74 Minutes With ... Jordan Peterson

Talking basement-dwellers and the importance of room cleaning with Reddit’s new favorite philosopher.

- Max Read

WHY NOT SIT in your mother’s basement and eat Cheetos and play video games and watch pornography?” Jordan Peterson asks me. For the record, he means it rhetorically, as the existential plight of modern man; my mother doesn’t even have a basement. We’re on the balcony of an Airbnb in a luxury loft in downtown Los Angeles, overlooking an unpopulated swimming pool. “That’s a perfectly valid question,” he says. “It’s certainly pleasurable, and not very onerous, moment to moment.”

We’re roughly four uninterrupted minutes into the answer to my first question: What about this particular historical moment has made Peterson, a University of Toronto professor in L.A. to lecture to a sold-out crowd at the Orpheum Theatre, a sudden celebrity as the author of a best-selling new book, 12 Rules for Life; the star of a wildly successful lecture tour across North America and Europe; a candidate, David Brooks says, for the title of the West’s “most influential public intellectual”? “I think the answer to that is actually to be found in an old story,” Peterson began. “There’s an idea that, especially in a moment of crisis, you have to go into the belly of the beast and rescue your father from the depths of chaos. Well, that’s what I’m doing.”