#1164 - Mikhaila Peterson

Joe Rogan (0:02)

Five, four, three, two, one.

And we're live? Yes. Hello.

Mikhaila Peterson (0:11)

Hello.

Joe Rogan (0:12)

What's happening?

Mikhaila Peterson (0:13)

Not much, I'm excited to be here.

Joe Rogan (0:14)

I'm excited to have you here. Your father speaks very highly of you.

Mikhaila Peterson (0:18)

That's good.

Joe Rogan (0:19)

What is it like to have Jordan Peterson as a dad? Is it weird? Do you have to check yourself constantly, make sure you're on steady ground, and not say anything ridiculous?

Mikhaila Peterson (0:28)

No, not at all, not at all. Well, I didn't realize it was weird until I went away to university and then kind of saw, like, just what was away for a while. And then when I came back to the house, especially, because the house is full of, like, paintings and masks and statues and, like, 32 different paint colors, and I came back and was like, oh, maybe he's a bit eccentric.

Joe Rogan (0:49)

No, he's definitely eccentric. We were talking off air about what it was like to watch your dad become famous and become famous in his 50s, right?

Mikhaila Peterson (1:01)

Yeah, like, 54, 55

Joe Rogan (1:03)

That's when he became famous. Before that, relatively unknown, respected professor, one issue with this one transgender bill, the preferred pronouns bill, and then boom, off to the races.

Mikhaila Peterson (1:17)

Yeah.

Joe Rogan (1:18)

Is it strange?

Mikhaila Peterson (1:19)

It was, yeah, it was super weird, especially how the media was portraying him and how what was actually happening at the events wasn't what was being portrayed in the media. So that was weird to watch. And then people recognizing him on the street is strange. Yes.

Joe Rogan (1:34)

When you say what happened in real life was not what was being portrayed, like, what was different?

Mikhaila Peterson (1:41)

Mostly what he was saying. So most of what he said is on film anyway, so you can go to YouTube and see what he's been saying. Like, there's not like some secret that's going around. So what's been portrayed has been so much more negative than what he's actually said.

Or they'll take like sound bites and just weave a story that isn't quite true, which I didn't read for some reason. I now it looks silly. But for some reason, I just thought that what the media was portraying was honest.

Joe Rogan (2:08)

Always.

Mikhaila Peterson (2:09)

Yeah.

Joe Rogan (2:10)

Yeah, me too.

Mikhaila Peterson (2:11)

Yeah. Yeah. And it's not.

Joe Rogan (2:13)

Well, they're writers, you know, and what's there's a real issue today.

And that issue, I've talked about this before, but the issue is clicks.

It's not just about what's the facts of the story. It's about these publications are struggling to stay alive.

And one of the only ways that they can get people to click on stories is salacious headlines, make things really click baity. And that's what they focus on. And they focus on negative aspects that are going to get people riled up. They have to have an angle. And I've talked to people who are writers, who will write something. And then I'll talk to them and I'll say, hey, man, this is not what we talked about or what happened. And they said, I'm going to be honest with you, I didn't even write that. The headline was completely written by the editor. So the editor came in, changed it all up, changed this, put some dot, dot, dots out of things. So cut off sentences so that they seemed just more controversial than they really are because they didn't allow the counterpoint of... Sometimes you say something and then you say, or it could be this. Well, the or it could be this part is cut out. They do things like that just to stay alive because I think really big publications, whether it's The New York Times or the Boston Globe, big publications are struggling for their life right now because people don't want to buy newspapers anymore. And getting people to read things online is very difficult. And you have to do something salacious. You have to do something that's enticing for them to click on it.

Mikhaila Peterson (3:44)

Yeah, I guess. Wouldn't you say that's just driving them down?

Joe Rogan (3:48)

Yeah, I would. Yeah, they're fucked.

It's a bad place to be.

And I think it opens up the door for alternative media, but some of those alternative media sources don't have journalistic integrity either. So then it becomes a real issue. You know, that's a problem with a lot of online news shows. It's like they take a very obvious editorial spin as well on the news, and if you just read or watch their show, you would go, oh, well, it's this way because these guys are saying it's this way. But it might not be that way. There's no real objective source. It's very hard to find a good objective source. I mean, sometimes I count on The New York Times, but there's been some things that I've read from The New York Times that I know are not accurate.