[Barrin92]

because rather than doing serious intellectual work they're really good at selling what people want to hear, deliberately targeting an American online audience and their anxieties (as that is very profitable). All the mentioned guys are essentially permanent guests on the US podcast circuit.

Peterson and Zeihan are examples of this. Peterson has essentially monetized telling Americans what a dystopia Canada is, acting like some sort of reverse Handmaids Tale refugee, and Zeihan is the modern version of his mentor (and Straftor boss) George Friedman, whose primarily claim to fame is predicting an inevitable war between Japan and the US[1], on a crude theory of geographic determinism, "in the next two decades" in 1991. Zeihan has picked that baton up and replaced Japan with China.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Coming_War_with_Japan

[robertlagrant]

> Peterson has essentially monetized telling Americans what a dystopia Canada is, acting like some sort of reverse Handmaids Tale refugee

I think this hyper reductive. You can watch all his lectures, at Harvard and others, online[0]. It's hard to look objectively at his life and not call it "serious intellectual work".

[0] https://www.youtube.com/c/JordanPetersonVideos/about

[varnaud]

He might have done "serious intellectual work" in a distant past, like his main book were he writes in details about his grandma pubes he saw in a dream, or when in his lecture at UoT were he compares an ancient depiction of two snakes to the twin helix of DNA, but for the past few years he's been rambling about the culture war and strangely defending the fossil fuel industry.

[mcpackieh]

From his description,

>"You can watch the incredibly popular lecture series "Personality and Its Transformations", "Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief", as well as his "The Psychological Significance of the Biblical Stories" lectures for free."

I won't pretend I ever watched more than a few minutes of any of this stuff, but isn't it a bunch of inane rambling about finding deep psychological meaning or universal truths in fairy tails? Nonsense along the lines of "Slimey the worm from sesame street represents the dragon, the great primordial evil which the warrior, the eternal hero, must slay to conqueror his fears..."

It's the kind of analysis that right/conservative people with 'pragmatic/common sense' self-perceived alignments would usually mock college professors for, except in Peterson's case it gets lapped up because he mixes it in with things like "communism is bad because it murdered millions of people" and "If you're feeling depressed you should try not living like a slob"

[robertlagrant]

> I won't pretend I ever watched more than a few minutes of any of this stuff

Agreed.

> but isn't it a bunch of inane rambling about finding deep psychological meaning or universal truths in fairy tails?

No, it's not. Some of it is illustrated through fables, but I don't think it's inane rambling, no.