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Nov. 10, 2022 - Uncensored - Piers Morgan
47:19
20221110_piers-morgan-uncensored-dr-jordan-peterson
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Time Text
Pressure to Change Course 00:08:12
Tonight on Piers Morgan Uncensored, Dr. Jordan Peterson's interview on this show has been viewed 17 million times around the world.
Tonight, he's back for more.
Thus, millions of Brits pay tribute to our armed forces every year by wearing a poppy.
Is it right to shame those who don't?
We'll debate that with SAS hero Ant Middleton.
And as crucial US midterm elections end with no clear winners or losers, but from Donald Trump, are both parties now stuck with aging leaders that nobody wants.
Live from London, this is Piers Morgan Uncensored.
Well, good evening from London.
Welcome to Piers Morgan Uncensored.
The right to protest is fundamental to any democracy.
We've got every right to make demands of the people who are supposed to serve us and every right to make a nuisance when they don't.
Protest movements gave us civil rights, gay rights, the female vote.
They shaped the free world that we live in today.
But there's a kind of golden rule of protesting.
It's a pretty easy one to remember.
Don't be a dick.
Just as you have a right to protest, everybody else has the right to go on living their lives because the chances are they're not the people that you're protesting about.
The brats from Just Stop Oil have forgotten that golden rule.
They seem to be taking great pride and joy in causing daily havoc and misery for British commuters by shutting down motorways.
And in some cases, the consequences have been appalling.
First, a police officer was injured and two lorries crashed trying to avoid a roadblock.
And then came this.
I was actually due to be a ballbear on my father's coffin along with my son.
And we both got that taken away from us.
There's nothing that we could have done.
Someone that I don't know has taken that ability for me to say farewell to my father away from me.
That's disgusting.
He went on to say, you'll never forgive them.
And I don't blame him.
How could he?
He had to ring his mother and say he wasn't going to be there at the funeral of his father where he was going to carry the coffin.
And nor could he bring his children, that man's grandchildren.
They all missed the funeral.
You can't do it again.
What did he do wrong to deserve that?
What did any of the people who've missed work, lost money, missed very important medical appointments?
What did they all do wrong?
Just Stop Oil wants more action on climate change.
So do I.
But they're the wrong victims and they're going about this the wrong way.
The point of protest is to put pressure on the powerful to change course.
To do that, you need to have public support.
It's democracy.
That's why we have civil rights, gay rights and the female vote.
But what kind of protests like this, what it does is to infuriate and irritate the very people that it's supposedly trying to persuade.
If Just Stop Oil wants anyone to listen to them, well, let me give them some very, very simple advice.
Stop being dicks.
Well, joining me now are environmentalist and author Stanley Johnson, Talk TV presenter Richard Tyson, Talk TV international editor Isabel Oakeshott.
And across the pond, Fox News contributor Kat Tiff, who's on the hottest show on television, Gutfeld.
And I know you claim all the credit for that, Kat, and quite rightly.
I'll come to you in a moment, Kat, talking about the US midterms.
But first of all, Stanley Johnson, you're a big environmentalist.
I believe in climate change.
I think it's real.
I think it's dangerous.
I think that the world is heating up and we have to do something about it.
But I think that what is going on now with these Just Stop Oil protests is crossing a line and it's not having any good impact.
They're not changing people's minds.
If anything, they're alienating people.
I think what you say is, you know, pretty fair.
I, by the way, have addressed meetings in Trafalgar elsewhere wearing the Extinction Rebellion badge.
I think there is a case for peaceful process.
Some of the great achievements of this world have been achieved through peaceful process.
I looked at a film this afternoon of the lady who threw herself under the king's horse.
I think it was May 1913.
These things happened.
She went to prison.
You can't always keep everybody happy all the time.
But yes, I think you're absolutely right.
Who are we trying to influence?
We ought actually be trying to influence members of parliament who have a chance to do the right thing in terms of influencing the government.
This is where the target ought to be.
And I think that the way organisations do go about it, for example, I'm involved at the moment in a huge campaign to try and stop the government scrapping all the environmental laws, which they want to do.
But the way that is being done is by getting lots and lots of people to write to their MPs.
So yes, I think you're right about this.
You do alienate people, and you particularly alienate them if you break the law and break the law in a way that this...
Right, and Isabel, the problem is the police haven't really been tackling them hard enough, in my estimation.
There are many other countries in the world where this would not be happening.
If people block motorways in many European countries, actually, they'd be in very short thrift slung off.
But we seem oddly reluctant.
I mean, I'm not reluctant.
You know, you'd give me a water can and I'd be the first in there.
No, I think we've got to get much tougher.
This is going to go on and on.
They've made it very clear that they're going to go on and on doing it.
I mean, Stanley, you characterise this as peaceful protests.
I'm not sure that that actually is peaceful.
It's causing an immense amount of disruption.
It's not peaceful when policemen start being hit in car crashes, right?
Well, Isabel, in Iran at the moment, a lot of ladies are taking off their scarves and getting it.
They're not illegal for that.
Yes, but I'm sure the Iranian regime thinks that's illegal and causing disruption.
Do you see what I mean?
Well, no, I don't.
I don't accept that as equivalence whatsoever.
And the whole suffragette thing is absolutely ridiculous.
A very clever piece of spin on the part of these protesters.
Absolutely no equivalence whatsoever.
The suffragettes were completely disenfranchised.
The just stop oil protesters have a vote.
There are other ways to do it.
Richard says, they're also, a lot of what they're calling for is simply unworkable.
I mean, they want all fossil fuel work to stop overnight.
It's insane because the transformation...
We can't afford to do that and it's not practically possible anyway.
Everybody accepts, who is frankly sane, that we're in a transition period.
We don't know how long that transition is.
It might be 30 years, it might be 40 years.
But for example, gas and oil are the key fossil fuels that are part of that transition.
What they're asking for is impossible.
It's illogical.
And the truth is, we'd be much better actually to use our own fossil fuels than importing them literally halfway across the world, creating more CO2, more emissions, than actually using ourselves.
So what they're asking for is completely logical.
Yes, the right to protest is sacrosanct, but not the right to obstruct.
Not the right to prevent people going about their daily lives and, for example, going to a funeral of your parents.
Carrying your father's coffin.
I mean, I just think that the fact that man wasn't able to do that is really disgraceful.
Come back to Richard's point.
It's very nice to hear you say you think that the climate change is important.
And as we speak today, they're trying to deal with this in Kaitana, Kara, in Sharma-Sheikh.
The answer is, globally, we are in tremendous trouble.
What Glasgow said was we've got to keep it to 1.5.
Nowadays, it looks as though we're heading firmly for 2.8.
What is happening in Sharma-Sheikh at the moment is tremendously important.
Richie Schunak was there.
Boris was there.
It is, but the key thing, Stanley, this has to be done sensibly.
You can't just get rid of all use of fossil fuels overnight.
You have to move to green energy in a way which actually is practical, can happen.
You need the will of governments to do it, but ultimately it's got to be practical.
You can't just stop.
But what do you mean by practical?
What do you mean by practical?
We know what the carbon budget is.
It's got to be affordable.
It's got to be proportionate.
And what you can't do is penalize the least well-off in society who can't afford to heat.
They can't afford to eat.
Our businesses can't afford to be competitive.
And therefore, they're all going overseas.
And what you've got to be really careful of, Stanley, is the only zero is the amount of money left in our bank accounts.
Right.
Okay.
Look, I want to move on.
I want to move on to Cat Temp over in New York.
Celebrity Tensions Rise 00:12:13
Kat, the midterms have, they're still dragging on.
It's quite extraordinary to me that in America, some of these votes take weeks or months to resolve, to count.
What's the matter with you?
Can't you count over there?
Yeah, that's not my call.
I'm not involved in that aspect of things.
What do you make of it?
Because remember, we used to have election light.
Go ahead.
What do you make of the midterms?
I mean, it seemed to me that the big loser looked like it was Donald Trump.
Certainly the media has been playing that aggressively.
And there's clearly now a battle for the soul of the Republican Party between Trump and probably Ron DeSantis, who had a fantastically successful election result.
What do you make of that?
I mean, Trump's got this big announcement coming next week.
Is he actually going to go ahead now and say he's going to run?
Or do you think smarter, wiser voices may be able to persuade him to, at the very least, wait?
It's been very difficult for anyone to persuade him of anything.
I think when it comes to his candidates, the strategy of focusing on, you know, election denial and saying the election was stolen, it's not a good one.
And a lot of people talk about how it's not a good one because if you don't believe it, you might not want to vote for candidates who do believe it.
But one thing that people don't talk about, which I always think about, is what if people do believe it?
Why would they want to participate in an election that they think is going to be stolen anyway?
And what we've seen in the wake of these midterms that we haven't seen before is the kinds of people and the number of people who are saying Trump's got to stop this.
And if he can't stop it, he's got to go.
I mean, even Mike Cernovich was tweeting that.
Former Trump advisors were tweeting that.
It's not just what people are saying so much as the people who are actually saying this stuff that always had his back in the past, no matter what he said or no matter what he did.
Joe Biden would be 80 at the next election, but is now dropping heavy hints he wants to run again for another four years.
I mean, assuming he even makes it to the next election, which I think at the moment is an aspiration.
I don't mean that to be unkind.
Just the condition he appears to be in when he appears in public is increasingly unsteady.
Is it good for America that you may end up with a president that old?
Yeah, there are things that you see are very impossible to ignore.
Not just him stumbling over his words, but we've seen him shaking hands with people who are not there.
We've seen him looking for people who are already dead.
That's not something that inspires confidence in anyone.
I mean, my grandparents have about 10 years on Joe Biden, and I just saw them last weekend.
And if I saw them do any of those things, I would be deeply concerned and asking if they needed to go to the hospital, and they are not in control of the country.
Yes, I think that's the problem.
They're not in control of nuclear weapons.
That's what worries me.
Right.
Now, I want to talk to you about kangaroo testicles, which I know probably are your, to your surprise, you're probably your expert here.
I'll tell you why, because a gentleman called Matt Hancock, who may not have crossed over to the American zeitgeist in quite the way he has here, but he was the health secretary in the pandemic, was pretty disastrous for much of it.
And then he got fired from his job because he was caught having an affair in government buildings, breaking his own lockdown rules.
He's now popped up in a reality television show called I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here, which is notorious for making, you know, normally Zedless celebrities go into a jungle in Australia and do disgustingly humiliating things at the volition of the voting public, including eating kangaroo testicles.
And he's doing this while he should be serving his constituents back in West Suffolk as a member of parliament for which he receives a salary of £84,000.
So I guess my question for you is, if this was happening in America, if you had a serving congressman or woman or senator who basically took a month out, five weeks out, to go to a jungle and eat kangaroo testicles, what would be the reaction?
I would be torn.
I mean, with this guy, it kind of sounds as though perhaps he'd be better off there than influencing policy if he was a guy saying that he's right.
He was saying that you can't have gatherings of two people.
People couldn't see dying relatives, but he could have an affair with his assistant.
I mean, an affair is never a good luck when you get busted for one, especially not when you have to apologize for, I'm sorry I broke social distancing rules.
Exactly.
I don't know if people in Australia would want him anywhere near the government.
They might be happy he's out in the jungle.
Well, I'm going to play a little montage now for viewers who've not been caught up to speed.
He went in last night and we have a montage of the former health secretary.
Here he is.
You've got to hold your breath for a long time.
You don't have to hold your breath.
I don't.
It's just him.
Matt Hancock.
Matt Hancock.
The man that put the cock into Hancock.
Well, look, I'm not going to go at you again, Isabel, about the fact you've done a book with him.
We'll save that for when the book comes out.
But when I watched it last night, I can see, you know, to my horror, various people were messaging me saying, actually, it's coming over okay, which, of course, is exactly what he wants.
But if I'd lost a relative in the pandemic and there hasn't even been a proper inquiry yet into what the government did right or wrong in the pandemic, this looks to me like just a running smack in the face to those people that he's making all this money doing humiliating things, making a total ass of himself, frankly.
But for, you know, self-promotional reasons and fulfilling his bank balance.
And he's going to have to live with the consequences of what was an incredibly high-risk decision.
And I think it will be really interesting.
I'm sure Stanley will have a perspective on the dynamic in the jungle to see how that plays out.
Because already last night, and by the way, I've never watched I'm a celebrity before this series.
I mean, the rating's huge.
Everyone is tuning in to watch him get humiliated.
It's absolutely extraordinary.
But you can already see some tensions there.
There's boy George in there, who clearly, his mother had been very ill.
I can see him brewing to have a go.
There's others.
Mike Tyndall didn't look too.
No, he doesn't.
Charlie White lost to him.
Clearly the vibe amongst the other celebrities was pretty hostile to him.
So at some point, I don't know, is this going to blow up or is it going to go the other way?
Because it's going to go the other way.
Yeah, I think it's going to go the other way.
I'm going to warm to this.
I think I'm in a minority again, I suspect here.
But I think people are going to warm to him.
First, first they're going to think, actually, who has put dyslexia on everybody's talking about dyslexia?
He wants to pretend it's about dyslexia.
No one is talking about dyslexia.
I'm sorry.
Nothing but dyslexia being talked about recently.
Not to do with Matt Hancock.
But of course, he's put it on the other side.
You're talking about him being covered in slime and each.
Honestly, that is absolutely raised.
That's A and B and B.
I think we are going to see.
People say, look, you know, he's doing a good job.
He's actually in the jungle.
You dive him down into disgusting quarries of slime.
All I want is a good job, Stanley.
I did 17 days there.
I did 17 days.
Look at this.
This is a little bag which says Stanley.
I think this was all the food we had for 17 days.
And I thought it was a good experience.
Good experience.
Because you have nobody to talk to who was...
No, no, don't get me wrong.
He's perfectly entitled to have his good experience.
Richard Tyson, my problem with this is the timing, right?
He's perfectly entitled to be a Zed-list ex-politician going into a jungle, but not before there's been a public inquiry into his handling of a pandemic, which was the worst health crisis of our generation.
The winners here is ITV because the viewing numbers are going through the roof.
People want to see him make a fool of himself.
If he wants to be a celebrity, then please resign, stand down from your seat, have a by-election and go and be a Zed-list celebrity.
That's his call.
But the reality, as you say, there's a public inquiry going on at the moment.
Millions of people suffered terribly.
As you say, losing relatives, not being able to get...
And they're suffering now in his constituency from his cost of living crisis, exacerbated by the Conservative government.
And where's their MP?
He's feathering his nest for hundreds of thousands of pounds.
He's not representing him in the House of Commons, for which he is paid to do.
Right, Captain, if this was Donald Trump and he was in a jungle and having despicable things done to him in a very humiliating way, slime on his head and rats and tarantulas and being hung upside down and everything else.
And you can vote as the American people whether he should carry on doing this every night and do these horrible humiliating challenges.
It'd probably be the biggest TV show of all time, wouldn't it?
Everybody would watch it.
Nobody would miss it.
But is it right, though, when you think this guy, now you know a bit more about him, is it right, you think?
I mean, if an American politician did this while they were still serving as a politician, I think there'd be outrage, wouldn't it?
Right.
I mean, of course it's not, but I think that if you're going to actually, you know that it's not.
And he knew there'd be backlash, but going in and doing it anyway proves how bad he thought things would be if he was actually around to take some questions about this.
You know what?
I think that's absolutely spot on.
Cat, great to see you.
Thank you very much for coming on.
Appreciate it, Stanley.
Always good to lock horns with you.
Don't agree with almost anything you ever say, but I love the way you say it.
Isabel, we'll return to you when your book comes out.
Co-authored with Matt Hancock.
And Richard, thank you for coming on.
Appreciate it.
Well, certainly come.
I'm wearing one out of choice tonight.
SAS Soldier term presenter Anne Middleton thinks I should have to wear a poppy and only wokey warriors would refuse.
So next, we're going to debate that.
Also, banned from Twitter for supposed transphobia.
Will you or Musk have him back?
Jordan Peterson returns to Piers Morgan Uncensor.
Life.
There he is.
He's a great man.
Welcome back.
Well, clinical psychologist, Dr. Jordan Peterson is one of the world's most famous and fascinating intellectuals.
His books are instant bestsellers.
Tens of millions watch him online.
In fact, his last interview on Piers Morgan Uncensor has so far been viewed more than 17 million times.
And I'm delighted to say that he joins me again now.
Jordan, great to have you back on the program.
Well, thanks, Pierce.
It's good to see you again.
I was absolutely astonished, really.
Maybe I shouldn't have been, but by the reaction to our last interview worldwide, the sheer volume of people that watched the whole interview, the way the clips were disseminated on TikTok, on Facebook, on Twitter.
It was a really interesting insight, actually, into a whole world that doesn't even involve actually conventional television anymore.
I guess you wouldn't be surprised because this happens to you a lot, but I was.
What does it say about society that that number of people watch an interview on a computer or phone?
Well, I'm still continually surprised about it.
Well, I think what it shows is that there's really no way that legacy TV in some real sense can compete with the absolutely wide open frontier of online video distribution where the cost is low and people can access it everywhere.
It's fundamentally the consequence of a technological revolution.
And there's all sorts of good things about that.
And one of those would be the ability to widely disperse complex and sophisticated information, which YouTube has been particularly good at in the long form, but it's also problematic in that it produces all sorts of alterations in social behavior that we're only, and some of them very dangerous, many of which we're only just beginning to understand.
Psychopaths on Social Media 00:13:58
Right.
Elon Musk has just bought Twitter and it's creating a huge furore, obviously, in many different ways.
And he's admitted, I'm going to do lots of things in the next few months and we're going to get some wrong and we're going to pull them and try something else.
He's going to try and work out a way of making it a sustainable business model.
But also he wants to bring back what he perceives to be genuine free speech on the platform.
Is it possible, Jordan, do you think that he can do that?
Or are we now so entrenched in tribalism, particularly on social media, that it's almost impossible to do what he wants to do?
Well, you couldn't have picked a better day to talk about this with me because I just got a paper sent to me today by Jonathan Haidt.
He didn't write the paper.
It will be published.
It's published in a journal called Personality and Individual Differences.
And it's an examination of the personality traits associated with, let's say, excessive and self-promoting internet usage.
And if you don't mind, I'd like to read you a couple of the descriptions of what the people found because it's so absolutely spot-on and relevant.
I don't think we are descending into tribalism.
I think what's happening is that the virtualization of the world is enabling people who behave in a particular antisocial way in a self-aggrandizing and self-promoting antisocial way.
And I'll just read you the descriptions that are taken directly from this paper.
So it was an actual study of online behavior.
Women characterized by high self-centered antagonism, neurotic narcissism, Machiavellian views, Machiavellian tactics, so that's manipulativeness, meanness, disinhibition, physical sadism, and indirect sadism, used Instagram for a longer time and more frequently than did men.
In women, verbal sadism and emotionality was associated with longer, well, honesty, humility, and conscientiousness was with a shorter Facebook usage time.
Furthermore, women high in agentic extroversion, so that's manipulative self-promotion, and indirect sadism, used Facebook for a longer time and more frequently than men.
And so I've thought for a while that one of the things that's happening to us as we virtualize the world is that we're enabling the small percentage of people, it's usually about 3% in general populations, who use manipulation and reputation savaging and denigration and self-promotion, so the genuinely psychopathic types, to dominate the social conversation and to spew their poisonous and manipulative venom into the public domain,
not only with no fear of being stopped and no inhibition, which is almost all applied socially, but also well-being monetized and promoted by the people who run the social media channels.
And every society forever has had to contend with a small percentage of people who will utilize all the benefits of society only for themselves.
They had to contend with the fact that those people, if not brought under control, can demolish the structure of the entire society.
And I think the polarization that we're feeling is a consequence of their untrammeled expression online, Instagram, Facebook, and in online comment forums like Twitter.
That stuff you read out just said seemed to be gender-specific to women.
Presumably, it also applies in other ways to men as well on social media.
Oh, yeah.
Well, I think the reason that it applied in this study in women is because Instagram is very heavy image.
It involves heavy use of images.
And there are reasons to assume that because of that, it attracts women who are directed towards short-term impulsive mating strategies.
And that's another sign of impulsive, antisocial, and psychopathic behavior.
I think you'd see the same thing in men.
In fact, I've been talking to psychologists, great psychologists, to make sure that I'm on the right track here about those who post repeatedly, say, in online forums, especially in relationship to comments.
And you certainly see that same pattern of sadism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and narcissism characterizing the men who are also incentivized to use what used to be classic female antisocial strategies to advance themselves in the reputational hierarchy.
But the bottom line is...
Exploiters, fundamentally.
Right, but the bottom line is that there is a small percentage of people generating a vast amount of noise.
What impact is that happening on society, do you think?
Well, I think it skews our perceptions of what normal people are like.
We assume that what we're getting, you know, when you sample the world when you're walking through it, you make the assumption that you're getting unbiased, an unbiased representation of the things going on around you.
And when you're on an online platform and, say, reading comments, you also have the assumption that what you're seeing is something like a sample of public opinion.
But it's not.
You know, because if 10 strangers came up to you randomly in the street, then you'd have a bit of a sample of what people randomly think.
But behavior online isn't random, and the people who post aren't precisely normal.
And I have been talking with Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twangier about this, and I think they might know more about it than anybody else in the world.
And it's pretty clear that the people who are dominating, say, online comment sections, and I would especially say this is true of the people who post anonymously.
And there's other markers for this sort of behavior as well.
They dominate the political discourse.
And what's happening in some sense is that we have a new form of pollution that's also corporate sponsored.
And it's pollution of the domain of public discourse.
And the pollution occurs because the social media companies are either enabling or failing to control those known in the popular parlance as trolls.
But they're not just comical trolls using derision in some cute way and having their say in the free speech domain.
They're really poisonous individuals and they're poisoning the entire domain of social media.
So what can Elon Musk do?
What can Elon Musk do about it, do you think?
If you were advising him on this, I mean, ironically, at the moment, you're not on Twitter.
A, do you want to come back now that Musk is in charge?
Do you think you should be restored?
Do you want to be back on Twitter?
And secondly, what would you advise him to do about this issue of the trolls and so on?
Well, the first thing I would advise, and I'm going to be advising the political people I'll be talking to over the next few weeks of precisely this, and I have talked it over with Twengi and Haidt to make sure that I'm not, like I said, off on a personal tangent.
I would say there's no excuse for including the anonymous posters with the real human beings.
And I think that social media platforms who have a certain reach, maybe it's a million subscribers, and I don't really know what figure is appropriate, should be required to implement know-your-customer laws.
And then that the people who are posting who are genuine, verified human beings willing to abide by their words with their personal reputation, should be put in one comment section.
And then the online, anonymous, cowardly, narcissistic, pathological troll demons who are polluting the public discourse should be put in a different comment section.
And if you want to go to hell and visit the troll demons and see what they have to spew, you can, but otherwise you can be among the normal human beings engaged in normal civil human discourse.
And that would separate the bloody psychopaths from the bulk of decent normal people.
And, you know, 97% of people aren't psychopaths.
And so we are talking about a small minority here, but they have the upper hand.
See, there's a percentage of people who...
I actually, I had a psychopath test done on me, actually, a lengthy questionnaire, and they concluded I was a good psychopath.
And what do they mean by that example?
Apparently, I wasn't like the malevolent version.
It was slightly lost on me, the new one.
Okay, well, okay, look, look.
It's often the case that people in the industry that you're in, and this would be true for politics and journalism as well, anything with a public face, are more likely to be extroverted and also more likely to be somewhat disagreeable.
And those personality traits can tilt you towards, what would you say, a style of callous exploitation.
But there are other personality factors that mediate against that, like conscientiousness.
And so people who are hardworking and reliable, for example, aren't parasitic in the same way that a classic psychopath would be.
And so it's complicated.
And it isn't the case that extroversion and even a certain degree of disagreeableness in and of themselves are dangerous, but they lead, like everybody's led to temptation in the direction that's in accordance with their temperament.
And the fact that you are a public-facing person and that you like that would tilt you in one direction of potential temptation, but that's not necessarily diagnostic.
Now, it is a problem because it probably is the case that politics and journalism and entertainment attract a disproportionate number of Machiavellians psychopaths because of the status that goes along with those enterprises.
But it's not diagnostic.
It doesn't mean that if you're in that industry, and you've had a long career, and that's also another marker for failure or for lack of psychopathy, because in the normal world, psychopaths exploit and they get a reputation for doing so quite quickly.
And then people avoid them and stop working with them.
And so it doesn't work over the medium to the long run as a general rule.
Yeah, I get it.
Last time we spoke at length, you said afterwards we'd forgotten to get around to Donald Trump.
And you were quite keen to talk about Donald Trump.
So we're going to take a short break.
And when we come back, I do want to talk about Trump because the big question right now in America is, is Trump done?
So we'll talk about that after the break.
Raise your hand if you've ever been called crazy.
I don't think that men can control crazy women.
Welcome back to Petersburg Sensor.
I'm still here with Dr. Jordan Peterson, my special guest tonight.
Jordan, Donald Trump, what is he?
Is he a narcissist, a sociopath, a psychopath?
All of those things, none of them?
I don't think that he's a psychopath Because he's been successful in repeated enterprises over long periods of time, and he has a variety of people who remain intensely loyal to him.
Now, he's definitely extroverted to a very great degree, and he's definitely disagreeable.
And so, that gives him some of the traits that are associated with those personality features.
But from what I've been able to understand, he's also very conscientious and hardworking, for example.
And so, that's a real mitigating factor.
And so, I think it's very easy to demonize someone that you don't approve of, let's say.
And certainly, Trump has been subject, I would say, to more demonization than any political leader in the West that I can remember in my entire lifetime, including Richard Nixon.
And so, that's also set him back on his heels and made him somewhat embattled and defensive, which I don't think did any great things for his personality in some real sense.
So, I think it's a mistake to assume that Trump is a psychopath.
I think it's a big mistake.
I think it's a big mistake to assume that Putin is a psychopath.
It's easy to do that, but I don't think the evidence suggests that.
You don't want to throw those labels around casually.
And, you know, if Trump was psychopathic, well, he did a pretty good job of keeping the United States clear of war for four years.
That's pretty damn remarkable.
And he did have a big hand in promoting the Abraham Peace Accords, and that was pretty remarkable.
And those aren't the sorts of things that you would expect from a psychopath.
He also seems to have a pretty good hand with the working class.
So I don't think it's reasonable.
Those are reasonable diagnostic labels to place on someone.
I don't want to put words in your mouth, but you sound like you're a bit of a fan of Donald Trump.
Would you like him to run again?
Would he be good for America, do you think?
No, I don't think it would be good for America.
Would it be good for him to run?
That's a difficult question because it might be that it would be good for America to have whether or not Donald Trump should be president sorted out in the public sphere, debated intensely, and subject to an election.
So it might be very interesting to see him put himself forward on the Republican ticket.
If I had my druthers, and I say this, I hope with due care, I would rather see someone like DeSantis step forward who shares some of that forthright strength, let's say, that characterizes Trump at his best, but seems to be a more cautious administrator and a less divisive figure.
I think that would be better because Trump, for whatever virtues he might have, and I think he has the virtues of a Washington outsider, I think that's quite clear.
I think that his behavior in the political realm raises the political temperature to a dangerous degree.
Trump Raises Political Temperature 00:04:38
And, you know, I say that while trying to give the devil his due and not casting careless aspersions on his name.
No, exactly.
I want to turn to somebody else who may well have presidential ambitions and has been the subject of a lot of negativity.
Megan Markle, Prince Harry's wife, who does this podcast, Archerwell podcast, or archetypes, it's called, in which she seems to perennially play the victim, the female victim of all outrages.
And your name got dragged into this.
Let's take a listen to what she said.
Raise your hand if you've ever been called crazy or hysterical.
Or what about nuts, insane, out of your mind, completely irrational?
I don't think that men can control crazy women.
The use of these labels has been drilled into us from movies and TV, from friends and family, and even from random strangers.
And the fact is, no one wants this label.
What did you make of that, Jordan, to be suddenly appearing on Meghan Markle's podcast as a villain?
The first thing I make is that she...
Yeah, well, the first thing I make of it is that her voice drips with the same falsehood that the voice of Kamala Harris drips with.
It's this sanctimonious, faux compassionate, talking down to her audience and trying to be sure that we're all really on the same compassionate page here.
And we're all being victimized by terrible forces that are arrayed against us.
And none of that's really fair.
And it just grates on me.
And I do believe you played a bit of a clip from me when I was talking to Pellia, Camille Pellia, the literary critic.
And I do believe that it is the case that it's very difficult to control female antisocial behavior, often of the type that's been pilloried as hysterical.
And I think that there's no shortage of clinical evidence to support precisely that claim.
It's very difficult for women to control female antisocial behavior and females who are antisocial.
That feminine pattern is reputation savaging under the guise of compassionate care.
And it's extraordinarily destructive.
And so I stand by my words.
Absolutely.
And I do think it scales online because you can use anonymous reputation savaging to unbelievably great effect online with absolutely no punishment for your sins, so to speak.
And that is certainly one of the things that's contributing to so-called cancel culture.
And there's no shortage of that coming from the female side.
Now, men can engage in exactly the same strategies, and they do so online, and that's enabled.
But it's definitely...
See, with men, and I've said this before, and I do believe this to be the case, the ever-present threat of the potential for physical violence keeps men from doing that to each other most of the time in person.
And that all disappears online.
And that means that those who are prone to do such things, to use corrosive and denigrating derision, for example, and reputation savaging can have a free hand at it.
And that includes no shortage of women.
And women are often, very, very often, the targets of that behavior from their own fellows, so to speak.
We've talked about Trump and Meghan Markle.
I wanted to just ask you again about Elon Musk, about what you thought of him as a character.
He seems to me a fascinating individual.
You know, whether he's slightly on the spectrum or I'm not sure what his makeup is psychologically, but he's certainly a creative genius, a whirlwind, a life force, who's done remarkable things.
What do you make of him?
Well, I know people who know him very well and have worked with him very closely.
And these are very solid people, extremely competent and extremely creative.
And they're admirers of Musk.
I talked with my brother-in-law, Jim Keller, who's one of the world's great chip engineers.
And he worked very closely with Musk for years.
And he believes that he's in many ways exactly what you'd think he was.
He's a genius, but he's also like a visionary genius, but he's also someone who's very, very good at implementing, very good at running companies, as you can tell, because he has a multitude of impossible successful companies.
And so he goes into a company and he cleans house and puts things in order and makes things work efficiently.
Wearing the Poppy 00:08:15
And maybe he can do that with Twitter.
I hope he can because Musk is doing all sorts of things that appear to be useful and difficult and it would be a catastrophe to see him derailed in his efforts.
And I think he's with Twitter.
Would you like to be back on Twitter?
You know, I dipped into Twitter this morning when I was looking at some of the research that I just shared with you and it instantly struck me the same way.
It struck me the last time I was on Twitter.
It's so, it's such a den of pathology that using it I think is psychologically damaging.
And if it's possible for Musk to get the trolls, and they're not trolls, they're psychopathic, Machiavellian, sadistic narcissists under control, then it's possible that the platform might be useful.
I like to share information on it.
I like to follow people to see what they're up to.
A lot of the people that I've met over the years, but man, it's a snake pit.
It is.
It isn't obvious to me that we know what to do about it.
Before I let you go, John, you're wearing a poppy.
I'm wearing a poppy.
We're about to have a debate after the break about whether people should be compelled to wear poppies.
And I guess this goes to the wider thing about general displays of, I guess, signaling your virtue in any way that you choose.
Should anyone be compelled to, whatever the cause, whether it's a black square on Instagram when George Floyd died or a poppy for Armistice Day or so on.
Should people ever be compelled?
I think that compulsion, especially in matters of public policy, is a sign of bad policy.
If you can't get people on board voluntarily by motivating them with the proper story, then you're a poor leader.
And so I certainly, certainly would be opposed to anything approximating legal compulsion.
Now, we use social compulsion frequently to produce consensus, let's say, and to enforce it.
And that's never going to go away.
And there's some utility in that.
But my general take on the world is that people should be allowed to go to hell in a handbasket pretty much any way they choose once they're adults, although they might be encouraged not to do that and invited not to do that.
But I'm not a fan of compulsion for any reason.
I think it is a sign of bad policy.
If you and I can't play together voluntarily, then we don't have a very good relationship and it's not going to be efficient and productive.
It's going to require force to continue.
I will take that analysis to commence our debate.
Dr. Jordan Peterson, as always, fascinating.
Thank you very much indeed for joining me.
Thank you very much indeed for being really good to talk to you again, Peterson, and good to see you and thank you to everyone watching and listening.
They always thoroughly enjoy it.
Come back soon.
Thank you very much.
Well coming next.
So is it offensive not to wear a poppy?
Former SAS soldier Ant Middleton goes head to head with the mirror's Kevin Maguire who refuses to wear one.
It should be lively.
Welcome back to Piers Organised State.
The poppy is Britain's national symbol of remembrance for armed forces heroes who lose their lives in service of their country.
Most people wear it with pride, but some people, for their own reasons, refuse to, and they're often savagely criticised.
But should any display of personal respect ever be mandatory?
Well, joining me now as Adventure Reformer Marine, Anne Middleton from the SBS, plus Associate Editor of the Daily Mirror, Kevin Maguire.
So Kevin Maguire, you've very sensibly, I'll notice, not come into the studio to tell this to Anne Middleton's face, where he would break your face in two, and you're not wearing a poppy.
So explain to me, why don't you wear a poppy and why do you feel the way you do?
Piers Ant is too disciplined to break my case.
He might want to, but he wouldn't do it.
Look, I'm happy to buy a poppy and make my donation.
I realise the Royal British Legion make about £50 million a year, or they did before COVID.
It's very important.
But it's the compulsion I bulk against and the poppy police finger pointing, saying, why aren't you wearing a poppy from the end of October when TV stations compete to stick poppies in lapels of whoever appears on them?
It's almost like Christmas comes earlier every year.
It's that level of compulsion.
And I'm in Exeter, which is why I'm not with you and in London.
And I've been doing my survey on the street, because I knew we were going to discuss this.
Most people are not wearing a poppy.
I would say at least nine in ten, probably more than nine are not wearing poppies.
They're not.
They're just not doing it.
And the argument from Kevin is...
Are they all disrespectful?
He doesn't want to wear one.
Why should he?
It's a symbol of respect.
It's as simple as that.
It's a symbol of respect.
It's a symbol of remembrance for those that fall during World War II, World War I, you name it, for those that are given the ultimate sacrifice for us to live on this island, for us to be in the UK, to us to live in this privileged society that we live in, and for us to even have the opportunity to not wear the poppy or to wear the poppy.
You know, I guarantee you, yeah, freedom of choice is guarantee you.
Everyone has been affected by the world wars, you know, even the last generation.
It's that close to us.
What about people like there's an Irish footballer called James MacLean who gets regularly criticised and hounded for not wearing a poppy.
But he comes from Derry and he comes from a particular part of Derry where six people in that community lost their lives on the Bloody Sunday shootings back in 1972.
And he says, I cannot wear the poppy.
The poppy has nothing to do with...
It does actually represent all military action by the British Armed Forces.
The poppy has nothing to do with Bloody Sunday.
The Irish fought, we fought with the Irish, we fought with the Welsh, we fought with the Scottish.
You know, this island came together to fight for the freedom for the people on the island and for the freedom of the United Kingdom.
Now we fought together.
People are getting lost and confused with what it symbolises.
It symbolises the coming together, personal sacrifice, remembering that personal sacrifice.
Should people be forced to live freely in this country?
Should they be forced to wear them?
No, no one should be forced to live.
Look at anything.
No, it shouldn't be, but it should be strongly recommended.
Now when we see people wearing the white poppy, it's like, no, you either wear one or you don't.
You know, the white poppy, that just causes divide.
It's absolutely ridiculous to even have a white poppy out there.
Kevin, I mean, to me, it's, look, I don't think people should be mandated to wear one.
But it does seem strange to me that people seem to make more effort not to wear one than they do to put one on.
It's almost a trend.
It's a few days every year where you just remember these horrendous world wars in particular, where so many millions of people lost their lives.
Is it too much to just put a poppy on and say thank you and respect them?
I think there's a case, Piers.
People don't like to be told what to do and they don't like the finger pointing by the poppy police trying to name and shame Charlene White, the ITN newsreader who's now in the jungle and I'm a celeb.
She didn't wear a poppy because she doesn't wear symbols for a lot of the other charities she represents.
She got terrible racist abuse.
I know the James McLean story because he used to play for Sunday.
He's at Wigan now and he's from Derry and in Northern Ireland and some parts of Great Britain too, the poppy is an issue that divides people and it is because it's connected to the military and the establishment, although it's trademarked by the Royal British Legion who have the trademark, they get the money, it doesn't go to other charities, it goes to them and it's very important.
It is this idea of not persuading people but pointing the finger and saying you must wear it.
I strongly recommended that.
Final word to you Anna.
It's our history.
Like I said, our grandfathers and grandmothers were affected by it.
It's a mark of respect for them.
It's a mark of respect and remembrance for those who have given up this country.
And I actually think we fought for the right for people like Kevin McGuire.
They don't want to wear one.
They don't have to, but I would prefer they do.
Great to see you as always.
As it remained.
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