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Nov. 22, 2024 - Uncensored - Piers Morgan
53:36
20241122_go-to-hell-jordan-peterson-on-trump-putin-more
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Time Text
The Trump Administration Avengers 00:02:53
This new Trump administration.
They're calling it the Avengers.
You're a fool if you're going to predict the outcome of that.
He has Musk.
He has RFK.
Ramaswamy.
These are formidable people.
These aren't people who need the political power.
Those are the people you surround yourself with if you're out on a quest.
Putin will hold himself in check until Trump takes power and that the war will come to a rapid end.
I'm strapped in for the ride.
My father, he died recently.
Man with very high standards.
My deepest condolence.
I think I remember mostly reading with you.
That was so much fun.
I thought so.
I can see how moved you are.
You say here he could be fearsome.
Pierce, you always make me cry when you interview me.
Do you believe in God?
Do you think there is a heaven?
The problem is there's a whole literature that Richard Dawkins knows nothing about.
Go to hell.
You're not stopping me.
Well, the last time I interviewed the world's most famous psychologist, he unpacked with incisive clarity the reasons why Americans should trust Donald Trump over Kamala Harris.
Clearly, America agreed.
And when it comes to Dr. Jordan Peterson, they often do.
His books and tools have had a profound impact on 21st century culture.
Now he's back to tackle the biggest subject of all in his new book, We Who Wrestle with God.
The best-selling author, psychologist, and co-founder of the Peterson Academy.
Joins me now.
Jordan, great to have you back on Ancensen.
Hi, Pierce.
Nice to see you.
I'm going to get to your book a little later, and it was utterly gripping, fascinating, challenging, all the things I'd expect from you.
But before we move on and then come back to it, the reviews have been almost comical.
Like people love you or they hate you so much they want to rip you to pieces.
Do you care?
Or, because I get the same, we call it Marmite over here, which is a savory thing you put on toast, which people either love or hate.
Do you care?
Or do you just want people to be reacting?
Well, look, I mean, if you have any sense and people are paying attention to what you're doing, you're happy about the fact that they're paying attention to what you're doing.
And then whether the attention is negative or positive, I suppose that's the next thing up on the agenda.
And it's been a pattern through my life that people have that kind of reaction to what I'm doing, you know.
And luckily, in my actual life, day to day, in the real world, virtually everybody I meet is pleased with what I'm doing.
Yeah.
And so that's wonderful.
The reviews, as you said, have been comical.
I was reading the Times Review today.
Oh, my God.
He hates James Marriott.
He just hates me.
Oh, my God.
He just hates me.
Adventurers and Provocative Themes 00:11:11
Yeah.
What really got him?
What I loved about that review was he was clearly, it was eating away at him that the last time one of your books came out, he said something positive that you then used in the marketing for the book, which is obviously what we all do as authors.
And he was so determined this time you couldn't do that that he wanted to address that right off the top.
Right off the top.
Yeah, well, I did do it, though.
I did do it.
I tweeted out something today that I culled from his review to make it look very positive.
So I thought that was hilarious because it wasn't easy because there wasn't much in it that was positive.
But I thought that would really rub him the wrong way.
Oh, it would enrage him.
Well, we'll come back to the book.
It's fascinating, the book.
And I really want to get into that with you a little later.
But I want to talk to you.
Just first of all, I want to play you a clip.
This is from when you and I did an interview just after the start of the Russia invasion of Ukraine.
Let's take a look at this.
Do you think he will use a nuclear weapon?
If necessary, he'll use a tactical battlefield weapon.
Even if it starts World War III.
It won't.
Probably.
Why?
we wouldn't respond.
What's in it for us?
If you let him do it and get away with it, where does that end?
Then you are under a hit.
Well, there's a lot.
You can get yourself in a situation, no problem, where there's no good outcome.
I mean, here we are, Jordan.
You know, we're two years later.
We're in a stalemate.
Putin is still rattling his nuclear weapons as a threatening, back off, pretty menacing device.
He's done that a few times and then not acted on it.
But things are clearly very tense there.
And there's a change coming in the presidency in America, which could be crucial as well.
Where do you think we are with this war?
Are we any better off or towards any kind of clarity or ending than we were when you and I spoke back then?
Well, I thought a week ago that the most likely outcome with regard to the outgoing Biden administration is that the military-industrial complex, who has a vested interest in seeing this war prolonged, would do something to provoke Russia into doing something that was unforgivable so that the war would have to continue.
And that's, as far as I'm concerned, that's exactly, now I could be wrong, but that seems to me to be exactly what's happened this week.
I mean, Biden, in the dying embers of his administration, decided that it was okay for Ukraine to use medium to long-range missiles, which is a hell of a thing to do as an outgoing president.
And now they've also proposed that it will be acceptable for Ukraine to use a certain kind of distributable landmine.
And it's like, this is independent of what you think about the war, as far as I'm concerned.
It's like, really, is that what you do?
That's the steps you take as a dead duck president in the final months of your administration, eh?
I think that's a little bit on the provocative side.
Now, my sense is that Putin will hold himself in check until Trump takes power and that the war will come to a relatively rapid end soon thereafter.
Now, I don't know.
I'm not a foreign policy expert, and the world's a very unpredictable place.
But if I had to bet, that's what I would bet on.
And I think it's a highly probable outcome.
So we'll see.
I mean, everything's up in the air, obviously, Pierce.
This new administration, this new Trump administration, God only knows what is going to happen with Musk involved and Vivek Ramaswamy and JD Vance and Mehmet Oz and RFK.
I mean, you're a fool if you're going to predict the outcome of that.
What do you make of it?
I mean, they're calling it the Avengers.
What do you make of his picks?
I mean, most of them are causing surprise.
I'm not massively surprised because I think Trump tried the first time to do things in a more conventional way, and he felt that that just didn't work for him.
He's now had four years out of office to really think about it, and he's come back in and he's just hit the ground with people that he thinks are going to be basically very loyal, and then they're going to be quite disruptive in the way they go about their business.
And he thinks that kind of disruptive blunt instrument is actually exactly what America needs right now.
Well, I think what's happened fundamentally is that these remarkable people that have aggregated themselves around Trump understand very thoroughly that we're in a time of unprecedented rate of change.
And I think that's pretty obvious to everyone, and that there are immense opportunities awaiting us and immense perils.
And they're sufficiently concerned about the perils and sufficiently compelled by the opportunities to state themselves politically and to take the risk of doing so.
You know, people like Musk in particular, but Ramaswamy's in the same boat essentially.
These aren't people, and many of the other people around Trump, these aren't people who need the political power.
They already have lives.
They already have immense influence.
I mean, for Musk to involve himself in the Department of Governmental Efficiency is obviously something that's taking him away from many other things that he's highly concerned about.
But he obviously believes that the time demands that kind of response.
And I think he's right.
And, you know, more power to them.
I'm strapped in for the ride as far as I'm concerned.
I thought that what happened around Trump in the last two months of the election was absolutely remarkable that these people aggregated themselves around him and were in for unprecedented times.
And like the Americans are remarkable people and you're always a fool to bet against them.
And I think we have a good chance of seeing a revival of the American spirit that is unprecedented in our times.
Yeah, you know, there was a moment yesterday when Trump went down to see the latest SpaceX rocket launch with Musk.
And it just made me think, this is great, actually.
Whatever you think of the individual policies and everything else, there you've got the richest, most successful guy in the world who actually is a big thinker, a big dreamer.
We're going to come to one of the themes of your book, which is about adventure and how the Bible basically tells us to go and be adventurous, albeit with responsibility and everything else.
So there's a real sort of theme that I see with this where both Trump and Musk are adventurers.
And there you had them going down to this rocket launch.
And it wasn't, it didn't all go exactly how they hoped and everything else.
But wow, I love the ambition.
I love the fact that Elon Musk is prepared to say, you know, I met him in France early this year, and hearing him talk about why we need to colonize Mars, how we would colonize Mars, how we would get to Mars if we colonize it, was absolutely riveting.
And you've got to have an amazing big picture brain.
We've got to have an amazing brain full stop, but you've got to have an amazing big picture brain to think the way that he does.
And if he's right next to Trump in this administration, I'm all for it.
That's my situation too.
And I feel the same way about RFK.
I mean, he's also a preposterous person.
You know, he's bigger than life.
He's full of remarkable and crazy ideas.
And I'm fascinated to see what he might put in place.
And I would say the same thing about Ramaswamy.
Like, Ramaswamy's establishment of the Strive Fund was brilliant and daring.
And we have brilliant and daring people in government.
And that doesn't ever happen.
And God only knows.
I don't even know if it's a good thing under normal circumstances.
Because I think under normal circumstances, you want competent administrators running your nation.
But we're not in normal times, far from it.
And so I'm, like I said, strapped in, waiting exactly as you pointed out, waiting for the adventure of this administration.
And everyone's sitting there thinking, oh my God, what's going to happen next?
Yeah.
Good.
We should be thinking that because we should be thinking out of the box because conventional thinking hasn't got us very far.
You know, I'm always mindful of one of my favorite quotes in sport was Wayne Gretzky, a fellow Canadian, of course, the greatest ice hockey player that's ever lived.
And his quote was simple.
You'll miss 100% of the shots you never take.
Right, I mean, simple as that.
Right, right.
I mean, that really is, to me, that's the difference in life between a certain type of person and another, is that certain people in life, they just take the shots and they don't mind failure.
You know, Elon Musk is going to see a lot of his rockets plummet into the ocean until he gets it right.
But the thrill of the dare, of the adventure, of all of it, you know, again, we'll come to this with your book because it's one of the big themes.
But I do think that I feel like it's invigorating right now.
It might be slightly dangerous and it might take us off on weird places and it might not all work.
But I do feel the scale of ambition is going to be invigorating.
Yep, amen to that, definitely.
That's exactly how I feel.
And I also, you pointed out with regards to this book, that one of the definitions of God in the biblical library, in the story of Abraham in particular, is that God is, in fact, the voice of adventure.
I mean, whenever people are discussing religious matters, one of the first questions that arises, obviously, is, well, what exactly is it that you're speaking of?
What's your conceptualization of God?
What constitutes the divine?
And you could say the divine is the pinnacle of ambition or the foundation of reality.
Those are both good ways of looking at it.
And one of the answers in the biblical text is that God is the call to adventure.
And that's definitely the case in the story of Abraham.
And the idea there, which is an unbelievably deep idea and also one that works biologically, is that the full expression of the spirit that takes you beyond your zone of comfort and out into the terrible world is the same spirit that makes your life a blessing to you, that makes your name renowned among other people and for good reason, that helps you establish something of lasting value and that does that in a way that brings benefit to everyone.
And that's actually the deal that God offers Abraham in response to his willingness to embark on a life of adventure.
And I think all of that's true.
I mean, one of the rules I had with this book, Pierce, was that I tried not to offer any explanations of the biblical text that weren't also fully justifiable from a scientific perspective, and usually from multiple different orientation places on the scientific side.
And so why wouldn't the spirit of adventure take us out into the world in the most glorious possible manner?
Like, what the hell else would it possibly be for?
Yeah.
Yeah, I agree.
Young Men and the Rifle 00:09:35
The other part of this, which is fascinating for me involving you subliminally, is that you've become this kind of heroic figure for millions of young men who felt totally disenfranchised from society.
And I remember the first time I interviewed you in my studio, and you got quite emotional talking about them and how you felt responsible to them and how many of them would come up to you, literally in the street come up to you and tell you how you had saved their lives in many ways.
And what we've seen here is, I think, in what they're calling the broligarchy, which I love, which is the bros, Elon Musk, Donald Trump, Joe Rogan, RFK, Vivek, they're all bros.
And they're the broligarchy.
Is that you saw so many young men, whether they were white young men, black young men, Latino young men, but millions of them gravitating to vote for Trump because they bought into this general sense that finally there were a group of people here who were going to make you not feel ashamed of being a man, who were going to say that there's something great about being masculine, not something to be, you know, to be shirking away from because apparently it's all toxic.
These are men in the old-fashioned sense.
I'm very curious how you feel about that because you've been in such a vanguard of this.
How do you feel about the brolegarchy and the impact it had, clearly had?
I mean, may well have won Trump the election.
Well, I don't think it's, I don't think that the care that I've taken, let's say, with regards to young men is any different in its essence than the care I take with my son.
You know, I like my son.
I want the best for him.
I think he's great.
I encourage him all the time.
I like to see him move beyond his zone of comfort out into the world.
And then I have all these young men who have been listening to what I've been saying who are doing the same thing.
And it's the best possible thing.
I mean, I had a show last night in Westbury, New York.
And afterwards, I usually meet somewhere between 60 and 100 people.
And many of them are young men.
And they come to the show very dressed up.
You know, they often buy suits to come to the show.
And they're like standing up and their shoulders are back and they're looking distinguished and they've got ambition and they're thrilled to death because they're doing something worthwhile.
And, you know, they shake my hand and they say, you know, thanks for the help.
Yeah.
That's great.
It's powerful.
It's great.
Yeah.
It's great, man.
It's great.
Yes.
And I remember the first time I interviewed you, my sons wanted to come and watch that interview.
First time.
They wanted to be in the room with you because you had had that impact on them.
And that I found remarkable, too, that you have this real visceral impact on young men who've been really in the last 10 years floundering for their identity and what is acceptable and not acceptable and what it means to be a man, what it means to be masculine.
Yeah, well, I had a good father, Pierce.
And my father, he died recently.
He died about three weeks ago.
And he was a very tough man, very hunter, a trapper, a deadly shot, and man with very high standards and very encouraging.
He was really good at that, really good with little kids.
And, you know, it's a privilege to play that role for as many people as possible.
There isn't anything better than that.
And, you know, I think you're right about the fact that that spirit has been kindled around Trump.
And, you know, what's so cool to see with Trump is that he's accepted that.
He's proved himself willing to share the stage with all of these other remarkable people.
And even in some ways, I wouldn't say to fade into the background because Trump isn't exactly your fade into the background sort of guy.
But, you know, the fact that he's invited so willingly these other participants, all of whom are high-status people around him, also, to me, put to rest any concerns I had about any pathological narcissism on his part.
I mean, obviously, Trump is a very effective self-promoter, and there's something in that that's a real skill.
But by the same token, you know, he has RFK, who's a force in his own right.
He has Musk, Ramaswamy, Vance.
These are formidable people.
Tulsi Gabbard as well.
That's not the sort of person you surround yourself with if you're a toxic narcissist.
That's someone, those are the people you surround yourself with if you're out on a quest.
And it's so cool to see this.
It's so literary.
It's absurd.
Jordan, I was going to come to your dad because one of my producers discovered that your father had died several weeks ago and found an obituary.
I don't know whether you wrote this obituary.
One of the family did.
And it talked about dad.
So it's one of the things.
I wish I wrote it.
It was you.
I thought it was.
Because I read it and I found it unbelievably moving.
I was going to leave it to the end, but since you've mentioned it now, first of all, my deepest condolences on losing a remarkable man.
I mean, even if I didn't know the connection, I just read this about somebody.
think what a remarkable life he had.
He had three children, four grandchildren.
He was a great grandfather to four more.
He grew up in Norway in a log cabin.
But then as you said, he lived outdoors shooting, hunting, bird watching, trapping, cross-country skiing, canoeing.
And he was an enthusiastic collector of single-shot rifles.
I love this detail.
He loved their simplicity of their design and craftsmanship.
More importantly, he loved the precision of these rifles.
And he liked the fact that a single-shot rifle only allowed for one bullet as a hunter, dead center.
And that epitomized to you the care and attention that he put into his work.
And he was a beautiful gunsmith and craftsman, all of these things.
And then became a teacher and was quite a tough disciplinarian.
You say he could be fearsome.
You know, acting up in Wally's class was not the world's best idea.
And as a result, there wasn't much trouble.
Oh, that was definitely true.
But he loved kids too, and he was great with them.
And as I was reading all this, I was just thinking, wow, okay, I get it now.
I get where Jordan has got all this from.
There are so many parts of your dad's character in you, clearly.
I mean, do you feel that?
When you wrote this obituary, did you feel that really quite intensely?
Well, you know, you pointed to that detail with regards to these rifles.
Like, my father had 300 rifles.
This was a real obsession, and he was a very good shot.
He was a provincial-level shot.
And it took me 30 years to figure out why the hell he collected those guns.
I don't think he knew.
And I told him five years ago, I said, Dad, I figured out why you're so obsessed with rifles.
I said, it's because you want to hit the target dead center with one shot.
And that's like it's a symbolic representation of your aim in life.
And he thought about that.
And my dad wasn't particularly metaphysically oriented.
And that was an explanation he was entirely satisfied with.
Right?
And you know, the word sin means to miss the mark, right?
It means to miss the target.
And that's acted out in this, it was acted out in my dad's life in this relationship that he had with guns.
And as a hunter, it was the same thing.
He hunted with a single-shot rifle.
You got one shot.
You got one chance to hit the mark.
And he was very dedicated towards that kind of precision.
That was part of what gave him that rough edge.
He had very high standards.
He's a very encouraging person.
He believed that he imbued me with the belief that I could do anything I set my mind to, but that didn't make him someone who was easy to please.
Quite the contrary.
It was a very remarkable combination.
You said dad had the force of nature about him.
He'll be greatly missed.
That force of nature, is that, was it a sense also of that adventure that you talk about so much in the book?
Was he an adventurous man?
Well, he was adventurous in his outdoor life, I would say.
My father was a tough man.
And so he was the fire chief of the local town as well.
And the adventure for him was his ability to prevail.
And as you pointed out, the log cabin that he grew up in was actually in Saskatchewan.
His parents were pioneers.
And like the log cabin that he grew up in still stood when I was a kid.
We used to go out there.
He was quite sentimentally attached to it.
But he was a pioneer type, my father.
And he was great with little kids, great.
And he spent a lot of time with me when I was little, a lot.
And it made a huge difference to me.
You know, we found a clip.
This is you actually interviewing your father several years ago.
A Pioneer Father's Legacy 00:16:16
Let's take a look at this.
I remember driving home with you to Nakam a number of times and talking the whole time because you'd never stop asking questions.
Yeah, well, hasn't changed much.
I think I remember mostly when I was a little kid reading with you.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Well, that was great.
That was so much fun.
I thought so.
I can see how moved you are, Jordan, understandably.
Obviously.
Piers, you always make me cry when you.
You know, I knew you might get emotional about this.
I wanted to leave it to the end.
It just, when you brought it up, it just, it was so, I found the obituary so powerful.
And I said to my producer who found it, this looks to me like Jordan wrote this.
And we didn't know.
And it's just so beautifully written.
I mean, I also know, because you say at the start of it, that he was a husband to Beverly Peterson, who predeceased him by only five months.
You've lost both your parents now in the space of...
Yes, and Tammy lost her father last December, too.
Yeah, so it's been a brutal year on that front, that's for sure.
You know, it's been remarkable watching my wife, too, because one of the things she did in the last 15 years was really set her relationship with her father in order and really practiced being grateful for what he had offered to her.
And, you know, every family has its complexity.
You know, in the story of Noah, to return to the book a minute, there's a scene when after Noah brings the ark successfully to shore, he plants a vineyard and brews up some wine and then proceeds to get Rip Roaring Drunk, which you could maybe imagine he was entitled to after his adventure.
And his son Ham comes along and sees him splayed out in his tent naked and thinks that's pretty damn comical.
And to see your father naked is to see the vulnerability of your father and maybe even his proclivity for misbehavior.
And Ham brings his other brothers along to have a good joke at the old man.
And the other brothers walk backwards into the tent and cover him with a blanket.
And then Noah gets wind of what Ham has done.
And he brings all the sons in and he says to his son Ham, who laughed at him, he says, because you have no respect for your father, your children will be the servants of slaves forever.
And this is a very interesting curse because what it means is that if you fail to respond to what your ancestors offer you, your father, let's say in particular, with gratitude and love, then you will fail to embody the spirit of your ancestors and your children will in consequence become the slaves of servants.
And that's exactly right.
It's exactly right.
And so it was interesting to watch my wife, you know, develop extreme gratitude for what her father had offered her.
I really liked, his name was Del Roberts.
I really liked Del.
He was a bigger than life character, something like Trump on a smaller scale, you know, bombastic and entrepreneurial.
And that spirit of the benevolent father, that's associated with divinity, of course, in the biblical texts.
And understanding how that spirit transmits itself down the generations is part of what stabilizes society itself.
And I was very fortunate, my father.
You know, I knew, and my mother as well, my parents were 100% behind the best part of me.
Unbelievably useful.
And that's something I've been able to offer many people, you know, as what would you say, an abstract or virtualized father, and that's a great honor.
There isn't anything better that can happen to you than that.
Jordan, how have you, you know, you're a strong man and you're an emotional man.
I've seen that again today, and I've seen that many times with you.
But to lose both your parents in the space of six months at your age is a really, no, I'm very fortunate.
Both my parents are still alive.
I spent the weekend with them.
It's a huge moment in your life, isn't it?
How are you dealing with it?
Well, my brother and my sister were there with me when my father died.
And, you know, we've drawn more closely together in consequence of that.
It shared loss.
And I saw that happen with Tammy when her mom and dad died, that her family drew together.
And Tammy, for example, established a much better relationship with her older brother.
And that turned, that was not a substitute for her father, obviously, but a very positive alternative.
And so we've found solace in each other, my sister and my brother, and drawn more closely together.
And that's been very good.
And none of us are naive, you know.
I mean, our parents were getting old, and I would say we were also fortunate in some ways.
My mother was very vital, right?
Literally till the day she died, she had a heart attack, and then two days later, another, but she was a young and vivacious person, despite being in her 80s, and then bowed out with no fuss and very suddenly.
And my father as well, you know, I mean, I've watched people deteriorate for sometimes decades in old folks' homes.
And both my parents departed from life in a relatively, what would you say, in a relatively suffering-free manner.
And so we're grateful for that.
And it is a terrible thing to see someone that you love die.
And there's always the sense that you have that there was perhaps more that you could have done.
You know, I wonder, I suppose, in an ultimate sense, whether the fact that we die is in some way the ultimate moral failure.
I mean, that's a preposterous thing to think, but that's the sort of thought that plagues you when you see someone that you love die.
But they lived good lives, and they were probably both in some ways ready to go.
And so it was far less terrible than it might have been.
And I was fortunate to be surrounded by people who, instead of making it hell, did everything they could to make it better.
And I have drawn closer to my brother and sister in consequence.
And I suspect that will continue.
Did you get the chance to tell your parents how you really felt about them?
Obviously, you're brilliant at doing this with people.
Oh, yes, definitely.
And I had some conversations, some deep conversations with my dad in the, well, in the last few months, and certainly let him know how appreciative I was of him, of the attention he paid to me.
He knew that, but it never hurts to make it explicit.
Tammy also, when we knew that dad was dying, Tammy also, I mean, I've known my wife since she was seven, and she knew my father very well.
We lived across the street, and she always admired him.
And one of the things she pointed out about both our parents, or both our fathers, which is very interesting, is that they were both very positive about our relationship.
Like we were friends when we were kids, and my dad loved Tammy.
And her dad really cared for me.
And he was this noisy, foghorn, leghorn character who was bigger than life.
And he was bombastic and booming and terrified everyone.
But he really liked me and he always treated me great.
And one of the consequences of that was we knew that they both smiled on our friendship and then our marriage.
And that was a huge benefit, too.
And so Tammy was very grateful for that and let me know about that.
And I told my father that.
very shortly before he died.
You know, one of the things I did, Pierce, that maybe the people who are listening would be interested in is like probably 15 years ago, I counted all the times I would see my parents before they died.
And it was about 15 times at that point, because I saw them about twice a year or something like that, because we live quite distant.
I phoned them and so on.
But, you know, it's very useful to take stock and to understand that.
You know, as your parents age, the number of times that you see them decreases very dramatically.
And you need to know that because then you don't waste the time when you have it.
And I don't think we wasted the time that we had together.
I took my mother to Australia on the tour with me and to Iceland, and she had a very good adventure.
And I spent a lot of time with my dad.
So neither my sister, my brother, and I, we really didn't come to the end of our parents' lives with regrets, thank God.
Yeah.
Obviously, you've just written a whole book about the Bible, about God, about all of this.
When I finished it, I couldn't work out whether you actually believe in God, whether you think there is, personally think there is, for example, a heaven.
You've obviously had to give this, through the death of your parents, a lot of thought, I would imagine.
What is the reality?
I mean, do you believe there is a, do you believe in God?
Do you think there is a heaven?
Is that where you think they've gone to?
You know, Pierce, I would say that I leave the things that are beyond my comprehension outside the realm of my comprehension, and I try to understand what I can understand.
I certainly believe that we can produce hell on earth, and we have in many ways.
I've certainly had experiences that indicated to me that the reestablishment of the Garden of Eden, of Eden, on earth is a possibility and that you can live like that.
How those things are related to what's eternal is beyond me.
I think like it's beyond everyone.
And I believe that with sufficient faith that you walk with God through the valley of the shadow of death.
I think that's true.
I think that if you're courageous and you confront the worst life has to offer, that the spirit of your ancestors walks with you.
What that means in the final analysis with regards to the relationship between the finite and the eternal, I don't know.
I don't know.
I can feel eternity touching the mundane life in the confines of my own life.
And I try to make that welcome and that works.
Everything else that I think I've written or spoken about, and there's nothing hidden, you know, I'm trying to take people along my own explorations and discovery and sharing what I've come to understand.
I can tell you with regards to studying the biblical texts that the more I study them, the more they reveal.
That seems inexhaustible.
And it's been unbelievably useful.
Like writing this book was ridiculously useful.
I learned so much.
I'm still adjusting to the things that I've learned.
And so, and I certainly do believe as well that it's by no means chance that the most functional societies in the world are predicated upon the biblical text.
That's not that there's a direct causal relationship there.
Not least because the did the book give you a greater sense of faith?
I mean, did it make you in a way more religious as you read more and more and dissected text after text after text?
Yeah, well, I do believe, like I said, I do believe that, and I think the clinical, all the clinical evidence points to this, the more forthrightly you confront the challenges of life, the more powerful the spirit that abides with you.
And I think you can make a very strong biological case for that.
The biological case is, well, obviously, you're going to make what's within you more manifest psychophysiologically in precise proportion to your willingness to take, voluntarily take on the burdens of life.
Like, obviously, if you shrink away from things, you're not going to adapt and adjust to them.
And so if you confront them with faith and hope, then why wouldn't that put you in a position where the best of you is brought to bear on the challenges of the situation?
And why wouldn't that be identical to the spirit of the most profound spirit of your illustrious ancestors?
I can't see how that cannot be true.
And, you know, what's the relationship between the core of the human spirit and the nature of reality itself?
Well, there's some relationship, obviously.
What's that relationship in its totality?
Well, I don't think that's not within, what would you say?
That's not within the realm of the graspable, but we can make approximations to it.
Christianity Today reviewed your book and said Christian readers should learn from Peterson's boldness, his disposition of awe and docility before the sacred page.
However, the question of God is unavoidable.
Peterson is slippery on this point.
Familiar words from Christian doctrine like creation and redemption and resurrection mean something altogether different when Peterson uses them.
They're kind of suggesting that you go right to the point of saying you believe in God and that you're a fully paid up God believer, if you like, for want of a better phrase, but you don't quite cross that line.
Is that, I mean, is that where you are?
I mean, you say you've had a sort of...
Well, the first.
No, I don't think so.
I think the first thing I would say is that, no, there is a continual insistence in the biblical text that God is outside of understanding, outside of our understanding.
Right?
So whatever God is, is beyond the categories, even of real and unreal.
And that's not my interpretation of the text.
I mean, even Moses only gets a glimpse of God's back.
And so we have to always remember that we're talking about something that in the final analysis we don't understand.
But then I would also say, I don't believe that belief means what most people think when they say belief.
For me, religious belief isn't propositional.
It's existential.
And, you know, we talked about the great adventure, let's say, that Trump and his weird team of X-Men and Avengers are embarking upon.
And I would say their faith is manifest in the pattern of their action and not in what they say.
And I think that religious faith in the most fundamental sense is the willingness to hoist your cross joyfully as you trudge uphill.
And that's not the same thing as declaiming about what you assume propositionally to be true.
And, you know, Christ in the Gospels says, not all those who say, Lord, Lord, will enter the kingdom of heaven.
It's like belief is a very complicated issue, and I think the best way that you infer your knowledge about someone's belief is watching how they conduct themselves, not what they say.
The Pharisees in the gospel text proclaim their belief constantly, but they're the ones who crucify Christ.
And that's something to think about.
You got into this with Richard Dawkins.
It's a fascinating exchange.
I want to just play a little mash up from that encounter.
You either believe that the world of truth is unified in the final analysis, or you don't.
The fact that I care about are the facts that are true and have evidence.
Miracles in Biblical Truth 00:04:41
Did they exist or did they not exist?
Well, I'm speaking allegorically there within the confines of the text.
What makes you think the writers of Genesis were a great writer?
I mean, who were they?
We know nothing about them.
I think that there's a spirit of literary genius at work across millennia, crafting that story so that it has almost an infinite depth.
The truth of science is the truth that gets us to the moon.
And I don't think it makes any difference.
It doesn't make a difference whether it was divinely inspired or whether it evolved.
Truth is unified.
And what that's going to mean eventually is that the world of value and the world of fact coincide in some manner that we don't yet understand.
You've analogized the dragon fight to.
Well, how many dragons have you overcome in your life?
I'm not interested in dragons.
I'm interested in reality.
I think, Dr. Peterson, you're drunk on symbols.
Yes, you mentioned, I've heard that comment.
It's really interesting.
I've interviewed Richard Dawkins several times, and I always say to him, you know, it's interesting, I said, because you cannot explain to me, Richard Dawkins, for example, what was there before nothing?
You know, what was there before nothing?
Because the human brain can't comprehend what that even means.
There has to be a superior power to a human being out there somewhere that can make sense of all that.
And that's why, look, I believe in God.
I was raised as a Catholic.
But the Catholic Herald said of your debate there, there was no meeting of minds.
They were forced to agree their minds were differently constructed.
There was no merging of reality.
And it seems to me, probably, if you have me, you, and Dawkins in the same room, you've got the three components there.
You've got one person, me, who's an absolute unequivocal believer.
You've got you that I suspect is nudging that way, but it's not quite there in the way that I am.
And you've got Dawkins who's completely implacably opposed to any sense that there could possibly be anything other than what's staring him in front of his eyes.
Would that be fair?
Well, I'd say a couple of things about that.
The first is that even the scientific accounts for materialist reality require one miracle to get going.
And for example, it's a truism among cosmologists that the laws of time and space, the laws of science, break down at the singularity.
And there's no difference between saying that and saying something that we can't explain from within the confines of our materialist understanding emerged at the origin to bring all things into being.
There's a miracle lurking in there somewhere.
And of course, the biologists are also stuck with the problem of the origin of life, which they hand-wave about constantly, but have been completely unable to account for.
And so my friend Jonathan Pajo, you know, his insistence is that if he's going to accept a miracle, he'll accept the miracle that proclaims that the cosmos itself is founded on sacrifice.
And that's a completely different framework of conceptualization that I unpack to a large degree in my book, because you can make a very strong case that perception itself is a sacrificial endeavor.
And so Dawkins' metaphysics is very narrowly empirical and very narrowly enlightened.
And part of the problem with that is that there are also just things that Dawkins doesn't know.
And I would say in his favor and in the favor of our discussion is that near the end of that discussion, we did have a meeting of minds because we started to talk about how the evolution of narrative in the manner that he represented as memes could have a long-term effect on the genetic evolution of humanity.
And he got very excited about that.
And I was thrilled about that because one of the reasons I wanted to talk to Dawkins is because I think some of his ideas, especially the idea of meme, has far more significance than he thinks it does.
Right.
Now, part of the problem is there's a whole literature that Richard Dawkins knows nothing about.
So for example, he doesn't know anything about the work of a man named Merchau Eliad, who was the preeminent historian of religion for years.
He's out of favor in the academia because he's not a postmodern hedonistic power-mad nihilist.
And, you know, Eliada was one of those people who thinks that there was something fundamental about the structure of mythology and narrative.
And Dawkins doesn't know anything about that entire field of endeavor.
And that's a major problem, given that he's also very concerned with the evolution of our ability to abstract.
Dramatic Portrayals of Power 00:06:32
And I was trying to move the discussion in that direction.
And that happened very successfully near the end of it.
There's a brilliant, in the Telegraph review, actually, of your book, there's a really good line there where they said Peterson's at his best when he brings alive the pathological behavior of the Bible's bad guys from Cain to the Whore of Babylon via everyone who dawdles, resents, exhibits pride, worships false idols, complains, lies, accuses, wallows in victimhood, and fails to live up to their responsibilities or talents.
It's all on you, he writes, with God as a guide.
And I love that because that was a big takeaway from the book for me is, again, the way you take the text of the Bible, the Old Testament, but you make the point that if you bring it forward to today, all of those things there, you know, when I look at Trump's big win in America, for example, yes, it was to do with the economy and cost of living, no question.
Yes, it was to do with the border crisis and people genuinely concerned about what's been going on there.
But it was also, I felt, a real repudiation of what Elon Musk calls the woke mind virus in all its guises.
That people have just basically had enough of what is ironically a kind of modern day fascism, the way they go about destroying people that don't sign up to their worldview.
And all the things they kind of represent the woke brigade, for want of a better phrase, the wallowing in victimhood, you know, the constant whining and moaning about absolutely everything, the lack of taking personal responsibility, et cetera, et cetera.
The kind of inherent laziness of so many of them as well.
Very work shy, I've noticed.
You put it all together, and you've got all these things, all these themes from the Bible of things to avoid in the way you conduct yourself.
They're in that mentality.
That woke mind virus, it encourages that way of thinking.
I mean, do you see a parallel there?
Well, we'll start with a practical parallel.
I mean, the Trump election campaign was a great drama.
And there was a kind of victimized femininity, let's say, on the Democrat side with Kamala Harris and her cohorts really emblematic of that.
And then what did we have on the Trump side?
One of the most dramatic portrayals, maybe the most dramatic portrayal of what we had on the Trump side was Trump's response to being shot.
It was like this.
Yeah.
Right?
Go to hell.
You're not stopping me.
No matter what.
And like, as Musk pointed out, that's not staged.
And, you know, it was so interesting watching the victimized Democrat response to that because their response was open-mouthed amazement that anything like that could even be possible.
It must have been a hoax because no one can possibly react like that.
It's like, well, wrong.
Trump could react like that.
And despite whatever faults he might have, that's what he's like.
He got up and said, you're not stopping me no matter what.
And, you know, more power to him.
And I don't think it's an overestimate to presume that that won him the election.
I totally agree.
And you can see the immense literary drama there.
You know what, Jordan?
I've just written exactly that.
I've done the Spectator magazine diary this week.
And I said, when I think back, I spoke to Trump four times in the last few weeks of the race, including a week after he got shot, when he saw me talking about it on TV in America and he called me.
And we had a fascinating conversation.
A, he said it had reinvigorated his faith in God because he said God must have wanted me to survive.
Because he said literally he was alive because he moved his head half an inch to read some charts on the teleprompters.
And if he hadn't, he'd be dead.
And secondly, that he, you know, I said to him, amazing you're back out doing rallies so soon.
And he went, well, I knew if I didn't do it quickly, I may not ever do it, which I thought was one of the very few times I've seen any vulnerability for Trump.
But of course that.
But the balls, not just to stand back up when he got shot, to stand back up saying fight, fight, fight, when he didn't know if there were other shooters out there.
But secondly, to get back on a stage in front of 20,000 people, none of whom you know, a week later and to keep doing it, sometimes much bigger crowds, especially when there was a second attempt to kill him a few weeks later, where literally a Secret Service agent walking ahead of him on a golf course saw the barrel of an AK-47 poke out of a bush.
And if he hadn't, Trump would have been there four minutes later and would be dead.
So twice in the space of two months, Trump came very, very close to being assassinated.
And yet it didn't stop him getting back out there.
And I do think when I think back on the whole thing, there were lots of components to why he won, not least the incompetence of the opposition.
However, I think regular Americans and the rest of the world, actually, but regular Americans looked at his strength literally under fire and his resilience and his determination to keep pounding on.
I think they looked at that and thought, you know what, after everything that's been thrown at him, the weaponizing of a justice system, literal attempts to kill him and all the rest of it, look at him.
He's still pounding on.
And it's a really admirable quality in a man, right?
Absolutely.
Well, and, you know, you pointed out that it wasn't only the fact that he immediately leapt up on stage and basically said, go to hell, you're not stopping me.
Yeah.
But then also that he continued to speak and didn't take, what would you say, even perhaps warranted precautions.
It's the perfect thing to do psychologically because if you shrink away in consequence of that threat, you live in fear for the rest of your life.
And Trump's determination was obviously, no matter what, I won't live in fear.
And that's the same decision Job makes, by the way, in the book of Job.
It's a decision not to lose faith and not to live in fear, no matter what, right?
No matter what.
And that is a manifestation of the spirit that is indomitable.
And I think that is a reflection of the image of God.
And so.
An Indomitable Spirit 00:02:24
You know, Jordan, I'm just going to...
No, I don't think the divine providence with regards to Trump wasn't the fact that he turned his head at the proper moment.
The divine providence with regard to Trump was that he jumped up immediately afterwards and said, you're not stopping me.
Yeah.
Yeah, I completely agree.
Jordan, I've got to leave you there.
I don't want to because it's been absolutely, as always with you, a riveting interview.
My deepest condolences on losing both of your parents.
It must be an enormous moment in your life.
And the fact you've talked about it so openly, I really appreciate that.
I wasn't sure if you would want to or anything, but I found your obituary for your dad just so moving that I really wanted to discuss it with you.
But also, I just, I've got to end with some news that I know would have made them, I'm sure, very, very proud and will make you very happy and will make your most savage critics very unhappy.
Because as we've been talking, your book has moved to number one in the Amazon bestseller list.
You are back where you normally are with your books, Jordan.
You're number one.
Congratulations.
Well, thank you, sir.
And thank you very much for highlighting the obituary.
Much appreciated.
That was an unexpected benefit to doing this interview and a great testament to my father and his indomitable spirit.
Which lives on with you, Jordan.
And that's very clear to me.
When I read it, I just thought, yeah, I can see now.
I see where Jordan gets all this from.
And he was very proud of you, and you rightly are very proud of him.
But thank you very much indeed.
Very good to see you, Pierce.
Thanks again for the conversation and for all the things that you've done for me and my family.
Well, it's been great getting to know you.
I really feel we've developed a good friendship.
And it's great getting to know you.
And like I say, it came because my sons all listened to you all the time and felt compelled to actually come and just be in the studio when I interviewed you.
I very rarely have that from them towards any of my guests.
Oh, that's a great privilege.
So thank you for the privilege.
Well, thank you for the impact you've had on them.
I think it's been very helpful to them.
I appreciate it.
Great.
Good to talk to you, man.
Thanks, Jordan.
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