They've been dozens of responses to the jordan peterson channel for interview already. What makes this one different?

Well, I have a pretty unique perspective in

October last year I went to Toronto to interview Jordan Peterson at his home you came in from where I came in from London

last night, I turned the interview into the first full-length documentary about Jordan Peterson's ideas I

Was pretty sure he'd soon become a lot more famous and be recognized as one of the most significant public thinkers

but I couldn't possibly have predicted how he'd break through to a mass audience a

few weeks later Peterson did an interview with journalist Kathy Newman on Channel four News in the UK a

Program I worked on as a reporter and producer for ten years

It was a sensation

Millions watched it online

Tens of thousands commented an overwhelming majority felt Peterson had been unfairly represented

And in the week since it hasn't stopped

Peterson has been asked about it constantly on the most high-profile online shows

12 rules for life so without reading this

So what you're saying is

There's only 12 things you need to do in life right, that's it well yeah this

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

it was Channel 4 UK so what does this glitch say about the state of mainstream media and

the culture at large

By diagnosis of what's actually happening is that people are moving further and further away from?

what is what thinking actually is I'm at or more into merely running a script and

What does Jordan Peterson actually think that's so controversial you are?

misrepresented more than anyone

I know in a weird way. You are villainized in a weird way where I can't believe that these people are honestly

looking at your opinions and

Coming up with these conclusions. I believe this encounter struck such a nerve because it's a cultural watershed moment

But seen properly as Peterson would say it's archetypal in that it contains layers and layers of meaning

That go right to the heart of the biggest rift. We're seeing playing out in the culture

Over the next 50 minutes. I'm gonna do my best to unpack it

From the clash between new and old media. There's also why YouTube is gonna kill TV

Because television by its nature all of these narrow

broadcast

technologies they rely on forcing the story all the way down to the mythological an

Archetypal level I thought of ideologies as fragmentary mythologies

That's where they get their archetypal and psychological power, but in the postmodern world and this seems to be something that's increasingly

Seeping out into the culture at large you have nothing but the tyrannical father nothing

But the destructive force of masculine consciousness and nothing, but the benevolent

Benevolent great mother and it's a it's an appalling ideology, and it seems to me that it's sucking the vitality

Which is exactly what you'd expect symbolically

It's sucking the vitality of her culture and to ask how do we move forward constructively rather than just adding to the polarization?

I've been a journalist for 16 years in the newsrooms of the BBC in channel 4 and then making documentaries I

moved away from the frontline of news some time ago and started learning psychology

Which is what first drew me to Jordan Peterson?

from a distance I've started to see the blind spots of the establishment media much more clearly I

Spent some of the best years of my working life at Channel 4 News and have a huge amount of respect

And gratitude to the program

But I'm making this film because I feel so strongly that if we can't have open conversations about the kind of topics Peterson is raising

We're in serious trouble

My book went up to number two and on amazon.com in the US the next day right it's number one in Canada

it's number three in the UK all on Amazon I

Couldn't have asked for more publicity right and so I could also be sitting back and saying well. You know she tried to

My a person who regarded herself as my ideological opponent

Tried to go after my philosophy and my reputation on national TV

Failed brutally and has been taken apart for it. It's like

This is a good day, but I don't regard it as a good day. I don't think it's a good day

I

think that it's evidence of the

Instability of the times that we're in it would have been much better

For me and for everyone else if what we would have had was a real conversation

You said that it's actually a sign of the times where things could go really wrong for all of us really soon

Yeah, we're playing with fire. Yeah, what do you mean by this? Can you can you elaborate?

Well things go wrong in cultures all the time right you get you get the polarization

Increases until people start to act it out

Peterson is one of a new breed of thinkers made famous almost completely by the internet not the broadcast media

Part of a powerful new informal network being called the intellectual dark web

The mainstream media is based on an old dying model that is being replaced by new media

And new technology so quickly that its faults are becoming glaringly obvious

Fortunately, thanks to YouTube podcasting and however else you get shows like this one the mainstream media's stranglehold on information

Which really is a stranglehold on your ability to think clearly about the issues of the day is crumbling at an incredible rate?

Now the question is who and what will replace it a few months ago one of my favorite people to sit across this table from

Eric Weinstein came up with the phrase

Intellectual dark web to describe this eclectic mix of people from Sam Harris to Ben Shapiro to his brother Brett

Weinstein to jordan Peterson all of whom are figuring out ways to have the important and often dangerous

Conversations that are completely ignored by the mainstream

It's why I would argue that this collection of people are actually more

influential at this point than whatever collection of cable news pundits you can come up with

If you think I'm being hyperbolic about the growing influence of this group just check the traction that these people get on Twitter or Facebook

Compared to our mainstream competitors twitter may not be real life as I say in my Twitter bio

But it is some barometer of what the zeitgeist is right now

what unites this group of thinkers is a sense that the set of ideas that have run Western culture for years are breaking down and

That the chaos of the moment is the attempt to find new ones

It's nearly all happening online part of the problem that we have right now in our culture is

Trying to diagnose the level at which the discussion should be taking place

And I think the reason that this is a tumultuous time is because it actually is a time for discussion of first principles

and it's that first principles are

Virtually at the level of theology because the first principles are the things that you assume and then move forwards like well

What should we assume well the dignity of the human soul let's start with that you can't treat yourself properly without assuming that you

Have a relationship with another person you can't stabilize your family

You can't have a functional society, so what does it mean for this human soul to have dignity?

well

The part of the idea is that you're participating in

Creation itself and you do that with your actions in your language

And you get to decide whether you're tilting the world a bit more towards heaven or a bit more towards hell

And that's actually what you're doing so that's a place where the literal and the metaphorical truth comes together and people are very

They're terrified of that idea as they should be because it's a massive responsibility

They also argue that the central problem is polarization

boosted by social media

Peterson's work looks at how people are hard-wired to see the world differently a lot of what determines your political

orientation is

Biological temperament far more than people realize so for example

left-leaning people

liberals, let's say although that's kind of MIS misnomer, but

We'll keep with the terminology liberals are high in a trait called openness, which is one of the big five personality traits

And it's associated with interest in abstraction and interest in aesthetics

it's the best predictor of liberal political leaning and they're low in trait conscientiousness, which is dutifulness and and

Orderliness in particular whereas the Conservatives are the opposite?

They're high in conscientiousness

They're dutiful and orderly and they're low in openness and that makes them really good managers and administers ministers and often businessman

But not very good entrepreneurs

Because the entrepreneurs are almost all drawn from the liberal types and so

These are really fundamental

fundamentally biologically predicated differences, and they're you might think about them as different sets of

Opportunities and limitations, and and certainly different ways of screening the world and

Each of those different temperamental types needs the other type

Let's call this a diversity issue if you start understanding that the person that you're talking to who doesn't share your political views

isn't

Stupid that's the first thing necessarily. They might be but so might you be no stupid. He isn't the

Differences in intelligence are not the prime determinant of differences in political belief

All right

so you might be talking to someone who's

More conscientious and less creative than you if you're if you happen to be a liberal

But that doesn't mean that that person's perspective is not valid

And it doesn't mean that they wouldn't outperform you in some domains because they would so one thing to remember is

People actually do see the world differently. It's not merely that they that they're possessed of love

ilie informed opinions

the whole point of the dava democracy is to

Continue the dialogue between people of different

Temperamental types so that we don't move so far to the right that everything

becomes

encapsulated and stone and doesn't move or so far to the left and everything dissolves in a kind of

Mealy-mouthed chaos and the only way that you can you can navigate between those two

Shoals is by is through discussion, which is why free speech is such an important value

It's the thing that keeps the temperamental types from being at each other's throats in

The aftermath of the Trump election that came as such a shock to most of the media

One of the most widely shared analysis pieces was from deep code

It describes how the establishment mainstream media perspective based around liberal values of openness and inclusivity

He calls the blue church is being challenged by a new web-based

insurgency a red religion based on the values of tribalism

The culture were the the 20th century was a decisive

success for blue any

effectively a route for red

So what we see first is that red was forced to move into a deeply exploratory phase

Second that it did this in a context

Where as it turns out?

things were changing meaningfully quite significantly in fact it from my perspective in a world historical level the emergence of

entirely new forms of

communication and therefore entirely new sense-making and coherence

He concludes that the blue church is in the process of collapse as its dominant ideology

Can't adapt to changing reality

But that a combination of the two sets of values of blue and red is essential

we are conscious and

Effective in the world in groups, not as individuals and the ingredients of those groups

Include aspects that are currently showing up as both red and blue I

Propose somewhat strongly that

Neither red nor blue as pure

Elements contain the ingredients necessary to actually be adaptive to reality

This is a disaster in fact

It's a little bit like

Separating the hand and the eye

Now you're the eye can see if the eye takes itself as being the essence of virtue it separates itself from the ability to do

The same thing with the hand for most of human history these groups have actually always commingled

They're necessary that they actually relate to each other in a deeply healthy and direct fashion

their separations into armed camps is

Extinction area actually you know the values of red that you think blue needs to integrate you also may also reintegrate. Oh well

That's actually pretty easy

Responsibility I mean we've actually even seen it

The ability to

Make a commitment and keep it

Which which by the way ideologically shows up is either duty or loyalty, but those are both ideologies the the deeper sense is that ability

Responsibility both of the individual in the group level the ability to actually really make a

Personal sacrifice on the part of the group that's actually a deeply

read value

and I don't mean that by the way as

Politically ideological certainly there are people who?

Are currently part of blue who feel that deeply what I'm saying is that that shows up much much more intensely in

Read and when you're feeling it in blue. You're actually feeling a red value, and that's good mixing is crucial

Because that's very Jordan Peterson esque -

How would you how do you define Jordan Peterson?

Or do you think the fact the issue is that he is is not definable within one of those two camps

Yeah, I think that's the point

I think that he grasps directly the fact that human beings can only actually make sense of the world by virtue of

communication with other human beings and this is all about the notion of admixture that one must have a mixture of of

What I mean he uses the mythopoetic to make sense the order order and chaos

The way right the taoist way is the alchemical admixture of order and chaos

And that's it like that's how you do it, and so if you bias towards orderliness

You find yourself in a rigid non adaptive

non creative non exploratory framework

Which will die because the world changes if you bias towards chaos

You you eat your young and evaporate

Which also ties for obvious reasons?

And the key is to actually enable these things to be in

relationship with each other and vital healthy relationship with each other, and I think that's in some sense the essence of what he's

Focusing on and instead of the core what he's asking about Peterson is hard for the broadcast media to get a handle on

Because the depth of his thought means he doesn't fit easily into any of their categories

The clash with Kathy Newman was his breakthrough a moment where the new world met the old

To give the context from Kathy Newman side she has to do dozens of interviews each month

Peterson is hard to get a grip on and he sure as hell looks controversial

She's also focused on getting sound bites for a five minute cut down of the interview for TV. Not a long conversation for online

The interview was ridiculous. It was a ridiculous interviewing. I listen to it or watched it several times

I was like this is so strange

It's like her determination to turn into a conflict - it's one of the issues that I have with

Television shows yeah, because they have a very limited amount of time, and they're trying to make things as salacious as possible

They wouldn't have these sound bites these clickbait sound bites

And she just went into it incredibly confrontational not trying to find your actual perspective