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Sept. 27, 2022 - Uncensored - Piers Morgan
45:45
20220927_piers-morgan-uncensored-jordan-peterson-part-two
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Thinking On My Feet 00:06:32
Tonight on Piers Morgan Uncensored, one of the most fascinating and controversial polemicists on the planet.
Dr. Jordan Peterson's books became overnight hits.
Millions watch him online and his tours pack theatres across the world.
He's a clinical psychologist whose fans treated more like a rock star.
And tonight we go toe to toe and most definitely uncensored.
From London, this is Piers Morgan Uncensored.
Well good evening from London and welcome to a special edition of Piers Morgan Uncensored.
Dr. Jordan Peterson, one-on-one.
He's a clinical psychologist, turned culture warrior and one of the world's most famous and infamous intellectuals.
His books are instant bestsellers.
Tens of millions watch him online.
Legions of fans swear by his straight talking guidance.
What I've recommended to people is clean up your room.
But his outspoken views on issues like feminism.
The taming of the wild man, essentially, by the desirable and virginal woman.
And if you think women don't want that, then you better bloody well come up with an explanation for 50 shades of grey.
And gender.
You won't use my pronouns, so I'm pretty sure you're my enemy, yes.
Yeah, well, I know you think that, but I don't believe that using your pronouns is going to do you any good in the long run.
I've made him a lightning rod for controversy.
Almost 40 million people have now seen this notorious interview with a British news show.
You're exercising your freedom of speech to certainly risk offending me.
And that's fine.
I think more power to you as far as I'm concerned.
So you haven't sat there and...
I'll just try to work that out.
I mean.
Ha, gotcha.
Celebrity friends face criticism just for meeting him.
He's loved, he's loathed, but he's never ignored.
And tonight, Jordan Peterson is uncensored.
Well, Jordan Peterson joins me now.
Jordan Peterson, welcome to Piers Morgan Uncensored.
I suppose my first question, and there will be people genuinely wanting a simple answer, but there's a bigger answer too.
Who is Jordan Peterson?
Well, I'm a clinical psychologist and a professor.
And I'm doing that on a broader scale now, I suppose.
But it's an extension of what I've done since 1987, really.
I mean, I taught the same things I'm teaching, although I've expanded them throughout my academic career.
And my classes were very popular and not popular exactly.
The students found them extremely useful.
Why have you become so notorious?
Because I look at it as I've actually watched a lot of your lectures.
I've listened to hours of you and Joe Rogan talking about stuff.
I don't see the devil that some people try and portray you as at all.
And it seems to me the one thing we may share in common is certainly not intellectual prowess, where unfortunately I'm many yards behind you.
But what we do share, I think, is that a lot of people seem to have drawn an opinion about us based on either what they've seen in a tiny clip taken out of context a lot of the time or what they've been told to think about you by other people.
Yeah, well, that's some of it.
I mean, I got tangled up in a political controversy in Canada.
I mean, tangled up.
I put my foot in it to some degree because I wasn't very happy with what I regarded as government overreach in relationship to who is in possession of my tongue.
And I decided a long time ago, and really a long time ago, that I was going to say what I thought.
And sort of independent of the outcome, you know, often people craft their speech.
You know, I could have come here on your show, for example.
I spent half an hour thinking, well, what do I want out of this show?
But I don't think like that.
I wanted to come here and have a conversation with you.
You don't actually make notes, I'm told, before you're big.
I make notes, but I generally don't use them.
So I have to prepare, you know.
And are they different when you go on tour?
Is every night different?
Yes.
I never do this again.
How do you decide what to talk about?
Well, at the moment, sometimes I'm taking questions from the audience, and so I just do a Q ⁇ A, but I don't look at the questions before I go on stage.
And I ask my wife, who asked me the questions, not to show them to me.
And then if I prepare a lecture, I usually have a question in mind, often that relates to one of the topics in my books, but sometimes something I'm thinking about.
And then I use the lecture as an opportunity to explore that question and answer it while I'm watching the audience to see if my words are landing.
And so it's an opportunity to think on my feet.
And I think part of the reason the lectures are well attended is because it's a high-wire act in some sense.
Because I never know when I go on stage whether I'm going to bring the lecture to something like a punchline, to something like a conclusion.
And I have no idea, because I'll have a variety of ideas up in the air.
That's extraordinary.
You have no idea where it may lead to.
No.
No, no.
It's an exercise.
It's a little scary.
I mean.
Yes.
But, you know, there's an idea that the truth will set you free, right?
And that's a very strange idea, because you could imagine that I could come here and I could decide there are things I want to do to promote my books, let's say, and I could tilt our conversation towards that.
Or I could just say, well, I'm going to pay attention to what's going on here and I'm going to see what happens and I'm going to say what I think.
And then I'm going to assume that whatever the outcome is, is the right outcome because it was based on something approximating the truth.
What is your, ultimately, what is your goal?
What is the point of Dr. Jordan Peterson?
What do you hope to achieve through what is now huge global fame?
I hope to encourage people.
Other than that, I want to see what happens.
I want to say what I believe to be true as clearly and carefully as I possibly can.
And I want to see what happens as a consequence.
And what people don't understand about that in some sense is happiness, the purpose of your life is not going to be happiness.
Sometimes it is.
Sometimes that will come.
But there will be difficult periods in your life and happiness won't suffice then.
But what you can have in your life is an adventure.
You can have an adventure.
And the truth is the best adventure.
There's no doubt about that.
And there's a couple of reasons for that.
One is you don't know what's going to happen if you say what you think.
Why We Fight For Truth 00:02:24
Now, I don't mean incautiously, and I don't mean provocatively or any more than necessary.
You don't know what's going to happen.
So that's very adventurous.
But also, if it's you and your voice, then it's your adventure.
And if it isn't, like if you're crafting your speech or manipulating in any way or parroting or abiding by the dictates of the crowd, then I don't know whose adventure you're having, but it's not yours.
On free speech, it seems to me in my 57 years of being on this planet that free speech has never been under more ferocious attack.
Not in places you would expect, like authoritarian regimes, but actually in democracies.
I never thought I'd come to a day in my lifetime where people were literally being fired or in some cases imprisoned for expressing honestly held opinions, even if I find those opinions grotesquely wrong or offensive.
It's worse than that.
People underestimate the significance of this because it isn't, we're not having a fight about who has the right to speak freely.
That's nothing.
That's a peripheral problem, even though that can be serious in and of itself.
We're having a fight about whether or not your claim that free speech exists is nothing but a masquerade for your willingness to dominate and use power.
And so if I was taking that tack, I'd say, it's all well and good for you to speak about free speech, but look, you're white and you're middle class and you're British and you're privileged.
And you have this theory about free speech that your ancestors derive.
But the only reason they ever derived that to begin with is so they could exercise their power.
There's no such thing as free speech.
That's just a lie to mask a power claim.
And that's a way worse cynical criticism of the notion of free speech than you can't speak because I don't agree with you.
I mean, it's a form of fascism, isn't it?
I mean, these people...
It's worse than that.
They're kind of the ultra-woke brigade out there.
They categorize themselves as liberals, but there's nothing liberal about that mentality.
When you have a cancel culture, which is driven by if you don't agree with what I say, you're going to get shamed, vilified, cancelled, fired, maybe even in prison.
That is actually what fascist regimes do to people, to their population.
Yeah, but the fascists are more straightforward about it, because they basically come out and say something like, shut up or we'll beat you.
The Cost Of Cancel Culture 00:16:11
Whereas the compassionate types, who are narcissistic, compassionate types, they come out and say, well, we're really trying to save the world, you know, and we're acting in everyone's best interest.
And we think it would be better if you should just, you know, regulate what you say.
Because if you don't, you're not a good person.
And so that's, it's much more, I'd take the fascist bully over the narcissistic, over the compassionate narcissist anytime.
They're way more straightforward.
I mean, we live again in an era where the hashtag be kind almost invariably is used by people who are the least kind people I think I've ever encountered.
In other words, people that love to be utterly vicious.
Yeah, well, kindness.
And yeah, they hide behind this fake persona of hashtag be kind.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, kindness is tricky, you know, because one of the things you deal with very commonly if you're a clinical psychologist, apart from depression and anxiety, is, well, behavior therapists offer assertiveness training.
And now, the people who need assertiveness training are often people who are too agreeable, compassionate, polite by temperament.
Now, the problem with that is that they let people walk all over them because they don't stand up enough for themselves.
And the consequence of that is they get resentful and then they get bitter and then they get conniving and then they get and then they'll mob.
And so because they're not, they'll do anything for everyone else, but they push themselves beyond their limits and then they won't even recognize the limits because they feel, well, if I'm not doing everything for you, then I'm not a good person.
It's like, no, a good person does a little for you.
Like if I'm acting properly with you, say in this conversation, there's something in it for you and there's something in it for me, right?
And we want that to be reciprocal.
And so the cost of me bending too far in your direction is that I'll become bitter and resentful and conniving.
And that, and resentment is an unbelievably toxic state of being.
Take a short break.
I want to come back and talk to you about a random collection of people.
Cristiano Ronaldo, the most famous footballer on the planet, the greatest in my opinion.
And also Olivia Wilde, who's made a movie in which she says it's about you because you're the guy that drives some of the worst human beings on planet Earth.
We'll talk about all those things after the break.
Welcome back to the special edition of Piers Morgan Uncensored, one-on-one with Dr. Jordan Peterson.
So a weird thing happened about two weeks ago.
I was on Instagram and suddenly I popped this picture.
And it was you with a friend of mine, Cristiano Ronaldo, the football genius, greatest player to ever play the game as far as I'm concerned.
And you'd been to see him just privately.
And he was saying how great it was that he'd met you and you'd gone there.
And all hell broke this.
He was bombarded with people saying this is outrageous, legend over, legacy finished.
None of which would have bothered him because he'd heard all this kind of thing before.
But the venom of it was from certain quarters was so pathetic, it seemed to me.
So first of all, what were you doing with Cristiano?
Why were you there?
Well, he invited me to come and see him.
And he had had some trouble in his life a few months ago.
And a friend of his sent him some of my videos.
And he said he had watched those.
And then he read my book, one of my books, and found them very helpful.
And he wanted to talk.
So I went out to his house and we talked for about two hours.
And he showed me all his equipment for keeping himself in tip-top condition.
And we talked a bit about his companies, but mostly we talked about what he wanted in the future and some of the obstacles that he's facing while pursuing that.
And so we had a strategic conversation, I would say, on those topics for about 90 minutes.
Were you in a way, were you the Ted Lasso figure in his life?
Well, that's what it felt like.
He didn't realize he was missing it?
Well, I think maybe he did realize that he was missing it because he seemed to have found it to some degree in those lectures.
And so, and I was, I always like to hear not only what people are up to, but what they want.
And one of the things I loved about my clinical practice, which was very much predicated on this, like, well, you're miserable, let's say.
And not to say that he was, because he has a good life in many ways.
But if you could envision a path forward out of your misery, let's say, to somewhere better, what would that look like?
And it's not a question people ask themselves with enough depth.
And then having developed that vision, what are the strategies that might be put in place to make that more likely?
And again, not in a manipulative way, but if you had to conduct yourself in the proper manner to bring about this desirable end, or at least to move towards it, how would you organize your behavior?
When someone like Cristiano, who, you know, we know what the personal problem was, he'd lost a baby and his partner was incredibly sad for him.
And professionally, after that, a lot of turmoil as to whether he was going to stay at his club and so on and so on.
It seemed to me talking to him in the last couple of days after he saw you, he's in a much better place, actually.
That's what happens when you hang out with a reprobate like me.
Yes, but really interesting to me.
So you got, and you and he both got criticised for just seeing each other.
But actually, it was clearly very helpful to him.
Well, I hope so.
That would be lovely if it was true.
It's a weird position, isn't it?
There's you, Dr. Jordan Peterson, this guy that comes out of Canada lecturing students.
And then you're at the home of the greatest football player of all time.
And you're genuinely helping him.
I mean, Ronaldo is known as one of the most mentally strong athletes has ever been.
Yeah, right.
Not just physically, but mentally strong.
And yet he needed someone like you to help him.
I find that really fascinating.
Well, I don't know if he needed me because he's a pretty competent guy, but, you know, you can always, and this is something that very competent people do, you can always improve on the edge, you know.
And so his life is very well put together and he had some trouble, but people do.
But we talked a lot about what he wanted, how he wanted his career to end in the most graceful possible manner and how that might be optimized.
And so I'm going to sign for Arsenal in the January transfer window, did you, Jordan?
No, I did give him my question.
I try not to give people advice.
I mean, I'm curious on that because he's obviously reaching not the end of his career by any means.
He's still a world-class player and he's incredibly fit.
So he could play for another three, four years, perhaps.
But what is an end game for someone who's achieved everything in the game?
Yeah, well, that's a good question.
And it's hard for people who have had a stellar career, especially one that's to some degree predicated on youth, to figure out what to do with the rest of their life.
Now, he's well set up because he's a very canny businessman and he has a young family and he has lots of friends.
And as far as I can tell on that front, he's situated himself extremely intelligently.
So I think it looks to me like the transition for him is going to be quite smooth.
But that's a testament to his wisdom because he made sure that his life was founded on more than one dimension of attainment, and that was very wise.
And does it make you feel good that even people like him can find great solace from watching your lectures?
Well, all that makes me feel good.
I mean, I do think that this is part of the reason I keep going on these lecture tours, is that it seems to be doing people good.
So let me ask you about kids, what you by kids, I mean young adults, really, and then into their 20s, trying to form their way through life.
One of my favorite movie clips is Rocky Balboa, who's probably the non-intellectual version of Jordan Peterson in many ways, because he said this to his son.
He was getting a bit spoiled and entitled and moaning about being Rocky Summerson.
And he says this to him.
Let me tell you something you already know.
The world ain't all sunshine and rainbows.
It's a very mean and nasty place.
And I don't care how tough you are, it will beat you to your knees and keep you there permanently if you let it.
You, me, or nobody is going to hit as hard as life.
But it ain't about how hard you hit.
It's about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward.
How much you can take and keep moving forward.
That's how winning is done.
Now, if you know what you're worth, then go out and get what you're worth.
But you've got to be willing to take the hits and not pointing fingers saying you ain't where you want to be because of him or her or anybody.
Cowards do that and that ain't you.
You're better than that.
I love that speech.
Yeah, it's good.
What do you think of it?
Well, that ethos was what lifted up Sylvester Stallone to stardom very rapidly with his first movie.
And what do I think about that?
I think that young people are literally dying for that message.
I really, and I mean literally, they're so demoralized.
It's just beyond belief.
And so one of the things that's been painful about what I've been doing with my wife as we've traveled around the world for the last number of years is to see how desperate people are for an encouraging word.
Let's take a break and find out what that encouraging word should be.
I want to know why a lot of young people are very anxious about life.
Why is that?
And what's the best way for them to come through it?
Yep.
We'll deal with that after the break.
More from Dr. Jordan Peterson in a few minutes.
Well, welcome back to the special edition of Piers Morgan Uncensor, one-on-one with Dr. Jordan Peterson.
We left him on the cliffhanger with Rocky Balboa and his address to his son about how to grow a pear, for want of a better phrase.
This idea that actually your life is defined not so much by success because you're everyone's friend when you're successful, but by the knocks you inevitably are going to get, whether it's through losing loved ones, losing a job, you know, losing a car, whatever it may be, you're going to get hit by blows in your life of differing magnitude.
And I've always believed that how you deal with the downside of life really defines how you lead the rest of your life.
Well, the clip is very interesting because it starts out with the admission that life is brutally difficult and sometimes unbearably brutally difficult.
And you can see the progressive playing with that notion.
It's warped into this sense of victimization, but it does reflect some understanding of the underlying tragic reality of life.
And so it's good to get that right on the table to begin with.
Say, well, you're miserable.
You have your reasons.
And they might be deep reasons.
But if you let the misery demoralize you and make you bitter and cynical and cowardly and make you withdraw, then, first of all, that's a failure in the highest sense on your part, and all it's going to do is make everything worse.
And then you might think, well, what do you have to respond to that?
How do you respond to that catastrophe and challenge?
And the answer is, and this is what Rocky is telling his son in no uncertain terms, it's like, terrible as things are, there's a lot more to you than you can possibly imagine.
And that if you face those things forthrightly and with some faith and courage, then you can have the adventure of your life and prevail even over catastrophe.
And that's true.
Right.
I mean, I couldn't really get my head around why so many young people feel so anxious all the time compared to when I was young, when it just wasn't really a big thing amongst my friendship groups, certainly.
But I reckon it's two things.
One, social media, the constant bombardment of other people having a great time or looking great, often a false imagery and having to live up to false ideals.
But also a conversation I had with Dr. Phil in America, where his explanation for it was that he said, you've got to understand that social media means that young people now are being bombarded all day long and all night long with quite shocking imagery.
And he gave an example.
He said, when I was young, he said, if a crocodile ate somebody on a golf course in Florida, the chances are I would never have heard about it.
It probably wouldn't have made the national news, probably wouldn't have even made the state news, and I wouldn't have heard about this incident.
Now, it's quite likely that a video of the crocodile eating this person would be whipping its way around social media within half an hour.
And young kids will be sharing it, disseminating it, and being exposed to this constant imagery all the time of quite unsettling and shocking imagery.
What do you think of that theory?
That in itself was adding to a sense of everything's terrible.
Well, I think it's a corollary of an information overload theory, right?
I mean, one of the advantages to having the computational power we have is that everything is at your fingertips.
And the disadvantage is that everything's in your face.
And by everything, it might be 40 million pornographic images.
Like, that's a lot.
Or an endless array of tragic scenarios and really endless.
And so that's a problem.
And the problem, the fundamental problem is how do you handle the fire hose of information?
And no one really knows the answer to that.
But we should Also, point out that it's no wonder that young people are demoralized and anxious because we're doing everything we can to demoralize them and make them anxious.
So, on the masculine front, we tell young boys that, well, the world's a terrible patriarchal tyranny and all of that patriarchal tyranny, which is the whole explanation for history, has done nothing but oppress and exploit people and destroy the planet.
And so, that any manifestation of that masculine impulse on your part is equivalent to the world-destroying force.
Well, all masculinity now is branded toxic.
And I remember, I think that the key moment for me came when Gillette, who'd always had these very masculine commercials with the big guy cuddling a baby or whatever it may be, they suddenly switched gears and did a campaign where it started with a lot of Me Too imagery and basically the assumption that all men are awful until they can prove otherwise.
And I predicted in a column this would be a complete disaster for them.
And sure enough, $9 billion later, they did a screeching U-turn and went back to the big guy cuddling the babies.
Because actually, two things I think about that.
One, most men are not awful, actually.
But not all the time.
No, some men are, obviously.
Some women are pretty awful.
No.
But not most of them.
But if you try saying that and not getting cancelled.
But I think also this thing that you've got into trouble about, which I don't understand why, that you believe that most women probably quite like their men to be strong and confident.
I don't believe that.
All the data shows that clearly on cultural samples and has for 50 years.
Not everyone is.
Anecdotally, most women I know, I think, would absolutely agree.
Why is it that you've been so vilified for suggesting something which is so palpably true?
Well, I think, first of all, that annoys narcissistic women no end.
And it annoys people who think that there are no biological or cultural limits on how we manifest our behaviors.
And also, it frightens a large number of women because many women have never had a good relationship with anyone masculine in their life.
And so the notion that they would need to establish a trusting relationship with a man, especially if he's also in something approximating a superordinate position, which is what they might like to find him maximally attractive, also implies that they're in some sense going to be under his sway.
Defining Biological Reality 00:02:47
And if there's no trust there, well, that's absolutely terrifying.
And I have some sympathy for that because there are no shortage of women out there who've never had a positive relationship with anyone masculine.
And so they're very, they're completely unable to discriminate between narcissistic power and compulsion and confident competence.
And so because they can't distinguish that and they're afraid, they put all of that in the same category, which is something like the predator category.
And that's not good for them because, well, as you said, all men aren't predators all the time.
And they need to establish a relationship with a man.
Right.
We're also in a very strange place where a lot of high-profile women will not say what they think a woman is.
Yeah.
Because they are.
Katangi Brown Jackson, the new member of the Supreme Court, in her nomination hearings was asked a question.
This is what she said.
Can I provide a definition?
No.
Yeah.
I can't.
You can't?
Not in this context.
It was a riveting moment because you're like, you're going to be on the Supreme Court of the United States of America.
You're a woman.
You're the first black woman on the court.
And that in itself, I know you've raised eyebrows about why did Joe Biden go out there and say we need to have a black woman?
Why not just say we want the best person available?
And then if she's the best person, get her on the court, which I completely agree with.
But for her not to be able to commit to explaining what she thinks a woman is.
And then I had a moment on this show where Macy Gray, the singer, did stick her neck out.
And she said this.
I will say this and everybody's going to hate me, but as a woman, just because you go change your parts doesn't make you a woman.
Right.
Sorry.
You feel that?
I know that for a fact.
Like if you want me to call you a her, I will, because that's what you want.
But that doesn't make you a woman, just because I call you a her, and just because you got a surgery.
With chilling predictability, Macy Gray stuck to her guns for a couple of days, and then the onslaught was so overwhelming against her, she had to go on national television in America, issue a groveling apology for everyone that she'd hurt with this statement of what many would think is just a statement of biological fact.
How have we got to this place where women are terrified of saying what a woman is and women who do say what they think it is, i.e. there are clear biological distinctions between a man and a woman, they get destroyed.
Well, we've accepted this preposterous hypothesis that your identity is only subjectively defined.
And as I've tried to point out in some of my lectures, the only people who think their identity is subjectively defined are two-year-olds.
Reinforcing National Identity 00:04:32
And I mean that technically, because two-year-olds are egocentric, which means they can't bring their identity in alignment with a social norm, which also means that two-year-olds can't play with other children.
They can play beside them, but they can't play with them.
That doesn't happen until you're three.
What happens when you're three, if you're reasonably well socialized or start to move towards that, is that you learn how to negotiate a social identity.
And then identity becomes, obviously, it has some roots in your subjectivity and in your biology for that matter.
But a sophisticated identity is not only socially negotiated, as the constructivists know perfectly well, but it's also, it's got a dynamism about it because it has to be constantly renegotiated.
Like, as we're having a conversation here, to some degree, we're renegotiating our mutual identities because we learn something from each other, and so we transform.
We're also trying to figure out to some degree who each of us is in this situation.
And then we're also trying to learn, can we play together towards some productive end?
And you might ask, well, what do you mean play?
And say, well, we're trying to have an interesting conversation.
Let's take another break.
I want to come back and talk to you about the royal family in this country and the huge seismic moment in history we've just had.
We'll talk to Jordan Peterson after break again.
Welcome back for my final part with Dr. Jordan Peterson.
The royal family and the death of this great queen and the extraordinary outpouring of love and respect, not just here, but around the world actually.
Biggest event of its kind I think I've ever seen.
What did you make of it?
What do you think of a monarchy in the modern age?
Is it survivable?
Well, I thought that what happened was extremely interesting psychologically because Queen Elizabeth stood for or embodied a whole set of virtues, which is the right way of thinking about it, that aren't in the least bit fashionable, but in fact, they're the inverse of fashionable in some sense, but are desperately needed.
And so you might say humility, dutifulness, careful emotional self-regulation, discretion, the antithesis of narcissism, all of that.
And she managed it extraordinarily well for 70 years.
And so whenever things go too far in one direction, there's a tremendous unconscious or implicit desire for something that would set it right.
And that's what you saw happen.
And not only on the personal front, but there's also all the pomp and ceremony, which is also archaic and unfashionable, that was all part of that, that you Brits managed so spectacularly.
That was all.
People are just dying for that beauty.
What I felt was I felt like the country before this happened, two weeks before it, felt like the whole country was in a shambolic state, that everything was going wrong in our country.
And in a way, the death of the Queen unified us in a way we hadn't been for a long time, certainly since Brexit.
No one was talking about hot-button political issues or social issues.
They're all talking about one thing, and that it also reinforced our national identity.
Oh, yeah.
In a way that actually made the world look on with great awe about the procession, our military, our royal family, the country.
It made people feel good about Britain again.
And therefore made British people feel good about themselves again.
Yeah, well, you guys have lots to feel good about.
And that's not the standard mantra of the modern world.
You know, this is an unbelievably admirable country for all its flaws.
And so what do you find admirable about us?
English common law, the tradition of free speech, sardonic and self-effacing humor that's so much a part of the culture.
Our ability to cue for 13 hours politely?
To see a woman lying a state who's not even a member of our family.
Very strong resilience, right?
Well, and to do that peacefully and to do that in a spirit of mutual goodwill and come to a place like London.
It's unbelievably ethnically diverse and yet it functions extraordinarily well.
What are your best traits and what are the worst traits of Dr. Jordan Peterson?
Regulating Personal Irritation 00:09:10
Well, I think that it's been difficult for me to optimally regulate my irritation at times over the last few years.
And I'm trying to get that right, to figure out what the right, because a lot of things that have happened have outraged me.
And then I'm not exactly sure what emotional tone to take as a consequence of that outrage.
And that's a very complicated thing to figure out.
And that's been exacerbated, that problem, by the fact that I have been, my family and I have been the targets of very conniving and attacks and underground attacks.
And that isn't stopping.
Another time when your wife was fighting a deadly cancer.
Yeah, and my daughter was sick, and so was I.
So yeah, so it's very difficult to regulate your temper properly under those circumstances, let's say.
And so I don't imagine that.
Where have you most improved yourself, do you think, as you've got older?
I get better and better at listening, you know, and I'm better and better at finding my way forward with the words that I choose.
And that's just a continual, in some sense, incremental expansion.
I've probably got better, too, at seeking out corrective information.
So, for example, I got banned from Twitter recently for making a statement that I don't regret, by the way.
But I had a friend of mine, two friends of mine, grill me, and I put that on YouTube.
It's called Mean Tweets.
It was an hour and a half, I said.
And one of them, both of them are very, very smart people.
One of them is more liberal than I am, I would say, but a very good advocate for that liberal position.
And I said, well, let's hash this out.
There's some things I've said that have made people angry, and you think I made them unnecessarily angry.
And that I was unnecessarily harsh in my tone.
Did they change your mind?
They changed my approach, you know, because one of the things I decided was that I would try to be equally judicious in my words, but that I would use a calmer and more measured tone.
And I don't mean use instrumentally.
I mean that I would attempt to make the effort to take as much unnecessary emotion out of the statement as possible.
And so I started to do that in some of my more recent videos.
I mean, I tried to do that before.
I think part of the reason that my interview with Kathy Newman went well was because I kept my head.
And I didn't get irritated.
Yeah, but she's a good friend of mine, and I watched it with great interest because I felt like you were slightly on parallel lines.
And that maybe she would do that interview differently if she had her time again.
I think that's highly possible.
Yeah.
So, yes, I changed my approach quite dramatically.
And what happened was that I read a Telegraph article I recently published about Deloitte, and it was a very cutting article.
And I was really worried about publishing it because I think it was the most cutting article I've ever written.
And I read it on YouTube very, very calmly and carefully.
And what happened was I got the response was much more positive and much less negative.
So there was no downside to it.
So people didn't say, some people said, I, you know, I think that I liked your tone when you were more aggressive, especially on issues like this.
But by and large, it had all, it worked even better because I could be careful in what I was discriminating.
And then to ally that with calmness actually made it more potent rather than less.
And so that was very interesting.
And yeah, and I mean, we had a very serious discussion about this, my friends and I.
I had a lot of people with me in Miami when this was happening across the political spectrum.
We had a very healthy debate for a couple of hours about whether or not I had gone beyond some reasonable limit in the way I was conducting myself, say, on YouTube and Twitter.
And some people were very strongly advocating for more of what I was doing and even harsher.
And others were saying, well, you're alienating people that you could otherwise communicate with unusual.
See, it's interesting about the listening.
One of my sons, two of my sons have come today because I just wanted to listen to this.
Very unusual.
One of them has not even been to the studio before.
So he just said to me, I said, give me some advice.
You know, you love Jordan Peterson.
What's the advice for the interview?
He said, just listen more than you normally do.
So I've tried hard to ask a question and let you answer.
Right.
And so I'm work in progress.
And I've been interviewing people for 35 years.
But I do think the listening, as I've got older, I felt the same thing.
Yeah, it's a real skill, man.
Listening is a powerful tool, actually.
Oh, yeah.
Well, there is nothing that people like more and need more than to be listened to.
You know, and that's partly why the left clamors all the time.
You know, it says, look, there's all these people who aren't being listened to.
It's like, there are a lot of people who aren't being listened to.
They're absolutely right.
There's no doubt about that.
And I've dealt with people who were extraordinarily marginalized, so to speak, in my clinical practice.
And some of those people, to straighten out their minds, they need like 10,000 hours of listening.
Because no one, and I mean this literally, I've had people in my clinical practice, no one ever listened to them their whole life.
And so when they start talking, they're all over the place.
They're disorganized.
They're hyper-emotional.
Having met me now for an hour, what would your initial clinical diagnosis be?
Well, you're probably optimally disagreeable for your profession, you know, because you can listen, but you're also not a pushover.
And that's a very fine line, right?
Because if you're too assertive or aggressive, then you get domineering.
But if you're not enough, then you're a pushover.
And this was also the case with Kathy Newman, she's quite disagreeable.
And that's a masculine trait, by the way.
And it was one of the things I was doing.
Well, I think she got into it.
In a way, it's how we started the interview.
She'd gone into it, I think, with a preconceived idea of what you would be like and sort of stuck to that.
She's actually a very skillful journalist and interviewer, and I was surprised the way that interview went when I was watching it.
I think it was because she just had an idea of what she thought you would be.
Well, I think she probably, I think she also had an outcome, an idea of what the optimal outcome of the interview might be.
And I think a lot of the journalists who've gone after me in some sense have that.
They think there's part of them that thinks, I'll be the person that finally exposes him for what he is.
But then they find out that I'm not who they thought that I am.
At least I'm not quite as demonic as they thought I might be.
Well, Professor Stephen Hawking, before he died, gave me his last television interview, and he said that the biggest threat to the future of mankind was when artificial intelligence learnt to self-design.
What do you think the biggest threat to mankind is?
Narcissistic compassion.
Now, AI is, you know, it's a threat too.
But if we had our act together ethically, it's possible that AI could become a useful servant rather than a tyrannical master.
You don't want to automate your tyrannical masters.
And that's one of the dangers of AI.
I've got to wrap it up.
I don't want to, but I have to.
I want to ask you just quickly.
The film director Olivia Wilde has a new movie out, which she says is based on you, this insane man, this pseudo-intellectual hero to the incel community.
Incel being these weirdo loner men who are despicable in many ways.
Is that you?
Are you the intellectual hero to these people?
Sure.
Why not?
You know, people have been after me for a long time because I've been speaking to disaffected young men.
You know, what a terrible thing to do that is.
I thought the marginalized were supposed to have a voice.
It's making you emotional talking about that.
Well, God, you know, it's very difficult to understand how demoralized people are.
And certainly many young men are in that category.
And you get these casual insults, these incels.
What does it mean?
It's like, well, these men, they don't know how to make themselves attractive to women who are very picky.
And good for them.
Women, like, be picky.
That's your gift, man.
Demand high standards from your men.
Fair enough.
But all these men who are alienated, it's like they're lonesome and they don't know what to do.
And everyone piles abuse on them.
When she said that, Olivia Wilde, it stung you, didn't it?
I saw the...
Oh, by that time, you know, as far as critiques go, that was kind of low level.
I mean, once I got painted as red skull, you know, magical super Nazi, that was kind of the end of the insults.
A Net Force For Good 00:04:05
There's no place past that.
So when Olivia Wilde made those comments, the first thing I did was go look at the preview for her movie, which I quite liked.
I thought I would go see that movie probably, and perhaps I will.
It didn't really bother me.
My family and I talked about it right away, and we were able to respond to it with some degree of humor, which then people completely misunderstood.
I said I hope that, you know, that if I had to be played by someone, he's a very good-looking man, and so that seems all right.
And then I said something like, I hope he gets my fashion style choice right when he plays me.
And it was a joke.
All that was a joke.
I mean, you've been so controlled today, and yet in that brief moment, you got very emotional.
Why?
It's really something to see constantly.
How many people are dying for lack of an encouraging word?
And how easy it is to provide that if you're careful.
You know, give credit where credit is due.
And to say, you're a net force for good if you want to be.
Do you believe you're a net force for good?
Net?
Yes.
In all the details?
Probably not.
You know, no one's perfect.
So people make their mistakes as they stumble uphill.
Jordan, it's been a fascinating interview.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
You've got this new box set up.
Yeah, yeah.
I'm pretty happy about that.
Jordan B. Peterson, 24 Rules for Life and Beyond Order.
Fascinating books.
They've sold how many millions now?
Well, 12 Rules sold seven, and I think Beyond Order is approaching a million now.
So they're doing just fine.
Did you ever think you'd sell that number of books?
I never thought any of this would happen, you know.
I mean, so I knew when I was teaching at Harvard and at the University of Toronto that some of the things I was teaching were revolutionary.
I was surprised that I got along with it, got away with it, let's say, as long as I did.
And so there's a way in which it doesn't surprise me.
And I wouldn't say that's because of the brilliance of my ideas.
It's because I'm good at communicating ideas, but the ideas that I've been developing, they're ancient ideas.
They're the oldest ideas we have in some real sense.
So they have a power.
Right, absolutely.
And just finally, you're healthy, you look healthy.
Pretty good.
And much better.
Your wife's doing a lot better than she was.
She's better than she was before, even.
And my daughter's not ill either.
So fancy that.
I mean, that's an amazing turnaround from where you are.
That's for sure, man.
It was pretty brutal.
Yeah.
For a long time.
You know, my wife almost died every day for seven months.
So.
I'm very glad for you.
Thank you, sir.
I really am.
It's been a really fascinating interview.
Appreciate the time.
Come back.
It's a pleasure to see you.
I feel like we've got a million more things I can talk to you about, which I'm sure everyone thinks that when they talk to you.
Well, that's a good thing to have happen during an interview.
Jordan, thank you.
You bet, man.
Well, an extraordinary interview with an extraordinary character.
Whatever you think of Jordan Peterson, you can't listen to that and not be enthralled, captivated, maybe challenged.
Maybe you don't agree with him.
I'm not sure he minds if you disagree with him.
That's the whole point.
It's about stimulating ideas.
It's about challenging what you believe, evolving, as we both do as we've got older.
That's it from me.
Whatever you're up to, keep it uncensored.
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