The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

She mentioned 'Life at the Bottom' to me. And so I picked it up and read it, and I thought, I've never heard anyone state this so bluntly...

I was listening to your book this morning, 'Life at the Bottom' at 2.5 times normal speed.

...'Life at the Bottom', the world view that makes the underclass 2001 where he discusses what you might describe as the philosophy of poverty.

And he's written a new book called Truths, The Future of America First, which launches on September 24th.

So I left the campaign at the start of this year. And one of the core tenets of my campaign, the slogan was truth, actually. But it caused me to reflect more deeply on, OK, what did that actually mean?

And so that's what this book is about. It goes through 10 simple, hard Truths.

So the first one is God is real. And I'll go kind of go straight down the list of some of these.

The Title comes from an essay that Alexander Solzhenitsyn sent out to his followers just before the Soviets expelled him in 1974 and in the essay he told the people who followed him that look we can't go out on red square and say exactly what we think.

we can't go out on red square and say exactly what we think. We don't have that option in totalitarian Russia but what we can do is refuse to say what we do not think this is the power we have to refuse to speak lies or to refuse to assent to lies where they are spoken around us.

I think that that is a very valuable lesson for us today living under very different conditions in the 2020s but we are living in a time of a different kind of totalitarianism.

Solzhenitsyn's advice was while you start by not lying that's the first thing you do let me read out some of his rules for responsible conduct it's like a bill of responsibilities we can think of it that way instead of bill of rights I will not say right affirm or distribute anything that distorts the truth I will not go to a demonstration or participate in a collective action unless I truly believe in the cause I will not take part in a meeting in which the discussion is forced and no one can speak the truth I will not vote for a candidate or proposal I consider to be dubious or unworthy I will walk out of an event as soon as I hear the speaker utter a lie ideological drivel or shameless propaganda well that would produce a lot of abandonment to a lot of meetings right now it would and it will not support just journalism that distorts or hides the underlying facts.

his his his diagnosis was that it was the willingness to knowingly deceive yourself and other people that generated and supported the totalitarian catastrophe and that your primarily primary obligation was to cease participating in that.

I just wrote a book, Mafia Democracy, about the government.

And it's a masterpiece. And that's really in terms of modern Austrian economics people can read that.

there's a there's a very interesting do you know Jacques Les Sarrons that he wrote a book called And There Was Light he he was he was a he was a French resistance fighter and he wrote he wrote this very interesting autobiography

The Talmud is which was printed by Princeton University Press you know makes makes that argument that The Talmudic views of Christ which he they he argues in that book that it was understandable given that the Jews were so persecuted by the Christians

I read Rick Strasman's book The Spirit Molecule...was quite shocked...to put it mildly by what his research subjects were reporting as a consequence of being administered DMT they would report being shot out of their body and then going to other places and encountering what were essentially alien beings of one form or another

It's the story of how uh that a scientist can become obsessed in this case the scientist is me it's a memoir of my career trying to detect these early reverberations of universe's spacetime structure in order to see whether or not inflation or an alternative took place to ignite the hot big bang that we do observe and have have stacks and reams of evidence to support so the existence of matter the existence of the CMB the existence of galaxies and expansion those all support the fact the universe was in an extremely hot and dense state early on in its history but they don't provide the mechanism by which that came about.

It's a play on words because that polarization signal I told you about Jordan the orientation is called a curl so it's called a curl tight motion but there's a profound nerd joke for you.

that's described in my book Losing the Nobel Prize we claimed we detected these waves of gravity that's as close as scientists think we can get to the detecting the smoking gun it's actually the smoke from the gun if you will of the initial inflationary expansion of the universe

so the results were accurate so what's the stat what's the status of the quantum fluctuation field agglomeration theory now you didn't provide evidence that it was the case right is that still the extent theory in relation yes the initial agglomeration of matter it is it is it is an end it's that theory you just know it's your claim to have provided evidence for it exactly and we made the most precise detection ever of this type of signal it's just the interpretation was wrong we didn't make a blunder we didn't say there's faster than light neutrinos or what we made an exquisitely precise measurement of dust in our galaxy which is useful by the way because what we see we'll never see a unit well as I said until we get out of the galaxy which won't even happen you know with with trillions of dollars of funding it's it's physically impossible right so until we we're always going to be measuring a combined signal a potential cosmic signal plus an actual dust signal

I mean we're human beings we have to support and there's and there's a lot to be said about good honest work and the work that colleagues and I are engaged in but we were confronted with the discovery of a lifetime and that would not only mean as I said before that we had discovered you know gravitational waves which had never been observed in this fashion and in 2014 when we made this announcement at Harvard you know that we had discovered the aftershocks of the inflationary epoch but that we had discovered evidence for the multiverse and and yet what did it get undone by the most humble meager make substance in the whole world which in the universe which is called dust

And then I go back as much as I can to the source documents including Foucault and I think Andera down they think they said they were Marxists that seems like you know proof and the entire intellectual milieu at that time in France was Marxist including people who should have known better like John Paul Sartre so it's like that was the that was the water in which which those particular fish swam and the postmodernists when they themselves say that they're what would you say that their intellectual effort is tending in the Marxist direction or as an extension of Marxism I'm pretty much inclined to believe them and so I don't understand how this notion that those two two concepts are separate has come about do you have any any idea about that

And academics hyper focus on these distinctions and they say look I see I see they say just like you say well they say that they're Marxists that looks like proof they say well they said we're criticizing Marx so that's proof that they're different in the neo-Marxist or no exception

So there's a level of analysis at which these I think your genus and species metaphor is a good one so there's a there's a level of analysis at which these are all variations on a theme and there's another level of analysis where that well no they're distinctly different which is exactly what does happen in academic microarguments right

Well I think part of it's just the attempt to sow confusion as well

If it's economic analysis for Marx then you get classical Marxism. If it's race analysis for the critical race theorist it's almost you have to massage around the edges but it's almost the exact same architecture

Well that's certainly what it seemed to me to be you know one of the things that's been disturbing I suppose on the gaslighting front is whenever I draw a relationship between postmodernism and neo Marxism first of all people say two things that I don't know what I'm talking about which by the way is rarely the case and second that you know that's that's a conspiratorial misreading of the relationship that there's nothing that most postmodernism has nothing to do with Marxism and you know I've taken that criticism seriously because it happens a lot I think well you know is there some manner in which I have this wrong

the pandemic took me by shock, surprise. I didn't anticipate how we would respond to the pandemic and I didn't anticipate the appetite of people for being able to have their lives completely shut down and controlled by politicians and other people, public health experts.

it became more like an autoimmune response where we started attacking things that didn't matter like schools and issuing mandates without evidence that they were really going to make a difference.

I think that you can reduce it maybe to instead of left and right, authoritarian versus non-authoritarian.

the response was was something that we really really blew and didn't you know focus on the people who were actually affected.

I think that's exactly what happened. We're experiencing a lot of global instability as we plunge into primary season.

I have 1400 references in that book that book was an earlier book I did called thymarisol with science-week so I know if somebody asks me I can tell you you know this effect is highly likely being produced

you spent a lot of time your last book letter to liberals I think I've got that title right concentrated on the strange collusion that has occurred between the Democrats and the and big pharma and this is also something I find completely inexplicable

now as you pointed out in your last book big pharma controls about 75% of the advertising on legacy media and even more on the news shows