Conversation between Sam Harris & Jordan Peterson - Waking Up Podcast #67

[Music]

Welcome to the Waking Up Podcast. This is Sam Harris.

Okay, well today, back by popular demand, I have Jordan Peterson. Jordan is a clinical psychologist and professor at the University of Toronto. He formerly taught at Harvard University, and he has published articles on drug abuse, alcoholism, and aggression, but he's made a special focus on tyranny. Of late, he has been fighting a pitched battle against political correctness up in Canada, and he's attracted a lot of support and criticism on that front.

As I said last time around, he is far the most requested guest I've ever had. We did a podcast about four or so episodes back entitled "What Is True," podcast number 62. To the disappointment of everyone, that was a fairly brutal slog through differing conceptions of epistemology. If ever the phrase "bog down" applied to a podcast, it applied there. Some people enjoyed it, but most of you didn't.

As I say in the conversation today with Jordan, I did a poll online, and 30,000 of you responded. Eighty-one percent wanted us to try again because there was much more to talk about, and as it turns out, there was. We had a much better conversation this time around. It was very collegial, and if you have anything to say about it, feel free to reach out to Jordan and me on Twitter or make noise wherever you want.

And now, I bring you Jordan.

[Music]

Peterson: I am back here with Jordan Peterson. Jordan, thanks for coming back on the podcast.

Peterson: My pleasure.

Harris: Let's just take a moment to bring people up to speed while we can assume many have heard our previous effort at this—some won't have. We did a podcast a little over a month ago. It was podcast 62, I believe, on my list, and it went fairly Haywire. We intended to speak about many things but got bogged down on the question of what it means to say that a proposition is true.

I consider this actually a very interesting problem in philosophy, but it seemed to me that we got stuck at a point that wasn't very interesting, and many of our listeners felt the same. At the time, I didn't let the conversation proceed to other topics because I felt that it would just be pointless. I knew you wanted to talk about things like the validity of religious faith and Jungian archetypes and many other controversial things, and I felt if we couldn't agree on what separates fact from fantasy, we would just be doomed to talk past one another.

I think it's still possible we are doomed to talk past one another, but we ran a Twitter poll after our first podcast, and despite all the complaints I received about our conversation, eighty-one percent of people wanted us to make a second attempt. I think 30,000 people answered that poll, so it was a considerable number of people. I decided we should give our people what most of them claim to want, and we'll just see how it goes because I don't want us to fight the same battle all over again.

I think listeners who are curious about how that last conversation went can listen to it, and I'm sure the topic of truth and falsity will come up. But if it does, I think the best thing to do is kind of flag it on the fly and move on. I think this will be an exercise in seeing just how much can profitably be said across differing epistemologies. With that warning about the various road hazards, I think we should just see where we wind up, and I think it could be someplace interesting because you and I appear to share many of the same concerns.

I think we both find the question of how to live in this world to be the most important one, and I think we're equally concerned about some of the very well-subscribed answers to that question that are obviously wrong. So, I think we should just do our best to make sense and see where it goes.

Peterson: Well, I hope so too. That seems right. I mean, you place a tremendous emphasis on the moral necessity of the spoken truth, and that's certainly something that I'm in accord with. You're also concerned with ethics in relationship to the alleviation of suffering from what I’ve been able to understand from what I've read of your writings, and you're also very much con...