https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=_xjP4fMwdLY
Jordan Peterson has become hugely successful. What do you make of the phenomena? Why do you think he’s become so successful now? There is a drought of authenticity and courage and Peterson has found that hunger and he’s tapped into it and I admire his ability to detect it and to speak to it plainly in a way that it resonates with. I did, we were on a panel together in Vancouver and I watched his talk and he described his own surprise at how effective his message had been and he basically said that if he had outlined his message as the core of a business model that it would have looked laughable to him and that he was as shocked as anybody that people were resonating with it. But when you live in a world that is as full of crap as the world we live in where people are advertising bullshit to you from the moment you get up to the sleep and then somebody finally tells you some truth that you need to hear it’s a relief. It’s a relief just to know that there’s some channel that isn’t compromised by nonsense and he I don’t think he’s the only one speaking truthfully but I think he is speaking from the heart and people know it. I think that he grasps directly the fact that human beings can only actually make sense of the world by virtue of communication with other human beings and this is all about the notion of admixture. That one must have a mixture of, well I mean he uses the mythopoetic to make sense, the order and chaos. The way, the Taoist way is the alchemical admixture of order and chaos and that’s it, like that’s how you do it. And so if you bias towards orderliness you find yourself in a rigid non-adaptive, non-creative, non-exploratory framework which will die because the world changes. If you bias towards chaos you eat your young and evaporate which also dies for obvious reasons and the key is to actually enable these things to be in relationship with each other and vital healthy relationship with each other and I think that’s in some sense the essence of what he’s focusing on and it’s sort of the core of what he’s actually about. He’s very easy to work with as his voice is an instrument because he speaks very deliberately and sonorously and rhythmically. Anyway he actually speaks in a kind of form of rhythmic poetry. Sometimes he is actually rapid. Peterson’s words plus lo-fi hip-hop equals J.B.P. Wade. At first it’s like oh it’s a novelty thing and then I kind of listen to it’s like no it’s not a novelty thing this is actually really good. Yeah that’s been the reaction all over. I think that was Peterson’s reaction. He was instantly like thought this was gonna be silly and was amused and then was like oh this is actually artful and now it’s actually proving useful and that’s generally the reaction from people. Interesting that you say as well that Peterson has a very musical or a very performative aspect to his speech because he talks about performance or aligning yourself with the truth and if you’re aligning yourself with the logos of the creative principle you would expect to be for that to have an effect on your actual performance. Like he feels like a very embodied speaker when he’s on stage like he’s fully inhabiting the stories that he’s telling and that performative aspect of it seems to me at least also related to what he’s talking about the logos and incarnating it more in your life and incarnating it more in your being. Yes and watching him become that over the years because he was not always as confident and able to just now you know he freestyles right. His whole career has really reminded me of it’s very 50 Cent for example got big off the back of drama. There was creative drama you know beefs with other rappers and being shot 13 times and all this stuff which draws people into the story but then he had this huge body of work and that kept people there. Peterson did this Peterson had these public dramas and that brought people to him but then when they got to him there was this huge body of work for them to get sort of lost and immersed in it. Peterson has some kind of drama like every week at this point he’s like the ultimate sort of contemporary battle rapper he’s at war with all sorts of people at all times and it’s brilliant very interesting and if you’re into you know if you’re a rap fan or if you’re a what would you call if you’re a intellectual dark web or whatever the hell it is fan it’s like this guy’s getting incredible beefs every week right and there’s a new sort of super villain to root against every week with regards to him or if you’re on his side or not you know it’s the whole thing’s very entertaining but then it pulls you in and then there’s all this meaning of this huge body of work. Meaning is what you have to buttress yourself against the tragedy of life. Despite the fact that you’re a fragile damaged mortal creature. But he’s quite new on this like if you watch him like 15 years ago he was a bit awkward and sort of he was very charming and he knew what he was talking about but the absolute fucking beast that he has become as a performance creature who can now just rock up at an amphitheater and just like freestyle the new two-hour lecture off the top of his head and he’s very into not repeating himself too much and it’s like you go see a stand-up comedian you’ll see pretty much the same set every week for like a year or something right he won’t do that. He’s more like a very good DJ like you know he has all these he has like a fistful of things that you know his works together and they’re linked and he can take you on these different journeys but depending on who’s in the room and where he is he will create a new and transformative always experience. I remember discovering Jordan Peterson last June and just immediately thinking this is the thing that is needed right now this is about the re-enchantment of the world the assimilation of spirituality the assimilation of religion this is this is the thing and I was kind of obsessed like digesting listening to all of his stuff and then pitched an interview to him and was lucky enough to get an interview with him in October that we then put out as the truth in the time of chaos documentary in January at exactly the time that ironically he then kind of shot to fame with an interview with my ex-colleague Kathy Newman on Channel 4 News when a lot of what I had gone to talk to Jordan Peterson about was synchronicity and it was just uncanny. That’s when the synchronicity started. That’s right that’s right that’s when things start to line up yeah and the more you’re in that space the more they line up yeah and so the question is if you’re like really in that space how much do things line up? All of this was happening and I wondered what I was going to make what to make of this and for quite a while I was thinking well I have this kind of link to Kathy and I have some kind of link to Jordan so what I need to do is liaise between them and get them to go and do the second interview that I thought was necessary and so for a while I was doing that kind of trying to do stuff behind the scenes and then it was clear that Kathy wasn’t interested Channel 4 weren’t interested so Channel 4 News sorry weren’t interested so in the end I thought well okay and then it came to me okay I should make a documentary Glitch in the Matrix which then was a way of like just downloading all the stuff that I’ve been thinking about for quite a while including especially since the election of Trump about kind of the shadow side of liberalism and all of the the blind spots of liberalism so Glitch in the Matrix was kind of the title of it and it all it was it came from a very from a real flow state of like being really aligned and feeling like okay this is what I’m meant to be doing which is the essence of kind of synchronicity and the essence of Jordan Peterson’s deeper meaning is you know when you’re aligned at the right place and then your sense of meaning tells you what to do and I think he’s often misconstrued by people who can’t get past the politics or have a reactivity to him but to me he is doing nothing less than channeling and fully articulating the deep story of western culture for the first time and or certainly for the first time in the internet age you could argue that Jung was doing the same thing back in the in the 50s and that there are people who come along and do this at times in the past but effectively he’s saying we already know a lot of the answers we already know the way to live it’s embodied in our actions it’s embodied in our mythologies embodied in our religions it’s embodied in all of these things look at this piece of art what is it saying we represented it in art we represented it in all these ways and now we can fully articulate it tie it into neuroscience tie it into and that it’s a it’s an epic epic project and so I get accused and it’s very easy to sort of say well you’re obsessed with Jordan Peterson or you’re a fan boy and all that stuff and but for me the message that he’s bringing forward is that it’s that deep and therefore I want to continue to use his thought as a lens to link into other great thinkers like we just put out an interview with Rupert Sheldrake who I think is an amazing rebellious thinker he’s been doing this stuff for a long time and I want to also continue to kind of expand that into other into other thinkers make the conscious link to this sort of deeper worldview and help yeah just bring out great bring out great content really where is his insight coming from and so we talked you know you when you were describing hey you almost sound a little bit like Jordan Pearson I mean in the sense of yeah I mean if I had to describe my worldview in a nutshell it would be sort of a neo-platonic so there was a neo-platonic stoic mystic christic gnostic so the idea of neo-platonic I believe I have always just sort of felt like there is a a realm of ideal forms stoic do the suck it up fat kid and do the hard thing 100% gnostic there is a certain ineffable experience of being and then the mystic christic is some some reflection on the Judeo-Christian western tradition but nothing to do with 2,000 years of bureaucratic administration and everything to do with what is nominally the metaphor of kairos and kronos the intersection of kind of sacred and profane time in human form so in that respect yeah I would track with with Peterson my senses for me my you know gnosis or understanding has come from ecstasis has come from peak experiences and my sense for him at least as he shares what he does of his life has come from catharsis has come from the suffering it’s come from battling depression has come from staring the abyss in the face versus the view from the summit and those are ideally come full circle and reinforce each other but if I had to sort of delineate maybe where is his transmission anchoring from it’s maybe a little bit more the staring the abyss and and and surviving it than then calling out coordinates from the mountaintop the most important thing for me quite apart from his work with you know these stories modern myths was as you say his investigation into the bible and i’ve always been fascinated although i’m an atheist i’m always been fascinated by the power of the biblical stories i haven’t found myself looking at these huge cathedrals and churches that sprouted up all over europe you know and and asked myself well what’s that about you know why was this story so powerful i mean yeah it’s a defense against death if you want to be cynical but hey you know it could be lots of other stories you know why is this one so unbelievably powerful and what does it mean for it to be so powerful and peter i think brilliantly answers that question in the biblical lectures he’s done and he really changed me those lectures he genuinely did i think change the way i lived my life because he came to this very very important conclusion which i’m pretty convinced by i don’t think i’m ever 100 convinced by anything but i’m very convinced by his idea as i’ve i’ve someone who’s suffered depression and depression is like a crisis of meaning in your it’s the worst thing about depression is not about being miserable it’s being having a life that seems utterly meaningless and that’s why it’s such torment and peterson in a way tries to answer the question how do we as an individual that’s a bit of a paradox how do i as an individual acquire meaning because meaning is the most important thing any of us could have you know there’s meaning is it you know if you don’t know and yet no one can quite say what meaning is which i think is interesting in itself everyone says well i want a sense of meaning what is a sense of meaning what is meaning and peterson i think acknowledges that mystery but also says well you know if you want a sense of meaning it’s not about just doing what you want it’s not about just following your bliss as joseph camp would be or or or having as much fun as possible or or even necessarily being happy no absolutely not not necessarily being happy it’s there are more important things than being happy and and i’ve also found that to be true in my life i hadn’t heard someone making a compelling case like this that was actually getting traction with people and it was clear peterson was getting traction and so then i said i’ve got to listen to this guy i’ve got to figure out what he’s saying and why it’s working and what how i should respond to what’s happening around him how has it been as well because peterson has obviously began it been getting more and more controversial and i’ve kind of felt this as well sort of like you end up getting into conversations no he didn’t mean that it wasn’t about that how is how has that been like have people started arguing with you or judging what you’re saying or how’s that been i deeply suspect there are a number of friends of mine that are deeply concerned for me because of this jordan peterson thing because they hear again the soundbite world grabs a few things jordan peterson is a bigot he’s transphobic he’s homophobic he’s you know the godfather of the patriarchy whatever he is and so paul but the thing is they know me they know i’m not a bigot they know they know where i was raised they know who’s in my church they know they know me by my actions so what to do with this i’ve given jordan peterson in a sense a year of my life what do you do with that well they don’t know what to do with that so they’re quiet and they watch and they wait when adam and matt invited me to do that podcast we were all someone who similar to the two of you i believe was starting to track peterson and not just jordan peterson and what he was saying but also the ripples he was having in culture the absolute phenomenon and explosion of attention that was happening around him in the media and started kind of watching him reading him with an open mind my experience was an open mind like oh i resonate with that i love how he’s bringing in carl jung and joseph campbell and archetypal dimensions to his thinking like how he’s kind of kicking the left a little bit and calling them on some of their problematic thinking and then watching this kind of phenomenon from the left or the far left where people just with extraordinary levels of anger and fear and distrust and kind of the the difference in that experience of my own and some of our experiences of peterson and then watching a lot of friends who are on the far left having radically different experience and perception of who he is and what he’s bringing and was really just curious about that and it seems like similar to some of the stuff you’ve been doing with rebel wisdom and as a i mean your training as a psychologist we do a lot of work with with psychology as well when there’s a huge reactivity to something there’s always something interesting going on behind it and then it sort of makes you inquire it’s like okay what is what are people reacting to yes whether you love them or hate them it’s like equal proportion of intensity and whenever that’s there it’s what’s kind of called a complex complex is a psychological and i think young would say it like it can be a autonomous and autonomous complexes it’s not part of the ego it’s so deep rooted and it’s my opinion it’s a collective complex it’s indeed collective unconscious and it’s like everyone on the right thinks everyone on the left is a stalinist and everyone everyone on the right thinks everyone everyone on the left thinks everyone on the right is a nazi and there’s this polarization happening where people like like peterson who are trying to carve out i would say not non-political but a kind of a position that’s lateral to politics that’s more in the psychological domain to ask people to look at themselves as individuals to question the extent to which they’re projecting their shadow onto the other which until we can resolve issues on that level it’s going to be very difficult to resolve these political disagreements and so that’s one of the main reasons that i’ve found myself so interested in what peterson is saying he’s shifting the level of the conversation or trying to at least i was so excited to see jordan peterson erupt onto the stage and i know you had a particularly part in that there is a culture war that is in bright precedence i mean we are in the middle of a culture war there’s a polarization and jordan peterson is standing in the middle as a lightning rod taking all the projections from both sides he clearly sees the post-modern ideology and it is an ideology it’s a system of beliefs and values that will not lead us to the promised land it is it is problematic it leads us into a swamp with no exit it is not sustainable he sees it very clearly and in my opinion he sees it from a modern perspective very brilliant modern perspective he’s he’s and he has a depth because of his understanding of carl jung and his own work in psychology the field of psychology that is deeper than most people so people are drawn to that depth he sees something much deeper than other people are seeing right now we had had we’ve never met one another and i knew actually very little about jordan peterson’s written work he knew pretty little about mine and we were just told sit down and shoot and we had no idea where we were going so he just started talking so why the master in his hemisphere he just went from there but what i felt was here was you know a super intelligent man who had wide-ranging interests in psychology philosophy and didn’t rule out a spiritual angle to things and i don’t think that i would and in the film in that clip i think it probably comes out that there are aspects of what jordan was saying that i was going well yes but so i don’t entirely kind of i’m not a petersonian but i do have huge respect for him and we had a great conversation and we’re proposing to do more what do you make of the sort of the criticisms because often he’s described as a fraud or a charlatan in some of the media coverage but when you watch the interview with yourself i mean that’s that’s a very high level conversation the idea of him as a fraud or a charlatan just seems kind of bizarre it’s it’s outrageous it’s um it’s disrespectful it’s dismissive and it’s entirely typical of blinker liberalism he you can disagree with him about many things and i would disagree with him about a number of things but to say that is just to show how blinker you are he’s clearly an extraordinary man and i how dare they call him a charlatan what does that mean i think what strikes people is that he was relatively unknown and then he became known but that’s what life is and it doesn’t prove for a charlatan yeah i mean a lot of this sounds quite jordan peterson-esque what’s your attitude to jordan peterson yeah i mean i i’m glad he’s out there um and i think there are you know i mean i think at a minimum there’s sort of three different jordan petersons you know there’s jordan peterson the analyst and academic which virtually nobody ever heard of there’s jordan peterson the kind of contrarian public intellectual which sort of you know kicked off in 2016 um and then there’s sort of jordan peterson sort of raw shot block for the culture wars of which both left and right wildly distort who he is what he’s saying and what it and what it means for them and so we get we get the the second and the third ones completely mixed although the first one you know university of toronto and hop you know former harvard professor is the one that gives the credibility and the weight to the other two dialogues so in that respect um i think as a what i imagine him to be as an actual man is a pretty high integrity principled person who likes to think for himself and likes to speak not just truth to power but but also likes to um remind his audience whether it’s students or or broader than that um what what is you know what is the what is a life well a good life well lived and now there i think there are there are problems in how in the age of sound bites and hundreds of hours of footage and tons of speaking and those kind of things that become problematic and i’m not in any way convinced that if i sat down with him and said hey mate what about this bit that he would actually stand and defend them but impressions i get would be that his um i think he sometimes over catastrophizes the slippery slope to marxism uh in the sense of that that all the you know this way lies stalinist death camps therefore we cannot give one inch on um concessions to progressive ideals or agendas although having said that i have also personally experienced the almost chinese communist like tom zing struggle sessions of political correctness in in the academy and in kind of left wing you know left coast um ideas so it’s not that i don’t see the peril i do i just think sometimes he uses the slippery slope argument maybe he i think he pulls it out just sometimes a little early is the bottom line without necessarily enough conditions to justify it he sometimes um in my experience i think i remember him on joe rogan doing the life is nasty brutish and short the kind of hobbsy and it’s always been this way therefore any efforts to try and recalibrate or rebalance the scales are fundamentally flawed delusional and by the way lead to the stalinist death camps um without any more nuanced socio political critique of practices and policies so for instance concentration of wealth in the one percent and even the percent of the one percent has been directly traceable in at least in the u.s or you know tax and tax and corporate law various various deliberate policies that are fundamentally different in the 70s and 80s and have now resulted in an incredible skewing an aggregation of wealth in the hands of the few for him to skip over that and go to lobsters and serotonin feels like skipping some critical steps and also skipping some critical places of potential responsibility and what became real clear is that left and liberal were no longer the same the old original leftists were liberals but the new leftists were illiberals they’re anti-liberal and that’s a disaster you can’t go forward with that kind of pathology and so if you’re somebody like jordan peterson who is thinking integrally and you’re looking around and seeing what the hell’s going on and you’re starting to notice this and then a government comes along and says oh and by the way i’m going to compel your speech that would send anybody with integrity and integral thinking over the wall and so he was up you know all night he did those three videos and you know forcing unconscious bias retraining and political correctness and what he saw happening with that and and the nightmare of bill c-16 threw him up on the net went viral and the main cause of that in my opinion is that is these orange liberal values of equal opportunity that were getting crushed between the extreme far left of green and the strong far right of ethnocentric amber and these liberal values in between were just getting out of the picture and that was a disaster and that was the thing that at least put jordan peterson on the map and he was arguing against bill c-16 because not only that it put into law a constructivist view of human identity that was his complaint it had nothing to do with transgender people and the people that attacked him for being anti-transgender had absolutely nothing to do with that and he’s very clear about that what it was was putting into actual law a constructivist view of human nature which by the way is pure green it’s pure post-modern green viewpoint and that also is an attack on free speech in the worst possible way for me his success signifies how much we’re thirsting for this father energy in our culture what do you make of jordan peterson what do you make of the jordan peterson phenomena yeah i think first of all i would not have predicted it so i don’t want to i i think maybe i’m often called among my among my people who agree with me i’m called a visionary and but i was not a visionary in foreseeing jordan peterson i think it’s amazing that an intellectual that is a young man who is you know who speaks in terms of often of metaphor and an allegory that he has risen to such extraordinary success and i think it is a it is in part a result of our enormous hunger we you know we have we’ve attached to two extremely unlikely figures because of our hunger that donald trump on the one hand and jordan peterson on the other two ends of the extreme in terms of somebody who’s been willing to say you know fathers are important families are important and so jordan and i found ourselves in in an hour and a half dialogue in which i would give a you know i would talk about fathers in rough housing and he would talk about some intellectual piaget or someone else who was you know who was in the literature or in disney movies or something else that related to that and it was just a fascinating hour and a half i i think because you know i’m usually when i’m being interviewed i don’t learn a great deal but i certainly learned it was wonderful the way we learned from each other and you’re you’re from canada yeah one of the the the biggest phenomenon of the last couple of years has been jordan peterson yeah what have you made of of him his rise and what it says about the culture that people are so thirsting for what he’s talking about peterson first of all is very bright extraordinary articulate and in some ways a compelling speaker so he’s an attractive figure in some ways when i read him i sense a lot of suppressed rage in him in fact i think his voice is choking with a rage a lot of the time it’s interesting because he talks about rage that you have to deal with it i don’t think you understand just how angry he is and this and and if you look at his websites the comments are full of rage by his young acolytes now that’s an energetic thing that it’s his energy that draws people as much as what he actually teaches secondly he teaches repression i mean he he very rightly takes an issue where somebody mandates a certain common language and he very rightly and righteously and righteously says that i will not be dictated to about what language i’m going to use well good for him i’m all in favor of not mandating language on the one hand on the other hand he basically advocates repression in his book he talks about how an angry two-year-old child needs to be sit by themselves until they get over it rather than understanding why a child would be angry at age two what frustrations are having and what human contact they need to help them move through that anger he says we press the anger so he’s all about repressed anger as far as i could say and it’s very interesting how he talks about children he talks about little varmints and little monsters and so on i know that’s meant to be humorous but it’s also a certain way of thinking of the young human child so fundamentally i see him as an agent of repression he posing as an agent of libertarianism not to mention he’s got this being his bonnet about what he considers to be seems to consider to be conspiracies by left-wing intellectuals they seem to be his beth noir being a left-wing intellectual myself i like to talk to him sometimes what are you so upset about jordan what are you so afraid of you know he talks about these bloody marxists and and any points are very accurately all the horror that occurred under so-called marxist regimes particularly in the soviet union he’s absolutely accurate about that but then he promotes christianity shall i tell him about the mass murders that occurred in the name of christianity shall i tell him about all the millions that were slaughtered in the names of the gentle jesus in other words let’s be fair about it he seems to pick ideologies to attack and of horror and embrace other ideologies that are just as murderous in practice sometimes it’s a much more interesting question for me what happened in eastern europe how come under an ideology that was meant to deliberate people so many people were oppressed i come from eastern europe i was born in hungary he doesn’t have to tell me about what it was like but how about asking how come a religious philosophy that was meant to promote love and acceptance and compassion has become such an agent of two million of repression oppression and and and and killing so can we be objective or we’re going to be simply tribal about it i have a lot to say to jordan or a lot to as much as i appreciate actually some of what he says and as interesting as i find him i think he’s a very mixed figure largely an agent of repression you