#1070 - Jordan Peterson

Joe Rogan (0:02)

Four, three, two, one.

Boom, and we're live. Twelve rules for life. So without reading this, so what you're saying is...

Jordan Peterson (0:12)

There's only 12 things you need to know in life, right? That's it?

Joe Rogan (0:18)

This interview that you just did with this woman, Kathy Newman, was that in the UK?

Jordan Peterson (0:23)

It was, Channel 4 UK.

Joe Rogan (0:25)

I just went, I felt bad, but I was also laughing. I went to her Twitter page to read, and with each one of her tweets, no matter what she says, someone writes underneath it. So what you're saying is, and then some ridiculous... But, by the way, your fans were mocking her, but politely, non-aggressively. I didn't read any rude things. There was no insults, well, maybe a few insults, but there's no swears.

It was just playful mocking of the interview that she did with you, because the interview was ridiculous. It was a ridiculous interview. I listened to it or watched it several times. I was like, this is so strange. It's like her determination to turn it into a conflict, it's one of the issues that I have with television shows, because they have a very limited amount of time, and they're trying to make things as salacious as possible. They want to have these sound bites, these clickbait sound bites, and she just went into it incredibly confrontational, not trying to find your actual perspective, but trying to force you to defend a non-realistic perspective.

Jordan Peterson (1:35)

Yes, well, I was the hypothetical villain of her imagination, essentially. Well, what happened was interesting, too, the way it played itself out, because I met her in the green room beforehand, she was being made up, and then they put a little bit of powder on me, and we had a friendly kind of interchange, and then we went and sat in front of the cameras for a couple of minutes before the show got rolling, and we had a pretty pleasant back and forth, and then as soon as the cameras went on, she was a completely different person.

And I thought, oh, I see. I see what's going on. Yeah, well, so that kind of alerted me to, well, the fact that there was something rotten in the state of Denmark, let's say.

Yeah, but this is also why YouTube is gonna kill TV, because television, by its nature, all of these narrow broadcast technologies, they rely on forcing the story, right? Because it has to happen now. It has to happen, like, often in five minutes, because they only broadcast five minutes of that interview. They did put the whole thing up on YouTube.

Joe Rogan (2:37)

To their credit.

Jordan Peterson (2:39)

It hasn't ceased to amaze me yet. I think that they thought that the interview went fine. That's the scuttlebutt I've got from sort of behind the scenes, because I know some people who know what's going on at Channel 4 And they're shell shocked by the response. And then, of course, there is the counter response. The Guardian the next day published an article saying that the head of Channel 4 had to call in police security because of threats.

Well, first of all, you can call the police in about anything. And they never did detail out exactly what the threats were.

But then about 20 newspapers picked that up and went for the, well, Kathy Newman is now being harassed by an army of online trolls for doing nothing but doing her job, which, well, and then there was a backlash against that in the press. And so it's been a, well, what do you say about that?

Joe Rogan (3:35)

Well, someone took an audit of the actual interchanges between fans and her. And there was way more negative ones coming your way.

Jordan Peterson (3:43)

Yes, that were seriously negative. Yeah, that's right.

Joe Rogan (3:45)

Seriously negative, violent, harassing, just rude. There were way more.

Jordan Peterson (3:50)

Yeah.

Joe Rogan (3:51)

And no one picked up on that at all. It was all, the narrative was, she's a victim, even though she was highly aggressive in this. But I don't like-

Jordan Peterson (4:00)

She's a funny victim. It's not like she's not successful.

At some point, you think you should have to hand in your victim card. I think when you go to an Ivy League university, it's like right then and there. You get to hand it in. Yeah, because you don't get to be oppressor and oppressed at the same time. That's just too much.

Joe Rogan (4:16)

Well, one of the things that you pointed out was when you were talking about competition for very lucrative jobs, and you were saying, look what you've done. Like you must have had to work here. And she proudly was saying how hard she had to work to get there. I'm like, well, yes, of course. No one's going to hand this to you.