All Episodes
Previous Next
Plain Text
Sept. 19, 2024 - Uncensored - Piers Morgan
55:56
20240919_id-vote-for-trump-i-dont-trust-harris-jordan-peter
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
|

Time Text
Incendiary Words in Crazy Times 00:01:23
I tend to say things that are, let's say, incendiary, so I might as well do that right now.
By the time you're 30, you're already a geriatric mother.
And if you're single, 30 and childless, you have a lot of problems to solve in a very short period of time.
It's a psychological epidemic, and the liars say those children are all now free to show their true identity, which is another complete bloody lie.
Bad people are using mental health as a protective shield against accountability for their crimes.
You have a proclivity to presume that everyone who's misbehaving is a victim who needs sympathy.
The problems with untrammeled speech mount, not least because the narcissistic psychopaths come rushing forward.
How do you psychoanalyze Kamala Harris?
I would vote for Trump.
Dr. Jordan Peterson is a clinical psychologist, a best-selling author, and the closest thing we have to a rock star intellectual.
I never quite know what he may say, but I do know it will be illuminating, inspiring, incisive, and occasionally incendiary.
There's far too much going on in the world to waste too much more time on his introduction.
So I'm delighted to say that Jordan Peterson joins me again now.
Welcome back to Uncensored, Jordan.
How are you?
Good, good.
Thanks for the invitation.
It's good to see you.
Doom-Laden Neurosis of Youth 00:05:27
It feels like we're in a crazy time.
The double assassination attempt on Donald Trump within the space of two months, a man who until recently was president of the United States, who may well be again.
Unprecedented to see this happen.
We now have Israel attacking 3,000 Hezbollah terrorists by putting stuff in their pages and so on.
There's a lot going on in the world.
Does it feel to you like things are slightly out of control?
Or is it simply that we know more about what's going on in the world?
Well, I think a lot of it is a consequence of sheer rate of technological change.
So the world's the same as it ever was in a way, but it's way faster.
So the contours of things are clearer to people than they were, which is why people have a sense of massive things moving under the psychological and sociological tectonic plates.
And the rate of change is going to, you know, barring cataclysm is going to just keep increasing.
So you could say this is the new normal, but it's going to become even more intense.
I mean, what's extraordinary is that by any sort of conventional metric of what it is like to live right now, it should be, and it should feel like the best time to ever be alive.
You know, we're living longer.
We're living healthier.
There are actually fewer wars than in recorded history.
Water's cleaner.
There's less abject poverty and so on and so on.
And yet young people in particular, very large numbers of young people, seem completely gripped in a kind of doom-laden neurosis about life.
What is going on there?
Jonathan Haight wrote this fascinating book about the impact of cell phones, but it can't just be that.
No, I think the cell phones are particularly bad because they interfere with childhood play and childhood play isn't replaceable.
When children play, that's how they formulate their identities and that's how they cement their social groups and that's how they learn to integrate themselves with other people and to play nice together, which is something you obviously have to do as an adult.
And screen time seriously interferes with that.
And then, well, there's content as well.
Pornography is a complete bloody catastrophe in 15 different dimensions.
And then I would say as well, there's been a there was a there's been a Malthusian, a neo-Malthusian campaign going on since the 1960s to basically demoralize young people based on this preposterous idea that essentially there are too many people on the planet,
that human beings are a kind of cancer, that all masculine striving upward is part of the pathological patriarchy, which is a real lovely thing to teach young men who, and if they manage to escape, you know, the, what would you say,
the criticism as well of their play styles when they're young, then their ambition comes under assault and they're fed a never-ending diet of apocalyptic catastrophe that's human-caused and caused even worse by exactly the human ambition that actually, in the main, makes things better.
So it's not surprising they're demoralized.
And the same is true for young women.
I mean, they're divorced completely, increasingly divorced from their traditional destiny, which is associated with monogamous marriage and the rearing of children.
And I'm not saying just for anybody foolish who might be listening that that's all women are capable of, but it's also something I hold in extremely high esteem.
You know, Piers, we have a situation now in the West with regards to young women.
So young men are demoralized.
50% of women, 30 and under, are now childless in the West.
50%.
And half of them will never have a child.
And 90% of them will regret it.
You know, by the time you're 30, you're already a geriatric mother.
And if you're single and 30 and childless, you have a lot of problems to solve in a very short period of time.
And then you also got to ask yourself: well, what's your life going to be like if you're partnerless and childless from your 30s going forward?
You know, and we know in keeping with that, that the segment of the population that's most politically alienated at the moment is, in fact, young women from the ages of 18 to 34.
And that's also partly because they get almost all their information from TikTok.
And TikTok is a rat hole of propaganda, funded by Iran, funded by China, funded by Russia, but Iran and China primarily.
And so you're right in your first supposition is that we've made immense strides forward, especially since the Berlin Wall fell and the idiot communist regimes around the world that were doing everything they could to destroy their own people's economy have collapsed and people have turned, at least in the main, to something approximating free market and free exchange solutions.
Weaponized Political Discourse 00:14:51
And so the world has 8 billion people on it, something like that, 78 billion will peak at about nine.
We've done a tremendous amount to eradicate absolute poverty.
And there are lots of reasons to be positive, but that's all in the face of an anti-human campaign that's really been going on since the 1960s with the Club of Rome and Paul Ehrlich, the Stanford biologist, who's, I don't know, if he's the worst person who's emerged in the last 60 years, but he's certainly a contender.
It's a massive campaign of demoralization.
You know, and I see it everywhere when I tour around lecturing.
Young people dying for the lack of an encouraging word.
It's really, and in the face of all this possibility, you know, it's really quite awful.
Yeah, it is.
And, you know, I was very struck by something that Elon Musk said to you when you interviewed him for your hugely successful podcast.
Let's take a look.
I was essentially tricked into signing documents for one of my older boys, Xavier.
This is before I had really any understanding of what was going on.
We had COVID going on, so there was a lot of confusion.
And, you know, I was told, oh, Xavier might commit suicide if he did.
That was a lie right from the outset.
I lost my son, essentially.
So, you know, they call it deadnaming for a reason.
Yeah, right.
All right.
So the reason it's called deadnaming is because your son is dead.
So my son, Xavier, is dead.
Killed by the World Cup virus.
I mean, I found it was a startling thing to watch that and to hear him say that.
And we've watched that kind of human tragedy of his family play out in public because this boy that he had, this son, now identifies in a different way and is very hostile towards him and says so on social media and so on.
But what did you feel when Elon Musk, right now, the richest, most successful, and in many ways, most entrepreneurial guy in the world, somebody who is really trying to save the world from itself in many ways through Tesla, through SpaceX, through Neuralink, all these extraordinary things.
There he was, just gripped in his own human crisis with his own family because of a mindset which has wrestled his child away from him.
Well, that shows you how pervasive the problem is, especially with regards to our current misconceptions of what constitutes identity.
And even someone like Elon Musk has a family that falls prey to it.
And, you know, you said at the beginning of this interview that I tend to say things that are, let's say, incendiary, so I might as well do that right now.
I think that every single medical professional and psychological professional who has been, who's played a role in facilitating the trans butchery of minor children should be put in prison for the rest of their lives for crimes against humanity.
It is the worst medical and certainly psychological scandal that I've ever seen in my entire life.
And the only things that I've seen that rival it are the medical experiments that were conducted by the Nazis and the Japanese running up to World War II.
It's absolutely 100% unforgivable.
And that lie they told Elon Musk, would you rather have a live trans child or a dead child?
There's never been a single bit of evidence to suggest that that has no grounding whatsoever in empirical fact.
It's an absolute bloody lie.
It's pathological beyond belief.
We know in the United States, for example, that at least 8,000 young women have been subjected to double mastectomies, minors.
And that's the documentation on the insured medical procedure side.
So there's a lot more than that.
And I also know that puberty blocking Drugs are available outside the medical community in the black and gray market at a much higher rate than is occurring within the medical space.
And that the fact of this trans epidemic, which is exactly what it is, it's a psychological epidemic.
And the liars say those children are all now free to show their true identity, which is another complete bloody lie.
All of that's so unacceptable.
It was so sad to hear Musk walk through that.
I mean, there's a world of grief behind that story, and there's plenty of stories like it.
I can't believe as well.
I mean, this is one of the things that I hold seriously against the Democrats in the United States, let's say, the Liberals in Canada and the Labour Party in the UK.
If you people are behind this identity politics and you think that it's a good idea to free up young women in particular to find their true identities as men, there is something seriously sick about you.
It's inexcusable.
It's absolutely inexcusable.
There is no evidence whatsoever for any of those gender transformation identity claims, as the CAS report clearly indicated.
So, you know, the UK has walked back a little bit, but not the US and not Canada.
And so it's really, Jesus, Piers, the more you know about that surgery, the more it will like it'll curdle your spine.
It's experimental medicine conducted by butchering sadists at its absolute worst.
What they do to people to transform them into, what would you say, malfunctioning pseudo-members of the opposite sex is it's far beyond brutal.
And I would like to also point out clinically that there's been evidence for a very long time that sadists are overrepresented in the profession of surgery.
And all you have to do is think for about 15 seconds before you can figure out why that might be.
So yeah, it's really, man, as far as moral crimes go, sterilization and mutilation of children involuntary because they cannot consent to such medical procedures.
And so that's a crime against humanity in accordance with UN definitions.
And so I just think it's to call it reprehensible is to barely scrape the surface.
And I don't think it'll stop till there are the right length of prison sentences for the people who've been involved in it.
Yeah.
The other thing that Elon Musk has been at the center of, of course, is the battle, as he puts it, for free speech.
And you're seeing it coming under attack, probably like we've never seen free speech be attacked before.
Is it because Jordan people don't understand what free speech actually is?
Or is it because this woke mind virus that Musk talks about has turned people who, if you ask them, would say, oh, I'm a liberal, but it's actually turned them into a new breed of fascist.
Well, we can't again underestimate the impact of the new technologies.
You know, we've invented a whole variety of means to network people together at a scale and a rate that's never been attempted before in human history.
And we're playing with all these technologies that look trivial on the surface.
You know, for example, on Twitter, for a long time, the character limit was 140 characters.
Well, we have no idea what happens to the human race when you link hundreds of millions of people together and flood them with political information and only allow them to communicate in 140 character burst.
I mean, that's equivalent, Piers.
That's equivalent to a radical biological mutation.
Like it's a major transformation, and it's only one of a series of such transformations that are continually occurring in the virtual space.
And so, one of the things we have to understand is that we can't contend with this because we don't understand the significance of the technologies.
You know, I've been watching Zuckerberg and Musk try to deal with the issue of policing the net.
And you can see both of them are whipping boys in a way.
You know, Zuckerberg is a whipping boy for people on the right, and Musk is a whipping boy for people on the left.
But they're both making a mistake.
Both groups are making a mistake in attacking those two, in my estimation, even though they may have done things that weren't wise or well considered as they were experimenting their way forward.
It's like nobody knows how to police the net.
And the idea that you can link together hundreds of millions of people who can now communicate while bearing no responsibility whatsoever for the content of their utterances, the idea that we can do that without a policing mechanism is absurd.
We've never been able to do that.
Now, what the policing method should be, now that's a complicated problem, right?
It's just as complicated as the issue of free speech and its limits itself.
And the truth of the matter is we don't know.
You know, I talked to Lex Friedman after a podcast I did with him recently about one of the things that I think is pathologizing discourse.
You know, I believe that the 3 to 5% of the population who are clinical psychopaths, and that's about what it is, see, they'll weaponize political discourse, left-wing and right-wing, because they don't give a damn about politics.
They'll weaponize political discourse to bring attention to themselves.
And they can do that online with their anonymous accounts because they can't be held responsible.
And so they can gain social reputation in a narcissistic and pathological way while dementing the entire field of discourse to everyone's downfall.
Like a friend of mine has been doing polling on main political issues for the last few months.
He's working on a project designed to address the excesses of the victim-victimizer narrative that underlies such phenomena, let's say, as anti-Semitism.
And he showed quite clearly that Americans, and you could extrapolate to the rest of the West, Americans hold views that are 85% in common across a very broad range of contentious political issues.
And yet we have the amplification of divisive political discourse that makes everyone believe that there's far more division than there is.
And that's all weaponized by a cadre of psychopaths.
And you might think, well, you're exaggerating that, Dr. Peterson.
It's like, I'm not exaggerating that.
The problem of manipulative parasitism is an ancient biological problem.
There's evidence that sex itself evolved to solve the parasite problem.
And really what we have online is the fact that the free social media communication networks are swarmed by parasites who are narcissistic and Machiavellian, and they're warping and twisting the system to bring themselves up into a public view they don't deserve by exaggerating the significance of the discrepancy between people.
And like I think of all the things that I can see happening, especially in the online world, there's plenty of dangers in the real world, but on the online world, the fact that the narcissistic psychopaths have the upper hand in the realm of free, so-called free discourse is, what would you say, first and foremost among them?
One of the things I recommended, well, Friedman and I talked about this, is I think that on social media platforms, the anonymous people and the verified human beings should be put in separate bins.
I think the anonymous people should be allowed to have their say, but they should be categorized separately from the verified human beings because otherwise they can't be held responsible for their utterances.
Now, we know there's an immense psychological literature on this.
We know that if you put people in situations where they're shielded from the repercussions of their actions, they're much more likely to misbehave.
And that's really terrible in the case of people who are really prone to misbehave.
Like if you're driving in your car, that bug shell you protect yourself with, you're much more likely to curse at someone if they cut you off than you would be if you were walking and they could hear you.
A lot of what regulates our social behavior is immediate feedback that pertains to our reputation.
That's all stripped away, especially in the case of the anonymous troll demons online.
And Jordan, let me ask you, is there a correlation between what you're talking about here and what is happening with these people who are now wanting to kill Donald Trump, for example?
And in the case of the second shooter, is on record on his social media, amplifying talking points that have been rammed home by Democrats, including Kamala Harris, Hillary Clinton and others.
Donald Trump is an existential threat to democracy.
He was posting exactly the same phraseology and had whipped his mind into a place where presumably he felt the only answer to save America and democracy from inevitable extinction was to get rid of the person who would perpetrate that.
And that's Trump.
I mean, is there a correlation here?
Well, there's an old saying, Pierce, that's accurate psychologically that when the working class or when the aristocracy catches a cold, the working class dies of pneumonia.
And so one of the ways of thinking about that more generally is that if things start to become unstable, let's say with regards to combative terminology at the pinnacle of the social hierarchy, that echoes down the rungs of the hierarchy to people who are already pretty damn unstable.
And it doesn't take much to tilt them over the edge.
You know, when this trans issue arose in Canada in 2016, when the government of Canada made it their business to compel the speech of people in relationship to gender identity and gender, what do they call it?
The way you present yourself.
I don't remember the terminology at the moment.
I told the Canadian Senate that they were going to cause a psychological epidemic because when you destabilize the center, you really upset the fringe.
And so, well, we've seen two fringe now.
Careless Speech on Social Media 00:04:09
We don't know everything that's going on in the background with regard to those assassination attempts.
But as you turn up the temperature, it's the people at the bottom of the bloody hierarchy you boil.
You do the same thing when you raise energy costs to save the planet.
It's like you punish the people who are barely clinging to the edge of the world most dramatically.
Like they don't take much additional stress to knock them off.
1% increase in unemployment produces a 5% increase in psychiatric hospitalizations.
And so careless, well, and the other thing too is that the social media communication platforms that we've invented, as I said already, they incentivize careless speech.
It's been hard for me, for example, to learn how to communicate properly on Twitter and X because it rewards impulsive behavior.
And it's very difficult to remember.
I'm sure it's difficult for Musk to remember that an ill thought through comment that might be fine in the confines of a private conversation can have a massively disproportionate effect given that it's published to, well, in Musk's case, you know, more than 100 million people.
And we're not, we don't have any, we don't have the kind of wisdom with regards to the regulation of our speech and our emotions that enables us to act wisely when there's that short a gap between mouth and publication.
So, you know, we're still in the early phases of determining how to regulate our behavior online.
Now, have the Democrats been particularly egregious in that regard?
Well, there's been two assassination attempts on Trump.
And so you could draw whatever conclusion from that you think is meat.
It's obviously a terrible thing.
And the problem, too, is there's another problem, which is that copycat crimes are very, very, very common.
Yeah.
And it's partly because the pathological types, they keep an eye on each other.
You know, for example, on the school shooter side, there is a school shooter subculture.
Make no mistake about it.
And the people who are fantasizing for the thousands of hours that are necessary to fantasize before you transform yourself into a school shooter, they're perfectly aware of their peers and those who they are competing with and the best way to gain maximal public attention.
So, and that's also amplified, let's say, in its pathology by this interconnectedness.
Like one of the things we don't know, for example, Pierce, is we don't know, well, when you link everyone together, you know, we're trying to educate people at the moment en masse with this Peterson Academy that we launched.
And it's a wonderful thing to be able to use the net because we can bring extremely high quality lecturers to the attention of an unlimited amount of people for very low cost.
And so we're trying to facilitate the spread of the highest quality ideas.
But, you know, at the same time, the social media networks and the internet itself facilitate the transmission of the lowest quality ideas.
And which of those are going to win out in the long run is a very difficult question.
You know, that's the free speech question too.
You know, the more libertarian types, and certainly Elon Musk believe that if you just put the information in front of people, that the best ideas will win.
And I think fundamentally that's true.
But we have to understand that the free speech tradition that we've inherited in the West has been bound by a set of traditions and practices that have enabled it to function.
You know, you could say, for example, that the free speech that characterizes the West emerged in the context of general group adherence to a set of well-established Judeo-Christian norms, and that it worked within that context, that implicit context.
Psychopaths Shielded by Mental Health 00:13:15
And as that underlying structure falls apart, then the problems with untrammeled speech mount, not least because the narcissistic psychopaths come rushing forward and it's very, very difficult to regulate them.
Now, you know, I am an advocate for free speech.
I'm on Musk's side in this argument, but I also understand that the 3%, 5%, something like that, of truly bad actors, they're worse than you think.
I guess I'd add one more thing to that.
I have a suspicion as well that people on the left have less of an imagination for evil and are therefore more likely to be captured in their endeavors by the Machiavellian actors.
And I believe that because the more liberal/slash progressive types are higher in trait agreeableness, which makes them value compassion, for example, in the way that they do.
And the problem with compassion, apart from the fact that it can become devouring if it's overextended, like you shouldn't treat grown people, for example, as if they're infants because you demoralize them.
The other problem is that you have a proclivity to presume that everyone who's misbehaving is a victim who needs sympathy.
Now, it could even be that 80% of criminals are salvageable, maybe even 90%, but the 10% that aren't, oh, boy, you better look out for them.
And if you are incapable of imagining that there's a subset of people who are animated primarily by self-interest and malevolence, you know very little about the world.
But there's also 1% of the criminals commit 65% of the crimes.
So you hit on something when you spoke a little earlier, where you said that people have been, I've seen it happen, and I knew this would happen, that the explosion of conversation about mental health has led to two things on a negative side.
Well, three actually.
One is that so many people now self-identify as mentally ill when I don't think they are.
Secondly, a lot of people are using it.
I mean, in Britain, we have 5 million people out of a population of 67 million currently off work.
And the vast majority are off work being paid to stay at home because of various mental health related issues, anxiety and so on.
And this is completely unprecedented in the history of this country and is dramatically affecting in a negative way, you know, workplace and people's ability to function as employers.
But he's also got a very malevolent side that's now cropped up, where bad people are using mental health as a protective shield against accountability for their crimes.
And the classic example in the news this week was Hugh Edwards, who was literally the face of BBC News, the most respected news anchor man in my country.
He was the one who announced the Queen's death on the BBC, for example.
He was chosen for that honor because he was so respected and so trusted.
And he's now been exposed as a paedophile, somebody who was grooming young men, who was paying a paedophile money for illegal images of underage boys.
And he's now been sentenced, but he wasn't sent to prison.
So you had the juxtaposition of the riots recently in the UK, where people were putting things on Facebook and were being put in prison for two years for saying threatening things on Facebook, whereas an active pedophile who was paying another paedophile for illegal images, which involved criminal activity involving the sex abuse of children, did not go to prison.
But what was interesting was the way he, through his legal team, tried to mitigate his crimes.
And he said a fascinating thing where he, A, he used mental health to lock down any media scrutiny at the time.
Media were told to not report this at the time because he was having treatment for mental health.
But secondly, he said that his inability to get into Oxford when he was young had meant that when he got to the BBC, he was at a disadvantage and this had really sort of eaten away at him and damaged him.
As if somehow this explained why he then groomed young boys and paid for illegal pictures of children being abused.
And all of this, this whole story showed me the natural pathway of where this was always going to go, which is people weaponizing mental health to protect their own nefarious behavior and people also using mental health to just be work shy and not just put a shift in.
And both of these things are a really malevolent development.
You're referring to exactly the same phenomena that I was talking about with regards to the pathologization of online behavior.
It's the same thing.
Pierce, we know as clinicians, at least the honest ones that are left, and that's not very many, we know that the psychopathic manipulators, the cluster B psychopathology types, the dark tetrad types, Machiavellian, narcissistic, psychopathic, and sadistic, a lovely combination.
We know that they cloak themselves in moral virtue and they use pronouncements of self-victimization to manipulate and to and to and to conspire.
That's what they do.
And they're very effective at it.
You know, there's a couple of more psychopathic types that I thought about interviewing on my podcast.
I won't name any names at the moment.
But in the most famous case, I decided against it because I wasn't convinced that he would fail to charm me during the interview.
You know, even though I have a fair bit of clinical experience and a pretty decent serpent's eye for the psychopathic types, I'm generally an agreeable person and I give people the benefit of the doubt.
I knew Robert Hare a little bit.
Robert Hare was the first clinician from the University of British Columbia who really made a pronounced and prolonged study of the psychopathic types.
And he interviewed many of the worst criminals and specifically the psychopathic criminals.
So conscience-less might be one way of radically immature, hedonistic, and consciousless.
That's how you might describe them.
He said that almost invariably they pulled the wool over his eyes and charmed him during the video interviews.
And it wasn't until he reviewed the footage later that he could see where their manipulations were.
And you have to understand that a well-practiced psychopath who's got 30 years of manipulation under his belt, especially if he's smart, is probably better at pulling the wool over your eyes than you are at detecting him.
You know, because your rule of thumb, you're a pretty disagreeable guy.
And, you know, you're pretty good at giving people who misbehave a rough time.
And so, you know, you might be less prone to that kind of manipulation than the typically more agreeable person.
But you don't want to overestimate your capacity to discriminate between the psychopaths and the good guys, especially.
I've actually interviewed genuine psychopaths who have been serving lengthy sentences in American prisons.
And they've been diagnosed as psychopaths.
So kind of devoid of empathy, devoid of sort of normal human emotion, devoid of, you know, one was a young psychopath who killed his sister, who he loved, just to annoy his mother and to distress his mother.
And he didn't have any sort of regret.
He had no sense of grieving, no sense of empathy about any of it.
And it was genuinely fascinating for me to be with this guy for an hour and to try and unpick that kind of mind.
I mean, almost impossible because it was just like a blocked wall, very bright, very articulate, could easily have charmed me in the way you're talking about.
And it was only because I knew what he was.
But had I met him in a bar many years later, I'm quite convinced he could have hoodwinked me very straightforwardly.
But this thing, to go back briefly to the Hugh Edwards story, I don't know if you're familiar with it, but.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yes.
Did you make of him using mental health to avoid proper scrutiny of what was really going on?
Well, I'd say two things about that.
I mean, the amateur garden variety Freudians, and this is no critique of Freud, by the way, like to make the assumption that, and this is true of the altruistic types who have a compassion, a range, an expression of compassion that starts to become devouring.
They make the assumption that if you're a bad guy, the reason for that is that bad things have happened to you.
Now, the problem with that is, number one, that bad things happen to everyone and not everyone turns out bad.
Number two, now and then, and perhaps not even that infrequently, you meet people who've had terrible lives who are paragons of moral virtue rather than criminals.
And so, the idea that there's a direct causal link between suffering and the generation of malevolence, that's a really pathological theory.
I don't think it holds any water whatsoever.
Because if you're bullied as a kid, you can learn not to bully just as well as you can learn to bully, right?
I mean, there's a logical chain of deductions in both directions.
And it's also the case, Pierce, that as time progresses, if the victimized became criminal, it would only take a few generations before every single person was a criminal.
What generally happens is that people don't propagate familial violence forward.
Now, this is also often masked because if you look, for example, if you look at the group of people who beat their children, many of them were beaten as children.
Okay.
So then you'd think, well, that proves the causal link.
But if you reverse that and you look at all the people who were beaten as children, only a small proportion of them grow up to beat their own children.
So the idea that there's a direct pathway between suffering, whatever it is, and malevolence with others, that's got to go.
Right.
Hueb was outside court.
There was a statement read on his behalf.
It said, Edwards appears to have an underlying cerebrovascular disorder, which further reduces his emotional inhibition and is likely to increase his impulsivity to behave in a way that risks himself.
What do you make of that?
Well, those things do happen.
I mean, there are well-documented cases of neurological insult that produce disinhibition of behavior.
So if you have right prefrontal damage, you're more likely to tilt in the hedonistic and in the hedonistic and impulsive direction.
So that sort of thing can happen.
That doesn't mean that it's a garden variety of excuse for all manner of misbehavior.
That's for sure.
And it also, it doesn't bear that directly on what you do in consequence.
I mean, all right, perhaps he does have a cerebrovascular insult of the sort that increases his impulsivity.
That would have to be very carefully documented before it should be admitted at all, because neurology is a tricky business.
But even if that is the case, well, what effect should that have on his sentencing?
If he constitutes a genuine threat to the public, it's kind of irrelevant.
Now, you know, I don't mean that that implies that mitigating conditions shouldn't be taken into account because they should be.
But if he's pathologically incapable of regulating his more transgressive sexual impulses, for example, well, that can't, that can't be, there's no way that can be allowed to make itself manifest socially merely because he's the unfortunate, what would you say, recipient of a neurological insult.
And so let me let me just and I'd also say it's a bit convenient.
Yeah, you know, it's a bit convenient.
So I would look at that with a tremendous amount of skepticism.
Yeah, I agree.
That's what I felt.
Just talking of psychoanalyzing people, you've got two complete polar opposites now running for president of the United States.
If you were psychoanalyzing Trump and Kamala Harris, what would you conclude right now based on everything you've seen and heard?
Well, if I could vote in the American election, I would vote for Trump.
Trump's Accidental Presidency 00:11:00
And I don't trust Harris.
Now, do I trust Trump?
Well, he was president for four years.
Like, look, the best predictor of someone's future behavior is their past behavior.
If you're trying to hire someone and you have documented history of their efforts in precisely the domain that you're attempting to hire for, and the evidence is clear and valid, you use that in favor of all other predictive markers.
So I think it's more appropriate for me as a clinician who knows the psychometric literature to point out that independent of Trump's personality, which tends, by the way, to be a relatively weak predictor of behavior, it's intelligence that's the best predictor and then personality.
We have a documented track record.
Okay, so what do we know about Trump?
Well, as far as I'm concerned, we know this: decent economic performance, markedly stable international situation, no wars, plus, and that's something, no wars.
Plus, he established the Abraham Accords, and they've held even after October 7th.
And everybody in the State Department told the Trump administration that that was that putting that agreement together was impossible.
Now, of course, it's the Abraham Accords that have infuriated and frustrated the bad actors in Iran, and that's pretty much the entire political class there, and fomented October 7th and produced this catastrophe that's unfolding.
But putting that at the feet of Donald Trump is a very ill-advised thing to do.
So I would say, with regards to Trump, well, we know what a Trump presidency would be like, but there's something else to consider too, because you might say, well, you know, that was round one, and now it's round two, and Trump is older.
And although I think he's actually modified his behavior to some degree as a consequence of being beat up so thoroughly over the last five years, and although he's a bit defensive, he's also less blustery and more human, which I think is a big plus.
But for me, the other thing that I've seen really switch that's really been positive for me is that Trump has pulled a lot of hyper-powerful people together around him: Musk, Helse Gabbard, Vivek Ramaswamy, Robert F. Kennedy, most of whom would have been Democrats in anything approximating a sane and normal world.
And so, you see, my sense is that somebody whose narcissistic impulses are out of control, because Trump is a flamboyant and dominating character who likes the public light.
So you think, well, you know, does he tilt too far in the narcissistic direction?
It's like, well, why would he share the spotlight with the rest of this crew?
And the other thing that we should consider is that, look, man, I would vote for Trump if for no other reason than Musk himself has already agreed to head something like a Department of Governmental Efficiency in the U.S.
It's like, okay, enough said.
And then Kennedy is bringing the public health crisis into the political realm.
Both those two things are revolutionary.
I would also say Ramaswamy seems to be Ramaswami is a very smart guy as well.
I I completely agree with you Um, on that also.
I think that Trump has shown with these assassination attempts something very surprising that I suspect a lot of people would not have expected, and that is genuine personal courage.
I mean, the first time when he was actually shot, to insist on getting back up and to punch the air defiantly was a remarkable thing to do.
But I thought even more remarkably was a week later he was back on stage at another rally with an even bigger crowd like nothing had happened.
I spoke to him at night and he was, you know, very gung-ho.
I'm just going to keep, keep doing it.
They're not going to stop me.
That is personal moral courage.
I I don't think you ever know whether you have it until it happens.
And then you saw again with this latest one.
You know he was cracking jokes immediately afterwards saying well, I wish I could have finished my birdie putt, uh again the reaction.
I mean I it's a quality of Trump that we haven't really seen until you see it, and you're never quite sure how people will respond when there are genuine threats to kill them and he's actually been shot and then nearly got killed again, and yet he's back out there continuing with the campaigning.
So, whatever you think of Trump, I do think on the personal courage aspect, he's shown a lot of it recently.
Yes, grace under pressure.
But also you pointed to something else is that he was up cracking jokes.
You know, Hitler wasn't well known for his sense of humor.
And the thing about Trump and you can't deny this Trump is a funny bastard.
Right, he is funny.
He'll say daring things just because they're comical.
He's really good at it.
And even his twitter usage his ex usage twitter, of course, because he's not really using the platform now um impulsive uh entertaining, unbelievably cutting and funny in a stand-up comedian sort of manner.
And you know that just doesn't go well with the tyrannical personality, because tyrants aren't well known for being able to tolerate the court gesture, let's put it that way.
And so Trump is tough and funny.
The other thing about Trump you got to think about too is, you know, is he ambitious?
Well, I don't think it's ambition that's driving his pursuit of this second term.
I mean, first of all, Trump's an old man and, second of all, he's already president and he's as famous as you can get yeah, and you might say well, his ambition is so overweening that you know it's compelling him forward regardless.
And I don't actually think so.
I actually think that what happened was that Trump accidentally became president, shocked the hell out of him, and then he got some sense of exactly how unstable and corrupt the Dc Swamp had become and he started to take the role seriously.
And now I think he's taking it even more seriously and that's part of why he's building this coalition.
I think he made a dreadful mistake in the debate with Kamala Harris because well, first of all, he didn't highlight the Biden laptop spectacle, which is like a bit of political maneuvering that Outdoors any deviance that I've ever seen since the beginning of my political awareness, including everything that went around on around Richard Nixon, who was impeached for his much lesser sins.
Trump has gathered these people around him and he's ready to move forward.
Now, he didn't make a case for that in the damn debate.
I thought he was a bit of a dad.
I thought he had a bad debate, actually.
I thought that she played him rather cleverly.
She played to his narcissism.
Let's call it, I think, what it is a bit about the crowd sizes, about all that kind of stuff.
And rather than him laser-like focusing on her weakness, which is that after four years, the country clearly is not in a better place.
That's why she couldn't answer that question.
And skewing her on her actual paucity of policy knowledge.
I mean, she doesn't seem to know what she would do if she ran the country.
She sort of played into his hands of allowing himself to be goaded and getting into a bit of a street fight and then saying crazy stuff about cats and dogs and so on and so on.
Conversely, if you were looking at her right now, how do you psychoanalyze Kamala Harris?
Okay, well, let's give the devil his due to begin with.
One of the market things I have seen happening with the Democrats since this switch in leadership is their movement away from the radical left.
And so I'd like to give them credit for that.
I think, now, is it real?
Well, maybe.
Some of me doesn't care if it's real, even if it's performative, even if it's purely performative, it's long overdue and very welcome.
And so you don't hear Kamala talking much about the climate crisis, which I'm perfectly happy about because I think that's an absolute load of anti-human rubbish in the main.
And the more leftist types within the Democrat Party have been effectively sidelined, at least as this campaign has progressed.
So, you know, thumbs up on that regard.
Having said that, on the principle that previous performance is the best indicator of future performance, Kamala's had her time in the White House.
Now, you might say the vice presidency is a secondary role, but if you're the sort of person that would only allow the vice presidency to be a secondary role, then maybe you're not fit to be president.
You don't have enough force of character.
And we've already seen what a Biden administration looks like.
And what I see the Biden administration look like, I mean, America is such an economic powerhouse that it's still trudging along, rampaging along like a bull in a China shop, like it always does.
But foreign policy has been a complete bloody world-ending disaster under the Democrats.
They haven't stood up to Iran, which is a pack of vipers without compare.
And we have this terrible, brutal, and I think unnecessary war going on between Russia and Ukraine, which could spiral out of control at any moment and is highly likely to.
And so that's on Harris and the Democrats, and that's a major issue.
So, and then what we might say, well, what will we get under Camela?
And maybe it's the case that the move away from the radical left is real, although I'd need a lot more evidence before I would believe that.
But the easiest thing to predict is another four years of the same thing.
Yeah.
Like, why wouldn't you predict that?
It's not like she's the only one calling the shots.
And as you already pointed out, maybe we could have more confidence that she would be a transformative leader, pull the Democrats to the center.
What would you say?
Act in a stellar manner on the foreign policy front and put the economy in order.
Well, we can be a lot more convinced of that if she was 10 times more policy oriented than she appears to be.
I completely agree.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I've never seen a candidacy focused so much on image in my life in any country.
No, you know, I think she's basically she's bet the bank on three things.
One, she's not Joe Biden, which is a clear win for her.
She's not.
Secondly, she wants to avoid any substantive policy talk and shift everything to how awful Trump is, because that's an easier way for her to win, as she displayed quite skillfully at the debate.
And thirdly, she wants to divorce herself from any accountability for what has happened under the administration in which she served as vice president, which if she can get away with it, will be a skillful bit of politics.
Dumbing Up at Peterson Academy 00:05:47
Jordan, we're nearly out of time.
I can always talk to you for a lot longer.
You know that.
I want to end with two quick things.
One is a woman called Carol Voldeman, who's a British television personality, was doing a radio show, and this happened on her show.
To come back to like women's aggressions in society.
So Dr. Jordan Peterson, there's a YouTube video.
Oh, don't quote me.
No, You cannot quote Jordan Peterson on my show.
I'm sorry.
I mean, it's just that they're on.
No, I'm not having that, Neil.
You know, that reminded me of your encounter with Kathy Newman, who's a good friend of mine.
And I know Carol well, but when you went on Channel 4 News and Kathy Newman just didn't really know much about you, it seemed to me.
I don't think Carol Voldeman has a clue what you really are about or what you actually say.
Because if she was, she certainly wouldn't be suppressing any mention of your name like you're some newborn Mussolini.
It was the most extraordinary piece of outright censorship I've heard in a long time.
And I thought, have you ever met Jordan Peterson?
Did you ever listen to him?
Because if you did, you would never do that.
You would never say that.
What did you think?
Well, the same thing recently happened, even more recently happened in the US.
They featured my picture and then asked the question about me on Jeopardy and the producers and the film crew, et cetera, are in deep trouble for platforming someone with the reprehensible views that I have.
Piers, it's just another example of that casual progressive moralizing.
Why do you have to be familiar with what someone actually says and does when you can gain undeserved reputational credit for being the sort of person who just doesn't put up with that sort of thing?
You know, it's such, there's nothing worse than moralistic hypocrites.
You know, and you can identify them by the fact that they're willing to throw someone else under the bus to raise their own moral status.
And that's part of that.
Well, I won't go into that anymore, but that was the same thing.
You know, it's, you know, and I can understand it in a sense, I suppose, because it's hard for people to become aware of everything.
With Kathy Newman, for example, you know, a journalist like her has to be aware of a lot of things at the same time in order to ask intelligent questions and to progress appropriately.
And a lot of the work that I do is actually very complicated and it requires a fair bit of study.
And so I just don't think that she, had she done her homework?
No.
Can she be held entirely responsible for that?
Well, her team could have prepped her better.
You know, she does have a team.
And so this happens time and time again.
And most of the time now, when it happens, I just think it's comical.
But it is reflective as well.
The part of it that's not comical is it's very reflective of this casual cancel culture.
Yeah, it is.
It's exactly what it is.
The progressive moralists.
It's exactly this mentality of wanting to just cancel and destroy or eradicate anyone who doesn't fit your worldview.
I want to end just by, we've talked about it briefly about the Peterson Academy.
I love the fact that as universities are dumbing down, killing free speech, all the rest of it, yours is dumbing up.
You have things like introduction to Nietzsche, for example, Plato, the dawn of thought, the history of Western music, all the stuff that young people should absolutely be studying to enrich their minds.
And we found a great picture of you as a young lecturer.
It's a clip, actually.
Let's have a look at this.
If something that's the same hue, red, is poisoned as something edible green, well, you've had it because you can't distinguish them if you can only see black and white.
Now, if you can see color, which means you can make a finer level of sensory discrimination.
Apart from your fine mullet hairdo there, Jordan, what struck me listening to you and watching you is I would love to be in one of your classes.
It's come too late for me, sadly, but I certainly think what you're doing with the academy is such a great thing.
And we can talk about it in more detail next time.
I know you've got a new book coming out.
I'd love to talk to you a bit more about, obviously, the book, but also about the academy.
But I just think people should be racing to get into your academy, to enrich their minds.
Well, they seem to be racing to it.
We have 31,000 students already, and our students will run through their course of education, emerge not propagandized and debt-free.
And we have great lecturers.
The courses are great.
They've exceeded my expectations by a substantial margin.
So I'm thrilled about it.
And so, you know, welcome aboard.
And we also think, Pierce, this is funny.
We have the most progressive university in the world by the progressives' own standards.
We're open to everyone and it doesn't cost much.
And that's what the progressive, I'm dead serious.
I know you are.
That's what the progressives are.
I know you are.
But the irony.
Education should be open to all.
Of course.
Come on board Peterson Academy, man.
It's open to all.
I love that.
Jordan, brilliant to talk to you.
Thank you so much for coming back on.
And when your new book comes out, you sent me a copy.
I haven't had time to read it.
I'm hoping to in the next week.
And certainly by the time it comes out, we must get together again and discuss all the themes of that in more detail.
But great to have you for now.
Great.
Great.
Thanks, man.
You could rake me over the coals about my book.
I'd love that.
I'll try.
I will try.
But great to see you.
Take care.
You bet.
Bye-bye.
Export Selection