https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=crMTrCZAbrI

I also thought, for what it’s worth, that you talked to me in a very straightforward manner, and I certainly appreciated that. I had many people on my team who were concerned about the potential manner in which the interview might proceed, not least because we’ve had plenty of fun with British journalists before, although that often turned out well. But you also said during that interview, or maybe it was before we talked, that you had been thinking about listening in a way that was somewhat new for you, or at least new in part. I mean, everybody learns as they go along. And so I was curious afterwards about what exactly that meant, because I really felt that during the interview you did listen to me, and that we had, and vice versa, hopefully, and that as a consequence we had, we genuinely communicated, and I think that that was part of the reason that made the interview successful. Yeah, I mean, actually it was my middle son, who’s a young actor and photographer, and listens avidly to YouTube, and most of your stuff he’s watched in recent years, most of Joe Rogan’s stuff he’s watched, and he said, Dad, look, you can’t do your normal sledgehammer act. You can’t just go in and start interrupting every five seconds like you normally do, which is a fault line of mine. It works well actually when you’re interviewing a politician who’s trying to obfuscate or answer different questions or simply avoid the one you’re asking. Sometimes you do have to be slightly bully boy in the way you interrupt a politician to get an answer out of them. So it’s a different technique. But actually the point that my son Stanley made to me was, Dad, if you want to get the best out of Jordan Peterson, he said, trust me, you have to listen. And so that was constantly in the back of my mind. He was actually at the back of the studio, as you know, with my youngest son Bertie, and he was adamant that that was the way I would get the best out of you, and he was completely right. And it was a learning curve for me. It might sound slightly odd that I’m getting to this stage of my life, 57 years old, and been a journalist since I was in my early 20s, to suddenly learn the art of interviewing. But I’ve been through many guises as a journalist and interviewer. When you’re a newspaper interviewer, as I was for many years, or I did big interviews also for GQ magazine, often the interviewer can talk a lot to get a one-line revelation. So you can keep talking, keep talking, keep talking, and then lull your interviewee into saying something that maybe you were trying to get. It’s a very different discipline on television or on any form of on-camera interview. And I was also struck by the fact this wasn’t the first person who’d given me the advice to listen. I remember the great Sir David Frost, who did with the Watergate interviews with Richard Nixon, some of the great interviews ever seen in political journalism. And he always said to me, the most powerful tool of any television interviewer is silence, because the interviewee will always fill that void. At some stage, after one second, two seconds, three seconds, four seconds, an interviewee will fill the gap. They won’t just sit there in silence, too. And sometimes the most powerful revelations you can get from people come when they have their own moment to really think about what they’re going to say, and they say it. And if you’re too busy, as you said earlier, and I’ve been very guilty of this myself, of talking too much, expressing your own opinions, not really listening to what the person is saying, then you can sometimes miss these moments of real gold, which come actually from the power of silence. So I think the experience I had with you was really informative to me, when you’re interviewing somebody obviously very intelligent, obviously very used to doing interviews, perhaps coming with a slight sense of suspicion after what happened with you on Channel 4 News. And I watched that interview live, as I told you, and I just felt in that interview, I know the interviewer, Kathy Newman, and I felt that she didn’t really know who you were, hadn’t done quite enough research into what you really felt and what you really thought, and had made a series of presumptions about you, which you were able to bat away quite quickly, and it made for very uncomfortable viewing if you were a Channel 4 News viewer, because it was quite clear that you were slightly on parallel lines. So I think that, yeah, I found our experience really, really good, actually. I felt that had I done my political interview technique with you, I think you would have clammed up. Well, you wouldn’t have clammed up, but I think it would have been a much more confrontational exchange, which I wasn’t seeking to get, because I actually agree with a lot of what you say. So to me, it does depend who the interviewee is. Did you know you can own physical gold and silver in a tax sheltered account? We can help you transfer an IRA or 401k tied to stocks into an IRA in gold. If you’re skeptical about the trajectory of the economy in the US dollar, then text JORDAN to 989898. Birch Gold Group will send you a free info kit on securing your savings with gold, with thousands of satisfied customers, five-star reviews and an A-plus rating with the Better Business Bureau. We take precious metals seriously. Text JORDAN to 989898 for your free info kit. It might depend too on, well, it might also depend on exactly what the purpose of the stage is. So if you’re a political actor, let’s say, and you’re acting instrumentally, so you have a purpose in the interview that’s a priori, then you’re going to be inclined as the person being interviewed to craft your words and to make sure you don’t step in anything toxic and to deflect anything that might be too penetrating. And so what that seems to me to necessitate on the part of an investigative journalist is a much more adversarial and antagonistic stance, because the journalist is going to be required, especially if the interviewee is obfuscating or deceiving, to have to dig with a relatively sharp blade. And so I can really see that there’s utility in that adversarial stance when what you’re trying to uncover is a web of intrigue and self-serving instrumentalism and deception. And this also segues quite interestingly, I think, into the main, one of the main topics I want to talk to you about today, which is something approximating temperament and fame. And so one of the cardinal personality dimensions is agreeableness. And agreeable people, it’s really a maternal dimension. And agreeable people are compassionate and polite. They’re very interested in people and in serving people. And it’s likely a dimension that maximizes the capacity to take care of the weak and the infirm and infants and the outsiders. Now, the disadvantage to being agreeable is that you can be taken advantage of because you can’t stand up for yourself very well, partly because of your self-sacrificing nature, let’s say. And so you can be a pushover and then become resentful and angry and bitter and feel that you’re in an unfair world, giving all the time and never receiving. On the other side, you have the disagreeable temperament, which is more masculine. And I say that because women are reliably higher in agreeableness and men reliably lower. And that’s true cross-culturally. And it maximizes in egalitarian countries. And so what happens in journalism is that journalists tend to be selected for two personality traits, perhaps more, but at least two. They’re extroverted because they like to talk to people and they like to talk and they have lots to say and they’re verbally fluent. But they’re also disagreeable. And the problem with those two traits, extroversion and disagreeableness, is they tilt people towards narcissism. So and it’s what was it Nietzsche, I think, the German philosopher said, great men are seldom credited with their stupidity. And so you need these traits of extroversion and being disagreeable to put yourself in the public eye and to enable you to be adversarial. But there’s a set of probable sins that go along with that. And those include the sins, let’s say, of narcissism. Now, if you’re conscientious and you keep your word, you can ameliorate that. I like having disagreeable people around because they tell you what they will tell you what they think. They don’t pull any punches. And that can be harsh and even callous at times. But at least you get the damn information. Whereas agreeable people are always trying to keep the peace at any cost, including the cost of their own well-being. So you so in your situation, this is what I’m very curious about. You have to be adversarial and you have to be antagonistic to the degree that you’re uncovering deception and and obfuscation and those sorts of things, to the degree that you have to counter the tricks that people are bringing to bear on the situation. One of the things I guess that makes YouTube different and Rogan in particular is I don’t think Rogan. Rogan almost never talks to people who are doing that. Right. He just like he I’ve talked to him, for example, about speaking with politicians and he tends not to speak with them. And I think the reason for that is that he’s not interested in that adversarial discussion and he doesn’t want his platform to be used for people who are trying to score political points now. And fair enough. And that’s worked very well for Rogan. And I understand exactly why he does that. And I don’t like to conduct adversarial interviews either. But it’s still the case that there is a need for that adversarial conduct on the journalistic front. If part of the role of journalism is to keep dishonest narcissists as as honest as possible. You