The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

We discuss topics from his latest book, A Question of Power, Electricity and the Wealth of Nations, the current audacity of those pushing the zero emissions net zero agenda.

My latest is the question of power electricity and the wealth of nations.

I've been very fortunate to have the same publisher public affairs the same editor Lisa Kaufman same agent Dan Green all have been incredibly supportive and helpful along the way so I consider myself incredibly fortunate Jordan to be able to write about think about do a lot of public speaking on energy and power.

I've been saying now for more than a dozen years natural gas to nuclear this is the way forward.

And this is the part that just you know as I said grills my cheese chaps my hide on this Angola deal and it's on my sub stack Robert Bryce dot sub stack dot com let them eat solar panels right that the export import bank of the United States is not funding a natural gas fired power plant in Angola even though Angola has trillions of cubic feet of available natural gas instead we're funding a solar panel project.

I cited him I think in my latest book or in in my fourth book Power Hungry but he documented and was one among the first researchers to document the effects of indoor air pollution on women and girls and you know I was interviewing a climate activist yesterday and by the way I don't call it green energy I don't call them green I call them climate activists I don't call it green energy I don't call it clean energy I called it alt energy right because I don't think it's green I don't think it's clean covering the landscape with solar panels uh destroying landscapes with wind with wind turbines I'm a long time critic of the wind business proudly so they don't like me I don't like them back okay let me because I have you know I've documented now for more than 10 years and on the renewable rejection database which is on my website uh Robert Bryce dot com I've documented nearly 400 rejections of wind energy in the U.S. from Manda Hawaii it's happening in Canada too by the way in Ontario over 90 communities have declared themselves unwilling hosts to wind energy now you don't read about this in New York times because it doesn't fit the narrative um but I digress so back to the point about hydrocarbons and Kirk Smith indoor air pollution is one of the leading killers of women and girls in developing countries Kirk Smith and and the WHO I think the World Health Organization documented something like three or four million women a year women and girls year are dying premature deaths because of indoor air pollution because they're cooking with Dung or Wheat Straw in in their homes and and and Kirk Smith made this point they need LKG they need butane they need propane they need clean forget electricity for just a minute let's replace those low those low uh density fuels at low bur low density high polluting fuels with hydrocarbons that's a step change in their standards of living and so you know I but I'm with you in terms of kind of your broader points here we need more energy not less we and choke and and I'll stop here because I could go on a pound the table here but expensive energy is the enemy of the poor and I remember very vividly I live in Austin which is of course you know I used to have friends here it's a liberal hub right but uh friend of mine a former acquaintance of mine he was pounding the table oh energies too cheap and I thought okay here you are you vacation and you fly around the world you go summer here they're in there everywhere you're rich and you're telling me energy is too cheap I don't see it that way and I wait I haven't talked to him in a long time because of that because I just thought you don't understand what you're talking about expensive energy is the enemy of the poor and yet so many of these policies both in the developed countries and the developing countries are aimed at by these bilateral multilateral lenders by policy makers at the state level and federal level are aiming that are creating policies that make energy more expensive and I just think that's just fundamentally wrong with energy means life and the absence of energy is death to quote my friend Duneberg I started to take this whole domain of trouble particularly seriously when watching what was happening in Europe and starting to understand that the West in its delusions of repentance would sacrifice hundreds of millions of people and literally sacrifice them on the altar of Gaia to not save the planet well virtue is signaling about how in the industrial enterprise was unethical despite benefiting from every single one of the gains that the industrial revolution has produced and being 100% absolutely unwilling to give up any of it at all whatsoever under any circumstances for ourselves like there's no excuse for any of that now my understanding is this is that we there's a pretty clear developmental pathway to cleaner and more reliable energy in the long run it's something like well you start at the very lowest wrong with with dung and with wheat straw and with those things and with wood scrap wood so forth that can be burned that's there in the local environment and its low energy dance it's expensive it runs out easily it's unreliable it's polluting you move from that to coal now you move to coal because coal is unbelievably plentiful and it's dirt cheap and you can get a coal fired plant up and running with relatively rudimentary technology in almost no time flat and it's disadvantaged in particular as particulate pollution although it also produces a lot of carbon which I don't really care about but the particulate pollution is a problem you move from that to oil or natural gas and you move from that to nuclear like do we know this or not is this just like can we rest assured that this is a reasonable developmental pathway and one that we should be pursuing?

So you recently wrote a Letter to the American Church. I released a podcast a while back or I guess it was just a monologue which was a message to Christians and so obviously to some degree we're thinking along parallel lines. Why did you think it was necessary to write a Letter to the American Church?

The thesis of this book, Letter to the American Church, is that precisely as the German Church was silent and precisely as that opened the door to hell, to every kind of evil, it is the silence of the church in America now, this minute that is similarly opening the door to hellish things on a number of fronts.

But I just had a sense of humility. There is something I suppose mystical about that intuition that there's a distinction between words that are false and words that are true. It isn't easy exactly to describe how you know the difference.

And so that's again you know you see this all through history but the reason I wrote Letter to the American Church is because you know it's my thesis that Christians have no excuse in this you claim to believe in the ground of all being you claim to believe in the god of the bible that he you know not just died for you but literally bodily rose from the dead and defeated to death if you believe that what you claim to you will behave differently you will behave fearlessly as martyrs and others have throughout the centuries that's what's required of us and we've been kind of drifting along with everything you know pretty fine we kind of thought like well we don't we don't actually have to give our lives or or maybe lose our jobs or whatever you have a lot of pastors um you know to put this even more pointedly who they're worried about maybe losing their 501c3 tax deductible status by saying something vaguely political from the pulpit and I thought what kind of cowards can you be you're supposed to be speaking truth you're supposed to care about people out there not just in your congregation but out there in the world so that if you were alive in slavery times you would be speaking against this satanic abomination of the slave trade as will before it's did uh and against slavery as people did and when people say oh you're being political just stick to theology you say excuse me what kind of theology do we have what kind of gospel am I preaching if I don't care about people who are suffering horrors if I if I'm silent this is what happened in Canada you know when I burst onto the scene I supposed to speak so to speak in 2016 it was on this trans issue peripherally but for me it was the government was mandating a certain form of speech right the government said well here's the words you have to use and I thought there's no god damn way I'm letting you pikers take control of my tongue because I know what happens when that happens and what happens is everyone ends up in hell and although it's sort of like hell being in Trudeau's Canada it's not as bad as it could get but it'll certainly get there if everybody keeps holds their tongue when they have something to say

So imagine where we are today that you have people I mean they've effectively created a false religion which is particularly horrifying and wicked. It's almost like a you know what we're seeing it now with the with the sheer lunacy of the the pride juggernaut you know that everybody has to be bullied into agreeing with whatever it is and not agree but it's celebrating and worshipping.

In 2010, I came out with my longest book biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German pastor who was involved in the plot to kill Hitler.

I knew when I was writing that book that it sort of, I could smell what was happening as I was writing that book. I could smell that in our future, in the West, not just in America but in America specifically.

And of course, I documented in my Bonhoeffer book and in this new book letter to the American Church.

And the reason I wrote it in a nutshell is that in 2010, I came out with my longest book biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German pastor who was involved in the plot to kill Hitler. I knew when I was writing that book that it sort of, I could smell what was happening as I was writing that book. I could smell that in our future, in the West, not just in America but in America specifically. And with the events of the last few years, let's say the last three years, it was impossible for me to avoid the thought that just as the silence of the church in Germany opened the door to hell on earth, which we now know because we know what happened. And of course, I documented in my Bonhoeffer book and in this new book letter to the American Church.

I'm very eclectic and I have to tell you that some people know me principally as a writer because I've written whatever 14 plus books, many children's books. I do of course radio show, TV show and so on and so forth but almost everything that I do for everyone.

Her recent book is The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, published in 2022.

You wrote a rather controversial book recently. Let's talk about the book.

I was interested today, I was going through your book again and I noticed once again that you started with the story of Marilyn Monroe and Hugh Hefner.

So one of the things that people who are watching and listening might be interested in knowing is that people pursue different mating strategies so to speak.

And so I think it is an open question to what degree can sex just be, you know, fun and fancy free, and also it's an open question to what degree aren't women just now the same as men?

I think most people know me in the Bitcoin world because I wrote a little book called 21 Lessons. It's basically a short summary of what I've learned from falling down the Bitcoin rabbit hole and other than that I've been involved in the Bitcoin space for a couple of years and I've just I've learned a lot.

It was my first book. It's the one that won three national prizes, was cited by the Supreme Court. It's the book that Claudine Gay plagiarized and used as a straw man for her own research.

It was her dissertation where she got her PhD that started her career was framed around my work, her early articles.

I started talking about affirmative action. I wrote an op-ed piece. I favored class-based, race-neutral affirmative action. That was not what the elites wanted.

And he pointed out that if you don't use objective classifications of Merit for your hiring and your promotion, the systems that don't rely on objective Merit default to dynasty and nepotism.

I published a book in 2023 after the Supreme Court decision striking down race-based college admissions, The Adversity of Diversity.

In Defense of Canada: Reflections of a Patriot (book) https://www.amazon.com/Defence-Canada-Reflections-Patriot/dp/1990823955