Episode 1070: Jordan Peterson

TL;DR: Peterson uses his platform to mainstream the “postmodern neo-Marxist” conspiracy framing, mischaracterize Canadian human rights law as “compelled speech,” and dismiss the gender pay gap — with Rogan offering enthusiastic agreement rather than skepticism.

This was Peterson’s second JRE appearance, timed to the January 2018 release of 12 Rules for Life. The conversation veers from clinical psychology (his actual area of expertise) into sweeping claims about law, sociology, gender, and political philosophy that have been widely fact-checked and rejected by specialists in those fields.

Key Problematic Claims

1. Bill C-16 as “compelled speech”

Peterson built much of his public profile on the claim that Canada’s Bill C-16 — which added “gender identity or expression” to the Canadian Human Rights Act — would jail people for misgendering. He repeats this framing on the episode.

What the evidence says:

Brenda Cossman, University of Toronto law professor (2016): The bill does not criminalize pronoun misuse; it adds gender identity/expression to existing anti-discrimination and hate-propaganda provisions. Toronto Star
Canadian Bar Association: Stated that C-16 was a “minor, incremental change” that simply harmonized federal law with provincial human-rights protections already in force.
Department of Justice (2018): Confirmed that one year after C-16 came into force, no one had been jailed for pronoun usage. CBC

2. “Postmodern neo-Marxism”

Peterson frames a wide range of progressive thought — feminism, identity politics, HR diversity training — as a coherent ideology he calls “postmodern neo-Marxism.”

Why this is incoherent:

Postmodernism and Marxism are philosophically opposed. Postmodernists (Lyotard, Foucault, Derrida) explicitly rejected Marxism’s grand narrative of class struggle. Current Affairs
Philosopher Stephen Hicks, whom Peterson cites, is not considered a mainstream authority on postmodernism by specialists in continental philosophy.
The framing functions as a thought-terminating cliché, lumping unrelated phenomena into a single “Marxist” enemy.

3. Gender pay gap denial

Peterson echoes his then-recent Cathy Newman interview claim that “a multivariate analysis of the pay gap indicates that it doesn’t exist.”

What the evidence actually says:

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics: Women earn roughly 82 cents per dollar earned by men in median weekly earnings. Even controlling for occupation, hours, and experience, a residual gap of 5-8% persists. BLS
Blau & Kahn (2017), Journal of Economic Literature: A large unexplained gap remains after controlling for human capital and occupation, consistent with discrimination and bargaining differences. NBER
Peterson’s claim conflates “controlling for X” with “X is not a problem” — the very factors he controls for (occupational segregation, hours, caregiving) are themselves shaped by gender.

4. Lobsters, hierarchy, and “nature”

Peterson’s serotonin/lobster argument — that human social hierarchies are biologically inevitable because lobsters share a serotonergic system with us — is repeated here.

Why specialists reject it:

Bailey Steinworth, biologist (Washington Post, 2018): Lobsters and humans diverged ~350 million years ago; lobster serotonin functions differently, and SSRIs do not affect them the way Peterson implies. Washington Post
The argument is a textbook appeal to nature fallacy, and even if the biology were accurate, it would not justify any particular human social arrangement.

Joe Rogan’s Role

Rogan plays the role of enthusiastic amplifier rather than skeptical interviewer:

He does not challenge Peterson’s mischaracterization of Bill C-16, despite the fact that Canadian legal experts had already publicly rebutted it.
He echoes the “postmodern neo-Marxist” framing rather than asking Peterson to define or defend it.
He treats Peterson’s claims about gender, hierarchy, and biology as authoritative even when they fall outside Peterson’s clinical-psychology training.
He repeatedly steers toward “they’re trying to silence you” framing, helping cement Peterson’s martyr narrative.

This episode is one of the most consequential platforming events of the “Intellectual Dark Web” era. It helped drive 12 Rules for Life to bestseller status and pushed Peterson’s culture-war framing into mainstream consciousness.

Real-World Harm

Mainstreaming anti-trans rhetoric: Peterson’s misrepresentation of C-16 became a template used by U.S. opponents of trans-inclusive laws, despite being legally inaccurate.
Conspiracy framing: “Cultural Marxism” / “postmodern neo-Marxism” is a recycled term with antisemitic roots in interwar far-right discourse. Southern Poverty Law Center
Audience radicalization: Subsequent studies of YouTube and podcast pipelines have documented Peterson’s content as a common on-ramp into more extreme reactionary content. Ribeiro et al., FAT* 2020

Why It Matters

A clinical psychologist with real credentials in personality research used a massive platform to spread inaccurate claims about Canadian law, mischaracterize an entire tradition of philosophy, and dismiss well-documented economic inequality — while the host nodded along. The episode is a case study in how credentials in one field get laundered into authority in unrelated ones.