The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

I was noticing disproportionately on the left, specifically, we've come full circle now to this moment, you know, in the news cycle.

But, you know, mostly in response to my criticism of Islamic extremism, and, you know, the kind of the urgency with which I was, I was saying that the Islamic doctrines of martyrdom and jihad are, you know, are sincerely believed by millions of people. And these beliefs have real consequences in the world. And they're not good ones. Right. And we should talk about that.

But, you know, mostly in response to my criticism of Islamic extremism, and, you know, the kind of the urgency with which I was, I was saying that the Islamic doctrines of martyrdom and jihad are, you know, are sincerely believed by millions of people. And these beliefs have real consequences in the world. And they're not good ones. Right. And we should talk about that. Honestly, what I was getting, mostly from the left, was you know, what struck me as pure masochistic delusion, but it was on its own side, a very sophisticated philosophy of postmodernist truth claims about the relativity of everything, which, you know, in the minds of its adherents left us with no solid ground to stand on ever when making claims about right and wrong and good and evil.

So, you know, I mean, the point where it became, and this is something that I, this is actually a scene I wrote verbatim in my third book, The Moral Landscape, which is where I laid out my argument on this topic.

I have a book Waking Up and it touches, you know, it is my attempt to ground so-called spiritual experience, you know, experiences like self-transcendence and unconditional love and the kind of things people experience on, you know, various psychedelics.

Victor Davis Hanson wrote a great book on Trump called The Case for Trump which which is the best thing I've read on that on that election cycle and he points out something that seemed relatively obvious to me at the time watching from the outside was that you know Clinton and her crew first of all I don't think people trusted Hillary at all because even though she had a lot of experience because when someone aims at power that egregiously for like six decades you really got to wonder what the hell's going on it's like why is it that important to you you know and you might think well of course being president would be that important but you know it's not that obvious because if you if you associate with people who are highly accomplished many of them would have to set aside the concerns they're already engaged in which are often large scale concerns to consider something like a political career and so if you're someone who has the chops to be president which should mean that you're good at a lot of things it isn't obvious that political power per se would dangle as the greatest possible opportunity right maybe you could be coerced or enticed into running for leadership because a lot of people come to you and say you know we really need someone like you which is the best way to become a leader by the way but other than that you know you're sort of about your own business whereas Clinton was she was making a b-line for the presidency certainly even while her husband was president and so and then of course her and her foolish and treacherous advisors I would say decided that it was perfectly good thing to sacrifice the American working class on the altar of their purported moral virtue and she sunk herself doing that and it was it was an act of true hubris and foolishness right because Trump didn't so much win that election has Clinton lost it because it was hers for the taking had she not been who she was I would say fundamentally and especially had she not stabbed the American working class in the back and of course they turned to Trump for odd reasons you know because it isn't obvious that this sort of brash flashy billionaire would or at least multi-millionaire would appeal to working class people they're not of the same economic class obviously but you know I had a wise working class guy I once worked for back in the 1970s he was a conservative not a socialist and I was at that time I was about 14 I was pretty entranced by socialist ideas and the socialist party in Alberta by Crovence had a pretty good small business platform and I said why the hell don't you vote for the socialist they have a lot better platform for your endeavor than the conservatives who are a party of big business and he said small business owners don't want to be small business owners they want to be big business owners and people vote through dreams not their reality and I thought oh my god that's so smart and you know and then I thought too with regards to Trump is that even though his wealth was unimaginably out of reach for the typical working class person I think people could look at Trump and think well there are conceivable universes in which I could be Donald Trump right or this is what I would do with that money yeah right right right right and then he also had this capacity to speak off the cuff and directly to people you know when I heard from people who were around Trump especially when he was talking to military personnel that he was actually very good at that and the same people who made that comment had been around other politicians who were often flumoxed and intimidated when they were talking to real servicemen you know because well first of all there was a cultural gap between them in second you know they felt morally intimidated in the face of people who'd actually put themselves on the line but Trump seemed to have that ability to talk directly to working class people and you know you have to be a certain kind of person to do that what one kind of person you have to be is someone who actually regards the working class and what they're capable of doing which is working with the degree of respect that's actually appropriate you know and I mean I've worked with lots of working class people and contractors and so forth and I have lots of working class jobs and you're an absolute bloody fool if you don't have respect for you know electricians and plumbers and carpenters and and people who keep everything going who are truly competent because that requires a high level of honesty and expertise and communicative ability and planning and and real knowledge and so Trump seemed to be able to deal with people like that maybe because he had so much experience on the on the construction yeah the irony of that is that Hillary Clinton tried to run actually she quite successfully ran a similar campaign towards the end of her duel with Barack Obama in the Pennsylvania primary she ran as the avatar of the white working class who might remember she had all these speeches about being the granddaughter of you know a worker in a lace factory and she seemed to really enjoy that role and in all the different personas that I've seen her try to play on the stump and she has many of them that was the one I thought she did best at but she reverted in 2016 to try and to sell herself as the most experienced insider which was a catastrophic strategic error in a year where there was an unprecedented level of distrust towards Washington the degree to which they were blind to that was kind of amazing to me and you know you brought up Hunter Thompson before he actually had a metaphor that really described how that happens he talked about how if you go hunting in normal times you can't get within a thousand yards of a bull out like it's sensitive to the smallest sound in the forest it will never let you get near it but when it's in heat you know you can drive right past it and you know it won't even know that you're there it's so focused on it's going you know it's goal of mating right and that's exactly what politicians who see the presidency are like they become blind to just about everything but power and they don't think strategically anymore and I think that happened to the democrats in 2016 they just were not paying attention to all the different signs that were so obvious to everybody yeah well you think with all their polling and all their hypothetical reliance on their idiot consultants that they would have been glued into some degree and of course Clinton also allied herself with the progressive front of the democrats and that certainly wasn't something in keeping with the basic sentiments of the working class that she also stuck a shiv in so she's certainly deserved to lose and whether we deserve to have Trump as president in consequence well that's a whole different question but at least he was a bull in the china shop speaking of whom what do you I kind of think Robert F. Kennedy is the same sort of force on the democrats side I mean what do you think of Kennedy yeah

Oxford University Press published his book The Consolation of Beethius as Boethius as poetic liturgy in 2015

And earlier than that, the Paul Ehrlich and Limits to Growth, this whole notion that the world did not have enough resources to be able to keep up with the population growth that we would ultimately outpace our ability to feed ourselves.

I remember reading as you probably did the Limits to Growth right the first book right? Right and the time frame prediction was the year 2000

And overcomes evil through self-sacrifice. Those two books are probably the two most popular books in the English language today. And Tolkien in a more subtle way is saying the same thing because the three Christ figures there are Frodo and Aragorn and Gandalf, all of whom sacrifice themselves, all of whom in different ways die. And Frodo can't live in the Shire anymore. He's he can only be healed in the other place and Gandalf actually dies in Rizorex and Aragorn goes through the paths of the dead which no other man can do. So there's profoundly Christian imagery of sacrifice there.

Let's take Tolkien for instance, good people look good, bad people look bad, they look like orcs, they're ugly, and there are villains, and then there are heroes, and they are good, there isn't complexity.

I would rather be a... a descendant from a monkey than a savage

we've got some presents for you we have here an edition first edition of a work by someone you mentioned tonight which is Darwin's descendant man through the first edition of that but as well as mental food you also need real food so in addition we've got an enormous slab of meat

And then at the time I also read a book called Enchantment which was written by Guy Kawasaki, the former marketing director of Apple.

and then at the time I also read a book called Enchantment which was written by Guy Kawasaki the former marketing director of Apple

and he defined Enchantment as a process by which you delight someone where a person starts to open up to life and life's enticement and enticement and invitation

and he also said that Steve Jobs used this idea to design Apple products to sort of figure out the aesthetic of what Apple products should look like

I was talking to Alex Epstein recently he wrote a book called Fossil Field.

He's the author of the new book Fossil Future as well as the New York Times bestseller, The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels which was published in 2014.

I talk about this in moral case and in fossil future.

And you are certainly making that case in the 2014 book, which as you pointed out, you've updated.

So I go as far as to call the other side fossil fuel benefit deniers I also call them climate mastery deniers because they deny our ability to master climate danger.

if you look at my work The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels fossil future it's really stressing the goodness of fossil fuels not just fossil fuels aren't as bad as you think but they're an actual positive good.

It's a beautiful book and so that's an accomplishment in and of itself. It's also an extremely interesting book, wide-ranging and necessary in my estimation partly because most of what we consume in relationship to global occurrences, economic and otherwise, is negative.

Well, fundamentally the reality of the world, the reality of human existence is much better than people understand, let alone appreciate. Most people assume that the world is in a much worse shape than it really is.

And so if you think the reality of human existence is different from what really is, then your improvement can actually detract from human flourishing rather than contribute to it.

The book is largely free of theory. It is only facts that we have gotten from third parties with one exception, of a trend on natural resources that we will discuss.

So in addition to all the architecture books and books about dogs and cooking that people put on their dining room tables or living room tables, we are hoping that they will include this book.

His other books include The New York Times Best Seller Why Men Are the Way They Are. Plus The International Best Seller, The Myth of Male Power.

Dr. Warren Farrell was chosen by the financial times as one of the world's top 100 thought leaders his books have been published in more than 50 countries and in 19 different languages they include the New York Times bestseller why men are the way they are, which must be a very thick book plus the international bestseller The Myth of Male Power is most recent is the boy crisis.

In 2010 I read a wonderful book which is still worth reading by one of your previous guests materially it's called rational optimist and materially this book was filled with some very interesting statistics that I didn't know about I should have known about but I didn't and I thought to myself well if I don't know about them and it is my job to know them what about the larger public I mean the general public is surely to be as ignorant if not more than I am.

The Narcissism Epidemic Living in the Age of Entitlement co-authored with W. Keith Campbell,

What's Wrong with Rights? (Oxford University Press, 2020):

Dr. Nigel Bigger is the regiist professor of moral and pastoral theology at Oxford where he also directs the McDonald's Center for Theology Ethics and Public Life. He's also an Anglican priest and his professorial chair at Oxford is tied to a canonry in Christchurch Cathedral Oxford. He holds a BA from Oxford Masters in Christian Studies from Regent College van Kuver and an MA and PhD in Christian theology and ethics from the University of Chicago before his current post he occupied chairs in theology at the University of Leeds and at Trinity College Dublin.

Among his many books are the recent What's Wrong with Rights? Oxford 2020. Between Ken and Cosmopolus an ethic of the nation 2014 and in defense of war Oxford 2013 as well as behaving in public how to do Christian ethics 2011 provocative titles.

Nigel's written very well about this but it's often overlooked.

Between Kin and Cosmopolis: An Ethic of the Nation (Wipf & Stock; James Clarke, 2014):

Among his many books are the recent What's Wrong with Rights? Oxford 2020. Between Ken and Cosmopolus an ethic of the nation 2014 and in defense of war Oxford 2013 as well as behaving in public how to do Christian ethics 2011 provocative titles.

In Defence of War (Oxford University Press, 2013, 2014):

Among his many books are the recent What's Wrong with Rights? Oxford 2020. Between Ken and Cosmopolus an ethic of the nation 2014 and in defense of war Oxford 2013 as well as behaving in public how to do Christian ethics 2011 provocative titles.

It reminds me in that sense of Matthew Pagiot's recent book called The Language of Creation, which is about this long and is analogous to this book in some ways. Although more on the theological side.

Matthew Pazzo lives in Quebec Canada. Matthew has been engaged in discussions about the deepest religious matters with his aforementioned brother Jonathan Pazzo, a fine artist, orthodox Christian thinker and frequent guest on my podcast for many decades.

On Matthew's side these discussions and the accompanying thoughts resulted in the production of his 2018 book The Language of Creation, Cosmic Symbolism in Genesis, a commentary which we are going to walk through today.

That book manages the difficult combination of extreme depth and extreme clarity. In some senses it reads like a programming manual of mythic narrative laying out the foundation of The Language of Creation employed by the authors of the biblical story that for better or worse undergirds the entire culture of the West and increasingly the rest of the world.

I read his book in depth in the last weeks and was struck by its utility on many fronts and the remarkable manner in which Matthew manages to render what are often otherwise impossibly complex and mysterious symbolic representations both lucid and clear in a manner depends on a tremendous knowledge of the interrelationship between all of the different aspects of the biblical text and the interpenetration of all of its verses.

It's not like any other book on religious thinking that I've encountered.

He wrote a best-selling book, Unsettled What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn't And Why It Matters Was Published In 2021.

I think one of the foundations of the book or one of the principles when I wrote it is that I would only use material that was out of the IPCC reports or the quality research literature or the primary data itself in other words I wasn't making anything up it's all traceable back to those gold standard sources and so people can accuse me as they have of cherry picking or not telling the whole story of course I have responses to all of that but by and large they have a very hard time criticizing what I've written they can criticize me show for the oil industry not a climate scientist a denier etc etc but by and large I've only gotten very positive reactions from other people who've actually read the book I mean I can tell you stories about some of the nonsense criticisms

and there's another guy built a Steve Koonin who's written this book and I know Steve well and you know the point is he could use the documents that are cited on behalf of alarm to say look nobody here is saying it's the problem that the environmentalists and the politicians are saying where did this come from