https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=mmy0FwRKSCM
What are your best traits and what are the worst traits of Dr. Jordan Peterson? Well, I think that it’s been difficult for me to optimally regulate my irritation at times over the last few years and I’m trying to get that right to figure out what the right… because a lot of things that have happened have outraged me and then I’m not exactly sure what emotional tone to take as a consequence of that outrage and that’s a very complicated thing to figure out and that’s been exacerbated, that problem, by the fact that I have been, my family and I have been the targets of very conniving attacks and underground attacks and that isn’t stopping. I mean… Another time when your wife was fighting a deadly cancer. Yeah, and my daughter was sick and so was I. So yeah, yeah, so it’s very difficult to regulate your temper properly under those circumstances, let’s say, and so I don’t imagine… Where have you most improved yourself, do you think, as you’ve got older? I get better and better at listening, you know, and I’m better and better at finding my way forward with the words that I choose and that’s just… it’s just a continual, in some sense, incremental expansion. I’ve probably got better too at seeking out corrective information. So for example, I got banned from Twitter recently for making a statement that I don’t regret, by the way, but I had a friend of mine, two friends of mine, grill me and I put that on YouTube. It’s called Mean Tweets. It was an hour and a half, I said, and one of them, both of them are very, very smart people. One of them is more liberal than I am, I would say, but a very good advocate for that liberal position and I said, well, let’s hash this out. There’s some things I’ve said that have made people angry and you think I made them unnecessarily angry and that I was unnecessarily harsh in my tone. Did they change your mind? They changed my approach, you know, because one of the things I decided was that I would try to be equally judicious in my words, but that I would use a calmer and more measured tone, and I don’t mean use instrumentally. I mean that I would attempt to make the effort to take as much unnecessary emotion out of the statement as possible and so I started to do that in some of my more recent videos. I mean, I tried to do that before and I think part of the reason that my interview with Kathy Newman went well was because I kept my head and I didn’t get irritated. She’s a good friend of mine and I watched it with great interest because I felt like you were slightly on parallel lines and that maybe she would do that interview differently if she had her time again. I think that’s highly possible. Yeah. Yeah. So yes, I changed my approach quite dramatically and what happened was that I read a Telegraph article I recently published about Deloitte and it was a very cutting article and I was really worried about publishing it because I think it was the most cutting article I’ve ever written and I read it on YouTube very, very calmly and carefully and what happened was I got the response was much more positive and much less negative. So there was no downside to it. So people didn’t say, some people said, I think that I liked your tone when you were more aggressive, especially on issues like this, but by and large it had all, it worked even better because I could be careful in what I was discriminating and then to ally that with calmness actually made it more potent rather than less and so that was very interesting and yeah and I mean we had a very serious discussion about this, my friends and I. I had a lot of people with me in Miami when this was happening across the political spectrum. We had a very healthy debate for a couple of hours about whether or not I had gone beyond some reasonable limit in the way I was conducting myself say on YouTube and Twitter and some people were very strongly advocating for more of what I was doing and even harsher and others were saying, well you’re alienating people that you could otherwise communicate with unnecessarily. It’s interesting about the listening, like one of my sons too, my sons have come today because they just wanted to listen to this, very unusual. One of them’s not even been to the studio before so he just said to me, I said give me some advice, you know you love Jordan Peterson, what’s the advice for the interview? He said just listen more than you normally do. So I’ve tried, I’ve tried hard to ask a question and let you answer and so I’m work in progress, not being interviewing people for 35 years but I do think the listening as I’ve got on I felt the same thing. Yeah it’s a real skill man. Listening is a powerful tool actually. Oh yeah well there isn’t, there is nothing that people like more and need more than to be listened to. You know and that’s partly why the left clamors all the time, you know it says look there’s all these people who aren’t being listened to, it’s like there are a lot of people who aren’t being listened to, they’re absolutely right, there’s no doubt about that and I’ve dealt with people who were extraordinarily marginalized so to speak in my clinical practice and some of those people to straighten out their minds they need like 10,000 hours of listening because no one, I mean this literally, I’ve had people in my clinical practice, no one ever listened to them their whole life and so when you they start talking they’re all over the place, they’re disorganized, they’re hyper emotional. Having met me now for an hour what would your initial clinical diagnosis be? Well you’re probably optimally disagreeable for your profession you know because you can listen but you’re also not a pushover and that’s a very fine line right because if you’re too assertive or aggressive then you get domineering but if you’re not enough then you’re a pushover and to be and this was also the case with Kathy Newman, she’s quite disagreeable and that’s a masculine trait by the way and it was one of the things I mentioned to her. I think she got into it in a way so how we started the interview, she’d gone into it I think with a preconceived idea of what you would be like and sort of stuck to that. She’s actually a very skillful journalist and interviewer and I was surprised the way that interview went when I was watching it and I think it was because she just had an idea of what she thought you would be. Well I think she probably, I think she also had an outcome, an idea of what the optimal outcome of the interview might be and I think a lot of the journalists who’ve gone after me in some sense have that. They think they there’s part of them and thinks I’ll be the person that finally exposes him for what he is but then they find out that I’m not who they thought they that I am. At least I’m not quite as demonic as they thought I might be. Well Professor Stephen Hawking before he died gave me his last television interview and he said that the biggest threat to the future of mankind was when artificial intelligence learned to self-design. What do you think the biggest threat to mankind is? Narcissistic compassion. Now AIs you know it’s a threat too but if we had our act together ethically it’s possible that AI could become a useful servant rather than a tyrannical master. You don’t want to automate your tyrannical masters and that’s the danger that’s one of the dangers of AI. I’ve got to wrap it up. I don’t want to but I have to. What I’ll ask you just quickly the film director Olivia Wilde has a new movie out which she says is based on you this insane man the pseudo intellectual hero to the incel community. Incel being these weirdo loner men who are despicable in many ways. Is that you? Are you the intellectual hero to these people? Sure why not you know people have been after me for a long time by because I’ve been speaking to disaffected young men. You know what a terrible thing to do that is.