Well I posted this as soon as I saw the video’s title (I hate watching clips instead of full episodes of a show, but The Russell Howard Hour puts up little clips at a time on YouTube and often takes a week or more to get the full episode up, and I can’t find the full versions of recent episodes on any other streaming sites, so I get impatient waiting for the full one and just watch the clips as they go up) with the thought that then I’d watch the video and post updated thoughts about it. It took me longer than I expected, because I watched the first full few minutes and found it so hard to watch that I decided to take a break to eat breakfast and watch some more of Airplane!, a movie I loved as a kid but haven’t seen in years and am currently in the middle of re-watching. That’s how I did it, I just went back and forth between that terrible interview and an incredibly funny and nostalgic movie, to balance things out a bit.
Anyway… to answer your question, @mikesmoustache,
It was worse than I expected based on the title, though I’m not sure if that’s because it was actually worse than what the title promised or just because I wasn’t prepared for how viscerally upsetting it would be to see Russell Howard gazing in awestruck admiration of a guy who has done so much to mess up a lot of people, but particularly an entire generation of teenage boys.
Of course that’s hyperbolic, I don’t know every teenage boy in the world. But as a coach, I work with a lot of teenage boys. And in recent years, we’ve dealt with a lot more problems from them that can be specifically traced back to Jordan Peterson (and Joe Rogan). I know this because when my co-coaches and I try to deal with these issues by talking to them about why they’re showing disrespect that they didn’t used to show to the girls on the team, why we’re hearing more sexist and homophobic comments from them than we used to, why they’re developing an attitude that anyone trying to get them to be nice to people is trying to silence men - they’ll often specifically cite Jordan Peterson (and Joe Rogan) as someone they listened to. It’s multiple times that a teenage boy I coach has said something absolutely untrue about how straight men are victims or whatever, and I ask them why they think that, and they tell me they heard it from Jordan Peterson (and Joe Rogan, it really is those two who come up and over and over).
So I did the thing that I know is bad for my mental health and sometimes I do it: I put way too much time into reading and listening to stuff that’s written and said by terrible people. Because I wanted to understand. I knew generally what Jordan Peterson stood for, but if he was having this big effect on people I care about, I wanted to know what they were hearing. I wanted to see if it was true that there were good messages in the bad.
I watched hours and hours of footage of him giving lectures on YouTube. I watched the full lectures - as I said, I don’t like breaking things down into clips. And oh God, some of them were so long. I read all kinds of articles he wrote. I haven’t read his books, because there’s more than enough stuff to read and watch for free online. This man loves to hear himself talk and put it on the internet to get other people to listen; I don’t need to spend money on his books to find out what he says.
I did that deep dive into the fucked up world of Jordan Peterson a few years ago, and since then I’ve occasionally kept up with more recent things he’s said and done. And here’s what I know: don’t get tricked into doing what I fucking did. Jordan Peterson, and all his fans - that’s their greatest trick. Whenever anyone criticizes Jordan Peterson at all, they say, “Well you’ve only heard about him from biased left-wing sources and you’ve believed all those lies they say about him and anyone who’s actually read his stuff understands how great he is.” And the trick is that you will never satisfy those people. You can say, “Well I did watch this interview he did.” And they say that interview was biased, was edited, doesn’t count, you haven’t heard enough from him. And because there’s so much Jordan Peterson content out there, you have to watch hours and hours and hours of an asshole who speaks in a boring and convoluted way just to be able to truthfully say that you have actually heard from him directly. And then people will say you didn’t really watch it, you didn’t understand it, you need to watch more or you’re not allowed to have an opinion on him.
For the record, I haven’t actually gotten into arguments about Jordan Peterson with anyone except my brother (and it’s been a few years since I’ve done that, I’ve learned to just stop talking about anything political with my brother). When the boys I coach mention him, I avoid discussing Jordan Peterson directly at all, and instead talk about the specific things the boys have said/done and views they’ve expressed, because I don’t think arguing about Jordan Peterson with them is helpful. I’ve never actually talked to the Jordan Peterson fans all over the internet, so I’ve never had them say these things (“You can’t criticize him because you haven’t actually listened to all his hundreds of hours of boring lectures”) to me. But I have read the arguments they make online any time anyone criticizes Jordan Peterson at all. And sometimes they make this argument even when no one has criticized him! They’re not responding to anyone, they’re just talking about how great he is, and they include in this talk some stuff about how everyone who criticizes him hasn’t really listened to him and just believes lies they’ve heard from biased sources. It’s pretty much their main discussion point.
So. All that to say. If you have ever been frustrated by accusations that you’re not allowed to criticize Jordan Peterson because you haven’t listened to hours and hours and hours of him rambling, I’m going to do you a favour: I have listened to hours and hours and hours of that, I have heard and read the primary sources instead of just biased opinion pieces, so I can save you the time of doing all that and just say yes, he really is bad. By taking my word for it you are getting your information from a secondary source, but it’s a secondary source that’s been informed by a lot of primary source material. So read/watch him if you want, but if you don’t want to - and my God, why would you want to? - you can take the word of someone who did that work for you. Context doesn’t make him less of an asshole. It makes him more long-winded, more annoying, and frequently boring. But all the sexist quotes you’ve heard from him sound just as sexist in context. You can listen to him make an hour-long argument about why trans people wanting their identities respected is actually fascisms, and it doesn’t make any more sense than it does in the out-of-context clips that are floating around. If you ever see someone say that he just looks bad in clips but when you hear his full speech he makes total sense - I’ve checked, and they’re wrong. There’s no need for all of us to check individually, it’s a waste of many hours and we have shit to do.
So that brings me back to @mikesmoustache’s comment: I completely sympathize with your desire to not watch that interview. In fact, I recommend that you do not watch that interview. I did it for you, and I can tell you: nothing in there made me say, “Oh shit, Russell Howard is right, Jordan Peterson is pretty cool.” There’s also no point in that interview when Russell challenged him on anything whatsoever, in case anyone was hoping (as I was, a bit, though I didn’t expect it given the way Russell’s talked about Jordan Peterson in the past) that maybe he’d bring him on and then ask him to defend some of his more awful beliefs. It was a lot of Russell Howard being very impressed with this man’s very wise self-help advice.
And the thing about Jordan Peterson is some of his ideas are actually all right. It’s not groundbreaking; it’s stuff you can find in any cheap self-help book yet it somehow gets him lauded as a towering intellectual. But it’s still good advice. Cleaning your room is a good idea. Finding something you’re passionate about is a good idea. Taking pragmatic charge of your own mental state is a good idea. The trouble is that people - especially teenage boys - who are lost and having a hard time mentally get drawn in by the self-help advice, and then end up falling down the rabbit hole of all his fucked up beliefs. Pick up any self-help book; it’ll give you tips about how to keep your room clean for a mentally healthier life without also saying women are trying to trap you into sexual harassment lawsuits by wearing makeup at work.
There’s a 3.5-minute YouTube video that collects some of the awful sexist things Jordan Peterson has said, and its description is: “When Jordan Peterson says something particularly sexist, it’s usually buried in an hour long video. Since I’ve been watching so much of his videos, I decided to start making a compilation of the statements that stand out to me” I quite like that, because it makes me feel like someone else has felt my exact frustration while watching all those hours. The frustration of “context does not make any of this better, if I’m going to waste my time watching all this then I’ll at least distill what I’ve learned so other people can learn it without wading through hours of bullshit, even though I know people will then say it was taken out of context so none of it counts.” The video is not fun to watch, but it does summarize one aspect of Jordan Peterson’s views pretty well. They are clips out of context, but I have personally seen the full versions of a lot of those clips from the original source, and context doesn’t make it better.
For the record, I am thirty-one years old, do not want to have kids, and consider myself a very compassionate person. I have dedicated much of my life working as a coach (I say “working”, but I don’t get paid for it, I just do it because I care about the people I can help) trying to whatever I can to help the kids and teenagers on my team live the best life possible. I care deeply about my friends, my family, and everyone I work with as a coach. I realize I don’t need to defend myself to anyone here; “a woman can be over thirty and not want to have kids but still have a compassionate nature” is not a controversial claim on this website. But I felt the need to express that anyway.
Finally, I’m going to end this post with something I find quite therapeutic. It’s an extremely silly comedy song that expresses so well what I think of that whole situation. It captures the frustration of anyone who’s ever criticized Jordan Peterson and been met with the accusation that they’re just listening to lies and ad hominem attacks from biased sources instead of engaging with his ideas. And it doesn’t matter how many of his ideas you engage with - they still find a way to say your engagement doesn’t count and you just hate him because the lying media tells you to and it’s all ad hominem. Ad hominem. There is something wonderfully freeing about listening to a song that says, “You know what? Fuck you. If you won’t accept any of my arguments as having intellectual merit because nothing could have intellectual merit compared to the great Jordan Peterson, then fuck it, I will just do what you accuse me of doing throw a bunch of ad hominem attacks at him. Because that is a better use of my time than trying to engage in intellectual debate with that bullshit. Listen to me fling some childhood insults and then fuck off, I’m tired of trying to argue with you.”
…Thank you for allowing me to get this off my chest. I genuinely feel better for having done so. Yes, I recognize the hypocrisy in me accusing Jordan Peterson of being long-winded while I was quite long-winded myself in this and many other posts. Trust me, he’s even worse than I am.
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