the Bad Bunny halftime show?
It was great.
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And I felt like I was really representing my family, you know, my brand, my city.
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Listen to Against All Odds on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
I actually drop better when I'm high.
It heightens my senses, calms me down.
If anything, I'm more careful.
Honestly, it just helps me focus.
That's probably what the driver who killed a four-year-old told himself.
And now he's in prison.
You see, no matter what you tell yourself, if you feel different, you drive different.