Jordan B. Peterson | Full interview | SVT/TV 2/Skavlan

right well well please which phone do you find the hardest to follow yourself probably the hardest one is to tell the truth or at least not to lie well it's a constant challenge well because it's easy to use your speech in a way that pays off in the short term and it's difficult to contend with the conflict that's inevitable if you try to do things in a straightforward manner because that produces short-term conflict it produces long-term peace which is a huge advantage but it's very tempting in the short term to circumvent the problem and pretend that it's not there do you sometimes avoid telling the truth just to be kind I try to be as kind as possible but no good I'm tempted to yeah because I'm fundamentally an agreeable person surprisingly enough but I'm convinced that it's better to face things when they need to be faced and to get to the bottom of things even though that's and of course you have to be constituted in that manner if you're going to be useful psychotherapists because you can't let things go they have to be dealt with just like they have to be dealt with if if you're a medical professional it's unpleasant to sit tell someone that they have an illness it hurts their feelings it upsets them but if you don't deal with it then perhaps they die and psychological issues can be of the same significance you you talked you talked sometimes about weak man mm-hmm why are weak men such a problem what weak people are a problem in general and I don't mean physically weak I mean cowardly let's say and deceitful because I'm thinking it more in terms of moral weakness well there's a variety of reasons is first of all if you can't support your own weight let's say then someone else has to do it and that's not good and then if you don't make your pathway if you don't pick a four right and useful and noble pathway through life then you will become bitter and and and to hurt by the tragedy of existence and then you tend to seek your revenge wherever you can get it and that's not good so it's a it's a mistake on all fronts it's not good for you it's not good for your family it's not good for the community it's certainly not a good medium to long term strategy because life is very very difficult and you have to be prepared for that and and I had a watcher the other night he was at my lecture in Oslo and he wrote me a letter he was a 17 year old boy and he said that he that my work had been very helpful to him his father had died suddenly about six months before and he found his dad when he was dying and was very very shocked and horrified and hurt by what had happened and I had recommended on my youtube lectures that one thing you could aim for was to be the strongest person at your father's funeral and so that's what he did and he helped his mom and he wrote a 200 word eulogy and got through it and so good for him that strength and necessary it's a terrible thing that happened but he did everything he could not to make it any worse than it had to be but do you never see that showing weakness can be a strength - not weakness vulnerability that's that's a whole different thing to admit - to admit to the fact that you're vulnerable that's a form of courage that's not a form of weakness but that leads you to take whatever steps are necessary to deal with that properly it isn't some facade that you're invulnerable no one is invulnerable by any stretch of the imagination and to stand up and face that is is the best route that you have well why why do you think so many young men are following you because you you have a lot of your best for them genuinely I mean everything more than you do for young women no no no why do you think so many are young men oh well I think part of its technological fluke I mean I came to prominence at least in part on YouTube because I put my university lectures there and it happens to be the case that 80% of the people who watch YouTube are young men so there's that and it's hard to know how to factor that in exactly but then I'm also I think that young women are encouraged a lot which is fine as far as I'm concerned but I think that that's less true for young men now because we believe that there's something pernicious about male competence and activity it's part of a I suppose it's part of the notion that the best way to characterize Western society is as a tyrannical patriarchy which is a appalling doctrine as far as I'm concerned how come is that well it's not a tyrannical patriarchy so it's not tyrannical that's the first thing certainly not compared to any other governmental form that currently exists and has ever existed and it's not essentially patriarchal unless you believe that women haven't contributed in immense part to the construction of what we have now so and I also don't believe that to the degree that it is patriarchal that its structure is dependent on the expression of power arbitrary power on the part of men I think that happens sometimes but only when things go wrong what you're doing and doing now as well is is is challenging the the idea of gender equality that is very important in in in Scandinavia I think it's it's as you probably know why do you think that that can be a problem yeah equality I don't think that equality of opportunity is a problem I think that's a great thing and that anyone with any sense champions equality of opportunity I mean even if you're purely selfish say and purely self-centered you'd want to set up an economy where everyone who had ability could be maximally exploited by everyone else because then we can all benefit from each other's talents and so equality of opportunity is absolutely useful fundament principal so where's but that has nothing to do with equality of outcome those things aren't even in the same conceptual universe and to strive for equality of outcome is well it's a fool's game and likely to be extraordinarily it has proved to be in the past extraordinarily dangerous as well as impossible so I mean one of the things we know for example is that I don't know to what degree it's common knowledge in Scandinavia but the biggest differences between men and women in the world in terms of temperament and interest are in Scandinavia and they've maximized as a consequence of your egalitarian policies what do you mean by that it means that the more egalitarian your state the bigger the personality differences between men and women that's like the it's how do you measure that how do you know that oh well psychologists have perfected at least to some degree the measure of personality over the last thirty years with very advanced statistical models and so what you do is you offer men and women well validated tests of preference and of personality and you do that all across the world with tens of thousands of people in multi country samples and then you look at the difference between men and women and then you rank order that by wealth and egalitarian social policy and what you find is the more egalitarian this society the more different the men and women become is this something you can recognize or is it I would say for me it's quite a simple question actually do we want that our sons and daughters should have the same opportunities and the same man the same dreams or in hopes for the good thing or no and for me it's simple to ask that answer that it's yes of course so for me equality and gender equality is very very important for me also when we talk about gender equality is important for me to learn my daughter that her mom can lead and show the way and her dad can hug and kiss her and show feelings and I think that's something very important for they the hoots where kids grow up to show feelings to to have these gender quality discussions to show her a way of opportunities and to strive forward and it's important both for lonely men lonely young men but also for women that feel this this roof of glass they need to to fight and to struggle the roof of glass - yeah to be successful in their lives do you agree on this I think that equality of opportunity is a perfectly reasonable proposition I mean I have a daughter and the wife I do everything I part and many many female clients and who I've consulted with and helped and and in many cases accelerated helped accelerate the development of their career tremendously it's of obviously of great utility to encourage forward striving in in young people and people in general that's not the issue in the least the outcome yeah well then why do you think the the outcome and these countries where the outcome is is more equal why do you think that leads to a bigger differences between oh because there's only two reasons that men and women differ one is cultural and the other is biological and if you minimize the cultural differences you maximise the biological differences so I know everyone's shocked when they hear this that this isn't shocking news people have known this in the scientific community for at least 25 years and it's been replicated in the last month three times in three separate samples including in science which is the world's greatest scientific magazine by a large margin and it isn't the small effect it's a huge effect but so excuse me what does it mean does it mean it's getting even men and women are having more difficulties meeting each other talking to each other than other places no not necessarily but it does mean that there are reasons for differences in participation rates in different occupations that aren't a consequence of socialization so for example as is especially true at the extremes so for example on average men are more interested in things and women are more interested in people and that's actually the biggest difference we know of psychologically between men and women and and even though women are quite similar all things considered the extremes make a difference so you imagine that in order to become an engineer look obviously not everyone becomes an engineer you have to have a particular temperamental proclivity to become an engineer you have to be extraordinarily interested in things rather than people well most of those people are men and if you want to become a nurse well then you have to be much more interested in people than you are in things and most of those people are women and so you get differences in occupational choice that are also by the way quite great in Scandinavia especially in the case of engineering and nursing they're mostly due to biological differences and you cannot minimize that by social engineering so and it's not a bad thing like look one of the things you want to ask yourself is that what is the purpose of setting up the society that offers maximal equality of opportunity and one of the answers is that you maximize people's free choice and if you maximize free choice then you also maximize differences in choice between people and so you can't have both of those but of course it will have have differences in choices of course because we are human beings but I can't see why it differs between me and skavlan for instance but of course it differs in biological things but not in choices because I think more how we raise them how we live education sort of cultural attitudes form a human being whether or not they are a girl or a boy when they grow up and if I raise my daughter to become a leader to be self-confident to have a high education for instance I think she will have a good platform to become a civil engineer to become a CEO company or to become a nurse well that that is what that is what people who think that the difference is between people who are primarily culturally constructed believe but it's not what the evidence suggests what's necessary to understand about this is this this is not a contentious issue among informed scientists we've known this for 25 years and so that and it's a perverse effect no one expected it why do you talk then about you talk about chaos I mean is what we're experiencing now tails your book is is called an antidote to chaos well what is the chaos well I think the chaos is the uncertainty that so many people feel about the meaning of life and about their position in the world that that's fundamentally what I was aiming at and what I'm trying to do in my online lectures and with my book is to provide people with a guideline to meaning so one of the points that I make in my lectures for example is that we actually have a biological instinct for meaning that Orient's us in the world and that instinct manifests itself when we place ourselves in a position in the world where were competent where what we're doing is working so that we're not too terrified and anxious but also well we're simultaneously advancing ourselves and improving our ability to cope with the world so for example if you watch an athlete a high-level athlete who's at the peak of his or her performance you see someone who's extraordinarily practiced at what they're doing and has developed the expertise necessary to do it but then you also see them push themselves on that developmental edge to make themselves just that much better and that that function is associated with an intrinsic sense of meaning and whenever you see anyone manifest that you you are automatically drawn to it you you see that when an actor pushes him or herself beyond their limits you see that when someone speaks extemporaneously and manages it extraordinarily well and I'm trying to help people understand that this this meaning is a true phenomenon it's not a secondary thing and also to point out that most of the time that meaning is associated with the adoption of responsibilities so it's also something that people don't understand but but part of the Cales is that the rules are so hard to see the the there aren't that obvious rules anymore well part of the chaos is that we're transforming our landscape socially culturally technologically so rapidly that it's hard for people to gain footing and so it destabilizes us is the real problem that quite a lot of men and also young men are struggling to deal with the fact that women now are more in control of their lives than earlier I don't think that's the problem I think the problem is is that the idea that the West is a patriarchal tyranny is rapidly translated into the idea that young men who strive for word are to be regarded with suspicion because they're doing nothing but manifesting the same sort of tyrannical power that has kept women oppressed for the last 2,000 years and I think that entire narrative is appalling right to the core so and I don't see that it's helpful to anyone because making young men weak or or a lot or or failing to encourage them to be strong that's a better way of putting it certainly does the young men no good and it doesn't do the young women any good at all if they want to find a partner so you're saying that all along have had the same opportunities always no I'm basically saying that all along hardly anyone had any opportunities I mean if you look at the history of the world things really started to shift in about 1895 but before the 1895 the typical person in the West lived on less than a dollar a day in today's money which is about two-thirds the UN cutoff for abject poverty by today's standards and so what happened through most of the history of the world is that men and women struggled mightily together sometimes at each other's throats but mostly cooperatively to keep the wolf from the door and the tyrant at bay life was very very very very difficult and the fact that we survived it all meant that fundamentally we cooperated despite the fact that were rife with stupidity ignorance and malevolence but what's so terrifying with gender equality nothing here is except when people gerrymander the data it's like what do you mean by equality do you want women to have their free choice or not if you do they're not going to pick occupations that are the same as the occupations men pick but we have structures today that that women need to struggle they need to take a step to to have the possibility to become like a prime minister as we talked before we don't have had any Prime Minister in Sweden there have been a woman for instance we have a lower rate of female entrepreneurs men had a higher income than women in Sweden even if they work with the same tasks and that's one that I work with gender equality I think even in the lower class in schools to learn kids how to play with dolls we need to I think we need to learn boys to be more sensitive but also young girls to become more self-confident and I think that's very important too well the problem the problem with that the problem with that is the data indicate that the consequence of the policies that you're promoting have maximized the differences between men and women so that isn't what it's doing now that isn't to say that the movement towards egalitarianism is necessarily a bad thing but tremendous amount of that's being driven not by social policy but by technology I mean you know the narrative that were fed now is that up until 1960 when the enlightened feminists developed their egalitarian doctrines men had kept women down and they finally rose and the truth of the matter is is that from about 9 1895 onward there was a series of technological revolutions that were extraordinarily powerful in their impact that allowed women to step forward free of many of the burdens that had kept them back in the past birth control being one of them but only only only one sanitary facilities of all sorts plumbing had a huge role to play tampons had a huge role to play as did sanitary now ken's all of these technologies developed that enabled women to to move forward to move forward with with with less biological impediments what would you say is the best period in history to be both a man and a woman Oh clearly now there's no absolutely no doubt about that anyone who would like to you're worried for the chaos you worry about the chaos well you know it's nice if we could make things better than they are and I would say that just as all around the world we're raising living standards at a rate that is absolutely unparalleled in human history we're also in danger of destabilizing our culture in the West and I don't like that part of that problem you called you talked about there is what we call the identity politics yes I think that any Oh any political position that puts someone's group identity ahead of their individuality is a regression to a kind of a regression to a tribalism that will definitely become violent because that's what happens to well what's an example of identity politics following that rule yeah what happens every time people divide divide themselves into tribal groups I mean what we're trying to do to make peace is to bring people under the rubric of something approximating a single identity a shared identity and I mean the evidence that people fight in tribes it's the that's the entire evidence of the human race and the farther back you go in time and the smaller the tribal groups become the higher the rates of intertribal warfare and the higher the rates of homicide and and this you're talking about this part I I think it's part of why you also are people that feel some kind of ambivalence towards towards you also yeah I mean we call it controversial from time to time and I know that do you like that being controversial do you enjoy provoking groups like like no and I don't provoke people I just say what I think I just say well to be true well that's no I don't have you to say what I believe to be true and people find that provoking that's not the same as me provoking people if I was provoking people I would be setting out to and I'm not setting out to upset them I'm just setting out to say what I believe to be true and I'm a very you're following the the rules we talk to them yes and what I'm talking about gender gender issues for example in personality that's actually one of my my fields of expertise I know the literature and it says exactly what I said it says and as I said as well it's been replicated three times in the last month the London Times came out three weeks ago and said that the finding that gender differences maximized as egalitarian policies are developed is now one of the most solidly grounded findings ever produced by social scientists so you know you could make of that what you want it's not something that I particularly enjoy just happens to be the case so what what are the fake news about Jordan Pizza oh well the the fake news is one is that I'm provocative the other is that the other is that I have a like a right-leaning or a particularly conservative agenda and the mere fact that I oppose radical you're a conservative at heart aren't you not particularly I'm I don't have the temperament for it so for example conservative people tend to be low in trait openness which is associated with creativity and I'm very high in trade openness and so temperamentally I'm not much of a conservative at all and people who knew me people who come to my house would certainly not think that I was a conservative person so or if or if they they saw the breadth of my ideas I'm I'm also very entrepreneurial minded which also is not associated with conservatism I am a great skeptic of well-meaning attempts to adjust large social systems on the basis of ideology but that doesn't make me conservative it just makes me educated social scientists so what what when are you to walk yourself um when am i provoke myself Oh mm-hmm being called a Nazi I find somewhat provoking that I think money the most deserving days no no certainly not one of the most absurd days in my life in the last two years and there's been plenty of them was a day probably three months ago where I was accused by one magazine in the UK of being a Jewish shill and another magazine in the United States of being an all right Nazi I thought well that's that's it I pretty much covered both ends of the insults fellas it's like yeah that's right so you can average that out to zero I suppose so I I find I find that somewhat provoking but you know you take the good with the bad and and I I'm I'm not I'm not complaining about it it's but it is provoking is it is it true that you have an opinion about about people having to stay married if they have children I mean we it's better if they do it's most people would agree that that's the best but but yeah as far as I understand you you think that the law should say that we have to stay together oh it isn't obvious to me that the liberalisation of the divorce laws in the 60s was for everyone's best interest know exactly what that means I'm not sure I mean it's okay for people to go to hell in hand in a handbasket in their own particular means of choosing but we do know that stable intact two-parent families are better for children so you know it depends on who you put first and look I'm not saying that everyone who's got divorced is reprehensible I understand that life is very difficult and that it's a very hard thing to maintain a relationship over a very long period of time but it's not obvious to me that we're better off for the additional plethora of choices so we'll see but isn't that an individual choice and not something the law should decide well it depends to some degree on whether the law should advocate for children I mean children really can't speak for themselves can they they need some authority to speak for and so we do know like the the data for example on on child welfare indicates Krista it's crystal clear that children from intact two-parent families do better on virtually every measure that you can possibly imagine so what are we supposed to make of that it's irrelevant it's like maybe the rule should be if if you don't have children then no problem divorce is no problem but if you have children and plus it's not like divorce solves the problem with regards to to to your relationship with your ex it often produces a whole boatload of problems that you didn't expect so but I'm not advocating draconian measures to keep people together who don't want to be together that that horse has already left the barn should there be an age limit on the children where you can divorce or well the older the order the children are the less effect it has on them so for divorce yes Oh 45 what about what about when you were when you were a kid yourself who was your masculine role model oh I I think I had a number of them but would problem primarily have been my father and some of my friends because peers play an important role in development especially after year after the age of about four but I would definitely say it was my father and how would you describe his masculinity well he - your point he spent a tremendous amount of time with me when I was a kid and there are very fond memories as far as I'm concerned like when when I was a young when I was very young 2 and 3 my dad would come home from work and he spent an hour and a half with me a night for you for a long time teaching me to read which has been of inestimable and he did many things with me you know we hunted and trapped and canoed and fished and Kent and and he was a harsh guy in many ways he was a disciplinarian in some sense but but he was very honest and very good craftsman and and so I learned a lot about trying to conduct yourself in a respectable manner from him so what were you were you're a tough kid or were you a careful kid no what kind of kid who are you alright I guess it depends on what you mean by tough no I don't think if you would have met me when I was a kid you would have thought I was tough I'm kind of a tender-hearted character and and I was skipped a grade and I was small for my age and so I certainly wasn't physically tough in the standard sense because I was small and because I'd been put ahead of grade I was never particularly facile at sports and that was kind of a problem I I did something about that when I got older but um I hung around with tough kids but that was partly because most of the kids that were in the town I grew up in were were either tough kids or were sort of off the radar entirely and so and maybe that was a certain amount of compensation I could defend myself verbally fairly well so but that tended to get me hung up by my you know my shirt collar in closets and played cats with on the stairs and that sort of thing in junior high so is it is it like did you come from an environment where where were weak and it was a bad thing where self-pitying was a bad thing where self-pitying was a bad thing I would say yes I come from that background but that was that was par for the course I would say when I grew up and I mean where where I grew up it was still a frontier place in some sense you know my town was only 50 years old and people were essentially self-reliant to the degree that that was possible it was certainly the case within my family on on both my mother and father's side and the idea was but this wasn't particularly what would you say unique to my family you know the ethos was feeling sorry for yourself isn't going to be of much utility you should get out there and do what you can do and and straighten your back yes if you can do that and I got lots of encouragement from from my parents from both of them certainly I have a very good relationship with my mother who I loved very much and we we shared a sense of humor which was lovely and my dad although he was a harsh taskmaster also was very encouraging to me in that he believed that I could do whatever I put my mind to and he helped instill that conviction in me in a manner that I hope wasn't and isn't to let's say narcissistic it wasn't a matter of privilege it was a matter of drive and dedication and effort and so that was one of the things that's so sad about what I'm doing you know I'm going all around the world and I'm talking to many many people I've talked to about 250,000 people in the last six months and I offer encouraging words you know that people I believe that people are stronger than their misfortunes I believe that if you turn around and confront the vulnerability that's part and parcel of life you'll find within yourself a strength that will transcend that and I believe that not only to be true but supported by the best clinical evidence and that it's important for lost young people male and female alike to develop a vision and take on some responsibility and understand that they have a vital role to play in the world that the lack of their best hurts everything and I think that's true and the sad thing is that very there's very many people who have not heard an encouraging word in their life and it takes so little to encourage them that it's rather tragic you know why have people come up to me and I mean all and by all the time I mean many people every day in the lectures and on the street who tell me I was in a bad place I was struggling I've been watching your lectures I've been reading your book I put my life together I'm trying to be responsible tell the truth things are way better thank you and so can't can't get any better than that so and that's divorce question what is the best situation to to tell your children we don't love each other anymore but we're going to stay together for your sake so that you'll have a semblance of a happy family life or to say I'm sorry this doesn't work we will continue to love you but will part and will will love you the rest of our lives and maybe we even can be happy on on our different well sometimes sometimes often you have to make the best of a bad lot you know I mean sometimes the best possible choice isn't there in front of you and I would say well it's generally up to each person to decide under the circumstances which of those pathways forward would be likely to cause the least amount of misery for well you know for you for your wife for your kids you know you have to balance all of that out that's not an easy thing to do I would also say that by the time it comes to the point where you're divorced divorcing all you may have left are one of two suboptimal choices and you know so part of what I do as well is to try to lecture about what sort of interactions might facilitate a marriage such that it's less likely to end up in a situation like that now sometimes people have irreconcilable differences and there's nothing that can be done about it but often people are not good at negotiating partly because they don't they won't admit what they want because then they know that then they know if they're not getting it they make their criteria for failure clear and that frightens them so they keep themselves vague because they don't know what they want they can't communicate it to their partners and they don't know how to do that anyways because they're not very good at negotiating and then they avoid conflict and so then the conflict because we you avoid conflict all you do is store it up for the future you know I've seen lots of people on the brink of divorce and in horrible marital situations horrible family situations and you know they have 25,000 disputes that haven't been settled and at that point it's like maybe divorce is the best option but that doesn't mean that it was the best option from the beginning so hopefully people can learn to negotiate and to tell each other the truth and that will increase the probability that they can maintain their relationships in a stable manner but and I'm not I'm not suggesting by the way that you didn't do that because I don't know anything about you know sure but I'm a little bit surprised that you don't take into the account our level of irrationality we're super irrational people when you discuss it's like we can all just agree on these things and look at the science and we'll fix everything that's not how I don't think people are irrational at all and I think that it's very difficult for us to negotiate and it's amazing that we ever live in peace at all yes tremendously difficult so tell me one last question when when are you irrational yourself when I'm hungry what happens then little things bother me far more than they would bother any reasonable person so that's and I would say if you find that you're irrational like that frequently one of the things you might try is to eat something and you and you have a you have a peculiar diet you have yeah you could say that again yes what is it well there seems to be some sort of autoimmune condition in my family and some of it's also reflected in my wife's family unfortunately and the culmination of that was that my daughter had an extraordinarily serious serious set of autoimmune dysfunctions that caused her an endless amount of misery and destruction and she found out about three years ago as a consequence of very very careful experimentation that if she ate nothing but meat then all her symptoms disappeared so and her primary symptoms were degenerative bone disease that had been diagnosed as idiopathic arthritis which means arthritis with no known cause and she had her ankle and her hip replaced when she was in her teens because of that and had 38 other effective deflected joints so as hell and she caught and on to the fact that diet had something to do with it for a variety of reasons I can't go into and and radically restricted her eating and all her symptoms disappeared so that is why you do it isn't yes well I had many but not all of the same symptoms and she told I watched what happened to her and I thought well that's impossible because it was and she encouraged me to try it and I thought well I can try anything for a month you know and so I I started for a month and I add changes almost immediately and so I've continued with a very restricted diet for about two years and extraordinarily restricted for the last eight months so and that seems to be working for me quite well even though it's you know it has its downsides Jordan Peterson it's been so interesting talking to you thank you so much thank you very much hope you enjoyed the clip for more interesting conversations please hit subscribe

Channel: Skavlan

Views: 5,270,695

Rating: 4.8812485 out of 5

Keywords: Skavlan, interview, talk show, Fredrik skavlan, talkshow, jordan, peterson, jordan b peterson, psychologist, professor, author, full interview, annie, lööf, swedish, politician, erlend, loe, norwegian, gender roles, equality

Id: _iudkPi4_sY

Length: 38min 40sec (2320 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 29 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/geejay12345]

I enjoyed this interview. It was so far from the usually attempted JP hatchet job and both the other contributers were decent too. Then went on to watch the train wreck GQ interview and it was pretty much business as usual with all the same debunked tropes typically presented to him to defend again. The interview itself was not exactly Newmanesque but in some ways it was worse as the time gap and the knowledge about JP available since that time is immense. Cathy Newman was awful but you could conceivably stretch to allowing her the excuse that JP was relatively new phenomenon at that time as far as mainstream media were concerned. The GQ interviewer had no such excuse.

[u/RGBSplitter]

I know some depth is lost in translation amongst the other guests in this interview, and they are attempting to debate in a second language, but my god, at 15:45 when the bearded chap try’s to present a point that the chaos that men feel in their lives is due to the fact that women now have, what, managerial roles?? How entry level is that line of thinking? Surely another few minutes mulling that over for himself would have concluded that to be false. The lady lost me with her first two strokes as she kind of quotes some of what is just being said but then immediately deviates back to a set of prepacked taglines for the her ideals. Nice people, basic thinking.

[u/Devaco]

To me it felt like teacher talking to kindergarden children.