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Oct. 4, 2023 - Uncensored - Piers Morgan
47:18
20231004_piers-morgan-uncensored-jordan-and-mikhaila-peters
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Tough Love and Reality Checks 00:14:59
Tonight on Piers Morgan Uncensored, a world exclusive double-headed Jordan and Michaela Peterson together for their first major interview and completely uncensored.
Live from the news building in London, this is Piers Morgan Uncensored.
Good evening from London.
Welcome to Piers Morgan Uncensored.
Jordan Peterson is one of the world's most famous and controversial thinkers.
His daughter Michaela is a star in her own right with a smash hit podcast and her own burgeoning army of followers.
She's nurtured her father through a near-death experience, which included an induced coma in a Russian hospital and served as a guiding hand behind all the decisions that made him a superstar.
Tonight I'm bringing both of them together and I started by asking Michaela for her reaction to my emotional interview with her dad on last night's show.
Well I've been joined now by Michaela Peterson, of course Jordan's daughter who was on Piers Morgan Uncensored recently.
Michaela, I know you were watching that last interview that I was doing with your dad there and he got emotional at the end of that.
What do you make of it when you see your dad like that and why he was emotional in that case?
I think, to tell you the truth, I think he's worn out from doing 10,000 things every day.
Even when we tell him to take rests, he doesn't take them.
So I think that plays a major role.
But also the way our lives have changed has been overwhelming.
So when he says he's overwhelmed all the time, I think that that's accurate.
Yeah, I mean, Jordan was saying to me that he's overwhelmed by the sense of responsibility he feels and the influence that he has now over so many people brings with it the burden of that responsibility.
And it's something he feels very acutely.
Do you see that with your dad on a daily basis?
Oh, definitely.
If people approach him on the street, he gets emotional quite frequently because the conversations are emotional.
So people come up and say, this is how hard my life was.
And maybe my life is still hard, but I'm managing to take it on in a more positive way.
And I credit you for that.
And he gets emotional.
And that's all real.
And it's because it's an emotional conversation.
So I think that makes sense.
Yeah, I mean, Jordan, that is an extraordinary responsibility.
What I'm thinking is I see the two of you here.
I read recently, I think it was some TikTok thing I saw, but it was an old business guy and he was saying, you know, the real definition of success in life is not money or material things or anything like that.
The real definition of success is if you're a father and your kids, when they become adults and therefore can make their own decisions, choose to hang out with you because they want to hang out with you.
And that's the ultimate definition of success.
What do you think of that theory?
Oh yeah, that's right.
I mean, I would say I feel that acutely.
I would say my wife feels that even more acutely.
Like she's so thrilled if her kids want to hang out with her, if they want to do, you know, committed things with her that she can hardly stand it.
And I mean, this is also one of the great advantages of having a family.
People just don't understand this.
There isn't anything more important that you will have in your life than your kids, period.
And it's such a lot.
We lie to young women so terribly by telling them that their career will be where they find the meaning in their life.
I mean, I have a stellar career, and I'm pretty damn thrilled about it, and I should be, but it takes second place to my wife and my kids, and then to my extended family as well.
And so, and if you organize, I think that's true even if your family isn't working that well.
And it's definitely true if it's working well.
I mean, why wouldn't you want to be around the people that you love?
That's sort of the definition of love.
Michaela, I mean, I would imagine you've had sort of a weird life in one respect where for a long time your dad wasn't a globally renowned figure, right?
And then he became one.
What was that transition like for you as his daughter to see your dad go from a dad and an academic and a psychologist and so on?
To suddenly become this sort of, you know, odd superstar of, you know, with an influence over millions of people.
What was that like for you?
Well, completely surreal at the beginning.
So I remember walking down Bloor Street in Toronto when this first happened and he was still a university professor and seeing a picture of dad on the front cover of a newspaper and it said something like Heil Jordan.
It was something like that, comparing him to Hitler.
And it was the newspaper I used to read on the Metro on the way to school.
And I was like, well, guess I, who knows how many lies I've been reading from that newspaper.
And then for the next, I would say, I would say our family probably only really stabilized in the last year and a half.
So it took, what is that, six years to kind of come to grips with what had happened to my dad.
And at the very beginning, he was kind of lost to the internet.
So everybody was wrapped up in this, but at the dinner table and whenever we had conversations, it was really focused on what was the news saying?
Was he going to lose his job?
What was happening online?
And it was hard to focus on anything other than that.
Even if we said, okay, you know, no media at the dinner table, it was still hard to focus on anything other than that.
And I think part of the reason I stepped in to help you and mom was to have something I was also involved in so that I could be part of the conversation.
And I think my brother Julian probably felt that to the same degree was, okay, well, I guess we've moved from kind of having this normal, more normal family relationship to whatever it is now.
Yeah.
You see, it's really interesting.
I mean, I love the chemistry between you two.
I've got a younger daughter.
She's 11.
I've got three much older sons, all in their 20s, one 30 now.
Very different thing.
Very special relationship, I think, of father and daughter.
But you talk there, Michaela, about a normal sort of family world.
I find it hard, Jordan, to believe that the Peterson family has ever been conventionally normal.
Were we normal?
Do you want to go there?
I feel like it was a lot more normal than it is now, that's for sure.
We still had school, you worked, you had a number of jobs, so you worked a lot.
Mom was at home, and we had more of a dinner routine and a schedule.
So we had that.
But I think things were still a little weird now that I know what other families look like more.
When you're isolated in one weird family, you don't know that it's weird for a while.
I think the depths of concern in our household and in my life made our existence somewhat not run of the mill, not typical.
I mean, the artwork in the house, I suppose, was an example of that.
I mean, Michaela grew up in a house.
There were, I don't know, 300 paintings, I suppose, in our little house.
I had Lenin fall on my head in my bedroom when I came back from the ship.
It happened to every team.
Wham, Lennon.
You had a gigantic picture of Lenin in your bedroom that fell on your head.
Is that what you're saying?
Yeah, it kind of just leaned over.
It didn't crush me.
You were literally struck down by communism.
Yeah.
Jordan, what kind of father do you think you were when Michaela was younger?
Because I'll get ahead of fact check it.
Playful, playful.
Yeah, we had a lot of fun.
I mean, the people I grew up with, my friends in junior high and high school and even later, All we really did was engage in competitive bouts of humor.
Like all the status among the people I hung around with was who could say the most outrageous and comical thing.
And I really like, I've always really liked little kids.
I really like playing with little kids.
And I'm quite good at it, as my father was.
It's one of his sort of stellar traits, the ability to, he really likes little kids.
And he liked me when I was a little kid, so that was a good deal.
And I really liked being with my kids.
I really enjoyed playing with them.
There's very little that I would rather do than play with little kids who are well-behaved.
It's ridiculously fun.
They're extremely comical.
They have a very clown-like nature.
They're imaginative and they see the world through fresh eyes.
And that's a great deal.
And so whenever I had a moment when I wasn't working, I spent it with my kids and my wife.
And we had a good time.
I mean, we had our troubles, partly because Michaela was so ill, but it was always play and humor and teasing, but not mean, you know, like fun.
I mean, you put it in.
Competitive fun.
And both my kids have vicious senses of humor.
And so that's great.
And I had the same with mine.
I know exactly what you mean.
Michaela, you've had periods in your life as a family where your dad has probably feared he may lose you.
You feared you may lose your dad.
And you both may have feared that you would lose your mom, Michaela, and Jordan, your wife.
I mean, you've had some extraordinary things to deal with as a family.
How have you dealt with that?
We communicated.
We communicated a lot.
Yeah.
And prayed at the end when it got really tough.
So that's interesting.
We tried to find our way through.
I told Michaela when she was a little kid.
I told her at one point when she got really sick, I said, we had a very serious conversation.
She wasn't a very old girl.
I said, look, kid, you're going to have a very hard life.
It's going to be brutal.
And this is after we knew she, she had the worst case of arthritis that the Toronto Sick Kids Hospital had ever seen.
That's not a diagnosis you want to hear from a hospital, not a big hospital.
Your child has the worst case of this illness we've ever seen.
It's like, what's her prognosis?
Multiple early joint replacements.
So that's like painful degeneration followed by early death.
Oh yeah, that's not so good.
Well, so what's worse than that?
Well, what's worse than that is adopting the role of victim, becoming resentful, and turning against life, because then you get to have multiple early collapsed joints followed by death.
Then you get to be ultimately miserable and in hell at the same time.
So I sat her down and I said, look, kid, you can't, don't ever use your illness as an excuse.
Like, it's going to be difficult for you to do things, difficult for you to get up in the morning to go to school.
It's going to be painful.
And it's even going to be hard for you to tell when you can do something and when you can't, when you're justified in saying, look, dad, I just can't get out of bed.
I said, don't fool yourself about your illness because then you won't be able to distinguish what you can do from what you can't do.
And then you will truly be lost.
And she listened.
You know, I don't think you were more than about nine or ten when we had that conversation.
She listened.
I had a conversation with my son at about the same time.
You know, and I said, look, kid, your sister is very sick and we're screwed.
And the probability that I'm going to be able to pay sufficient attention to you for the next few years is like zero.
You're going to have to like face this and you're going to have to grow up and take this on yourself.
And you cannot be any trouble because we've got enough trouble.
Anymore, it's going to sink us.
And so he listened and he was no trouble.
I mean, how was Julian with you when you were at home?
Good.
Very good.
Compassionate for somebody who's fairly disagreeable.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And he stuck around.
He was at home.
I mean, he had lots of friends and he did his teenage things, but he came home and he helped and he was no trouble.
He had his things to deal with, but he took care of them himself.
We have a clip of you guys with Julian, I think, just several years ago, which will show people, just to show who Julian is.
And so one of the great ways to figure out what to write about is, well, what bugs you?
Notice that.
That's that involuntary rumination.
That's the manifestation of underlying complexes from a psychoanalytic perspective.
So something's on your mind poking you, bugging you.
It's like Jiminy Cricket in Pinocchio.
That is really annoying.
I knew that would bug you.
It's a great clip.
We don't see a lot of Julian.
He's not as high profile as you two.
But you're a very tight family.
I mean, Michael, the way your dad taught that, it could be taken as being tough love, or it could be just a reality check of, look, you can either spend the next few years of your life feeling sorry for yourself or you can crack on with life and make the best of it, which is exactly the advice I would have given one of my children in that position.
But how did you feel at the time you were given it?
Well, I think I remember that, and I think I was in grade two.
So I would have been seven or eight.
I was pretty little.
So I didn't even, like, at that time, I didn't even understand what arthritis was.
I thought, oh, great, I have an old person disease.
That's as much as I understood.
And I didn't want to tell anybody about it because it was an old person disease.
And so I don't even think I had second thoughts about anything dad said because I was so young.
I just figured, okay, that's my dad.
That's what he says I should do.
Then I'll do it.
I don't think I thought anything more than that.
But I do think that was instrumental in getting out of chronic illness, honestly.
Yeah, because you barely got out of it.
If you would have complicated it up with some additional stupidity, some resentment.
Well, I think that's probably true in our family in general.
I mean, we didn't do things perfectly, but we did our best not to be resentful.
And resentment is really a killer.
I think if you would have burdened yourself with victimized resentment, you wouldn't have made it.
Yeah, you know what I did rather than become resentful, and I don't know if this was a healthy thing to do, but I got really angry.
I didn't get angry at anybody per se.
I got angry in a, it wasn't feeling sorry for myself, but it was, what am I going to do to get out of this?
Like, how dare life do this to me?
Accepting Unjust Suffering 00:03:36
That's not who I am.
So I was angry for a long time.
Yeah, well, that's part of, you know, one of the things you want to do is you want to get your anger on your side.
You want to put it inside instead of facing you and stopping you.
You want to use it as a force that drives you forward.
And you definitely did that.
You were a pretty implacable person.
You know, it's interesting listening to you both talking about that because I had a fascinating conversation a few years ago with Joe Biden, who had just lost his son, Bo to brain cancer.
And obviously he'd also, many years before, lost his wife and baby daughter in a car crash.
And his two sons survived and were badly hurt and so on.
And everyone knows the story, but I'd written a column, a newspaper column, about Bo Biden after he died because he used to come on my old show at CNN.
And I just said that this guy was an amazing guy.
He'd been a state's attorney general.
He'd been an Iraq war hero.
He had a lovely family.
He was going right to the top, I felt, politically.
He may even have become president candidate, perhaps.
And I said, he'll now be the best president America will never know they could have had.
And I wrote this column heartfelt.
I liked him very much.
I thought he was very impressive.
And Joe Biden called me.
He was vice president at the time.
And I'd never met him.
And he had a 15, 20 minute conversation with me.
And I asked him, I said, I've got four children.
I don't know how you would ever deal with losing a child.
You've had to do this twice and you lost your first wife.
How do you deal with it?
And he said, you know, it's interesting.
He said, as I talk to you, I have in front of me a cartoon strip, Hagar the Horrible.
And it was in two parts.
And in one part, Hagar was on a boat that was floundering on the rocks.
And he had his trident and he was raising it to the skies in very stormy conditions and shouting at the gods, why me?
And in the second part of the cartoon, the gods shout back, why not?
And he said he got annoyed originally when he saw that, when his dad had found it in a flea market, he got annoyed.
He thought it was insensitive.
And then the more he thought about it, the more he realized what his dad was saying, which is you cannot rationalize what's happened to you.
You can't try and work out why it's happened to you.
Stuff happens like this to people all the time.
And in a way, it's different.
But the way that you talk to Michaela about her condition, it's kind of similar.
It's like you didn't waste time and energy trying to rationalize this or explain why you'd been singled out.
It was just a case of it's happened.
We've got to deal with it.
Well, I went to Jerusalem with a friend of mine, Jonathan Pago, and Pago is a very brilliant man.
And we walked the Via Dolorosa, which is the root of Christ's passion with its 12 stations.
And each station is a kind of, is a microcosm of suffering.
And then, of course, the entire journey culminates in the most unjust suffering imaginable.
And that's what the story is.
The Christian passion is the story of the most unjust suffering imaginable.
And you might say, well, what does that have to do with you?
And the answer is, that's going to happen to you.
There's going to be unjust suffering in your life.
And you're called upon to radically embrace that and to say yes.
And that's even the case if it's your children who are called upon to make the sacrifice.
And that's the story of Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac.
God calls on Abraham to sacrifice Isaac.
And, you know, that seems like a bit much, but you have to offer your children to the world.
You have to offer your children to be destroyed by the world.
Faith Through Family Trials 00:16:18
You have to say yes to that radically, fullheartedly.
And the more you do that, weirdly, paradoxically, the more you do both of those, accept that for yourself, accept that for your children.
Welcome it, the less catastrophic this sacrifice has to be.
It's so paradoxical.
Well, you think about it, you know, if you protect your children unduly, you weaken them.
If you let them encounter the world and the micro-tragedies that go along with that encounter, let's say they get strong.
And there's no limit to that.
There's no upper end.
And so that's why in the Judeo-Christian tradition, for example, you're enjoined to take up your cross and bear it and to walk uphill nonetheless.
And the reason for that is there is no better alternative.
Of course you have to say yes to life.
And that means saying yes to some pretty brutal realities.
Welcome back to an Arsenal special, Jordan and Michaela Peterson for the hour.
In the next part, we talk about Jordan's brush and death, including a medically induced coma in Russia.
What was that like for you, Michaela?
Oh, I cannot even describe how horrible it was.
Like, I thought being sick myself was bad because it was very bad.
I thought getting off of antidepressants, I went through antidepressant withdrawal, which was just horrifying beyond belief.
I thought that was bad.
Watching how sick my dad got was so much worse than what I went through that it was hard not to, what did I think?
I literally, you know what?
For some reason, for some reason, when he got really sick, I thought I could just move to LA.
I was in Toronto and I thought, I could just move to LA.
We didn't know what was wrong with him.
He'd been to a number of different hospitals, and my mom had been sick, and I thought I could just move to LA, and I could do things by myself, and I don't have to deal with this.
And then I thought about it, and I had this weird feeling that whatever was wrong with him, which I thought was antidepressant withdrawal, which is what had happened to me, would last about two years.
So I sat down and I decided, okay, I'm going to do whatever I can to help this guy.
And I think it's going to be absolute hell for a couple of years.
And I don't know why I had that feeling, but I had this feeling of this two-year period.
And so I decided rather than running away, which had definitely crossed my mind, I'd do everything I possibly could and just put my life on hold until he got better, which I figured was about two years.
So while this was happening, particularly when we were in Russia, I was like, at that point, I was literally learning Russian.
I was like, I don't know how long we're going to be here.
Russian is not easy to learn.
But I was like, I, you know, made a commitment.
I'm going to help and see this through.
And I believe that he can get better.
So I think the way I managed that was I had a really strong belief that he's sick, but he can get better.
And I just have to stick with him till he gets better.
And nobody could change my mind from that, not even him, even though he tried.
It's like, I'm not going to make it.
Like, yeah, you are.
You're going to be fine.
We just got to get through this.
So I think that's what helped was a naive optimism of getting better.
It was fascinating, Faith.
Fascinating to see the roles reversed there, Jordan.
But then you both had to deal with your wife getting very sick with cancer, your mom, Michaela.
And you both had to deal with that.
After given what you'd both been through, what was that like for you as a unit, the pair of you?
And of course, Julian too.
Well, it was remarkable to see her deal with that, really, to see Tammy deal with that, because Tammy's a very, very tough person.
And even she got the news initially that she had a form of cancer that was 100% fatal in 11 months and that no treatment, there was no evidence whatsoever that any treatment, radiologic, chemotherapeutic, or surgical, would help.
So that we all got that dumped on us in about 10 minutes.
And she just took that in and went on walking.
And in fact, I think she was not really even overwhelmingly affected by that until she had to tell Julian and saw that reflected in him.
And that really changed her because she saw that that made more of a difference to him than it did even to her.
And so she saw the love she had granted him, because she was an excellent mother, reflected.
And that really changed her life.
It might have saved her life, but it certainly transformed her permanently.
And that took a long time to unfold.
But Tammy's a, she's one tough cookie, and she took everything on the chin.
And Tammy basically was at the edge of death for three months every day.
She just about starved to death during the recovery process from her surgery because of a surgical complication.
She lost about almost 30% of her body weight.
And she did suffer a little bit with post-starvation syndrome as a consequence of that.
But I don't think I ever saw Tammy desperate or resentful during that whole time.
No.
And she opened herself up.
She accepted help where she could get it.
She took every possibility to move forward that was offered to her.
She opened herself up to transformation on every front and really did change.
And I would say she's now doing better than she ever has in her life.
It's really quite miraculous to see apart from the fact that she also recovered.
And as far as we know, she's the only person who ever survived this form of cancer.
Incredible.
She said, she credits it.
I think this is worth mentioning.
She, it was the weirdest thing.
So she got really sick.
It was horrible.
I wasn't around as much when she got sick because I had PTSD from my hospital experiences and I didn't want to go into a hospital.
I went to the hospitals, but like the PTSD was pretty bad.
And she was stuck in the hospital and she said, I'm going to get better.
This is just such a strange story.
She said, I'm going to get better on her anniversary, which for mom and dad is mid-August.
And this was June.
And she told everybody this.
And we're like, okay, mom, like, she's on morphine.
We're like, not sure what's going on.
And then they flew to the U.S. to do a procedure, which didn't work.
And then on their anniversary, she got better, which was really weird because nobody was expecting that.
And she goes, oh, it was God and converted to Catholicism.
That is miraculous.
And it brings me back to what I asked you when it was just me and you talking, which is whether you believe in God.
What happened to your wife, to Tammy, and her turning to God in that moment?
Did that not give you all the proof you needed that there is a God?
Well, I was already very religiously inclined before that.
I mean, I've been studying religious thinking for 40 years, you know, and speaking to my students about that very diligently during that whole time.
And so in some ways, I mean, the anniversary issue, that was very strange.
Yeah.
And the transformations that have occurred in relationship to Tammy are quite profound and wonderful and hard to believe.
Was that additional evidence to me?
I already had a lot of evidence, you know, what we talked about in other...
I was already a firm believer in hell, you know, and I knew there was a route away from hell.
And the route away from hell is a religious pathway.
So I've been walking down that pathway a very, very long time.
So this was just another, not just, you know what I mean?
It's a milestone and a marker, but it wasn't, for me, that wasn't a qualitative transformation.
Did you dodge the God question in the previous interview?
He did.
He did.
Okay, then.
He did.
It was really interesting.
And in fact, it's almost like he's almost rewinding now because if I'd asked him right now, I may have got a different answer.
Because I think, Jordan, I think you do believe in God.
And I think what's happened to your family has reinforced that belief.
But for some reason, you're reticent to just...
Modern people, modern people don't understand this question.
They think that it's a matter of believing in a set of facts.
It's not.
If you believe in God, you allow the spirit of the Logos to take residence within you.
Now, but nobody understands what you mean if you say that.
But like, think about it this way.
Michaela could have got bitter and resentful.
Well, the spirit of bitter resentment is the spirit of Cain, because her sacrifices would have gone unrewarded.
She would have been rejected by God, and she would have shaken her fist at the sky.
And the spirit of Cain is a Luciferian spirit, and it's a genocidal spirit.
And you can allow that spirit to take up its residence within you.
And that means that you're a follower of the Luciferian spirit.
Or you can do the opposite.
You can allow the spirit of the Logos to take residence within you.
And that's what you're attempting to do if you adhere assiduously to a genuine religious practice.
Okay, Michaela.
And that's real.
It's real.
Let me ask Michaela.
I mean, you said to me, did he dodge the question on God?
Why did you say that?
Just to see what his face would look like if I said that while he was on Piers Morgan.
And his body language.
The arms went up very quickly, I noticed.
Quite defensive body language, Mr. Psychologist.
You gave her a chance to be annoying.
She immediately took it.
Well, Michaela, Michaela, explain why did you ask him about God, you ask you?
Why?
Well, I believe in God.
Yeah.
And I didn't before.
Or I wasn't sure before.
I was never an atheist, but when people say, do you believe in God?
I'd say, I don't know.
I don't really get it.
I'd like to.
I always wanted to.
And so when mom converted to Catholicism and I saw a whole bunch of really weird things that I couldn't logic out happened, let alone dad becoming famous and then us all getting so sick and an unbelievable amount of suffering.
And then mom's miraculous recovery that she knew ahead of time by two months, the date of that nobody could explain.
Yeah, well, you learned at least that you had no idea how the world worked.
Oh, absolutely none.
That's what I learned is I don't understand what's going on at all.
But I saw the transformation that took place in mom and I saw how much more compassionate she became because she's a very disagreeable woman.
And I wouldn't say compassion is one of her strong suits.
And she became more compassionate somewhat dramatically.
And then I met.
And you're trying to love everybody in the world now.
It's very annoying.
Yeah, it's nice.
And so that was enough for, oh, that wasn't quite enough for me, actually.
It was about a year later, and dad was so sick.
And I didn't know.
I had exhausted everything I knew how to do to help.
I couldn't think of any other way I could help.
And I remember praying at that point because I literally couldn't think of anything else to do.
I was just like, God, help us, help me.
And I think it was around that period where something switched and then my life got easier.
And I don't know if that's because I let go of some control that I don't actually have, but my life switched directions and I felt calmer in a way that I couldn't describe or come to any, I couldn't figure out why.
And I figured that was God.
So that was enough for me to say reality isn't exactly how we see it.
There's more going on out there.
And Michaela, if I asked you, Michaela, do you think your dad believes in God?
What would you say?
Get it right.
Yeah, I think so.
Yeah, I do see.
He definitely, he definitely, I think so.
He definitely lives in a way where he knows that if he acts as if he believes in God, then he avoids hell.
So I don't know what the difference between that and belief is.
Why would you do that if you didn't believe?
Right?
Seems reasonable to me.
Right, Jordan?
Sometimes it's always good to bring out the daughter because you'll get the truth out of the dad.
You know, you can put the old arms up to me, Jordan, down there from America, but you can't to your daughter sitting right next to you.
She knows you better than you probably know.
Very sneaky plan on your part, Piers.
Welcome back to the special edition of Piers Morgan and Censored with Jordan and Michaela Peterson.
Michaela, I want to play you a take.
This is from a podcast in which you talked about getting divorced.
It was very, very difficult to get divorced considering what my dad talks about.
It made me stay in a relationship longer than I should have.
I don't agree with the more conservative story of divorce that people are being told.
I think being in a relationship that's not good for you, I think you should get out of that relationship.
Interesting that.
Let me ask you, Jordan, when you heard her say that, did you feel any responsibility that she may have stayed in a very unhappy marriage for too long because she didn't want to upset you because of your views?
No, I wouldn't say so.
I'm able to let my children handle the complexity of their own private lives, knowing at least, I think, as I do, that there isn't, that's a place where only fools would go.
And I had faith that she would sort things out, you know, and so I was willing to give her her space.
I mean, I believe in committed marriage.
And so at that level of generality, obviously I have objections to the breakup of a marriage, but I have faith in my daughter.
And so I believe she'll, I believe she's oriented to find her way.
And finding your way is a complex process.
And I'm willing to stand back and watch her and to provide whatever help I can along the way, but also not to interfere too much.
Michaela, you're remarried now, right?
Yes.
And the name of your second husband?
Jordan Fuller.
Now, I'm a psychologist.
You ended up marrying a man named Jordan.
Should I be reading anything into this?
If I was a clinical psychologist.
Oh, I have no idea.
Like I said before, I don't know how the world works.
I don't think so.
My secretary is named Jordan, too.
This is very weird now.
Everyone in your world is Jordan.
This is like being in Barbie world.
Yeah.
Michaela, let me ask you with Michaela because her husband looks like Ken.
Is that true, Michaela?
Yes.
100% true, yeah.
I want to play you both a clip.
New Husband, Old Feuds 00:03:43
Your dad's had a lot of feuds with people.
Some he starts, some he doesn't, some he just gets picked on for the sake of it.
There's a lot of feminists who he winds up very successfully, I would say, because they're very easy to wind up.
One of them is Caitlin Moran, who's currently in America, and she's using your dad a lot, ranting away about him.
Here's one clip of her talking about your dad.
He shared a piece to his 10 million followers in which I think I do a pretty good demolishment job of his entire career in Urva.
The advice that he gives is either the kind of stuff your mum would say for free, like make your bed, pet a cat in the street, or mad stuff about lobsters.
I didn't even go to school at Nunn University.
And I was halfway through his book going, I'm fairly sure I can demolish a great deal of the logic in this book.
This guy is not the smartest guy in the world.
He's just a man in a waistcoat who sounds, to be honest, a bit like Kermit from the Muppet Show.
Kermit from the Muppet Show.
Your thoughts?
Well, that's true.
I do sound a lot like Kermit from the Muppet Show.
So that was the one thing she said that was accurate.
That's not even her joke, though.
No, that's not clever if you steal it from somebody else.
It's an old joke.
But it was a good one when it first came out.
So what do you think of her?
Sounds like she'd be fun at a party.
Or as your mother.
Or as your mother.
As your mother, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
Michaela, do they think, Michaela, the people?
Michaela, do you think people like Caitlin Moran, do they just basically misunderstand what your dad really is about?
I don't even think they're capable of understanding what he's about.
There's too much arrogance there.
You can't be that arrogant and assume you know everything and then read something and learn or read anything and learn.
Right?
That's why you don't cast pearls before swine, dear.
You know, Jordan, my sons, as I think I've told you before, are all big fans of yours.
And they just said to me, they've got one question, which what advice do you give for children who are the children of controversial public figures?
Well, you know, Michaela has leapt out and taken the opportunities that came along with that in the public way.
My son, Julian, is a more private person, and he's chosen to erect barriers around his family and not to face the public as much, although he has played his music at my lectures and he works with me.
I think, you know, each person has to find their own way.
There are great advantages to having a tremendous amount of attention devoted to you and having people offer opportunities, but each person, depending on their own temperamental proclivities, has to figure out how to manage that themselves.
And it's complex, but it can work.
I mean, Julian, Tammy, and Michaela have all reacted to that in their own way.
It took Tammy a good while, like the rest of us, to figure out what her place was, so to speak.
But she's really managed that.
And Tammy is out in public much more than I would have thought she would have been, you know, if I would have guessed, if I would have been able to see into the future 10 years ago, she's become quite an accomplished public speaker, for example.
And she certainly didn't think that was in her cards, in the cards or in the stars.
But things come at you and you surf the wave and you're happy for the opportunity.
And Julian and Michaela and Tammy have all adapted in their various ways.
And I think at the moment that's working like a charm.
Surfing Life's Waves 00:02:29
Michaela, if I asked you...
Great.
Michaela, obviously the family's gone through this extraordinary six, seven years or more now, involving some extraordinary challenges for you or personally, which would have happened anyway, or perhaps not actually in your dad's case, but certainly for you and your mum.
But you've come out and you've got fabulously wealthier as a family, I guess, than before this started.
Fabulously more famous than before it started.
But if I had the power to transport you back to anonymity without the fame, without the extra money and all the rest of it, would you take that deal?
Or would you be actually quite happy where you've all washed up now?
Oh, there's no way I would take that deal, even with everything we went through.
I was talking to my husband the other day about why I'm interested in making money versus why he is.
And he said he always liked expensive things, basically.
And I said, I didn't, I'm like decked out right now, but I also didn't mind buying things from thrift shops and decorating my room that way.
I didn't want to feel vulnerable anymore from not having enough money.
And so my yearn to be successful was always so that I would be less vulnerable so that when I had a problem, I had money to help me solve it.
And that was my motivation.
And so I wouldn't want to go back to before because I feel more secure and less vulnerable now.
Answer to the next.
It's the final part of my exclusive double header with Jordan and Michaela.
And things get emotional.
Will I get a better interview roughen you up a bit?
Will I get the real zlattan then?
You want to play with fire?
I will bring you fire, but I will burn you.
When I say I am God, you think I'm joking or not?
You tell me.
I'm not joking.
When you score a goal, is it better than sex?
Sex is better.
Whoever thinks different, he has a problem with his sex.
I'm the best.
I'm Zlatan.
I'm sensible.
Welcome back to Ansett's Special with Jordan Michaela Peterson.
One of them will ask how much of a hand Michaela's had in transforming her father's questionable sartorial style.
One thing that money has definitely bought you, Jordan, is a better fashion sense.
Zlatan's Fire and Wisdom 00:05:44
I mean, the radical change in you in the smart suits, the crop, your hairstyle, everything.
You are really being dragged kicking and screaming into the pin-up world.
Well, you know, when I went out on tour the first time, I thought, I'm going to go speak to, you know, a third of a million people.
And I thought, well, okay, you should probably be happy about that.
And you should probably try to do it right.
And it's a stage show, fundamentally.
It's in a theater.
You probably should deck yourself out.
So I went and got a couple of very good suits.
And that had all sorts of strange consequences, including over time that most of the people, many of the people who came to my shows started showing up in three-piece suits and relatively formal attire, which is a lovely thing to see.
And that saying yes to that and not being condescending towards it.
You know, I was never overwhelmingly interested in fashion, but I didn't assume that I was morally superior because of my ignorance and disinterest.
And then because I said yes to that, a whole avenue opened up.
A whole avenue opened up there in a surreal and comical way.
And now I'm having a really good time with it.
And now you've reached out to me.
So it's very fun.
Yeah, obviously great fun.
And you look, by the way, you look sharp.
So congratulations.
Thank you, sir.
What you're both doing now is this academy.
Tell me about the Peterson Academy.
What is the, Michaela, for you, what is the purpose of this?
The purpose is to allow people a proper 2023 style education.
I think that what you learn, what you learn in universities, generally speaking, is taught through an ideological filter.
It's overpriced, and I don't think it actually improves you as a person.
And I think generally speaking, you can say that for almost every university.
And we have the ability now to learn online from genius people.
So we figured, why not produce courses that are extremely well edited, allow the professors to teach the way they would want to teach without the guidelines put in place on them by the universities, and then give access to everybody.
And then anybody who's actually interested in learning and retaining that information to better themselves has a place to go, a social media platform where they can meet other people, which I think will be very interesting.
We don't know how that's going to go.
But I'm hoping it'll give people the opportunity to learn and meet other people who are like-minded.
Yeah, we have great professors.
And one of the advantages to being in the position that I'm in at the moment, and this is partly a consequence of my podcast, is that I can find great speakers from all around the world because I'm also touring around the world.
And every time I find someone and I think, wow, you're so interesting, I can hardly stand it.
I think, how would you like to come down to Miami and record a lecture?
And virtually everyone says yes.
And then they come down to Miami and we put them in the studio and we treat them very, very nicely.
And we do that because we're actually happy that they're there.
And we tell them, you can teach whatever you want the way you would dream to teach if you could have what you wanted.
And so then people come down there and do that.
And they're pretty happy about that.
And then they're often willing to do another course.
Well, why wouldn't they be?
So I just want to ask you both finally, this really.
It's clear to me from interviewing you both together, you have an extraordinary bond.
You clearly love each other very much.
You're a very tight family.
It's been through a hell of a lot of challenges.
But if I was to ask you, Jordan, and I'm going to ask you, Michaela, the other side.
Ask you, Jordan, what is it that you love about Michaela?
What would you say?
She's pretty damn funny.
She's tough, man.
Don't mess with her.
She'll bite you and you'll remember it.
So she's a formidable person, like my wife, like my son.
They're fun to be around.
Don't mess with them.
That's a pretty good combination.
It is.
Michaela, what would you say about your dad?
Why do you love your dad?
He's incredibly compassionate and open.
So there's opportunity everywhere in a positive way.
And he cares deeply about everything that's going on in people's lives.
Definitely, you've definitely a more compassion for the average person than I do.
I kind of think.
Come on there.
You're a hard ass, maybe.
Maybe try a little harder.
That's not what you think.
So I'd say what I love about him is his openness, which has led our family, I mean, to where it is now, I think, is him saying yes to opportunity and being open and compassionate.
Yeah.
What a great way to end.
Thank you both so much for all the time you've given me.
I think you're a great family.
I think you're an important family.
I think in a world where people are scared to express their opinions, they don't know what to think.
I think both of you in different ways, but also you have commonality too, but in different ways, you're really having a huge influence over millions and millions of people around the world.
And it's an influence I know you take very seriously.
And it moves you both.
And I think that's an extraordinary thing.
And I wish you all the best in continuing with that.
Global Influence and Gratitude 00:00:26
But thank you both very much indeed for joining Piers Morgan Uncensored.
Thank you very much, Pierce.
Thank you.
The full-on cut, uncensored version of both of my Peterson interviews will be available on the Piers Morgan Uncensored YouTube channel tomorrow.
Another world exclusive footballing icons, Latan Ibrahimovich, in one of the most explosive interviews of a year.
Until then, whatever you're up to, keep it
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