Transcript of Dr Jordan B Peterson’s Interview on Piers Morgan Uncensored

Now, Trump has already said publicly that he’d rather deal with a weak liberal than a strong conservative, speaking from his pro-American stance. But Canadians really haven’t taken that to heart.

You can’t overestimate the utility of looking the part. And Carney really is a master at that. And the Liberals, the Canadian Liberals, are a treacherous bunch, and they will say anything to get elected. Carney has convinced Canadians that he’s going to put together an effective industrial policy. And this is something that I just can’t understand.

I read his book “Values” twice. I really tried to understand it. And there isn’t anything that Carney believes more deeply than that carbon dioxide is going to destroy the world. He staked his entire soul on that proposition. And now he’s telling Canadians that he’s going to be the leader to turn us back into an industrial dynamo, which is kind of a 1970s vision anyways. And Canadians are desperate to believe that.

The Unintended Consequences of Trump’s Strategy

And then the Liberals have been extremely canny in leveraging that anti-American sentiment. And the Americans, insofar as they care about Canada, have been extremely blind and foolish in relationship to the consequences of their utterances.

I’ve used my connection network to find out what’s going on behind the scenes in DC and it’s pretty clear that the demolition of the Canadian Conservatives is an unintended consequence of Trump’s broader strategy. And so if he would have just held off for a couple of months, then he would have had a much more stable, reliable, productive and intelligent country to the north.

And now I’m afraid, I’m not only afraid that Carney will win, and the polls, especially Polymarket, seem to indicate that at the moment, I don’t actually believe that the country will stay intact with another four to eight years of Liberal governance. I think the west of Canada will decide that it’s had enough.

And certainly the premier of Alberta, which is our oil-rich province, has been very forthright in her objection to everything Carney does. And you know, the minister who was responsible for energy policy under Trudeau was literally a climate activist from the time he was 5. And Carney, with his emphasis on decarbonization, couldn’t be a worse enemy of, really, Canada’s fundamental economic engine.

And of course, now he’s rebranded himself entirely. And as I said, he looks the part. He looks every inch the part, and Canadians would like some stability and to move away from the narcissistic pretender who was our last leader, but they’re not going to get what they bargained for.

The “51st State” Rhetoric and Its Impact

PIERS MORGAN: This concept that Trump keeps pushing of Canada being the 51st state of the United States, I mean, I can’t think of anything more guaranteed to rile most Canadians against an idea than that they would become a vessel state of the U.S. Again, how damaging do you think that has been in making Canadians appreciate the real danger of the Liberals?

DR JORDAN B PETERSON: It’s been very damaging, and this is especially true for older Canadians. There’s a huge age divide in voting preference in Canada. And older Canadians who lived in a stellar period of Canadian history when all of our institutions were solid and reliable, look to Carney to restructure the country, to return the country to its former—I wouldn’t say glory, because glory isn’t a Canadian concept—but productive, peaceful, predictable stability.

That’s not so bad, you know, and we had that for a long time. And older Canadians believe that Carney will bring that back and that he can negotiate effectively with Trump. Younger Canadians aren’t fundamentally concerned with Trump. They’re fundamentally concerned with the fact that their economic future looks dismal.

The projections are that Canada will be the worst performing economy in the developing world for the next 40 years. And that’s definitely a liberal legacy. And the fact that we’re utterly confused about how we’re going to move forward on the basis of the economy that we have, which is not entirely a fossil fuel economy or resource economy. But in large part, that means that there’s no reason to assume that sunnier ways are coming our way.

And young people are really concerned about that. That’s their fundamental issue. Housing price acceleration, for example, which has made many Canadians under 40 despair of ever owning a house in a country that’s got nothing but land to spare.

And so the younger people aren’t concerned about Trump and his saber rattling, but the older people are. And at the moment, that’s enough to tilt the election quite heavily in Carney’s favor. We’re looking at a majority Liberal government at the moment, which is an absolute and utter reversal over the situation even a month and a half ago.

Trump’s Tariff War

PIERS MORGAN: Well, I was going to ask you about—because you’ve been pretty supportive of Donald Trump. This, though, has been a very damaging thing, I think, for what you would have preferred to happen in Canada. Looking at Trump’s wider tariff war that he’s now waging on, it seems, the entire planet. Some people, depending who you talk to, think, well, obviously this has to be done. It needs a radical new rethink. America’s $37 trillion in debt, it’s been losing manufacturing hand over fist, wiping out the middle class and so on.

I can get the big picture argument Trump has been putting forward, but the way he’s going about trying to achieve what he says he wants to achieve is being seen by many as incredibly disruptive, almost certainly destined to fail. What do you think of it, Jordan? We’ve never seen anything quite like it. But what do you think of it?

Trump’s Tariff Strategy and International Relations

DR JORDAN B PETERSON: Well, we haven’t seen anything quite like Trump. And so this is par for the course as far as I’m concerned. My suspicions are that he’s doing what he tends to do, which is to set the cat among the pigeons and see what the consequence is. He’s certainly put the world, and not only Canada, the world, on notice that things need to shift radically.

My suspicion is that what Trump is doing, I mean, I read an interesting article yesterday in Newsweek by Mark Joseph, and he claims, and he’s reasonably well informed, that Trump does, in fact, want to shift the tax burden away from income tax to tariffs. And I don’t know enough about economic history to be a judge of that policy. In principle, that happened, that worked 100 years ago. Does that mean it’ll work again? I have no idea. I don’t think income tax is a great strategy for funding a country. And so, but that’s like a casual and idiotic opinion from someone who isn’t informed in such matters.

But it’s certainly possible that that’s part of what Trump is pursuing. Another real possibility is that he’s doing his Art of the Deal work and he’s terrifying everyone into returning to the negotiating table so that he can make a better deal for the United States and maybe particularly for the working and middle class that he really does seem to care about, that he’s putting everyone on notice that the old order is done and we’re going to make some new negotiations.

And again, I don’t think I’m qualified enough on the political and economic front to judge the suitability of that approach. It certainly seems to have woken up Europe, and that’s something to say because Europe’s been asleep for a long time. And I can’t say that I’m unhappy about that because Europe deserves to be woken up. And it is the case that the working class and the middle class in the United States has been hauled out to some substantive degree and people are unhappy about that. It’s going to take months or years to evaluate this particular strategy.

Now, it’s part of the Art of the Deal issue, though, as far as I’m concerned, is that Trump is thumping his chest and saying, we’re going to retake a new look at things and I’m going to bloody well make sure that the US comes out on top. That’s actually his job. And it’s something, by the way, that we have been spectacularly bad at in Canada. Our industrial policy for the last 30 years, particularly the last 10, has been bad, backward looking to a degree that’s almost unimaginable. We’ve got no strategy for dealing with IP or data ownership, even though that’s the entire new economy. And even if we turn back to an intelligent resource policy, that’ll still mean that we’re stuck in the 1970s.

And so, well, that’s a lot of complication. But I understand Trump’s motivation and he’s certainly taken a radically pro-American stance, which is kind of what you’d want to see from a national leader. Now, I’m not very happy that it was ill-timed from a Canadian perspective and the collateral damage is going to be immense. I also think, and I’ve tried to use my DC contacts to make this known, that the last thing Trump really needs is an international banker with WEF connections who is the UN special climate envoy and who led 400 international companies down the primrose path to idiot net zero policies, maneuvering behind his back and trying to undo everything he’s done, Trump’s done and trying to do, say, even on the climate and industry side, behind his back with his international connections. That was not well thought through. And certainly Pierre Poilievre is the person who’s paying the price for that.

PIERS MORGAN: How does Pierre Poilievre actually feel about this? Because he looked like he was on a certain pathway to become Prime Minister and then bang, through no fault of his own really, and certainly no great work by his opponent. But all because of what’s been happening in the US everything has completely changed. I would imagine he’s feeling very frustrated, isn’t he?

Canadian Politics and Media Challenges

DR JORDAN B PETERSON: Well, I have had the opportunity to speak to Mr. Poilievre on multiple occasions and you know, he never took his victory for granted. One of the things he insisted upon when he was speaking with me was that he was going to campaign continually until the election on the assumption that things could shift radically in a sideways direction and that his apparent lead was not something he would rely on. And I think he has done that and he’s certainly not happy with what’s happened on the Trump side. And that is a but I mean, if you’re going to be the leader of a country, then you’re going to have to deal with the unexpected. And I think he’s done a credible job of that.

Part of Poilievre’s problem too is that communication problem, let’s say, is that the Canadian legacy media, particularly the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, very much similar to the BBC, is state funded and very much inclined to favor the ever ruling Liberals, particularly because Poilievre has threatened, and I think he means it, to defund the CBC, which is an institution that royally deserves being defunded. It’s incompetent to the core.

But Poilievre is having a hard time communicating with Canadians, especially older Canadians who tend to get their news from the CBC, let’s say, and assume that it’s reliable like it was 30 years ago. And so he’s facing that as an obstacle as well. And then he’s also facing the fact that it’s a very deep temptation for Canadians to parade themselves as morally superior to the evil and unpredictable Yankees to the south. And certainly the Liberals have been capitalizing on that and terrifying people about Trump and telling everyone that our relationship with the US is over, which is a preposterous claim in many ways, although Canada definitely needs to differentiate and make more sophisticated its economic structures.

We’re far too dependent on the Americans. And Trump is also in some ways to give the devil his due, pointing that out to Canadians. And one thing he said, and he said this to other countries in the world too, is that if you can’t really bring anything to the negotiating table, if you have no real power, then why should we pay any attention to what it is that you are asking for or claiming?

And I would also put that absolutely 100% firmly at the feet of the Liberals who are hypothetically likely to rectify this now because their policies have been, for example, there’s no east to west pipelines in Canada to speak of. And that’s definitely a liberal doing. And Carney says he’ll rectify that. But he was the author of those policies to begin with.

The other thing he’s done that’s so treacherous, like truly treacherous, is to present himself as an outsider. And what he means by that, I suppose technically is that he’s never been elected, which you know, is a dangerous thing for an actual prime minister of a country. But he’s been a key economic adviser operating both in front of and behind the scenes in Canada for the last decade. And he’s a man that’s responsible in large part for the policies that have made Trump able to do exactly what he has done to Canada over the last month and a half.

You know, if you’re so damn daft that you got no power when you come to the negotiating table, especially when you’re dealing with the superpower Americans and, you know, madman deal making Trump, then it’s not surprising that you’re going to find yourself at a loss and not holding the appropriate cards. And maybe Canadians have woken up to that to some degree, but they’re definitely turning to the wrong man to solve the problem.

So what’s Poilievre is attempting to put forward his pro working class policies and he’s very popular among young Canadians who should have a say in their future. But the saber rattling by the Americans has definitely worked to a staggering degree in favor of Mark Carney and the Liberals. And Canadians are deluded enough to think that he’s a new guy and he’s not. He’s the worst of the old, that’s for sure.

Elon Musk and Government Spending

PIERS MORGAN: The interesting thing about America at the moment is it’s run by two people in terms of Donald Trump and Elon Musk, who I would imagine from a psycho analysis point of view would be just about as fascinating a subject as you could possibly get. We talked about Trump, but what do you make of Elon Musk and the whole DOGE thing, but also the vicious reaction from the woke left, who of course originally had him as their green energy savior?

DR JORDAN B PETERSON: Well, it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if half the money that the American government spent, the Canadian government as well, the British government, governments as such, is utter waste and worse than that, like positively counterproductive. And it’s certainly the case that Musk is the kind of managerial businessman who’s very detail oriented. He’s an engineer. Engineers know how things work from the atoms upward.

I have many engineers as friends and I’ve watched them run companies and the good ones know everything about how their enterprises operate and they pay attention to every detail. And Musk is definitely one of those people. And we know that because he’s done five impossible things, at least. And then he bought Twitter and he cut its staff by 75% and made it work better, despite the fact that his advertising base collapsed. And he did that despite the fact as well that everyone thought it was a mad move economically and practically.

And so I think it’s great that Musk and his team of brilliant young engineers are going through the budget line by line trying to figure out where all the idiot money goes. And I think the left is appalled by that because they’ve set up an entire network of so called non-governmental agencies, organizations, NGOs that are essentially funded by taxpayer money that run their quasi-criminal radical enterprises all around the world. And now the gravy train has ceased to operate. And so it’s not surprising they’re unhappy about that.

But thank God for that as far as I’m concerned, especially given the catastrophic levels of debt that the American government, Western governments everywhere are carrying is absolutely necessary. And for some reason the left is skeptical of big business because they don’t trust capitalists, even though capitalists have made the world wealthy and almost eradicated absolute poverty all around the world, especially since the Berlin Wall fell and done that far more cleanly than socialist or communist governments everywhere by a huge amount.

Apparently the radicals think that big government is trustworthy even though big is the problem. And they believe that because good thinking moralists like themselves are in charge and have the wisdom and the intelligence. And this is also what Carney believes fervently to believe that they could operate by central planning principles and make the world a much better place.

And we know what happens when that happens, Piers. We know what’s happened to Germany, where energy prices are five times what they should be and they cause more pollution than they did 10 years ago before these idiot green policies were put in place. Then there’s you characters in the UK and you guys can’t even make steel anymore. And if you think that’s progress, well then you deserve the poverty that’s coming down the pipes at you very, very rapidly.

And there’s no evidence whatsoever that any of these policies have produced even the tiniest transformation in levels of carbon dioxide output. Not in the least. Especially not with China and India thinking that the west has gone out of its mind. Absolutely. And making their own way forward to an industrial future. And the whole bloody climate thing is a scam from top to bottom anyways and everything about it is a lie. And that’s a terrible thing to understand. And people don’t want to understand that. And no wonder, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true. So yeah, sad.

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The Backlash Against Elon Musk

PIERS MORGAN: In relation to the way the woke left has now turned on Elon Musk, it’s purely because he flipped sides and decided to support Trump because he found he had nothing in common with the woke left. I completely agree with him. I have nothing in common with them either. But his punishment is that all these people who love to have “be kind” hashtags on their bios on social media promptly went out and started torching Tesla dealerships and attacking people in Tesla cars and so on. You know, reacting with violence against somebody for political reasons. What do you think of that?

DR JORDAN B PETERSON: Well, I think that’s a warning to everyone because there’s a tremendous false morality in the planetary savior posturing of the radical left. The anti-capitalist planetary saving posturing is “we’re moral agents because we’re on the side of the planet.” There’s a catastrophe coming down on us that warrants all intervention. All we have to do to be moral people is proclaim to be on the side of Mother Earth. And that justifies everything?

Well, what do you mean by everything? Well, how about violence in service of your moral rectitude? Yep, looks like that’s justifiable too. How about keying your neighbor’s Tesla to show just what a stellar moral individual you are, what an utter pharisee you truly are.

And you can see the line between mere moral posturing in service of these putative goals—saving the planet, let’s say, and anti-capitalism—you can see that that has the proclivity to turn into violence at the drop of a hat. And here’s the excuse: The world’s greatest industrialist is trying to go through the budget line by line, which by the way, is an extraordinarily difficult thing to do. And he’s putting his own ventures at risk to do it.

And his reward is that the radicals decide that he’s enemy number one and do everything they can, not even to undermine him, although that’s happening, but to target people who bought green vehicles from the most effective electric car manufacturer in the world. And that’s progressive logic. Progressive, right.

Political Views and Maturity

You know, Piers, one of the things I figured out, there’s this finding in the psychological literature that people become more conservative as they get older. And that’s actually not the right way to read that data. The right way to read that data is that progressive policy, that infantile, hedonistic, self-centered progressive policy is nothing but the political expression of radical immaturity. And that like classical liberalism and classic small C conservatism, is something that you have to learn how to manage painfully as you get older.

And so the reason that those Marxist doctrines and the socialist hedonistic, “we’re going to take care of you for the rest of your life” doctrines go away despite all the evidence that they’re pathological to the core, is because they are really nothing but the political expression of radical immaturity.

And so that’s a much better way of looking at it psychologically because otherwise it’s a mystery, like why do these ideas never go away despite the fact that they’ve been demonstrated time and time again to be utterly counterproductive. Why does Eastern Europe think that the west has lost its mind turning to these policies that destroyed them for 70 years?

Well, the answer is that if you haven’t grown up, you look to progressive hedonism as the expression of your failure to develop. And that’s what we’re seeing playing out in the West. It’s probably a pathology of wealth, you know, because it’s easy to be over-coddled and turn to irresponsible hedonism and to presume that that’s the appropriate political stance.

And the leftists, well, and we can see where that leads. And I think the Tesla example is a great one. It’s like the border between that holier-than-thou radicalism and the idiot violence that’s actually merely targeting people who bought a Tesla. There’s no line at all. And we should pay very, very careful attention to that.

The Netflix Drama “Adolescence”

PIERS MORGAN: Yeah, I completely agree. Let’s just change subject slightly to this Netflix drama phenomenon, “Adolescence,” which is really in your wheelhouse, I think, Jordan, because it follows a 13-year-old boy who’s suspected of killing a young girl and he’s been adversely influenced, affected by what he’s seen online. Some pretty extreme stuff, a lot of misogyny. He’s portrayed as a young incel and so on.

There’s now a move to have this series shown in schools. It’s been a huge hit in the UK, in America and everywhere else. I don’t know if you’ve seen it yet, but you’ve probably seen the coverage of it. What do you make of the fact A, that it’s been so successful and B, the premise behind it, that we’re basically having an epidemic at the moment of young boys in particular whose brains are getting scrambled by pretty vile stuff online?

The Crisis of Youth and Demoralization

DR JORDAN B PETERSON: Well, look, there is a crisis of youth both among young men and young women. And with young men it’s a consequence of the fact that they’ve been programmatically demoralized for 60 years. I would say their play preferences in schools are not favored because boys tend to be more active as they’re taught that competition is wrong by utter fools who don’t understand that peaceful competition in game-like settings is actually an advanced form of cooperation that socializes aggression.

They’ve been taught that their ambition is nothing but a manifestation of the oppressive patriarchy. They’ve been taught that all of their attraction towards women is to be regarded with extreme skepticism because fundamentally they’re nothing but would-be rapists. And you know, that all has an effect.

I’ve been struck to the core over the last six years as my influence has grown to see just exactly the scope of demoralization among young people. Talk about men first all around the world and also Pierce, hurt as well by the observation that many of these young men can be set right with not much more than some truly encouraging words. And that exaggerates the pain because the problem is deep and the solution isn’t that complex or difficult and you don’t need that much of it.

I warned back in 2016 about this assault on masculinity. I said, you people, you keep pushing, you’re going to find out you think strong men are a problem. You wait till you produce weak men who are resentful and bitter because of their failure. And you’re going to see real trouble and you’re going to see people turn.

The Andrew Tate Phenomenon

Well, and this is happening to some degree because one of the most popular influencers in the world among young men is Andrew Tate. And I wouldn’t hold out much hope for the west if Andrew Tate is the direction that young men go in. Because he’s a bad actor right to the core.

But the thing about someone like him is that if you’re weak and dependent and demoralized by your culture, let’s say, and you’ve fallen into that isolated trap, someone blustery and successful on the surface and aggressive and dominating in the power-mad way that Andrew Tate is, is going to look pretty damn attractive compared to your infantile dependency.

And the other thing about that, Pierce, is there’s some truth in it because it’s actually better to be a bit of a monster than a complete bloody lamb. And, you know, a passive lamb. I’ll give you an example. So in the Lord of the Rings, for example, when the Hobbit Bilbo decides that he’s going to stop being hyper protected, the first thing he has to do is join this band of miscreants and become a bit of a thief.

There’s a bit of darkness that has to be incorporated into men before they can mature, before they can stop being children. And there’s different pathways that can take, and it can take that blustery, quasi-psychopathic route that characterizes people like Andrew Tate and the hyper masculinity that goes along with that. Or it can be truly civilized and socialized so that men can become civilized and staunch competitors who are moving forward implacably in the world.

That’s much more complicated to manage, right? Because that’s the true path of civilization, the self-sacrificial path of true civilization. An alternative to mere utilization of power or degeneration into hedonism. But we’ve decided in our culture that we’re going to throw the baby out with the bathwater and that everything about the patriarchy is pathological. And the consequence of that is that we’re demoralizing young men.

The Impact on Young Women

Now that also turns out to be very bad for young women because they might even be in worse shape than young men. And so you get a show like “Adolescence,” and it does target in some way one element of the problem, although it’s ill-formed in its psychological analysis, and there are much greater threats to the integrity of British culture, as Kemi Badenoch pointed out this week, than violent incel culture of which really, Pierce, there’s pretty much none.

Like, I’m not saying that that isn’t a lurking psychological danger, and I think the Andrew Tate phenomenon points to that, but you guys in the UK, and maybe everyone in the west more broadly, we have more serious things to consider than conspiratorial incels.

Let’s take the Muslim extremist front, shall we? Even countries like the UAE and Saudi Arabia have been insistently warning the west that the true danger from Islamism is going to come from Europe and the UK in the future and not from places like the UAE and Saudi Arabia which have already become alert to the threat. And for those who might want to call me racist for pointing such things out, it’s like, well, the UAE and the Saudis, they know what they’re talking about when it comes to such things. And so we could dispense with that right away.

Political Posturing vs. Real Solutions

And Kemi Badenoch, I would say, put her finger on the true problem, or at least one of the true problems. Keir Starmer, he’s just playing that typical leftist game that it’s toxic young masculinity, and particularly of the Caucasian version, which is really quite the insane claim. That’s the thing that young people should be taught more about, because obviously they’re not demoralized enough yet.

So that’s what I think of “Adolescents.” Jesus, talk about putting the cart before the horse. And it’s exactly what you’d expect from the progressive playbook. It’s like we’re going to double down on the incels. Well, why don’t you give some thought to trying to figure out why they’re so bloody isolated? Why young men and women are so isolated from one another now that they don’t even date? They don’t drive, they don’t drink, they don’t go out, they don’t date, they don’t marry. Why is that?

How about because it’s 60 years of radically demoralizing quasi-feminist, dim-wit, hedonistic leftist propaganda shoveled at them from grade one all the way through university. And of course they’re going to turn to figures like Andrew Tate in their desperation.

But you might as well do a causal analysis and try to figure out why they’re so bloody demoralized to begin with. And I would say I actually know something about that because I think I’ve talked to more demoralized young people in the last 10 years than anybody on the planet, and I’ve watched and seen what works. And more demoralization is not the answer.

The Model for Healthy Masculinity

There’s something remarkable about well-socialized masculinity. One of the things I learned, for example, when I was writing my last book, one of the things I analyzed was the symbolic use of the figure of the shepherd in the biblical corpus. Because the shepherd figures large both in the Old Testament and in the New.

And the reason for that is because the shepherd is a very good symbol of well-socialized, ordinary masculinity. Shepherds in the ancient Middle East had to live by their own wits in the wilderness. And so they were tough guys, and they had to keep the wolves and the lions at bay with pretty primitive weapons, as exemplified in the story of Moses and in the story of David. But at the same time, they had to protect the most vulnerable. And a lamb is a pretty good example of something vulnerable and edible, especially by monsters.

And so the model for masculinity, the biblical model for masculinity, at least in part, is tough enough to keep the bloody wolves and the lions at bay and resourceful enough to survive on your own and then devoted to caring for the most vulnerable. And that’s a pretty damn good model. And it’s certainly exemplified by the figure of Christ in the New Testament, who’s metaphorically a shepherd, capable of keeping the worst evils at bay while simultaneously serving the most alienated and vulnerable.

That’s the right model for masculinity. And if you don’t think that exists, well, you’re definitely part of the problem and not part of the solution. And maybe you’re a woman who’s been damaged by men who’ve entered into your life who are radically immature or mad users of power. That’s really sad, and there’s plenty of that, too. But that doesn’t mean that at its core, there’s something pathological about masculinity.

And it certainly doesn’t mean that the radical leftist proclivity to describe everything as an oppressive patriarchy and to make men weak is doing anything other than hurting young people right to the core. And Starmer’s posturing with regards to “Adolescence” is only going to make that worse. It’s bad psychology. And it’s not only that, it’s also oriented not to help young people, but to make Mr. Starmer feel a hell of a lot more secure in the idiot presumptions of his dimwit progressivism.

And that’s really the fundamental aim. It’s like, how can we show we’re right? And if we have to burn some young people on the pyre to make sure that our moral presuppositions can remain intact and our faith in our idiocy remains unchallenged, then we might as well teach kids using a Netflix series on adolescence. Jesus. Brutal. Pathetic to the core.

This terrible moral posturing, I think, is the most pathological element of our age. How can we garner as much undeserved moral credit as we possibly can? Well, we’ll stand up against toxic masculinity and we’ll worship the planet. It’s so appalling, so destructive.

And the evidence is also in, Pierce. Look at Germany, for God’s sake. What a mess. And you guys in the UK, you’re not much better. And we’re walking down the same road in Canada, so Western Europe as a whole. I’ve gone through Eastern Europe many times now, talked to many Eastern Europeans there, and they’re appalled at what’s happening in the west, and they’re rightly so. It’s all part of the same mess that Starmer’s still pushing, race to the bottom. Christ.

PIERS MORGAN: Jordan, I’m always struck by how emotional you get when you talk specifically. And this has happened a few times when I talk to you, when your mind takes you specifically to young men who’ve come and told you what they’ve been going through, and it’s almost like you’ve become a surrogate dad to just, I don’t know, hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of young men who, for whatever reason, have been lost and feel lost and feel abandoned and feel don’t have anyone to try and try and steer them to some better place. Why does it affect you so emotionally?

The Importance of Deep Listening and Responsibility

DR JORDAN B PETERSON: Well, you know, Pierce, before my public presence emerged, let’s say, or developed, I worked as a clinical psychologist, and that was pretty intense. I spent about 13 hours a week, maybe more than that, listening to people at a very deep level. I really liked that. It was unbelievably interesting, you know, it was like one Dostoyevsky novel after another, hour by hour. And I really learned to listen, and people are so fascinated if you listen to them and they actually start to tell you what they think. They’re unbearably interesting. It’s just partly why people keep the conversations at a shallow and polite level. But I like to go deeper than that.

That was kind of bounded when I was doing my clinical practice. It was a set number of hours a week, and I had many other things to occupy myself with. But then when the work I was doing started to explode, I was in contact with thousands of people, not individuals. And they talked to me. And I could see this demoralization, you know, and it’s part of fatherlessness, broadly speaking, and sometimes specifically.

The Path to Meaning Through Responsibility

I could see the pathway to rectifying that. The pathway to rectifying that, as far as I have been able to understand, and I’ve understood this more deeply as the years have gone by, is that we’re built for adventure, Pierce. And you take on adventure by taking on maximal responsibility. And that’s the symbol of hoisting your cross voluntarily and trudging up the hill, right? And that’s the symbol upon which our society is founded.

The adventure of life justifies its suffering and it’s maximized with maximal responsibility. And it’s maximized with truth. Because if you tell the truth, what should happen as a consequence of the truth makes itself manifest in the world. And that’s the best possible outcome. But it’s also the most adventurous thing that you can do, the most exciting thing you can do, hands down, there’s nothing that compares to it, that pathway of maximal responsibility, voluntary responsibility and truth.

I understand that deeply. At a religious level, I understand that that’s the symbolic world on which our productive and peaceful culture was properly founded. And I’ve seen the effect of communicating that to people, thousands of people. And it’s a great privilege to serve that role. But it’s also overwhelming. I think it is one of the things that made me ill for quite a long time. And I think that was part of the reason, just seeing this malaise, so deep, and it’s also so easily addressed in a sense. It’s that paradoxical combination of depth of suffering and ease of rectification.

The Conservative Approach to Morality

I kind of understood what the conservatives have done wrong all along. They tend to moralize in a finger wagging way, you know, you should do this, you should do that. And there’s truth in that, that imposition of mature structure on immature hedonism and disunion and disorientation. But it’s much better to talk to young people about morality and truth as an adventure than as a moral burden, as something that enlightens and offers opportunity, which it absolutely 100% does.

I’ve had so many young men come to me, I don’t know how many, but there’s thousands. It’s continual, who say, “I was completely disoriented and lost five years ago. I started putting my world in order a little bit, making my bed, you know, in that cliched way. At least it’s a gesture in the right bloody direction, trying to tell the truth, because now I understand that that’s necessary. Trying to act responsibly and my life is completely turned around.”

These are guys who are usually standing up straight and they have a girlfriend and maybe they have a baby and maybe they’re married, and they were bloody suicidal wrecks five years ago. So, great. And as I’ve delved into this, I’ve started to understand more deeply why this works. And it does work because this pattern of voluntary self-sacrifice, that service to the truth, service to your wife, to your kids, to the future, to your community, all of that is what makes your life rich and meaningful because your self-regard and the significance of your existence is obviously proportional to the burden that you’re willing to uphold.

That’s the symbol that underlies Western culture. And I’m trying to teach people what that means. The alternative is something like power and compulsion or this idiot hedonism that certainly does no one any good.

The Paradox of Suffering and Rectification

Well, it’s overwhelming, I suppose. The magnitude of it, I suppose, is what’s overwhelming. But also that paradoxical juxtaposition of depth of suffering and relative ease of rectification. These things are so obvious when you lay them out. It’s like, who do you admire? You admire some power-mad hedonist? Well, that would be Andrew Tate. Or do you admire someone who’s taken on some responsibility? Your natural proclivity in a healthy psyche is to admire the shepherd, let’s say, and not the goddamn tyrant and not the hedonist who lives for the immediate pleasure driven by his whims.

It’s hard for me to imagine that we’ve forgotten these things. I guess that’s part of the religious degeneration of the religious substrate in the West. We’ve forgotten what our symbols mean. And the thing is, Pierce, they mean something. There’s something I’ve really figured out. We put the crucifix, for example, at the center of our churches. And we put the churches at the centers of our towns particularly. That’s a European thing. And the reason for that is because we long ago understood that the proper foundation of the world is voluntary self-sacrifice upward. And that’s true. It’s absolutely true.

And if you understand that truth, your life becomes meaningful even in its suffering. And you set things right around you. And everyone has to remember that in the West. We have to remember that. We have to relearn that. We’re going to be weak in the face of Islamism, for example. We’re going to be weak in the face of progressivism, nihilism and despair. And we are already. And it’s because we’ve forgotten the deepest things, not only the deepest things that we knew, but the very things that the best countries in the world have been founded on.

And you might say, well, what do you mean by best? It’s like, how about the countries that the miserable and oppressed flee to voluntarily? How’s that a definition for best? And if you think that those countries existed independent of their Judeo-Christian foundation, you don’t know anything. You don’t know anything and you’re a danger. So yeah, so that’s what I’ve been touring around San Diego for like eight years.

PIERS MORGAN: Yeah, well, I was going to say, you know, I wanted to end by mentioning two things which really in a way you’ve kind of talked about without actually specifying them. One is your tour where you’ve been doing a lot of this very emotive talking, very heart-rending talking. The tour comes to Europe in May and the UK June 12th to the 19th. And you’ve also had the Peterson Academy, which goes from strength to strength.

But both of these things, it seems to me, if you are a young man confused about life and your purpose and what it means to be a man and your masculinity, and you are being bombarded with all this negativity all the time and you’re watching adolescents and thinking, is that how everybody views young men? They could do a lot worse. In fact, I would urge them to go and watch your show and to sign up for your academy, because at the very least, what they would be getting is a more positive expression of what it means to be a man and a guideline to how you don’t have to get sucked in to all the negativity and you don’t have to go down these paths.

You can make a different choice. But a lot of them, Jordan, as you know, from talking to them, they feel like they don’t have anyone they can talk to. But actually, in a way, you know, because of the medium of live shows, of YouTube in particular, where you’re extremely dominant, obviously, and through the academy, they actually can. Because they can do it through you. They can do it through the prism you are.

The Peterson Academy and the Adventure of Truth

DR JORDAN B PETERSON: Well, the Peterson Academy is a good example of that, not least because it has a very effective social media element. We have 40,000 students and about 15,000 active users of the social media site. And it’s very positive. People are exchanging their visions of the future and their plans for development. We monitor it very carefully, Pierce. We had to toss about 10 people out of 15,000 off because 10 people misbehaving was enough to tilt the whole thing in a pathological direction. Very interesting thing to watch. But if people are looking for a community, they can definitely find it there. And it’s a community that’s aiming upward and not in a naive manner.

It’s easy to think of morality as never doing anything wrong, but that’s… You want to aim to not err, fair enough. But the other side of it, that’s never amplified, let’s say, particularly by the conservatives who are concerned about morality, is that there isn’t a greater adventure than truth and responsibility. And I don’t mean that in a trivial manner.

It’s like with the truth, for example. Why is the truth an adventure? Because if you’re going to say what you believe to be true, you have to sacrifice the outcome. Right? You can’t use your words instrumentally in a manipulative way. You have to say what you think is the case, and then you have to let the cards fall wherever the hell they’re going to. And that can be a real mess. But it’s unbelievably exciting because you don’t know what’s going to happen.

We know in the West, at least we knew, that the truth is what sets you free. And that the world of proper order is founded on the truth. And there’s terrible risk in that, as everyone who’s tried to tell the truth under difficult circumstance comes to understand. But the payoff is that your life is so exciting if you only say what you believe to be true that it becomes virtually unbearable. And you need that, too, because you need an unbearable meaning to give you strength and commitment when you’re suffering deeply, and many young people are suffering deeply.

They don’t know where to turn. And you turn towards the truth, and you turn towards responsibility. Like, why wouldn’t you want that? To have someone you could care for deeply, your wife, and to be able to make sacrifices on behalf of your children and your grandchildren. All that does is extend your view way out into the future.

In the story of Abraham, God comes to Abraham as the voice of adventure. And he says to Abraham that he has to leave his zone of infantile comfort and move into the terrible world. And he makes them a deal. He says, if you do that, this is the covenant of Abraham. This is the covenant that our civilization is founded on. If you follow the pathway of maximal adventure, here’s what happens. You become a blessing to yourself. Your name becomes known validly among your people. You establish something of permanence. You do that in a way that brings nothing but abundance to everyone, and no one can stand in your way.

And that’s what I’m trying to tell young people, is that if you follow the proper pathway upward, then your life becomes so rich that even the suffering justifies itself. And they understand that, Pierce. They understand that, and they put it into action, and they straighten out their lives. And, you know, my sense is I started doing this because I was concerned about the culture war. I was concerned about the manner in which totalitarianism emerges. But my discovery, I suppose, or presumption, was that you fundamentally address that one soul at a time. It’s not a political issue.

The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship

DR JORDAN B PETERSON: And everybody kind of knows that the culture war is much deeper than the mere political. That’s what we’re trying to do with Arc too, with the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship. It’s not a political movement. It’s a movement designed to foster individual fortitude and purpose, and that has to be put in place before the political can even operate, before the liberal dream, let’s say, can make itself manifest. There’s no free societies without trust, and there’s no trust without responsible citizens. And that’s the best way to act.

And it’s also the way, man. It makes you more confident, it makes you more trustworthy, it makes you a better partner. It makes you far more attractive to women, at least women with any sense, they can be demented by their attraction to idiot psychopaths, and you know that, because psychopaths are very good at gaming female confidence. But in the final analysis, women are looking for a stalwart shepherd, and that’s been true forever. And I’m trying to remind young men to be that and young women to notice.

And why does that make me emotional? Well, because I’ve seen the breadth of suffering and the consequence of its rectification, you know, and there’s a sense of desperation about it, I suppose, too, because there’s so many people that are suffering. And I suppose in his own way, demented way, Keir Starmer recognizes that to some degree, and that’s why he’s stumbling so foolishly towards this television series. But all of his presuppositions are wrong and shallow and he’s part of the problem and not part of the solution.

The education system has been dominated by progressives for four generations. And it’s produced a culture of infantile dependency and anti-masculinity. And that’s been terrible for young men, but equally terrible for young women. And more of the same is not going to fix that, you know, and you say, well, where do we turn for a better model? Well, I outlined a better model. That’s a better model. Obviously, everyone knows it.

PIERS MORGAN: Yeah. Well, I’ve got three sons, Jordan, who, as you know, are all massive fans of yours. I, as a parent, would much rather they take guidance from you than Andrew Tate. And that’s the bottom line.

DR JORDAN B PETERSON: Well, those are the two choices.

PIERS MORGAN: See it for what it is.

The Privilege of Service

DR JORDAN B PETERSON: Yeah, well, you know, it’s a privilege to be of service, Piers. Seriously, like, it’s so rewarding that it’s almost incomprehensible. It’s why my wife and I keep touring, you know, and she’s got very good at this too and has taken these things very seriously and it’s really transformed her life, especially after she just about died a couple of years ago. And she’s put herself together so remarkably and has learned these things deeply and is trying to provide salutary service to young women. And we’ll see how that goes. They’re a hard market to reach, a hard audience to reach, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. So it’s hard for Starmer and his crew to rethink their first principles, you know?

PIERS MORGAN: Yeah, well, they should talk to you. They should talk to you. In my opinion, just to wrap up, Jordan, I’ve got to say, I’ve interviewed you many times. I think this has been our best interview. I just think the way you’ve opened up and the way you’ve articulated these problems and how best they can be fixed is just so important for people to hear. And the fact it moves you so much to me says it all. If you didn’t genuinely care, you wouldn’t get emotional talking about this stuff. Why would you?

But you genuinely, passionately care that young people are put on the right pathway to adult life. And I think it’s… As a parent, I thank you. Honestly, I do. I see the impact on my own sons when they listen to you. And again, I’d much rather they take their guidance from you than someone like Tate, who I think is just a chancer on the make and exploiting people. I don’t think you’re ever that kind of person. You’re doing it because you genuinely care and there’s a massive difference.

DR JORDAN B PETERSON: Well, thank you, sir. It’s like I said, it’s a privilege to serve like it truly is. You know, I can’t… Look, imagine this. You know, imagine that wherever you go in the world, people come up to you and tell you that they put themselves together and their life is much better because they’ve been trying to put into practice what you’ve been suggesting, man. Like, just… You could let yourself dream and you could dream of what you would want if you had sense and you could have anything. And that’s what you pick.

And that’s the consequence of putting yourself in service. Like, really. That’s the consequence of serving the truth and putting yourself in service. And anything hedonistic, anything that might accrue to you as a consequence of power. They’re not even in the same universe, you know, if you have the pearl of great price, you don’t need any other treasure.

PIERS MORGAN: Completely agree, Jordan. It’s been brilliant. Thank you so much again for joining me again. I love talking to you. I feel like as we get to know each other better, you open up to me more and more and I feel very privileged to listen to you. So thank you very much.

DR JORDAN B PETERSON: Yeah, well, it’s been a pleasure getting to know you. And I’m also very thankful for the fact that you’ve treated me so straightly, and with no tricks and no games and that we communicate. That’s rare, especially, you know, there’s a legacy media element to what you’re doing, but you’re never playing tricks with me. And that’s much appreciated and definitely noticed. So, yeah, thank you for that.

PIERS MORGAN: Thank you, Jordan. Great to talk.

DR JORDAN B PETERSON: Maybe we’ll see you in the UK.

PIERS MORGAN: Yeah, I’ll take you for dinner. We share a love of the same Italian restaurant. I shall take you there. You will be my guest.

DR JORDAN B PETERSON: All right. Good to see you, Piers. And thanks again.

PIERS MORGAN: Great to see you, Jordan. All the very best. Thank you very much.

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