https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=7ygdiLfNIRg

All right. Well, what I’d like to talk about today is Jordan Peterson joining the Daily Wire and some framing around that. And well, let’s jump right in. The way I’d like to summarize Jordan Peterson joining the Daily Wire is everything is getting better in every possible quadrant for Jordan, for the people he’s trying to message, for his message, and everybody’s upset. So I think this is due to a lot of bad framing. I think a lot of this depends on how you’re viewing this. If you, for example, view the Daily Wire in terms of politics, I think politics is always bad framing, what you might come away with is that this is a political move. And I don’t think it’s a political move. I don’t think the Daily Wire is a political entity. I think that there’s a lot of evidence for this. I think that a lot of the animosity comes from people who sort of saw Jordan Peterson as their own personal YouTube hero, right? They put him on a pedestal and now he’s changed. He’s no longer on YouTube, right? Or he’s on YouTube and something else, like it’s betrayal in some sense, or at least that’s how people seem to be treating it. I think this is deeply unfair. I think that, you know, YouTube’s played out. Like YouTube has gotten all the audience for Peterson that it’s ever going to get and that he can’t make a new message on YouTube because of the limitations of YouTube and a limitation to the audience he can reach. I think that’s just, it’s not going to get any better for him. I don’t think he’s going to be drawing people to YouTube in order to draw a big enough audience to him. I think he needs to go to where the audience is and I think Daily Wire has that audience. So why do I think Daily Wire has an audience beyond just YouTube? Because clearly they’re on YouTube, but also, right, they have other outlets. I think the easiest framing to understand this with is the Daily Wire represents an entity that is filling a vacuum left by the fall of the fourth estate, the news media. The transparency of the news media died 20 years ago. So the news media doesn’t need to be neutral. It doesn’t need to be unbiased, but it does need to be transparent. And I think we lost that. We’ve lost the transparency. Where do they stand on things? I don’t think they were, you know, they’ve been honest about that recently. I think that’s a problem. It’s a problem for the news media. It’s a problem for those of us who wish the news media didn’t have that problem, right, wish that they were sort of transparent. And the fact that they’re not is creating a bunch of confusion, I would say. And so I think what’s happening is you have the rise of Tim Pool, right, Carl Benjamin with Lotus Eaters and Ben Shapiro with Daily Wire. These are filling the void of transparent media. And I would argue that effectively what’s happened is Shapiro’s really not political. And the reason why he’s not political, I would say, is because if you think he’s a conservative, you should read conservative media. You can’t watch conservative media. I would argue there really wasn’t any. You could say Fox News is conservative. Fox News is very moderate, very moderate. It’s just that sensationalism in TV tends to lean left. It just does. It always has. It’s not a big deal. You don’t have to get all upset about it. And when you read conservative media, you realize what conservatives are actually like in terms of where the right actually is, if that’s the way you want to frame things. Ben Shapiro has routinely gotten a lot of pushback from the Jewish Orthodox community. I know a lot of Orthodox Jews, a lot of them are upset with Ben Shapiro. Why? Because Ben Shapiro represents views on his show that he does not hold in his personal life. In other words, he’s a lot closer to a moderate position to the neutral position than an Orthodox Jew should be in his life. And Ben has said, publicly, many times, I’m not like this in my life. These are not my beliefs. I’m a reporter. I’m a journalist. I’m journalism. I’m being a journalist. I’m not trying to tell you how I live my life, although sometimes he does. But he’s primarily trying to report in a transparent fashion on what he’s seeing. And he does interject how he feels about some of this stuff, but largely, he does pretty neutral reporting on it and very transparent. He says the difference between his opinions and things that are facts that you just observe in the world. And good for him. And I think that’s the restoration of transparency in media. And I would say the loss of transparency in media is roughly the fall of the Fourth Estate. And now it’s being restored. And I would say Daily Wire is unique from, say, Tim Poole’s project, Tim Kast. Tim Kast strays into entertainment news. And it’s unique from Lotus Eaters, which is in the UK. That’s Carl Benjamin’s outfit, in that Lotus Eaters is pretty much strictly news. Daily Wire is trying to branch out. So they have an entertainment arm. They’re making movies for entertainment. So they’re doing news and entertainment. That’s interesting. And I think that they are branching out into wisdom. How do you branch out into wisdom? Well, you get Jordan Peterson, because he’s the closest to pragmatic wisdom that you’re going to get right now. And I think that’s what’s happening. I think, will the Daily Wire change Peterson? Of course it will. But I think really, the Daily Wire wants to move where Peterson is and not the other way around. They don’t want to move Peterson into their camp. They don’t have a camp. I think some of the criticisms over the Daily Wire being a tidal pool, as Paul VanDerKley calls it, or catering to their base or something, the Daily Wire is growing. They don’t have a base. They have an ever-increasing audience. And that audience is of different types. And if you want a demonstration, and I don’t know what’s true for the Daily Wire, because I don’t really follow their numbers that closely, Tim Poole was already out drawing CNN two or three years ago. So these new media folks are getting more audience than the old media. And that’s important. I mean, it shows a shift. And the shift is away from the non-transparent old guard towards the more transparent folks. And Tim Poole, for example, was an anarchist effectively during Occupy Wall Street. He was as close to anarchy as you can possibly get. And he’s not anymore. Right now he’s a gun owner. He lives in West Virginia or Virginia. These people have moved. They’ve moved physically. They’ve moved, quote, politically. This is a change. Daily Wire represents that. And I think they’re trying to further represent that by adding more people to the show. They’re trying to further represent that by adding this wisdom component to their entertainment and news slots with his Peterson and his message. Another way to think about this is in terms of culture war. I think the problem with using a culture war framing is that if there is a culture war, insofar as you are part of a culture, you are part of the war. That’s a universalist framing. I don’t like universalist framings. They’re not very helpful, because now you have to decide, are you really not on Jordan Peterson’s side? Because if you are on Jordan Peterson’s side, his involvement in the culture war should not be a problem for you. Because he’s on your side. This is why this isn’t helpful framing. I do think that there is a point to culture war. And I have a video on that. You should watch that video. I’m going to link it. I think it’ll be here. I don’t know. It might be there. It’s going to be linked somewhere anyway. The culture war video is interesting. I make a case there. I think some of these people are not looking at the potential for the good. They’ve got this political frame. There’s no potential to the good in the political frame, because there’s no good side in the political dichotomy. It’s a false equivalency and a false dichotomy. I think culture war is the same thing. There’s no good side in the culture war. It’s a false dichotomy and a false equivalency, unless you use my definition, of course. That’s way better, actually. I think when you look at people like, say, David Fuller, I think David Fuller is jealous. David Fuller tried to save the BBC, tried to save the fourth estate in England. And he didn’t succeed. These are things he said. He’s indicated before. I’m not making this up. He said it. I think there’s no coincidence that he has changed his project right around the time that Peterson has moved on, because David Fuller, to some extent, his rise was tied to Peterson. I think he’s upset that he’s lost his access to Peterson. Look, Fuller’s doing what Fuller’s doing, and good luck to him. I don’t know that his project and Peterson’s project were ever the same, not to disparage Fuller or anything. But he’s making claims like Peterson’s more political now. Peterson got popular on Bill C-16 and the Kathy Newman interview. I don’t like political framing. I don’t think they were political issues. I think one thing that just came up recently on the Bridges of Meaning server that I was just talking on before I made this second attempt at this video is Peterson’s message has changed significantly, and his tone has changed. It’s like, okay, but the world changed also due to a pandemic, right? However you want to think about that pandemic. Change is good. It can be bad, but change in general is good. We shouldn’t stay the same throughout our lives. There’s a lot of dangers. There’s always a lot of dangers for humans. We fall into traps. He is focused on a larger picture now, before he was focused on the individual or the family. Now he’s focused on more worldly issues, some of which he’s not directly affected by. C-16 directly affected him. The Kathy Newman interview was an interview of him. He had real skin in the game to invoke Taleb. Fair enough. Some of the stuff he’s talking about, he’s not in the Christian church. He’s not a Muslim. Why is he talking about these things? Well, I think it’s fair. I think he’s talking about virtuous values and wisdom. I think that’s what he’s talking about, and I think that’s a good frame for him. I think that’s what he should be talking about. I think it’s good. I’m not too worried about it. I am concerned that at any minute he might go off the rails, but I’m concerned for everybody for that, literally everybody. I’m concerned for me, concerned for you, concerned that that may happen to any of us. I don’t think Peterson moving to Daily Wire to cover virtues and values at a high level and talk about these greater issues is a bad thing. I think it’s a good thing. I think expanding his audience and reaching more people that he can help is a good thing. I think he does help people. So saying that he’s changed, okay, you’re not saying much. I’m glad he’s changed. I’ve changed too in the same amount of time I’ve been listening to him. I’ve changed the results of listening to Peterson, that’s for sure. I think Peterson should have changed. I don’t know why this is being framed as a negative. He’s popular because he gives you a way to participate with your future self, right, with nature, with your family, with the community, right, and he aims at the good. And I think he’s going to continue to do that. And I think he’s going to do it to people who are otherwise not on YouTube, people he couldn’t reach on YouTube, people that want a new message and are willing to look to a transparent new media or the rebuilding of the Fourth Estate, the filling of that vacuum, to do it. And I think this is good. So I don’t understand the cynicism. I think that when you have an important message, taking the time to make that message look good, present yourself well is a plus, not a minus. I think we need to restore the signal of hard work in our messaging. I go through a lot of work to give you these videos. Unfortunately, my microphone is somehow broken, so I have to use my headset. But I spent a good hour trying to set up just to do this one video. I did it once, in fact, not including the hour of setup time, and the microphone was broken, so I didn’t get good sound. So I’m redoing the video for you. There’s a lot of effort that goes into these things. There’s way more effort. I’m sure that Peterson’s doing with Daily Wire. And I think that adds to the import of the message, the weight of the message, the gravitas of what he’s saying. Some people, granted they should be, are a little suspicious about slick looking things or good looking things because we were fooled. We were bamboozled. We were tricked and hornswaggled. So I get it, but I think now’s the time to say, no, hard work is worth something. Just because you put hard work in doesn’t mean that you’ve done a bad thing. It doesn’t mean that the new thing that you’re doing, whether it’s a change in tone or a change in message or change in audience, a change in who you’re messaging to with your audience, I don’t think we should assume that’s a bad thing. I think we should assume it’s a good thing. I think we should operate on the idea that it’s a good thing. And I think we should move forward with hope and in gratitude at what we’ve gotten out of Peterson because he’s helped a lot more people than anybody else in recent memory anyway. And he now has a larger pool to draw from. Hopefully, if daily wires audience is growing all the time and they’re not just on YouTube, they’re also on YouTube, which is good because they’re going to reach people who are never going to go to YouTube. There’s a lot of people who don’t go to YouTube. And I think that his change in messaging is also going to be able to reach people who aren’t so thinky talky. And I think that’s good. I think we need to reach more people with a good message. And I think Peterson has a good message. I think he has a good heart. And I think that will continue. And I hope that it will. And I hope that everybody else hopes that it will rather than assuming the worst. And so that’s what I wanted to say. That’s what I wanted to exemplify. And I also wanted to take the time to make you understand that I put effort into these things, into these videos. I put effort into my clubhouse room that I do Mondays at noon with Manuel and Anne. I put effort into my signaling to the best of my ability. I know I do not a great job, but it’s better than it could be. Believe me, there’s a lot of time, energy, and effort that goes into this. And I appreciate that you reciprocate in giving me the thing that I value the most, which is your time and attention.