We take a look at a recent conversation between Jordan Peterson and the streamer Steven Bonnell (AKA Destiny) and use the opportunity to reflect on Jordan's journey as a public intellectual and guru.We consider how his stances have changed, whether he is more extreme now than when he emerged or if it is just his presentation style that has shifted. Along the way, we look at his demon-infested understanding of the COVID-19 vaccines, his climate change denialism, and address the unresolved question of the ages: Were the Nazis actually right-wing?LinksJordan Peterson Podcast: Streaming, Politics, & Philosophy | @destiny | EP 433Video of Jordan Peterson on climate change and climate policy at the Cambridge UnionHistorian specialising on the Nazis article in Haaretz: Exposing Jordan Peterson’s Barrage of Revisionist Falsehoods About Hitler, the Holocaust and NazismThe Nazis were not right-wing memeSnopes article on whether the Nazis were socialistsReuters: Fact Check: No evidence to link UK excess deaths to COVID-19 vaccinesJordan Peterson is Back! - Bret Weinstein's DarkHorse PodcastThe Guardian: Jordan Peterson’s ‘zombie’ climate contrarianism follows a well-worn path
Hello and welcome to Decoding the Gurus, the podcast where an anthropologist and a psychologist listen to the greatest minds the world has to offer.
And we try to understand what they're talking about.
I'm Matt Brown.
I'm the psychologist.
With me is Chris Kavanagh.
He's the anthropologist.
And today we are going to do a mini decoding, charting the, well, descent, I think we might have to call it, Chris, of one of our favorite stellar shining lights in the guru's sphere, Jordan B. Peterson.
Jordan B. Peterson, that's correct.
He was somebody that we covered early in the show.
I think our third or fourth episode was Jordan, and he's cropped up multiple times since then.
But most recently, he conducted an interview on streaming politics and philosophy with Destiny, Stephen Bonnell.
He had a sit-down and ended up saying, A variety of unhinged things that we will cover.
But one interesting aspect of it was to consider just a little bit where Jordan has come from over the course of us covering him.
So we'll see today where he is today.
And we'll look a little bit, just a couple of times at previous clips from earlier content that we looked at.
I think you can see a lot of the seeds, but you can also see a difference quite clearly in the presentation style, if not all of the aspects of the content.
Yes, it's a pattern we've seen multiple times with our gurus, the tendency to have this trajectory.
And we're still, well, we'll talk about it, but we go backwards and forwards as to whether or not it's indicative of some sort of...
Psychological issue on the part of the guru or whether it's maybe the financial and social and attention dynamics that inevitably drives them in that direction.
So we'll see.
But I remember, Chris, when we first covered Jordan Peterson, we looked at his book, 12 Rules for Life, and I think we were pretty moderate in our evaluation.
We didn't love him, but I don't think he was...
He was in our class of the worst type of guru.
Am I remembering wrong?
Well, the episode that we did on him was about him reflecting mostly on his kind of religious and theology-infused view of the world.
So there wasn't as much unhinged conspiracism in it as you now will often find in his content.
But, yeah, I think that...
Partly contributed to him coming across better.
But I will say, Matt, you were fonder of him than I was at that time.
Hang on, don't you reckon this?
Because you know people take your words and take them as truth.
I invite people to go back and listen.
But, you know, this is just a general thing.
I, overall, am more harsh.
And you're more chilled and relaxed and that kind of thing.
So, you know, just like with Scott Adams, we had different opinions.
So, yeah.
Gad's sad, I think.
I think he convinced everyone that I love Gad's sad.
You said he was like a harmless old uncle who is embarrassing and saying cringe things, which is sort of true.
But you're right.
No, you're right, Chris.
I'm more easygoing.
I have a greater tendency to give people the benefit of the doubt.
I'm not going to apologize for that.
I'm not going to apologize for that.
That's right.
You should.
That's part of why people blame everything on me.
But that's all right.
The slings and arrows, I'll take them.
Much as Jordan.
Has throughout his career.
And so, Matt, one of the pieces of content that we covered was Jordan talking to Brett Weinstein after he returned from his illness, his medically induced coma, and, you know, the subsequent processed recovery that he underwent in Russia and Serbia,
wherever he was.
So that conversation is interesting because although...
That competition includes the famous lines about whether hospitals kill more people than they help.
I suspect if you did these statistics properly, I suspect that medicine, independent of public health, kills more people than it saves.
I suspect if you factor in phenomena like the development of superbugs in hospitals, for example, that overall the net consequence of hospitals is negative.
Now, that's just a guess, and it could easily be wrong.
But it also could not be wrong.
And that is a good example.
That's where my thinking about what we don't know has taken me with regards to the critique of what we do.
The fact that it's even plausible is a stunning fact.
Well, you know, medical error is the third leading cause of death.
And that doesn't take into account the generation of superbugs, for example.
So it isn't like Jordan had completely restrained his hot takes and was now a very mild, meek person.
But it is fair to say that in comparison to Brett, he was a lot more restrained, right?
And a little bit chastened by his experience.
Yeah, I just want to clarify the timeline here, Chris, because I think that at that point where he's recovering from his induced coma...
That's not like at the beginning of his trajectory.
That's like about midway through.
Yeah, yeah.
He had went mental long before that.
But yes, he had become famous.
And that was part of the reason why he had the health issues with addiction and whatnot was partly related to him going on a world tour.
So yes, this is not the earliest D.H. Peterson.
This is his return.
To the fold after being absent for some time.
So there's one point in it where Brett suggests that when he was originally doing his protest that he kind of saw where things were going.
And just listen to this.
You felt obligated to stand up and say no, which resulted, as you know better than anyone, in you being mocked for overreacting.
And then here we are years later, and it turns out that you saw with absolute clarity what others couldn't even imagine.
Yes, but I certainly didn't see what was going to happen to me.
Right.
With clarity, you know.
So, being quite a strange route.
It wasn't possible to see what would happen with specificity to you.
But am I correct in seeing that you knew that something very dramatic was likely to come from your standing on principle and that that didn't provide any license to do anything but make that stand?
You heard Brett there invite Jordan to present himself as a...
A four-sided prophet of Doom.
But Jordan's self-pity kind of kicked in, you know, in saying, well, I didn't predict what was going to happen to myself.
That's for sure.
And then that catches Brett off guard.
And in the longer context of the conversation, they do get back to endorsing Jordan as a, you know, a mythical figure that has risen Christ-like from all the persecution.
But you can hear in this response there that Brett is kind of taken off guard by his unwillingness to just like respond.
Yeah, you've got two conflicting garometer priorities there.
One is to be the sort of Cassandra, you know, with foresight predicting the future.
And that's the thing that Brett is talking to.
But there's also...
The grievance, the tale of woe, the tale of suffering that they've had to endure in their role.
So Jordan's taking one of them, whereas Brett was taking the other, leading to the off-footing.
The amount of effort it takes for you to get to the point where you can be productive in the day, the amount that is riding on your doing it, the number of people who are listening to you and who...
Basically, need your influence in their life.
And, you know, in some sense, it's a mythological story, and I know you will have spotted that a thousand times over.
But just the Herculean effort, the tremendous amount that's riding on it, and the degree to which you're paying some inhuman price in order just to continue playing your role.
I don't see how you can see that.
It shocks me that you say that.
I mean, that isn't to say I...
You disagree?
No.
It seems like that from inside here.
Yeah.
And so the other point that I wanted to highlight from this conversation is there's a point at it where Brett is discussing...
The lab leak and how it's been all but proven.
And this is part of his, it links into his broader anti-vaccine narratives because he wants to talk about how, you know, the pandemic was caused by the actions in Wuhan and then the pharmaceutical companies and so on have collaborated to produce a non-effective vaccine,
right?
All breadth-wide conspiracies.
But listen to Jordan's response when he's invited.
To riff on that.
Then you have to add that to the balance sheet with respect to the costs of medical errors, because it looks like if this was an escapee from the Wuhan lab, that it was an escapee from experiments designed to create a vaccine to protect us from future coronaviruses.
So, we can't say that with specificity, but if we look at the circumstantial evidence of what was being studied, how it was being studied, and what the likely purpose of those investigations were, then this is, you know, the mother of all self-inflicted wounds, and it is downstream of naive thinking about the cost-benefit ratio of enhancing the infectivity of viruses.
I know.
I did know that that's something that you've been tracking and pursuing.
I don't have an opinion about it because I don't know enough about it to have an opinion.
Yeah, so interesting there.
We see Jordan Peterson not really picking up the stick that Brett laid out for him, saying that he doesn't really know anything about that topic and is pretty noncommittal.
So it really illustrates that at that time, Jordan Peterson, He's still a Jordan Peterson that we know and love.
He's still a God-obsessed conservative bomb thrower in many respects, but he's not all in in terms of this all-encompassing conspiratorial view of the world where everything's connected, where the lab leak and the vaccines and public health and maybe whatever wars in Ukraine or in the Middle East,
where it all forms part of this rigid worldview.
Doesn't seem to be at that place.
Yeah, I think another reading of it is that he has not yet familiarized himself with the positions he needs to take, right?
Because around this time, or I think it's shortly before, he had tweeted out that he was going to get vaccinated.
And he then got a wall of responses, you know, saying...
What are you doing?
You've already been infected.
Don't you know?
His whole audience came crashing down, but it was clear that he had not fully absorbed the memo yet, that the right-wing audience had now become very skeptical of vaccines.
So he kind of blundered into it.
Yeah, yeah.
And you actually saw an interesting pattern with Donald Trump, didn't you?
Because for a while there, and still at times, he likes to take credit for the speedy, A way in which effective vaccines were generated.
And while he's happy to throw people like Fauci or whatever under the bus, he sort of missed the fact that so much of his constituency had become so anti-vax.
And he had to kind of retroactively spin his message.
And he sort of does both at the same time now.
Yeah, similar kind of deal where you can clearly see the incentives in terms of what the audience is wanting from them, but it can sometimes take a little while for the leader to catch up.
So that's where he was.
Now let's see where he's gotten to with vaccines.
We use force for all sorts of things in terms of public health.
We don't generally use force to invade people's bodies.
How long have vaccine mandates been a thing in Canada, the United States, and the entire world?
I don't think they should have been a thing.
That's great if you don't think they should have been, but when you say we don't generally use force, we absolutely use force.
We've enforced vaccines for a long time.
It's an important part of public health.
Yes, fair enough.
We did it on a scale and at a rate during the COVID pandemic, so-called pandemic, that was unparalleled.
And the consequence of that was that we injected billions of people with an experimental...
It wasn't a bloody vaccine.
No, it wasn't.
No, it isn't.
Yes, it is.
Well, does it have a 100% success rate?
You think it's a definition of vaccine?
Well, the point of the vaccine is to give your body a protein to train on so the immune system works.
It's not the same technology.
Who cares if it's not the same?
They used the word vaccine so that they didn't have to contend with the fact that it wasn't the same technology.
There are different types of vaccines that are different technologies.
The mRNA vaccines is a type of vaccine technology.
Now this is vaccines.
No, it was like this and now it's like this.
No, no, no.
It was like this and now it's like this.
The mRNA technology.
was a radical qualitative leap forward in technology.
You can call it a vaccine if you want to, but it bears very little resemblance to any
I think the reason it's called a vaccine is because they're injecting you with something that's inoculating you against something in the future because it has proteins that resemble a virus that...
Hmm.
So he's on board now.
He's caught up.
Yeah, he's got the memos in the meantime.
But I think it's a really good illustration of how much he's ingested anti-vaccine talking points and how these are now just boilerplate on the right.
You hear him there mention, first of all, the so-called pandemic.
Pretty sure it was a pandemic, Jordan.
Pretty sure there were millions and millions of deaths worldwide from a novel.
That's the definition of a global pandemic.
And secondly, the so-called vaccine.
It's not a vaccine.
It's using mRNA technology to deliver it.
It's a brand, Matt.
Vaccine is a brand.
It's the pharmaceutical companies trying to slip something in.
Destiny provides all the correct responses, though, to his credit, by the way.
He does a better job, I think, than I would in that same situation because of his...
Debate bro energy.
He's fine at responding, you know, with exasperation and talking quickly.
And he has a bunch of vaccine responses well memorized.
So, yeah, he highlights that, you know, it is a vaccine.
It's based on the same underlying principles as all other.
Vaccine technologies and that Jordan's various claims are inaccurate.
The bit that you can't see from the audio is they're kind of debating with their hands about how wide the definition has been expanded, right?
And Destiny wants to make the point that a vaccine not being 100% effective is not the definition of a vaccine because by that definition there are many previous vaccines that wouldn't count like that.
So Jordan's trying to say, you know, we expanded it.
So that there's a huge change and Destiny's saying, no, it's just, you know, it's a new delivery for it.
So, yeah.
Yeah.
Having almost finished the excellent book about the immune system from the guy who produces...
Philip Detzmar.
That's it.
He produces Kurzgesagt.
Yeah, I mean, Destiny's correct.
The mRNA technology for instigating a response from the immune system is fundamentally...
It works according to exactly the same principles as all the other styles of vaccines, of which there are about four or five or six different ways of doing it with various pros and cons.
But yeah, so Jordan has really absorbed, as you said, the anti-vax talking points.
I mean, you and I can hear them.
Maybe it's not as obvious to other listeners who haven't been exposed to as much anti-vax rhetoric.
But yeah, you know, the so-called pan...
Pandemic and so-called vaccines that aren't really vaccines, but are actually an experimental thing.
Yeah, and they haven't even been tested properly and so on.
And I can give some more illustration of just how extreme his point of view is.
There are overlaps between the mRNA technologies and vaccines, to be sure.
But they wouldn't have been put forward with the rate that they were put forward if they weren't a radical new technology.
And it's bad in principle.
To inject billions of people with an untested new technology.
Isn't it also bad in principle for billions of people to get infected with a worldwide pandemic that initially was causing a decent number of deaths, a ton of complications, shutting down world economies?
Maybe.
Maybe it was.
Maybe it was.
So shouldn't we be able to engage in that analysis and figure out, like, if we look at the side effects of the vaccine?
We're not engaging in the analysis.
No, because now we're talking about whether or not vaccines are even vaccines or not instead.
No, no, no.
Don't play that game.
That is not what I was doing.
I was making a very specific and careful case.
The mRNA technology, by wide recognition, is an extraordinarily novel technology.
That doesn't make it not a vaccine, though.
Well...
Okay, it's a radically transformed form of vaccine.
I don't give a damn.
That still makes it something so new that the potential danger of its mass administration was highly probably, highly probable to be at least or more dangerous than the thing that it was supposed to.
Protect against.
And we are seeing that in the excess deaths.
We are absolutely not seeing that.
So are you implying that the excess deaths were caused by the vaccines?
I don't bloody well know what they're caused by.
That's what you're implying now.
Look, if you're going to use Occam's razor, you're kind of stuck in an awkward place here.
I'm absolutely not stuck in an awkward place here.
The most administered vaccine in the history of all of mankind.
Wow.
I hadn't heard this part of the conversation, Chris.
This...
It's really an excellent example of how, like, Jordan Peterson is still using the phraseology of an intellectual guru.
You know, I'm making a very precise and careful argument.
So, yeah, there is so much about his position there that is just wrong, that the vaccines aren't effective, that they're causing more deaths than they're curing.
Yeah, it's interesting to see where he is.
You remember, Matt, when he made the argument about the hospitals causing more deaths, right?
And that was linked to him having a bad experience at hospitals.
So a lot of Jordan's thinking about things tends to be based on his anecdotal experience and vibes, right?
And here, he clearly wants to make the case that the vaccines have caused more deaths and more illnesses than the virus that they were designed to treat.
But here's what he said.
That still makes it something so new that the potential danger of its mass administration was highly probably, highly probable to be at least or more dangerous than the thing it was supposed to protect against.
So he tries to kind of use the weasel word and the probabilistic terms, but he still wants to endorse that that is it.
So, you know, he wants to say it was highly...
It's probable that that was a reasonable concern that people could have had.
But he simultaneously wants to make the case that we have seen that and that it's been observed now.
And Destiny is correct that we absolutely have not seen that.
We have not seen that and they weren't untested.
They went through the various trials and monitoring and so on.
So there are many things just wrong, like flat out wrong about Jordan Peterson's point of view.
And it just shows that he actually...
Doesn't understand what's going on.
What's happened is he's been exposed to the run-of-the-mill, bog-standard, anti-vax propaganda that's floating around out there.
And he's peering its talking points pretty mindlessly, but he's still trying to use his trademark, you know, careful, analytical language.
Yeah, well, so you mentioned this trademark, careful language, right?
So I'm going to jump back in time now to...
The transliminal interview that we covered, I think this was from 2017.
So listen to Jordan talking about how careful he is and what he says.
I've been in a situation for, especially for the first four months, where had I said one thing that was self-evidently non-credible, you know, that would have justified a claim of bigotry or racism or any of those things,
I would have been sunk.
And so, I wouldn't say I'm pleased with my performance because it isn't a performance and it isn't something to be pleased about or displeased about.
But I can say that to the degree that it's possible, I've done my best to say, to do what I said I'm doing, which is to say what I think as clearly as I can.
Yes, always very careful to make sure he never says anything inaccurate.
Well, so, you know, he's been saying that a long time.
He still says that, right?
But you can hear there...
That he's much more clinging his hat.
People haven't been able to pin him with saying anything inaccurate.
That is absolutely not the case now.
Just go on his Twitter feed any day and he's tweeting out endless memes.
But here's him, in comparison to that, talking about whether there's evidence that the vaccines have caused deaths.
You can hear him here trying to be slippery with the language, and I think Destiny does a good job of highlighting what he's trying to imply, but what he doesn't want to directly acknowledge that he's implying.
So we can pretend now that the conservative argument was just compulsory vaccines are bad because they infringe on my freedom.
That wasn't the conservative argument.
The conservative argument was that mass deaths were going to happen, mass side effects were going to happen, there was going to be all this corruption and stuff related to vaccine distribution, to the crazier theories where microchips and blah, blah, blah.
None of that came true.
Absolutely none of the conservative fear-mongering related to the mRNA vaccines came to fruition.
But now that's all forgotten, and that was used as an excuse to- What do you mean none of it?
What do you make of the excess deaths?
For related to vaccines, there are almost none.
The mRNA vaccines have been administered to- Excess deaths in Europe.
Related to vaccines?
We don't know, no, no.
We don't know.
We absolutely know.
Wait a second.
This is like settled science.
What do we know?
In terms of vaccine-related deaths?
No, no, no, no, no, no, that's not my question.
Excess deaths in Europe are up about 20%, and they have been since the end of the COVID pandemic.
Sounds really high to me.
Go look!
Go look!
I'll check afterwards, but is this including the Ukrainian war with Russia?
No, it's not including the Ukrainian war.
Okay.
Are you implying that you think it's because of vaccines?
I'm not implying anything.
I'm saying what the excess deaths are.
But what is your take on what's causing it?
You said that in a counter to me describing mRNA vaccines.
You said, well, the excess does for 20%.
That makes sense that the implication is that the vaccines are causing it.
Okay, first of all, something is causing it.
Obviously, yeah.
Something is causing it, or some combination of factors.
Sure.
Yes, something.
And there's a bit at the end of one of the clips we heard earlier where he, again, tries to draw...
Jordan, when Jordan references these excess deaths in relation to vaccines, and then, you know, Jordan says, no, I'm not saying that's vaccines.
And like, well, why are you bringing it up at this point?
The potential danger of its mass administration was highly probably, highly probable to be at least or more dangerous than the thing that it was supposed to.
Protect against.
And we are seeing that in the excess deaths.
We are absolutely not seeing that.
So are you implying now that the excess deaths were caused by the vaccines?
I don't bloody well know what they're caused by.
That's what you're implying now.
Look, if you're going to use Occam's razor, you're kind of stuck in an awkward place here.
Absolutely not stuck in an awkward place here.
This is the most administered vaccine in the history of all of mankind.
Every single organization around the world is motivated to call this out if it was a bad thing.
I think Jordan's claim, as Destiny highlights, is wrong.
He's repeating a point that he's heard in Discoursephere about 20% excess deaths, and we've no idea what that's about, right?
He strongly wants to imply it's because of the vaccines.
But whenever called on that, are you saying that that is because of the vaccines?
He doesn't want to acknowledge that that's what he's implying.
Directly.
So he wants to keep the kind of ambiguous spears to say, well, I didn't say definitely.
He's basically just going, you know, I'm just asking questions, right?
Yeah, we don't know.
We don't know what specific nugget of information regarding excess deaths, whatever statistic has been thrown around.
But, you know, excess deaths are very helpful, right?
This is something they monitor very carefully.
But destiny is fundamentally just correct, which is that the number of deaths attributable to vaccines is absolutely minuscule, and it would have been very easy to detect them given the massive amount of vaccines that have been administered.
You know, subsequent excess deaths can be attributable to the actual disease itself.
Yeah, or Jordan Peterson does mention the knock-on effects on healthcare systems and so on.
There's a whole bunch.
There's a heap of things.
People drinking more or something.
And Destiny references the war in Ukraine, whatever the case might be.
But every time this issue is raised, there are anti-vax sources who emphasize that it must be the vaccines.
And every careful analysis...
Shows that that is not the case and that the worst effect people are the unvaccinated in the demographics.
So in any case, it is what Jordan wants to imply, that the vaccines cause death, but he doesn't want to directly...
He will say it sometimes by accident when he's in the flow of his speech, but when he's trying to be pinned down on something, he'll retreat to vigories and inserting weasel words.
So, yeah, that's...
Talking about Occam's razor and things like that.
Yeah.
I mean, what it says to me is that he's not getting his information about COVID or vaccines from any decent.
Any scientific source.
He's getting it from the Memosphere, from people like Brett Weinstein and so on.
And it seems to me that this has just been integrated now into his particular worldview.
I mean, we saw this before, Chris, right?
He's been a long-standing opponent of climate change action.
We'll get to that.
Yeah.
And early on...
Integrated that into his worldview, right?
That this is all just a woke kind of scaremongering campaign trying to make us eat bugs and so on.
So, you know, you can see how the science denial can just be wrapped in to make everything fit with your ideological worldview.
And that's also happened, perhaps inevitably, with vaccines because this is fundamentally against his ideological worldview.
The government has got to be doing it the wrong.
Any attempts to do some sort of communal type thing where people are forced or required or obligated to do something must be wrong and don't trust whatever the so-called experts are trying to tell you.
Yeah.
I've got a clip from him responding to somebody who early on suggested this was early, early days in Jordan Peterson's Rise to Fiem.
And they wanted to suggest that, you know, in the...
Loss of collective meaning that perhaps climate change activism could be used to unite people, right?
This was the suggestion by an audience member.
Now, they obviously didn't fully understand the extent to which Jordan Peterson is a climate change skeptic, to put it charitably, or denialist might be another way to put it, but listen to his response to this or some of it.
The climate change issue is an absolutely catastrophic, nightmarish mess.
And the idea that that will unite us, that's not going to unite us.
I mean, first of all, it's very difficult to separate the science from the politics.
And second, even if the claims, the more radical claims are true, we have no idea what to do about it.
And so, no.
And besides, it's even worse than that.
Here's one of the worst things about the whole mess.
So, as you project outwards with regards to your climate change projections, which are quite unreliable to begin with, and the unreliability of the measurement magnifies as you move forward in time, obviously, because the errors accumulate.
And so, if you go out 50 years, the error bars around the projections are already so wide that we won't be able to measure the positive or negative effects of anything we do right now.
So how in the world are you going to solve a problem when you can't even measure the consequence of your actions?
Like, how is that even possible?
And besides that, well, what's the solution?
What are we going to do?
Switch to wind and solar?
Well, good luck with that.
Just try it and see what happens.
We can't store the power.
Germany tried it.
They produced more carbon dioxide than they did when they started because they had to turn on their coal-fired plants again.
That wasn't a very good plan.
Well, we don't want nuclear.
It's like, okay, what happens at night?
Huh!
The sun goes down.
Well, isn't that something that we should have taken into account?
Oh, we've got to flip on the coal-fired plants.
Well, so it was a complete catastrophe, and all that happened was the price of electricity shot up.
It was like zero utility.
That's not a solution.
So what are we going to do about it?
Well, we should cut back.
We can't consume as much as we are all consuming.
It's like, well, maybe, except the data that I've read indicate that if you can get...
The GDP of people up to about $5,000 a year, then they start caring about the environment, and the environment cleans up.
Oh, it's so much in there.
But just that last point, you get the GDP up to $5,000 a person, and then they start caring about the environment, then it cleans up?
You know, it's Constantine Kissen stuff.
Well, actually, this is the source, right?
Jordan is reflecting Bjorn Lomborg, so it's actually the other way.
but it's the same argument as Constantine Kisson wants to make that the way to address climate change is just the economic development.
And any restrictions on the production of coal or burning of fossil fuels will prevent economic development.
So you're actually causing a lot of change
You need to prioritize economic development because then once everyone...
Becomes richer.
Then they'll care about the environment.
Then they'll implement some policies to prevent climate change.
Cleaner.
They'll produce cleaner energy, maybe.
But, you know, as Jordan, his argument doesn't entirely hang together because he wants to question whether even cleaner energy is better.
Well, he first of all questions whether or not climate change is real.
But then he sort of operates on the assumption that it is real.
But then questions all of, you know.
We can't do anything about it, basically.
We have no idea what to do about it.
So, what date was that, Chris?
When was that recorded?
I don't know.
The clip up on YouTube is from 2019, but I believe the video might be slightly earlier, but at least around four years or so ago.
Well, we don't need to point out all of the fallacies and just things that are wrong in the stuff that he's talking about with climate change.
Let's take that as a given.
I mean, my comment there, Chris, is that I can see how, to some people's ears, he sounds like someone who is engaged with the science, who is thinking about the issues in a rational, scientific way, right?
Because he uses that form of language.
But to you and me, and to many other people, many people listening, I'm sure, he's doing nothing more than repeating very bad, fallacious...
Climate skeptic talking points, but he's just doing it in that style.
Yeah, well, he does it in that style.
He uses that technique that he often uses of the Socratic dialogue with himself.
Well, you might say, you know, and then like a little funny voice of the person objecting.
And as with many of the people in that sector, he highlights, you know, the demonization of nuclear fuel.
Which is true.
That is an issue that you can legitimately raise with kind of climate activists.
So there is points in most of his content where he's raising a legitimate issue.
But so are climate skeptics.
That's the thing as well.
They're not absolute inventing everything or there's no legitimate points of criticism or issues about where you focus attention or so on.
There are.
There are issues there.
In Jordan's case, and in the case of most climate skeptics, it is absolutely used for rhetorical purposes.
They have a conclusion that they want to get to, which is that we shouldn't be taking any of the measures to reduce reliance on fossil fuels or try to change towards more renewable energies.
And everything is back from that.
whether you have to denigrate the science to show that there is climate change, whether you need to say the economics don't work out, or whether you have to highlight flaws in the technology or whatever, whatever the case might be.
It actually is almost always tied to a particular political agenda.
And that's the beat and switch, which I don't like.
And just to highlight this rhetorical tool, which we heard in the Constantine Kissin speech, about like kind of presenting it as Eelor
And listen to this.
Jordan does it, I think, just as well as Constantine, if not better.
What are you going to do about them?
Well, we'll ignore them because we can feel good about, you know, being concerned about global warming.
It's like, I don't...
You know, one of the reasons, there's more trees in the Northern Hemisphere than there were a hundred years ago.
No one knows that, but it's true, and by a substantial margin.
You know why, in part?
Because people burned coal instead of wood.
It's like everyone says, well, we shouldn't burn coal.
It's like, okay, fair enough.
What do you want to do, burn trees instead?
Because that's what poor people would have done.
It's like, coal isn't good.
Well, it's better than burning wood.
So these things are complicated.
So they're unbelievably complicated.
And so, no, it's not going to unite us.
And we're not going to do a damn thing about it either.
So it doesn't really matter.
So...
Well, what are we going to do?
You're going to stop, like, having heat?
You're going to stop having electricity?
You're going to stop driving your cars?
You're going to stop taking trains?
It's like, you know, you're going to stop using your iPhones?
You're not going to do any of that.
And no wonder.
So, so, no.
Yeah, yeah.
It's a very strong rhetoric there.
It does remind me of Constantine Kissin.
How many of you are going to go home tonight and say let's rip out our bathroom and erect a Siberian shithouse in the back garden?
And if you're not, why should they?
120 million people in China do not have enough food.
I don't mean that they don't get dessert.
I mean they suffer from malnutrition.
That means that their immune system is breaking down because they don't have enough food.
You're not going to get them to stay poor.
Like you said, Chris, it's not that there's not a grain of truth in any of the things you're saying, right?
Like, it might well be that there is a reduction of economic growth associated with climate change action.
I mean, I'm pretty optimistic with all of the technological fixes that...
That actually, there may not be as big a trade-off as some people like to think.
Cars are vastly more efficient these days.
Our ways of using electricity are vastly more efficient than they used to be.
So it's not necessarily the case that there's a one-to-one relationship with economic growth or quality of life in material goods and energy consumption.
And there are lots of other alternative sources of energy coming online, including storage.
But yes, there are technological challenges in storage and managing the complex grids.
There are lots of points there, but they really do.
When you are setting up a rhetorical platform, you take each of those things and you magnify them out to be, like you said, a total binary choice.
You can either care about or let's say it's okay for people in developing countries to get a little bit better off.
Or you can do something about climate change, right?
And you set it up like that, and you go, well, of course we're not going to do anything about climate change.
So, yeah, it's just, I don't know what to say, except that, I mean, I could see how it's kind of obvious that being an anti-vaxxer, being anti-climate action, it all just fits with what is a very common, very, I don't want to say boring,
but it's just something I've been acquainted with for 20, 25 years, basically, which is that if you're a conservative, Then you don't care about these things.
I also think that what Jordan wants to inject there is the notion that you might take specific Like, you know, a carbon tax or something like that, right, to offset externalities.
Jordan would be completely against that.
But that wouldn't require that everybody stop driving cars, that everybody gives up their phone, that people in developing countries don't...
You could even make it that there was a greater burden on the more developed countries to make it not so burdensome on developing economies.
But in those cases, like...
Jordan's not interested in that.
He wants to project it as you have this choice between making poor people forced to deal with these concerns of elite, out of touch, people who are trying to, you know, restrain economic growth and don't give a damn.
They're just all virtue signaling.
Versus that you care about poor people and you're willing to accept that not everything has to be focused on the standards of an elite Western liberal who's tied to a tree or that kind of thing, right?
So he casts it in this extreme black and white very simple distinction.
The most extreme solution is the only one that you could possibly advocate.
And if you're not going to do that, well then you're completely hypocritical.
Yeah, it makes the whole debate into a caricature, but that was him years ago, right?
So let's see where he is now.
And one thing to note there, Matt, is that you heard him use this thing where he likes to insert, we don't know.
We've said this many times when we covered his content.
One of his favorite techniques is to suggest that we don't know anything.
We're really just grasping in the dark about these topics, so we shouldn't really make any statement with confidence.
You heard him do it there, and he's still doing it now.
I mean, I'm not going to tell you that every model is perfect.
They're not perfect.
Sure, but right now we're like standing in traffic with our eyes closed saying the car hasn't hit me yet so I don't think there's any coming.
I think it's pretty undeniable at this point that there is an impact on climate across the planet.
I think that's highly deniable.
We have no idea what the impact is from.
We don't know where the carbon dioxide is from.
We can't measure the warming of the oceans.
We have terrible temperature records going back 100 years.
Almost all the terrestrial temperature detection sites were first put outside urban areas and then you have to correct for the movement of the urban areas and then you introduce an error parameter that's larger than the purported increase in temperature that you're planning to measure.
This isn't data.
This is guess.
And there's something weird underneath it.
There's something weird that isn't oriented well towards human beings underneath it.
It has this guise of compassion.
Oh, we're going to save the poor in the future.
It's like, that's what the bloody communists said.
And they killed a lot of people doing it.
And we're walking down that same road now with this insistence that, you know, we're so compassionate that we care about the poor a hundred years from now.
And if we have to wipe out several hundred million of them now, well, that's a small price to pay for the future utopia.
And we've heard that sort of thing before.
And the alternative to that is to stop having global-level elites plot out a utopian future, or even an anti-dystopian future.
And that's exactly what's happening now with organizations like the WEF.
And if this wasn't immediately impacting the poor in a devastating manner, I wouldn't care about it that much, but it is.
It's hard to resist the temptation to just...
But we just have to mention that...
He's just wrong about the quality of the data.
Everything he said about we don't know where the carbon dioxide is from, we can't measure the warming of the oceans, we have no idea if there's climate change happening.
We have no idea what's going on and we have no idea what to do about it.
It's all totally wrong.
If you look at the graphs of how much energy is coming say from wind and solar production, it's still a small proportion of total energy production, but the graphs are exponential.
So it is already happening.
Jordan would have you believe that it is impossible and that it just can't be done.
It's not really happening.
We don't know what's going on, so don't even try.
But what strikes me, Chris, in terms of the rhetoric and the words he's dropping there about the WEF, about how it's basically communism, how it's a deeply anti-human ideology masquerading as...
Being something that cares about people and the rest of the planet, I assume.
Yeah, I think to me that illustrates just how much each of these specific topics are being just bound up into his all-embracing, paranoid worldview.
Yeah, would you agree?
Yeah, I draw direct parallels to an Alex Jones view of the world.
Jordan is talking about there being a secret global elite which is anti-human.
Which is using climate change as a tool to depopulate the world.
He starts going on about the planning to wipe out millions and call it compassion and all this thing.
And that directly from his point of view connects to this agenda.
To try and reduce the footprint of fossil fuels, right?
And so it is all tied together.
And it's exactly the same opinion, the same worldview that Alex Jones and so many others have.
And this is now not really a fringe position amongst the right wing, especially...
In North America, but in Europe and so on as well.
So it is obviously conspiratorial.
And in Jordan's case, it's worse because, like Alex Jones, it's tied to this millennial theology about an evil that is lurking underneath an anti-human evil, which is bending things to its will.
And just to make this clear, Matt, here is one more clip from the same interview talking about That's evil.
Let's say that everything you've said is true.
What do you think is the plan, then?
What is the goal?
What is the drive?
Like, why push obviously horrible ideas for the planet and the poor?
That's a good question.
That's a good question.
Well, because you're positing it, right?
So what do you think is the driver goal?
Well, I listen to what people say.
Here's the most terrible thing they say.
There are too many people on the planet.
Okay, so who says that?
I've heard people say that for 30 years.
Perfectly ordinary, compassionate people.
Well, there's too many people on the planet.
And I think, well, for me, that's like hearing Satan himself take possession of their spine and move their mouth.
It's like, okay, who are these excess people that you're so concerned about?
And exactly who has to go?
And when?
And why?
And how?
And who's going to make that decision?
And even if you're not consciously aiming at that?
You are the one who uttered the words.
You're the ones who muttered the phrase.
What makes you think that the thing that possessed you to make you utter that words isn't aiming at exactly what you just declared?
And so that's, you know, that's a terrible vision.
But when you look at what happens in genocidal societies, and they emerge with fair regularity, and usually with a utopian vision at hand, the consequence is the mass destruction of millions of people.
So why should I assume that something horrible isn't lurking like that right now?
Wow.
He certainly got a long way from, you know, some discussion about the optimal, you know, human population on planet Earth, saying that there might be some limits to population growth, to all of that.
He comes across as a millennial fire and brimstone preacher, doesn't he, Chris?
I mean, he's got his full ball there.
He's absolutely inconsistent as well, because there he's talking about the horrors of utopian visions, right?
And the lurking evil that he's so wary of.
What about MAGA?
What about a Make America Great Again?
Is there a utopian vision in that movement, right?
The slogan itself highlights it.
Does Jordan have concern about that?
No.
Not one inch.
And not one inch about various utopian...
You know, utopian images that people on the right propose.
So I'm saying it's an inconsistent standard, but I also agree that it is a highly religious and conspiratorial one.
I mean, he references Satan, right?
And you can say that he's speaking poetically, but he's also talking about the people not realizing how the thing which possesses them is moving them to express.
You know, it has malevolent intentions.
And we know from the conversations with Jonathan Pejot, with all the others, that they genuinely mean there are these evil lurking forces and they don't like to get pinned down in whether, you know, it's like slime or a ghost or whatever.
Is it a metaphor or an actual one?
Yeah, no, but it's very real for them.
Look, the other thing, speaking about the inconsistency, you and I have taken a look at some of the papers that he's published as a research psychologist.
And back then when he was on his high horse about how the quality of data from...
Geophysics and climatology is just rubbish, you know.
It's just guesses, you know.
Speaking as a psychologist, I could say that's pretty rich coming from someone who's done the relatively low quality, you know, low reliability, like the kind of conclusions that he drew from his very weak, just typical psychology, small N experiments and things.
You know, you cannot hold a candle between the quality of that data.
And the data from the geosciences.
So, I mean, that just goes to show if he seems like a careful scientist, he's getting, you know, very concerned about the quality of the data.
That's not what's going on here at all.
Yeah, that leads to the last clip that I want to play on because he has a study that he wants to carry out which hasn't been run yet and which he thinks can solve a pressing issue of our time.
So, what's the issue?
Well, let me first let him introduce it.
Yes, well, I also think it's an open question still to what degree Hitler's policies were right-wing versus left-wing, and no one's done the analysis properly yet to determine that.
Because he was a national socialist movement for a reason, and the socialist part of it wasn't accidental.
Well, but there was no cooperatively formed businesses that were owned by all of the people for the people and distributed to the people, and I don't think redistribution was high on Hitler's list of things to do.
So, that old chestnut.
It was Hitler and the Nazis' right wing.
Yeah, Jordan's confidence, with which he says, no one's done the analysis.
Really, historians haven't looked into the ideology behind the Nazis, and they haven't...
Overwhelmingly determined that it was a far-right nationalist ideology.
You know, some even non-professional historians might be able to figure that out.
Like, it's not that hard.
I mean, the thing which has tripped up Jordan here, which is very common amongst conservatives, seemingly, is that they use socialists in the title, right?
National socialism.
Now, historians have known that, Matt, and they've addressed that.
And it is true that the Nazis in the earlier periods tried to appeal to some of the dissatisfaction that was being scooped up by the communists at the time.
But it was absolutely opportunistic.
And you can see that because you just need to look at what Nazi actual policies were when they were actually...
Implemented in the third right.
And one of the first things was the targeted destruction of communists, right?
Of socialists.
So it's mind-boggling to claim that.
But this is a common viewpoint amongst the right more recently, right?
And this, again, speaks to Jordan's network of information.
Dinesh D'Souza has written a book about Hitler.
You know, being left-wing and so on.
So all these polemical right-wing figures, they want to categorize Hitler as left-wing because they don't want him to be in the right, which is so stupid!
It's so stupid!
It is so stupid because there is, you know, admittedly...
Maybe I can just restrict it to Australia.
Your typical person who votes for the Liberal Party or your typical person who votes for the Labour Party is not trying to usher in either a great leap forward in a five-year plan or the final solution and annexing New Zealand, right?
It's just different.
Yeah, Australia, you're fine.
I'm just trying to agree with you that it's just stupid.
You don't need to sort of disown these historical...
Because they happen to be on your side of the fence, right?
And try to find a way that you can make them out to be, oh, well, really, they were on the other side.
Look, we're moderate left-wing people, but Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao.
Yeah, they were left-wing too.
That's right.
Yeah, they were communists.
That's right.
But they were on the left, and that's fine.
The left can spawn extremists and extreme ideologies just as the right can and passed.
Yes, that's my point.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, so much of it is just based on misrepresentation.
Just like he misrepresents, there's just no question about where to place the Nazis politically.
He misrepresents the literature on...
I mean, I've read a bunch of these documents, Chris, you have too.
There's nothing utopian about them.
The way Jordan Peterson represents it is that underlying all of it is this sort of crazy, you know, hyper left-wing, ideologically infused person who is trying to create some sort of...
You know, communist utopia and doing something about global warming is a part of that thing.
Yeah, we have the W-E-F.
I know.
You may find someone like that online on Twitter, but there's no utopianism in any of the normal literature on this.
It's just, this is happening.
We understand why it's happening.
Yes, it's lovely to have these.
Nice, cheap, available sources of energy like oil and coal, but unfortunately they do release carbon.
How are we going to manage this problem?
There's just nothing more pragmatic in my mind than that.
There's no utopianism in there at all.
So it just irritates me.
I said to you before, Chris, I'm not frustrated by people.
Okay, I think the most important thing in the world is the economy and economic growth.
Yes, it's a shame about climate change, but I don't think we should prioritize it.
I might disagree with them, but, you know, that's their opinion, right?
That's fine.
But totally making it out to be something that it isn't and misrepresenting the science of it and creating like a fictional narrative to justify the position you wanted to come to, that's the bit that makes me upset.
Yeah, I think the reason Jordan does that is because you would hear it if you listened to the full conversation.
He will regularly reference the most extreme Extinction Rebellion or whatever people, right?
And use them, just like we talked about with the speech, he will focus on the most extreme advocates or extreme claim and then basically present that as that is what the WEF or what the IPCC...
It's all about, which it isn't, right?
The Extinction Rebellion people generally think the IPCC is too conservative and those kind of things.
So that's part of the issue is there are utopian visions.
There are people who have, you could say, anti-human agendas, right?
The extreme environmentalists.
But they are not the mainstream.
They are not the people trying to come up with economic plans to encourage renewable fuels.
W-E-F.
That's not the reason why countries like China are building solar panels.
No.
China's got a lot of things wrong with it, but you've got a weird, distorted, nightmare view of the world if you buy into Jordan's millennial prophesying about it.
It's part of the issue with Constantine's speech as well is that a lot of the people in the countries which...
Constantine claim don't care about climate change.
In surveys say they care about climate change and support policies to try and prevent their environment from being polluted, right?
Because that's one of the things about fossil fuels is they produce pollution.
So anyway, anyway, Matt, to return to Jordan's plan to sort out this issue about the Nazis and Hitler.
Oh, the Nazis.
Yes, we've got to figure it out.
He's got a plan.
He's got a plan.
I don't think it was a strange mix.
I think it was a bid to appeal to mid-left and center-left, the KPD and the German Socialist Party by calling themselves National Socialists.
I think it was very much like an authoritarian, ultra-nationalist regime that pretty squarely fits with...
People get mad if you call something far-right or far-left because they have an attachment to terms.
Well, you know, one of the things I would have done if I would have been able to hang on to my professorship at the University of Toronto would have been to extract out a random sample of Nazi policies.
And strip them of markers of their origin and present them to a set of people with conservative or leftist beliefs and see who agreed with them more.
And that analysis has never been done, as far as I know, so we actually don't know.
And we could know if the social scientists would do their bloody job, which they don't, generally speaking.
That's something we could know.
We could probably use the AI systems we have now, the large language models, to determine to what degree left and right beliefs intermingled in the rise of national socialism.
So that's all technically possible.
And it hasn't been done, so it's a matter of opinion.
Sure.
I don't necessarily disagree.
Wrong, Destiny.
You should.
I feel like he was allowing things to...
Jordan is just constantly saying things, so you've got to pick your battles.
But this particular one, I don't agree with Destiny.
It's not necessarily wrong.
No, it is a very silly...
Because Jordan's claim here is that, you know, until we run this silly little study that he's just imagined about anonymizing the Nazi's policies and presenting them to a wide spectrum of people, we'll never be able to determine which kind of people are attracted to the Nazi policies.
We were Jordan!
In history, the people attracted to the Nazi policies were ultra-nationalists, right?
Artists, academics, intellectuals were the victims.
They fled the country.
I think part of this is, you know, James Lindsay, if you recall, the Sokal Squared people, they tried to take a section of the Mein Kampf and remove all of the references to The Jews or whatever,
and kind of change the language, and then submit it as a journal article.
And they wanted to show that basically, you know, the left have now become, or maybe they always were, right, the authoritarians, and they would endorse the kind of authoritarian suggestions of Hitler.
But in what James Lindsay did as one historian who specializes in the Nazis and, you know, their policies.
Highlighted when looking into that was they fundamentally removed almost everything about the section of the Mein Kampf that they focused on was one that already was the least objectionable, right?
Was arguing about economic changes and whatnot.
And then when you change the target and you change the language, you actually change what is being suggested, right?
So if you have a policy which is like, we will...
Root out all the Jews and we will remove this parasite from our midst.
And you change that language.
So we will remove all the corrupt politicians and we will instigate policies that enable financial reforms.
You can say, oh, we kept the skeleton the same.
But actually, what you've asked people to endorse is very different, right?
And economic populist policies or whatever are...
But that's not the bit about the Nazi platform which caused the problem.
It's a silly thought experiment he's got there.
As you said, you could take certain policies and some of them you could strip them of little signifiers that they're Nazis, right?
Like one of them would be like they had a large-scale public works program.
They weren't like libertarians, right?
They believed in big spending to build like the autobahn highway system and things like that and deal with unemployment via just like putting people to work.
So it did have that sort of, you know, state controlled of the economy aspect to it.
So maybe that one you could.
But most of their policies are quite specific.
Like, they had policies at strengthening the Aryan race, right?
Promoting Aryan births, right?
And sterilizing individuals with disabilities and euthanasia of the severely disabled.
Now, it's pretty difficult to strip out...
Like, how do you...
Like, what do you do with that one?
Oh, yeah.
Or, you know, the admiration of the Fuhrer, right?
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, the Fuhrer principle.
Putting your will to the...
The Fuhrer and the Volt.
Here's a really challenging one.
How about the Anti-Comintern Pact?
So they want the Anti-Communist Alliance with Japan and Italy.
So how would you make that so it's not left-wing or right-wing?
Yeah, so well, yeah, that's the thing.
I mean, it's a silly argument, but also silly because absolutely nothing's stopping Jordan doing this.
He's saying, you know, they stripped me of my professorship.
It's impossible.
Jordan has repeatedly talked about how rich he is, about how much resources he has, about how his team is now better at producing research than they ever were at the university.
And this is a little research project that I could get an honor student to do because it's a stupid thing.
I wouldn't get them to do this, but it wouldn't cost...
Hardly any money.
No, it would cost nothing.
You could run this tomorrow, right?
So Jordan's saying it's impossible to do it.
You know, he was about to do it until the woke mob stripped him from his professorship.
Not true, Jordan.
First of all, you had your professorship for many years and you didn't show any sign of running any study like this or generally good studies.
You're bad at study design.
But secondly, his second suggestion is LLMs.
Maybe they could do it.
Oh, yeah.
We could do that.
You could just go and check now, Jordan.
If you type into any of the LLMs that are currently existing and ask them that exact question about the degree to which left and right beliefs intermingled in the rise of National Socialism, I will tell you now that they will all correctly identify that it's the right-wing beliefs which were the driving force.
The only exception will be the weird conservative gab AIs, the ones which are explicitly anti-Semitic or whatever the case might be.
So, again, he talks like it's impossible to do this.
Well, immediately after he did this, people went to the Nas chat, GBT, and the answer was that, yes, the Nazis made use of left-wing rhetoric, but they abandoned that as soon as it was politically expedient.
So, yeah.
All right, I'm just typing in.
I've already asked GPT-4.
Let's ask Claude.
We're doing it live.
Were the Nazis right-wing?
Oh, yes.
Apparently the LMMs have solved this eventually.
There's even, there's a historical fact or quirk about that period that in the German parliament, the parties were geographically positioned.
According to where they located themselves on the left or right political spectrum.
And the Nazis chose the farthest right position, the chamber.
In the farthest right geographic location.
So this is another research project.
You've just given Jordan an idea.
He could go and ask a Nazi.
He could ask the Nazis.
If they're right-wing or not.
I think that'd be pretty clear.
You must have seen that meme, Matt, where there's the question, you know, were the Nazis right-wing?
And everybody is saying, you know, it's like far-left, yes, centre-left, yes, moderates, yes.
And it has the Nazis saying...
Yes.
And the only ones saying no are, you know, the conservative right.
You know, Jordan Peterson, Dinesh D'Souza.
That's the only one saying no.
So even the Nazis themselves were quite clear that they were a right-wing movement.
I mean, they were fascists, Matt.
They were freaking fascists.
I get it.
I get it.
I think everyone gets it.
We can stop belaboring this point.
But, you know, I think it's a good one to make because if Jordan Peterson is so adult that he thinks this is an important point to make, to the extent that he's, you know, thinking through potential research.
I mean, it just illustrates how in common with those other two topics we covered, the vaccines and climate change, it just illustrates just how strongly it is his political ideology and paranoid worldview that is driving his take on any given thing,
That you might think about.
Yeah, and he's got a set, like a little bag of rhetorical techniques.
One is his intellectual puppet show.
Well, you might say that I'm saying blah, blah, blah, right?
That's one of them.
The other one is, we don't know.
Nobody has done the work.
Nobody has any idea.
Those two rhetorical techniques...
Well, I'll add one to that, another technique, which is that scientism.
Well, you know, I talked about it, but that scientism really gets my goat.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
If we ran his crappy study.
Yeah, or pretending that his concerns about climate change is because the data isn't of a high enough quality that, you know, there are some biases and they made some methodological errors.
And, you know, it is pretending.
It is nothing more than pretending.
He pretends that he is approaching these issues in a scientifically minded way.
And I hope this episode has demonstrated that couldn't be further from the truth.
No.
He's approaching it closer to demonology than he is to careful science.
And the sad thing is, I think he genuinely believes himself to be a careful, scientific, empirically-minded person.
He must know that he's lying about the amount of books that he's read and stuff.
Like, somewhere in his brain, there's a compartment which knows that he...
There isn't enough time in the universe to have read all the things that he's claimed.
He doesn't have the statistical competence that he constantly presents himself as having.
But I think Jordan's self-mythos and degree of confidence in his beliefs is absolute rock-solid ideological commitments.
And narcissism mean that he does believe in the moment what he says.
About, you know, there not being the work done, the evidence not being clear, that it's all because of his careful examination.
Like, I think he says that with the conviction of a true believer, even though it can constantly be demonstrated that he's either intentionally not being accurate or, you know, he's lying.
And he might be lying to himself as well.
And that is how I would read it.
You know, I think he's delusional.
In essence, about the degree to which his views are based on science.
Oh yeah, certainly.
I mean, this is the thing that crops up again and again, which is, is someone being deliberately deceptive because they've got a, either they've got secret political motives or maybe they've got financial motives or they're trying to appeal to their audience, but they're consciously lying as opposed to them just being,
frankly, delusional and being just as crazy as they sound.
And they are in good faith, if you like, about their crazy opinions.
And, you know, the truth is and the interesting thing is that I think that it's both is happening at the same time.
We've talked about this, the way that cognitive dissonance works, the way that people tend to align their beliefs with their actions and they generally take actions that are in their best interest.
You know, in this case, we'll be leading to more clicks, more attention, more positive feedback.
You're doing more of that kind of thing.
That's what you want to do.
You find a way to align your beliefs to those.
There's another kind of dissonance resolving, which is resolving the dissonance of your opinion or belief about a specific topic and make it consonant with your broader worldview.
So let's say Jordan Peterson is a conservative, is very inherent, suspicious of the kinds of things like climate change.
He might have come across some...
Some evidence, some opinions about climate change being a genuine thing.
He likes to think of himself as a scientist.
He might have felt it convincing.
But he would be strongly compelled to find some problems with that and find a way to allow himself to disregard that information such that he can form an opinion about climate change that is fully aligned with his broader worldview.
And, you know, I don't think the gurus are special in that regard.
Everybody, all of us are prone to doing that.
Backwards kind of reasoning, where you start off with your conclusions, you start off with your deeply held beliefs.
And then you work backwards and find out a way that you can deal with the various bits of evidence, broadly construed, in such a way that allows you to come to the conclusions that you've already decided upon.
And we'd like to believe that we start from whatever evidence, whatever information is available and work forward to beliefs and then revise those beliefs or even more general sort of worldviews based on that.
But sadly, we are mere mortals and we're not very good at that.
Yeah, and this point stands, regardless of the current replication rules, about some issues with the cognitive dissonance literature.
Just like I can hear the psychologists in my head raising this, this is not the same as various claims made about cognitive dissonance not holding up, because the basic idea that people seek to resolve inconsistencies in a way that's psychologically satisfying is obviously true.
Now, That isn't also to say, though, Matt, that everyone does things.
These are all psychological mechanisms which afflict everyone, you know, motivated reasoning and all these kind of things, but not to the same extent as like a Jordan Peterson.
No.
He is unusual.
The conspiratorial ideation, the belief in the malevolent power animating essentially every position that he doesn't like, that is not normal.
He is an outlier in that perspective.
So it is right to have empathy and to acknowledge that we're all fallible.
But we're not all alleging the kind of things that Jordan does publicly, reliably.
And I think these clips, this episode, should illustrate that Wiley was always not great.
And you heard his early climate change take, which is not that different from his current one.
But overall, he's become...
Much more extreme.
He's much more closer to Alex Jones now than he was when he initially appeared.
And it might be, to a certain extent, in delivery, but I think it is also in the degree to which the conspiratorial worldview has encompassed everything.
And I think, as you said, Chris, it's not just a conspiratorial worldview.
It's also that demon-infested Millennial religious worldview.
For Jordan, these things go together.
Like those things go together for a lot of flat earthers, actually, now I think of it.
Or QAnon.
Yeah, or QAnon.
That's true.
It's probably pretty common.
But what's your thought?
I mean, so there's clearly been a descent.
It hasn't been good.
And, you know, Jordan is not alone amongst our gurus to have traced such a journey.
Yeah.
What would you attribute it to?
Would he have become like this if he had not become a celebrity, had just gotten a bit older and a bit more, you know, weird as we all do?
Or is it his psychology, his personality, or is it something to do with the social and financial dynamics?
I think that there is multiple contributing factors.
One is that he appears to be a grandiose narcissist and that he always saw himself as a kind of revolutionary thinker with big ideas, right?
His Maps of Meaning book is claiming to absolutely revolutionize our understanding of so many topics, right?
And to be of great significance to the world.
And that's before...
He had much of a public profile.
He sought out a public profile.
He wanted to be a commentator.
He would appear on Canadian television in a tweed outfit or whatever, like the bowler hat.
I don't know how to describe his look, but he clearly wanted to be a figure of commentary, a figure of note, and saw that as his role.
And his old mentor mentioned about how he spoke about You know, wanting to establish a religion, to buy an old church and kind of give sermons, right?
So that's not normal.
None of that's normal behavior.
His reeling against the IRB review ethics board from having the right to examine his work, the standard thing which all academics go through when they're trying to do research with people, regarding that as...
Being, you know, beyond the appeal that they would dare or have the right to assess him.
All that speaks to a kind of narcissistic, self-absorbed personality.
And then I think when you add to that his clear obsessions and constant wrestling with his religious devotions or lack of religious belief or his desire to be religious,
that creates, you know, a kind of heady stew.
And one which is also illustrated by the amount of illnesses that he has picked up.
You know, he's got so many autoimmune, so many psychological and physical ailments.
Yeah, so I think that all speaks to a personality which is not normal and which is susceptible to perceiving itself as a guru figure.
And then when you add to that the reception of social media, Audiences, the YouTube clips, and a partisan polemical ecosystem, which he slotted into and was encouraged repeatedly by people in those ecosystems,
you know, to give more takes, to offer his opinion on more things, to talk about Ukraine, to have a very financially rewarding pundit position at the Daily Wire, right?
He's been constantly provided positive feedback.
By audiences, by the right-wing ecosystem, and even in some respects, just the general media ecosystem, which fed him huge amounts of attention, huge amounts of accolades.
So, yeah, I think all of that mixes in together, but it's clear when you look back at his early content that although he wasn't as far gone as he is now, he is essentially now just Alex Jones in the suit.
Much like Brett Weinstein is Alex Jones cosplaying as a scientist.
But Jordan was more an academic with tendencies towards grandiosity and, you know, a really strong political streak.
And now he isn't that.
So there has been a change, but I don't think it's that.
Lots of people have pointed out that, you know, it was after he had the coma.
That things started to go, like, extremely wrong.
And I don't think that's, I think the cracks were all there pre-coma.
Yeah, I like your thesis there, and I basically agree.
We've said before that it's perhaps that the grandiose narcissism is the secret piece of the puzzle that makes these things progressively get more and more extreme.
The seeds are there, the personality characteristics are there, but then because of the narcissism, the attention.
And the rewards is just like throwing petrol on a fire.
And I think we saw all of these same features in, I'm thinking of Jordan here, but also of other people we've covered, Brett Weinstein, James Lindsay.
Like you could see some concerning signs, but I think how you'd characterize it is that they were more careful then, like that they weren't quite as big, you know, they weren't quite as self-assured, they weren't quite as confident.
Yeah.
And the main difference in their content between now and before is that now that they have, like, complete confidence that they can say and do sort of anything in a way.
Yeah, and they're right.
They're right.
Like, this would be, well, it should be absolutely destructive of Jordan's credibility, various things that he said.
In the interview with Destiny.
But it's not.
It's just Tuesday.
It's just Tuesday.
Yeah, exactly.
He'll say more things tomorrow and his audience will grow and he can constantly reference the millions of people that are still saying he's great and so on.
So, yeah.
I just like with someone like Donald Trump, when you get increasingly more batshit crazy, it doesn't matter if the people that already didn't like you.
Dislike you more.
Yeah, don't like you more.
That doesn't matter, right?
And the constituency, like you said, I've seen the comments of Jordan Peterson fans about videos like this, and they don't see it.
They don't see anything amiss.
No.
Constantine Kessing would sign off on.
All of this.
He might say Hitler was right-wing, but who knows?
Like, yeah, it might be just a couple of months before you hear the same thing on the stage.
Give him time.
Give him time, Chris.
Give him time.
He's just starting out.
He hasn't been doing this as long as Jordan.
We'll see.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, that was...
A depressing journey into the mind of a self-indulgent ideologue.
But that's what we do.
That's what we do.
That's right.
It's not a glamorous job, but someone's got to do it.
Well, thank you, Chris.
I enjoyed this mini decoding.
Yeah, let's see where he goes from here.
Brett has already been on Infowars.
Will Jordan join him at some point?
You know, let's see.
Yeah, we should.
He doesn't really need to.
He doesn't need to.
I'm not a gambling man, but we should have one of those betting markets.
You know what I mean?
You know how they have betting markets?
We could have various things like that.
Will Jordan Peterson go on InfoWars?
That would be...
Yeah.
I would have put, give you, what is the one?
Good odds.
I would have had good odds that Brett is going to appear.
Jordan on InfoWars, I kind of feel like he doesn't need it.
He already has the Daily Wire.
So, like, what's the...
What's the benefit?
Yeah.
Fair enough.
All right.
Well, thanks, Chris.
We'll see you soon.
We're going to stay away from people like Jordan for a little while.
Next up is...
What's his name again?
Yuval Noah Harari, who is the lapdog of the WEF.
He is one of the villains in, you know, Jordan Peterson's pantheon.
So we're going to look into the eyes of Satan.
And see what dark malevolent forces lurks underneath.
Yeah, some kind of awful utopian or dystopian future is what he wants, I'm sure.
