The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

what was what was at the Churchill said at the beginning of his of his of his histories of The Second World War um in defeat defiance in war resolution in peace could will and in victory magnanimity I mean something like that is what we need today

He would later detail his work in a series of books such as Securing Democracy: My Fight for Press Freedom and Justice in Brazil and No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State.

yeah I lived very close to where Eric Garner um was killed in Staten Island I was in New Jersey just a short travel way so I decided to do a book about um what happened there and I just on a lark I went to the neighborhood hung out in the street for a little bit talk to some of his friends and found that he was I thought an interesting person so I thought it might be cool to write a book about this this guy and you know so I spent a couple of years really just talking to drug dealers and hanging out in the street and ended up with a portrait of what happened uh to Garner all the different forces that converge to um cause you know that incident and you know left with an understanding of police brutality that was a lot more um complicated than people made it out of the George Floyd incident which is I think is um was unfortunate

He would later detail his work in a series of books such as Securing Democracy: My Fight for Press Freedom and Justice in Brazil and No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State.

You wrote a book in 2007, "A Tragic Legacy: How the Good Versus Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency." So I want to delve into that for a minute and share with you some thoughts I've been developing, and you tell me what you think about them.

yeah when I said few words about that and then we'll talk about the debate you had recently with Douglas Murray and and sure so hey dink um I had always loved when I was a kid the the book as I mentioned before Manufacturing Consent I grew up in a family of journalists my father was a television reporter and that book was very eye opening to me even though I had been around the media my whole life because it was about the unspoken pressures that go into editorial decisions before they get to the reporter you know why are some stories were assigned and not others right why why do people at ABC or CBS why do they freak out about the assassination of a Catholic priest in Poland but not an L Salvador um you know it's that kind of thing I always thought that book was interesting so I wanted to do basically a um a new version of that for the internet age and see if anything had changed and I I talked to chomsky before I started writing the book I said are you okay with me doing this project and he sort of said okay and um and the premise of the book that I came up with is that the internet had changed the game significantly and that really for financial reasons um the media business had evolved in this new direction where instead of trying to go for the whole audience which is how ABC CBS NBC made their money in the old days now they were using the new model which was what you might call um audience optimization where you pick a demographic and try to dominate it and that's how we get this basically stratified fracture media landscape where you have some companies that are selling only to blue leaning audiences and then some that are only selling to the right and it's a very successful commercial formula but as news it's really bad because what ends up happening is that you're just giving your audience what they want to hear most of the time usually about the people on the other side and that's that formula that that um commercial formula of doing news um I think has been a major driver a lot of the kind of culture war division in this country

In 2008, you published a book called "Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics."

I had actually, I had just started writing about politics in 2005, late 2005, 2006, and I wrote these first two books that actually I am proud of. I came from kind of a good place, and I was a constitutional lawyer.

The book itself, the way it's framed, the title, "Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Party Politics," is very...

But the idea was that there's a kind of iconography in Republican party politics. Remember when I was growing up, my father was mostly conservative, um, but not politically, and he used to kind of revere this certain sort of male archetype that I think he felt was lacking in his life, like John Wayne, Ronald Reagan, all over North, um, and I think Republican party politics has relied in a lot of ways on these archetypes, often from people who don't really exude those virtues in their actual life.

And I think the way that book got framed, the way they kind of forced me into this, you know, attack the Republican party, was more a byproduct of that. So I don't think I've ever gotten back and read that book once it was done because it was just kind of a, you know, sort of labor of necessity rather than a labor of love.

I also really like Tom Wolf especially um the electric cool aid no uh no no no uh yeah yeah the electric cool aid acid test yep yes exactly and and and candy colored tangerine flake baby that's also a great collection of uh this he wasn't as much of a Gonzo journalist as Thompson but man he had an eye for the times and he could sure write man those those uh those articles are so brilliantly plotted in books yeah he really nailed it so

So I was reading "Behave" in some detail, I've read a number of your other books, I've followed your career for a long time.

The thing that really struck me in "Behave" is the are the sections on game theory and I wanted to start talking about game theory

And you describe that in "Behave" as difficult it's very easy to fall prey to an immediate impulse anger is a good example of that or maybe fear right that grips you and forces you to act in the moment but you want to constrain your impulses which would be manifestations of brain circuits that are much more evolutionarily ancient you want to constrain those with increased knowledge of multiple future possibilities in a complex social landscape.

You do that in particular in behavior with the as you map out the nervous system from the hypothalamus upward toward the prefrontal cortex. There's going to be an interaction between context and physiology that's necessary.

So you talk a lot in the book about tit for tat and so what do you outline that for people too because lots of people listening again this is one of these things that just sounds it sounds trivial when you first encounter it especially the computer simulations but it's absolutely it's of stunning importance once again so do you want to outline the science behind these iterative game competitions and the fact that tit for tat emerged as a solution and then the variations around that too let's get into those

I also really like Tom Wolf especially um the electric cool aid no uh no no no uh yeah yeah the electric cool aid acid test yep yes exactly and and and candy colored tangerine flake baby that's also a great collection of uh this he wasn't as much of a Gonzo journalist as Thompson but man he had an eye for the times and he could sure write man those those uh those articles are so brilliantly plotted in books yeah he really nailed it so

And it deeply shaped my worldview. I mean these books were incredibly formative for me

So 21 years old sitting in a apartment I couldn't afford in the worst part of the San Fernando Valley. Truly looking for quarters under the couch to see if I could afford dollar menu jack in the box, I as a teenager had been in love with Stephen Lawhead's novels the pin dragon cycle. It's a it's a young adult series about Arthurian myth and about the fall of Roman Britain and the sort of rise of sub-Roman Britain and the preservation of Christianity in this very small Celtic area in Wales

I'm in Eastern Europe and Croatia today, producing our first major scripted series for daily wire plus called the pin drag and cycle.

When andrew brybart wrote his book Righteous Indignation Excuse me while i save the world i called him and said andrew You can't call the book that and he said well i am indignant and it is righteous Well you can call you can use that part but don't use the subtitle I said it's you're not saving the world and god is a jealous god He's not going to share credit for saving the world with you And i understand that andrew was on that mission I supported him i loved him in that mission But the mission is to do our part In god's work not to think that we're god and that the work is ours to do And i don't mean to be critical of my friend only of this one bad idea that i think that he This one bad idea that it i think that he had

So you have a new book coming out on October 17th, this is recorded in 2023, October 17th, Canceling of the American Mind, authors Greg Luke-In-Off and Ricky Shlott. So congratulations on that. Thank you so much. Why don't you start by telling us a little bit about the book and why you guys are partnering together also to write it? Yeah.

I think it's probably a little unusual for a 48-year-old and a 23-year-old to be writing together, but I couldn't feel luckier than to get to work with Ricky Shlott. She's absolutely brilliant.

And we pull no punches. You know, when we think the right or left has been wrong just like we do as fire, we call them out.

And we pull no punches. You know, when we think the right or left has been wrong just like we do as fire, we call them out. But when it comes to the, well, when it comes to the phenomenon of cancel culture, the place where it's the most dominant of course is in higher ed.

I do think that it's just an honest truth, that just speaks to the female proclivity a little bit more.

And I think the other thing is also making sure that our universities can maintain a balance that's more healthy than the balance that we have right now because like I think Richard Reeves in his research and in boys and men falling behind and so I think it's a combination of having to make sure that we can foster young men who are able to take up leadership roles in higher education

So that could easily be the case you know I read this great book decades ago called Systemantics by a man named John Galt and it's a great book very very short tongue in cheek in a way but brilliant and he has a lot of maxims and axioms it's a list of axioms about how you analyze how a system works and one of his axioms which I've never forgotten and has been unbelievably useful to me as an analytic researcher was uh the system does not do what its name says it does and so that when you approach a system you have to look at so if you want to for example figure out what a system does you look at where it spends its money so I learned this when I was working for the Alberta government 30 years ago 40 years ago as a junior analyst

And I want to delve into that as deeply as possible to establish let's say its credibility but.

I really i'm taking a back by the material that that you reported in Laptop from Hell I don't know what to make of it I was thinking about.

I'm still recovering from reading your book.

I'm trying to understand this so first of all, I'm thinking about it the way I would think about it if I heard this story from a client. So the first thing I'd wonder is the timing is suspect like why would you drop off those laptops a week before your father announces his run for president.

It's done very well it sold in hard cover 200 like I can't remember.

I was reading the Stonstein's key quote the other day and writing about he said he has a father there a Zosama who is the spiritual guide of this uh I think it's a Lose Alliose who's a monetic monastic novitiate in the Brothers Karamazog which is a great book and Zosama tells Alliose you are responsible not only for everything you do but for everything everyone else does.

And he wrote a book called what is it the sacred or I'll remember it momentarily.

It's about Genesis and I talked to him about the sin of eve in the in the story of the garden of Eden and.

I wrote my first book on Enron which came out in 2002.

It's now already 20 years ago.

My book on Enron was called Piped Dreams Green Ego and the death of Enron came out now 20 and a half years ago and I'm still writing about Enron in fact these days.