Controversial Canadian psychology professor Jordan Peterson has touched down in Auckland to speak about his new book 12 Rules For Life and says his main audience at his talk are young men looking to turn their lives around.
Peterson has sold millions of copies of his books, has nearly 2 million subscribers on YouTube and his talks sell out in a matter of minutes.
Peterson told TVNZ1’s Breakfast that most people at his live shows are young men aged 25-35.
"They're an audience that generally isn't reached by this sort of thing," he says.
"They're not there (at his talks) for political reasons or radical reasons they’re there to get their lives together."
"They drop their addictions, they drop their alcoholism, they increase their ambitions with regards to their jobs, they take on more responsibility, they marry their girlfriends, they fix their families, they’re in much better shape and many of them are no longer suicidal and desperate and there is absolutely nothing about that is not good."
He told Breakfast presenter Hayley Holt that men being suicidal and desperate is consequence of the "the act of discouragement of young men".
"You see that manifesting itself through society all the way from elementary school all the way up through university," he says.
"Boys are under-performing girls at every academic level, they drop out far more frequently out of school and university. They are bailing out of the humanities and have been for 20 years."
The professor of psychology at the University of Toronto says society's constant discourse is that western civilisation is fundamentally oppressive, patriarchal and destructive.
"Any sign of ambition on your part as a male is nothing but indication that you're participating in the same oppressive structure.
"Anything that's ambitious or noble or forward looking is actively discouraged and punished and its very very disheartening."
Peterson is in New Zealand talking about his book 12 Rules of Life: The Antidote To Chaos, in Auckland, Christchurch and Wellington with one of his Auckland shows and his Christchurch show already sold out.
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