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Nov. 9, 2023 - On Brand

03:07:28

OB #28 - Jordan Peterson

The personification of white male fragility, Jordan Peterson, just keeps coming on Russell's show, and so we knew we'd have to deal with him eventually. We cover their most recent two-hour-long interview, and it's every bit as gross as you might expect. Support us on Patreon! - patreon.com/OnBrand Righteous Gemstones Bangers Playlist - Spotify Link

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	This is On Brand, a podcast where we discuss the ideas and antics of one Russell Brand.
	I'm Al Worth, and each week I go through an episode of Brand Show with my co-host Lauren B. That's me!
	I'm Lauren B. And I'm the host that has no idea what we are about to listen to, but I know that it probably isn't great.
	Yep, it is most likely going to be bad, which is why we do the good thing before the bad thing.
	So, Lauren, what is your good thing this week?
	Tamales!
	I've still never had one.
	I've still never had one.
	I'm so sorry, but also fucking too bad.
	So I try to do like a twice Yearly giant tamale making that's never enough because they're delicious.
	So we eat them all immediately like little pigs.
	I get it.
	I would love to.
	I mean, I have friends that have, you know, like, oh, yeah, my mom makes 30 pounds of tamales every fall.
	And I was like, that's impressive.
	I can't do that.
	But, you know, having a full fridge would be great.
	Some freezer I'm also cool with, and it initially went very bad because I made my own vegetable stock for the filling stuff.
	Was it full of rats?
	No, I managed to keep the rats out of this one.
	Good job.
	No, but I think I burnt the vegetable stock because I'm a crazy person.
	I had to make my own but then I burnt it and so I made my first batch of like 30 tamales that were like really bitter and gross.
	I had to throw them away.
	No, that bad.
	That bad.
	Shit.
	That's why I just haven't even brought it up to you.
	Because we've been talking about this off air.
	Because I'm very excited about this.
	And also, I did research the ability to mail them.
	I was excited.
	I was like, oh, it's winter.
	I can probably mail some overseas because we may or may not have been joking about that.
	It'll be cold.
	Air freight.
	Yeah.
	I mean, well, but they're gonna be in inside buildings sometimes.
	So I could make you very sick, which is a which is a drag.
	I'm very annoyed.
	But I'm also not going to pack them in dry ice because come on.
	You could I think that we should just find you a place where you can get to Molly's hard to like, I've never seen them in this country, not once.
	And also, I mean, patrons, if you don't mind some of your funds going on dry ice for me to eat a tamale, then...
	I am 100% down with that, but it's up to you guys.
	You tell us, you tell us, because I will do it.
	Or if you're in the UK and you're like, yes, there is a tamale place and it's so well, yeah.
	Yeah, equally, yeah.
	The much easier option is if someone knows where to find or how to make tamales in this country.
	There's a restaurant, yeah.
	Because I fucking love Mexican food.
	That is my favorite cuisine.
	If I had to pick one, it would be that one.
	Also, we're in my dietary restriction situation, so like, I'm, yes, and I also love Mexican food.
	And we're a little spoiled where we're at, but I agree.
	It's still kind of hard because like tamales are, they mostly only make them with meat around here.
	And so, and they're all, they always run out at like 3 p.m.
	because everybody wants them and they're delicious.
	So I'm fucking psyched that like, I worked it out, fixed the issue.
	Sorted out the problem and they're like, I mean, we just make ourselves sick, like eating all the tamales.
	So what's your good thing?
	My good thing this week is algorithms.
	And do you know what?
	I know it sounds abstract, because generally speaking, algorithms are something I detest, especially.
	But in this case, specifically Spotify algorithms.
	Oh, have your daily mixes been working your pussy out this week?
	That's fantastic.
	I don't know how else to express it.
	I'm sorry.
	I've never heard that one.
	I like it.
	My pussy has been worked out this week, but yeah.
	Well, they do this relatively new kind of thing where they'll refresh a mix every, I don't know, six hours or something, and they'll give you a new thing.
	Oh, so it's more than just the three daily mix.
	Yeah, yeah.
	And I like to confuse the algorithms with music at the best of times because I listen to things all across the board.
	I'll go from fucking jazz to classical to hip-hop to the extremest of metals.
	But the last couple of weeks, or the last week certainly, I had a couple of days where I spent time listening mostly to your Righteous Gemstones bangers playlist, because what a playlist.
	It's been our go-to at this point for years.
	It's so good, and it's linked in an off-brand somewhere.
	If someone wants the link, it's somewhere around there.
	I'm gonna make a note so I don't forget right now.
	If I remember, I'll put it in the show notes.
	Yeah, we'll figure it out.
	But yeah, Righteous Gemstones bangers.
	Search for it on Spotify, you'll probably be able to find it.
	Hell of a playlist.
	I've been listening to a lot of that, and then a lot of Rockabilly and Outlaw Country.
	And so, like, I've been having playlists that have been, like, a combination of, like, Sam and Dave and Volbeat.
	And, you know, shit like that.
	I'm just like, oh, this is a great day.
	I'm getting, like, I don't know, funk and attitude and, like, all kinds of great stuff.
	And I'll be like, ah, then Little Richard, then Johnny Cash.
	I'm like, oh, fantastic.
	It is great.
	There's some fucking hilarious, very, like, I mean, yeah, there's some hilarious, like, Outlaw Country dudes that have made it to the playlist.
	And to explain the Righteous Gemstones Bangers playlist, there's no, like, soundtrack that you can look and just, like, listen to.
	It's, like, music from the show each season, and it's mostly, like, the instrumental stuff or whatever, which they also, I mean, the sound design is absolutely great.
	But I am a total, like, I'm, you know, anytime I hear, I'm like, I haven't heard that song before, which like, I don't get stumped a lot, you know, like listening to most things.
	So like, or, you know, like most like regular old TV shows.
	I, you know, like I, uh, but man, especially on the first season and a little bit on the second and it's same thing happened with Eastbound and Down.
	Like they can stump, I'm like, Oh, I've never heard this before.
	And I scurry up to my, to my, um, my TV and I hold my Shazam right next to the TV.
	So I make sure to do it.
	I get very excited.
	That's how I know a music supervisor's done a good job, is if I have to shazam it, then I'm like, good going.
	If I'm into it enough to look it up and I already don't know it, then you've done a fucking good job.
	I've thrown some on there too that just have either been recommended or aren't that great.
	I'll clean it up a little bit.
	That fucking Little Richard one with Quincy Jones, Money.
	Money, money, money, money.
	Holy shit.
	The funkiest song in the universe.
	And it's Little Richard, so like the attitude.
	There's a lot of funk.
	I feel like Fatback Band is very funky.
	That, that, that yum, yum, give me some.
	That like, watch you, watch you, watch you.
	Yeah, it sounds like Shaft, the Shaft soundtrack.
	Yes.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	There's a lot of really good and very silly, dumb, fun.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	Right?
	We should be moving on from it.
	It's a little weird.
	We should, but it's so good.
	Why are we just listening to it?
	It's gotten so much play.
	We're still living for it.
	Yeah, go on.
	This is why I'm happy with the algorithm, because it's giving me things that are... Oh, and I was listening to the Blues Brothers soundtrack as well, which obviously combines well with those kind of things.
	Sam and Dave below, yes.
	Exactly, right?
	And so I'm getting all these recommendations that are adjacent to all of those things.
	Absolutely!
	Also, yes, if you would like more funk soul and garage and fuzz and prog in your algorithm on Spotify, I can help.
	I'm here for you.
	Check out some of the off-brand episodes.
	We do a Music Is Nice segment every now and then, and we need to do another one, actually.
	It's been a little while.
	And I was like, I need to clean up some of the playlists that I've just, like... I'm working a lot, I'm in a hurry, and I'm like, I'll just throw a whole album on there, whatever!
	Or like, oh, I'm curious about this album, and I just, like, throw it in those playlists.
	Like, that's not a playlist anymore.
	That's just Lauren being kind of like... Well, I don't know.
	If you get a collection of specific albums and then it's a playlist where you're supposed to put it on Shuffle, that could work.
	That could work.
	I've got a couple of those.
	I'd like to pretend I was being that responsible.
	But no, it's just album after album after album.
	Leaving laundry in the washing machine until you can get to it.
	He just... Sometimes you just need to run the washing machine again instead of letting it sit there.
	And I may have let him sit a little bit, but...
	I'm happy to do that.
	That sounds like a fun saying.
	And I think there's two more good ones that I found.
	But the sound design is really good.
	And they got to do a lot of like, you know, since what they're doing is very specific to this type of like show, which actually that okay.
	One thing.
	The playlist, and because we like Righteous Gemstone so much, has gotten actual, like, big megachurch stuff in our feeds.
	Like on- That's funny.
	That is funny.
	Instagram.
	And it's upsetting.
	I mean, Mike sends me some stuff that he can find that's like, oh no, this is a person who Because it seems like a joke, you know?
	You're like, oh this is another Eric Andre sketch.
	Oh wait, this is a sincere person.
	Yeah, when life satirizes itself, and I feel like we've been there for quite a while to be perfectly honest, it's why no one can expect any new seasons of The Thick of It any time soon.
	It's because British politics just got too fucking insane, which is a bitter pill to have to swallow.
	I've seen that a lot!
	Yeah yeah yeah yeah!
	So we have a show to deal with and normally here we'd thank some new patrons but there aren't any this week and hey that's okay it absolutely happens but I would like to take a moment to encourage you to sign up if you haven't already.
	We have great fun and serious fun as well in Off-Brand our full-length exclusive show just for patrons sometimes going up to like three hours And I really want to reach our next Patreon stretch goal, which is going through Brandemic, Russell's last comedy special with a comedian guest to dissect not only the bullshit he says, but how good or bad he is at comedy.
	Because, you know, I kind of want to hear from the pros in that respect.
	I have my feelings, but, you know, I'm not a student of comedy.
	I'm just an appreciator.
	Also, I think comedians, where they are at in 2023, Can sometimes be very different than where they were in, say, 2015.
	I think it's interesting to see where folks are at, you know?
	Yeah.
	Because some guys are really coming back in a bad way!
	Yes, yeah, yeah.
	And really, yikes!
	Yeah, there's a bit of that.
	If anyone wants to support us in what we do, become an Awakening Wander, join the Invisible Hand, or donate on an elevated tier, please head to patreon.com slash onbrand and you will have our eternal gratitude.
	It is this which allows us to be editorially independent and ad-free, and as a patron you will also get a shout-out on the show and access to our patron-only show Offbrand, where we talk about pretty much anything but Russell Brand.
	And please note that while you can easily listen to our audio version anywhere you can find podcasts, you can also watch us on YouTube or if you listen in the Spotify app, the video should come up there too.
	Right out the gate, we have an update on the state of Russell's legal situation.
	Many of you may have seen that there has been yet another person come forward about Brand, this time from 2010 during the filming of the flop remake of Arthur.
	Oh yeah!
	Yeah, we can laugh about that.
	I forgot all about it.
	Terrible.
	Just terrible.
	The woman... The next bit is less funny.
	The woman in question was an extra on set and has stated that Russell forced her into a toilet cubicle and then forced her to perform oral sex while a member of the film crew guarded the door.
	Oh no.
	Yeah, there has been a lawsuit filed in New York and this is the first proper legal proceeding that we are seeing against Brand, albeit in a civil court.
	Warner Brothers are also included in the suit as they are seen as having aided and abetted the offence.
	Very interesting.
	There is also an interesting claim that Brand was intoxicated and was swaggering around set with a vodka bottle in hand.
	This is the first allegation we've seen of Brand not being sober and I will be very curious to see if anything comes of that.
	Suffice to say, if you're willing to lie about being a rapist, you're probably willing to
	lie about being sober.
	But as ever, I await a reasonable amount of evidence for such a thing.
	With any luck, other members of the film crew will come forward about at least some of the
	allegations.
	Yeah, that's that's pretty much where I'd be a lot more forgiving if you fall off the
	wagon and because shit happens and life's tough.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	And you don't also rape?
	Like...
	Oh, yeah, this...
	That one is one I'm not going to be upset about, but it's the combo for me.
	And don't then lie about it and kind of add it to your own mythos.
	It was only not that long ago, it was like, oh, I've been 20 years sober now, so if that turns out to be a lie, then like...
	Yeah that's um that's that's some bullshit right there um but yeah in terms of the allegations in general I would like to make it clear in Russell's own words yet again.
	Oh and also I raped someone once!
	Yeah um yeah yeah uh yeah so um Brand and his representatives are supposedly yet to respond to the suit, as of today, and Brand is way too busy talking to the guest that we're going to be covering this week.
	As ever, I'm going to let Brand introduce the guest.
	Hello there, you Awakening Wonders.
	Thanks for joining me for a very special edition of Stay Free with Russell Brand.
	We've had a massive, extraordinary, revealing, and deep conversation with Jordan Peterson.
	It's the first time we've spoken for a long while, or certainly spoken publicly, because Jordan Peterson and I communicate a lot about the culture.
	I talked to him personally about what I've been through and what I've been going through.
	He's an extraordinary mind and an extraordinary man and he has an incredible ability to ascertain just what's going on and obviously he ain't afraid to offer his opinion on what's going wrong in the world.
	Today, because he's over in the UK to talk about ARK, which is his consortium discussing potential solutions for the world, and you should check that out.
	There's a link in the description if you want to learn more.
	We talk about, this being Jordan Peterson, is In particular, the war in the Middle East, a kind of living, vivid symbol of end times.
	What specifically is the legacy of Judaism to world faith and to world solutions?
	The debt owed by, in Jordan Pearson's view, Christianity and Islam To the originator of the monotheistic faiths, the Abrahamic faiths as they're more commonly known.
	Of course, we talk about kindness.
	Of course, we talk about ways in which we can change the world.
	The first 15 minutes will be available wherever you're watching this right now, but then...
	We will have to, just because of the nature of free speech.
	It's no longer even about just our alliance to our platform.
	It's a necessity now.
	You know that.
	Free speech is being closed down.
	You are not allowed to communicate independently.
	You are not allowed to think independently.
	And if you still believe you are able to communicate and think independently, that's because your communication of thought is no threat to the establishment.
	He says, on his YouTube channel.
	Okay.
	Sure, dude.
	Apparently, our thoughts are no threat to the establishment.
	I'm pretty sure we've openly discussed how many, many current and former world leaders should be in prison and how the entire system of capitalism needs to be dismantled, which is more than Russell ever gets to doing.
	And yet, we are the ones whose speech is no threat to the establishment.
	Okay, buddy.
	I also, I agree that Jordan Peterson is an extraordinary man!
	Yes, yes, yeah.
	I think from a different direction, but oh, he's extraordinary alright.
	Yeah, there are arguments that can be made.
	Also, we spoke briefly about how Brand conditions his audience last week, but that clip there went pretty hard.
	Like, he's past even telling people to do their own research and that kind of shit and is just making a statement and saying, you know this, don't look into it, you know this, because I've said it a billion times and that makes it true, YouTube is shutting down free speech, it couldn't possibly be that I'm spreading harmful bullshit for profit.
	You know this!
	Thought stopping.
	We're stopping thought.
	Thought stopping.
	What are we talking about?
	You know this.
	Don't question it.
	You know it.
	The arc thing I will get onto a little bit later as to why the fuck Jordan Peterson is in the UK.
	Though interestingly he's not in the UK for this interview that they're doing.
	He's actually in a hotel in Amsterdam So they're still doing that digitally.
	I don't know.
	Could it line up the schedules to get him into the studio?
	I don't know.
	You can get Tucker Carlson, but you can't get Jordan Peterson, right?
	You fucking go figure.
	Anyway, we are not particularly going to cover Jordan Peterson's thoughts on the Israel-Palestine conflict or Judaism in general, because he mostly just goes on a very Zionist sort of ramble that is neither interesting nor surprising.
	I do have a question.
	Is it like a Christian Zionist kind of bent, if you could tell from that?
	That's a whole other evangelical thing.
	Yeah, there's a leaning, but it's not kind of extreme.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
	Honestly, his response is kind of boring.
	You don't say.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	He's like, oh, the Jews are... and he does make it sound like a hard Jew when he says it, a hard Jew, a hard J when he says it, but the Jews are confounding because they're a successful minority and If you can't tolerate a successful minority then your civilization is a failure and that kind of shit.
	Instead we are going to leap to a question about how people connect with God and I swear to fucking Christ these people can only ever think of existence in terms of movies.
	You see this detailed very well in the story of Pinocchio.
	So when Pinocchio is, of course, attempting to become real instead of being a puppet, being controlled from behind the scenes.
	And when he first encounters his conscience, this little voice that bugs him, hence the cricket.
	The conscience is also not very well tuned.
	It bugs him.
	Like, Jiminy Cricket is just a tramp who's been everywhere, but he doesn't have a home, and he doesn't really know what he's doing.
	And it's in the dialogue between the two of them that the ascension to the divine occurs, right?
	And the full realization of individuality.
	That, well, that's a good example of how a relationship with what's highest can be personal.
	Like, modern people have a very difficult time with that idea, right?
	It's like, most educated people, if they deign to contemplate God at all, it's as some abstract spiritual entity who really has very little to do with existence per se.
	Kind of the God of Einstein, let's say.
	Did he watch the movie, or did he see a poster of the characters of the movie and then make some postulations?
	There is a question, and you know what, there's a consistent theme about Jordan Peterson that seems to suggest very similar things about almost anything that he has thoughts about.
	Um, so Pinocchio is apparently actually about one's connection with God via the coming together of the self and the conscience in the form of a wooden puppet boy and a hobo cricket.
	Who knew?
	It's fucking not.
	It's fucking not.
	The analysis from actual literary experts is quite different.
	Often comparing Pinocchio to Odysseus, which I think is reasonable, Yeah.
	And I didn't know this, but it was actually written in the style of, you know, folk tales of peasants who venture out into the world, but are naively unprepared for what they find and get into ridiculous situations, specifically because this was at the time a major problem in Italy.
	So Pinocchio was written in 1883.
	And at that time, because of the industrialization of Italy and other countries, there was a growing need for reliable labor in the cities, which led to peasants, farmers and country folk migrating.
	not knowing what they were walking into and almost invariably ending up in precarious or life-threatening situations.
	It's also arguably what happened to Italians emigrating to the United States,
	with men arriving in America unable to find work, which in turn left them vulnerable to all sorts of criminal
	enterprises, or more commonly, just people paying basically nothing for
	labor because there was an unemployment crisis which they could take advantage of.
	Yay, capitalism.
	Welcome, fellow Paisans!
	Yeah...
	All of that aside, the only person I've found making comparisons to people's relationship with God in Pinocchio is Jordan Peterson.
	There is, of course, religious imagery in an Italian book from 1883, and honestly, it's quite difficult to write a story without religious imagery at this point, because according to these people, a big tree is religious imagery.
	A bush could be religious imagery, right?
	A puppy!
	Certainly!
	People who look for it will find it, I think, at the end of the day.
	But in this case, Peterson is doing that.
	He's just inflicting his worldview on a work of fiction in exactly the same way that Russell does with Watership Down.
	Going into Stalinist, you know, that kind of bent.
	He's doing the same thing.
	Peterson's doing the same thing here.
	Oh, so we're developing our own, like, Kind of, yeah!
	It is fascinating.
	Like these kind of weird fucking book reports from these people.
	It's really interesting.
	I would love to see it, I would love to see like that from right-wing grifters in general.
	Like give me fucking, I don't know, Steven Crowder's opinion on mouse or something.
	Like I would love to I would love to hear what these people think about any of this shit.
	I mean, that was a thing.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	Dudes got real upset about that for a minute.
	Oh no, I know they did.
	I don't know if Steven Crowder would.
	I don't know.
	We'll be collecting them, I think.
	Yeah, I think so.
	I'm keeping an eye out, you know.
	Give me fucking...
	I don't know.
	Tucker Carlson on Lolita would be interesting.
	I can guess how that one would go.
	I'm going to send that one out.
	How about that?
	I think we all should.
	No one wants to know.
	So I do want to briefly touch on his mentioning of Einstein's God, by the way, because it may come across as a glib sort of phrase, but Einstein's actual beliefs seemed to marry with what Peterson was saying there.
	I don't think he was full of shit on this one, which is surprising.
	So here's what Einstein said, quote, I cannot conceive of a personal god who would directly influence the actions of individuals or would sit directly in judgment on creatures of his own creation.
	I cannot do this in spite of the fact that mechanistic causality has, to a certain extent, been placed in doubt by modern science.
	My religiosity consists in a humble admiration of the infinitely superior spirit that reveals itself in the little that we, with our weak and transitory understanding, can comprehend of reality.
	Morality is of the highest importance, but for us, not for God."
	Unquote.
	So, he wasn't necessarily atheistic, but he wasn't a devout Christian in the traditional sense, arguably more spiritualist, and he kind of almost kind of held God at arm's length as just kind of a distant thing that was kind of Kind of up there, in a more kind of academic sense.
	But the whole thing of Einstein's religiosity has been a subject of debate for decades.
	I don't think he was talking shit on that score, but that is probably the most credit I'm going to give him for the next two hours of this interview.
	Yeah, because this interview was two hours long.
	It did also seem insulting and derisive to, like, Einstein's God didn't sound like something that Jordan Peterson put any stock in.
	No, no, no, no.
	He doesn't like it.
	No, no, no.
	He's definitely being derogatory towards Einstein there.
	Dude, it's Einstein, come on!
	Oh, but it's Jordan Peterson, though!
	Oh, this is true, this is true!
	Jordan Meterson, if you will.
	Oh, fucking hell.
	You're welcome!
	Has the answer for all things.
	Yeah, right?
	And answer!
	Yeah, yeah, this is it.
	Yeah, the interview was a couple of hours and it was released in two parts as well, and Russell managed to take up two days of his show with that, instead just shoving Jordan Peterson down everyone's throats for a couple of days.
	Which is like, okay, you wanted a couple of days off.
	Fair enough.
	Good to know.
	In the next clip, we are confronted with what will become the main theme of this show.
	The relationship between psyche and matter requires symbolism to catharsize it and to provide cartilage that would otherwise be absent, impossible to envisage without that Non-syntactical representation that symbols can provide.
	If the conscience, Jiminy Cricket, and the being, the entity, the marionette, the puppet, the boy, Pinocchio, to have a relationship at all, there is a kind of a tension in it, there is a polarity in it, and both of them require one another for its realization, and perhaps that's as good an explanation for God creating our kind as any.
	When you say that monotheism is the great Judaic artifact, do you feel that even in a secularized culture, the paradigm ultimately remains consistent?
	Even if it's humanist?
	Even if this alliance is transferred to the state?
	Even if the pinnacle of authority and power becomes the state?
	Is the imprature ultimately consistent?
	Do even those of us, and I wouldn't include myself actually, do even those who consider themselves to live in a post-religious society still will live within this monotheistic template which I suppose if it's anything at all offers us a kind of a centrifugal point rather than a pantheonistic or pervasive or even Or a panoply of potential gods and deities, there is one centralising entity and we intersect with that reality.
	I'd like to add to that already rather complex question, even by my own standards when I'm dealing with you, because I'm a different man when I'm dealing with you, you better believe it.
	How do we fold into this What advances Christianity offer us on that template, particularly if Isaiah in particular is offering us the messianic event as his key and defining prophecy.
	What is the function of Christianity as an advance of Judaism and even in a secularized society are we still operating within a kind of monotheistic template With the state, an increasingly authoritarian state, even under a liberal guise as a Canadian, you'll recognize what I'm saying there.
	Is that still the paradigm we're operating within?
	So there's two questions there really.
	Oh, boy.
	Well, you know, I do.
	I do think that that was a more pointed question than what he was leveling at Dawkins.
	I feel like there there was at least a direction he was trying to move, not just like, I'm going to wander over here for a bit and look at these bushes and talk about those.
	And, you know, yeah.
	So how good is monotheism really specifically Christianity?
	Oh, there are definitely more concise ways to phrase that question or those questions.
	I only listened to it one time, so what is he actually asking?
	Yeah, and you can see that Jordan Peterson's got his eyes closed there to try and take in what the fuck this guy is saying.
	The final kind of questions that he settles on is, you know, how is Christianity in advance of Judaism?
	How is it kind of an evolution of it?
	Which I don't recall actually gets answered.
	And then, you know, what about, like, are we still living in monotheism but with the state as God, as religion?
	Because that's one of his talking points that he likes.
	One of his make-em-ups, because it's insane.
	Yeah.
	Oh, so is Christianity, like, great?
	Or, like, super great?
	Like, that's basically what he's asking.
	Well, this is it.
	So, like, before we get into Peterson's response, I think it's important to note what we're dealing with here, and that is two Christian zealots who are about to argue why Christianity is the best and every other option is terrible.
	Especially secularism or atheism, right?
	So through the course of this interview we get a pretty stunning glimpse into the fragility of these two straight white men and a good few hints as to why it's Christianity specifically that they're providing is the answer to all things.
	So we have a conservative agreement fight that we're getting into right now is what you're saying.
	Yeah, yeah, I guess.
	There's not much fight going on.
	It's just a lot of, like, jerking each other off.
	It's a whole lot of that.
	It feels gross.
	It feels gross throughout.
	It's a theme.
	It's a theme that I'm noticing is like, boy, important man wants to talk to other important man about how important they are.
	Like, it's really fucking gross.
	Yeah, there is nothing about this that makes me feel clean, let's put it that way.
	So let's hear what Peterson has to say to Russell's questions, and I'm going to preface this clip by saying that here he very intentionally conflates the idea of secularism with nihilism, The idea that nothing has any meaning.
	So when he says nihilism in this next clip, he is speaking of secularism and atheism because to him they are the same thing.
	Okay, well the first one, well imagine that there's only, well there's three options.
	Nothing is of any value.
	That'd be the first option.
	That's a real finalized nihilism.
	Now the problem with that option is that it's It's not realistic, and in any sense, it's not existentially realistic in that it doesn't accord with our experience, but it's also not practically realistic.
	It doesn't accord with our experience because if you dispense with all the positive meaning in life as a consequence of being nihilistic, you won't dispense with the pain and the terror.
	And so what you do if you're nihilistic is reduce life to pain and terror, not to nothing.
	And so that seems like a really bad deal.
	And then, because pain and terror are by definition what's negative about life, so you can't elevate them to what's positive.
	That's not without inverting the very basis for communication itself.
	Okay, so then we can put that off the table.
	There's no life has no meaning theory, because you can't get rid of the pain and the terror.
	So, You could say life has no meaning other than pain and terror, you know.
	Now that's a pretty damn dismal judgment, and I also think that's not in accord with people's experience, but at least it's more logically coherent.
	Is that three?
	We're going to get to the other two in a minute.
	So according to Jordan Peterson's conception of things, to be an atheist or secular humanist is to view life through a lens of life has no meaning except pain and misery, which is a total straw man argument that he is making up.
	The phrase I tend to use when someone is coming from a position of having to do mental backflips to make their point is intellectual dishonesty, and I'm going to be straight up and tell you that the phrase describes Jordan Peterson to a fucking T. He is both intellectual and dishonest, but he also intentionally ignores basic pushback to his ideas that even a philosophy freshman could manage in service of claiming that he has the answers.
	In this instance, in case I have to point out the blatantly fucking obvious, is that atheists and secular humanists find plenty of meaning in life and experience all manners of joy through love and nature and all the things that people often ascribe to feelings of religiosity.
	It's almost like all the meaning is in life.
	Right, well this is it.
	Atheists and secularists just don't believe that the meaning extends beyond life, or at the very least have never been presented with any evidence for that that they've found to be sufficient.
	To me, it makes my time here more precious.
	I don't have an eternity waiting for me, or an afterlife of any sort, or a shot at reincarnation.
	I have to use my time here to extract the most meaning, value, love, and positivity from life that is possible, while also giving as much as I can back to those around me and to our society in general.
	My time here is finite and precious, and I can't help but think, personally, I would struggle to feel that way if I knew I had a heaven waiting for me.
	Like, I know I spend all my time working, but I'm actually a deeply lazy person.
	And especially in a system where I can ask for forgiveness and immediately receive it and still go to heaven, I would absolutely be sat in my boxes playing Xbox until I shuffled off this mortal coil.
	Or wanking and eating expensive German biscuits.
	But that is, of course, just me.
	Yeah, you don't have a Sky Daddy that is signing permission slips for you to misbehave whenever you feel bad enough about it, or you think that you did something wrong and you don't want to get caught.
	We don't have an excuse daddy.
	And just like the concept of an afterlife in general, to me, especially if it's one that I knew with any certainty that was there, I would be like, Oh shit, well, why am I bothering to do stuff now?
	I can kick the can down the road until I am in literal heaven.
	Yeah, they had to make like so many rules, if anyone actually believed that that was true, to keep people from being like, well, I'm out, or just like punching the clock.
	If heaven existed the way that it's pitched, Which is just some notions.
	Like, it's not, like, biblical, really?
	You know what I mean?
	Yeah, I think that... I'd be like, well, that sounds way better.
	I'm gonna do that instead.
	Yeah, no, no, 100%.
	And punch the clock, human-wise.
	Yeah, they had to make up a bunch of rules as to why suicide wasn't allowed.
	All of a sudden, like, ah, this could be it.
	This is a loophole.
	Exactly, yeah.
	We need to fix that.
	They had to really clamp down on the self-service option, shall we say.
	Yeah, yeah.
	By the way, did I just make a peep show reference without you noticing, or did you just gloss past it?
	I'm curious.
	Wanking and eating expensive German biscuits.
	That's something that... I did miss that one.
	They don't always stick with me, because listen, every single episode is perfect.
	Well, no, that one sticks with me because as a British person, I... All you want to do is wank and eat German biscuits.
	I mean, no, but what does enter the back of my mind as a biscuit-obsessed people is like, which biscuit is he talking about?
	I think he's talking about Chocoliebnitz biscuits, but that's just me.
	I mean, they're at least 50% chocolate.
	Delicious.
	Anyway, let's hear the second of Jordan Peterson's options for life.
	Okay, next.
	Well, there's either a unity that attempts to make itself manifest, or there isn't.
	There's a plurality.
	Okay, now, if there's a plurality, what's the consequence?
	Well, the consequence is that you're torn apart by inner conflict.
	That's the psychological consequence, because you're pointing in all sorts of different directions at once.
	Maybe you're a war of different desires, let's say, a war of different impulses, and that's a state of confusion and chaos, and we know technically that that's associated with both anxiety and hopelessness.
	And I say we know that technically because the most advanced neuroscientists in the world, Carl Friston among them, foremost perhaps, has already determined that Anxiety indexes entropy, so chaos and confusion.
	And chaos and confusion demolish hope, because hope is an emotional manifestation that makes itself known in relationship to a defined goal.
	So you feel hope, and that's positive emotion.
	That's dopaminergically mediated positive emotion.
	You only feel that while you see yourself advancing towards a goal.
	Now, if the goals are diverse and disunified, so no monotheism, let's say, then confusion reigns and so does hopelessness.
	Okay, so... If there's no monotheism... Shit's going down in Chicago, by the way.
	If there's... Again, if we had to pause... If we had to pause for sirens... Every time there were sirens, yeah, nothing would ever get made in Chicago.
	So what he's saying here is that if there's no monotheism, if there's a plurality, then confusion reigns and so does hopelessness.
	So on an individual level, if you haven't found God in whatever way, you are going to be a chaotic, confused mess just running around and being anxious about all the various options laid out before you.
	And if you apply this to society on a wider scale, so if lots of people aren't monotheistic or haven't found God in whatever way Jordan Peterson deems appropriate, then the whole of society is going to be a confused, anxious mess, and the only answer to that must be everyone coming to monotheism and getting under the same umbrella, both personally and societally.
	First things first, I reject the premise.
	The idea that monotheism only leads to chaos and anxiety is stupid, reductive, and entirely ignorant of history.
	You're a student of history, Lauren, right?
	Were the Greeks monotheistic?
	Were the Romans?
	Ancient Egypt?
	The Aztec?
	The Mayans?
	Fuck no, right?
	Most of the quote-unquote successful civilizations from history were polytheistic.
	And sure, they all rose and all fell, but so shall we, eventually.
	There are prominent religions today that are polytheistic, like Hinduism, Shinto, or Paganism.
	To say nothing of African religions or indigenous American beliefs, right?
	So if Jordan Peterson is to be believed, all of these civilizations were a complete clusterfuck, and people following these religions today are in shambles, which again is just so obviously intellectually dishonest upon even a cursory examination.
	It's absurd.
	That's okay.
	Also, yes.
	Yes!
	Of course!
	And what I honestly feel, like, you know, the older I get and the more I think about this, because I was also, hmm, I've been a nerd from the jump.
	Obviously, Greek myths and dinosaurs, listen, that was the ish when I was wee, when I was little.
	Of course, right?
	Kind of all of us a little bit.
	For me it was dinosaurs in space, but yeah.
	Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
	That's the other option, really.
	And so the Pantheon is so much more interesting, especially as like fables.
	I feel like there's something a lot more honest and manageable about the imperfect Pantheon as like, Relatable and or like you relay these ideas to teach morality instead of like this perfect one unifying God that kind of doesn't make any sense if you think about it at all.
	It's just sort of confusing and weird.
	And we have all these other deities under like Catholicism.
	I'm just the one.
	I'm sorry.
	Well, this is it.
	I don't know.
	I do find that because there is kind of more humanity within the deities, within the polytheistic deities, typically speaking, I do find that more relatable and more believable because I have seen aspects of those deities within life.
	I think there are reasons beyond white nationalism.
	For instance, why Norse mythology has been on uptick in recent years.
	I don't think it's just the Nazis co-opting things.
	Um, you know, I think people are liking that shit.
	They're like, hey, you know what?
	This stuff makes sense to me.
	Couple of ravens on a one-eyed guy's shoulder, and I'm like, ah, okay, fair enough.
	Yeah, let's... Frost Giants, yeah, let's go for it.
	Yeah, it's like, cool.
	The imagery is cool, the stories are neat, and you can learn something.
	It's like this... Way cooler than Christianity, that's for sure.
	Well, I mean, it's, there's, there's so many, yeah, I mean, fables make, kind of make more sense.
	That's the thing is you can't relate to something that is perfect because you're like, oh, fully man and fully God.
	Well, but what?
	Like it's, it's, it's so unrelatable.
	I almost can't be that mad at a Christian for being confused.
	Cause that's the thing is like, Jordan Peterson putting forth the notion that monotheism and Christianity assuages one's anxiety in any way is ludicrous.
	It's absolutely ludicrous!
	A little bit.
	A little bit, yeah.
	It's not a religion that is designed to do that.
	It'll tell you, don't be anxious.
	Don't be anxious at all.
	Whereas I think there's some Greek myths that are like, "Meh." - Don't do these other
	5,000 things. - Right.
	Well, it's like, well, you can't be anxious about it, but also you're never doing it right.
	And that's like, if you've got this like imperfect, shitty pantheon, you know, Zeus is running around
	doing terrible things, like, yeah, sometimes the guys--
	Yeah, Zeus is a piece of shit.
	Yeah, and sometimes the guys in charge do terrible things and get away with it.
	And like, sometimes you can intervene and it's the right thing to do if you have the capacity.
	There's something more relatable and understandable to those stories.
	Yeah, I completely agree.
	I completely agree.
	Also, he brought up the work of Carl Friston there, Carl J. Friston, who is a British neuroscientist.
	So, Friston is responsible for a good number of significant contributions to various fields, including functional neuroimaging, computational neuroscience, and neuropsychology.
	All of it far beyond my understanding.
	He is best known for coming up with the Free Energy Principle, a theoretical framework for understanding how biological systems, including the brain, maintain order and adapt to their environment.
	According to the Free Energy Principle, systems, including biological systems like the brain, resist a state of disorder and are constantly trying to minimize the amount of surprise or uncertainty they experience.
	The framework itself is intensely complicated and based upon mathematics that quite simply fries my brain.
	It's extraordinarily complicated.
	It fries the brains of most people.
	And while proponents of the free energy principle like to use it as the answer to all things, the reality is the amount of empirical evidence backing it up is thus far quite limited, possibly because of its inherent complexity.
	And so the jury is still out on a lot of things.
	But one thing I absolutely couldn't find within this free energy principle, which I'm pretty sure is what Peterson is referring to, is confirmation or evidence that anxiety indexes entropy, as he put it.
	He can argue that being the case as much as he likes in broad strokes, but Friston's work shouldn't be dragged into it, because while yes, his system provides for the idea that the brain minimizes uncertainty wherever possible, that does not mean that multiple choices inherently creates uncertainty.
	And it also does not mean that we are not all bags of impulses and desires and conflicting emotions, because we all are, every single day, including anyone who subscribes to a religion.
	It's just part of what it is to be human, and suggesting that any one religion fixes that is pure fantasy and borderline heresy, to be perfectly honest, because, you know, supposedly we were made this way for a reason.
	Right.
	Well, we can't.
	We can't start down the African route.
	Nope.
	Nope.
	They don't.
	No.
	Why should we?
	No, no, no, no.
	Man, that's... Okay.
	Leave Carl Friston out of your damn mouth.
	Is that like a new version of calling everything quantum?
	Is that like...
	I don't know, I don't know.
	A new, not-tired quantum moment?
	Like, it sounds like that's just a different... Locky concept to invoke, I guess.
	Yeah, because it sounds very abstract, but it can be applied to things.
	It does make sense, but yeah, to people far more intelligent than me.
	So, you know, I'm sure a member of our audience could explain this.
	That might be, yeah, this is a science issue, I'm calling it, it's a science issue, so I'm leaving it alone.
	I do think you understand it enough to be like, that's not what Jordan's talking about.
	Yes, no, I feel like I understand it about as well as Jordan Peterson, because again, Maybe, maybe.
	I mean, the thing is, he's not dumb.
	He does have an intellect, but it's also not in the direction of what this framework is.
	Because, like I said, it's intensely mathematical.
	And this guy is not that.
	This guy right here, he's a words person, is what he is.
	He deals with some science, does some of the psychological stuff.
	But mostly, he's a words person.
	He's not a numbers person.
	Here's my definition for a smart person, though.
	An understander.
	Like, an understander of stuff is when you explain it, things make more sense, not less sense.
	Like, if you can't explain it to a five-year-old or, you know, like a fifth grader, five-year-old, I don't remember how the phrase goes.
	Like, if you can't explain it to a kid, then you don't really understand a thing.
	I mean, obviously there are complex ideas, but I got explained a lot of complex ideas.
	I was very fortunate whenever I was a kid, and it's because people knew their shit.
	And it's not that hard.
	The thing is, it's not on the kid to understand it all, but to be able to put it in simple terms means you understand something.
	And he just makes- To a degree.
	I do think- Flowery, complex, for no good reason.
	Oh yeah, no, no, he's fucking terrible.
	I will say that I think communicating complicated ideas and reducing them down is an art form.
	It can be really tough, especially when you're dealing with complex science.
	It's one of the things that fucking Dawkins is actually good at.
	As a science communicator, reducing ideas down to their basest form and being able to say, like, here's this thing.
	That's predominantly what he was known for, really.
	As well as the science, it was mostly like, hey, this guy is really good at explaining stuff to people.
	Jordan Peterson is the exact fucking opposite.
	He will complicate things and go off on tangents, and yeah.
	You will leave more confused than when you entered, most likely.
	But to me, that's a bad teacher!
	And that's supposed to be his job!
	He is a teacher!
	Yes, no, he's a professor.
	He's a professor emeritus at the University of Toronto.
	I would be fucking livid if I was forced to learn from this person.
	Because I was like, this is bullshit.
	This guy is not...
	Yeah, no, I would not go there, personally.
	Or at least not to study the thing that he teaches, which I'm going to assume is some kind of psychology.
	So let's hear the third of Peterson's options, anyway.
	Let's hear where he lands.
	Now, if the goal is unified, which implies a unity underneath everything, let's say, then another problem arises, which is, well, what should the unity be predicated upon?
	Now, your observation was, and this is something Nietzsche pointed out back in the late 1900s or 1800s, that it's very easy for the collective or the state or something hedonistic to become the highest Unity.
	And for everything to be bent in that direction.
	Well, when the state becomes This source of unity, you have a Tower of Babel situation where people have built in a Luciferian manner, they have presumed to take on to themselves the value that should only be accorded what is truly transcendent.
	Then you get the collapse of the religious into the state, the failure to separate Caesar and God, you get the collapse of God into the state, then everything that the state does becomes tinged with religious significance and Well, let's put it this way, that's not good.
	And so that's how it seems to me.
	It's like, look, there's either a monotheism or there's a plurality.
	The cost of plurality is psychologically, it's anxiety and hopelessness.
	Socially, it's disunity, right?
	Because if your goal and my goal cannot be unified, then If we're occupying the same territory, we're definitely in conflict.
	It's the definition of conflict because we're pursuing.
	Now, you know, we could be walking side by side and at the moment your pursuits and mine have nothing to do with one another.
	But if there is a point where what you want and I want aren't in concordance, there's either going to be reversion to power.
	I'll try to dominate you.
	There's going to be conflict or some sort of one of us is going to give up.
	The alternative is to unify it.
	And a society is actually The manifestation of some implicit or transcendent unity.
	Compromise?
	Compromising!
	No.
	Why did he not say- No.
	Yeah, right?
	It's like, well, we can't have, I mean- No.
	The notion that, I mean, Christianity, famous unifying force in society.
	Are you fucking kidding me?
	If you spill enough blood, it works.
	Tell all the different kinds of churches that are within a block of my house.
	But, no.
	No!
	Well, yeah, there is that.
	There is that.
	Yeah!
	It's not!
	It's, it's, it's like, it's a profoundly divisive force.
	I'm still laughing at the idea of this man dominating anyone.
	So there's another premise here which I must immediately reject.
	We might need to define that actually if people aren't familiar with Jordan Peterson.
	Bless your heart if you are not.
	I think that what you're referring to is the name of like YouTube videos is Jordan Peterson dominates is in like a gotcha kind of like I mean in any way whatsoever.
	His idea was in conflict there.
	The idea of Jordan Peterson physically attacking someone is hilarious to me.
	He's also fucking slender, man.
	I can't imagine him being dominant in bed either.
	That's another situation that I think I would just find it.
	Don't you even try to put any of that picture in my head.
	He's already in, like, a hotel- like, he's sitting on the edge of a bed in a hotel room, like, right now.
	That's true.
	Picture, uh, picture Kermit- Kermit the Frog with a whip in hand, right?
	No, no, no.
	You've got it.
	Nope.
	Filibustering.
	No, no, no.
	You ain't gonna get- Okay, okay.
	So yeah, there is another premise here that I have to immediately reject, and that is the notion that without following a religion, people will turn to the state and view the state as a religious figure, and whoever is at the head of said state in particular.
	You know, Caesar becomes God, right?
	According to a survey done by the National Center for Social Research in 2018, 52% of the UK identifies as having no specific religion.
	It's a pretty high figure.
	It's a pretty high figure, especially for a country that, legally speaking, is still Christian.
	At that time, in 2018, we were cursed with Theresa May as our strong and stable Prime Minister, who had all the strength and stability of chocolate pudding.
	I can assure you that the general sense towards her was not reverence.
	Nor was it towards her predecessor, pig fucker David Cameron, or the flopsy haired racist
	philanderer who came later on, Boris Johnson.
	The closest I'd say we've come to a religious sense and a political following in this country
	in recent years was probably around Jeremy Corbyn, sort of our Bernie Sanders, and he
	stood for pretty much dismantling the status quo within the state itself.
	Even if we remove the people at the top, right, and focus on just the state itself, the British are very much not the type of people who go, oh, the government's doing it, so it must be good.
	I dare say we as a people are amongst some of the most cynical, pessimistic bastards the world has ever seen, with an inherent distrust of authority that harks back to most of our ancestors being peasant folk who were treated with disdain by those in power.
	I say all of this- King, though!
	There's a king, though!
	There is an exception for the monarchy.
	There is an exception for the monarchy within this.
	Weirdly, there's a weird fucking- There's a little crown on it!
	[C
	[M
	Parasocial relationship thing that we were discussing last week.
	I think it was an off-brand we were discussing this.
	Yeah, it's the same thing with the monarchy.
	There is an exception there.
	Yeah, but we like sparkly shit.
	That's so human.
	Like, y'all have a king, we have gritty.
	Listen, it all shakes out in the wash.
	Especially when it's just an old guy who goes around the country and shakes people's hands, because that's pretty much all he does at this point.
	Also, I'm a sucker for all the sparkly shit.
	I will show up!
	Technically, he has to sign things into law as well, because that's a quirk of our system.
	But it's one of those situations where like, well, if he didn't do it, we could just take that away from him.
	It's more special than a stamp, I think, you know?
	What, signing things into law?
	Well, like having a person do it with a bunch of spangles around them instead of just like a, you know, just a notarized like boop, you know?
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	No, no, for sure.
	For sure.
	It is nice.
	We're talking about theater to get everybody.
	Oh yeah.
	We do love theater.
	We do that.
	That is a thing in this country.
	Not defending the monarchy by any stretch, but.
	Oh no, total garbage should be dismantled.
	But, you know, I do understand why people have affection towards it, I disagree, but you know.
	Anyway, I say all of this about the British fairly proudly, in that if you want someone to be an inherently, almost automatically critical arsehole of something, the British is... we're a damn good place to start, right?
	We do not worship the state, and if you asked any random British person on the street what they thought of the government or politicians, the overwhelming answer would be, well, they're a bunch of self-serving lying bastards, aren't they?
	And yeah, that's just kind of where we stand as a country.
	You'd even argue that there were a lot of those ideas that made it here across the pond.
	One might think!
	Who kind of started a country!
	Yeah, exactly.
	Taken ungenerously, Peterson could be alluding to the notion of the welfare state here, but he hasn't brought it up right this moment, so neither shall I. In any case, we have landed on the preferred of Peterson's three options, which is, as he puts it, unity.
	Which must be universally predicated upon the same thing or there will be conflict and chaos.
	Simply put, everyone gets behind the same religion or it's all over.
	And this can only be the view if religion and his ideas of it are taken to their most extreme form, which is the idea of the end goal being everyone ends up Christian or everyone ends up Muslim, etc.
	In that conception of things, sure, Christians and Muslims would end up in a conflict because they're ultimately trying to evangelize the same people and each other.
	Religious wars are pretty well documented, historically speaking, but in most cases we have sort of evolved past that these days.
	At least, mostly.
	Again, heavy asterisk, but for the most part.
	In 2023, the concept of people of Different religions in most of the world not being able to live side by side is pretty fucking drastic.
	And, you know, it's in direct opposition to the very existence of large cities like London and New York, right?
	Massive multicultural melting pots where, hey, you've got everyone from all kinds of religions living.
	Apparently, according to Jordan Peterson, it's all terrible and they're all living in chaos and hate themselves and life.
	I would love just for him to pick a day ever in history where his idea is working.
	Like, truly.
	Working?
	Oh, working?
	Yeah.
	Yeah, no.
	Like, he's got this little idea that he has concocted on paper that if you ever plonk it down in real life is completely un- like, it's the Chicago School of Economics.
	It's a fucking fantasy by a fucking rich dick or two.
	Like, it has nothing to do with real life.
	No, no, exactly.
	If you get his idea on paper and compare that to a history book on paper, you'll see this does not add up at all in any way, shape, or form.
	None of this has ever happened or will happen in that way.
	Uh-huh.
	Yeah, I may or may not have been looking into different instances that we can point to because of some things that Russell has said, where a nexus of religions and cultures is actually thriving, and it's almost like all of them.
	It's like really, like anytime we're all just doing real good as like a species is when there's a lot of diversity.
	A lot of coexistence, one might say.
	Yeah.
	It's like more often than not, almost, that there's an overwhelming amount of evidence of that, in fact.
	But both of these guys take issue with that.
	Both of them.
	It is really interesting to see how much their ideas line up.
	It is really.
	Jordan Peterson's ideas line up with a lot of the shit that Russell says.
	It's just keeping your head in the sand about life and the world.
	It's amazing.
	Okay, all right.
	I mean it's pretty easy when you're a rich white guy.
	There's a lot you can keep your head in the sand about.
	And people think you're smart even though you talk like this.
	That's crazy.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Next we, in a long-winded kind of way because it's fucking Jordan Peterson, we discover something about technology.
	I suppose if you extract the sublime and perhaps more specifically even love, if the idea that the nuministic includes within it as well as or a type of fear, if it includes a type of love, a type of awareness of a unit of force, Then, and all you're left with is kind of material rationalism, then power to organize this material and rational space does become the only observable metric.
	You speak a lot, George.
	That's exactly what happens in the story of Genesis.
	That's exactly what happens.
	Well, the people who build the Tower of Babel are basically engineering technocrats who presume that the manipulation of the material world can produce the proper pyramid of power.
	That's a way of thinking about it.
	That's what the Tower of Babel is.
	It's a ziggurat that reaches to the sky.
	And as you just said, you can understand and you can see You can see why this is an attractive proposition.
	If we could only master the material world, we would be the masters of the cosmos and our psyches.
	And the problem with that is that it's simply not true.
	You know, you can be lost amidst the most glorious toys.
	And the other problem, of course, with the technological enterprise is that it produces Immense capacity for catastrophe, along with all of its abundance, and so if you don't have a wisdom, the wisdom that enables you to utilize your technological tools, they'll just destroy you.
	And that is what happens in the Tower of Babel, because it eventually collapses under its own weight, so to speak, and the people who inhabit it no longer even communicate with one another, because it's oriented in the wrong direction.
	Oh, it does not do that!
	So Jordan Peterson believes that if one were to approach technology without any religious guidance, a person would be led to complete collapse.
	Well, I guess half the people in the UK are just going to sort of implode at some point, myself very much included.
	I might as well make my peace with it, I guess.
	I mean, you know, the idea from a mythological standpoint of the Tower of Babel, I prefer Babel.
	I think it sounds better.
	Yeah, me too.
	Is that when an issue becomes overcomplicated, it becomes impossible to solve and will collapse from the weight of its complexity.
	That is the kind of general, general gist, you know, if you were being generous.
	Jordan Peterson is taking that, taking that kind of little nugget and taking it to mean, ah yes, unfettered access to smartphones and the internet without the guidance of an almighty God means your brain will melt.
	Yeah.
	See, what I've, I mean- What do you get from Babel?
	Give me, give me.
	Right?
	So, because I do think it's, as far as like an art tradition, it's always really interesting to me how people have chosen to represent it over the centuries.
	It always makes for really cool imagery.
	It, you know, kind of encourages like a Hieronymus Bosch type treatment, because it's a very weird story.
	And to me, what I get from people, because He said that it collapsed.
	No.
	No, no, no.
	God was angry that they were trying to build a ladder to heaven to meet God.
	The arrogance of man, right?
	Yeah, right.
	Well, like that, I mean...
	It could be read another way, which kind of seems nice, that they just wanted to be as close to God as possible and didn't necessarily understand how mad he'd be until he struck them down and destroyed- Like a toddler building a tower, you know?
	Yeah, collectively punishing everyone on Earth Who would have been unified because they could all communicate.
	God doing that in the Bible?
	Collectively punishing.
	Oh, it was only the one time.
	Don't worry about it.
	Never did it again.
	On the other hand, and what you're saying.
	Do you feel rain?
	It feels like it's raining.
	Sorry, carry on.
	Crazy.
	But you know what I mean?
	Pairs of animals everywhere.
	But you know what I mean?
	Like, oh yeah, God's extremely cruel or like arbitrarily cruel.
	So like, maybe I don't want to be on his team.
	Also, I think that it's a sticky wicket.
	What I was taught is that the problem was the hubris, a man's hubristic endeavors, and I think that is a sticky wicket for this person to be talking about.
	It's the implications of what hubris can do to you and your life and those around you.
	That is interesting, that is interesting.
	I don't know what else to say!
	Obviously, right.
	So I'm from a Christian country, despite half of us being atheists, right?
	And so things like Bible readings and that kind of thing are the norm in schools here.
	Like, in primary schools and secondary schools, you know, prayer and that kind of thing is in schools.
	That is a thing, and there's not really much we can do about it, because again, it's in the legal system.
	And so, you know, we are kind of taught various stories and shit, as children mostly, and I always kind of thought that the Tower of Babel was kind of There's a reason that kids hear the story and remember it.
	book. I was like, "Huh, that's interesting." It almost belongs more in one of the Greek
	kind of stories. It's such a kind of- There's a reason that kids hear the story and
	remember it. But also, the artistic interpretations over the centuries have
	kind of a lot of stories in the Bible that benefited from the creativity of people along the way.
	Spicing it up, painting it, putting it on a ceiling.
	They were written across hundreds of years.
	Well, and depicted across hundreds and hundreds of years, which can add a lot of flavor, but Oh God, yeah.
	They've been punched up quite a bit.
	I would say so.
	Since the original conception, but it is interesting to kind of, the different interpretations is interesting because obviously again, you know, Christian story, but I grew up in a predominantly atheist kind of country.
	Mostly I grew up in an atheist household, very kind of non-religious schools for the most part, despite having to Throw religion in there, so I do wonder if part of the difference in interpretation will come down to the way it was taught when I was in school.
	Well, but we kind of boil down the hubris thing, because no one has told me about, no one described the Tower of Babel as a Babel.
	You're right, it's better.
	Yeah, Tower Babel as a story, you know, no one said to me, this is an example of how terrible God is to his people.
	I just kind of got that myself, like, wow, that seems like setting them up to fail again, and then imposing collective punishment on- Well, that's one of those things that you feel as a child, isn't it?
	When you hear that kind of story as a child, you're like, oh, that doesn't sound nice.
	That sounds like an angry adult to me.
	That's how that's, you know, when you're a child, that is how that sounds.
	Yeah, because punishment kind of seems arbitrary because your brain... Sounds like I made dad mad by building this tower and so dad is going to destroy it and kill me.
	But I think the hubristic kind of reading of it is kind of the same.
	I would think, essentially.
	Which, again, I don't know.
	Like, why do you gotta bring that one up?
	But I do think the Bible story is just another version of movie.
	Like, it's just a movie reference for them.
	Even if it's not conscious.
	I guess.
	I guess.
	It could just seem like it has more gravitas because it's the Bible.
	He does keep doing it.
	He does keep doing it.
	It's really irritating.
	Because you can say anything about him!
	Pretty much.
	Especially as half the people have never read the fucking book.
	Yeah.
	Atheist.
	I know a lot about it.
	That's what we do.
	That is often the way.
	In the next clip Peterson says something kind of true and then something very false in true propagandist style.
	We know that children, infants will die without love.
	Now, and I mean this technically, this is well studied.
	So, a hundred years ago, this is a very interesting story, a hundred years ago, in the typical orphanage, the mortality rate for kids under one was a hundred percent.
	And this was despite the fact that these orphanages would provide shelter and food, let's say, the so-called necessities of life.
	They all died and no one knew why.
	And this woman appeared in Germany.
	She worked in a ward where the mortality rate was quite low.
	And a physician from New York got interested in this and went to Germany to see what was going on.
	And there was a nurse there named Fat Anna.
	And Fat Anna would take the orphans out of their cribs, which wasn't common practice at the time, and just, like, pick them up and hold them and pack them around on her hip and, you know, have a relationship with them.
	Some physical manifestation of love, and those infants didn't die.
	And then we saw this in Romania, again, when there were orphans there who had the benefits of the state utopia, everything but love, and they were, if they didn't die, they were damaged beyond belief.
	Without love, children cannot live.
	Literally!
	Like, metaphysically, yes.
	Philosophically, theologically, all that, too.
	But no, just absolutely practically, love is what entices the infant to the adventure of life.
	That's definitely the case.
	So, first off, I couldn't find- Ow.
	Ow.
	Alright, okay.
	So I couldn't find anything about a nurse called Fat Anna.
	No shit.
	Because none of that ever happened.
	None of that ever happened.
	At this point, I'm thinking he just really wanted to call a woman fat, and just twice, Fat Anna!
	Fat Anna!
	Like, ah, she's German, you buy it, right?
	Hearty woman was Anna.
	Now it is true that orphanages in the 19th century across the board had terrible infant mortality rates, particularly for those under a year old, but it was not 100%.
	It was nowhere close.
	What Peterson was describing, children being given the basics of nutrition and what was required for survival, is somewhat accurate.
	During the 1940s and 50s, the psychologist René Spitz conducted studies on infants who were raised in orphanages with very little human contact and interaction.
	These children received adequate nutrition and basic hygiene care, but lacked individual attention, emotional care, and stimulation.
	Many of these children became apathetic and unresponsive, and some failed to thrive and died despite the absence of organic disease.
	This condition was sometimes referred to as hospitalism or anaeclytic depression.
	As for why this was so commonplace until the fairly recent past, Well, for a start, orphanages were and are traditionally understaffed and overcrowded, meaning that even if a member of staff did want to have the time to be caring towards the babies, they couldn't.
	There were also some incredible misunderstandings around attachment and development, But one of the biggest issues, I would say, personally, is conservatism in its true form.
	The idea of emotional distance to get a child to learn to fend for itself rather than relying on the parent.
	The concept of, oh, if you pick up the child when it cries, it'll just cry all the time, so let it cry until it stops.
	Like it or not, and that's a fucking belief that people still have now.
	Like it or not, this conservatism is wrapped up in religiosity, right?
	Spare the rod, spoil the child, and so on and so forth.
	And it's not lost on me that most orphanages until the very recent past were run by one religion or another, most likely the Catholic fucking church.
	Peterson ignores all of this to instead say, Aha!
	If people aren't in a system that loves them like God loves them then they will wither and die and that is all you can expect from the state which loves no one.
	Whereas the reality of the situation is of course that when things are run by the state they are regulated heavily and carefully to ensure the safety of those who are a part of it.
	Ding, ding, ding.
	Oh, hey, what do you know?
	There's also like a tinge of misogyny to it.
	You know what I mean?
	Like that there's this kind of women.
	All these dumb women.
	Yeah, like women didn't know how to be a, didn't know how to mother and no women, cause I'm sorry.
	Do you think there were men working in Victorian orphanages?
	No.
	And so they just, Didn't know how to be mothers except for Fat Anna?
	That is so fucking absurd!
	Yeah, I couldn't find anything about Fat Anna or about fucking orphanages in Romania.
	I couldn't find anything about this journalist in New York that got interested.
	This man read that in a chain email that he got on fucking AOL.
	I don't know where he got it.
	And it's stuck in his fucking head because it's bullshit.
	That's obviously not true.
	I'm not saying that there isn't a difference, right?
	Obviously, scientifically, they absolutely have been, you know, the monkey with the, you know, the wire and the whatever.
	Right.
	Obviously.
	But the way that he's putting this forth, because Right, and it's also so black and white, the way that, like, he's thinking- black and white thinking!
	Oh, so we talked about the B.I.T.E.
	model and about kind of like cultic behavior, high-pressure, high-control group behavior last- Off-brand.
	Off-brand, so I'm sorry if I'm referencing something from, you know, behind the- on the Patreon or whatever, but I think that it's really important to point this kind of stuff out because this is thought-stopping, this is- Black and white thinking, this is kind of like couching misinformation in something that seems reasonable if your reasoning is motivated.
	It's just, it's so absurd.
	The concept that every child who was sent, you know, every child under one that was sent to an orphanage a hundred years ago died.
	A hundred percent.
	A hundred percent so many times.
	That's insane!
	That is insane.
	Also, honestly, even to understand the implications of disease in the 40s and 50s versus now.
	Yeah.
	Who fucking knows, dude?
	Yeah, right.
	Like, it just doesn't... nutrition?
	We've learned a lot since then.
	I just... Yeah.
	Yeah, no.
	Abso-fucking-lutely.
	Absolutely.
	Absolutely.
	Yeah, okay, alright, that's completely insane.
	State things are regulated and culpable if something goes wrong.
	A lot of the religious things were not and are not.
	Religious schools, another fucking example to get into.
	Anyway, there's a lot there to unpack, especially in the United States.
	Oh yeah, I've never heard of it.
	Yeah, so Russell has already intimated that he and Jordan Peterson are friends, and he wants to talk to his friend about how he is a victim.
	This total pessimism, this pessimistic take that the power dynamic modality offers, even though I can Understand it as a lens, because that is one way of observing trends, and by the nature of power, power will determine outcomes.
	That's what power actually is.
	But you said some stuff earlier about nihilism, which when married to this power narrative that we're currently discussing, makes a lot of sense.
	Because I've seen an absence of values when under attack, that I recognize a kind of war against nature.
	A war against any kind of universal principle to which we might align ourselves, with which we might align ourselves.
	That nothing is constant or consistent.
	That there is no benign force behind any of these avatars.
	There's no such thing as the good father, except perhaps for a submissive father.
	There is no complexity afforded in its opposite, if indeed you want to see masculine and feminine as opposites.
	Certainly, perhaps, we could regard them as pairs.
	That there is no acknowledgement that there is a clear mendacity taking place in many narratives that I've personally encountered and experienced.
	Principles like innocent before innocent till proven guilty are just Just cast aside in an instant, and I see a sense within this mode, an appetite to destroy many components that certainly are within the remit of morality, within the rubric of morality, i.e.
	sexuality, humour, maleness, femaleness, like all of these, it's almost as if there is a kind of Bold attempt to strip us down into molecules in some way.
	Meaningless molecules, which is part of nihilism.
	To strip away the possibility of benign and loving and successful relationships between men and women.
	The removal of nuance and complexity in order to create... You know, certainly what I'm struck by.
	I don't know in order to create what, but I do recognize... Atomized slaves.
	Atomized slaves.
	Well, so...
	Yeah!
	Fucking what?!
	Oh my, okay.
	So, the mask is definitely off here.
	This is definitely how Russell feels.
	The attacks on Russell Brand, as he calls them, attacks.
	I call them him being outed as a serial rapist and sexual assaulter.
	Yeah.
	They're apparently an attack on sexuality, humour, maleness and femaleness, and the idea of innocent until proven guilty has just been cast aside.
	To which I say, yet again, Russell, I'm going to continue calling you a rapist because you are one, and if you want to go to court over it, I'll happily prove it there, based on the weight of the evidence against you.
	Not one legal case or defense has been raised by Russell or his legal team who have previously been amongst the most litigious people on the planet, and there's good fucking reason for that.
	But no, it's all actually a conspiracy to turn us all into atomized slaves, according to him and Jordan Peterson.
	That gave me the ick listening to that.
	I'm like, oh, oh, this is where we're going.
	Also, how fucking selfish to take this conversation to... It would never even occur to me to defend myself in this conversation.
	I don't relate to where Russell's brain goes, but he's just a constant manipulator.
	He knows that Jordan Peterson is someone that he can do this with.
	He's someone who he can express these views to, and Jordan will be like, yeah, no, you're right on, buddy.
	You're 100%.
	We should be allowed to rape people.
	That should be what we're allowed to do.
	Cancel culture has ruined our ability to rape with impunity.
	How dare?
	How very dare?
	Yeah, I mean, it's a big problem for the budding rapists out there, right?
	Yeah, right.
	It's a concern.
	They have plenty of role models, I'll tell you that.
	Wow, Jesus.
	That rationale is a... I mean, you know what, though?
	It removes all nuance of sexual relationships and blah, blah, blah.
	Okay.
	What he did just do was So plainly outline and explain his own rationale.
	Like, how he rationalizes it in his brain, that was his internal narrative, externalized in a way that's obviously, like, flowery, as he's wont to do.
	But, yeah, that's what, I mean, I think there is value Not to toot our horns here, but I think there's value in pointing out and and enshrining that moment and like, oh, this is what he thinks.
	Yeah.
	Because that's going to be useful once these fucking lawsuits or investigations or whatever start coming down the fucking pike, because I mean, if.
	Oh, yeah.
	You know, I'm I'm I'm I've resigned myself to like, well, there's like really very little at all that we can do except for.
	Pretty much.
	Born and like, well, we told you.
	We tried.
	It's here.
	It's right here.
	Here's the stuff that we found, at least, you know?
	And if a person in your life is doing this, well, that's a problem.
	Maybe that's something, you know, maybe that is the efficacy that we can have in someone's life is like, oh, well, I've heard that kind of weird ass rationale that's been excused away in my life before.
	Maybe I should be acutely aware of this person.
	Danger, Robinson!
	Yeah, or just keep an eye on it.
	Keep an eye on it.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	Keep a wet eye on that person.
	I can't imagine where this is even gonna go.
	Okay, man, it's weeping all over the map already.
	Okay.
	ALICE Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	Well, yeah, we're gonna continue going all over the map, because next, Jordan Peterson has some ideas on what the Left has to offer to people.
	There's no escaping the drive to unity.
	The only question is, unity under what principle?
	And if it's not the proper principle, it's the Tower of Babel, and that is a degenerating totalitarianism, or the dynamic between Tyrant and slave.
	And of course that begs the question, is there a proper principle?
	Right?
	And your point is, we're in an era where even the notion of proper principle itself is under full-out assault.
	And that's certainly a consequence of the deconstructionist tendency.
	But it's entirely counterproductive, because it does fail to take into account the existence, well, the existence of the very goodness whose absence is the reason for the accusation of tyranny and power to begin with, right?
	Now, you might say, well, why is that happening?
	And I would say, it's part, it's part the desire to allow It's partly the wish to have no restriction whatsoever on the gratification of hedonistic desire.
	That's another thing, and I think this is again true of the radical left.
	The radical left offers endless hedonistic gratification as the potential reward for full subordination to the utopia of the state, and that's an illusory Offering!
	Partly because self-serving, hedonistic gratification is actually indistinguishable from the power that is being resisted.
	Right?
	We know, we know... I'll leave that, I'll leave that for the time being.
	Hit a wall, did ya?
	Please tell me what he meant!
	Please fucking help me!
	This is how I would love for him to finish that thought.
	So, us on the left just want everybody to be fucking and sucking and sucking and fucking and eating and consuming everything possible at all times.
	I mean, it doesn't sound that bad, honestly, but you'd need a solid clean-up crew.
	I don't quite understand what he means by the power that's being resisted is actually the same as endless hedonistic gratification, because that's certainly not how society works for me, or the state for that matter, so we may never know!
	No shit!
	No shit!
	What I am learning is a lot about myself tonight, so my brain is going to implode soon, and also I just want everyone to be fucking and sucking at every available moment.
	Thanks, Jordan.
	Where would I be without you?
	Isn't the state repressive control for them?
	Like, isn't that, like...
	The argument, the problem with the state is repression and control.
	Is the state trying to force everyone to fuck?
	Is that what's happening?
	Fuck and suck and fuck and suck?
	No!
	Really?
	I mean... I would love...
	Two thoughts he has to be consistent.
	Because I have heard enough of Jordan Peterson in my media consumption in a critical way, because honestly, I don't know how else you can really take it.
	No.
	And the ideas are so- I don't like having to take it at all.
	I know, shit.
	I mean, it's just like, it's a bouncy ball.
	It's not anything.
	That's stupid!
	I mean... Yes!
	It's very stupid!
	And that's exactly why I cut that clip.
	Exactly why I cut that clip.
	I heard that and I thought, that's fucking dumb!
	Watching him paint his silly ass into a corner, then he's like, well, this has run its course.
	He just did it to himself.
	Yeah!
	Just did it to himself.
	It's like, this is what the left offer!
	They offer endless hedonism and gratification!
	Wait, where am I going with this?
	Fuck.
	The notion that people pay him to speak.
	I'll save that for another time.
	Oh, they pay him so much money for so many other things as well.
	Like, he's a fucking life coach, he's all manner of shit.
	The power of marketing, dude.
	It's so gross.
	I know, I know.
	I mean, he's got, you know, pretty slick websites, I'll give him that.
	Yeah, he can hire people?
	Cool, okay.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Groundbreaking.
	He's good at being white and having money.
	Okay.
	I think we got to the bottom of the problem.
	We've discovered who Jordan Peterson is, he's a white rich guy.
	Okay, you're welcome everybody, that's our show.
	Alright, we're done.
	So in the next clip, again, we're going to keep moving all over the place here because next week we have some thoughts on communism this time.
	Oh, no.
	Now, you asked earlier, too, is it that there is a conspiracy that's working behind the scenes?
	And I would say this is something I learned primarily from reading Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
	Solzhenitsyn noted that the best way to conceptualize the ideas of communism They aren't as ideas.
	They're not descriptions of the nature of reality.
	They're not objective scientific theories.
	They're animating principles.
	They're more like a spirit.
	And if you launch a spirit into the world, which is like a principality of ideas, the spirit unfolds in accordance with its nature.
	And that was Solzhenitsyn's explanation, for example, for why No matter where communism was tried, the same dreadful outcomes occurred.
	That was in keeping with the nature of that spirit.
	And so there is a spirit afoot that is attempting to centralize, and it acts as if it's a conspiracy, and there are conspiratorial elements to it.
	But it's mostly a manifestation of something that's best regarded as Well, it's a, look, it's a principality or a, you could even think, you can think about it as a transcendent spirit.
	Like.
	So one of the things I like about doing these kinds of episodes, much like the RFK Jr.
	episode is I, I get to hear something like, oh, this person said X or this happened at this point in history.
	And I get to go, did it?
	Or did they say that?
	Let's find out.
	Tell me how wrong he is!
	Did Alexander Solzhenitsyn claim that communism is not in fact ideas and is a spirit and that's why no matter where communism is tried it's given over to dictators and has horrible outcomes?
	Lauren, what is your immediate guess on that?
	I think that I know why he sticks to stories and fables and movies that he can make stuff up about.
	I bet it's not.
	I bet it's not.
	not. I mean it's not. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh.
	Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh.
	Yeah. Yeah. Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Uh, so, so, so J.P. is a little bit full of it once again, uh,
	throwing his own interpretation of someone's words out there as being the only and correct interpretation. Um,
	didn't make any fucking sense to me. Or a correct interpretation. That was... Yeah, that would, that would be
	something. Um, I, I, I couldn't find anything of Solzhenitsyn claiming communism is a spirit of any kind.
	What I do know is that Solzhenitsyn's works are laced with metaphors and symbolism used to critique the application of communism in Soviet Russia specifically.
	It's very probable that Jordan Peterson got lost in one of those somewhere and just, I don't know, just kind of inflicted himself upon it.
	Having served in the Soviet Army during World War II, Solzhenitsyn was arrested for criticizing Joseph Stalin in a private letter and spent eight years in the Gulag, the Soviet labor camp system.
	His experience in the Gulag formed the basis for much of his writing and his views on communism.
	He largely critiques totalitarianism, dehumanization, oppression, censorship, ideological dogmatism, and mistreatment of intellectuals.
	He was also a devout Christian and believed materialist Marxism neglected the spiritual and ethical facets of life, and that Soviet Russia was devoid of morality.
	So I mostly agree with him, but you can also see exactly why someone like Jordan Peterson would read this guy's work specifically.
	Yeah, but yeah, Jordan Peterson's wrong.
	Also not understanding it enough to explain it accurately.
	No, no, no, no.
	You can see why he was drawn to it.
	It was like, oh, Christian guy saying all these things that are wrong with communism.
	I like it.
	I'm into this.
	And then, yeah, I don't know.
	I don't know how good he is at actually digesting information at this point.
	No, no, his reading comprehension is questionable.
	Listen, I'm just speaking from every time I've heard him try to explain a thing.
	Yeah, it feels like it, because obviously the problem in an interview setting in something like this especially is that he can throw this out and then breeze past it and the interviewer is not going to know what the fuck he's talking about, so the interviewer will be like, Sure, that sounds right.
	And no one will ever question it.
	Which is why then I get to look at it and be like, oh no, this is complete bullshit and someone should be looking at this.
	It's the exact problem with fucking Jordan Peterson appearing on Joe Rogan every fucking couple of weeks.
	Anyway, centralization is a transcendent spirit or principality that has conspiracy-like tendencies, apparently.
	It couldn't possibly be that centralization is bred from necessity due to having so, so many people on an increasingly complex and better connected planet.
	No, it's a spirit, like in Avatar The Last Airbender, and it's gonna fuck our shit up.
	That's what's gonna happen.
	Have you seen that show, by the way?
	No.
	You should watch it, it's great.
	I've heard it's fantastic.
	It's phenomenal.
	Starts off a little kind of kiddy in like the first kind of, I don't know, half a season, and then BAM!
	Shit goes down.
	And it just gets progressively darker.
	I don't know.
	Any kid's show that deals with genocide as a subject, it's worth a watch.
	Yeah.
	Anyway, next we get yet more evidence that Jordan Peterson and these people in general just fucking live in movies, man.
	Think about the idea of Satan for a minute.
	You might say, well, is Satan real?
	And I don't like questions like that, because those questions are always predicated on the assumption that we know what real means.
	And we don't, right?
	Because we don't have access to the fundamental truths of what is real and what isn't.
	But I can tell you the ways in which Satan is real.
	Imagine the figure of the Joker, who we've seen emerge repeatedly in popular culture in recent years.
	Well, the Joker is an approximation of the satanic figure.
	And the best Joker was Heath Ledger, I would say.
	And he was king of the criminals.
	And why?
	Well, the criminals, they weren't entirely criminal.
	They were mafia types, you know?
	They still wanted money.
	They still wanted women.
	They still wanted power.
	So they were sort of like you.
	Now, they bend the rules to get it, but they weren't heretical to the point where they would burn a pile of money just to make a point.
	Right?
	Whereas the Heath Ledger Joker, it was like, nothing sacred to him.
	Like, nothing.
	Absolutely, 100%.
	Nothing.
	Now, is that a real spirit?
	Well, you know, when you've been pushed past your limit by the suffering in your life, and you believe that you've been put upon To a degree that's 100% untenable because of the underlying inadequacy of the cosmic structure, then it could easily be that you will invite the spirit that holds nothing sacred to dwell within you and let its destructive force entirely loose.
	Now, is that real?
	I'll tell you, man, it's real enough to entice 17-year-olds to shoot up their high schools.
	It's plenty real.
	Mmm.
	He has made me want to watch that movie again, I've got to say.
	That is a great performance from Heath Ledger, he's not wrong about that.
	But Satan is real.
	Awesome.
	And the Joker.
	And the Joker is a figure that keeps coming up again and again in pop culture.
	Yeah, since the 60s, since Batman.
	That's how this works.
	I can also concede that Heath Ledger's probably the best, but Jack Nicholson's my favorite.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Cam!
	Joaquin Phoenix did a fucking terrific job, you know?
	Yeah, but him doing a terrific job is a bummer.
	That's true.
	That is very, very true.
	He's amazing and my stomach hurts.
	I'm sorry, I don't want to go down that road.
	No, no, it's fine.
	It's much easier to talk about that than what he's discussing.
	I feel like I'm hanging on by a thread whenever Russell goes on a tirade, but this is worse.
	And it's so like, just he'll come, it's just, it's like he's stumbling on a rocky beach and he'll just,
	well, I stumbled on that one and pick it up and look at it and then I got to go stumble on
	my next idea and they'd probably go together, I guess.
	I just really like- this feels so disparate for someone that it's their job to think about, talk about, and write about this stuff.
	He's so incoherent.
	Yeah, he makes a fortune off of doing this.
	I don't know how, but he does!
	But anyway, Satan's real.
	School shootings, I'm sure, have absolutely nothing to do with gun culture, or media culture, or white nationalism, or the inherent lack of mental health facilities for teenagers, or the many, many other issues that cause the phenomenon.
	Or the insistence on the notion that Satan is real!
	No, no, no, no, it's Satan, right?
	There's reductionist, and then there's 50s reductionist, and Jordan Peterson is the latter, right?
	Oh, something bad happened?
	Well, it must be the devil!
	Right, that's exactly who we're dealing with here.
	1550s?
	Yeah, right.
	Jesus Christ.
	Burn him at the stake!
	Oh, God, yeah.
	I'm relying very heavily on you explaining what the fuck he's saying to me.
	One of the many reasons I don't like having to deal with Jordan Peterson is it does take a lot of unpicking us to try and figure out what the fuck he's talking about.
	The last interview that they did that we didn't cover was mostly a lot of this kind of shit.
	I think they talked about the Joker then as well.
	I'm positive that's true!
	Yeah, no, he likes bringing up the Joker quite a bit.
	He really likes the Joker.
	I've heard that in other places, yeah.
	Yeah, I think he dressed up as the Joker for Halloween, I think, at some point.
	But yeah, that conversation was just, there was nothing.
	It was all this.
	It was all just like, bleh.
	Fucking bullshit.
	And I was like, well, there's nothing for me to latch onto there.
	Whereas what we're dealing with now, because I think because Russell is just getting more comfortable in his skin of like, well, the people who are with me are with me and the people who aren't aren't.
	And that's where I'm going.
	That's dangerous.
	It is.
	It's definitely worse.
	Getting your sea legs as a credibly accused rapist and still powering through it.
	Doesn't sound safe!
	That's a hell of a way to put it.
	Yeah, that somehow stabilized him.
	That's the worst fucking thing.
	Stabilized him, not necessarily as a person, but in doing his show, I think.
	Maybe stabilize his mission statement point of view kind of thing.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
	Right.
	One thing I do want to pick up on from that last little clip there is that Jordan Peterson just described burning a big pile of money as heresy.
	That's the word he used.
	He described it as a heretical act.
	So to view that as heretical, you must, to a certain degree, worship money, which says a lot about the man that we're listening to.
	But apparently Russell didn't quite get the memo.
	And you might say, well, is it an external reality?
	Well, if you decide to take a turn in the abysmal direction, you have plenty of role models.
	And the archetypal role model of the abyss is Satan.
	Is that real?
	You could make a case that that's as real as it gets, buddy.
	Like, how real is Auschwitz?
	Like, that's real.
	I love it.
	love, what I love there is your repetition of the refrain "nothing sacred" and of course that
	declarative motif within communism that there can be no god, there can be nothing sacred,
	of course though, sancre-sanct with inversions of it are all sorts of principles of centralization
	and even in original Marxism I would say some of the folk aspects of that, like you know you
	should have a bit of time off now and again, were as close to sacred as I dare to say that goes.
	I love, too, the analysis of the Joker there as a true nihilist, that there is no possibility of anything other than heresy because the Sancre Sancte exists nowhere, not even in Mammon.
	I love that idea and I'm reminded of a British group stroke artist group called KLF who burned
	a million pounds once as a sort of like literally piled it up and burned it as a sort of a
	kind of you know as a installation.
	So need like an interesting moment to sort of like to transcend the values of a pop culture
	that ultimately does have a kind of embedded nihilism woven through is materialism which
	I suppose is you know that as you talked about earlier it's not true nihilism materialism
	tends to emerge from it as well as terror and dread and the shadows of all that are
	good start to emerge there.
	Whoops!
	Yeah, ah yes.
	Jordan, burning a big pile of money is a heretical act, but also this artist group that I kind of like did that once as a sort of point about society at large, so it's all so cool, right?
	The reality, by the way... Yeah, they just talked right past each other.
	It was pretty incredible.
	There was just so much ass kissing going on, and then a complete like, oh yeah, but burning money, isn't that great?
	Can you imagine?
	Literally just described it as heresy.
	Like if we're trying to have a conversation, which we do into microphones once a week, and if we disagreed with each other, So profoundly, and then just didn't address it?
	That's absurd to me!
	The only way you could do that is to not be listening.
	I tell you what, there are a good number of, especially early on in the first chunk of this interview, because I think we're into the second one now, in the first chunk of this interview where Jordan Peterson gives an answer, and Russell doesn't even respond or acknowledge or react, he just goes into the next question.
	It's so unnatural.
	It's bizarre.
	But then he decides to segue into like, look how engaged and how much I understand you and how intelligent I am, daddy.
	And you know, he's very much on that kind of tip for the rest of the interview.
	The reality, by the way, about this group KLF, Burning a Million Pounds, is that they were a band, and artists, and they made documentaries and shit as well, but they never actually explained definitively their reasons for burning a million pounds back in 1995.
	So, no one to this day is quite 100% sure.
	They have since expressed regret for doing so and friends of theirs claim that they've never been the same since.
	Yeah, I bet!
	Well, apparently afterwards they were sat there with kind of a harrowed look on their face.
	I'm like, I'm not surprised.
	It took two hours for it to burn as well.
	That's like the ultimate self-prank.
	Oh, yeah!
	Yeah, I mean, I appreciate the intention, but, you know, I mean, from a personal perspective, it's like, you know, explain that one to your kids, you know?
	Yeah, there's like the notion of like money is the root of all evil.
	Yeah, but you still have to live in the world like that.
	Yeah, exactly.
	And it's that like, you know, that freshman college kind of edgy idea.
	Wow.
	It doesn't really shake out in the wash, does it?
	No, actually, and then all that happened was they became known as the guys who burned a million pounds, and that just kind of cemented their next few years, and as far as I'm aware, they just kind of disappeared.
	I do appreciate, well, it almost feels like the performance art was their, the aftermath to me, like, that's kind of, like, that's cool in a way, because like- Yeah, like, I mean, so, That was kind of basically all the money that they had earned from being a band through the 80s and everything.
	And so they were just like, right, we're going to burn it all as a big statement.
	Not kind of realizing, I think that like, okay, but this is everything that you have achieved commercially.
	As a band, and just burning that.
	That's a lot.
	Yeah, you've still got your artistic success, but, you know, the commercial success counts for something in the system we live in.
	You shouldn't just throw that away.
	Likes doesn't pay your rent.
	A lot of us have learned that lesson.
	No, it does not.
	Neither does Exposure, because they got a bit of that and they're back to being poor.
	You can't buy groceries with Exposure.
	No, you cannot.
	I mean, I do kind of respect that they didn't ever put a fine point on it, because I feel like good art doesn't need an explanation.
	Yeah, no, they vagued around it for the most part.
	I respect that.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Even to this day, it's fairly impressive.
	You know, it's been nearly 30 years at this point.
	I like that they regretted it.
	I know, I know.
	I'm like, that's very human.
	I would regret it.
	I would definitely fucking regret that.
	It kind of makes the art way better.
	They were like, oh no.
	Fuck.
	Fuck!
	You know, it's filmed and everything.
	I'll have to find the footage or something for Off-Brand, I don't know.
	But yeah, Russell at the end there decided to throw in a few more digs into materialism, as he likes to do, making it nice and clear that nihilism is an issue, but it's materialism we're really discussing here, isn't it?
	Obviously, to Russell just means absence of religiosity.
	He doesn't mean it in the scientific sense, which is what led to him and Dawkins talking at cross-purposes for a good ten minutes.
	He just means secularism when he says it, and so when he's on about all the darkness and the shadows, like...
	That's just, you don't follow religion, that's it.
	Life is terrible!
	That's what I'm getting from this.
	That's pretty much the unifying message from this whole two hours of interview.
	It's what you have to tell yourself.
	To stay in the boat.
	To stay free.
	The reason, by the way, that the kind of perspective has shifted is that there are little kind of segues for Russell to kind of tell people to go to rumble or whatever in between segments of the interview, which is great.
	Not jarring at all.
	Now, Russell starts to make a semi-decent point about the dangers of excess and addiction in the next clip before Peterson interjects and goes off on a tangent and tells on himself quite a bit.
	Now when you talk about the hedonic as a transcendent and mobilising force, I'm reminded of Blake's famous edict, you know, it's the road of excess that leads to the palace of wisdom.
	Perhaps because in some kind of my cup runneth over type way, in true ecstasy you might burst the bounds of the self and discover the transcendent through ecstasy.
	Although personally I've discovered that's a dangerous route to ecstasy.
	Yeah, but you discover something else there too, Russell.
	You know, one of the things Nietzsche pointed out very wisely was that most morality was convention and cowardice, right?
	And so I only see this when people go after, well, you've been in this ballpark recently, but I remember Tiger Woods, you know, and people pillorying him for his affairs.
	And I look at a situation like that and I think, To all the men in particular who were, you know, decrying Wood's immorality, which I don't approve of, by the way, and that's not my point, is like, look, buddy, if the Swedish bikini team was waiting for you in a bus when you were done your golf game, you'd be in there like a mad dog.
	And so don't be playing any, you know, moral games because you're so useless.
	No woman will look at you.
	No woman will touch me.
	And therefore I'm celibate and moral.
	It's like, no, you're not.
	You're just contemptible and useless.
	And you would fold at the first offer temptation.
	And for the women who are.
	Moralizing in an equivalent manner.
	It's like you're so sure you wouldn't throw yourself at the feet of the first stellar celebrity that happened to wander into your line of vision a because just because that hasn't happened to you because you are desirable enough or brave enough to make it happen doesn't mean you wouldn't be susceptible to that temptation.
	I think Jordan Peterson's sex life is not particularly great.
	That is my immediate takeaway.
	So I don't know what you heard there, but what I heard is, I want to fuck the Swedish bikini team, and also I'm contemptible and useless, and any woman who critiques a male philanderer is an undesirable coward.
	He seems to be pretty okay with men who fuck, and he's been a critic of female birth control, so it doesn't take a huge leap to guess his feelings about sexually liberated women.
	Oh, he fucking hates women.
	Uh-huh.
	Oh, yeah.
	Oh, yeah.
	But men, what are you gonna do?
	Bang the Swedish bikini team like a rabid dog, I guess.
	What?
	Rabid dog?
	Well, he said mad dog, but yeah, same diff.
	Also, what is a bikini team, anyway?
	Is it like a sport?
	Like, oh yeah, we must look the best in the bikinis, you know?
	As models!
	I was raised up married with children, I know all about being a bikini team.
	A bikini team, that's a thing.
	No, I mean, well, the thing is, is it's like, it's a phrase on early 90s television.
	Thank you.
	That as an entity or a notion, the Swedish bikini team is so fucking early 90s.
	It's ridiculous.
	Like, it's In my head I'm like, is it a volleyball thing?
	Is there like a... I don't know.
	They're models that show up at car shows.
	Yeah.
	And just like are hot for money.
	That's not like a team.
	I mean, that's just a collection of... I guess what is a team, I suppose.
	Yeah, they would show up.
	Well, they look very athletic, but they would show up on a bus and empty out- Actually, no, I'm not sure I agree.
	Yeah, yeah.
	I mean, like- I mean, they're thin.
	I think there's a difference between thin and athletic, but yeah, carry on.
	I mean, well, but athletic was the look in the early 90s.
	Rail thin wasn't really the ish from whatever I know exactly the moment that he is referring to.
	In pop culture, and it was like, it was thin, absolutely, but tall, athletic, tan, you know, blonde.
	Yeah, I guess my, my 90s culture kind of knowledge comes in kind of Buffy the Vampire Slayer onwards, you know, that's, that's my, that's my, uh, gotta love that show.
	Mary With Children was a much earlier moment.
	But yeah, they all look like Christine Applegate, that was kind of the thing.
	But like, that's, um, that like...
	That notion, it's so antique.
	I knew exactly what he was talking about because I've been conditioned from TV.
	Oh no, no, I know what he's trying to say, but I'm also like, what the fuck is a bikini team?
	That can't be a thing.
	The American version was like the Hawaiian Tropic Girls, because yeah, you have a pack of gals that obviously travel all the time on one bus, In bikinis, heels, full face of makeup, and their hair done so they can empty out in a comical procession at just the worst time for a particular man.
	That is absolutely what the intention is.
	Right, yes.
	I remember the trope.
	Very much so.
	It is quite funny, to be fair.
	I love that just women being hot can be a sport.
	That's a problem.
	That's a team.
	That's a team.
	Yeah, do you know what?
	Yeah, yeah.
	I mean, again, I don't have a problem with the bikini team, I just, I would like clarification, that's all.
	It is a fucking hilarious notion.
	Oh dear.
	A mad dog!
	You gotta be a mad dog!
	Gotta go at him like a mad dog!
	Like a cartoon Auga-wolf with your tongue flapping behind you in the breeze.
	You don't have any other choice as a man, of course!
	You can picture it from this guy, though, can't you?
	He would absolutely, like, 100%.
	100%!
	And you do have to wonder why.
	I know he's married and everything.
	You have to pay so much fucking money, dude.
	Well, but also what he's saying is like that what he is he is still married.
	Yeah, yeah.
	What he is insisting is if confronted with that.
	I don't know if the team has any agency in this moment?
	You just find yourself on the bus?
	I think the team wants to fuck, and that's the starting point of this situation.
	One would hope that that's the scenario.
	This is just like browbeating every woman, wife, partner that, well, you better fucking put up with it because it's once in a lifetime.
	How dare you?
	Right, hang on, hang on.
	How many women are on the Swedish bikini team?
	I'm picturing like 10-15.
	8-12.
	Okay, I was thinking 10-15.
	I think we're on the same page.
	I think we're on the Swedish bikini team page.
	I think we're on the same bus.
	I mean, we're the equipment managers, obviously, but we're still on the bus.
	No, god, I don't want to be the equipment manager for that orgy.
	Jesus.
	I don't know.
	Oh, not the orgy part.
	It kinda seems like fun.
	Okay, okay.
	Well, I mean, if you get to join in, I guess, sure.
	Fine, fine.
	Though not if Jordan Peterson's involved, but you know.
	But you know what I mean?
	Like, the agency of women is so absent from, like, his mind palace.
	Like, it's just...
	Yes.
	Not only does the bikini team have to fucking put up or shut up, but so does the wife.
	Nah, they all just, in this scenario, they all immediately have a wide-on.
	That's what's happening.
	They're all just, sploosh!
	Let's go!
	Let's have you, Jordan!
	It's so embarrassing.
	It's so embarrassing to hear a man say.
	ALICE It is, it's a pretty grim kind of admonishment of his own sexual existence.
	I do also have to think, like, how many people out there wanna fuck Jordan Peterson?
	I don't feel like it's a long list.
	I don't know.
	I don't know!
	There are crazy people out there!
	LINDSAY There's a lid for every pot, what are you gonna do?
	ALICE I mean, he is married, y'know?
	He's clearly done it at least once.
	Anyway, so Russell from here goes on a bit of a jag about materialism being devoid of meaning and how can we trust anything that's devoid of meaning and what these people are saying about God not existing.
	It's nothing new for him, but Peterson's response to it is fascinatingly dumb.
	I see you've got some thoughts.
	Look, one of the things that the prophet Elijah establishes, Elijah is the prophet that appears with Christ when he's transfigured along with Moses.
	And so in the Christian tradition, as well as the Jewish tradition, Elijah is held up as one of the two most Important prophets, right?
	Okay, so why Elijah?
	Well, Elijah defeats the God of nature, Baal, and also is the first person to posit that whatever God is, is identical with the still small voice within.
	That's actually a phrase from the book of Elijah.
	Right, right.
	So, he identifies God within with conscience.
	Okay, now, well, think about why the materialists abandoned God.
	Well, the first mistake they made was assuming that God would be found in nature.
	Well, the Jews dispensed with that idea like 3,000 years ago.
	If you're going to look in nature, you're not going to find God because that's not where he is.
	Right?
	And then the other thing that happens if you're a scientist is that you define what's real.
	Well, if God has an aspect of the subjective, then of course, none of your scientific investigations are going to reveal God, because you made God not part of the game in the initial formulation of the rules.
	And you can't say, well, the rules forbid us to discover God, and lo, we've not discovered God.
	It's like, well, you excluded Him to begin with.
	No!
	We can't find God because we were just intentionally looking elsewhere!
	Like, we're playing hide-and-seek with a five-year-old, right?
	God is hiding behind the couch, and we just intentionally look everywhere but the couch, right?
	Where has God gone?
	I can't find him!
	It's a mystery!
	Like I do with my kid.
	Like, that's what's happened!
	We can't find God because we intentionally excluded him.
	Does he mean now or, like, ever?
	I'm guessing ever, like the whole of science, forever.
	That's like most of science was to the glory of God.
	Like that's historically completely fucking wrong.
	Like what he just said.
	The notion of studying nature was a godly pursuit.
	To find God!
	Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely!
	Countless people through history have absolutely found God through nature.
	I feel like that's one of the last roots I can absolutely forgive.
	And kind of the nicest thing Christians fucking have to say is, like, God's real, look at a sunset.
	Like, okay, that sounds lovely.
	God is a tree.
	Okay, fine.
	You're Daoist now, I guess?
	I don't know.
	Um, there's another point to make here about the concept of God only existing in the subjective, which definitionally means God being based on or influenced by personal feelings, tastes or opinions.
	So the concept of God is in fact completely fucking disunified, if that is the case, and differs from person to person, which actively works against Peterson's idea that we all need to be unified under God, because all of the gods are different.
	So he just debunked his own bullshit within the space of this interview because one of those two ideas has to be wrong for the other to make sense.
	It's funny how we already figured that out.
	We already got there earlier, and he's just- Not surprised!
	Yeah, no.
	No.
	But this is where we're at.
	Okay.
	Yeah.
	The idea that this man is some kind of intellectual powerhouse is fucking maddening.
	Dude.
	It's all in the sales pitch, that's all it is.
	Yeah, marketing is a hell of a drug, straight up.
	Just, you just need lots of, like, images of you looking pensive at a camera.
	Just, you know, doing the Mr. Burns thing.
	You need lots of money!
	He has lots of money and people spend lots of money on him!
	Fox!
	PragerU!
	All these fucking, just, like, black holes of money!
	If there wasn't!
	Look, he could not do this on his own!
	To be able to afford the wingback leather chairs and the pinstripe suits for him to pose in.
	And the ads and the production!
	And yeah, the many, many fucking things.
	Yeah.
	Yeah!
	A few assholes have bankrolled him for years!
	Yeah, because his ideas are profitable to them.
	And he sells a book and he has a blah blah, whatever.
	Yeah, he needs piles of fucking cash to propel these stupid ass fucking, like, disparate, useless, like, navel-gazing ideas.
	Yeah.
	What the fuck do I know, though, right?
	I'm poor and a woman.
	ALICE Well, well, there are abouts, and he fucking hates trans people as well, so we're everything that this guy hates, to be perfectly honest.
	Everything that this guy does not like.
	If only we were people of colour as well, that would really cement it.
	Anyway, Jordan is not quite finished with his thought.
	Now, I would say, and this is why I actually believe I'm going to be speaking with Dawkins publicly at some point in the relatively near future, I'm looking forward to that, because there is a rigor in the exclusion of God that's actually part of rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar's, and unto God what is God's.
	Like, we shouldn't be confusing God with what isn't God.
	And one of the things the scientists have done, the Enlightenment types have done, is certainly help us figure out where God isn't.
	And that careful, delineated, reductionistic thought has also massively expanded our technological ability and brought with it the possibility of a kind of abundance that was undreamed of before that.
	Now, I don't think that can last.
	Or maintain itself without its own destruction in the absence of an overarching ethos within which it's embedded.
	But you don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
	But the reductionist materialists who say there's no God in the reductive materialist world, it's like, well, yeah!
	What's your point?
	You've already forbidden the evidence that would convince you from even existing.
	You're looking in the wrong places.
	Like I look, I think, well, what's compelling existence for the transcendent unity of all things, let's say.
	Maybe we can use that as a working definition of God.
	Well, the alternative is a dreadful plurality.
	We already walked through that.
	What can you identify that unity with?
	Well, love's not a bad first-pass approximation.
	Is it a relationship?
	Well, you have a relationship with your conscience, that pesky, mysterious little thing.
	Your interest compels and calls to you, like the burning bush called to Moses.
	That's the same sort of notion.
	Part of the reason that, you know, and Jung said this, part of the reason that modern man can't find God is because Well, he's looking in the wrong places.
	That's for sure.
	But Jung also said that, you know, modern people wouldn't look low enough.
	Maybe you discover God in the radical realization of your own insufficiency and sinfulness.
	You know, that's a classic idea.
	And I also think that's true.
	Yeah.
	I think that is the case.
	You know, I became convinced of the religious substrate of existence, mostly from studying evil, not from studying good.
	It's like, Yeah, and also in despair.
	In Bethlehem, the king will come, not in the palaces of your life or in the opulence of your life, but when you're down among the animals in the manger.
	This is where the king will be born.
	This is where the chosen one will be found.
	What does that have to do with anything?
	Yeah, the lowly, the lowly, the lowly.
	Yeah, and fucking Carl Jung has a lot to answer for with these fucking chuckleheads.
	They have, however, struck on an astute point here, but I don't see it as a positive like they do.
	Yes, many people turn to religion in moments of despair, in moments where they've been brought low by life being fucking hard and brutal.
	To me, there is something damn near predatory about the nature of religion and how it can inflict itself upon people in those moments.
	I'm nodding, listeners!
	I need my bell!
	Which is not to say everything about it is inherently negative, but I would say in that moment where a person is in despair, Give them support financially and through proper mental health care and tell me that that's somehow inadequate compared to religion.
	See how they come out on the other fucking side of it, right?
	I can tell you with absolute certainty that these two men here do not need religion.
	They need therapy.
	Years of it.
	Decades of it.
	Intensive fucking therapy.
	Good God, these people.
	I just- I don't feel like Russell was even- I don't know.
	Yeah, there's a little bit of a tangent there that they just decided to... I need to look in the low places for God.
	Okay, how low are you?
	I don't think that that's what Jordan Peterson was saying.
	That's not what I got.
	You know what, though?
	All bets are off.
	I mean... It's true.
	He does talk himself kind of in circles quite a lot, so it is difficult to Pin him down on the first pass, let's put it that way.
	Again, I've had the benefit of listening to these clips multiple times, so at least three.
	More than that, more like it.
	There's no building on an idea from what he has said before.
	I'm almost impressed at how disjointed his ideas are.
	Obviously, I am cutting clips from two hours of interview here, so, you know, there's a lot.
	I'm not going to use that as an excuse.
	No, no, no, no, neither am I. He's contradicting himself on his own.
	I guarantee you, listener, if you do go and watch the full things, You will understand why I made the cuts that I did, because holy shit, there's some hot garbage in there.
	And that's absolutely fair to clarify.
	You're totally right.
	But also, he does have a tendency, he'll build on a thing for like, maybe five minutes, and then he'll fucking drop it.
	And there's one, I think, maybe, point that he likes to come back to.
	There's, I think, one, and that'll come up Shortly, but generally speaking, yeah, just fucking throw it by the wayside.
	He just keeps painting without realizing where the door to the room is.
	Let's keep trucking.
	He's keep painting.
	Oh, no.
	I'm going to be covered in paint to get out of this corner.
	I painted myself.
	Yes.
	Now, Jordan Peterson is a vocally transphobic piece of shit.
	And in the next clip, Russell very nearly offers some pushback on those ideas.
	Now when we talk about what is the inherent problem with globalism, when built into at least their rhetoric around an authoritarian and centralised globalist state, is the idea of unity, actually what we're talking about is tyranny.
	And what I think that we need to offer as an alternative to people is...
	Diverse, decentralized, but unified.
	Is there a way?
	Although, see, the only game in town at the moment is centralization because it's corporatized, because it can incorporate big tech, because it can incorporate big pharma, because it can incorporate each nation's military, because it has got the game all but sewn up in the absence of a popular uprising, which cannot happen without a spiritual awakening.
	So, the pathway that we have to offer, the alchemy that we have to conduct, the spell that must now be cast, is one of reigniting the fires within the individual.
	And I love that call to adventure, and I love the pragmatism in, you know, start with these small things and do not despair.
	I suppose, in a sense, I'm offering you the question now of is the function of ARC inherently connected to anti-gargantuanism?
	Is it connected to decentralization?
	And in that, Jordan Peterson, you great crusader for so many subjects and a chief among them in the eyes of the uninitiated and the willfully ignorant, Would be the way that you've gone to war on subjects like gender identity.
	Would there be the inclusion of, yeah, if you want to run your culture that way democratically, then of course you must.
	As long as concomitant with that is the idea that there are people here who are living by a very different path and you don't seek to impose a transcendent and a coercive order above them and upon them.
	Huh?
	Frigidity.
	A counterproductive frigidity.
	Yes sir, yes sir.
	Can I say that any decentralization, I just finished, any decentralization worthy of the name will include, will have to include, the possibility for people living In extremely discreet ways as we once might have done in a tribalized culture where there'll be no reason to imagine that the tribes of Iceland would live in absolute ideological harmony with the tribes of Senegal or Japan and true diversity would afford us that kind of uniqueness of culture.
	Fuckin' this again.
	It could be argued that Russell is defending trans people here, but he's not.
	What he's actually defending is libertarianism among his concept of tiny theocratic ethnostates.
	Hey, I know you think these things and I'm going to make no effort to change your views about trans people, but would you leave them alone if we were all living in our tiny separate communities?
	Like, he doesn't give a shit about how harmful Jordan Peterson's denial of the existence of trans people is.
	He just wants to say, ah, if we all lived how I say we should live, it wouldn't be a problem because you'd all be separate.
	Haha!
	I fixed it, everyone!
	People in Senegal stay in Senegal, people in Japan stay in Japan, right?
	Russell's saying to Jordan Peterson right now, That you oh your idea doesn't impose a top down he made a pyramid with his hands if you aren't watching he did a little pyramid like oh a top down authoritarian enforcement.
	What else is Jordan Peterson arguing?
	That's what I was thinking through several of these clips.
	What does the unity you are pitching... First of all, how do we get there?
	And what does it look like in practice?
	I don't think that he's thought about that for a minute.
	A single minute.
	No.
	And also, Russell, What's the structure of your locals channel?
	Because I'm pretty sure it's not a circle.
	I think it's a pyramid, and I think you're at the top of it.
	That's just... boop.
	And you're enforcing the walk.
	Yeah!
	Enforcing all of your- Hungry.
	Button pushing.
	Yes, exactly, exactly.
	Doing your fucking bible readings on Monday, you prick.
	Again!
	Russell just said the opposite thing!
	That Jordan Peterson has been saying and pitching and insisting on.
	And they're like, oh yeah, totally!
	Oh my god, bro, yes!
	Yeah, so he's like, we need to unify, we all need to come under monotheism and we all need to join together under the same religion.
	Oh, have we all spontaneously unified under monotheistic Christianity so far?
	Has that worked out?
	Whereas Russell's kind of idea of it is like, yes, we do need to do that in our tiny little communities, in our tiny little, you know, 100 to 120 people.
	And then we can all be under the same thing and have exactly the same views in exactly the same place and never leave our little thing.
	Though, also, I'm going to Bali.
	So, you know, I mean, the Balinese people should stay in Bali, but I'm also going to go to Bali with my 100 people.
	OK.
	Okay, interesting.
	Very interesting.
	It's like a faucet of contradictions.
	It's just dumping contradiction on top of each other.
	It's amazing.
	Yeah, it's contradictions in service of promoting Christianity.
	I don't know how anyone can listen to this and make sense of it.
	Honestly, I don't know how this benefits anybody.
	I think when you've got two people like this, using a lot of big words, referencing scientists and philosophers and that kind of thing, If you're not paying if you're not paying close enough attention It will come off as intelligent and and maybe even coherent at a push But I've gotta pay very close attention and it still makes very little sense Yeah
	Oh, it makes way less sense upon close examination.
	That's the problem.
	We're taking this chunk by chunk.
	If you just had a constant stream of these two guys talking at each other... It might be way more agreeable if I was also doing the dishes.
	Yeah, exactly, right?
	Yeah, it all just kind of goes into a white noise.
	I had that issue a couple of times when I was cutting clips.
	I'd just be listening to the thing, kind of listening out for something that catches my ear or whatever, and I accidentally tune out, and I'm like, oh, wait, shit, I need to go back.
	I have to work really hard.
	Yeah, for that exact thing, for my brain, and I just go...
	It's like, these aren't words that make sense together.
	I don't think we can keep working on this anymore.
	Especially when Jordan Peterson is talking.
	Yeah, he really goes for it.
	It took me a while to work through this.
	Just a scrabble bag of ideas.
	Yeah, pretty much.
	In typical Jordan Peterson fashion, he doesn't actually answer the question or any of the ideas that Russell has put forward.
	He instead circles back.
	Well, this is it!
	So he circles back to his bullshit about unity.
	Well, one of the advantages to the leftist insistence on diversity is that with true diversity comes a range of unexpected solutions to unexpected problems, right?
	We don't know what the future will throw at us.
	If we're on the right track now and we're all busily Needling down that pathway, and something entirely unexpected comes along.
	Unless we have diversity within us, we won't have any answers to unforeseen problems.
	And so, the notion of diversity as a source of resilience, let's say, is accurate.
	It's no different than respect for a plurality of thought, let's say, and approach.
	But it begs the question, which is, well, what's the source that unifies that diversity?
	Because Disunified diversity is conflict, anxiety, and hopelessness.
	So how do you take advantage of diversity while maintaining the utility of unity?
	And then on the unity side, well, you don't want rigid unity because it's too fragile and brittle.
	Okay, so this problem is actually addressed in the book of Exodus.
	So the existential problem that the Israelites are grappling with is Well, they're escaped from tyranny, and they don't want the tyrant, so they don't want the enforced unity of the authoritarian state, and they don't want the habits of slaves, because being subjugated to tyranny has turned them into directionless slaves, which is why they're lost in the desert, right?
	They don't know where to go, and they keep trying to turn Moses into a pharaoh!
	And then there's a vision of proper governance that emerges, the analysis of which has been core to Catholic social doctrine for hundreds of years, and which actually constitutes the central aspect of a necessary conservatism.
	And it's the principle of subsidiarity.
	So the idea is that the proper alternative to tyranny and slavery.
	So you imagine a two rigid unity at the top and a two fractionated plurality at the bottom.
	Okay, that's a bad state.
	That's a bad state.
	You stole food off my plate again.
	Bad state.
	This guy can't go two minutes without bringing up the fucking Bible.
	It's absurd, and it has led me to wonder in this specific instance whether his notion of the state replacing religion comes from this biblical story of the Jews wandering the desert and trying to make Moses into a pharaoh.
	Like, if they're like, well, this whole system's gone, so we need to build this other one, because we need to fill the void somehow.
	I really do wonder if that's just where he gets all of his fucking ideas.
	It's just, oh, this comes from Genesis, this was from Exodus, this all happened, you know?
	The ideas are also wrong.
	Like, he's attributing other causes to God punishing those people.
	There aren't other extraneous causes.
	He's kind of-- - Invoking the God of the Old Testament is, I think, a poor choice
	if you wanna make sense and to support your argument.
	I just, I...
	Yeah, and-- - I think it's because if he just mentioned movies, he would obviously sound
	stupid.
	People would see through that.
	So if you call it the Bible, then there's kind of this unearned gravitas to it.
	Yeah, yeah, exactly.
	It's either the Bible, or it's a science, or it's a philosophy.
	That's where he's going.
	But not specific enough to point it out.
	He's not citing anything specific enough to really talk about his ideas.
	No, no, he's not being like, oh, in this passage, in this thing, is he?
	He's invoking a vibe, not referencing knowledge.
	We are in a vibes-based economy.
	And like, I don't know, there's also the aspect that all of this, all of these things are subject to his interpretation, which as we've established, is wildly fucking far away from everyone else's interpretation.
	It's gonna have to be!
	Because it's not consistent!
	He doesn't have a unifying, consistent point of view or narrative, even.
	He's a little dingy, out to sea, being tossed hither and thither, you know?
	I'd love to follow it!
	He's tossing himself hither and thither.
	He's hurling himself around the dinghy going, my god, what's happening?
	That's just how he's doing it.
	Like, alright, I guess that's a way to live.
	So what he's saying here is there's a system of unity at the top among the state and a sort of fractured disunity for everyone below who is not part of the state.
	I would say that he is partially correct in that it's not the state that are at the top, it's billionaires, right?
	Billionaires coming together every year, meeting up and deciding the various ways in which they will control our lives in one form or another.
	This is a thing that happens.
	But no, it's not capitalism that's the problem, it's the state and the lack of religion and the only way to fix it is God, specifically the Christian God, and also giving me money.
	Attend my conference.
	Pay for one of my courses.
	Nothing wrong with the billionaires.
	They're fine.
	They're fine.
	Oh, like, I mean, if you call them globalists, like, you know, if you if you make them into like a boogeyman.
	And then occasionally complain about it, but not actually attribute any of the real problems imposed by capitalism.
	Like, it's just well, it's a weird dance.
	It's interesting because even when kind of decrying them as globalists, it will only ever be specific billionaires.
	Usually with some kind of specific heritage or another.
	Bill Gates.
	Or yeah, Bill Gates.
	Soros.
	Yeah, Klaus Schwab.
	That's the traditional fucking Rockefellers or whatever.
	You know, there's all of that, you know, it won't be... Oh, the like, not even at all billionaires for a long time, the Rockefellers?
	Yes, yes, exactly.
	Rothschilds?
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	Yes, yeah, absolutely.
	So, you know, it will only ever be those specific ones, never mind the rest of the billionaires that are also beating up and doing all of this heinous shit, you know, never mind fucking Rupert Murdoch or whoever else, right?
	We're not going to complain about it.
	Yeah, that's a whole separate episode.
	Honestly, it's kind of fun at this point, in a whack-a-mole kind of way, to see what he's going to come up with next.
	Like, it's kind of fun.
	Rupert Murdoch, yeah.
	No, no, no, no, no.
	Jordan Peterson.
	Like, whatever the next clip is, I'm sure it's fucking off the wall.
	It's just like, this has been an exercise in like, what the fuck can pop up this time?
	Because they're so, like, disparate as ideas.
	Yeah, well, next, he tells on himself a little bit.
	Compared to the last couple episodes, this is a hoot!
	Well, yeah, no, that's fair, that's fair.
	He tells on himself a little bit more, and he waves around quite a lot.
	The thing about a king is because he's a symbol of Unified aristocracy.
	If you lack purpose and nobility in your own life, that false nobility of tyrannical unity will beckon to you.
	But you can eradicate that by being an aristocrat within the confines of your own life.
	It's like, look man, if you took your marriage seriously, that would be enough to occupy you.
	And it's certainly the case with your children, and with your own spiritual well-being, for that matter.
	It's like, what, you don't have enough to do?
	You want to tell other people what to do?
	Jesus, man, haven't you got enough problems of your own?
	That's what you do!
	That's literally all he does.
	Not only then do we cast out the shadow, as in the Schmittian dialectic of othering, we also cast out the light.
	Affording others these positions of sovereignty that would be better held in the consciousness of an elevated self.
	I was struck with your last shamanic proclamation by the amount of hand gestures you used there.
	Indicated a kind of, I wouldn't say unconscious, but integrated awareness of the geometric connotations.
	You know, crucifixes were made, triangles were made, squares were made, and indeed, isn't geometry the rational approach To symbology.
	And once again we can see how rationalism and post-enlightenment thought has abandoned its pair, its partner.
	Jung's obvious defining, perhaps, interest in symbolism.
	That there is that which can never be said, that which cannot be measured with the measure in mind, but can be felt intuitively with the belly.
	Geometry is the rational approach to symbology, and rationalism has abandoned its partner.
	Which, I think he's trying to say spirituality.
	It's all bullshit, of course, but I do want to give him credit for managing to pivot, right, from a guy waving and gesticulating to somehow shitting on secularism again.
	Like, that was an A-plus pivot I did not see coming, even if it is in fact complete bollocks.
	Of course, Peterson nodded along through all of that as though Russell was saying something profound.
	First of all, I'm not going to come for anybody.
	There were squares that were made, Lauren.
	There were squares that were made, right?
	There are so many shapes.
	Let's name them all.
	How about that?
	No, I mean...
	Big fish, little fish, cardboard box.
	Big fish, little fish, cardboard box.
	This is a lot.
	I mean, yeah, I don't know.
	It's incredibly dumb.
	It's incredibly dumb.
	And I nearly didn't include that clip, but I was like, it's just too stupid.
	I have to include this.
	I don't.
	How embarrassing.
	Oh God.
	We're going to start a revolution!
	Look at the shapes he made with his hands.
	Well, yeah, right, so here's the thing.
	I'm not gonna come for anybody gesticulating wildly or hand-talking.
	No, no, no, no, it's fine, it's fine.
	That'd be wrong for me to do.
	Go for it.
	Lots of people do it, myself included.
	But the notion that he was, like, shamanic?
	Get fucking out of here!
	That he was channeling his ideas.
	You made pyramids, the crucifix, you made a square.
	I did not consent to watching two dudes suck each other off today.
	That was nuts.
	Because if I'm going to do that, I wouldn't pick these two.
	I'll tell you that right now.
	No, no, you are not wrong.
	There are far more attractive individuals.
	Oh boy!
	Oh boy.
	So we've heard Peterson's thoughts on communism, and he elaborates a little bit more in the next clip.
	At some point the suggestion that there is a sublime realm, that there is a unitary force that we are participants in, that we can access and can use as a principle if we are not trapped and ensnared in the many levels of hell that might hedonically or materially suggest themselves, for surely they will come through material channels.
	Then, unitary behavior, such as kindness, such as service, such as a social organization, suggest themselves.
	I'm also struck that at some point you said, redistribution of responsibility, that suggested a kind of spiritual communism, like the radical redistribution of... No, that's very funny!
	Not material!
	Not material!
	Let's redistribute the responsibility.
	Well, absolutely!
	That would be way better than distributing the wealth.
	It's a way better model because the problem with redistributing the wealth is you have to steal the wealth.
	And then you distribute it to the psychopaths.
	And then the people you're distributing it to aren't psychopaths.
	You make them dependent and you destroy the adventure of their life by making the state the benevolent paternal, like the all benevolent combination of mother and father under whose wings you're currently permanently suffocating, not sheltered, but suffocating.
	It's like, well, why shouldn't you have a basic guaranteed income, let's say?
	Well, how about because you'll pay for that, buddy.
	You think you're going to get that for free?
	You're a fool.
	You're not going to get that for free.
	There will be strings attached and many of them, like one of the immediate strings would be like Pinocchio.
	Well, I don't think you should spend your money on that.
	You can see that with a digital currency instantly.
	It's like, well, you'll get your basic income, but you'll get to have one flight every three years and three articles of clothing a year.
	And there's a lot of things you really shouldn't be allowed to eat.
	And, you know, maybe you have to wash your laundry once a month because that's plenty for someone like you, et cetera, et cetera.
	If you think you're going to get the largesse of a utopian state without all those strings attached, you are one deluded fool.
	I see you, diluted fool, right now.
	I can see a couple.
	That was Olympic-level make-em-ups.
	That was, like, the leaps.
	Oh yeah.
	I mean, for a start, the concept that communism would first have to steal the billionaires' money and everything.
	It's like, well, no, it's not stealing when they didn't earn that.
	Because they didn't earn that, because capitalism is an exploitative system inherently.
	That money is off the backs of all of the other people below them who earned that.
	They're stealing.
	They're the ones that are taking it and hoarding it.
	They are dragons hoarding gold!
	That is what they are!
	The bad guys in the stories, by the way.
	Which is tough, because dragons are very cool.
	The wealthy guy doesn't see it that way, I wonder why.
	No shit!
	But it does occur to me that there are several concepts here that Jordan Peterson fundamentally does not understand.
	Oh my god, so much!
	But also I think being intentional, like, this is a masterclass and nothing else being intentionally obtuse.
	Like, obviously, just talking miles around a point that is so incredibly simple.
	Well, yeah, and just kind of taking it to that extreme as well.
	So obviously one of the ideas that he doesn't get is... Stealing from billionaires and giving it to psychopaths.
	That's like a... I mean... You become a psychopath!
	If you get Universal Basic Income, Lauren, you will become a psychopath!
	Oh yeah, that's the result of all the programs, the handful of programs that have been put in place for Universal Basic Income.
	Yeah, that's exactly right.
	That's what's happened.
	Yeah, so he doesn't understand universal basic income and how it can work and operate, and he doesn't understand taxes, specifically taxing the rich, or how taxes work in, for instance, countries like Denmark or Sweden or Norway.
	I know you might know something about those.
	Yes, taxes are much higher than we are used to over here or in the States, but most countries have a way higher standard of living than we do across the board because of it.
	Oh yeah.
	The idea is nobody's left behind, right?
	It's the same principle with universal basic income, right?
	Nobody is saying that UBI is all a person should live on.
	In most conceptions, it's supplementary, but Even taken to the point where a person could live on their UBI every month consistently and, you know, afford all the little things, you know, that people require to live.
	Most people actually do want to do things with their lives.
	They want to be productive members of society and create and produce work of some kind.
	This has been proven in study after study.
	It's not a case of, oh, you'll all just be beholden to the will of the state, which will somehow then also have control over your bank account and spending choices, as though that's not a fucking massive leap to have made.
	Guess what controls your spending choices?
	Fucking being poor.
	Yeah!
	Also, UBI that has been instituted, across the board, employment goes up drastically, and housing goes up drastically.
	People get better jobs, have access to more jobs and work.
	That is one of the biggest, most obvious, immediate benefits, even in a couple of months.
	Yeah.
	People have access, like the people who are really struggling suddenly have access to, I don't know, transport options.
	Housing.
	Housing.
	Food.
	Stability.
	They might have access to better, healthier food.
	They might be able to afford vegetables rather than... A safe place to sleep at night.
	Every night.
	Right?
	Heating!
	Heating!
	They might be able to afford to heat their home!
	Maybe!
	You know?
	It's just... Again, this is... I said it at the beginning.
	It's so cruel!
	Intellectual dishonesty, right?
	This is exactly where he's coming from.
	It's exactly the position he's taking.
	It's just complete fucking horse shit.
	And he knows it.
	He knows that.
	He knows that this is bollocks.
	I don't know if he does.
	I honestly I don't I don't really I think he's maybe a goldfish person.
	You know, like he just whatever thought is in his mind in the moment is what is correct.
	Yeah, I mean, there's definitely a potential there.
	And there is a potential that he truly does believe that universal basic income would somehow lead to everyone who was on it becoming psychopaths.
	It'd lead to him having less money or not having more than other people.
	That's his problem with it.
	Point blank period.
	Oh yeah.
	Oh yeah.
	No, there are so many things that will be wrapped up in his problems with it.
	Not least of all being like, yeah, I have lots of money.
	I don't want other people to have lots of money.
	And I don't want you to take my money and give it to those poor people.
	No, no, no.
	This is my money.
	Thank you very much.
	And also, you know, they haven't earned that.
	I've earned my money by lying to people repeatedly over the internet.
	But I've earned that money, again, in a system of capitalism that is inherently exploitative by nature.
	But anyway, we have one final clip here from this interview.
	Jordan, thank you as always for being so generous with your time and the almost limitless breadth of your thought, which I understand now better than before since you told me about the manner in which you've studied, and I can see how important that is to a kind of a fractal version of reality and indeed discourse, and the impact that you've made with that speaks for itself and is also shouted down pretty efficiently as well in some quarters.
	Thanks for joining us, Doctor.
	Hey, it's always a pleasure to talk to you, Russell, and I'm looking forward to when we speak again.
	Yeah, I want to see you in the car.
	Hopefully we'll get together when you're over, even if it is in some clandestine vestibule with me in some kind of shroud.
	Maybe not that!
	Perhaps I'll cross-dress.
	Yeah.
	All right, Russell.
	Good to talk to you, man.
	Thank you.
	Give my love to Tammy and thank you once again.
	Thank you.
	That's his wife.
	Yep.
	Yep.
	You can visit Arkforum.com to find out more about what Jordan Peterson's doing here in the UK at the moment.
	[Music]
	No.
	Here's the f***ing news.
	Good news!
	There's not gonna be a nuclear war because Putin will never use nuclear weapons.
	How do I know?
	Because Joe Biden told me so.
	Do you feel reassured?
	Do ya?
	Do ya feel reassured?
	Surprise!
	I didn't edit it that way.
	It was just edited in the most jarring way possible.
	An editorial just thrown in there right at the end.
	Wow.
	Yeah, we're not getting into the bullshit.
	Oh, thank God!
	Don't worry, don't worry.
	I haven't also gone through a whole editorial just for this.
	I was like, nah, I did look at it.
	It's all bullshit, yet again.
	And it's mostly just a shit-flinging exercise at Joe Biden.
	Shocker.
	With another fucking article from Jacobin.
	Wonderful.
	Anyway, to back us up a bit, it occurred to me I hadn't explained what this ARC thing they kept talking about was, or why Jordan Peterson was in the UK.
	So, ARC stands for the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, and to a degree, it feels like Russell isn't the only one starting a cult.
	I'm going to read from the ARC website that Russell invited me to go and take a look at.
	Quote, The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, ARC, is an international community with a vision for a better world where every citizen can prosper, contribute, and flourish.
	We are inviting you to join us in developing a better narrative in response to life's most fundamental social, economic, philosophical, and cultural questions.
	We reject the inevitability of decline and instead are seeking solutions which draw on humanity's highest virtues and extraordinary capacity for innovation and ingenuity.
	Life has improved dramatically over the past few centuries.
	We live longer, are increasingly well-educated, and enjoy unparalleled access to fresh water, food, energy, and resources.
	While many problems remain, it is important not to understate the magnitude of this accomplishment.
	Despite these long-running upward trends, we are at a defining moment in our societies.
	Growth, at least in the West, has stagnated, and there is a growing skepticism and anxiety about the sustainability of human development.
	The shared stories and values which once provided unity are contested, culture is more polarized and fragmented than ever, and there is a sense of fragility and crisis which pervades everything from the basics of individual identity to the heart With this as the backdrop, ARK has drawn together a unique alliance from around the world, covering politics, business, the arts, and culture.
	Our ambition is to draw on our moral, cultural, economic, and spiritual foundations to imagine a future where empowered citizens take responsibility and work together to bring flourishing and prosperity to their homes, communities, and beyond.
	We are citizens from around the world, but each of us recognizes that our societies are at a turning point.
	The time to develop a better story is now, and we invite you to join us in building this vision together."
	What's the impression you get of that?
	Bullshit!
	Utter, corporate-speak bullshit.
	A little bit vague, isn't it?
	A little bit vague.
	There are things, there are problems.
	I mean, it's very, like, well, I'm a goofy-ass Ayn Rand fan, and I've, like, if you told AI to, like, Ayn Rand corporate-speak, and go.
	Yeah, so ARC held a conference at the O2 Arena in London across three dates, and they were sold out.
	I think that's like 15,000, I think, something like that, 20,000 maybe.
	The founders of it, the founders of ARC, are Jordan Peterson, obviously, Baroness Stroud, a British Tory politician and Tory think tank person, wonderful, and John Anderson, former Deputy Prime Minister of
	Australia, who is also right-wing, obviously.
	Among the advisory board of ARC, there is Representative Dan Crenshaw, Michael Schellenberger,
	Senator Mike Lee, newly minted Speaker Mike Johnson.
	Oh no!
	Yeah.
	Yep.
	Miriam Cates, the transphobic piece of shit MP over here.
	Tony Abbott, former Australian Prime Minister and all-round piece of shit.
	And Vivek Ramaswamy.
	There's dozens more.
	Among them are prominent members of what's known as the Legatum Group, who own more than 40% of GB News, that shitty British Fox News thing that Neil Oliver is a presenter of.
	There is also Paul Marshall, who is the CIO of Marshall Waste LLP, founder of UnHerd Media, which is a Tory shitrag site, and he owns the other majority share in GB News, amounting to another 40-something percent equal to Legatum's.
	Basically, we should all be worried about this.
	Powerful, rich, right-wing shitheads are coming together to do something, and that has only ever worked to the detriment of us as a species.
	I am concerned.
	Well, I mean, are they organizing a community where they all want to live in the same place?
	No.
	They are, however, on tour.
	It's just an organization.
	They're on tour, which is weird.
	Yeah, they're doing dates in Dublin.
	I think they're going to Barcelona.
	Well, there's a bunch of people that have independently figured out that you can make money from speaking gigs, so they're just going to do it together.
	They're just supercharging their revenue stream.
	Maybe.
	I find it- Which can be very bad.
	That can absolutely be detrimental.
	I find it concerning that the people who are financing and behind GB News are involved in this, because they're not in front of the camera people, they're not speakers, they're funders, they're the people who profit from the bullshit.
	Those ones specifically, Paul Marshall especially, prominent Brexiteers, right?
	Right-wing propagandists, basically, who make as much money as they can off of right-wing bullshit.
	So it concerns me that they are funding that.
	And I get the feeling that ARC is going to present some kind of danger in the near future.
	Again, if they're funding GB News, I'm willing to bet they're funding this.
	Especially with so many members of the Legatum Group on the advisory board.
	There are like 40 members total, I think.
	It was a long fucking list.
	I guess I'm just curious as to what they're actually organizing.
	What is their goal?
	If they're stating goals?
	Very vague, very vague.
	I mean, they only formed in June of this year.
	You would think they would form around an idea of some kind, but yeah.
	The idea is just stealing.
	The idea is just like making money, making more money and then amassing money and power, I guess.
	I mean.
	Yeah, I don't know.
	It's something to keep an eye on.
	Yeah, I agree.
	I'm curious to see what it's shaping up to be and what their voice collectively sounds like.
	Yeah, it came along fairly late in my workflow, so I haven't been able to dedicate too much time to it.
	It's definitely something where I'm gonna have to investigate some of this, whatever content that's out there.
	I mean, the parts are bad.
	I completely agree, the parts are alarming.
	At least a couple of profound corporate thieves are in that list that I can pick out just off the bat.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	All of it, to me, spells trouble.
	And it's just, in exactly what kind of form it takes, I don't know.
	With these people behind it, and these kinds of people being the speakers, I don't know.
	My guess is it's gonna, you know, it'll be GB News adjacent, you know, it'll be right-wing shithead communications.
	I mean, I don't think that they're gonna say- That's my guess.
	Yeah, I think they're just going to say the same shit they always say.
	Yeah, maybe, maybe, maybe.
	Organizing in a way to more effectively extract money seems like the thing now, but I think time will tell.
	And insinuate their ideas even more.
	I don't think I can make any, I mean, I don't know if we can make any calls yet, unless they state a purpose of some kind.
	Yeah, and it's all it's all currently very still very vague.
	Yeah, no, it's Yeah, but yeah, I'm concerned.
	I'm concerned.
	Anyway, that's why that's why Jordan was was over here.
	He was here to do that.
	Which, um, wonderful, I guess.
	Money, money, money, money.
	Yeah, that's gonna be in my head forever.
	Okay.
	Yeah, so I think the thing, like the one thing I need to say about this Jordan Peterson fucking bullshit, and listen, also obviously I'm biased, because I've listened to the guy talk a fair amount, I have come in with a conclusion and it has been confirmed yet again, from the evidence.
	Again, other than having to deal with him on Russell, I've pretty much not had to deal with him because I specifically avoided him because I knew that he was a piece of shit and that I wouldn't like any of it.
	And so yeah, you possibly have more experience of Jordan Peterson as a whole than I do, I would say.
	He is wildly inconsistent, but his behavior is incredibly consistent.
	That is all the fuck over the place.
	But the thing is, is like, whenever I was younger, and for a long time when I was younger, and again, I say that I'm like, you know, being a non-binary person, but experiencing life as a woman in the world and being treated like a woman every day, regardless of how I feel.
	Especially, but not limited to.
	Just as my experience as I know it.
	Being told you don't, you just don't get it when something doesn't make sense.
	I think you're so used to not understanding and not having the full picture and also being told when you ask questions, like, wait a second, I don't think this totally jives.
	It doesn't make sense.
	Like, well, you're too young to understand.
	You don't know enough yet.
	And as I've gotten older and smarter and had more experience in life, These motherfuckers are the ones that are that they are guys who sound smart to dumb guys.
	And it's entirely an exercise in just in in sounding smart being confounding using $5 words and saying nothing.
	words and saying nothing. Yeah. And it doesn't make sense when you're young, when you're
	a kid, when you're less educated, because it fucking doesn't make sense.
	And they put it on you like it's your problem that, oh, you just don't get it.
	And especially, like, having to revisit a lot of, like, post, you know, 9-11 kind of, like, rehashing of recent history for those of us that went through it and watched the whole thing go down and how, like, collectively there was this notion of, like, wait, wait, wait, wait, what?
	Can you explain yourself?
	And government, TM, being like, oh, it's too complicated.
	You just don't get it.
	You need to quit asking questions because I would tell you, you wouldn't even understand the answer.
	And then, oh, well, as an adult and informed and like I know about, like I have more access to information and more access to the news, even as it was reported at the time, like, oh, y'all were just lying and bullshitting to get what you wanted.
	So that's what I hear.
	And I implore listeners, viewers, do not let people like this convince you that you're too stupid.
	If they can't explain something in a coherent and more sensical way, like if they're complicating by their explanation, they don't get it.
	Yeah.
	They don't understand what they're talking about.
	Like, you don't take a simple idea, and then complexify.
	Like, the only reason you do that is because you love hearing yourself talk.
	And people think that they're smart, because they can listen to you, and then kind of- You love hearing yourself talk, or you don't understand it, or like, yeah, they're, yeah.
	It's a manipulation tactic.
	It's an emotional appeal.
	It's like, oh, well, I'm very smart.
	So if you're nodding along and you're like, you're following and you're, you know, inserting your own preconceived notions and the other things I've trained you to believe, well then...
	You're smart, too.
	And when you talk to people about these ideas that I've explained to you because I'm the smartest and then people push back at you or don't understand when you start talking and they just glaze over because it's a mystery as to what your point is, oh, well, that's their problem, not your problem.
	Because you're learning from the smartest guy in the world that said, clean your room, and that's brilliant advice that fixes everything except also all this other, I don't know, it's like...
	There's something to the idea as well, I think, of these people being an idiot's idea of what a smart person looks like, you know, and that's something that the world has been suffering with for a little while.
	It's certainly, that was certainly kind of the impression around Boris Johnson for a long time, is that everyone kind of thought, oh, because he uses big words and references, you know, Historical things from, you know, three thousand years ago makes these obscure fucking comparisons and references.
	Oh, he must be the brightest man on the planet.
	And it's like, well, no, in many ways, he's a complete fucking buffoon.
	In many ways, he's also an insidious little shit.
	So, you know.
	The thing is, is you can memorize as much bullshit from history or whatever that you want, but memorization is not learning.
	Like, no, if you learned a concept and you understand it, then you've learned a thing.
	No.
	If you just repeat something that you learned verbatim, that you could understand it.
	Or not.
	Who's to say?
	And if you string enough of those ideas together, you just sound smart but understand nothing.
	One of my problems with the education system in general.
	It is very possible that Jordan Peterson got his doctorate by doing exactly that.
	By just repeating the right things at the right time.
	It's definitely possible.
	It's definitely a possibility.
	I mean, it can get people very far.
	Because it's also intimidating because a lot of people don't have the wherewithal, don't have the recall, but also it's not real.
	When you would look into the ideas he was putting forward as attributed to someone else that he was integrating into his ideas, oh, it actually was completely fucking wrong, and he just made shit up.
	Because, serious, the straw man of the straw man of the straw man of the straw man, the Matryoshka doll of straw men that he made, every clip was nuts.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, and his lack of understanding is pretty fascinating.
	It's why I compared him to RFK Jr.
	It's because with RFK Jr., everything he said was just completely made up.
	Just completely.
	It was just like, oh, and then this thing happened in the 60s.
	No, it didn't.
	You're just saying it did.
	That's not the same as that actually happening.
	And there is a bit of that with Jordan Peterson.
	They don't put ideas together to build off each other.
	It's all just disparate pieces.
	It's alphabet soup.
	Yeah, it's right.
	Here's this thing, and then there's also this thing.
	If it spells a word, that's a coincidence.
	It's not by design.
	You know what I mean?
	It's all just in a mess.
	Yeah, yeah.
	And then you get the rare moments where the actual human being kind of peeks through and says, I wanna fuck the Swedish bikini team!
	Oh, fantastic.
	Alright, well, that's our show, everyone.
	Yeah, I warned that we might have to deal with Jordan Peterson, and we did!
	It was way less painful than I thought, to be frank, and I think we probably saved us from the Christian Zionism that would have been painful, wasn't it?
	Yeah, there were bits of it that were way more boring and slow as well.
	Good God, he's just not good at talking.
	Jesus Christ, for a guy who gets paid to talk, he's really bad at it.
	I think he's amazing at talking.
	As in talking being making mouth noise?
	Yeah, you can say words.
	Making sense?
	You can say words, yeah.
	Communicating, however.
	Different question.
	Talking?
	Jibber jabber?
	Great.
	Aces.
	Oh, yes.
	If you would like to support us and what we do, please head to patreon.com slash on brand.
	We will be very, very grateful for any kind of thing you can throw at us and you can enjoy off brand and all the shit that we talk about there.
	And I'll be working on some stuff, some more patron content that will be coming up.
	I've got all kinds of new surprises coming down the pike.
	Basically.
	Oh shit!
	Oh shit!
	And I'm telling you none.
	Suck it!
	Maybe next time we should tease this up top, probably.
	That's fine.
	That's fine.
	Teased!
	Teased, check.
	If you would like to get in touch, please send us an email.
	It's theonbrandpod at gmail.com.
	We will respond eventually.
	That reminds me, Rob, I need to respond to your email is what I need to do.
	I know you're there, Rob.
	No, no, I'm good.
	The Robert, yeah, deserves the attention.
	We will get to you.
	Facebook, we have a group there now.
	It's on Brand Awakening Wonders.
	Come and join.
	Some lovely people have introduced themselves.
	I need to interact a little bit more, but it's fairly active so far.
	I started a post reply about five days ago, totally forgot, and then got busy.
	Nice, good.
	I'll get it done.
	The eternal motto of this podcast is, we will get there.
	There is a subreddit... We have, like, so much other stuff to do.
	We probably shouldn't do a podcast.
	Life, right now specifically, is a challenge.
	But hey, fuck it, we're here.
	Reddit, yeah, subreddit, it's onbrand underscore pod, some wonderful people there doing cool things and talking about stuff.
	Go and join, if you're a Reddit person, go say hi.
	Socials, we're at the onbrand pod at most places, most things, most meh, except for Twitter, and just look for the You'll find us.
	And everywhere else, I am at alworthofficial and Lauren is at made.buy.lauren.be.
	And yeah, that's us.
	I think Lauren has a plug.
	I do!
	So if you are in the Chicago area, and I do say the Chicago area because it's very accessible from all the highways, way more than you think.
	So Grabadelanya is like a print fair weekend situation culminating in Vendor Fair and live printing at the National Museum of Mexican Art, which is a rad place to be.
	It's also free all the time, if you ever have the occasion to go.
	Still jealous.
	Still want to go there.
	It's extremely cool, you should be.
	I want that and I want some tamales, goddamnit.
	I know, I know.
	I get it.
	So Sunday, November 19th from 10 a.m.
	to 4 p.m.
	at the National Museum of Mexican Art.
	We will be there slinging prints and all that kind of stuff.
	And some more events coming up, too, if y'all are in the area.
	But Grabitalania is just like the coolest.
	Instituto Grafico Chicago always puts it on every year and it's really, really fun.
	Please come out.
	I would love to meet a person I already didn't kind of harangue into.
	Yeah.
	As a friend and harangue into listening, I'd like to meet a listener in the wild.
	That'd be really, really cool.
	So.
	Oh, and it's free.
	It's free.
	And there's like interactive stuff.
	Bring the kids family friendly.
	It's like.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	Pretty fucking rad.
	So.
	I know we have listeners that can make it to this thing.
	Go on, good folks, if you can, please do the thing.
	I would love to see you.
	I'm bigger in person.
	Javara needs to meet some of you in the wild.
	I've already had the joy.
	I've already had the joy at QED of meeting listeners in the wild, and I was...
	I was not expecting it, so I was very surprised, but also overwhelmingly pleased.
	So, you know, it was great.
	Weird, but great.
	And I want Lauren to face that same experience of like, this is strange.
	It'll be great.
	We hug with permission.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
	Yeah, we do.
	Yeah, it'd be great to see you.
	Super cool.
	And like I said, there's more stuff coming down the pike and we will let you know as Hell yeah.
	We can!
	Yes.
	Yeah, we'll keep you posted.
	There is good stuff, there is real good stuff coming.
	Alright everybody, we will see you next week.
	I have some inkling of what's coming next week, but I'm gonna keep that little secret to myself.
	Those are the rules.
	Those are the rules.
	I'm not gonna tell you.
	You can't know.
	I could tell the audience, but I'm not gonna.
	Alright.
	We gotta go.
	We'll see you next week, everybody.
	In the bag.
	We survived our first Jordan Peterson excursion.
	Hopefully our only one, but he does keep coming on the show and Brandi's friends with him.
	I don't know.
	I hope we don't have to deal with him again.
	We'll see.
	We'll see.
	All right.
	Love you, everybody.
	Have a Jordan Peterson-less weekend.
	Have a great time.
	Take care of yourselves and each other.
	Yeah.
	Other than this podcast, please try and avoid any of that.
	Yes, from here on, I'm saying, you've done it.
	We're done.
	No more.
	You've had as much Jordan Peterson as you probably ever need or wanted.
	Maximum.
	Good.
	Yeah.
	All right.
	Take care!

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