Jordan Peterson on Mythology, Fame, and Reading People

Conversations with Tyler

Jordan Peterson joins Tyler to discuss collecting Soviet propaganda, why he’s so drawn to Jung, what the Exodus story can teach us about current events, his marriage and fame, what the Intellectual Dark Web gets wrong, immigration in America and Canada, his tendency towards depression, Tinder’s revolutionary nature, the lessons from The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter, fixing universities, the skills needed to become a good educator, and much more.

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TYLER COWEN: Thank you, Jordan. I’d like to give the audience that kind of rapid-fire overview of your thought and also your life as a human being.

JORDAN PETERSON: I’m looking forward to hearing that.

[laughter]

COWEN: Let me start with a very lateral question. Why do you collect old Communist memorabilia and propaganda?

PETERSON: Well, part of it is dark comedy. Really, I spent quite a bit of time on eBay for a number of years. And I had read this article by a psychologist named James Pennebaker. He said that the past turned into history at 15 years. That’s when you start to see people commemorate events in the past. At that point, it was 2004, and I thought, “Oh, that’s interesting. It’s 15 years since the Soviet Union collapsed. Maybe I can go online and see what historical memorabilia is left over.”

So I went on eBay, looking up Soviet artifacts, and I thought that was so comical because there isn’t anything more capitalistic than eBay, right? Seriously, that was completely unrestrained capitalism. And then all this Soviet-era stuff was for sale. I thought it was absolutely comical that I could buy paintings of Karl Marx discounted on the world’s most intense capitalist platform.

[laughter]

And I’m really interested in the relationship between art and propaganda. So I bought all these pieces. Some of them are of very high quality because the Russians kept the intense training characteristic of late-19th-century European art academies open throughout the entire 20th century. So they had very high-quality artists dedicated to producing Soviet realist propaganda.

Some of it is intensely propagandistic, and I’m interested in that because I’m interested in propaganda. And some of it is actually quite high quality from a purely artistic perspective. So it was interesting to surround myself with these works that were battlegrounds between art and propaganda.

COWEN: What’s the main thing you learned over the years, living with those works, viewing the propaganda, thinking about it every day, every night?

PETERSON: Art wins.

COWEN: Art wins over propaganda. Why?

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