← The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch
01:32:55
Dr. Jordan B. Peterson sits down with the new leader of the UK Conservative Party, Kemi Badenoch. They discuss her multi-national upbringing, how that informed her on the fallacies of multiculturalism, the necessary preconditions of a functioning society, the current political landscape of the UK, and why anger resonates - but cannot rebuild. The Rt Hon Kemi Badenoch was Secretary of State for the Department for Business and Trade between 7 February 2023 and 5 July 2024. She was Secretary of State for International Trade and President of the Board of Trade between 6 September 2022 and 4 July 2024, and Minister for Women and Equalities for the Equality Hub between 25 October 2022 and 4 July 2024. Previously she was Minister of State at the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities between 16 September 2021 and 6 July 2022. She was Minister of State (Minister for Equalities) in the Equality Hub between 14 February 2020 and July 2022. She was previously Exchequer Secretary...
Loading summary
Transcript90 lines
- [00:00]
Kemi Badenoch
My dad used to talk about a law of homogeneity and he said people find their kind of people and they stick together. And I had this experience when I joined the Conservative Party.
- [00:10]
Jordan Peterson
There are preconditions for liberalism to work in the classic sense, and those preconditions are conservative. When they vanish, then the liberal project doesn't work.
- [00:19]
Kemi Badenoch
A lot of what I see that has gone wrong is the corruption of liberalism. People have found the weakest points and are twisting it to do things it shouldn't be doing.
- [00:29]
Jordan Peterson
In a low trust society, everyone's a potential enemy.
- [00:32]
Kemi Badenoch
If a politician is prepared to tell you something that we all know is not true, then what else will they tell you?
- [00:38]
Jordan Peterson
Now you're kind of looking at the UK as an outsider. When you think about the unity of culture that brings people together and there's.
- [00:44]
Kemi Badenoch
A lot to unpack. There are a large number of people who are suffering from what I call cargo cult syndrome. Do you know what I mean by cargo cult syndrome?
- [00:52]
Jordan Peterson
You should explain it for people though.
- [01:04]
Kemi Badenoch
Foreign.
- [01:10]
Jordan Peterson
I had the privilege today because it was a privilege to speak to the new leader of the Conservative Party in the uk. And the Conservative Party is likely the most successful political party that has ever existed in the west as a whole, and its leadership is, well, a position of cardinal importance. And Cami Bednock, the new leader, is relatively young woman who's come to the UK from another country, who is grateful for the intellectual and cultural heritage of the UK and who understands it deeply. She's an engineer and has extensive legal training. And that's a very interesting combination because engineers are very practical and task oriented and they know how to build things that work because they have to deal with the realities of the real physical world. And her legal training has given her deep insight into the, well, the legal structure of not only the uk, but the Western world in general, because so many of the institutions that we rely on in the west were originated in the uk. I got a chance to talk to her about her childhood, her educational background, her rise to predominance in the Conservative Party, her forthright stance on issues such as NET zero, which the Conservatives move towards in a fit of, you have to say, foolishnesses, foolishness, egotism and cowardice. And we talked about that in some detail as well. We discussed why she believes that she became leader of the Conservative Party, but why she's also an extremely effective alternative, let's say, to Nigel Farage and the Reform Party, which is a right wing party in, in the UK as well. That's on the up and up and that has, you know, things going for it. I believe we'll be speaking with Mr. Farage. I interviewed him last year. We're going to do that again relatively soon. On the podcast we got a chance to speak about the west in general. And that's part of the reason this podcast should be relevant to everyone in the Western world. The UK is a pillar of Western society and it would be lovely to have a leader in place who understands and appreciates exactly what that culture is and what it's offered to the world. And it seems to me that Ms. Badenoch supported herself highly successfully in the interview. And I think its fundamental shortcoming was that it wasn't long enough. And it's very good to see a leader emerge on the international stage who's brave enough to bear the threat of long term format interview that's unscripted. She had no questions provided to her before this interview. And then to have concluded at the end of it that the best thing that could have happened with the interview, it would have been better if it was twice as long. So join us for a vision of the new Conservative party in the UK. So, Ms. Bednock, I thought, I think what we'll do to begin with is just walk through your life biographically and let people get a chance to situate you. You've emerged into a very influential position on the international scene relatively recently. And so everyone who's watching and listening is going to be curious about where you came from and who you are. So maybe take us back to your childhood to begin with and let's start there.
- [04:50]
Kemi Badenoch
I had a very interesting and varied childhood. I was born in London, I was born in Wimbledon, but purely by accident, it was not by design. My mother, who's a professor of physiology, had an obstetric referral and her doctor said, you need to go see this doctor in the uk. And, you know, she had me at a private hospital at a time when if you were born in the uk, you got citizenship automatically, which she was unaware of. And my childhood was, you know, us coming, you know, on holiday back and forth to the uk. We lived in the US for about a year. She had a fellowship there. So I come from a very academic family, not just my parents, but their siblings and so on. And she had a fellowship at the University of Nebraska. So a lot of my early childhood memories, really vivid ones, are actually of Omaha and the snow. It's hard to have first grade.
- [05:49]
Jordan Peterson
It's hard to have vivid memories of Omaha. Do you so. And where was your family from? What's the country of origin?
- [05:59]
Kemi Badenoch
Oh, so, yeah, so my family are from Nigeria, Lagos. So the southwest, the very sort of cosmopolitan city that's by the Atlantic. And I don't know how much of the history, you know, but Nigeria was a very wealthy country in the 70s and it was a country on the post colonial times. They discovered oil. So I was an oil boom baby. And it was at the height of the oil boom. There was a lot of wealth going on, lots of people buying homes in Knightsbridge in London, at a time when the UK was actually having a downturn. Nobody was really thinking about moving here the way that we see the mass migration now. And it just goes to show just how the fortunes of countries over the latter half of the 20th century have really changed. And by sort of 1995, the country's in a really terrible place. It's been kicked out of the Commonwealth, Universities are on strike. And I, by this point, 96, I'm doing very well in my studies. I have scholarships or part scholarships to go to Stanford and there's nowhere for me to go. And my mother says, you need to leave the country. And by this time we had discovered that I could come to the uk. It wasn't where she originally wanted me to come to, but I had a family friend who was here and who said, well, why doesn't she come stay in London with me? So my mother said, you should go and stay with her, I will take you. And my dad gave me his last hundred pounds. He spent all his money on the flights. Exchange rate was terrible. And I came here and it was just so amazing because I couldn't remember the UK from my early childhood. And it was like watching TV and just thinking the amount of opportunity I had was fantastic, how lucky I was. But also it was at a time where leaving was just something that felt like an escape from a place where no one could escape from. And I always feel very lucky about that. So I see the UK as a place of hope and opportunity. And one of the things I'm most worried about now is that the country is changing. It's not the same place that I moved back to in 1996. It's not the same place that I came back to. It's changed a lot and that worries me. So I think you and I probably have something in common here. I think that we are classified as conservatives now, but really what we are conserving is classical liberalism, like the old liberalism, not the horrible postmodern lefty nonsense stuff but the good stuff, the enlightenment values, freedom of speech, you know, things like the presumption of innocence, free enterprise, all of the things that I think helped make this country really great. And a lot of the countries around the west slowly being forgotten, being taken for granted. And I can never forget those things because I have a comparison country and I have lived and seen a place where every, you know, those things are not respected, institutions are not respected, where everybody looked like me. But it was multicultural and there was so much conflict. And it's one of the reasons why I describe the UK as a multi ethnic country, not a multicultural one. Because you need to make sure that you have a shared dominant culture. And yes, people can eat different foods and have songs and so on, but those are the very superficial markers of culture. Culture trumps everything. It's much deeper things, customs, norms, how we treat each other, the expectations that you have of society and more importantly, what society has of you, what are your responsibilities, not just your rights. And those are the things that led me on the journey to conservatism. But it is very rooted in my having two places to compare to.
- [09:54]
Jordan Peterson
So you were born in 1980 and you moved to the UK in 1996. So you were 16 or 17? Yeah. Okay, 16. 16. And you said your studies were going well in Nigeria. What were you interested in and what did you study? Now you have a, you have a background in engineering and law, which are very disparate fields. So I'm very curious about that. So what, what were you oriented to academically when you were 16? And did you have political aspirations or ambitions that early?
- [10:24]
Kemi Badenoch
No. How would you, how would I have political aspirations? I grew up under a military government. I didn't even know what politics was. You kind of knew what democracy was, but you knew you didn't have it. So the politics and the political sort of interest came much, much later. I was supposed to be a doctor like my parents and my uncles and aunts and all their friends. That was the family that I was born. That was the sort of family that I was born into. And I had, you know, when I talked about that, part scholarship, I had a pre med, part scholarship to Stanford and my father couldn't afford the rest of it and that was age 16. So there was time and I came here and the first thing I did was get a job because I was left on my own and I wanted money. So I got a job at McDonald's and I went to a college part time for sort of 16 to 18 year olds. It's called a further education college. And I just thought, well, you know, my parents are doctors, of course I will be a doctor as well. And what I didn't realize was that between the expectations of the school I was going to and the amount of time I was spending earning money and flipping burgers and eating them, that actually I was no longer on that academic track. And I also had my first experience of what I call the poverty of low. The soft bigotry of low expectations. Because I had grown up in a relatively wealthy middle class family. Everybody's a doctor, and of course you get all A's and of course you do. Well, it just wasn't even a thing to not succeed academically. And I got to a school where failing was okay and it didn't matter if you didn't get the top grades. And the teachers would say, well, why do you want to be a doctor? You can be a nurse instead. And it wasn't because they wanted to keep me down. It was because what they had seen was that if you're black, then you probably shouldn't be stretched too much because you won't achieve it. And so they set lower targets and give you a huge congratulations and a round of applause for meeting them. That was the complete opposite of my upbringing.
- [12:28]
Jordan Peterson
Well, Nigerians do particularly well when they immigrate, let's say, to the United States. And so there doesn't seem to be a culture of low expectation that's pervasive in Nigeria. I mean, I don't know how to account for the differential success of Nigerians. Maybe you can shed some light on that, or maybe you just did. And I'm also curious about your statement that your family was relatively wealthy in Nigeria, because you might want to clarify that too, because there's a difference between relatively wealthy and wealthy. And so a little bit more about like you, you were obviously upper middle class, let's say in terms of educational background, your family and aspiration. But economically, from what I understand, it was still relatively tough going at times in, in Nigeria, being relatively wealthy in.
- [13:18]
Kemi Badenoch
A poor country is very different from being relatively wealthy in, you know, in the West. For me, being relatively wealthy meant that we had a car and we certainly up until I was about 13, we had running water. After 13, we stopped having running water. And we could occasionally, but not very frequently, travel on holiday, but we didn't have electricity a lot of the time. So it's an experience that comes from just being in a poor country that even when you have a bit of money, you still experience Life like people who don't have any. So no electricity, eventually no running water, lots of fuel shortages, but I was never hungry. So that's what I mean by that. And my. You're absolutely right. A lot of Nigerians who do leave the country end up doing well because they have left a system that holds them back and go to a system that allows them to flourish. And that's why I'm so interested in what is it that holds people back in one place and allows them to flourish in another. And it is not just money, it is many of the things that go with culture. The attitude towards entrepreneurship, whether you live in a high trust or a low trust society. It's a very low trust society. You get a lot of clan behavior, but it is also, it's a very competitive place. So if you grow up in a very competitive culture and you then live in a place where competition is allowed and is allowed to flourish, you will very likely do well. And I think that's one of the things that explains the fact is when people look at the demographics.
- [15:03]
Jordan Peterson
Say that last part again, I want to just make sure I followed your argumentation there about the competitiveness.
- [15:10]
Kemi Badenoch
I think yes. So I think that if you live in a place, if you've come from a country that is very competitive because there are limited resources, because there are not enough jobs to go around, there are not enough university places, so you need to be very academic, you need to be, you know, very hustling in your behavior and then you then move to a place where you don't have those barriers, but you still have that culture, you are more likely to succeed. And I think that that is what explains some of the success of. I think it's West Africans, not just Nigerians. But as we, as I suspect as you see more and more lower skilled migration, I think you will start to see those improvements disappearing as well. I think that's one of the things I remember seeing a study that mentioned that so you know, the relative class of the people who move makes a difference. And it's one of the reasons why I say it's not just about the country people come from, but who is coming, what skills are they bringing and do they want the place to succeed.
- [16:19]
Jordan Peterson
Right, right. Well, and that's not even precisely class in the Marxist economic sense. It's more like level of intrinsic aspiration. And there'd be the determinants of that are actually relatively difficult to specify. You know what, what makes someone are.
- [16:36]
Kemi Badenoch
High interest debt on credit cards, personal loans, collections or medical Bills keeping you up at night. PDS Debt can help start saving you money immediately. PDS Debt's platform can analyze your unique situation and create the perfect personalized plan to get you out of debt. There's no minimum credit score required and it takes just 30 seconds to get your results. With PDS Debt, you'll save more, pay off your debt faster, and take back control of your finances. Learn more and get a free debt analysis in just 30 seconds@pdsdebt.com wire see.
- [17:05]
Jordan Peterson
The funny thing about you, so to speak, and this is how I felt when I lived in Montreal because I didn't have a lot of money as a graduate student and I lived among relatively poor people by Montreal standards, which, you know, they were still doing fine. I wasn't poor because of my level of aspiration and possibility. Right. And the idea that poverty is a consequence merely of lack of money is an unbelievably foolish presumption. And your upper middle class status, as you already pointed out, wasn't a consequence of absolute wealth, although relatively you were doing okay. It was a consequence of the fact that your family was so educated and so aspirational that it was an unspoken reality that you would, could and would succeed. Right. That's wealth to have that.
- [17:54]
Kemi Badenoch
Yes, it is more important than just pure money because it means that you can be thrown into any sort of circumstance and you are likely to succeed. And I always consider myself so lucky because had I been born into a different family, I might have had a different trajectory. And it's one of the reasons why I think that family is something that is not talked about enough in UK politics. And maybe we talk about a little bit more childcare for mothers and certain, you know, certain policy elements. But family is the biggest determinant of your success and your life outcomes. And we need to make sure that we have more stable families.
- [18:34]
Jordan Peterson
Yeah, well, we know, for example, the literature on fatherlessness, for example, is there's almost nothing that puts a child at higher risk for poor long term life outcome than fatherlessness, for example. And so we have, I think we.
- [18:48]
Kemi Badenoch
Have a statistic here that 95% of the prison population, or certainly in the 90s, the 90% plus of the prison population, the male prison population, grew up without their father.
- [19:02]
Jordan Peterson
Yeah. So there's even, there's effects of fatherlessness that are, that are not only behavioral in the, in the way that you just described, so more dysregulated aggression among men, but even more fundamental physiological alterations. So boys who are fatherless have shorter telomeres by the age of 12, which means that their life expectancy is shorter. And girls really? Yes, absolutely. 15, 12. 15% shorter. It's remarkable. And girls who lack a father hit puberty one year earlier. Right. That's a major change. And so that just shows you how, how, what would you say, pronounced and fundamental that disintegration of family below the nuclear level actually is. And that's not. That's certainly not merely an economic problem, although it's also an economic problem. Okay, so you moved when you were 16. And so you were already. You already had been doing well enough academically to get a scholarship offer from Stanford. So how was it that you were doing well enough academically at 16 to be offered a scholarship from Stanford?
- [20:07]
Kemi Badenoch
I don't know, I just was, you know, I was a good all rounder at school. I was very good at maths, I was very good at English. I remember my English was better than my teachers, which they found very frustrating. And I think some of that would have been just the exposure, you know, living in the us, having parents who, you know, bought books. So I read a lot and I was good academically. But something different happened when I moved to the uk. I stopped being good academically and I just became pretty average. And I didn't understand why that was happening. And my friends who left Nigeria at the same time I did and went to the private schools, gave a lot of money. You know, they had parents far wealthier than mine. Certainly by that time, by the mid-90s, whatever relative wealth we had was growing, gone. And they did. These were people who I used to beat easily at school. They were suddenly doing very well. And I realized that not all the schools are the same here, that there are some schools that are very focused, they coach, they train, and there are other schools which people pass through. And it was one of the things that I think was the foundation of my conservatism, that making sure everybody's got an equal chance or the best opportunity. And I realized that yes, there would have been a baseline level of good academics or intelligence with me. But actually the things that made the difference were the family that I had, the schools that I went to, the culture around me. All of those things added to however smart I was in maths and English. And when you took those things away and when I started hanging out with children who didn't care about those things, then my academic results dropped and it took a while for me to get back on track and I ended up studying engineering.
- [21:58]
Jordan Peterson
Sorry, how did you get back on track.
- [22:02]
Kemi Badenoch
So it took a while for me to just figure out what I wanted to do. Engineering was when I realized I couldn't get into medical school here. Very competitive and the number of places are regulated in the uk, so there's a limit on how many places that can be. Engineering, on the other hand, is not. And the society that I grew up in had four magic courses. There was medicine, engineering, law and accounting. And if you, you know, you were almost judged if you didn't do one of those four things. So I thought, well, I can't do medicine, I'm good at maths, I like computers a lot. By then I was already coding. I'd been coding since I was 7 years old. My dad got me a ZX81 and then a Spectrum Plus 2. So all of these things, just the exposure to those sorts of things helped me. So I went onto a course for systems engineering and I just kept reading and I took a year off to work because I needed to save up money for university. And I met a lot of kids during my apprenticeship. I worked as an apprentice engineer. I met a lot of other people who were going to Oxford and Cambridge and they had more of the sort of culture that I had grown up with. So hanging out with people who were different in a different setting also had an influence. And then also just knowing that if I didn't get my act together, my life trajectory would end up in a place that I would not like. I had already had all the values instilled in me by my parents. So 16, technically still a child, but just old enough to know how to con, you know, it's just old enough to remember and not forget what the values that you've been inculcated with, I would say.
- [23:41]
Jordan Peterson
Right, right. And so you also point there to the importance of peer selection, especially when you're making important life decisions. Yeah, well, it's one of the things that was a real relief to me when I went off to college and I was about the same age you were when I left my hometown was that the, my, my high school compatriots in northern Alberta. Most of them stayed in the, in our hometown. Their ambitions didn't really extend, their vision didn't really extend past the boundaries of the town. I left with a couple of my friends, but it was a very small minority of people. And when I got to college, my new peer group was much more ambitious and, and outward looking. And that was formative and also a great relief because it was something that was, well, something that I was striving.
- [24:33]
Kemi Badenoch
For it is a great relief. Do you know why it's a great relief? Because you find your people. And my dad used to talk about when he was alive and when I was younger he used to talk about a law of homogeneity. And he said people find their kind of people and you will always get. They find each other and they, they stick together. And I had this experience when I joined the Conservative Party. I thought these are my people, like where have you guys been all my life? People who I agreed with on almost everything. People who thought the way I did about so much. And I think when you are in a place where the people around you think so differently, you feel very isolated. And I think that making sure that young people in particular have a sense of belonging in is so critical for mental health. And it is why I hate so much of whether you call it postmodernism woke, but so much that tries to detach people from what is right for them and give them this horrible deconstructed nonsense and say this is what's real. I think it's terrible for mental health, it's terrible for society.
- [25:37]
Jordan Peterson
It is, it is. It's partly. Cause our definition of mental health in the west is, it's too individualistic. And we should return to that when we talk about, we will talk about the overlap and the distinctions between classic liberalism and conservatism because I've rethought that to some fair degree over the last five years. Well, partly. Well, partly because people kept telling me I was conservative and I had never really thought that, as you pointed out earlier. You know, I thought about myself like you had as a more of a classic liberal. But I understand, I understand there are preconditions for liberalism to work in the classic sense. And those preconditions are conservative. And so when they vanish, then the liberal project doesn't work. Okay, so now you studied systems engineering, but then you went to law.
- [26:29]
Kemi Badenoch
Yes, so after I finished my university degree and I did a longer degree, I did a four year engineering degree rather than a three year one.
- [26:38]
Jordan Peterson
Where was that?
- [26:39]
Kemi Badenoch
At the University of Sussex, which is on the south coast of England. And after university everybody disappears. You all go off to different places, you get different jobs, different parts of the country. And I just had this feeling of unfulfillment and I thought, I've made a mistake, maybe I shouldn't have done engineering, maybe I should have done something else. And everybody says I speak very well and I make good arguments, I should have been a lawyer. So I Went to was really night school. I went to the University of London but they have a college called Birkbeck where the classes are in the evening. And so I went to night school while working about 2005. So I'm about 25 and I do a law degree part time, which was fascinating because I learned so much about the principles of all of the things we talk about, you know, the rule of law, jurisprudence, but also a lot of the history of the UK which I would have learned had I gone to primary or secondary school here. I learned in my law degree and it was just so amazing. And at the end of it I thought I don't want to be a lawyer, definitely don't want to be a lawyer. But I love having this stuff in my head and I'd become quite political by that time and I was more interested in helping to make good law, so being a legislator than being, you know, a corporate lawyer or something like that.
- [27:59]
Jordan Peterson
Okay, so how did you become political and why did you decide that you weren't going to be a lawyer?
- [28:04]
Kemi Badenoch
Well, I think, yeah. Do you know the term the quarter life crisis?
- [28:09]
Jordan Peterson
No, no, I'm not familiar with that, but it sounds like you had one.
- [28:12]
Kemi Badenoch
Yes, I think I had a quarter life Crisis, sort of 25 and I've done everything I'm supposed to do. You know, you finish primary school, you finish secondary school, you do your A levels, you get your degree, you get a job. I had a good job. I was working in consultation and I still wasn't happy and I was looking, I didn't know what I was looking for but I knew I was looking for something and I thought another degree would, would give it, would give it to me. And what I really was looking for was the vocation which I found in politics and it was a long journey over, probably from age 16 onwards having that experience of the, you know, that's low expectation culture which I thought was very race coded and looking back on it, it was extremely race coded. If I was, I think a white child, I would have been treated differently. And again it was sort of left wing teachers who were trying to be helpful but actually creating a lot of destruction along the way that experiences at university where I think I met my first sort of proper left wing students, culture type person and I did not like it. I thought they were very ignorant. They because by this time of course I know a lot about Africa and they talked about Africa as this place where they would come in and help the people, you know, who was, you know, just these helpless People, no agency whatsoever, they were not interested in the real problems and it was really a way for them to virtue signal. And I found that so aggravating. And that also semi radicalized me around what we do with aid, for example, and how we let a lot of African countries get away with things that they shouldn't do. An irritation with what I call moral colonialism, where rather than focusing on growth and how to make these countries self sufficient, we sort of preach values which the west has come to after a long period and try and impose them in places where there's no, you know, they're not ready to receive them or interested and not engaging with people on that level. So I had that radicalism, that radicalization process and that was actually my first work with the Conservative party. So it's 2005, I'm 25, 2006, David Cameron sets up these policy commissions and one of them was called Globalization and Global Poverty. And I really cared about this subject because I thought a lot of money was being wasted and sent to places where it shouldn't be sent to, when actually what people needed was partnerships, business, more sensible, more sensible ideas. And it was supposed to, even back then in 2006 onwards it was how do we tackle globalization, how do we make sure it works for everyone else. But these things end up getting co opted always by vested interests, which is a real shame. So many things took me on the journey to conservatism. I think also culturally I am a Christian, I don't believe anymore. I used to, there was something changed, Something happened about 2008 which changed my views on Christianity. But still I am culturally a Christian. My grandfather was a reverend in the Methodist church, I went to a Church of England school. And many of the things that were formative in my experience, singing hymns and knowing them off by heart and just a lot of the stuff that you end up doing in an African country, almost all of which are very religious, can shape you. And I find the interpretation of Christianity in the UK quite interesting compared to certainly Africa and Nigeria. People believe that it's not just something you do on a Sunday. The Bible is a living word of God and you have to do all these things and of course they're inconsistent and there are all sorts of hypocrisies. But you know, growing up in a country that was genuinely multicultural, half the people were Muslim. We had both Christian and Muslim prayers in my school. You look at the behaviors and so on, you just get a lot of insight into religion as an aspect of culture. Religion in My view is downstream of culture, it's not upstream. And I think people not understanding that is why there are a lot of, I have a lot of critiques about the way people speak about religion, Islam in particular in this country. I don't think they understand it. I think that they, they miscategorize a lot of people in a way that should not happen.
- [32:36]
Jordan Peterson
Okay, well, we'll definitely going to, we're definitely going to return to that. And so you're at law school now, you're doing that at night. What are you working? How, what are you, what are you doing as a job during the day?
- [32:47]
Kemi Badenoch
I'm working as a systems analyst for a company that no longer exists. It was called Logica. It was quite big at the time. It was a sort of dot com boom software company. And it was fine and I was earning good money and saving. I had enough, you know, earning enough to save for a house deposit. It was okay, but I wasn't there in the, you know, hierarchy of fulfill fulfillment.
- [33:11]
Jordan Peterson
Right. And so you went to law school and you part time and you found that compelling intellectually, but you also. Is that where you ran across your, your leftist nemesis and, and first started to understand what the pathologies of the, of postmodern postmodernism that, that kind of sly Marxism that's a part of that. And why did that strike you so intensely? Like you tangled that together a little bit in your self description with that bigotry of low expectations that you encountered with the more leftist teachers. And so that's all percolating. But it sounds to me like there were some actual striking experiences that perhaps you had in law school that politicized you. And it also sounds like your politicization in part was, at least initially. I definitely don't want that. Right? Yes, very much.
- [34:04]
Kemi Badenoch
Very, very much so.
- [34:05]
Jordan Peterson
Well, so let's walk through that because I'd like to disentangle that there's the bigotry of low expectations that you described and that deviation that you had in your academic striving in consequence. And now you're at law school and what are you seeing among the leftist students there and why is that raising your hackles?
- [34:26]
Kemi Badenoch
So actually what I saw started before law school, but I just couldn't define it. It was the stuff that I saw when I was studying engineering with those students. That was the first degree. And I had just a very dim view of a lot of the students studying the humanities courses because they didn't need to work as hard as of us studying engineering. I think I had about 26 hours of, you know, teaching time and lab time. You know, we were in the laboratory all the time. And then you had these people studying arts, and they were all sort of, you know, just messing around all the time. They were acting plays and having lots of fun and going on demonstrations and protests. And I thought, where do they have time for this? And they were all so sort of smug and condescending. So I realized, well, I don't like this. And because I have the self confidence of growing up in a relatively wealthy family, I don't feel intimidated by them and I challenge them. I have arguments with them and they lose and they get angry. And I think that they are just very weak people who don't like arguments. And they say things like, well, you can't say that, or how can you? How can you say that you're black? You should know that all these people are racist and we're just trying to be helpful and so on. And they were so condescending. So I know I don't like that. I also know that I don't like teachers who just set very low expectations. I'm learning that family has actually been the most important thing in making me who I am, and I didn't realize that long enough. So all of these things are taking me on the journey to conservatism. Then I do the law degree where I'm reading about John Stuart Mill and Edmund and how the rule of law is so critical to the west, but how this country functions, and you learn the power of institutions. You see how you need to preserve institutions from generation to generation. You then compare with what happened during the colonial era where institutions are brought and dropped in a place. And so, yes, there's now a common law tradition, but the culture has really changed, and eventually the culture erodes it. So a lot of it is personal experience and observation and lots of arguing. So I loved arguing, loved debating. And I remember when I was in that job working as a systems analysis, there was a lefty French guy who worked with me and he kept saying, you are so right wing. You are so right wing. And I didn't know enough then. And I said, no, I'm not right wing, because right wing, as I had been taught, was a bad thing. You know, the media and the cultural establishment always used right wing as a pejorative term. So I would say, no, I'm not right wing. But I was. And I remember when I really sat down and read the canon and the text, and, you know, you read Hayek and Of course, Thomas Sowell, who I love very much, I realized, oh, my goodness, I'm very right wing and I'm proud of that. This is not something to be embarrassed or ashamed about. And my being very much on the right is that mix of the cultural conservatism. Because I want us to preserve the things that are amazing here. And one of the things that is amazing is the classic liberalism, not the postmodern, you know, sort of corruption of that. And a lot of what I see that has gone wrong is the corruption of liberalism. And I gave a speech in December where I said liberalism has been hacked, that people have found the weakest points and are twisting it to do things it shouldn't be doing. And you need muscular liberals to defend their turf. And instead what they've been doing is giving away their turf. And that is how we ended up with a lot of the extreme gender ideology coming into play. Because it wore the clothes of the gay rights movement. It's nothing like that. And that's how we saw a lot of the craziness of critical race theory. The BLM movement set race relations in a terrible, negative territory, but it wore the clothes of the civil rights movement. And you need people who are in touch with reality who can say, no, this is not real, this is not true. And I think that is something which I am lucky to have, that I just don't get detached from everyday life. I know what is real and what isn't. And I am amazed that we have politicians, including the British Prime Minister, who will say things like, 99% of women don't have a penis, as if 1% of women do. This is just not real. And if a politician is prepared to tell you something that we all know is not true, then what else will they tell you? And, yeah, well, there isn't a bigger.
- [39:11]
Jordan Peterson
There isn't a bigger lie than a man can be a woman. That's. I don't think there's a bigger. There's a. There's not a bigger perceptual falsehood that's even possible than that. It's more fundamental than up versus down or night versus day, you know, so even creatures without nervous systems can distinguish between the sexes. And so, yeah, it's. There's something very pathological going on there. So let's delve into some concepts now, because you're moving in that direction. And so I want to throw something out for you and, and you tell me what you think about this in when I regarded myself, let's say more as a Classic liberal. The, the fundamental reason for that, as far as I'm concerned, was that I believe that societies function better when the individual is the essential unit of analysis or identity. But then, and I do believe that's true. And so I don't like ethnic categorizations or racial categorizations or sexual categorizations. I think merit itself and ability are independent of those fundamentally. But even more particularly if you start identifying people in terms of their group membership, you get pathological attributions like group guilt or group privilege for that matter. And that, that doesn't go anywhere good. But what I've come to understand more recently is that, that that liberal project which really originated in many ways in the uk, I know the Americans like to take credit for it, but really they just.
- [40:47]
Kemi Badenoch
But it was us, really.
- [40:48]
Jordan Peterson
That's right. Really, it was really, it was. And, and, and in a very serious way. And it's, that's why it's so, it's so terrible to see the UK lose faith in itself because, because, well, of its common law tradition and its immense contribution philosophically in terms of sketching out liberalism. But then you might say, well, what are the preconditions for being able to use the individual as the fundamental unit of analysis, like perceptual analysis? And it seems to me it's like it has something to do with Christianity. And I say that partly because every Protestant and Catholic majority country outside of Africa is a functional democracy. And so that's a very striking fact. It has something to do with the presumption of intact family. Right? So imagine liberalism works, individual liberalism works if there's an underlying unitary ethos. And that would be the antithesis of the multiculturalism that you described. That's predicated on belief in the intrinsic value of every individual as a fundamental axiom and also the fundamental equality between men and women at the level of ultimate value. And so those are preconditions. And then the sanctity of the family and the stability of the family, and that would be the long term, committed, child focused, monogamous family, which is a very particular type of family arrangement. And then once you have that, then the liberal project will work, but it stops working if that understructure starts to disintegrate. And that seems to me to be where modern conservatism can play its most salutary role, is to remind us, well, no, we need, well, we need a unity of culture. That's a tricky thing and that's something that you referred to. It's like when you think about unity of culture and you made some reference to the relationship between that and religion, when you think about the unity of culture that brings people together, what is it that you think is irreplaceable? Now you're kind of looking at the UK as an outsider, in a sense, right? And an appreciative outsider. You're kind of like Ian Hirsi Ali in that regard, right? Because you can really see the advantages. And you had to come at that understanding of that advantages really in an intellectual manner and as an anthropologist almost. So what do you see as the necessary preconditions for the kind of unity that brings a country together? And that is a barrier to multicultural disintegration, nihilism and conflict.
- [43:35]
Kemi Badenoch
So what are the preconditions? And there's a lot to unpack in what you've just said. So you are right. I force myself to always try and look at our country from an outside lens, and that's how I know that it is. In my view, you will differ. You will disagree because you're in Canada. This is the best place to be. Despite a lot of efforts to change it, it still is wonderful. So you're asking what are the preconditions? In my view, having a high trust society is so critical. People need to be able to trust each other. And the problem with having lots of different groups and lots of different group identities rather than one shared group identity is that no matter how hard you try, people will compete with each other even when they look exactly the same. Whether you're looking at Nigeria or Northern Ireland where, you know, Protestants and Catholics had, you know, endless troubles and turmoil, everybody looks the same. We need to get past the, you know, the skin color categorization, because it's just a correlation. It's not the underlying thing. You need to create a society where people can trust each other. The more they trust each other, the more they will interact, the more you will have better businesses. Because you don't have to worry about people stealing. We're all safe. We're not worried about people harming each other. Anything that creates lots of different groups, where the group identity becomes more powerful than anything else, means that you start to dislike or distrust other groups, and that creates a problem. There's then competition for resources. People aren't collaborating, they're not cooperating. And I think what has been remarkably successful about Western society is that it has had a dominant culture for a very long time, but has been able to tolerate other strains within it. This is something that's very unique. Most countries, if you're bringing in something else, it gets killed or you are forced to assimilate. It's not just allowed to be its own thing and just sit there. And I think that that's something that's really special about a lot of Western culture. And it has allowed it to thrive and take the very best from what's all around the world. But the dominant culture has to be reinforced. And when we move away from culture as the starting point and think it's law or it's religion, we start to get confused about where we're going to end up. You end up with the relativism. It doesn't matter what people's cultures are and so on. As long as they follow these rules, everything will be fine. And yes, the rules are important, but if your culture is strong enough, quite often you don't even need the rules. People just know. They know that you don't behave this way. They know that you don't speak like this to other people. It's just in, you know, it's in the system. And that's where I want us to get to. That's where I want us to get to as a country. And you can see, you know, I haven't done, you know, theses and written books about this. A lot of it is just pure, as you say, anthropological observation. I look at a lot of Christianity or a lot of churches in Africa, and there are elements of the way that worship takes place that is exactly as it used to be when it was an animist society. And the cultures take the bits of Christianity that they like the most. So there is a lot of speaking in tongues, which is almost unheard of in Catholic and Protestant sort of churches in the uk you go to Africa, there's a lot of speaking in tongues and people throwing themselves on the floor. They love the exorcisms, the witchcraft, bits of the Bible which are barely spoken or land in a sermon in the West. So because that's what the culture demands, the culture's like, okay, there's this new thing called Christianity. What do we like here?
- [47:44]
Jordan Peterson
Right?
- [47:44]
Kemi Badenoch
We like exorcisms. We like speaking in tongues. We like all the bits. There's more singing and dancing. It's very vibrant. And the culture starts to take over. And it interprets texts in. In a way that works for it. And this is the thing about text. You have to really guard. If you wanted to keep doing what it was always doing, you have to really pay attention. You have to really guard it Otherwise people can appropriate it and almost make it do the opposite of what it was meant to do. And I see this with a lot of UK legislation. We see it with the non hate crime incidents, this nonsense where people get arrested for saying things. These laws have been there for 30 years, but the culture is changing. You have judges who think differently about this stuff. It's the same with the Equality Act. The Equality act was there as a shield, not a sword. It was there to protect people from discrimination, started being used to discriminate between different groups. Oh, let's have some positive action. These groups are being treated unfairly, so we'll give them a boost and treat these other people unfairly. You need to guard your text carefully and that needs principles, I think conservative principles.
- [48:53]
Jordan Peterson
So what do you think? So I'm curious about your thoughts, because I would organize the hierarchy. It sounds like slightly different than you do, but I see why you're doing it. I think about the religious presuppositions as being the deepest presuppositions and then the cultural presuppositions nested inside those. Now you just pointed to a situation where the cultural framework supersedes the religious and alters it. And so, you know, you can see that, you can see that there could be a shift in that. But having said that, I'm very curious about your comments on a high trust society, because it's been my understanding that there actually isn't any natural resource except trust. Like if you have trust, then everything can become a resource because you can now cooperate or even compete in a civilized manner that's sustainable and productive over the long run. But it does require this intrinsic trust. And then the question would be, what are the characteristics of a high trust society? And you pointed to some. While there's everyone thinks violence is wrong, that would be one nobody steals, no matter what. Right. And this is something that's particularly characteristic right now, let's say of Japan that's starting to disintegrate in the West. And we've seen a lot of that in the United States, for example. Like the problem with low trust societies is you have to be suspicious. In a low trust society, everyone's a potential enemy. In a high trust society, everyone's a potential friend and collaborator. Well, you're rich in a society like that. And that Japanese are another good example. That Japanese have no natural resources, but they're rich. And their richness, their, their wealth is their ethos, their moral ethos. The fact that the default Japanese citizen is unbelievably Law abiding, unbelievably law abiding. And the. Now your, your sense, your intuition is that you fragment high trust societies with a careless immigration policy sake, a careless multiculturalism. And there's Robert Putnam, the Harvard professor has shown that quite clearly that more homogeneous societies, let's say, tend to be higher trust. And I guess it's partly because there are just fewer differences to take into account. Right. There's a shared set of presumptions about the nature of proper behavior and of reality itself. And if you diversify that to too great a degree, nobody knows which way is up, nobody can tell the difference between a man and woman, for example. But what do you think's dissolved in. What do you think's dissolved or is dissolving in the west, in the UK more particularly, that is undermining that high trust reality that was part parcel of UK culture. I mean, the queuing is a good example of that even. And I mean, it's something that people always point to when they go to the uk. But it really matters that people will spontaneously organize themselves without duress, in a civilized manner. Right. It speaks volumes about the nature of the culture itself. What do you think has undermined that?
- [52:12]
Kemi Badenoch
We still queue, by the way, I remember someone showing a video, there was a set of that happened about 10, 15 years ago and the looters were queuing to get into the shop. We still queue.
- [52:27]
Jordan Peterson
That's good. Civilized looters, that's a good thing to see.
- [52:30]
Kemi Badenoch
Yes, we still queue. So the question is, what is the thing that is undermining the high trust nature of our society? And I think it's complacency. And you talked about the careless immigration policy. This is something that I find unbelievably infuriating. How did this happen? Because everybody thought someone else was dealing with it. And whether the ministers thought the civil service was doing it or the civil Service thought that the border people were doing it and so on, at the end of the day, we as the political party in charge have to take responsibility for that. But it's one of the things that I find most frustrating because there is a complacency in this country that it doesn't matter when something's happening because everything's going to be okay. We are the uk, we are a rich country. And so everything's going to be fine. And it doesn't matter what you do. The UK is the uk. It's a civilized country. People queue and it doesn't matter how many people come in, we're always going to be the UK and everything's going to be fine. It is complacency. And the complacency comes, from my view, the memories of harder times receding, almost fading from living memory. And by that I mean war. When people were very alive to the threat from other people, other countries, when you have generations that have grown up where everybody is having a great time and we're not really at war. And I think all of that contributes to the complacency. That's number one. And complacency means that people stop looking after things because they think it's always going to be like that. And there are a large number of people across our cultural establishment, even the political establishment. I would say, in fact, it's probably especially the political establishment who are suffering from what I call cargo cult syndrome. Do you know what I mean by cargo cult syndrome?
- [54:25]
Jordan Peterson
You should explain it for people though.
- [54:28]
Kemi Badenoch
Okay, so just to summarize and paraphrase, In World War II, there was a plane that would drop supplies on a Pacific island. And the islanders saw air traffic control people moving their arms. They saw runways had been drawn and eventually a plane would come around and drop the food. And after the plane stopped coming, they wanted the food supplies to return. So they drew lines on the ground and they made the hand signals, but they didn't understand why the food was no longer coming, why were the planes not coming? And it is what happens when people have the very superficial observation of what is happening and assume that they understand it all and they know everything. They don't test themselves, they don't really query. And I see that behavior in a lot of politics. Just today we had a chancellor who went out and made a whole bunch of announcements, oh, we're going to do this, we're going to do that. And said, we're delivering growth. That is not how growth is created. Announcements are not policy. But many politicians have just seen that. You stand up and you say we're going to do this. And they imagine that there's an army of minions somewhere that make the thing happen. This is what happened with our immigration policy. The ministers would say, the prime minister would say, we're going to cut immigration. Vote for us. And an assumption that we've said it, of course the people who are responsible for doing it will make it happen. It was complacency and I hate it because I always felt that immigration in this country was too high. But I did know that we needed to get good people coming in high skilled because other people were leaving and you needed to replace that. It never once crossed my mind that as we were saying, let's have some good high skill immigration in limited numbers, that people would use that to wedge the door open and effectively just let anyone who had a good story come in that needs to be fixed. And just because we got it wrong before doesn't mean that we don't have a right to talk about it anymore. We know more about this than anyone else. We know how to fix it in a way that other parties don't. And we have the will as well, certainly under my leadership. And that's one of the things that I'm trying to get people to see, that the Conservative Party is under new leadership. I am a different person from what we had before. And yes, I was there when we had those previous governments, but I was working on the inside to stop a lot of nonsense which is aggravating people out there. And I will never stop doing that.
- [56:56]
Jordan Peterson
Okay, so let's lay out the political landscape, then let's turn to the political. We haven't talked about how you move from your burgeoning political interest to leadership of the Conservative Party in the UK because that's quite a story. But I think we'll just put that aside for the time being and focus on the political. The first thing you might want to do for people, since it's an international audience as well that's listening to this, is why don't you outline what you see as the differences between the three major political parties in the uk, Conservative, Reform, labor, and describe the relationships as you see them presently and maybe the relative strengths and weaknesses of each position, assuming there are any strengths at all on the labor side, which I doubt by the way, I might as well put my. Well, seriously, I mean seriously. But okay, so let's go through the party structure and I'd like to hear your thoughts about the current situation in relationship to the political parties in the uk.
- [57:58]
Kemi Badenoch
Okay, so it's very interesting that you said reform as the third party. Reform is not the third party in this country. It's doing well in the polls at the moment. But the third party in this country is the Liberal Democrats who had more votes and have 14 times as many members of Parliament as reform. Reform has five, Liberal Democrats have 70. We have 100.
- [58:19]
Jordan Peterson
Yes, yes, my mistake.
- [58:21]
Kemi Badenoch
And then Labour has 400 and something. I can't even remember the exact number, but so I would say the difference between the four parties. So the Labour Party used to be the party of the working class, blue collar workers. It has now become the party of the bureaucracy, whether it's the public sector or people who live off government. So people who live off government regulations, compliance and so on, that's who they speak for. Now, they don't speak for the, you know, what we would call blue collar. We are the traditional party of the right. The Conservative party is the most successful political party I think, in history, certainly with our longevity. And we are the center right party and we are traditionally the party of the entrepreneurs low tax. We've merged what I would call classic liberalism with old school conservatism. And that's where we are now. The Liberal Democrats are basically a protest party for mainly people on the left. And they don't have much of an ideology other than being nice. They will go with all sorts of extreme things, you know, extreme gender ideology, et cetera. And reform is representing the rage that a lot of people are feeling about things going wrong in the country. But it's all rage. It's not courage. And I understand why. A lot of traditional conservative voters have gone to reform because they're angry with us because they think we let them down. And a lot of traditional labor voters are also going to reform because they're angry with their traditional party. And then people who don't want to have anything to do with it vote liberal Democrat.
- [60:00]
Jordan Peterson
That's a good summary. Well, I guess one of the things I'm curious about is why the Liberal Democrats are so invisible. I mean, they get no coverage at all on the international side, for example, like really none.
- [60:13]
Kemi Badenoch
They are not on Twitter, but they are in local communities. And what you tend to, you will tend to get. A typical Liberal Democrat will be somebody who is good at fixing their church roof. And you know, people in the community like them go, you fixed the church roof, you should be a member of parliament. And they want to be nice. And then they get there. But actually they've got lots of very silly and foolish ideas along with, you know, being able to fundraise for a local community. And then they have bad views on national security, for example, they don't want us to keep maybe a nuclear detective deterrence. They have silly ideas about education. They're always, you know, they don't want people to go to prison, they want prisons closed down. Let's just have restorative justice, you know, people being nice. And if you not, if you're not paying attention, you will think that's good. Well, these are nice people, we should vote for them. But actually they, they will destroy the whole country if you if you let them at it, are they distinguishable.
- [61:12]
Jordan Peterson
Are they distinguishable ideologically from the Labour Party?
- [61:17]
Kemi Badenoch
No. The Liberal Democrats are basically trying to be nicer. Labor, they have a. What I would say is that they have more of a rural base. So the Labor Party's very urban. It's very sort of towns and cities. You will find Liberal Democrats in a lot of rural constituencies because they talk about the environment, something that we care about is. But they talk about it in a way that resonates with people who want to maintain things as they are. So Liberal Democrats don't like building anything. They want everything to stay as it is, which in itself appeals to a certain kind of conservative. I don't want anything to change. And they will block any kind of thing being developed. And what is interesting is that as politics becomes more volatile, as we have more social media and people retreat into echo chambers of agreement, we're seeing a lot more fragmentation across the board. If this was a country where you had proportional representation, it would probably come out in the wash, but we don't. So you will have a party like Labour, which has won a landslide majority on 34% of the vote. That is a scandal. And unfortunately, a lot of the people who would have been in the labor movement that I would have respected because they were culturally conservative. And so we would have something to agree on. There aren't there anymore. So instead we have a prime minister who, when the Black Lives Matter protest happened, he took the knee right in this room. Actually, he took the knee in this room. And I sat there thinking, what on earth is this man doing? This is completely ludicrous. But people who will pander to whatever is going on because they're not rooted in anything serious, they are detached from reality and they don't know what is real and what isn't real. And we are the only party that is real. Which means that we're often pragmatic in a way that annoys people and we don't communicate the pragmatism well enough. And that's what I'm trying to do. Now we have new leadership. We're going to be honest. We're going to tell the truth to the public. Even when it's difficult, people like to tell the public what they want to hear rather than what's really happening. And I have said that the Conservative Party is not going to do that. People must know the truth.
- [63:31]
Jordan Peterson
Okay, so let's delve in a little bit into the fragmentation of the right. Broadly speaking, in the uk, it's analogous to something that happened in Canada because our Conservative party split about 20 years ago into reform and Conservative before reuniting eventually. And I know that the inspiration for the Reform Party in the UK actually, strangely enough, came from Western Canada and the Reform Party. But I want to, if you don't mind, I'm going to speak in some ways on behalf of the Reform Party and let you respond to that, if you would. Well, when I look at the situation in the UK and it's analogous to the situation in Canada, by the way, and the US the same things are happening all across the West. I look at what happened with the Conservatives who you now had, and I think two things fundamentally. The first thing I think is what the hell were you thinking with regards to net zero? Because I can't imagine a set of policies simultaneously less conservative, more destructive, more woke, more elitist, more globalist than the net zero policies, which, by the way, the presumptive new leader of the Liberal Party in Canada, Mark Carney, is a net zero advocate of the highest order and a man who used to be.
- [64:53]
Kemi Badenoch
Head of the bank of England.
- [64:54]
Jordan Peterson
Yes, exactly, exactly. And he's not a follower of the. Yes, exactly. He's not a follower of the WEF like Justin Trudeau was. He's a leader. And in any case, the net zero debacle has left England, left the UK de industrializing like Germany, which is a complete bloody catastrophe because it's a terrible thing to see Europe falter and disintegrate. And it's a real danger. It's, it's left you guys with unconscionably high energy prices. You, you won't frack even though you could and produce another economic boom. I mean, and Trump just announced drill, baby, drill. And the Americans have been pursuing fracking, fracking technology like madman. That was the basis of the economy of the province that I grew up in, in, in Canada, by the way. We've been fracking there for like 60 years. It's a very long time. And so there's the net zero debacle and then there's the weakness, I would say, on the Conservative side in the face of this pathological woke ideology, especially with regards to gender and gender identity. And then to top it all off, there's the immigration debacle. And so two things, you know, how do you account for that emerging within the Conservative Party? What are you going to do about it? And how do you distinguish? Like, how do you attract, once again, truly conservative voters who are, as you said, annoyed and irritated and have drifted off into the clutches of the Reform Party.
- [66:29]
Kemi Badenoch
So I think that we should, we should start by stating what my position is. So I am not a climate change skeptic, but I am very much a net zero skeptic. And the reason why I am a net zero skeptic is because I saw how the legislation was put in place. I was a newish MP when it started. And if you look at how it happened, then you look at why it happened, the whole thing makes sense. So we have a minority government, we can't get any legislation through. And we need to put something that everybody can agree on. And on both sides of the House, left and right, environmentalism has supporters. There's the center right type of environmentalism. In the center left, net zero looks like a thing that everybody can agree on. And I remember asking in the debate, it was a 90 minute debate for this trillion pound legislation and I stood up. I was one of only two people who asked a skeptical question. I said, how are we going to pay for this? Where is the plan? And I was dismissively waved away by the minister at the time saying the plans will be forthcoming. That minister now works in the green industries, I'm told. And I think that the reason why this happened is because a lot of people are afraid of being attacked, of cancellation, of going against the grain. This was a way for us to say we're showing global leadership. There's this thing that a lot of politicians like to have, you know, walking on stage, I'm at these conferences, global leadership. We signed this thing, we were the first to do it. And I think that that's how we ended up there. And what you had was some other. That's 2019. I think it's middle of 2019. Okay, so I've been an MP for two years and I'm already seeing quite a lot of what I call bad science, bad faith arguments to deal with climate change. And I know that conservatives love the environment. You know, of course that's what we want to conserve. Amongst other things, we want to keep things as they are. We want to leave a next generation inheritance. Let's give something to our children so there's fertile soil here. But the net zero idea is bad because there is no plan, it's just an announcement. So we say we're going to do this thing and then we start working it out later. This is one of the things that I want to stop. Conservative parties under new leadership. We're not just going to say things and figure it out later. We will figure it out and Then when we know how to do it, we can say it. But the why it happened, that fear of cancellation, that fear of going against the grain is a more fundamental problem. People are so afraid of challenging bad orthodoxy. There is a terror of being heterodox. And I think that I am, on one level, an outlier. You know how you describe yourself as being extreme on this?
- [69:23]
Jordan Peterson
What?
- [69:23]
Kemi Badenoch
For me, it is an outlier when it comes to telling the truth and challenging orthodoxies. And nothing will stop me from saying it. And a lot of people think that I'm very combative. If you look at almost every single argument I have had where people have said that it was because somebody was lying or being inaccurate, and I hate that we have to tell the truth. And you've gone through this thing where you say something and a lot of people agree with you, but they're all afraid of speaking out. People are afraid of being labeled. They're afraid of being called climate change skeptics. They're not able to speak up for themselves, and so they stay quiet. And that's how it happens. It's all part of the proliferation of identity politics, which goes well beyond race and religion and so on. It's even the identity of ideas. We are environmentalists, so this is what we believe in. You've got to do all these tick boxes, and with no one challenging or those few people who are challenged labeled as climate change deniers, I should say they're not worried about being called skeptics. They're worried about being called climate change deniers and being ostracized. So they stay with the herd. What's everybody saying? All right, I want to be with that crowd? And you add on top of that the diminishing of free speech, and you suddenly get a place where people are afraid to point out what's going wrong. And that's how we ended up with net zero. And throughout my time as a minister, I was constantly challenging it, saying no to things. I got some of the laws we had scaled back. But one person cannot change everything unless they are the leader and unless they are the prime minister. It all starts from the top.
- [70:58]
Jordan Peterson
Okay, okay.
- [70:58]
Kemi Badenoch
How's that for. Does that explain it?
- [71:01]
Jordan Peterson
Well, I want to delve into that some more because it's. It's a huge catastrophe. And let me reflect your argument back to you, and. And then we'll. We'll elaborate on it a little bit, and I'm going to push things a little bit farther. So you. You pointed to two causal factors, two primary causal factors, three really. One was that the Conservative government believed that the environmental movement was a place where cross party cooperation could be had. And that I imagine, too, the Conservatives believe that taking a pro environmental stance, especially in relationship to climate change, might broaden the appeal of the Conservative Party outside of its standard. What would you say? Standard? Realm of acceptability. Okay, so there's.
- [71:50]
Kemi Badenoch
And that's not a bad thing to want.
- [71:52]
Jordan Peterson
Fair enough, fair enough. I'm not, I'm trying to give. The devil is due here, you know. And then the next thing you said, which is, which is much more unforgivable, I would say, not because you said it, but because it exists, is the desire of preening narcissistic politicians to rise above even their national prominence and strut about the international stage as undeserving planetary saviors. And that's a form of narcissism. That's. I mean, Jesus, really, if it's, if being Prime Minister isn't enough for you, now you have to, to make your name on the international stage, it's like, is there any limits whatsoever to your hubris? And the answer to that is no. And someone like Justin Trudeau is an absolutely stellar example of exactly that pathology. And I think it was Keir Starmer himself who said, if I remember correctly, that Westminster in some ways was beneath him, that the real action was at places like Davos, you know, with the. They have the highest quality call girls there, for example, which is one of the indications of just how stellar an organization it is. Right. And so, so there's that hubris. And then, and that's a. That's really not good. Like, it's seriously not good. And then that's allied with this fear of cancellation. Now that fear of cancellation is actually real. You know, I mean, one of the reasons that my license as a clinical psychologist is under assault in Canada, this is literally. This is the literal truth. One of the reasons is that somebody who wasn't even a Canadian submitted the entire transcript of a conversation I had with Joe Rogan to my licensing board, and I was complaining about climate change policy, pointing out that we're stacking unbelievably unstable economic models that purport to project out 100 years, which is completely preposterous, on top of climate models that are really no more stable than the economic models, and that all of that is preposterous. And that was enough, as far as my governing board was concerned, to make me unfit to be a clinical psychologist. And that's been a real problem. It scared the hell out of psychologists and professionals all across Canada, including MD that is extraordinary.
- [74:01]
Kemi Badenoch
That should not be happening. That should.
- [74:04]
Jordan Peterson
It's 100% happening. And the reason that I'm bringing it up is to point that that fear is of something real. That doesn't mean it's justifiable, but it is of something real.
- [74:16]
Kemi Badenoch
And it's why I don't point fingers and blame. I just say this is what we need to do. And you know, I love the Reagan slogan of never speak ill of a fellow conservative. There's just no time for that. People just need to know there's a new leader, she does things differently. But one of the other things that I think is such a scam is that people don't know what other countries are doing. We are, as you say, basically exporting our carbon emissions to countries that are opening up new coal fired plants every week. It's just not serious. It's this complacency and an assumption that everything is going to be all right and we are losing resilience. And one of the things that I tried to do was sort of save a couple of our steel plants, maybe let them turn into electric arc furnaces, but we need to be able to do these things. You need national resilience and you need people who understand the system, who can make sure that it doesn't. They don't use all these legalistic frameworks, whether it's on cancellation, judicial review, et cetera, to unwind it all. And when you have a party that can see how to do things and another party that says what it wants to do but doesn't know how to do things, and it starts to do better, we're in a tricky situation because you need to tell people the truth. And what I have at the moment are parties on either side who are telling people exactly what they want to hear one way or another, on the left and on the right. And I have seen the inside, and I just think that we need to get real very quickly. We need to get serious and stop messing around.
- [75:48]
Jordan Peterson
Okay, so let's talk about that seriousness because this is obviously with Trump pulling out of the Paris Accords as well. This is about to become. There's renewed seriousness in this regard. So I'm a scientist, I've published 100 scientific papers, and I'm not a climate scientist, but I can read research and I'm pretty good at striking to the core of the topic at hand. And so I've spent a lot of time reviewing the carbon debate. And this is what it looks like to me, and I would like your opinion about this. The first thing that I think is incontrovertible is that carbon dioxide levels are at a historic low when calculated over a 500 million year period. That's a very long time, 500 million years. And we're low enough so that Patrick Moore, who was one of the people who founded Greenpeace, believed that had we not started burning fossil fuels and cranking up carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, that plants would have started to die en masse within 100 or 200 years. So we're really at historic lows now. There is evidence that the planet has greened quite substantively in the last 20 years because of increased carbon dioxide levels. Whether that's human caused or not is not exactly fixed, but there's some possibility of it. But not only has the planet green 20%, which is an immense amount, an immense amount, it is the cardinal piece of data on the carbon dioxide front, that greening, it's also greened most spectacularly in semi arid and desert areas because plants with more carbon dioxide can tolerate more arid conditions. And so the planet is greener and crop yields are up. And so as far as I can tell, and I'm going to push the envelope here, not only are the carbon dioxide fear mongers wrong, they're telling the opposite of the truth, is that it looks to me like there's some reason to believe that increased carbon dioxide is, I think, incontrovertibly a net good. And I can say that you don't have to agree, and I don't even expect you to agree, but it's a topic that needs to be broached. And the especially. And then let's add a couple of dimensions to that. So we have a situation in Australia, for example, where the Australians will sell coal to the Chinese who are building these plants that you described at a rate that's just beyond comprehension, but they won't build coal plants in their own country, even though the air we breathe, as the environmentalists keep pointing out, is pretty much the same everywhere. And so we're deindustrializing Germany, we're deindustrializing the uk we're deindustrializing Australia. Mark Carney, who wants to run Canada, thinks 85% of fossil fuels need to stay in the ground. And we're doing this while China is having an absolute bloody field day. And we're doing all of it to virtue signal at the international level and to protect us from cancellation.
- [78:56]
Kemi Badenoch
This is, this is what I mean by us not being serious, where you're not really solving the problem, you're just giving yourself a nice announcement or a nice headline. So there's certain things that I know. One is that the decisions we're making now, most of us will not be alive to see how it turns out. And it could be that we don't necessarily get the impact we want from Net zero, even if we achieve net zero. So you need to make sure that you are doing other things as well. You're making the planet better. You're creating renewable energy sources, for example, so that if one day the fossil fuels do run out in 500 or 1000 years or whenever it is that we have built something that is in place, I think that there is a way to look at how we create that sort of future that is more sensible than what worries me as being a movement that is inspired by a lot of things that are actually just anti human in and of themselves. That when I hear the rhetoric of a lot of people who talk about Net zero, you know, the left wing extremists, not just the traditional left, but the hardcore sort of climate extremists, it's like they don't like humanity itself. Like they don't like people. They see us as being alien to the planet and it should just be nature without people in them. And I'm particularly exercised by this because one of my younger cousins killed himself after going down an Internet rabbit hole of anti natalism and pro mortalism and started, you know, he didn't become an environmentalist, but at least not that I know of. But he became someone who felt that human beings shouldn't be here and why are we doing this to the planet? And I see a lot of that in, you know, much of the rhetoric around the climate change extremists. And I don't like it. I don't like things that are anti human. I don't like things that make people feel bad about themselves, whether it's that human beings shouldn't be on the planet, or the identity politics of race and white people are all evil or whatever. I don't like any of that stuff. And so I have a skepticism towards this movement and the outcomes I have seen. I was the Secretary of State for industry and business and I saw our manufacturing closing down because people said the energy prices were too high. This is crazy, we have to stop it. And there I was fighting my own colleagues and saying, we have to stop this. And they would say, paris agreement, the climate Change act, the labor brought in, we've Got to do it. Otherwise we're legally liable and so on. So we did not try to remove the framework of the left. We went along with it for many understandable reasons. We didn't have the numbers for most of the time. When we did have the numbers, we were dealing with COVID But that time has passed. Now we need to talk about the future. What are we leaving for our children? A much better environment, I think is important, and I don't think we will get it by just closing down all our industry and hoping that China looks after us. That is not serious. We have to be smarter than that.
- [81:57]
Jordan Peterson
Okay, so let me, let me, we're running out of time, which is really unfortunate because there's many other things that we didn't discuss that are necessary to discuss. Immigration, for example, the relationship between the Islamic world and the Western world. That's like a hot potato, to say the least. And we can't delve into those rabbit holes. But I would like to summarize, I think, why, because one of the questions I had that you obviously need to address is why should people trust you and why should they prefer you, let's say, to Nigel Farage on the reform side. And I'm going to summarize, I think, what you've said about that, and then I'll, I'll ask you if you'll, if you'll add to that. You know, you said, for example, that you're in a unique position to evaluate the strengths of UK Culture because you've benefited from it so indirectly and directly and you're conscious of its value. And I compared you in that regard to I and Hersea Lee, which I think is a good comparison. And so, you know, that's, that's really worth thinking about, is that you have reason to be grateful for what UK culture has brought to the world, and you know what those reasons are. And so, you know, that's, that's, that's, that's a big deal. And then you said as well, and maybe we can make a bit more of this, that you were one of the people who had expressed skepticism and doubt about the rampage to a trillion dollar expense on the net zero side. Now, interestingly enough, isn't it, isn't it fascinating that we talked about the notion that it was fear of cancellation that would stop people from doing what you did, but the consequence for you, indirect though it may be, is that you're now the leader of the Conservative Party, which is, you know, that wasn't exactly an obvious outcome, and yet it happened and, you know, one of the things we haven't talked about. So let's. Let's close with this. Like, why in the world are you the leader? How the hell did that happen? And why do you think it's. Why do you think that. That. Why is that a good thing? Why do you think you're a good leader? But also why are you a leader that's good in comparison, let's say, as a choice, if the choice is Nigel Farage in the Reform Party, why should people who feel that they've been burned by the Conservative Party trust you and the party now?
- [84:22]
Kemi Badenoch
So why should they trust me? Because they can look at my record when the Net Zero debate was happening. You can see me on the screen literally questioning it. So you can trust. Because of what I have done before. So it's asking people to look at what I did when I had the chance. And it is because every point where I had a fight, I was quite often fighting for other people, tackling extreme gender ideology. This was something that took hold, the social contagion across the West. And I fought despite a lot of personal attacks, a lot of threats of cancellation, and I broke through. So I'm not going to hide and not tell people the truth. It is because I am honest that they can trust me. But it is also because I like fixing things. I'm an engineer. I don't like seeing stuff that's broken and wondering who's coming by to deal with it. I like to deal with it. And I love this country. I love its institutions. I am a builder. I want us to build things. And the problem I have with other people on the right is that they're so angry, they want to destroy things. They don't have a plan for how to build things. They just say, well, we'll just do this and we'll tow boats back to France and we shoot the people who are coming there and then everything will be fine. You can't seriously think that that will work. These are people who've never been in the system. So I am a realist. I'm an honest realist. I know how to fix things. I have the experience which you were talking about, the Reform leader, he doesn't have that experience. He is more a media personality. He talks a lot. If we do not get labor out because the right is split, we're going to have so much more of this. And we don't want a party that has never had to deal with these things in government before. There is a system that works. If you Try and burn it down without knowing how to replace it, we'll be in trouble. And this is where my experience of other countries comes in. You look at the Arab Spring, for example, you look at revolutions across the world. This sort of rage, and we're going to have a revolution and we'll tear the establishment down does not tend to end well. And this isn't saying that people have no right to be angry. Of course they have a right to be angry. I am furious about immigration. It's absolutely too high. There was a lot of carelessness. Who's coming into our country, the culture, the levels of integration are getting lower and lower. No one has a plan for integration. I'm going to work on one. That is what is different about me. If you just want someone who's going to be angry with you, then that's a totally different proposition. I'm not here to be angry with you. I feel your anger. But I am here to fix things. And that's the big difference between the two of us. Whether it's on net zero, whether it's on extreme ideology, whether it's on deregulation, whether it was fighting for women's rights. I am somebody who always makes sure that I speak on behalf of those who have no voice. That is what I see my job as. I do not understand this love of global summits and so on. I went to Davos as a Secretary of State. Ministers from all over the world tend to meet there because they're all there at the same time. And I can see why a lot of people are angry about it, because it looks like a closed room where decisions are being made. It's not really. It's more like a boring conference where people spend a lot of time preening. And I didn't enjoy it. But once you start seeing those things, you start to understand how people get influenced, how decisions are made. And I am quite immune to a lot of that. And that is what I want to bring to the leadership of this country. And we've got four more years at least, of labor. By the time they have finished, there's going to be a big mess to fix. And you're going to want people who understand it and who get it to clean up that mess. You're not going to want people who will just start thinking about it and learning on the job, and that's the offer.
- [88:07]
Jordan Peterson
Yeah, Well, I think. I think one of the things that I really learned about you today that's striking is that combination of engineering and legal education. Now, I've worked with a lot of engineers. Well, and a lot of lawyers for that matter. But one of the things that's very interesting about engineers, two things. First of all, they tend to be pretty truthful. I think that's partly their autistic proclivity. Let's say they don't have the social skills to lie. But, but, but it's also the fact that they actually have to build things that work and they have to build them from the bottom up. And so the engineers I've worked with are very painstaking and very detail oriented and less flashy and entrepreneurial than you might want if you want to be with someone truly exciting. But they do have to build systems that work and if they make mistakes, the systems don't work. Right, right. And so the fact that you're an engineer by education and a lawyer, that's a really interesting combination because I'm not a lawyer.
- [89:03]
Kemi Badenoch
I went to.
- [89:04]
Jordan Peterson
Sorry, sorry. That you went to law school. Right, right, right. That you have legal. Extensive legal training. Right, okay, okay. And so. All right. And so. Well, I guess we could close. We're going to see each other at ARC at the alliance for Responsible Citizenship convention. And. Yeah, I'm looking forward to that. We'll get about 4,000 people there. And, you know, we're trying to outline a visionary, classic liberal conservative policy set on the cultural side in particular. And so we'll have a chance to speak again.
- [89:40]
Kemi Badenoch
And then we can talk about political Islam and how we manage to tackle those problems while having an integrated society. How we fix immigration, which has gone very wrong. And I have a plan. There's so much that we can dive into, but I think too many people have not done the foundational work and they're just angry and they're just talking. We have a labor government that is completely clueless. No plans, they've just accidentally found themselves where they are. But there's a way out. And I'm very optimistic about the future, especially for young people. And I think if I was to leave you with a thought, it is that I am so in despair at how young people see the future. Because I remember when I was in my 20s, having that quarter life crisis and wondering where my life was going. I never thought there was no opportunity. I just. Just didn't know which way to go. And the young people today don't see that anymore. They don't go out, they're not drinking, they're not socializing the way they used to. They're just becoming. They're becoming different. And that Worries me about the future. And it also means that they are more susceptible to a lot of bad ideas. Both, you know, what I call the woke left and the woke right. I've now started using the word woke. I never used to before. There's a woke left and a woke right. And they're going to those places because they're angry about migration and how it looks like it's taken opportunity away from them. They're angry because they think the world is unfair, intergenerational unfairness. We need to give young people the sort of optimism that we had when we were younger. Remember what it was like being 25? It was great. How can we take that away from people? And between Covid and high house prices and so on, there's so much that has created despair. And I remember having a conversation with Pierre Poliev about this. He's my kindred spirit, by the way. I love him, he's fantastic. And, you know, he is six months older than me. And we see these things in the same way. We have to give people hope. And that is really, I think, maybe the difference between me and the other party leaders, that I'm thinking very much about the future and giving people hope, not just about today or yesterday.
- [91:45]
Jordan Peterson
All right, well, that's a good place to end, I would say, for everybody watching and listening. We're going to continue our conversation on the daily wire side, and I think what I'll do there is tilt towards UK, US relationships, and talk to Ms. Badenoch about her response to the Trump election victory and her vision of, well, UK relationship with the us, certainly, but also UK relationship with Europe, given the new dynamic that's emerging because of the electoral transformation on the American side, perils and opportunities in the era of Trump, let's say. And we can cover that on the daily wire side, so everybody could join us there. Thank you very much. It'd be lovely to sit down with you again at some point, if you're inclined. We can see how this does and whether it's been of some benefit to the listeners and to you, because it would be really good to delve into the immigration issue and in some detail and. And also the issue of coexistence on. On the religious side between the Islamic world and the Western world, which is a conversation that seriously needs to be had, in which many people on the Muslim side are keen to have, especially in places like the United Arab Emirates and increasingly in places like Saudi Arabia. So there's sparks of hope there. All the signatories of the Abraham Accords. So thank you very much.
- [93:08]
Kemi Badenoch
Yes, we must talk about Abraham Accords, too. There's a lot more to discuss.
- [93:11]
Jordan Peterson
That there's. Certainly, yes. It was a pleasure, by the way. And thank you very much for agreeing to do this. And we'll see you in a. Well, we'll see you on the daily wire side. But we'll also see you in a couple of weeks in London at the ARC Conference.