LEIGH SALES, PRESENTER: Canadian professor Jordan Peterson's ascendancy from unknown academic to blockbuster intellectual happened almost overnight.

His latest book, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, is a kind of self-help guide to modern life, and it shot to the top of the New York Times' bestseller list earlier this year.

His views on some issues are controversial, even though his overall message is nothing new: basically, take responsibility for your own life instead of acting like a victim.

(Montage of video footage featuring Jordan Peterson)

JORDAN PETERSON, PSYCHOLOGIST AND AUTHOR (archive): The claim that the wage gap between men and women is only due to sex is wrong.

PRESENTER 1 (US news program, archive): He's become famous in large part because he refuses to be shamed from the public square for having his own opinions.

PRESENTER 2 (UK news program, archive): On the mall, millions of people died.

JORDAN PETERSON: Right.

PRESENTER 2: I mean, there's no comparison - Mao and a trans activist - is there?

JORDAN PETERSON: Why not?

PRESENTER 3 (US news program, archive): Are you a white supremacist?

(Jordan Peterson laughs)

CHANT LEADER (archive): No freedom for hate speech!

PROTESTERS (archive): No freedom for hate speech!

(Montage ends)

LEIGH SALES: Dr Peterson, good to have you on the program.

JORDAN PETERSON: Thank you very much.

LEIGH SALES: With the popularity of your book and your YouTube lectures, you're obviously tapping into something that nobody else is tapping into at the moment. What is that?

JORDAN PETERSON: It's partly responsibility. I don't think that people have talked to young people about responsibility in any real sense - and been on their side at the same time - for, like 50 years. And that's just too long, because most people find the meaning in their life through responsibility.

LEIGH SALES: Isn't it fair to say, though, that some people, through no fault of their own, have tough lives; and that, no matter how much personal responsibility they take, that that won't change?

So, for example...

JORDAN PETERSON: Yes.

LEIGH SALES: ...you and I: we have had a lot of good fortune in our lives. We have been born to reasonably affluent, peaceful countries. I have a job that I have worked hard at, but I have lots of luck. You have written a book and done a series of lectures that have become embraced around the world.

Some people don't get lucky breaks like that?

JORDAN PETERSON: That's for sure. Some people just die - and horribly. Yeah, life's rough: no doubt about it. And if good luck comes your way, then you should be grateful for it and if happiness manages to manifest itself, you should be grateful for that, too.

LEIGH SALES: But how do you give a personal responsibility message while taking account that, for some people, it's harder to take personal responsibility and the deck is stacked against them?

JORDAN PETERSON: Well, I think the deck is stacked against everyone to some degree, because life is very difficult and we all die.

But some people do have it harder than others. And all of us have it very hard at some times in our lives.

It's like: well, what's the alternative? You take responsibility for that and try to struggle uphill because the alternative makes everything worse.

It's not like it's fair. I know perfectly well that people have brutal lives. I have been a psychotherapist for 20 years. I have seen things you can't imagine: horror shows that you can't fathom; and people who have been hurt in so many ways, so many dimensions.

So, like: bitter? Should they be bitter? Should they be resentful? Should they become violent? These things don't help. They have to struggle uphill despite their excess burden.

And it's responsibility, not guilt. You know, it's not necessarily their fault. That's not the point.

LEIGH SALES: We have been seeing a trend, particularly in the United States but also here in Australia, where there has been an erosion of freedom of speech on campuses: where people with views that are considered offensive, politically incorrect or triggering are no longer now...

LEIGH SALES: You mean: people with views, in other words.

Well, certain views more than others tend to be not just the subject of protest, but those people will be: you know, there will be attempts to exclude them from speaking at campuses.

JORDAN PETERSON: Yeah, I have noticed that.

LEIGH SALES: What is going to be the effect if that kind of behaviour continues in those kinds of environments?

JORDAN PETERSON: Well, it's hard to tell. The broader social effect is not going to be good, because lots fo the things that are happening in the universities that aren't good are already leaking out into the broader social world.

Part of what is going to happen is that people are going to stop coming and speaking on campuses. The comedians in the United States: many of them already won't speak on - they won't come and do their shows on campus, because everybody is so sensitive to offence.

But it also drives political polarisation, which isn't a good thing, unless you want to drive political polarisation. And I think the universities are going to cut the branch off that they sit on.

LEIGH SALES: Is being sensitive to offence such a problem, though? We would have previously called that 'manners'.

JORDAN PETERSON: It's a terrible problem. So imagine. OK, so the rule is: you can't offend anyone. All right. Let's say you're speaking to one person. I can't offend you: all right, fair enough. What if I'm speaking to 10 people? Do I get to offend one in 10? How about one in 100? How about one in 1,000? You're going to come out onstage and you're going to say something important about something vital and you're not going to offend one person in 1,000?

Well, you can't say something important about anything ever, without offending: probably, the person you are talking to. Important speech about important issues, especially contentious issues, is instantly offensive.

LEIGH SALES: But there are ways that you can share, I guess, provocative views where you attempt to still do that with an air of, say, respectfulness, where you are trying to mitigate against the offensiveness?

JORDAN PETERSON: This is true. Yeah, you can actually try listening when you're having a conversation, right? Assuming that both people who are having the conversation are of good will and they're not trying to play tricks and they're struggling towards the truth, which neither of them hold completely and both understand that. Yeah, you can reach across fairly large gaps and negotiate peace. Thank God for that, or we'd be at each other's throats all the time.

LEIGH SALES: Say the example of: there are some transgender people who want to not be referred to as 'he' or 'she'. They would prefer to be called 'ze' or 'they'. If somebody wants to be addressed like that, what does it cost me to do that?

JORDAN PETERSON: It's hard to tell, because the devil is always in the details. But as far as I'm concerned, that situation: it's not relevant to the issues, for example, that I was involved in.

I didn't care if transgender people wanted to be called by some pronoun. It's like: whatever. That's something for individuals to negotiate.

When the government makes that a compulsion and insists in their legislation that biological sex, gender identity, gender expression and sexual proclivity vary independently? It's like: no, they don't. That's wrong factually and you're not going to compel my speech. I don't care what your damn justification is.

LEIGH SALES: So am I right in that you see that as a curtailing of freedom?

JORDAN PETERSON: It's worse than a curtailing of freedom: it's a demand that the population uses a certain kind of linguistic approach.

It's an appropriation of speech. There's no excuse for that.

That never has happened once in the history of English common law. It's a barrier that we do not cross. Hate speech laws are not bad enough. It's not like there's no hate speech. Like, anyone with any sense knows that there is hate speech.

Who is going to regulate it? Who is going to define it? I know the answer to that: the last people in the world you would want to.

And then we've cross another barrier and we allow the government to compel speech for some hypothetically compassionate reason? No way. That's a really bad idea.

LEIGH SALES: Dr Peterson, thanks very much for joining us.

JORDAN PETERSON: Thanks a lot for the invitation.