Russell Brand.

I'll be talking to Dr Professor Dr Jordan Peterson.

I've spoken to him before, but this special commemorative wasn't really commemorative chat.

It's not a detail for the royal wedding between Meghan Merkel and Prince Harry.

It's to celebrate their release on paper.

Back off my book recovery and look at it now on Amazon is particular and 50 I think maybe £6.47.

We talk about that book recovery we took out.

The principles of recovery is a road to enlightenment.

We talk about Dr Peterson's book 12 Rules for Life is an interesting chat.

Talking about myth.

We do, of course, go for some of the mainstays of Professor Peter Sissons.

What a canon of ideas the commonly talked about.

But also I think we really get to the heart of it and discover some, uh, some people think there's an exclusion of warmth.

I think sometimes when talking about Peterson's ideas in these insistence on individual culpability and responsibility, we get into that stuff quite deeply.

I think it's a great chance those you don't know who Julian Peterson is yet.

Where?

Where have you been?

Obviously not watching him at the Hammersmith Apollo with 5000 others.

So, yeah, we're talking toe Jordan Peterson on under the skin.

Thanks for joining me.

And do check out my book Recovery on paper back.

Thank you, Dr Jordan.

PS in.

Thank you for coming on under the skin.

It's lovely to see you again.

It's good to see you too.

It's nice to meet in London.

Yeah, It's different, isn't it?

We're both of us were exiled in Los Angeles in our last conversation by Enjoyed it very much.

I got a lot from it.

I'm happy to talk to you on.

This is very much home turf for me.

Now we're in London or in a publishing office.

You've been promoting a book up her team.

That's why you're here.

Yes.

And do undoing a public couple of public lectures.

How do you find that?

Now, How are you finding what, though?

In a way, I've been comparing you to the British opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn in that you've been doing this for ages and now you're experiencing I on I almost perhaps unprecedented level off attention, but I'm assuming that your skill set is applicable.

You're a lecturer.

You're a clinical psychoanalyst.

So it's not like, Oh, my God, there's cameras, right?

Right.

Well, I mean, the the large scale lectures I'm doing aren't that much different in kind from the lectures I was doing at the university.

I mean, the venue's er larger and, yeah, but the Hammersmith Apollo 3000 seats, I think maybe you're Yeah, there were 5000 at the Apollo.

Well, that's where you're not nervous.

Um, I'm not as nervous doing that as I am often going to talk to journalists.

Individual journalists.

Yeah, because like the thing about those venues, there's a variety of things about them that work in my favor.

I mean, I like talking to crowds.

You know, I've always enjoyed lecturing, and so lecturing to several 1000 people isn't much different than lecturing to several 100 people.

But I also know that the people who have come are they're happy to be there, like I'm I'm speaking to a welcoming crowd.

And so and it's all All of the details are essentially under my control.

So So it's not it.

I'm actually enjoying it quite a bit.

I mean, I'm apprehensive beforehand because Well, because you should be.

You know, I want to do a good job and I want to make sure things go well.

And I want to get through the material properly and and and get a little farther in my thinking that I have Bean and and I'm trying to make each time I lecture better than the last time, and I don't Obviously I always don't succeed at that, but But it's good.

I'm enjoying it.

And my wife is a very good travel companion.

She's very stable and she helps me plan my days.

And so we've got it down to a bit of a routine.

I would say Tommy is in the room with this.

We have already met previously in Los Angeles.

You won't be on Mike.

There isn't my book.

It's just in case.

Listeners are wondering why Perhaps they might be able to detect in my voice.

I'm occasionally glancing towards the spouse.

The reason is because I am now they will when you're, um, doing these letters.

Is there no a performance component?

Do you know if you're definitely Yeah, Well, sure.

I mean, a lecture theatre is a theater, you know in a lecture is a form of theater.

Now it It's a serious form of theater.

But theater can be serious, you know, And and there's a seat, because partly what I'm doing is I'm presenting ideas to an audience.

But I'm also modeling the act of engaging with ideas, and that's the theatrical end of it.

And I don't give the same talk twice, like I have my stories and I have my collection of things.

I know when I talk about, but I try to try to do two things I try to.

I'm always talking to specific individuals in the audience, and so I'm having a conversation with the audience.

And so that's that's part of the dynamic element of the performance.

And the other thing I'm trying to do is to further my thinking on the topics that I'm addressing.

And there is a theatrical element to that because it's it's like I think this is the closest thing really that it compares to is probably stand up comedy.

Although I think the routines that comedians have are probably more well and formerly practiced in the ones that you know that then the talks that I that I engage in, I don't really think of it as delivering a lecture to an audience.

I'm trying to think about complicated things in real time, with an audience there to participate and to use the audience as an indicator of whether what I'm saying is gripping and comprehensible.

Your apprehension and understandable adrenaline prior to going on stage doesn't lead you thio lean into shtick, which would be the opposite of what you're describing.

One into remain engaged in a kind of dialectic process of discovery.

Because I thought, I'm in off the I am a comedian, like for us, I would argue there is a There is a distinction between performing before 200 people or 5000 people around 200.

I feel like I'm very relaxed.

I'm comfortable.

I feel like I've got a lot of space in there.

5000 after, like sharpen up.

Now you've got no room, particularly because the other crucial difference is then is to be a laugh toe every 2030 seconds.

If there isn't, it gets pretty frosty up there is appealing to me as a comedian that's interesting, interested in furthering intellectual debate looking at their new intersections between politics and spirituality.

Perhaps they've always been there.

The's some of these evaporating context, the emergence of new ideas perhaps best exemplified by your own particular trajectory.

Is it interesting to me that these spaces are now becoming available for forms of types of performance that aren't so contingent?

It is on rapture and appear no right, And I know it is a very strange thing, and I'm not sure what to make of it.

You know, you see Sam Harris doing something quite similar.

Richard Dawkins is doing something quite similar, and and it's I mean, I was thinking, because I've been trying to conceptualize this and and 11 comparable audience or one comparable situation is probably that of standup comedians.

Another, I suspect are traveling IV engine avenge evangelical types?

Yeah, you know, because there, But of course, what they're doing is explicitly religious.

This is it.

This has elements of both of those, and what's emerging that's so interesting is that there's a clear public, um, appetite for high level intellectual conversation.

If it's if it's dynamic and I don't know what what's accounting for that all of a sudden.

Maybe it's because these sorts of discussions aren't taking place like they should in the classical media space.

You might be right that Jordan, I mean to slightly mangle to slightly mangle the young quote that you use in your book.

12 rules I'm really enjoying, actually, like the one could infer motivation from results, perhaps, is the political discourse.

Social discourse has become superficial and detached from meaning from purpose from experience that there isn't opening appetite for substance, that people startinto what you know.

And and, as you said about fear, before, you know, the origins of theater and the origins of religion are closely connected, and both of them still, our debt, or at least functionally, must relate to meaning purpose, giving us stories that help illuminate the path of Okay, well, I think that I think that's that's that's There's something about that that's profoundly correct.

I think that I know that The New York Times is recently written about the rise of the so called intellectual Dark Web, which is a term that Eric Weinstein so brilliantly coined, I would say, and very thoughtfully, I think that the thing that unites the people who are loosely grouped into that collection is that they are having serious conversations with an audience that they respect, and they're very diverse range of people.

They don't certainly don't like Salmon.

Sam Harris and I disagree about many things, for example, and but Sam respects his audiences and he's and he's engaging them in extremely serious discourse about very deep topics about the structure of reality, actually, and and the relationship between science and religion and and and the And I think it is a consequence of the fact that not only has our public discourse, let's say in the media and politics become shallow, I think it's become unbearably shallow in the universities.

So yeah, well, because it's become so ideological, you know, and it's just not helpful.

Look, I was interviewed by a New York Times journalist last week.

Uh, Nellie was her name, and she's going to publish this on Sunday, and she did a literature degree at Columbia, and she told me she was quite appalled, actually, by her degree, especially in in hindsight, she told me that she didn't know until she graduated that there was any other way of reading great literature than through a post modern lens and the postmodern lands takes a book, and basically you take a book, whatever it happens to be and you decide which power hierarchy the author was serving.

And who's he?

Who?

He's six or she has excluded from consideration.

So it's completely read through a political lens is if the book is nothing but a tool of political and economic domination?

Essentially, and that's the assumption and, like, look, everything's contaminated by politics and power to some degree.

But that doesn't mean that there's nothing to art and literature except in service of, of like, group domination.

It's an appalling way of looking at the world.

It would be an extraordinary bias.

To bring to Jane Eyre is a very difficult of sort of make sense of it through the lens.

Of course, you know economics and politics like, Oh, yes, of course, important themes are gonna be present in great works of art.

But I I'm interest.

There's still great works of art.

Yes, the thing.

And it's like, well, even even with something as transient as comedy, let's say I mean, you can't reduce comedy to the political or the economic and comics who become too ideological, let's say, like musicians who become idiot to ideological, they're just not funny anymore.

You have to be.

I mean, you can have your viewpoint left to right.

That's fine.

And people do.

But you have to be able to transcend that few point continually.

And you have to be able to criticize it because otherwise you're not a music.

You just become a demagogue of sorts.

Yes, I would agree that once there's a rubric to which you've become enslaved, that it becomes a dogmatic then then there's no room for nuance.

There's no room for hypocrisy, humor, the transcendent mirth, chaos, these forces I need to be unleashed.

There's also things you can no longer laugh about because you're you know you're so committed to your axioms.

You can't you dare not transgress against them.

And if that's deadly, if you're a comedian, because the rule for comedy would be on.

This is something I like about about Sarah Silverman, for example, is she will say anything if she thinks it's funny.

She's very daring in that matter, and like I've heard her tell jokes, that really would curl your hair.

You know, But you can tell by watching or something will pop into her head and part of her ghost chase.

I don't know if I should say this, and then she'll say it and it's often like horribly funny and horribly funny is a good kind of funny.

I mean, it's it's it's daring and And it's something I really admire about comedians, too, is that they'll they'll take that risk.

And and it's something also that I've found disturbing about with regards to the many things I find disturbing about university campuses is that so many comedians won't go perform on university campuses anymore because they can't be funny.

People get offended and it's a false Oh, fend off offended.

I think you're right.

I mean, I think it's like a kind of Simon says type of Ah, like, Do you know that game?

Do you have that game in your language?

Just like our this certain things that we know, we're not allowed to say the some things that we know is supposed to think there's a kind of a a kind of formulate dance, a courtly behavior.

I've heard it referred to as that we are meant to pay homage to a particular type of set of protocols and manners, and it's not necessarily anchored to a real morality is no anger to assess off a sense of spirit.

Present of love or kindness is about like these are the rules that we abide by.

I want to talk to you a bit about the 12 steps on the model for handling addiction.

I've written about myself in my book recovery because I want to see what you think of it.

Like So, like, uh, the 12 steps have anonymous fellowships, which I, if I were to belong to them, I wouldn't be able to say I belong to them without breaching their code of anonymity.

But what's positive about this approach to addiction is, as we have discussed off Mike, that it creates community like the other people, that I've got a similar in Devon.

In fact, it was young that identified tha This solution, he said that like people have got chronic addiction, issues will struggle to change, and they have a spiritually realization of some kind and the support the community on the spiritual realization component that's actually supported by the relevant addiction literature.

One of the classic cures for addiction is spiritual transformation, and the hard core scientists have have laid that out as as a reality in the addiction literature.

I agree, because they use more secular language around that a spiritual transformation could just be a change of perspective, a renewal radical change of perspective from and typically in my experience, that's from a self centered of you, a self obsessive you about getting your own needs met.