Jordan Peterson's 'Rat King' Speech Raises Eyebrows

Jordan Peterson has been ridiculed by critics for quoting a scene from a James Bond film, apparently as though it were fact.

The commentator and psychologist brought up the theory during an appearance on the This Weekend Past podcast.

Peterson observed a rat print on host Theo Von's T-shirt and complimented him on it, to which Von told him that one of his nicknames was "Rat King."

"Do you know what a Rat King is? Oh my God, it's a terrible story," Peterson responded.

"There is this theory, this is the theory, I don't know if people ever did this, but imagine your village is full of rats. So you go catch 10 rats and throw them in a pit... soon there is one rat because he gets all the other rats, he's a champ."

Peterson continued: "Then you throw 10 more rats in there and you do that three or four times. Then you take the remaining rat let him go.

"And soon there are no rats in the village, really. So it was like the toughest of them all and then he learns to eat rats."

But some eagle-eyed observers noticed Peterson's words bore a striking similarity to an early scene in the James Bond film Skyfall. In that scene, Javier Bardem appears for the first time as cyberterrorist Raoul Silver, who tells Bond, played by Daniel Craig, about the Rat King theory.

One X user, formerly known as Twitter, shared the video, which has had more than 706,500 views at the time of writing.

"This is from Skyfall. Jordan Peterson is half-remembering the villain monologue from the movie Skyfall and confidently retelling it as a historical fact. And that pretty much sums up how he gets most of his information," the person captioned the post.

An alternative, and enduring, Rat King theory refers to the phenomenon of rats being found with their tails intertwined, so that they appear as a cluster. Sightings of such incidents go as far back as the 16th century.

It is thought the entwined tails were the result of fighting among rats, or of older male rats sitting on younger rodents as a nest, which eventually caused their tails to become knotted up. The resulting Rat King relies on other members of its pack to bring its food to survive.

The largest alleged Rat King recorded had 32 rats and was found in Germany in 1828. It is now on display at the Mauritianum Natural History Museum in Altenburg, Germany.

However, Rat Kings may merely be urban legends or hoaxes and many public displays of them, such as photographs, have not been verified as authentic or naturally occurring.