Jordan Peterson's Insights on Strength and Truth

So, 12 rules. Which one do you find the hardest to follow yourself? Probably the hardest one is to tell the truth or at least not to lie. Why is that? 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. I'm tempted to, 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 a useful psychotherapist because you can't let things go. They have to be dealt with just like they have to be dealt with if you're a medical professional. It's unpleasant to 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 talk sometimes about weak men. Why are weak men such a problem? Well, 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. 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 forthright and useful and noble pathway through life, then you'll become bitter and too 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 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. 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 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's 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 too? Not weakness. Vulnerability. That's a whole different thing to admit to. 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 the best route that you have. Why do you think so many young men are following you? Because a lot of your audience are young men. Because I want the best for them, genuinely. I'm encouraging them. But more than you do for young women? No, no, not at least. So why do you think so many are young men? Oh, well, I think part of it's 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 an 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 challenging the... The idea of gender equality is very important in Scandinavia, I think, as you probably know. Why do you think that can be a problem, the idea of gender 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 an absolutely useful fundamental principle. 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... 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 30 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 the 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 dreams or hopes for the good thing or no? And for me, it's simple to 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, it's 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 the hoods where kids grew up. to show feelings, to have these gender equality 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 roof of glass. They need to fight and to struggle the roof of glass 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 a wife. I do everything I possibly can. And many, many female clients who I've consulted with and helped, and in many cases helped accelerate the development of their career tremendously. It's obviously of great utility to encourage forward striving in young people and people in general. That's not the issue, in the least. The issue is the outcome. Yeah, well, then why do you think the outcome, and these countries where the outcome is more equal, why do you think that leads to bigger differences? 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 maximize the biological differences. So, I know everyone's shocked when they hear this. 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 a small effect, it's a huge effect. Excuse me, what does it mean? Does it mean that Scandinavian 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 even though men and 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 that are 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 a 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 choice of course because we are human beings but i can't see why it differs between me and scavlan 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 culture, 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 of a company, or to become a nurse. Well, that is what people who think that the differences between people who are primarily culturally constructed believe, but it's not what the evidence suggests. Okay, we don't agree on that. The other thing I should say about this, what's necessary to understand about this, is this is not a contentious issue. among informed scientists. We've known this for 25 years. And so, 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 chaos? Your book is called An Antidote to Chaos. 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'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 orients us in the world. And that instinct manifests itself when we place ourselves in a position in the world where we're competent, where we're... What we're doing is working, so that we're not too terrified and anxious, but also while 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 function is associated with an intrinsic sense of meaning. And whenever you see anyone manifest that, you are automatically drawn to it. 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 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 responsibility, which is also something that people don't understand. But part of the chaos is that the rules are so hard to see. 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 this the world you represent? Isn't 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 that the idea that the West is a patriarchal tyranny is rapidly translated into the idea that young men who strive forward 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 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, women and men 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 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 we're rife with stupidity, ignorance and malevolence. But what's so terrifying with gender equality? Nothing. I'm so curious. 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 have the possibility to become like a prime minister. As we talked before, we don't have had any prime minister in Sweden that 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 we need to work with gender equality, I think, even in the lower class in schools, to learn kids how to play with dolls. 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 to build safety. Well, 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 a tremendous amount of that's been driven not by social policy, but by technology. I mean, you know, the narrative that we're 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 that from about 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 one. Sanitary facilities of all sorts. Plumbing had a huge role to play. Tampons had a huge role to play, as did sanitary napkins. All of these technologies developed that enabled women to move forward. to move forward with less biological impediments, let's say. So 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 go back... Even though you worry 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 think that's a good idea. Part of that problem you talk about there is what we call the identity politics. Yes, I think that any political position that puts someone's group identity ahead of their individuality is a regression to a tribalism that will definitely become violent. Because that's what happens to tribes. What's an example? Do you have an example of identity politics playing that role? Well, it happens every time people 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, 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 inter-tribal warfare and the higher the rates of homicide. And so... And this, you're talking about this, I think it's part of why you also are, people feel some kind of ambivalence towards you also. I mean, we call you controversial from time to time. And I don't know, do you like that, being controversial? Do you enjoy provoking groups like... No, and I don't provoke people. I just say what I think, I just say what I believe to be true. Well, that's... No, I don't. Have you ever been online? I 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 upset them. 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... So you're following the rules we talked about. Yes, and when I'm talking about gender issues, for example, and personality, that's actually one of 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 maximize as egalitarian policies are developed is now one of the most solidly grounded findings ever produced by social scientists. So, you know, you can make of that what you want. It's not something that I particularly enjoy. It just happens to be the case. So what are the fake news about Jordan Peterson? Oh, well, the fake news is one is that I'm... provocative. The other is that I have a right-leaning or a particularly conservative agenda. And the mere fact that I oppose radical leftists... You are conservative at heart, aren't you? Not particularly. 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 trait openness. And so, temperamentally, I'm not much of a conservative at all. People who knew me, people who come to my house, would certainly not think that I was a conservative person. Or if they saw the breadth of my ideas. I'm also very entrepreneurially 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 an educated social scientist. So when are you provoked yourself? When am I provoked myself? Oh, being called a Nazi I find somewhat provoking. I didn't do that. 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 alt-right Nazi. I thought, well, that's it. I pretty much covered both ends of the insult spectrum. It's like, yeah, that's right. So you can average that out to zero, I suppose. So I find that somewhat provoking. But, you know, you take the good with the bad. And I'm not... I'm not complaining about it, but it is provoking. Is it true that you have an opinion about people... having to stay married if they have children. I mean, we are two divorced men here. It's better if they do. It's better for the children. I think most people would agree that that's the best. But as far as I understand, you think that the laws should say that we have to stay together. Oh, it isn't obvious to me that the liberalization of the divorce laws in the 60s was for everyone's best interest. Now, exactly what that means, I'm not sure. I mean... It's okay for people to go to hell 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 them. And so we do know, like the data, for example, on child welfare indicates 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 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 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 horse has already left the barn. Should there be an age limit on the children where you can divorce? Well, the older the children are, the less effect it has on them. So, you know, and at some point they're not children. What's the ideal age then? For divorce? Yes. 45, something like that. I don't know. I don't know what the ideal age is. What about when you were a kid yourself? Who was your masculine role model? Oh, I think I had a number of them, but it would primarily have been my father and some of my friends, because peers play an important role in development, especially after the age of about four. But I would definitely say it was my father. And how would you describe his masculinity? Well, to your point, he spent a tremendous amount of time with me when I was a kid. And they're very fond memories as far as I'm concerned. Like when I was young, when I was very young, two and three, my dad would come home from work. And he spent an hour and a half with me a night for a long time teaching me to read, which has been of inestimable benefit with me. And he did many things with me. You know, we hunted and trapped and canoed and fished and... He was a harsh guy in many ways. He was a disciplinarian in some sense. But he was very honest and very good craftsman. And so I learned a lot about trying to conduct yourself in a respectable manner from him. So, what were you, were you a tough kid or were you a careful kid or what kind of kid were you? 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 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 did something about that when I got older, but 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 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. But that tended to get me hung up by my shirt collar in closets and played catch with on the stairs and that sort of thing in junior high. Is it like, did you come from an environment where weakness 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 par for the course, I would say, when I grew up. And I mean, 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 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 straighten your back. Yes, if you can do that. And I got lots of encouragement from my parents, from both of them. Certainly, I have a very good relationship with my mother, who I love very much. And 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 too, 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... I had... 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 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, I 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've put my life together, I'm trying to be responsible, tell the truth, things are... Way better. Thank you. And so that's... Can't get any better than that. So... And that's... Can I just come back to the... Divorce question. What is the best situation 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'll continue to love you, but we'll part and we'll love you the rest of our lives. And maybe we even can be happy on our different... Well, 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 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 when you avoid conflict, all you do is store it up for the future. And, 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 your situation But I'm a little bit surprised that you don't take into 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 it works. Oh, no, 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. It's tremendously difficult. So tell me, one last question. 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 have a peculiar diet. You have your own. 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 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 affected joints. So it was hell. And she cottoned on to the fact that diet had something to do with it, for a variety of reasons I can't go into, and radically restricted her. eating and all her symptoms disappeared. So that is why you do it as well? Yes, well I had many but not all of the same symptoms and 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 started for a month and I had 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 for the invitation. Hope you enjoyed the clip. For more interesting conversations, please hit subscribe.

So, 12 rules. Which one do you find the hardest to follow yourself? Probably the hardest one is to tell the truth or at least not to lie.

Why is that? 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. I'm tempted to, 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 a useful psychotherapist because you can't let things go. They have to be dealt with just like they have to be dealt with if you're a medical professional.

It's unpleasant to 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 talk sometimes about weak men. Why are weak men such a problem?

Well, 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.

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 forthright and useful and noble pathway through life, then you'll become bitter and too 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 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.

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 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's 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 too?

Not weakness. Vulnerability. That's a whole different thing to admit to.

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 the best route that you have.

Why do you think so many young men are following you? Because a lot of your audience are young men. Because I want the best for them, genuinely. I'm encouraging them. But more than you do for young women?

No, no, not at least. So why do you think so many are young men? Oh, well, I think part of it's 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 an 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 challenging the...

The idea of gender equality is very important in Scandinavia, I think, as you probably know. Why do you think that can be a problem, the idea of gender 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 an absolutely useful fundamental principle. 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...

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 30 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 the 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 dreams or hopes for the good thing or no? And for me, it's simple to 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, it's 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 the hoods where kids grew up. to show feelings, to have these gender equality 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 roof of glass.

They need to fight and to struggle the roof of glass 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 a wife. I do everything I possibly can. And many, many female clients who I've consulted with and helped, and in many cases helped accelerate the development of their career tremendously. It's obviously of great utility to encourage forward striving in young people and people in general. That's not the issue, in the least.

The issue is the outcome. Yeah, well, then why do you think the outcome, and these countries where the outcome is more equal, why do you think that leads to bigger differences? 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 maximize the biological differences. So, I know everyone's shocked when they hear this. 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 a small effect, it's a huge effect. Excuse me, what does it mean?

Does it mean that Scandinavian 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 even though men and 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 that are 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 a 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 choice of course because we are human beings but i can't see why it differs between me and scavlan 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 culture, 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 of a company, or to become a nurse.

Well, that is what people who think that the differences between people who are primarily culturally constructed believe, but it's not what the evidence suggests. Okay, we don't agree on that. The other thing I should say about this, what's necessary to understand about this, is this is not a contentious issue.

among informed scientists. We've known this for 25 years. And so, 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 chaos? Your book is called An Antidote to Chaos.

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'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 orients us in the world. And that instinct manifests itself when we place ourselves in a position in the world where we're competent, where we're... What we're doing is working, so that we're not too terrified and anxious, but also while 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 function is associated with an intrinsic sense of meaning. And whenever you see anyone manifest that, you are automatically drawn to it.

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 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 responsibility, which is also something that people don't understand. But part of the chaos is that the rules are so hard to see. 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 this the world you represent? Isn't 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 that the idea that the West is a patriarchal tyranny is rapidly translated into the idea that young men who strive forward 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 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, women and men 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 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 we're rife with stupidity, ignorance and malevolence. But what's so terrifying with gender equality? Nothing.

I'm so curious. 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 have the possibility to become like a prime minister.

As we talked before, we don't have had any prime minister in Sweden that 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 we need to work with gender equality, I think, even in the lower class in schools, to learn kids how to play with dolls. 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 to build safety. Well, 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 a tremendous amount of that's been driven not by social policy, but by technology. I mean, you know, the narrative that we're 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 that from about 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 one. Sanitary facilities of all sorts. Plumbing had a huge role to play.

Tampons had a huge role to play, as did sanitary napkins. All of these technologies developed that enabled women to move forward. to move forward with less biological impediments, let's say.

So 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 go back...

Even though you worry 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 think that's a good idea. Part of that problem you talk about there is what we call the identity politics.

Yes, I think that any political position that puts someone's group identity ahead of their individuality is a regression to a tribalism that will definitely become violent. Because that's what happens to tribes. What's an example?

Do you have an example of identity politics playing that role? Well, it happens every time people 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, 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 inter-tribal warfare and the higher the rates of homicide. And so... And this, you're talking about this, I think it's part of why you also are, people feel some kind of ambivalence towards you also.

I mean, we call you controversial from time to time. And I don't know, do you like that, being controversial? Do you enjoy provoking groups like...

No, and I don't provoke people. I just say what I think, I just say what I believe to be true. Well, that's... No, I don't.

Have you ever been online? I 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 upset them.

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... So you're following the rules we talked about.

Yes, and when I'm talking about gender issues, for example, and personality, that's actually one of 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 maximize as egalitarian policies are developed is now one of the most solidly grounded findings ever produced by social scientists. So, you know, you can make of that what you want. It's not something that I particularly enjoy. It just happens to be the case. So what are the fake news about Jordan Peterson?

Oh, well, the fake news is one is that I'm... provocative. The other is that I have a right-leaning or a particularly conservative agenda. And the mere fact that I oppose radical leftists... You are conservative at heart, aren't you?

Not particularly. 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 trait openness.

And so, temperamentally, I'm not much of a conservative at all. People who knew me, people who come to my house, would certainly not think that I was a conservative person. Or if they saw the breadth of my ideas.

I'm also very entrepreneurially 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 an educated social scientist.

So when are you provoked yourself? When am I provoked myself? Oh, being called a Nazi I find somewhat provoking. I didn't do that.

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 alt-right Nazi.

I thought, well, that's it. I pretty much covered both ends of the insult spectrum. It's like, yeah, that's right.

So you can average that out to zero, I suppose. So I find that somewhat provoking. But, you know, you take the good with the bad. And I'm not... I'm not complaining about it, but it is provoking.

Is it true that you have an opinion about people... having to stay married if they have children. I mean, we are two divorced men here.

It's better if they do. It's better for the children. I think most people would agree that that's the best. But as far as I understand, you think that the laws should say that we have to stay together.

Oh, it isn't obvious to me that the liberalization of the divorce laws in the 60s was for everyone's best interest. Now, exactly what that means, I'm not sure. I mean... It's okay for people to go to hell 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 them. And so we do know, like the data, for example, on child welfare indicates 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 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 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 horse has already left the barn.

Should there be an age limit on the children where you can divorce? Well, the older the children are, the less effect it has on them. So, you know, and at some point they're not children. What's the ideal age then? For divorce?

Yes. 45, something like that. I don't know. I don't know what the ideal age is. What about when you were a kid yourself?

Who was your masculine role model? Oh, I think I had a number of them, but it would primarily have been my father and some of my friends, because peers play an important role in development, especially after the age of about four. But I would definitely say it was my father. And how would you describe his masculinity?

Well, to your point, he spent a tremendous amount of time with me when I was a kid. And they're very fond memories as far as I'm concerned. Like when I was young, when I was very young, two and three, my dad would come home from work. And he spent an hour and a half with me a night for a long time teaching me to read, which has been of inestimable benefit with me. And he did many things with me.

You know, we hunted and trapped and canoed and fished and... He was a harsh guy in many ways. He was a disciplinarian in some sense. But he was very honest and very good craftsman.

And so I learned a lot about trying to conduct yourself in a respectable manner from him. So, what were you, were you a tough kid or were you a careful kid or what kind of kid were you? 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 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 did something about that when I got older, but 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 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. But that tended to get me hung up by my shirt collar in closets and played catch with on the stairs and that sort of thing in junior high. Is it like, did you come from an environment where weakness 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 par for the course, I would say, when I grew up. And I mean, 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 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 straighten your back. Yes, if you can do that. And I got lots of encouragement from my parents, from both of them. Certainly, I have a very good relationship with my mother, who I love very much.

And 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 too, 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... I had...

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 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, I 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've put my life together, I'm trying to be responsible, tell the truth, things are... Way better. Thank you.

And so that's... Can't get any better than that. So... And that's... Can I just come back to the...

Divorce question. What is the best situation 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'll continue to love you, but we'll part and we'll love you the rest of our lives. And maybe we even can be happy on our different...

Well, 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 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 when you avoid conflict, all you do is store it up for the future. And, 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 your situation But I'm a little bit surprised that you don't take into 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 it works. Oh, no, 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. It's tremendously difficult. So tell me, one last question. 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 have a peculiar diet. You have your own. 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 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 affected joints. So it was hell. And she cottoned on to the fact that diet had something to do with it, for a variety of reasons I can't go into, and radically restricted her. eating and all her symptoms disappeared.

So that is why you do it as well? Yes, well I had many but not all of the same symptoms and 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 started for a month and I had 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 for the invitation. Hope you enjoyed the clip. For more interesting conversations, please hit subscribe.

Transcript for:Jordan Peterson's Insights on Strength and Truth

Transcript for:
Jordan Peterson's Insights on Strength and Truth