Dr. Oz loves to learn about people through the worlds they live in. From his high-tech computer and podcast setup to a catalog of all of the artwork he’s purchased over the years, Dr. Oz takes a tour of Jordan Peterson’s home office. Jordan Peterson also talks about an important art piece he created almost 40 years ago which was inspired by his love of music.
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LearningTranscript
00:00 - You know, I love learning about people
00:01 through the worlds they live in.
00:03 So I love the efficiency of the camera.
00:06 You actually can see the entire world here.
00:08 - Yes, in a very real sense.
00:09 - Plenty of your podcasts I've witnessed.
00:12 This I love.
00:13 Always beef.
00:15 - Yeah, well, beef snacks, you know.
00:17 Poor animals.
00:19 - But it's made you healthy.
00:21 - Yeah, healthy as I am.
00:23 - This bookshelf, I think,
00:24 is probably what most folks wanna see.
00:26 I see Noam Chomsky here, I mean, the usual erudite.
00:29 - The Metaphysical Club.
00:30 I had a Meta-Psychological Club
00:32 for a while at the university.
00:34 So some people I met that I thought were,
00:36 you know, that wanted to talk to me
00:38 and the feeling was mutual.
00:40 We had a club that went for years.
00:41 Graduate students loved that.
00:42 Here, this is a catalog of all my art.
00:45 - Of your art?
00:46 - Well, art I bought.
00:48 - You're kidding me.
00:48 - No, no, no.
00:50 Hundreds of pieces.
00:52 I collected it after the Soviet Union collapsed,
00:54 mostly online.
00:55 And I got all of it for nothing, really.
00:59 - Huge paintings.
01:00 - Beautiful, beautiful.
01:01 - Where are you storing them?
01:03 - Well, when we renovated the house, all the art went.
01:05 This is an interesting one.
01:06 Painted on an asbestos sack
01:09 'cause they couldn't afford canvas.
01:12 - Oh, gosh.
01:12 - It's quite the representation.
01:15 - Not a lot of art in asbestos.
01:16 But there's a piece of art in here that's iconic.
01:18 - Here on the floor.
01:19 I had a carpet made out of it at one point.
01:22 So I made this in 1985.
01:24 It's a little worse for wear.
01:25 - You made this?
01:26 - Yeah, I made this.
01:28 Yeah, I made a bunch of these foam core sculptures.
01:31 So I think it's a new art form in some sense.
01:34 - Narrate it for us a little bit.
01:35 - Sure, well, I was reading a lot of Jung at the time
01:38 and I was meditating on music.
01:40 And because music has this intrinsic meaning
01:43 and I was trying to figure out,
01:44 what is the meaning of music?
01:46 And that's what this is called, by the way.
01:47 It's the meaning of music.
01:49 And I wanted to produce a,
01:51 it's a four dimensional,
01:53 it's a three dimensional representation
01:55 of a two dimensional representation
01:57 of a four dimensional phenomenon.
02:00 That's actually what it is,
02:01 'cause music is in four dimensions, right?
02:02 It's got three spatial dimensions
02:04 and a temporal dimension, four dimensions.
02:07 And so this is something that explodes outward
02:10 like an explosion and it's a spiral at the same time.
02:14 And it's a Mandela and it's a circle inscribed
02:16 inside a square.
02:18 And so I thought about this for about three months
02:21 and then I drew it in about 10 minutes
02:23 and then I spent four months making this thing.
02:26 It's about 25 layers thick, quarter inch foam core
02:30 and figured out how to make each plane a different level.
02:34 And then I couldn't put it up on my wall
02:37 'cause I didn't have a big enough wall.
02:38 It breaks into quarters.
02:39 So I had the quarters up.
02:40 And one day I was, after I'd finished it,
02:43 I was listening to this piece by Mozart,
02:45 40th Jupiter, I think it's the 40th.
02:47 And I was thinking, what does this mean?
02:50 What does it mean?
02:51 I had this overwhelming experience of meaning
02:54 just about knocked me on my, knocked me over.
02:58 I was shaking afterwards and sort of a revelation
03:01 of the idea that music was layered patterns,
03:05 harmonious interplay, moving out from the void to us
03:09 and that that was a representation
03:10 of the structure of experience itself
03:12 and that music was actually the most representational
03:15 art form rather than the least.
03:16 And all that was a consequence of, you know,
03:21 concentrating on this and then building it
03:23 and meditating on it.
03:24 And that realization was key for me
03:26 because, you know, I realized that in music
03:28 we had an incorruptible meaning that couldn't be destroyed
03:31 by rational criticism and that that was pointing
03:34 to something meaningful that couldn't be destroyed
03:36 by rational criticism, which is exactly what we need
03:39 in the modern age.
03:39 And then I had this idea that I would try
03:43 to make this image appear everywhere
03:44 and see if I could do that.
03:45 So I made some stamps out of it.
03:48 The Canada Post let you make your own stamps for a while.
03:50 So I made some stamps and it appeared on the cover
03:53 of the Routledge book catalog for a while.
03:55 And it's on my maps of meaning
03:57 and it's the logo I use online
03:59 and it's the meaning of music.
04:01 I made this car, I had this carpet made.
04:04 I was gonna offer this publicly, but it's kind of expensive.
04:06 And I kind of did it once and people were mad
04:08 so I didn't do it anymore.
04:10 So this is the only one.
04:12 - Why were they mad about a carpet?
04:13 - Oh, it was kind of expensive.
04:15 And, you know, so they thought I was being, I don't know.
04:18 - Oh, you were selling it.
04:19 - Greedy capitalist or something.
04:20 Yeah, I thought people might like it.
04:22 And, you know, that's why they could buy it
04:24 if they wanted to.
04:25 - I'd like it.
04:26 - But it didn't take, so that's life.
04:29 - If you have an extra one,
04:30 it's a perfect Christmas present for me.
04:32 - Yeah, well, that's an odd Christmas present,
04:34 but it's kind of fun to have it in this form too.
04:37 - And you know my wife, you know she'd appreciate it.
04:39 - I found out much later,
04:40 I got interested in Russian constructivism
04:42 and I found out much later that this is in some sense
04:45 allied with constructivism, it's sort of architectural.
04:48 The constructivists played a lot
04:50 with layered geometric forms.
04:52 I ended up with a painting, small one,
04:55 watercolor by a guy named Nikolai Sveit
04:56 and that I bought online from Eastern Europe
04:59 that actually looked something like this.
05:01 So that was quite interesting.
05:02 There's an explosion of creative Russian art in the 1920s
05:05 before Stalin clamped down and made everything into realism,
05:09 some of which was quite spectacular,
05:11 although very ideologically motivated.
05:13 And I had my entire house covered with Soviet art,
05:17 200 pieces on the ceiling, every single square inch,
05:21 hundreds of paintings.
05:23 Poor wife.
05:24 My poor kids had to grow up in that.
05:26 I liked it because I could see the struggle
05:28 between ideology and art in the canvases themselves.
05:31 That would transform across the years
05:33 as we got farther from the Soviet Union.
05:35 The art was dominating, the ideology,
05:37 just the ideology just receded into the past.
05:40 That was so interesting to see.
05:42 - Wasn't truth anymore.
05:43 - Right, right, well, the truth of the art,
05:46 'cause some of the paintings I bought,
05:48 a great artist had worked on,
05:49 or semi-great at least, had worked on for months.
05:52 So it was really something, some of them.
05:55 And the art defeated the ideology,
05:58 even in the more political paintings.
06:00 That took longer, but it still happened.
06:02 So that was really interesting to observe.
06:04 - Well, thank you again.
06:05 You've opened up in many ways and you help a lot of people.
06:08 - Yeah, well, you've helped me a lot too,
06:10 so, you know, hurray for that.
06:12 - Let's go eat something.
06:13 How was your steak?
06:14 - Yeah, no kidding.
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