With Australia's top radio host Neil Mitchell in studio...

Dr. Jordan Peterson: Good morning. Good morning! Thank you so much for coming in. You're developing this enormous power and reach. Is it a heavy burden for it?

Well, it's heavy and light at the same time. You know, it's constant. I don't know what I'm doing day-to-day until that day. I have people managing my schedule, and I'm busy enough so that I pretty much attend to the next thing. But the responsibility of getting into all these heads... mm-hmm.

Interviewer: And you are influencing people's lives, aren't you?

Well, I guess I take solace in the fact that so many thousands of people now have written to me and also talked to me to say that things are better for them because they've been trying to do some of the things that I suggest in my lectures. So, it is a heavy responsibility when you have influence of that sort, but it lightens it when you also have evidence suggesting that it seems to be doing people a lot of good.

Interviewer: You're changing lives?

That seems to be the case.

Interviewer: You're saving lives?

Saving lives too? Well, I would say there were six people in the audience last night. I was talking in Melbourne. I would say there were six, maybe there were more, but there were at least six—so half a dozen. They were young men who told me that—that's what they said.

Interviewer: That you had saved their lives.

Yeah. How do you feel about that?

It breaks me up.

Interviewer: Why? It's a very positive thing you've done.

What do you mean it breaks you up?

Well, it's sad that there are so many people in that state of crisis, you know, and they don't need that much encouragement. That's the thing. So, it's sad that it only takes that much encouragement to make that much difference. There's a lot of lost people in the world.

Interviewer: So it's a good thing to be able to help that?

It's overwhelming.

Interviewer: Well, I can tell that you're very emotional about it.

Yeah, well, it's really something. You know, at the time, I hadn't thought much about what had happened last night, but you know, probably 500 people lined up after the talk, and most of them say the same thing. You know, about a quarter of them say, "Look, you're putting into words things I already knew. I always knew, but I didn't know how to say." Just like, "Oh!" That's what archetypal stories do, and I guess that's what articulate people do, you know? So that's a good thing. But then the other three-quarters of them say some variant of, "You know, my life has been turned around." They say, "I was addicted" or "I was drinking too much," or "I wasn't moving ahead. My relationship with my girlfriend—I wasn't getting along with my family. I didn't have any direction in life. I was nihilistic or hopeless or anxious" or any number of variants of those. And I've been trying to put into practice what you've been talking about in your YouTube lectures and podcasts, and it's really helped me turn my life around.

Interviewer: Thank you. It's like, yeah. Do you feel fragile about that?

Well, no, I wouldn't say exactly that. I seem to be able to handle this. It's been going on a long time now. It's been 18 months, and I would say in many ways now it's better than it was because at the beginning, especially when I got in—when I put my hat in the political ring, let's say, because I felt that the Canadian politicians had overstepped their boundaries. You know, my job was threatened quite severely, and I thought I might lose my clinical license as well, and things were up in the air in a big way.

Interviewer: This was over the gender pronoun usage?

Yeah, it was my refusal—my stated refusal to abide by the requirement that I modified my language in a certain manner that I felt was, you know, appropriate. I felt it was inappropriate of the government to demand that I modify my language. The government has no right to intrude on people's lives to that degree. It's very, very dangerous when that happens.

Interviewer: And so, anyways, there was... I've been in one scandal after another in Canada—like seriously, like non-stop for 18 months. The last one, just two days ago, I was at Queen's University in Kingston, and there was a big demonstration. There was a very eerie occurrence—they arrested a woman who was carrying a garrote for God's sake, you know.

Interviewer: Does that frighten you?

That was not good. The Queen's University thing was not good. We were in a hall. It was kind of like a church—this hall. It's what it looked like. It was lined with stained glass windows and probably 20 of them. There was a protester who had climbed up in the window well of all 20 windows, probably five or six feet off the ground. They were seven feet high, these windows, and they were pounding on them—forcefully, forcefully enough in one case to break the window. There were 900 of us inside, and we were surrounded by this group that were pounding on the windows and yelling and pounding on the doors. And it was— and you know, you could see against the stained glass—you could see these shadowy forms pounding away. And it was very eerie. No one in that hall will ever forget that experience.

Interviewer: Why? Why were they trying to get in? Why the garrote? Why the... it sounds like hate. Is it hate?

Some of it was hate for sure.

Interviewer: Why? Why do they hate you?

Because of who they imagine I might be, I guess that's part of it. You know, it's easy to hate someone who's been caricatured. And so, but there's more to it than that. I have been very forceful, let's say, in my criticisms of the radical left—not only in Canada but in the West in general—not critical enough in my estimation. So, I hold no stock whatsoever for the radical leftists. I'm absolutely appalled that they're the force they are in the universities, and I do believe that in many ways, the universities have done more harm in society than good over the last 20 years. And I say that, you know, with a fair bit of regret because I've been obviously associated with universities since 1993.

But that, it's a really interesting thing. Sometimes I enjoy dealing with the radical left in the university. So I think you're going to grow up. You're going to get through this, and I enjoy the challenge and the drama and the—yeah.

Interviewer: It's a challenge of youth saying you're wrong, well I'm right, and I know I'm right because I'm 20 and I know everything.

It's not the students so much.

Interviewer: I'm concerned about staff, is it?

Oh yeah, it's the staff and the administrators. And no, it's not the students. I mean, look, I've been protested against. I watched the protesters, and most of the time, the vast majority of them are young people whose desire to have a positive influence in the world is channeled into this particular political expression at the moment. But so many of them are manipulated by the faculty members. Hmm.

And there's no excuse for that, and what they're doing is far more dangerous than it looks.

Interviewer: Why do young men need you?

Well, first of all, you know, it's not—I would say it's not just young men. Part of that's an artifact of the fact that most of the people who watch YouTube are young men. But I won't evade the question. I mean, because, see, to some degree, maturation among men is a voluntary process. It's not so voluntary for women; they have to grow up fast. They have a lot of things to do before they hit 30.

Yeah, with men it can take longer, and they need a call to adventure, let's say. And they need a call to responsibility, and they need to be initiated into responsibility and to have a case made for its utility. And so I'm saying, look, it's better to be adult than to be a child. It's better—it's better to be in control of your own destiny. There's a place for you in the world; the world would be lesser if you don't take your place in it.

That you have a responsibility to bear to sort out your education, to straighten out your life, and to become who you are. Grow the hell up. Don't grow up for reasons that are positive for you, positive for your family, positive for everyone.

Interviewer: So, is this generation lost? They’re desperate—they're clinging to what you're saying and doing in a desperate...

I'm not criticizing what you're saying I'm doing, but they need it. They need it desperately.

Interviewer: Why?

I think that every generation needs a message that supports maturation and responsibility. I think that we've done a bad job as a culture of putting that message forward. So to me, since the mid-1960s, our young people have been fed a never-ending diet of rights and impulsive freedoms or something like that. And that leaves a hole because most of the meaning that people manage in their lives—and so that would be the meaning that you can offset against the tragedy of life that comes from adopting responsibility and carrying a load. Like human beings in some sense are designed for a load, and the heavier the load, the better.

It's one of the things that gives you—you know, there's this proclivity among psychologists to attempt to facilitate self-esteem, which is a word I don't care much for. I think that self-respect is a much better term, and I think you develop self-respect by carrying a responsibility.

I feel very lucky to be born in this country. I think it's essentially a decent country. It does follow a lot of what happens in the United States. I'll get to that in a moment, but I was talking to some welfare workers, police, Salvation Army yesterday saying to me they think society is becoming—and particularly the younger age group we're talking—is becoming more aggressive, more cynical, more angry.

Interviewer: Do you agree with that, and if so, why?

Well, I don't think the statistics bear that out because what we've seen over the last—especially the last 20 years—is a remarkable decline in violent crime. I do think that there might be an epidemic more of aimlessness and depression and anxiety, that sort of thing, and I think that that's partly because the case for growing up is not made well.

And because we're also so cynical about our own societies. You know, I was in Amsterdam a month ago talking to a group of well-placed intellectuals. They're all friends of Theo van Gogh, who was killed in Amsterdam about 15 years ago. He was stabbed.

Interviewer: And there they said that embarrassment about the Dutch culture is rampant in their society.

And I—that just makes my jaw drop because I go to Holland, and I think, "My God, this is such an amazing place! These people scraped this country out of the bottom of the ocean. They built dikes to hold back the waves. It's free. It's liberal. It's compassionate. It's orderly. It's beautiful." Yet they're embarrassed by it.

They're embarrassed by it because of its tyrannical, patriarchal nature. It's like, "Well, who are you comparing it to?" It's like, "What are we comparing our societies to? Where do you want to live? On the planet or in time anywhere? But in the West? Not if you have any sense."

Interviewer: You think you've sort of been described as a warrior against political correctness? Does that fit?

Yeah.

Interviewer: Tell me about this. In our national carrier Qantas, it got some attention early this week. I was thinking about this—I knew you were coming in—and taking advice from a diversity group. That's a bad idea.

Interviewer: And I wanted to ban words like 'guys' and 'chairman,' 'husband' and 'wife,' replaceable words like 'mankind' and 'chairman.' What's your reaction to that?

I think that it would be better if people tried to solve some real problems instead of playing these idiot diversity games. I think that everyone who plays identity politics—whether they play it on the right or the left—is going to pay for it in ways they can hardly imagine. It's a very counterproductive way of dividing up the world.

Interviewer: It's impossible to come to a peaceful solution in the identity politics universe.

Even the identity politics types themselves, they've run into this problem they call intersectionality, right? So, ok, so you classify people by race and by sex, let's say, so—and seek for equity along those dimensions. But then, well, what about the intersection between those dimensions?

So you have enough ethnic minorities in your organization, let's say. You match by population, which is a foolish way of doing it, but you do that. And maybe you're matched by sex.

But then what about the intersection between race and sex? Well then what about the intersection between race, sex, ethnicity? Then you could add social class to that, then you could add social proclivity, then you could add attractiveness.

There's never-ending ways of dividing people up into groups, and you can't equalize across all those ways. It's just technically not possible.

Interviewer: Do you think people need to make a stand on issues like this? And when an airline like Qantas makes these decisions, do they need to stand against it? Do they need to boycott it and do that sort of thing?

I think they need to understand it at a deeper level. It's like we have to decide if we're going to divide people up if we think that dividing people up primarily by their group identity is a good idea. And it's not. It's a bad idea.

It will lead to an enhancement of our tribal proclivities, and I don't think that if you're an advocate of peace that you would push and advocate for our further division into tribal entities. It's not wise.

Interviewer: Is this transient? When we move through this...

We'll see. It's been not transient in the past. It's caused tremendous troubles in the past. This is another reason why I'm not a fan of the radical leftists.

The radical left ideologies were murderous in their expression throughout the 20th century. I mentioned earlier this country follows a lot of the US trends—good and bad.

Interviewer: Like Canada, we're a little bit behind, but it can be fashioned well. What do we need to be alert to? What do we need to be aware of? What do we need to avoid?

We need to be alert to the benefits of the societies that we now inhabit. We need to be grateful for their existence and note very carefully the unlikelihood of their continued success.

Interviewer: No, I don't understand.

How we managed it in the West—we have societies where the default assumption between human beings is trust. I do not understand how we managed that because there are so many ways that you can be betrayed by someone, especially if you don't know them.

How do you set up a society where the typical interaction between strangers is straight? Oh! How many societies in the world are like that? Like 30, 40—something like that? How did that ever happen?

We don't know, and it's an ongoing miracle, and we should do everything we can not to disrupt it because the alternative to that generous trust—that courageous trust, which is unbelievably productive—is ruled by thugs. And that's the rule in most of the world.

Interviewer: So, do you have optimism or not for the future?

I think we're in a time of extreme chaos. Things could go unbelievably well if we were careful. There are so many good things going on in the world right now—they're almost miraculous.

So, for example, between the year 2000 and 2012, the level of absolute poverty in the world was cut by 50%. That was the fastest rate of improvement by a large margin in human history. It was three years faster than the most optimistic projections had suggested.

There's hundreds of thousands of people a week now being pulled into the electrical power grid. Almost everyone has access to almost infinite computational power and all the educational resources that go along with that.

We're wiping out most transmissible diseases. The fastest-growing economies in the world are in sub-Saharan Africa. Like there are a lot of things—there's no starvation in China. There's a huge middle class in China and India. These things are absolutely miraculous.

And—and God only knows what we could accomplish if we got our act together in the next 20 years. You know, the sky's the limit!

So, but we're playing very foolish games in the West, and we could bring the house down around us, so we'll see.

Interviewer: Thank you so much for coming in. Good luck with the burden.

Dr. Jordan Peterson: Oh, thanks very much for the invitation and for the interview.

Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos.