Will Witt Interviews Dr. Jordan Peterson | Interviews

what's up guys this is will wit with Prager you joined by the man who needs no introduction dr. Jordan Peterson how are you doing today good I just gotta say before this I just saw a video as someone put together of two interviews of you and they're like talking to each other looks like dr. Jordan Peterson versus Peter Jordan s'en have you seen that absolutely hilarious I laughed my head off is so funny no shortage of comical material being generated about me online yeah the left definitely is saying everything is well it's a good thing to see that comedy as far as I'm concerned because when things get so serious mmm that people can't make jokes about them then you know that they've gone astray badly I've watched the sort of memes that have been satirizing me and so forth right from the beginning of this and you know mostly they've stayed good-natured and humorous and my sense is that that's kind of an in it's it's a large-scale indication that I'm more or less on the on the proper line you know and if you respond to that with a certain amount of humor then the humor stays funny and never degenerates into something that's particularly vicious it's a good thing to watch a lot in a lot of ways though with the left I mean comedy is dead the politically correct agenda they they hate comedy and they hate jokes yeah well that's part of the reason that's a dangerous thing right when comedians are under fire when they're afraid to come to campuses and so forth that's not a good thing that's a canary in the coalmine scenario yeah so you did two videos for Prager you fantastic videos you did the one about fixing yourself and then you did the one about college campuses the dangerous people are teaching your kids yeah dangerous they're like children and the professor's dangerous professors when you tell us a little bit about that video the dangerous people are teaching your kids and what the point of that one is well look when people come to University they're at a formative time in their life and it isn't all that useful to teach people to break everything down into pieces before they've built anything up at all and to bring students to a university and to subject them to a decimation of what little structure they might already have to me it doesn't do them and it doesn't do them any favors psychologically and the the line that our culture is best sieved of as a patriarchal tyranny and that anything that smacks of ambition or forward movement on the part especially of young men is to be regarded with a substantial amount of skepticism as a consequence is not the least bit helpful and and then that's allied with a set of other ideas that I think are particularly pernicious and dangerous like the idea that if every system that we have in our culture isn't characterized by precisely equal outcome across all conceivable groups at all conceivable levels that that's indication of discrimination of racism bigotry yeah yeah well it is that's a potential contributing cause to some of it but to draw that identity is very simple-minded and it's also technically impossible because there's no way that you can equalize all positions upon across the spectrum of all possible relevant groups the quest you know how many how many groups are relevant that's actually the issue that the intersectional lists deal with right on the left there you can keep breaking it down into so many different categories of size right breaking it down until what you're essentially left with is the individual right and so I think that the the radical leftists have already discovered their own Achilles heel with intersectionality they just haven't figured that out yet so it's not helpful for people and and the equality of outcome doctrine is particularly pernicious especially because there's all this evidence that's been accrued and being replicated multiple times recently showing that in countries like Skanda in the Scandinavian countries where they've gone a long ways to instantiating equality of outcome or equality of opportunity doctrines right to try to make a level playing field I know you can argue whether or not they've been successful but one of the consequences of that is that the differences between men and women and personality and temperament and interest are actually getting larger and so it doesn't look like you can simultaneously pursue equality of opportunity doctrines and equality of outcome doctrines because they actually produce produce paradoxical consequences and then this is a serious issue and it's something that people are going to have to deal with ideologically and practically very soon so yes you another serious issue a final question they did a survey and my generation the millennial generation is loneliest generation Mon if you heard about that but all of us are I guess are pretty lonely how do we add we fix that epidemic Bart say it's time to find some friends likely well it's hard it's hard to say you know because I'd have to look at the survey to see whether or not it's validly like if it was validly conducted but I would think that part of it is part of it is likely the intermediation of phone technology and so forth in the social environment and because these are massively complicated technologies and I've kind of watched my young nieces in particular struggle with using phone technology and and the the complicated social milieu that they find themselves in so they're doing a lot of interacting with people but they're not it isn't obvious to me that what they're doing is a lot of the sorts of things that would be associated with intimate and close friendships I read another survey recently that said that for a lot of young people their preferred method of communication with their friends is actually mediated by text it's not face-to-face and it's so attenuated you know and a bandwidth is so narrow and you know what you're not really sharing an activity when you're texting you're communicating verbally but friendship is much more about I would say mutual engagement and something approximating a shared project and so if I had to guess if the data is the case and Millennials and Generation Z are more isolated I would suspect that that's part of the reason and then there's fragmentation of there's fragmentation of the intimate relationship structure to which I think is also a problem so because I don't know if many young men and women I think they're confused about how to conduct themselves in the space of intimate relationships for for well for all the social reasons that have become obvious in in recent years so if I had to guess that would what that that would be what I would guess you'll be my friend right thank you thank you everyone for watching this is will wit dr. Jordan Peterson thank you so much