Maintenance Phase - Jordan Peterson Part 2: The Moscow Diaries

Episode Date: March 15, 2022

In 2019, Jordan Peterson disappeared from public life. One year later, he re-emerged with a diagnosis, a story and no self-reflection whatsoever.Thanks to Katelyn Burns and Talia Lavin for help fact-checking this episode and Doctor Dreamchip for our lovely theme song!Support us:Hear bonus episodes on PatreonDonate on PayPalGet Maintenance Phase T-shirts, stickers and moreLinks!Joe Rogan Experience #1070 - Jordan PetersonWhy the Left Is So Afraid of Jordan PetersonWhen Your Psychologist Goes Viral: How Jordan Peterson’s Fame Affected His Private PracticeJordan Peterson’s Gospel of MasculinityThe Intellectual We DeserveAuditing Radicalization Pathways on YouTubeThe Left’s Contempt for Jordan Peterson Is Perfectly RationalI was Jordan Peterson’s strongest supporter. Now I think he’s dangerous.Jordan Peterson: Why I am no longer a tenured professor at the University of TorontoJordan Peterson & Fascist MysticismSunday Times: Unedited Interview TranscriptAlgorithmic extremism: Examining YouTube's rabbit hole of radicalizationWhat is the “lite” in “alt-lite?” The discourse of white vulnerability and dominance among YouTube’s reactionariesExposing Jordan Peterson’s Barrage of Revisionist Falsehoods About Hitler, the Holocaust and NazismSupport the show

[♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ Hi everybody and welcome to Maintenance Phase, the podcast where we have the meat! [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ No? You've been practicing that. Are you, I have not been practicing that. I have specifically not been practicing it, but it's been in my head. I'm Lambo Gordon.

I'm Michael Hobbs. If you would like to support the show, you can do that at patreon.com slash maintenance phase. And today, Michael Hobbs, I'm very nervous about what comes next in our two partner about Jordan Peterson. The thrilling conclusion. We did a lot of build up last time.

I know, that's the thing. I've set your expectations too high. I know, we're just gonna fizzle out like a long-running TV show. Prepare to be disappointed. So, tell us where we are. What do we know about this Jordan Peterson guy so far? Jordan Peterson is a professor out of Toronto. He is very aligned with sort of academic frameworks around moral absolutism.

He talks about having felt depressed and anxious and finding comfort in that moral absolutism. Yes. And so he has a daughter named Michaela who has rheumatoid arthritis and convinces him to join her on her all-meet diet. And that is beef salt water the end. That is all you need. And Jordan Peterson has gone on Joe Rogan's show to spread the good word. What do we know about Mr. Peterson politically? What are his beliefs? His politics are categorically, completely unaligned with mine.

Yes, he is wrong about everything, and you were right about everything. So, that's a good rubric. As a shortcut. Is that a fair recap? Yes, that is exactly where we are. We should also start with a brontosaurus of a content note. Because we're talking about Jordan Peterson, this episode is going to involve transphobia,

suicide, some Holocaust stuff. It's impossible to talk about this man without getting into really rough territory really quickly. Yeah. So we'd love to you with a little cliffhanger, a reaction that he has to food. We are going to start with a clip of Mr. Peterson describing that reaction. A little background in early 2016, his daughter talks him into doing this pretty restrictive diet that is just basically beef and chicken and greens. So he mentioned in the last episode, it was like cucumbers and broccoli

and maybe some spinach or something, but he's basically, he's already down to five foods. And Jordan Peterson has been taking anti-depressants, SSRIs, for most of his adult life. In 2016, he stops taking them because the diet that he's already on is working such miracles. It will later work more miracles when he switches to only beef, but he's already seeing very positive developments from this very restrictive diet that he's on. And that is roughly where we find him in this clip. This is a clip from the same Joe Rogan show

that we watched last time, but slightly later in the interview. We're going back to Joe Rogan. Back to life. What's fascinating to me is I haven't heard any negative stories about people doing this. Well, I have a negative story. Okay.

Okay. One of the things that both Michaela and I noticed was that when we restricted our diet and then ate something we weren't supposed to, the reaction to eating what we weren't supposed to was absolutely catastrophic. What did you do? What did you switch to? What did you eat, rather? Well, the worst response, I think we're allergic to, or allergic, whatever the hell this is, having an inflammatory response to something called sulfites.

And we had some apple cider that had sulfites in it. And that was really not good. Like, I was done for a month. That was the first time I talked to Sam Harris. You were done for a month. Oh, yeah. It took me out for a month. It was awful.

Apple cider. Like, what was it doing to you? What was it doing to you? Oh, it produced an overwhelming sense of impending doom and I seriously been overwhelming like there's no way I could have lived like that if that would have lasted for See, Michaela knew by that point that it would probably only last a month and I was like a month. Yeah, I'm fucking cider and I was like a month, a month. Fucking citer. Well, I didn't sleep that month. I didn't sleep for 25 days.

I didn't sleep at all. I didn't sleep at all for 25 days. How is that possible? I'll tell you how it's possible. You lay in bed, frozen in something, approximating terror for eight hours, and then you get up. Oh my God.

Oh yeah, and this is from fucking citer. From citer. That's what we thought, yeah. Boy oh boy. Yeah, this is a free that I didn't expect to say here. Pretty sure in this case, Joe Rogan is right. BLEYO BLEYO. BLEYO. As usual.

The most cursed sentence I have ever uttered. I don't think you can stay up for 25 days. Yeah. But I also do know that there have been times when I thought I didn't sleep, but then sort of go back through my night and go. Yeah, yeah. Like I remember looking at the clock at 1 a.m. and then again at 4 a.m.

But I don't know what was happening for those three hours. So I must have dosed off or something. But in terms of like, is this actually what happened? It seems unlikely. You are saying things that are written down like word for word in my note. I'm not going to debunk this. Like the recorded, I don't want to say world record, but like, yeah, world record for staying up is 11 days. Like that's the longest time anyone has been documented to stay it without sleep. But also, we've all been in this case, right?

Where it feels like you were up all night. Yeah, because point is I felt really bad for a month. This episode puts us in the uncomfortable situation of having human sympathy for someone who I deeply dislike. Yeah, and who I fundamentally disagree with on, like, every level. This sounds like it just uncomplicatedly sucks. Like, he had this, I guess, allergic reaction. He says it's to something called sodium metabysulfates

that they put in apple cider to stop the fermentation process. That seems like something he got from Makayla. It's not clear if that's kind of true or if it's because this diet was so restrictive that his body just like couldn't process anything other than water as a liquid. Ultimately, it doesn't really matter. It sounds like these 25 days are just hell.

He's like, he's not sleeping. he almost faints when he gets up. He says he's cold all the time, no matter what. So he goes to the doctor and the doctor puts him on clonazapam, which is known as clonapam. Yeah, I used to have a prescription for that stuff. Oh wait, really? Yeah. Oh, this is very relevant to this episode.

I mean, it's Benzos. It's Benzos I know they work really well. I have a different thing now to replace my clonipin Okay, most of the healthcare providers that I have seen since I was regularly on clonipin have been like Oh, yeah, we don't do that anymore because that's extremely addictive and we should like super not be prescribing those to people Aubrey spoilers Did I just super not be prescribing those to people. Aubrey spoilers. Spoilers. Stop. Stop. Wait like this. Oh, fuck.

Oh, what am I doing it again? Oh. Am I fired now? I usually fire you. So yeah, I mean, what do you know about clonopin? Like what do you know about benzodiazepines? Okay, so more than usual. So clonopin is part of a drug class called benzodiazepines.

It's in there with drugs like Adavann and Xanax. They all have different acting times. I think sometimes people say panic attack and they mean like episodes of high anxiety. I was having like that kinds of panic attacks where it's like, you think you're having a heart attack so you call an ambulance. Oh my God.

So that's what I took them for was like, they're like, okay, when you feel yourself heading into that territory, take one of these and you won't have to do all that. Oh, so you were taking them regularly. You were taking them like acutely. Like when you felt something coming on, you would take one. Yeah, totally.

Totally interesting. Okay. So like that's the basic thing is that it's designed to pull the rip cord on all of your sort of physiological fight or flight responses. So it's designed to like stop erasing heart. It's designed to manage all of your sort of physiological fight or flight responses. So it's designed to like stop erasing heart, it's designed to manage all of these physiological symptoms that get triggered

when you're in a state of extremely high or acute anxiety. One of the descriptions like Kimacross said that it slows down the messages between the brain and the body. It works on something called the GABA receptors, which stands for something, but I don't know what it is, that is like how stimulated your nervous system is.

It just kind of takes the foot off the gas. And it works very similar to alcohol, actually, another piece of foreshadowing. It just kind of makes you calmer on every level. A valium is another benzodiazepine. Yeah. So Jordan Peterson is a licensed psychologist. He's not a psychiatrist. He didn't go to medical school, but like he's a medical provider, right?

And his doctor puts him on a daily clonipin and he like doesn't really think about it. He's just like, I had this crazy allergic reaction then my doctor gave me this thing so that I'm not anxious. And like it worked really well. I'm sleeping better, all my symptoms, whatever this allergic reaction was, that's all gone.

And like, whatever. He just kind of moves on. This is also, this is the time when he's getting very famous. We talked last episode about he basically has very standard conservative beliefs. In 2016, 2017, when all this begins, he's known as somebody with, he's got this weird cookie book, this academic unreadable mess. Then he becomes a public figure on this begins, he's known as somebody with, he's got this weird kooky book, this academic unreadable mess.

Then he becomes a public figure on this political correctness stuff is out of control. Then he puts out basically like a self-help book. It's called 12 Rules for Life. And it's like, we didn't really go into it in any great detail, because it's just like extremely standard. Sub-Rachael Hollis, like,

put your shoulders back, stand up straight, like bootstraps, bootstraps, bootstraps. It's just like very standard self-help stuff. Right, I mean, standard self-help stuff, but delivered by a moral absolutist. Exactly. I would venture a guess that it's like even more, like shitty and dismissive than usual self-health books.

Yeah, the line that I still cannot get out of my head is he's referring to an old childhood friend who's staying with him and is like struggling with depression than usual self-health books? Yeah, the line that I still cannot get out of my head is he's referring to an old childhood friend who's staying with him and is struggling with depression and alcohol and I think he's going through a divorce and he refers to his friend as having the smell of the unemployable. Holy fuck, what?

And then his friend kills himself. What? It's supposed to be this touching story and it's just like, oh, this is how you talk about your friend who died. Wait, why is it a touching story to tell about your friend's death by suicide? Well, it's like it's like it's supposed to be like we reconnected as people and I understood him and blah blah blah And then he like links it to climate change. It's We don't have time. Aubrey we don't have time. We don't have time.

There's too much even in a two-parter. I struggled with how to cover that book because I read the whole fucking thing and we really didn't talk about it last episode. But it's just pretty standard right wing stuff and pretty standard self-help stuff. Ultimately, it's like we can hammer it and like belabor it into the ground.

But it's ultimately just not that interesting. Even though people keep trying to make it interesting I just kept reading through it like no nothing new nothing you make here really just normal like Rachel Hollis But without any of like the writing talent or the likability But then as he becomes more famous two things start to happen one track is there's all of this media coverage of him That is like essentially making him seem a lot more respectable and like a lot more unique than he is.

There's an LA Times article called Hate on Jordan Peters and all you want, but he's tapping into frustration that feminists shouldn't ignore. Oh God. There's also another one in the Atlantic. The headline is why the left is so afraid of Jordan Peterson. The Canadian psychology professor's stardom is evidence that leftism is on the decline and deeply vulnerable.

Oh good. It's feminists and leftist fault that this right-wing person is popular. And I think this is very telling. So in this Atlantic article, it says, there are plenty of reasons for individual readers to dislike Jordan Peterson. There are many legitimate reasons to disagree with him on a number of subjects, and many people of Goodwill do. But there is no coherent reason for the left's obliterating and irrational hatred of Jordan Peterson. Oh, I'm tired.

So I know, I know. So this is like very typical of the media coverage at the time. It's like, what's everybody so worked up about? Like this guy's just telling the truth. Like, what were the critiques that folks are responding to at this point? Well, this is the other, this is the other track that is happening, is that as he becomes more of a public figure, right, he's doing interviews, he's on TV, he's tweeting, he's writing blog posts. As more information and content comes out of this man, it becomes clearer and clearer that,

like, not only does he have a bog standard set of conservative opinions, but he has, like, actually pretty far right opinions. So, like, he has bad gender stuff, he says, the idea that women were oppressed throughout history is an appalling theory. Cool. He says, feminists avoid criticizing Islam because they unconsciously long for masculine dominance. Oh, neat. Not sure how we could ever disprove that.

My longing for masculine dominance is very suppressed at this point. That's the first thing I say about you when people like, who's this co-host of yours? I'm like, her longing for masterland dominance. She actually is. She's very, very, very long. Yeah.

She doesn't know it, but we all know it. Yeah. Am I right, fellas? That's the voice I do are in straight people. He of course blames feminists for the rise of Trump and like this much harder right conservatism He says if men are pushed too hard to feminize They will become more and more interested in harsh fascist political ideology cool. So ladies You hadn't been so shrill the men would not be like lighting tiki torches. It's on us

There's obviously some like appalling race shit He has a video called White Privilege. It's a Marxist lie. Ooh! I'm interested. He says, Islamophobia is a word created by fascists and used by cowards to manipulate morons. Which isn't even his quote, that's something that he took from someone else, but he tweets it out.

Oh, that's cool for him to like plagiarize that ableism in Islamophobia, to just like, yank it from somebody else. That's where I draw the line. That's where I draw the line. One of the things that also drives me nuts is that there's always these debates about like, what does he really mean? Because he's kind of further to the right in some interviews than others. But like, he's extremely consistent on having wildly retrograde views on trans people.

So I have listened to many interviews with this man, and almost all of them, he brings up his very fervent belief that trans people do not exist. Are you familiar with this auto-guinephelia? Are you familiar with this? Yes, I hate it. It's so gross, dude. It's this decades-old myth that they used to say about gay people. There's no such thing as gay men. All they are is they're people who get turned on by themselves. They get turned on when they look in the mirror. So they've created this whole fantasy

where it's like, I'm gonna date other men because all they want is to be turned on by themselves. It's this bullshit myth that like, There's like two homophobic for Anita Bryant, right? And it's now been resurrected as a transphobic thing that trans women are just basically men who have a fetish for dressing up in women's clothes and like they take it too far.

That's the theory, right? There's no evidence for it. It's like complete garbage. This is a concept that is like too transphobic for a lot of like the transphobes. Like a lot of quote-a-quote gender critical people don't even bring this up because it's like two fucking hardcore. And Jordan Peterson is like,

on Joe Rogan's podcast, all these places saying that like, this is what's going on. He also, I found a really interesting piece in Haaretz about Jordan Peterson doing very consistently some light holocaust denial. What? Well, okay.

So to be clear, he's never done full on, like the Holocaust didn't happen stuff. But what he does is he repeats a number of myths that appear in Holocaust denial rhetoric and are kind of like an on ramp to Holocaust denial. So one of them is that, you know, he does this thing where he's like, you know, obviously Hitler was a monster, obviously atrocities,

but you have to give him credit for saving the German economy in the 1930s. You might not like his policies, but there were some good things about their gene as well. This is what Heuret says, the economic wonder of Nazi Germany is a Nazi propaganda myth. Economic problems were rife already by late 1934, this is a year after Hitler came to power, and only got worse from there. Hitler's many aggressive foreign policy actions and his accelerating persecution of the Jews during the second half of the 1930s were partly intended as distractions from the poor economy. It's not true that you have to give it to Hitler on this one, like you really don't

actually. Ever on anything. He also does this fake, like, hard truths thing, like you gotta admit, about the Nazis being elected. Like, you know, Hitler was elected. And like, no, in the last free and fair election that they had in Germany, he got 37% the vote. Yeah, totally.

This is another one. Peterson uses a false narrative of concern with health and cleanliness to argue that Hitler in 1933 initiated mass tuberculosis screenings, which actually turned out to be a good thing. So again, we're in the like, oh, you gotta admit Hitler did some good stuff. It says, but no such massive screenings for the benefit of public health occurred. The Nazis considered tuberculosis a sign of racial inferiority and often referred to Jews as racial TB infecting the body politic. Holy Mother fucking shit.

I know. Screenings were not a good thing, but were used to identify people deemed unworthy of life. tuberculosis was effectively used as a biological weapon in the ghettos and concentration camps during the war. Holy fuck! Again, it's like he's never really leaned into like where this stuff goes, but these are the kinds of arguments that get people curious about this stuff, right? And get people in this frame of like,

well, maybe the mainstream media isn't telling the full story about the Nazis, right? It's like you gotta be really careful with this shit. And it also plays into this bizarre fantasy that he would have to be bad at everything in every moment for him to be considered a bad leader. Right, the implication here is that committing genocide is not enough to be considered a bad leader.

Right. This feels like a bananas thing to be saying that I'm like, hey, everybody, it's okay to write off Hitler. I mean, to me, it's like kind of a metaphor for the role that Jordan Peterson ends up playing, right? Where he's not officially far right. Right? He stops just short, but he's like a little sampler platter, right? He makes a lot of the same arguments, right? Of like, aren't black people like lying about racism and like, aren't women lying about sexual harassment? And like, aren't there questions to be asked

about the typical narratives of history that we hear? He's someone who just like inserts doubt into all of these areas and he like, he kind of shepherds you over, not all the way over to the far right, but it's like he walks you to the door of the house party and he's like, have a good night. Yeah. Like there's actual research on this. Researchers have looked at commenters. If you look at YouTube commenters, you can see like, well, first they comment

that on this video and then they comment that on this video and then this one. And 40% of the people who comment on like super far right, like white nationalist videos on YouTube began in this intellectual dark web that like Jordan Peterson is personifying. So you can't draw straight line from Jordan Peterson to the far right, right? But it's like a lot of people who ended up on the far right did start in the place that Jordan Peterson

is like picking them up. Sure, it's like gateway drugs aren't real, but this is the gateway drug. Exactly. But then what's amazing to me is like by 2019, his links to the far right are like really out in the open. So he goes to Hungary and meets with Victor Orban. This like super far right authoritarian leader. He goes to Norway and goes to a party hosted by there like mega far-right

Antisemitic party takes a bunch of selfies with their party leaders He says that he didn't get a grant because of like oh, dude of my political beliefs I missed out on this grant and then of course all these other researchers are like Yeah, I have also lost grants like you don't get every grant that you apply for right There's no actual evidence that it was due to his political views. And then a far right website called the Rebel sets up a GoFundMe essentially for him and then he ends up earning more than $100,000. And he was going to get $200,000 from the grant.

And then this is the most bananas one. He does a video called the IQ problem. Oh, no. I will let you speculate in your mind as to what the IQ problem. Oh, no. I will let you speculate in your mind as to what the contents are. With, have you ever heard of Stefan Malanoo? No. He's like a full-on white nationalist.

I was gonna read you some quotes to like show you just how bad this guy was, but all I will tell you is that he has been permanently banned from YouTube, Twitter, MailChimp, SoundCloud, and PayPal. What is it taking a ban from MailChimp? Michael, how? Boy oh boy. You're gonna be like, he got banned from Safeway.

He got banned from the post office. This guy is too racist for fucking PayPal. And Jordan Peterson is doing videos with him. Boy oh boy. So looking back, I remain really mystified and frustrated by the fact that these two tracks existed simultaneously. That on one hand, you have pretty mainstream media sources who are constantly expressing bewilderment

that liberals are mad at Jordan Peterson. There's literally another Atlantic article called Why Can't People Hear What Jordan Peterson. There's literally another Atlantic article called, why can't people hear what Jordan Peterson is saying? And it's like, why can't you? Yeah. He's making very straightforward appeals to far-right people. He's being openly embraced by the far-right. He's saying things that are indistinguishable from far-right arguments. It's actually not weird at all.

Yeah. If we're already in this like bad faith shitty conversation about like, oh, what are people so fired up about? Is he really that bad? But blah, blah, blah, blah. That's someone who thinks it's not. Yeah. And is posing it as a question

so that they don't feel like as much of a jerk. Right. If you really want to find out, is it really that bad? Then actually looking to what's the work that you cite and source and like, who's sort of models are you following and that kind of thing?

Actually, it can be really illuminating and can really matter. So that, okay, that was the part of the episode where I make you really hate this guy. Well, it seems pretty earned. Yes, exactly. This is the part of the episode where I make you hate this guy

by telling you things that he has said and done. By accurately reporting it. His beliefs and actions, yes. But then this is the really annoying part, where now we have to go back to sympathizing with him as a human being. So he starts having kind of weird side effects from the benzodiazepines. He starts getting numbness on the side of his body.

He starts getting kind of light-headed, but he doesn't really link any of the health effects to the fact that he's now taking clonipin. So in January of 2019, his daughter, Michaela, has to have surgery on her foot, because apparently the ankle replacement that they had done when she was a kid didn't take her like it had been done poorly.

So they have to put in a new one, and according to him there's a question of how well this is going to take. So there's a chance that she's never going to walk again. So this is just like a very stressful thing to go through as a father. Two months after that, his wife is diagnosed with cancer. It's a mild, fairly routine form of kidney cancer. She's going to get a third of her kidney removed. They go in for the surgery. They're like, oh, yeah, it's a routine surgery. She's gonna get a third of her kidney removed. They go in for the surgery. They're like, oh yeah, it's a routine surgery. It's really not that big of a deal.

After the surgery, they sit down with the doctor and they're like, you know, how did everything go? Get like debrief. And the doctor says, it turns out you actually don't have a mild form of cancer. You have a severe form of cancer and you have one year to live. Oh, Christ.

And it's apparently it's like a super rare form of cancer. So then he, he described the next six months as just like a never ending nightmare. There's like more surgeries that she has to have. Nobody knows anything about this weird, rare form of cancer. So like traveling to different cities and countries to get specialists to look at. I mean, it just sounds like all of a sudden

your life is just completely thrown into turmoil and he talks about like sleeping on the floors of emergency rooms. I mean, this sounds like a genuine ordeal as a husband. Yeah, I mean, it sounds fucking horrible. This is like a horrible human experience for everyone involved and it's not something that anybody should have to go through,

but all kinds of people do. And boy, oh boy, it's terrible. And so luckily, they come out of the other end of this. His wife has her entire kidney removed, her lymphatic system is removed, and it seems that she's fine now. Okay. So everything returns to quote-unquote normal, but his anxiety, what's called breaks through the benzodiazepine. Uh-oh. He also starts getting super depressed.

So he goes to the doctor, he increases his dosage, but then the extra clonipin makes him more anxious. It's not totally clear why this happens, but sometimes taking a medication for anxiety can actually make you more anxious. So the doctor says, okay, that means we need to up the dose again. So they've now increased his dosage twice. But it seems that his anxiety symptoms and his depression are both getting worse. So in May of 2019, he decides to stop cold turkey. His benzos?

Yeah. Something that it doesn't appear Jordan Peterson's doctor ever told him is that benzos are extremely addictive. And effectively, the only way to get off of them is to do what's called a taper. So you take three quarters of the pill for two weeks and then half the pill for two weeks, et cetera, et cetera. I spent a lot of time for this on,

there's various forums for people going through benzo addiction and trying to get off. And it's really hard. And people talk about still taking one-sixteenth of a pill like a year later. Like if you have been on Benzos for two years, like Jordan Peterson has, yeah. It's like a really long and slow process

to get off of them and like needs to be very strictly controlled and monitored by a doctor. It feels very there before the grace of God go I because if I had taken these medications as they are more commonly prescribed, which is the way that they were prescribed to Jordan Peterson, I totally could have been in that same addiction and dependency boat. Also the idea of going to your doctor,

you're like, I have this symptom, they're like, take this drug and you're like, yeah, okay. And like you just don't really think that much of it, right? You're like, I had a thing, my doctor gave me a pill and now I'm better. And you don't really think of like the consequences of that or what it would mean to stop taking it. It doesn't seem that it was ever described to him

like how big of a deal this was. And it also doesn't seem like anybody explained to him that going off of a benzodiazepine called Turkey is really risky. Yeah, totally. There's insomnia, you can have psychosis, you can have really severe seizures, and then people oftentimes vomit during their seizures

and they choke on it and you can die. Yeah, I've had loved ones go off of anti-psychotic medications, and it's not an uncommon experience for people who are medicated for a particular mental illness or mental health condition to think, well, what's the big deal? Like, I don't wanna do this anymore.

Why can't I just not take medication? Nobody else I know takes medication, or I'm tired of this side effect. And it's not an uncommon decision to make, to just be like, I'm just gonna go cold turkey. Yeah, another funny thing about going cold turkeys, that it takes a while for the withdrawal symptoms to start happening because the drug has a half life.

It sits in your system for like kind of a long time. So, Petersen stops taking this medication, but at first he's like, what's the big deal? I stopped taking the benzone, no big deal, right? Cause like a day, two days later, you're basically fine. He finally starts getting withdrawal symptoms after a couple of days and they're quite severe. He has starts getting withdrawal symptoms after a couple of days, and they're quite severe. He has this thing called acathesia,

which is basically restless leg syndrome, but for your entire body. Like you can't not move, and it hurts to sit in chairs. It hurts to lie down. It hurts to have anything on you. So you just have this overwhelming restlessness and you kind of need to move at all times, but also you're super tired.

So it's like you can't sleep, but you can't not sleep. It sounds absolutely awful. So he starts getting these really severe withdrawal symptoms, but he doesn't think that they're benzo withdrawals, because he didn't think going off the benzo was like a big deal. He's like, whatever,

I stopped taking this pill that my doctor gave me. So he thinks all of these symptoms are due to his depression, not due to getting off of the benzo. So he starts taking ketamine, which is this experimental drug that they're using for treatment resistant depression. So if you've kind of tried everything for depression, it seems like ketamine treatment can kind of break through. Sure.

It's the same set of sort of experimental treatments that's been happening with psilocybin, which is mushrooms, and LSD, microdosing, all that kind of stuff. Yeah, there's this whole sort of world of psychedelics, in particular, for treatment of PTSD, depression, all kinds of stuff. All of this stuff actually seems relatively promising to me, but also, this isn't what Jordan Peterson has. He doesn't have treatment resistant depression, right?

He has benzodiazepine with drools. So he does the ketamine. He says it's like the worst 90 minutes of his life. He waits a couple days, he does it again. He says it's awful again. There's been a couple of like Monday morning, quarterback, doctors and journalists that have looked into this, and kind of like, what happened to this guy, right?

Because it's like he's, all of this is very weird. He's very famous, he's a psychologist, and this is when he basically falls off the radar, like he isn't seen in public. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And what doctors say when journalists contact them, and they're not commenting on his case specifically, but in general, they're like,

something really went wrong here. In the space of three months, Jordan Peterson had two increases in the dosage of his Benzo de Azepine, then stopped taking it cold turkey, then got two ketamine treatments. And according to Peterson, this was all like under some sort of medical supervision. It's not clear what that supervision was, but it's like no one at any point told him what was actually going on. There really is some sort of system breakdown here. Right. This is a series of things that on their own, each of these moves calls for somebody who knows more than just the person using the drug, right?

Like someone who's dealt with more than one person, giving you a heads up about like, okay, here's what comes next. That seems like really important information to have as you're making a series of health decisions for yourself, especially when I'm guessing that a lot of healthcare providers would say that's a really risky decision to make. Please don't do it.

I mean, one of the things I can't get over about the story is it's like a random family friend who's like, hey Jordan, I think you're going through Benzodasapine withdrawal. This sounds like a very textbook Benzod withdrawal to me. And so Peterson starts taking his Benzodasapine again. But are you aware of something called the kindling effect? No, tell me about the kindling effect.

It's a very well-known thing, apparently, for people who've gone through these kinds of withdrawals. If you go cold turkey off of a medication, oftentimes if you start taking it again, the symptoms of the withdrawal don't actually go away. These GABA receptors in your brain, it's like running your car engine without oil. Yeah.

It's grinding, there's smoke coming out, it's awful. And if you do that for long enough, you can't just pour oil in your engine and then be like, oh, it's fixed now, right? Right, you're going to have to replace a bunch of other stuff. You're going to have to do some deeper work if we're going with the car metaphor, right? And the withdrawals are going to be harder next time. This is something that the more times you go through, this the harder it gets apparently.

I think this is kind of like dieting, to be honest. This is so rough. Yeah, it's rough. Yeah. So he starts taking his benzos again, but he's also like sleeping in extra four hours a night. And he still has anxiety and he kind of still has benzo withdrawal symptoms, even though he's taking benzo.

So sometime in the fall of 2019, he checks himself into a detox clinic for benzo diasopene withdrawal. And it doesn't work. They're tapering him down, but this is something that happens. Like a lot of people continue to have withdrawal symptoms, even as they're taking benzodiazepines. One thing that they do is they often switch you to a different benzodiazepine, which is less addictive, so sometimes they'll switch you to, I think, valium or zanox, and then you can taper off of that easier.

So he says that by the time he gets out, he's taking more drugs than he was when he went in. He really objects to this. And in November of 2019, he goes back to Toronto where he checks into another rehab facility. That one doesn't work. It seems at this point that the family, like the entire family, is just completely desperate. That he's got these terrible withdrawal symptoms. He's also got the depression. He's still addicted to benzos, right? So he's got like the worst of all worlds. Yeah. This is when the narrative gets very murky. Because

from December of 2019 to February of 2020, Jordan Peterson does not remember anything. The only thing he remembers is he wakes up in a hospital in Moscow three months later. What? Does not know anything in the intervening time. All we have is the account of his daughter. Her husband at the time is Russian. So it's not like totally random that they end up in Russia. I don't, it's still not clear how they ended up at this particular clinic in Russia. The only thing that Michaela Peterson has said about her thinking process at this time is she says

he almost died from what the medical system did to him in the West. The doctors in Russia aren't influenced by the pharmaceutical companies, don't believe in treating symptoms caused by medications by adding more medications, and have the guts to medically detox someone from benzodiazepines. Uh-oh. Her narrative has always been that like, Western medicine couldn't fix it, and like they refused to get him off the benzodiazepines. Her narrative has always been that like Western medicine couldn't fix it. And like they refused to get him off the benzodiazepines.

Other people have said it could be that they were asking for a rapid detox. They wanted him off the benzodiazepines really quickly. And like that essentially isn't medically possible. The treatment protocol that they find in this clinic in Russia is they use a general anesthetic to put him in a coma for eight days while he goes through Benzet withdraws. So that he's not experiencing the physical sensations of the withdrawals consciously. Exactly.

That's the idea, okay. So in what way this is not Western medicine, I have no idea. But the reason that she goes to this clinic is because they will do this protocol using Propafal, which is actually a very common general anesthetic. When you get a surgery, they put you under, they give you a big old dose, and then they give you like a trickle dose

that like keeps you under, right? But it's quite dangerous in that you have to monitor the patient the entire time. This is the drug that killed Michael Jackson. Oh, fuck. His doctor's in jail for four years now. When you put a patient under, you have to monitor them that their heart rate and their breathing

don't just completely collapse. You have to make sure that you don't give them too much. So it's like, this is a fairly risky procedure. I found literature on this thing of putting people in a coma for opioid withdrawals. I don't know how credible it is, but it's like something that has been tried. But it seems like for Benzo with your oils,

it's like completely off the books. It doesn't seem like something that is like anyone is recommending for Benzo with your oils because it's so dangerous to put people under and your body and your brain are like going through stuff when you're going through Benzo with your oils, you're having like seizures in your brain and shit. Oh no.

And so apparently it's quite dangerous to have people under because their nervous system is bouncing all over the place because they're going through these withdrawals, and you have to give them this drug to keep them stable somehow. Yeah, this whole thing feels gross and weird and takes us into the gross and weird territory

of like, who do we believe about their own health stuff? Yeah. You and I are both pretty staunchly in the camp of like, when people tell you their health stuff, you should believe them. And I think the challenge with all of this stuff is like, okay, you have now been publicly selling a series of decisions that you have made about your health.

That's brought to bear here. So like, there is actually like, similar to the Morgan Spurlock stuff, right? Like when you make your own body the site of experimentation and then other things that are happening to your body become relevant, right? And this feels like a relevant thing.

I also think that this is a person who had every resource to do the right thing, right? I think a lot of my sympathy for people who make risky or bad medical decisions comes from the fact that they don't have the information, they don't have access to the medical system, they don't have the resources that they need to make a better decision.

And I think it's unfair to criticize those people and hold them up to the same standards people who have more resources. But Jordan Peterson is someone with the most possible resources, right? He's a licensed psychologist. I don't understand how somebody who is 57 years old, who's been treating patients for decades, does not know

that benzodiazepines are addictive, that he shouldn't go off of benzodiazepine cold turkey. This is like the first thing you learn when you Google chronic bin. It's like make sure not to go off of it. His money into some of his fame gives him unfettered access to three countries, medical systems, right? He gets treatment in America, he gets treatment in Canada,

and then he mentions offhand in his book that like he had some person arrange an urgent visa for him to go to Russia, to go to this clinic on short notice. Yeah. It's like this is someone with an unbelievable amount of privilege and like the most imaginable access to the medical system and he makes these like objectively cockamame decisions. Yeah.

So on some level, I do feel like it's unfair to criticize him for these like personal medical decisions. On the other hand, I think that it's worth noting that it's not necessarily a double standard to say that this is somebody who should have known better. I also do think, God, I cannot decide what I think about this for longer than five minutes at a time. I'm acually aware of the fact that if somebody I liked who was going through all this,

I would have a bottle of sympathy for them. And I kind of get the desperation too. Like I've had medical stuff where I've been like furiously googling and like ordering weird shit on Amazon because I'm like so anxious and I'm like, oh my God, I'll give anything to make this go away. Yeah, totally. Listen, if somebody that you love is going through

something painful and hard and scary. Yeah, of course you will do like whatever the fuck it takes, which is like part of how people end up in sort of the hinterlands of this kind of questionable treatments or treatments that have never been tested or what have you, right? That's how people get there. And it feels really tricky to figure out how to critique

the places where people land versus the path that they take to get there. Because like the path that they take to get there is Because the path that they take to get there is a very human, very understandable to me. So he's in a coma for eight days. He's completely lost his memory of these three months. This is actually a relatively common side-effect of propifal. But most people don't get doses of it like this. When he wakes up, he can't use his legs. He ends up getting pneumonia, but it's not clear if he got pneumonia, like when he got pneumonia or where, and then he has to recover in some random house in Moscow. For like three weeks to like get his legs back, he can't

speak at first. He has to get his speech back. Obviously, his thinking is extremely cloudy. It's like a really long recovery from this. God, this is so... Ugh. I am feeling human empathy for Jordan Peterson, a person who specifically does not feel human empathy for trans people, and I hate it. I know, someone who is like, someone who he literally has a YouTube video

called The Problem with Empathy. Oh, fuck, man, what? I mean, he says throughout his sub-Rachael Hollis self-help book that addiction is a personal failing. Are you kidding me? He says, before you help someone, you should find out why that person is in trouble. You shouldn't merely assume that he or she

is a noble victim of unjust circumstances. It's the most unlikely explanation, not the most probable. It is far more likely that a given individual has just decided to reject the path upward because of its difficulties. Just what's happening here? Basically, basically my own principles prevent me from doing this with Jordan Peterson, but his own principles are directing me to call him a personal failure. That's what he has spent his entire public career saying that we should not extend empathy

to people in a situation like his. Yeah. Another very important reason not to go under is that it doesn't work. Oh, Lordy. So after he's in Moscow for a couple of weeks, they fly to Florida to like recover fully, right? Like warm weather, it's nice.

Like let's get you away from everything. And it doesn't work. He starts getting benzo withdrawals. He says in his book, he says, in Florida, I attempted to wean off the medication prescribed by the Moscow clinic, but he doesn't specify if that's like a new benzo or like a completely different drug. It's probably not propifal, because you're not supposed to use that unless you're going to sleep.

It's not clear what that drug is, but whatever he's taking that this clinic gave him, it's not working and he's also got benzo with your all still. Ugh, creips. So then, Makayla finds a clinic in Serbia. Okay. I go to Serbia and he goes into a coma again. And it seems like they're using some other experimental treatment. She hasn't said exactly what it is.

But then it's May of 2020 now. And so everybody ends up getting COVID. This is like early in the pandemic. Oh my God. So they all get fucking COVID and Belgrade. And then that's kind of like the end of them talking about it. So in June of 2020, Jordan Peterson essentially hasn't been seen in public for like almost two years now.

He reappears on a podcast episode slash YouTube video by Michaela Peterson, where she's like, here's a family update. And they tell this entire story. They won't say what the treatment they got in Serbia was because they're like, we don't know if it works yet. So we don't really want to say anything. And he hasn't really talked about this since,

which is interesting. That is interesting. He writes about it in his book, but we still don't really know if this worked or if he's back on the benzodiazepine or if he's not. I mean, it's fully none of my business and I don't really care. But it's interesting that we have no real closure to this side of the story.

It's just like, I'm back now, he comes back to North America, and he's like, back on his bullshit. I'm not going to get into everything he's done since he returned to public life. But in January of 2022, he put out an article called, why I am no longer a tenured professor at the University of Toronto. Oh, this is the one I saw! Yeah. The op-ed that was like, I'm getting canceled,

but it was like, I'm getting canceled by quitting my own job, which in that case, I've gotten canceled multiple times, guys. Yeah, I'm being canceled by quitting my modest middle-class job for like being a millionaire political pundit. Right. Sort of getting canceled, sort of getting like implicitly promoted. Yes.

Exactly. And the main reason that he cites for quitting his job, he says, first, my qualified and supremely trained heterosexual white male graduate students face a negligible chance of being offered university research positions despite stellar scientific dossiers. These facts rendered my job morally untenable. How can I accept prospective researchers and train them in good conscience knowing their

employment prospects to be minimal? So he's genuinely quitting in the name of like, quote unquote, reverse racism? That's his argument. I'm literally like, I'm defending like my white men. Jesus fucking Christ. Things are hard out here. And of course, the greatest enemy to any of Jordan Peterson's

arguments is five minutes on fucking Google. So it's like graduate students, demographics, two seconds later, you're at a page, 62% of graduate students are white. I looked up the demographics for that age group, 18 to 24, and 54% are white people. So 54% of the population, and 62% of graduate students.

We're already significantly overrepresented in grad school. Exactly. He also, he does a whole done thing about like, wokeness is out of control. It's always these like low stakes, nothing burger anecdotes. He's like, you can tell wokeness is so out of control. Diversity's gone mad because this is a quote. CBS has literally mandated that every writer's room

be at least 40% non-white in 2021. But then you Google CBS mandate non-white or whatever. And like first link, CBS set a goal of 40% black indigenous people of color. A goal. It's not binding. Right. As a person who worked at NGOs for 11 years, when you set a goal, it does not mean you're going to reach it. Yeah, right? Setting a goal is a great way to get PR, and like no one is gonna follow up. No one's gonna be like, hey, I know five years ago,

you set that long-range goal. How's that coming along? Exactly. People probably should, but they don't. So I'm including this to show like the level of punditry that Jordan Peterson is now doing. Like this is what he left his job to do. Subben Shapiro, Edge Lord, boring,

like, wokeness is out of control, op-eds. These are like a dime a dozen. This, why I'm quitting my job, it quotes, it quotes Vladimir Putin at length. Like, it's just non-good. Wow, wow. Choices were made, sir. He's selling victimhood to white people.

Yeah. He's selling victimhood to people who already have a lot of societal power and are in no danger of losing it. Yes. Which is why he keeps resorting to this like chaos, dragon myths from a thousand years ago, nonsense, because if you actually have to substantiate any of the threats that you're warning your audience about, it's like, yes, CBS, set a goal.

It feels so, the whole thing feels so disingenuous and so shitty and so whatever. Like, it's a mixture of, I've never experienced actual oppression in my life, nor have I been close to someone who has. Therefore, I don't have any grounding in this topic, but I hear people talking about it all the time. And it seems like when they talk about it, they get some kind of social currency, right? Like, listen, therefore my way into the conversation and to assert my own

relevance and calm my own insecurities is to claim some level of oppression. I really try to have content, neutral principles that I apply to people like Jordan Peterson of like, I'm okay with extending empathy toward people like Jordan Peterson for what's going on in their personal lives. And it's always amazing to me that they go through these huge, you know, potentially life-changing medical crises, and it produces no empathy whatsoever. It seems to produce no genuine self-reflection. It's like he's now peddling the same food straps, like, wokeness, whatever stuff that he was doing before.

He also puts out a self-another self-help book within like a year of all this happening. And it's like, really dude, like you're still you're still a self-help guru after making, I think pretty incontrovertibly bad decisions. You're then still giving life advice? That's the part that like I struggle with the empathy. I'm like, should you be given advice right now, Jordan? Yeah, I mean, I also think this all gets really complicated because I feel extremely strongly that anyone's individual health is nobody's business but their own. Yeah, and also there is a public story that's happening here

that has been linked to, again, like promoting a particular way of eating and being and all that kind of stuff. It feels particularly endemic with like dudes in sort of like biohacking and biohacking light worlds. Well, the closest thing to a conclusion about all this I came to was that like, the reasons why I dislike Jordan Peterson are all exactly the same.

Yeah. I dislike him because of his public acts and what he writes in his books and what he says in his lectures and what he does in public. I don't need to dislike him for this. Yeah. I'm actually fine with all of this being like kind of human and kind of normal and it's a series of bad decisions, but I'm 100% sure that I have made worse decisions in this in my life with different consequences.

I'm fine with holding the duality of two things that like he's a huge piece of shit, and his piece of shitness has nothing to do with his personal medical stuff. Yeah, because it's not the reason why he was shitty in the first place. Right. It's just really easy to identify the ways that he's shitty. That's right.

His health is not a referendum on his character, his morality, or anything like that. Right. Because it's not that for fucking anybody. Exactly. Right? Yeah. But can I give us one last thing? Are you about to make this a three-parter?

No. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, addiction forms that I was reading and like the miserable Jordan Peterson subreddit that I spent like a really atrocious amount of time on. Oh my God. There were rumors that she stopped doing the carnivore diet. And I was like, wait, this is huge, you guys, because she's still actively promoting a beef only diet. She sells consultations to help you eat beef and like change your life with beef. So I scrolled back through three years of her Instagram posts and I found the one where she admits that she's no longer on the diet.

Okay. Do you want to guess how she does it? Right? Because it's a dilemma. You can't you can't be an influencer of a diet for years and then like, whoops, I'm not on this diet anymore. I would think that the way that you would want to talk about it is this played an important role in my life. It led to a bunch of healing for me, and it has served its purpose. I still believe in it, and it was a time limited thing for me. Ding, ding, ding.

Is that what she says? Yes. Really? So, I mean, what she does is she posts on Instagram three images. Each one is a diet. One is the super hardcore beef only diet, which she calls the lion diet.

Okay. L-I-O-N. One is the traditional carnivore diet, and that's only animal products. So, a lot of the Bitcoin carnivores there on this version, so you can have cheese, you can have eggs, you can have cream and yogurt. I gotta say, I haven't stopped being bummed out

by the phrase Bitcoin carnivores. You know? Ooh. Ooh. And then the third image is keto carnivore, which is also a bunch of animal products within the avocados and spinach and stuff. You know, there's like a couple of vegetables

that you can eat on keto. Sure, extremely low carbohydrate fruits and vegetables. Yeah. So she basically says the lion diet worked so well that she can now tolerate a wider range of foods. I'm not doing the carnivore diet anymore because it's so effective that I don't have to. Exactly, it worked so well.

It worked so beautifully. I dislike her so much. I've listened to so many episodes of her podcast. This is the only thing that I've seen her do where I'm like, you nailed it, Michaela. Yeah, like wait, wait, not do this deranged diet anymore, but also still promote the diet.

Impressive. This happens with everybody that does this diet for very obvious reasons. Physiologically, psychologically, eating only beef for the rest of your life is not going to work from 99.9% of people. So what you find with a lot of these carnivore influencers, they'll use these like carve-outs. They'll be like, oh, I started eating honey today because honey's like an animal product. So it's like they just redefined carnivore to include like a wider and wider range of foods, right?

So it's like, oh, it's keto carnivore now, which honestly is fine. It seems like it's good for their health. I'd rather have them promoting that diet than a beef-only diet. But it's like, yeah, no one can maintain this and they all just like end up cheating and then calling their cheat the carnivore diet.

Can I tell you how I thought this episode was gonna end, genuinely? Oh yeah. We have gotten some emails as a follow-up to our Rachel Hollis episode being like, can you do a Dave Hollis follow-up? He's dating this terrible blonde woman. Okay.

And I absolutely was like, are we gonna find out that Dave Hollis is dating Michaela Peterson? I'm 100% For a double. Had a moment in my head where I was like, are we about to have our first crossover? And like, no.

Well, he is dating Bel Gibson. Ha! So, that's a twist. Ha! So that's a twist. Thank you.