Joe Rogan & Jordan Peterson on Truth, Chaos, and Kekistan

Hello freak bitches! That's deep. That is deep. This is gonna be hurtful to a lot of people. There's a lot of people listening to this right now, very upset. Yeah, well you asked earlier why the postmodernists don't like blunt speech. Yeah, that's why. Well, that's why, man. You know, it's like the truth is something that burns. It burns off dead wood. And people don't like having their dead wood burnt off often because they're like 95 percent dead wood. And I'm not being, believe me, I'm not being snide about that. It's no joke. When you start to realize how much of what you've constructed of yourself is based on deception and lies, that is a horrifying realization. And it can easily be 95 percent of you. Things you say, things you act out. You know, it's, well, you see that in Pinocchio, which I often discuss, you know, Pinocchio, when he gets corrupt as he matures, he first learns to lie and then he becomes a braying jackass on Pleasure Island. It's like, and he's threatened by the underground authoritarians, right? They're going to sell him to the salt mines. It's like, yeah, that's for sure. It's exactly right, man. So then you figure out you're a braying jackass and you're lying all the time. That's a terrible realization. And then all that needs to be burnt away. And people don't like that. Now, you've been in battle in this conflict for quite a long time. And I've got to imagine that the way you look at the world, the way you see things many, many steps ahead. Do you see any sort of a logical conclusion to this process? Do you see any light at the end of the tunnel or do you see an impossible to avoid conflict? What do you see when you look at this whole thing long term? Well, I would say I can't look at it long term. And the reason for that is that, and this is why I get a kick out of all the Kekistan boys. You know, I do believe that we're in a period of chaos. What's a Kekistan? Oh, Kek is a mythological country that's ruled by chaos, by the god Kek, who's a frog, as it turns out. I don't know about this. Oh, well, you need to look them up. That's a big Internet thing. Kekistan. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Big Internet thing. All I know about the frog is the frog, the Trump frog, the peppy, the frog who is apparently so distraught that his frog has been used to align with... Yes, he killed them off. Yeah, he killed them off. But good luck. He didn't. All right. So the people who were using peppy... I haven't got the story quite right, but I'll get it mostly right. The people who were using peppy as a meme... There it is. Used, yeah, that's it. Republic of Kekistan. Yeah, so they used this symbol, K-E-K, to replace L-O-L. And the reason they did that was because K-E-K in Korean means L-O-L. And so it was just this little joke. Kek, K-E-K. Well, then somebody found out these were people who were using peppy, remember. It's a frog. Then people found out that Kek was an Egyptian god. And he was a frog. And he was between categories. Sort of like a transsexual, by the way. He was between categories. And so now they have this Republic of Kek, and it's ruled by this Egyptian god, whose name is Kek, who's a frog. Hold on, go back. Go back. Don't keep changing this. Jamie's doing this in the background while you're talking. But look at this. There's a frog with a Make America Great Again hat, and he's got a tombstone. It says, those who served in the meme war, 2015 and 2016, we are the gods of the great meme war. We are the shit posters. The Legion of Kek. We are the internet. The death of the normies. Lulls and Kek. We are one. Why the fuck is going on? That is the question. And that's the question you asked me. And my answer was, I don't know. We're in a period of chaos. We're in a period of chaos. And in a period of chaos, the time horizon shrinks, because the outcome is uncertain. Well, this seems to be truly embracing chaos. I mean, just that statement, the frog, the Donald Trump thing with the hat on. This is one of the things that seems to me to be a reoccurring feature in this whole chaos ballet that we're watching play out, is that people are enjoying the fact that Donald Trump sucks as a president. They don't feel threatened by it. They like it. And they don't like it because they want to burn this motherfucker to the ground and torch this thing and like a Phoenix wheel arrives from the fire. No, no, it's not that. It's that they are enjoying that it's falling apart. This is why we are the shit posters. Do you know what shit posting is? Yeah. Jamie explains shit posting. You're really good at explaining it. You're like posting for like literally no reason other than to get someone mad. It's almost like trolling, but it's like a separate level of trolling, right? Right. That's a good way to say it. Yeah, that's a good way. Provocation for its own sake. Jamie's the first person to tell me about shit posting. I wasn't aware. Until about what? A year ago? Yeah, I think it was, yeah. Probably right about pre-election time. I did not know. So I mean, there's rules for operating in chaos, right? Because that's when you're in the belly of the beast or the belly of the whale and you're underwater. You're in the underworld. You're in the underworld in chaos. And so that's a really cool thing to know, Joe. So imagine that the normal world of mankind is inside that dominance hierarchy where everything is going well because nothing abnormal is happening and you're getting what you need and you want and your conscious knowledge suffices, right? Okay, but then something tilts and that structure no longer works. So where do you end up? You end up in the underworld. That's what happens when your partner of 20 years has a long-term affair and you find out about it. It's like you thought you knew where you were, but you didn't. And now that you found out, you don't know where you are. Well, when you don't know where you are, you're in the underworld. Right. And that's where the unconscious forces play. Those are the gods. That's why there's gods in the underworld. And people go to the underworld all the time. It's chaos and fear and depression, hopelessness and imaginativeness. It's everything. It's chaos. And this realm is terrifying to people. Terrifying and promising. Terrifying and promising because dragons have gold because it's always done. The unknown has two things, just like the future. It's like, look out, it'll do you in. And look out, it offers everything to you. It's the underworld. That's why the hero always goes into the underworld to find a cave full of gold that's guarded by a dragon. In the Hobbit, literally. Yeah. Yeah, well, and that's Beowulf, right? Yeah, sure. That's the oldest story of mankind. It's really our oldest story. Wow. And so that the underworld is chaos. It's chaos. And down there, there's all sorts of play of possibility. And the reason the frog was the guardian of chaos is because the frog is this thing that doesn't fit into categories, you see? Because it's partly water. It's partly land. It's tadpole, yet it's adult, right? So it's like a fish and then it's like an animal. It doesn't fit. And it's things that don't fit that blow apart the categories, right? Well, that's what the transsexuals do to the category of gender, for example. And that puts you in this state of chaos. It puts you in the state of chaos. And that's what we're in now. We're in the state of chaos. And so what are the rules for operating in the state of chaos? Well, as far as I can tell, the fundamental rule when operating in chaos is tell the truth. So for example, if you... For the people that want to navigate this successfully. Yep. All you've got, that's what you've got, as a shield and a weapon. And that's the guidepost. That's the way through. And you see that in hero stories all the time, you know? So it's allegiance to the truth, but the truth is a strange thing. It's a very strange thing. Often the hero in a story has to assimilate their dark side before they're capable of telling the truth. Right? In The Hobbit, for example, he has to become a thief. Right? Right. Because he has to get tough. That's the thing. That's also the thing about telling the truth, is that it's not for the naive. Not at all. And partly because it burns off dead wood. It's partly because it hurts people's feelings. It's a sword. So you have to be a warrior. Wow. A truth warrior. In this time of chaos, what emerges from this? Right? Sometimes, sometimes it's catastrophe. That's the thing about these categories. They're real. They're real. And, you know, the optimist that I hear say, well, the pendulum swings and then it swings back. And I think, yeah, well, sometimes it takes a hundred years to swing back and it takes a hell of a lot of people out on the way. And sometimes it never swings back at all. So you know, sometimes people go out to fight a dragon and it just eats them or burns them. And that's the end of that. And like we're in an unstable period of time at the moment in a transition period of some sort. I can't put my finger on it, but I know that that's partly why what I've been saying has been resonating with people because obviously it's not about pronouns. Well it is. It is except language turns out to be about a lot more than... Like you can't take a little thing like the desire to transform pronouns and think that that's a little thing.