Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1139 - Jordan Peterson
Uploaded: 2018-07-02T22:41:37.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1139 - Jordan Peterson' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2018-07-02. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1139 - Jordan Peterson' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2018-07-02. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1139 - Jordan Peterson

5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Hello, Jordan Peterson.
Hello, Mr. Rogan. How are you doing?
You look very spiffy today.
Thank you, sir.
This is a new look for you. You've been rocking these a lot, these big,
gigantic, what do you call those things, these concerts that you guys are doing,
speeches?
Well, lectures, discussions is really what I think of them as, yeah.
Because I'm discussing, I mean, you might think it's kind of perverse to be
discussing with a 3,000-person audience, but it's not, because if you pay
attention to the audience, they're constantly, and the individuals in the
audience, they're constantly providing feedback.
So it's a discussion as far as I'm concerned.
Feedback in applause, laughter, sometimes they shout things out too, right?
Shuffling.
Shuffling.
Yeah, well, really what you want, if you're on track, if you're where you
should be, then it's dead silent, and everyone's focused and listening.
And so if that's not happening, I mean, you know, there can be laughter and
that kind of thing, but generally speaking, you don't want to hear noise from
the audience.
So if you're pursuing a complicated topic and you're paying attention, and I'm
always looking at individual people in the audience, you know, in the first few
rows, because that's all I can see because of the lights.
I'm trying to make sure that everyone's on track with the talk.
And, you know, there's people gesture with their face, and they gesture with
their eyes, and they shake their head, and they nod, and there's lots of things
to pick up.
And if you're not speaking with notes, you can really pay attention to the
audience, and then you know if you're in the dialogue, and that's where
everyone wants to be.
Yeah, it's an interesting thing you're doing, because you have experience in
doing that with lectures and colleges and universities, but now it's the
general public, and people just pay to see it, and you fill up these huge,
gigantic theaters.
I mean, I've seen some of the places that you guys are doing it, you and Sam
just got done doing one in Vancouver, and it's huge places.
We did two.
Two, that's right.
Yeah, yeah, back to back, and yeah, so it was about five hours of intense
discussion over two days, and, you know, we were supposed to talk for an hour
each night, and then go to Q&A, but we asked the audience,
Brett Weinstein, who was moderating, asked the audience if they wanted to go to
Q&A or continue the discussion, and, you know, the response from the crowd was
definitely continue the discussion, and so we ended up talking for about two
and a half hours each night.
And, again, it was the audience is along for the ride, you know, and they were
good discussions, as far as I'm concerned.
You know, it was kind of marketed as a takedown, in some sense, Harris versus
Peterson, but the discussion itself was an attempt on Sam's part and my part to
further our thinking about the topic and to bring everyone along for the ride,
you know, for the journey, so to speak.
Yeah, well, you guys had two podcasts that you did over the phone, so these
were the first meetings that you guys had in person.
Yeah, it was the first time I'd met Sam.
The first one that you two had was marred by this discussion about what is
truth, and it was like a strange sort of a – you got stuck.
You guys got kind of stuck in that first conversation, but I felt like the
second one was much better.
Yes.
I mean, both of you kind of recognized that there were some errors made in the
first podcast.
Yeah, we augured in on a definition and couldn't let it go, and so that wasn't
so good.
Yeah, and I wasn't in tip-top shape for that first discussion, well, or for the
second one for that matter, but they've been getting – each discussion I've
had with Sam has been getting better.
So as far as I'm concerned, I think he feels the same way, and I mean, we're
trying to sort something out that's really, really difficult, and it's the
relationship between facts and values, which is parallel to the relationship
between, say, objective truth and narrative, or parallel to the distinction
between scientific fact and religious truth.
All of those things sort of are layered on top of each other, and it's an
extraordinarily difficult topic, and so it's not surprising that it's taking
all of this discussion to even vaguely get it straight.
It's been a central bone of contention among philosophers for, well, probably
forever, but certainly since the time of David Hume, several hundred years.
Well, one of the more fascinating things that's coming out of the realm of
podcasting is these kind of discussions, these long-form live discussions in
front of enormous groups of people where you go over very complex issues.
It's a new thing, I mean, and it's something that's greatly received by the
public, which is really interesting.
I mean, you guys are selling out all over the place.
Yeah, well, I've really been trying to make sense of this, because I'm thinking,
well, what the hell's going on?
Why am I selling out 3,000-person auditoriums, but not just me, obviously.
Sam is doing it, and you're doing something on a larger scale, but very similar
with your long-form podcasts.
And then there's this whole rise of what Barry Weiss described as the
intellectual dark web.
That's actually Eric Weinstein's coinage.
And so there's a group of us that have been sort of clumped together for
reasons that aren't obvious.
But I've been trying to figure that out as I do these lectures.
Another thing I'm doing with the lectures or the discussions is trying to
continually further the development of my ideas.
I use the stage, let's say, as an opportunity in real time to think.
And I've been thinking, well, if you're surfing, you don't confuse yourself
with the wave, right?
That's a real mistake.
You might be on top of the wave, but you're not the wave.
And I think this long-form discussion and the public hunger for that is best
conceptualized like that.
There's a technological revolution.
It's a deep one.
The technological revolution is online video and audio, immediately accessible
to everyone all over the world.
And so what that's done is it's turned the spoken word into a tool that has the
same reach as the printed word.
So it's a Gutenberg revolution in the domain of video and audio.
And it might be even deeper than the original Gutenberg revolution because it
isn't obvious how many people can read, but lots of people can listen.
And now it turns out, so, I mean, you got a little bit of that with TV, right?
And you got a little bit of it with radio.
But there was bandwidth limitations that were really stringent, especially in
TV, where you could get 30 seconds, if you were lucky, and six minutes, if you
were stellar, to elucidate a complicated argument.
So you can't do that.
Everything gets compressed to a kind of oversimplified entertainment.
But now, all of a sudden, we have this forum for long-form discussion, real
long-form discussion.
And it turns out that everyone is way smarter than we thought, right?
We can have these discussions publicly, and there's a great hunger for it.
And I see this parallel.
And this would be, what would you call it, supporting evidence for this
hypothesis.
The same things happened in the entertainment world because, you know, TV made
us think, well, we can handle a 20-minute sitcom.
Or maybe we can handle an hour and a half made-for-TV movie.
But then Netflix came along, and HBO as well, with the bandwidth restrictions
gone.
And all of a sudden, it turned out that, no, no, we can handle 40-hour complex,
multi-layered narratives, where the characters shift, where the complexity
starts to reach the same complexity as great literature.
And there's a massive market for it.
And so, it turns out that we're smarter than our technology revealed to us.
And I think those of us who've been placed in this intellectual dark web group,
you know, there's some things we have in common.
We more or less have independent voices because we're not beholden to any
corporate masters except peripherally.
And we've been operating in this long-form space, and the technology has facilitated
that.
And so, all of a sudden, it turns out that there's more to people than we
thought.
And thank God for that.
I'm struggling with, I want to, I don't want to use the word hate.
There seems to be a non-acceptance or a resistance to the idea that anything of
quality could come out of this group of people.
It's really interesting to me.
And I'm wondering why, when I listen to you speak or Sam or Eric or any of
these people, Ben or Dave, and I hear very interesting points.
And I'm like, why are people resisting that these are interesting points?
Why are they resisting this?
And I think there's a lot of people that are beholden to mainstream
organizations, whether it's newspapers or magazines or television shows, that
feel trapped.
I think they feel trapped by this format that they're stuck in.
It's a very limiting format.
And it's a format that, in my opinion, is like, I mean, it might as well be
smoke signals or ham radio or something.
It's fucking, it's dumb.
You know, this, this idea that you're going to go to commercials every 15
minutes and, you know, and in between you have 15 people arguing.
I mean, I watched a panel on CNN once and I think we counted 10 people that
were trying to talk during this five minute segment.
I'm like, who, what genius thought that it would be a good idea to get 10
people struggling for airtime, barking over each other.
No one's saying anything that makes any sense because everybody's talking over
and trying to stand out and trying to say the most outrageous things.
And I'm seeing, like, some of the resistance to this when we span, I mean,
pretty far, you know, from Sam and I lean more left and Ben leans more right
and you're what you would call a classic liberal and Eric's very difficult to
define and Brett is fiercely progressive.
I mean, these are, Brett in particular is a very left-wing guy, but this desire
to label and to have this diminishing label is like alt-right or, you know,
right-wing or fascist.
It's very strange to me.
Yeah, well, there's a couple of things going on.
And I think one of them is that the technological transformation that I laid
out.
And then the other is that I do believe that, especially for the radical leftist
types, the whole notion of free speech among individuals is not only anathema,
but also something that isn't possible within their framework of reference.
I've been trying to think this through very carefully because, you know, free
speech in some sense has become identified as a right-wing issue.
And I thought, well, how the hell did that happen?
And then I thought, oh, yes, well, if you're radically left and you're playing
the identity politics game, there's actually no such thing as free speech
because you're only the mouthpiece of your group, whether you know it or not.
So you don't get to talk as Joe Rogan.
You get to talk as, like, Joe Rogan, patriarchal white guy.
And that's it.
And your utterances aren't a reflection of your own opinions as an individual,
but they're an attempt on your part, whether you know it or not, to justify
your position in the power hierarchy.
And so everything right now, and this is where the technology and the death of
the mainstream media and this political polarization all unite.
Everything is turned into a political conversation in the mainstream media, and
it has to be cast as left versus right.
And if you're criticizing the left, then all of a sudden you're right and right-wing,
and it has to be about politics.
It's like, well, it doesn't have to be about politics.
It could be about philosophy.
It doesn't have to be cast in political terms.
And then it's also subject to a form of, well, it's made more stupid than it
has to be by these terrible bandwidth limitations.
Like, I mean, I've been on mainstream TV talk shows, and it's a very strange
experience because you're definitely c