This is your host, Michael Sherman, and you're listening to Science Salon, a series of conversations

with leading scientists, scholars, and thinkers about the most important issues of our time.

Welcome to this AMA special. This is, well technically AMA number three, but it just has a single question,

what is your opinion of Jordan Peterson? This isn't any one person's question. I get this a lot pretty much every week.

And I just posted a link to some highlights from a public event.

Richard Dawkins and I did in Berlin in November, and we were asked four

questions in the Q&A about Jordan Peterson, even though it wasn't the topic of our discussion

at all.

So obviously people really are interested in Jordan.

So I thought for this AMA, I would just read the article,

the in-depth essay I wrote for Skipting magazine on Jordan Peterson. So I'm

before I do that let me just note parenthetically asking your opinion of somebody like Jordan who's a

complicated person who has commented many on many different topics in the

media there isn't one answer that is to say somebody who is opined about so many

different subjects, it's inevitable I'm going to agree with some and disagree with others

and have no opinions on still others. So it's a little bit like asking what's my opinion of Nome Chomsky

or Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris or somebody like that.

Plenty of things I agree with them on, others I disagree with them on, I had no opinion about other parts and so on.

That's just sort of the way it is with somebody like that.

I do know Jordan, not well, I wouldn't call him a close friend but I've

interacted with him a fair amount and I find him a highly likable person. He's a good

guy in the same way people ask me if you know Deepak Chopra is a fraud or

...