In this video, join Dr. Oz as he speaks with Jordan Peterson who discusses his near-death experience and how he overcame the loneliness and darkness that came with it. He talks about how his friends and family helped him through this difficult time, mentions the methods of working on social interactive skills to put yourself out there, and explores ways of forgiveness to prevent the blockage of relationships.
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00:00 (gentle music)
00:02 - You almost died.
00:05 You experienced a loneliness, a darkness
00:07 that I've witnessed with my own patients,
00:09 where you're just barely holding on to the ledge of life,
00:12 the dark abyss behind you.
00:14 And I want you to help our audience,
00:17 many of whom actually might feel that way,
00:19 like the world's falling apart around them
00:21 who are struggling to feel isolated and lonely.
00:23 How they can change that reality.
00:25 How did you do it?
00:27 - Well, I had a lot of help from a lot of people.
00:29 That was the major part of it, I would say,
00:33 is my family, my parents, my wife, my daughter, my son,
00:38 my close friends, my extended family.
00:40 They all stepped up in a remarkable way.
00:43 Many people went way above the call of duty, I would say.
00:47 I think they went farther for me
00:49 than I might have for them, to my chagrin, let's say.
00:54 So that's a huge part of what helped me,
00:57 and my wife too, when she was so sick.
00:59 So many people were so helpful.
01:01 And part of that, I suppose,
01:03 was that she allowed that help to occur.
01:07 She understood that there are times
01:10 when you're facing something that's so far beyond you,
01:14 in some sense, that there's no possibility
01:17 of you handling it alone,
01:18 and that if people offer their aid, then you can accept.
01:22 And part of, there's a lurking reciprocity in that, right?
01:26 Is that the idea is that, well, perhaps you would be there
01:29 under similar circumstances for someone else.
01:32 That keeps the scales balanced.
01:34 But a large part of that is saying yes
01:37 when people say that they will help.
01:39 - So how do you deal with the loneliness
01:42 that happened in your own life,
01:45 when you lost control,
01:46 at least the control you thought you had
01:48 over simple things like, am I gonna hurt myself?
01:51 And how does that, the tools you used to get through this,
01:56 how does that shine a path for the rest of us
02:01 to get through the loneliness,
02:01 the anxiety that is epidemic right now in America?
02:05 - Well, I suppose, attending very carefully
02:08 to the relationships that you do have,
02:11 and trying, if you're lonesome, trying to extend them to.
02:14 Ben Franklin said, this is something quite wise,
02:18 if you move to a new neighborhood,
02:20 one of the most appropriate things to do to begin with
02:23 is to ask someone nearby for a small favor.
02:26 Right, nothing too big,
02:28 but then that allows them to do something nice,
02:31 which is a gift to them in some sense.
02:35 And then, while you're also now
02:37 under an obligation to reciprocate,
02:39 and that can start that process going, right?
02:41 Because a friendship and personal relationship,
02:45 for that matter, an intimate relationship,
02:46 is a series of exchanges.
02:48 And so, you might think you have to initiate that
02:51 with a small gift, but perhaps you could ask instead.
02:55 And so, that's wise, and if you're lonely,
02:58 well, you have to make the attempt to meet people.
03:01 And you do that slowly and badly,
03:05 and try to learn as you go.
03:07 I mean, partly, if you're trying to solve a problem
03:09 like loneliness, you think,
03:10 well, I need more people in my life.
03:13 Okay, well, that's more people in my life.
03:16 That's pretty vague and abstract.
03:17 It's like, well, I need a friend.
03:20 Okay, well, that's still pretty hard,
03:21 but that's at least only one person.
03:23 I need to say something nice today
03:26 to the shopkeeper down the street.
03:28 Maybe tell them who I am.
03:30 Give them my name.
03:31 Ask them their name, right?
03:33 I mean, one of the things that I learned to do,
03:35 'cause I moved many times,
03:36 was when I moved to a new location,
03:38 is I would pick a few places,
03:40 and then go to them once a week as a routine,
03:43 and get to know the people there.
03:46 And so, when I moved to Toronto, for example,
03:48 I went to this little cafe, bar, hangout for students
03:52 that was colloquially known as The Dive.
03:54 And it was a, it had karaoke,
03:57 and it was not a fancy place,
03:59 but it was a place where students would go,
04:00 and so it was kind of comfortable,
04:02 and we got to know the people who ran it.
04:04 And we went there diligently every week for like a year.
04:07 And that put a little stake in the ground, you know?
04:11 It was a place that we could start to predict and know.
04:14 And when you move somewhere new,
04:15 or if you're alienated where you are,
04:17 that's what you have to do,
04:18 is you have to put these stakes in the ground,
04:19 and then learn the nature of that territory.
04:24 And you can do that.
04:26 People are almost always open to a friendly exchange.
04:32 And if you don't think that's true,
04:35 then I would say,
04:36 perhaps your social skills aren't what they could be,
04:39 and you need to work on that.
04:40 I mean, as a behavioral psychologist,
04:42 I used to practice with some of my clients
04:45 just how to say hello and to introduce themselves.
04:48 You have no idea how many people don't know how to do that.
04:51 - How do you do that?
04:52 What's the right way to say hello?
04:53 - Well, let's do it.
04:54 - All right, let's do it.
04:54 - Sure.
04:55 So, hi, I'm Jordan Peterson.
04:57 - Mehmet Oz, pleasure.
04:58 - Very nice to meet you.
05:00 - Good to meet you as well.
05:01 - So what do you do?
05:01 Well, you put your hand out, and you smile,
05:03 and you look the other person in the eyes a little bit,
05:05 and you have a reasonably firm grip,
05:07 and you want to be friendly,
05:08 and you're opening the door here,
05:10 and offering a, what would you say,
05:13 the possibility of trust.
05:15 - And the mistakes--
05:15 - It's a big deal, that.
05:16 - The mistakes people make,
05:17 I'll just bring it up 'cause I taught my kids this,
05:20 most parents try to look them in the eyes.
05:21 - Yeah.
05:22 - It has to be a firm handshake,
05:24 not trying to hurt the person.
05:25 - Right.
05:25 - But that's, I think, symbolic, 'cause we're not armed.
05:28 - Yeah.
05:29 - If you're shaking someone's hands.
05:29 - Yeah, but you want to show
05:30 that there's some commitment there, right?
05:32 It's that, and you don't want to make them uncomfortable
05:34 by offering them like a dead fish, you know?
05:37 And these are very important.
05:38 These initial rituals are extremely important,
05:42 and often people who haven't been well socialized,
05:45 let's say, who weren't fortunate enough
05:46 to have good parents, let's say, or sophisticated parents,
05:51 the fact that they really don't know how to do that,
05:54 it's like, they're lonesome,
05:56 because how do they get it going?
05:58 These things are so important.
06:00 And so, well, that's a very good start.
06:03 You could do, you know, I had a friend
06:05 who was a master at this, man.
06:07 He was so good at this.
06:08 We used to go to shops everywhere I went with him.
06:11 He went clothing shopping with me a number of times.
06:13 He's an artist, and he liked to do clothing shopping.
06:17 And he would walk into a store,
06:19 and the first thing he would do
06:20 when he was engaged in an interaction to buy something
06:23 was take like 10 seconds to have a little personal
06:28 interaction with the person who was selling.
06:30 And he'd just say, like, "What's your name?"
06:32 And, "How are you doing today?"
06:33 And he meant it, right?
06:34 This wasn't some manipulative game.
06:38 It was a mark of his extreme social skill.
06:41 And the person would be so happy that this happened,
06:44 then the whole interchange would be extremely pleasant,
06:47 and they'd be unbelievably helpful,
06:48 and then we'd get exactly what it was
06:50 that we were coming for.
06:52 And so, and then it was also a pleasure.
06:54 And it was partly because his social skills
06:56 were just so good.
06:57 He put the person at ease right away.
06:59 Instead of being harsh with them or anything like that,
07:01 he took just that really 10 seconds
07:03 to frame the interaction properly.
07:06 And so I learned a lot from watching him.
07:08 - Are there mistakes that you notice people make
07:10 in that simple little interaction that you're describing
07:13 that most of us would never think twice of?
07:16 A dismissive comment, not acting sincere,
07:20 or actually not believing that it's important
07:21 what you're doing, 'cause I think it sort of is.
07:24 - Well, they don't trust.
07:25 They assume that they don't,
07:27 and they may not even notice this assumption,
07:29 that they're distrustful of what the other person might do,
07:32 and then that's broadcast.
07:33 So you might say, well, you know, trust is for the naive.
07:37 It's like, no, that's not trust.
07:39 That's naivety.
07:41 So imagine a small child who's never, fortunately,
07:45 had to face anyone malevolent or deceptive or manipulative.
07:49 They trust.
07:50 Well, we're not four-year-olds,
07:54 and we know that people can be full of snakes.
07:56 We're full of snakes ourselves.
07:58 We know that.
07:58 So how can you be such a damn fool that you would trust?
08:02 And the answer is because you're courageous,
08:05 not because you're naive,
08:07 not because you don't know that things couldn't go wrong,
08:09 'cause they could, but if you trust,
08:11 you open the door to the best side of that person,
08:15 some people will slam that door in your face,
08:17 but very, very few people,
08:18 and they usually have plenty of issues,
08:22 and maybe you don't wanna get tangled up in that,
08:23 but most 95% of the time, it'll work,
08:27 and if you get good at it,
08:28 it'll work like 99.9% of the time,
08:31 because you'll even be able to charm people
08:33 who are themselves distrustful
08:36 and who won't respond to that invitation
08:39 without skepticism and mistrust.
08:41 - How do you deal with conflict?
08:43 When you were ill, there were times,
08:45 we would periodically speak,
08:47 or I'd be speaking to your family, even more than you,
08:49 about what was going down,
08:50 and there was clear conflict happening
08:52 with people wanting to help,
08:53 but moving in opposite directions,
08:55 and that's true in our lives,
08:56 even if we're not fighting off a bad addiction.
09:00 For the many people who are isolated,
09:04 in part because they have conflicts in their life
09:06 that they can't resolve,
09:07 do they just make new friends?
09:09 Do they write off old friends?
09:11 Or do they try to fix those relationships?
09:14 And that's, I mean, I guess part of it is,
09:16 what is forgiveness?
09:18 And I don't think forgiveness is
09:19 saying what you did was okay.
09:21 I think forgiveness is saying,
09:22 I have a problem with what you did,
09:24 but I'm not gonna let it block our relationship,
09:26 which is especially important between parents and children.
09:30 - Well, I mean, I guess the first thing you do
09:33 is you figure out what you want.
09:35 What do you want?
09:36 If you have any sense, you want peace,
09:38 'cause wouldn't it be something if you could have that?
09:43 And so you try to make sure
09:48 that that's actually what you want,
09:49 and not victory, and not moral superiority,
09:53 and not, what would you say,
09:56 gratification that you were right and they were wrong.
09:59 All of that's just gonna get in the way.
10:01 And then you have to think through
10:04 the nature of the problem.
10:06 What's exactly the problem here?
10:07 And what would you like to see as a solution?
10:10 If you could have the solution you wanted,
10:12 what would it be?
10:13 Well, that'll set the frame properly.
10:15 And then you ask yourself, okay, well,
10:17 I need to broach this topic,
10:19 and God, there's more elephants under the carpet
10:22 than I know what to do with, and snakes in the rafters.
10:24 It's a terrible situation to walk into.
10:26 Is there some small step I can take
10:28 to just begin the process?
10:30 And you wait, and you hope that you get an answer.
10:33 I suppose that's something vaguely reminiscent of prayer.
10:37 It's like, God, grant me the possibility
10:39 of finding the appropriate words to broach this situation.
10:44 But a lot of it has to do with your intent,
10:49 and that's not an easy thing to straighten around,
10:52 because if you're in a conflict, you're angry,
10:54 and you wanna be right, and you wanna win,
10:57 and you wanna hurt the other person
10:59 'cause you're mad at them,
11:00 and all of those are impediments to peace.
11:02 And why would you not want peace?
11:04 Okay, well, 'cause you're resentful,
11:06 and you're angry at life, and it's very, very hard
11:10 to resolve conflict.
11:12 But just think what you can have if you resolve it.
11:17 You can be aligned with people
11:18 whose interests are aligned with yours,
11:20 and you can cooperate without all of the terrible stress
11:25 that unresolved issues lay on all of us.
11:28 And it's a very difficult thing to manage,
11:30 but it's a good thing to aim for,
11:32 and you hope you have the humility
11:34 and the goodness of spirit and the clarity of mind
11:37 and the pureness of heart to set your ambitions correctly
11:42 when you walk into the fray,
11:45 and that you're courageous enough
11:46 not to just avoid the fact that the conflict is there.
11:50 And then maybe you pick the time too
11:51 when you're reasonably well-rested and not angry
11:55 and not hungover and not hungry.
12:00 That's another one.
12:01 And you plan it carefully.
12:03 - Why do you think you're the most popular psychologist
12:07 in the world right now?
12:08 - Well, I was educated by good people,
12:11 so that's part of it.
12:12 I had a good education at McGill
12:15 when I was being trained as a clinical psychologist.
12:17 - But those people who educated you
12:19 aren't as well known as you,
12:21 nor are they perceived as compelling.
12:25 And of course, with adoration comes
12:28 a whole stew of people who detest you.
12:32 I've actually always tried to understand
12:34 why that was the case as well.
12:35 You must think about this.
12:38 I'm sure in the...
12:39 - I must think about nothing else, but yes.
12:43 I mean, the greatest thinkers of our time
12:45 have struggled emotionally.
12:47 I mean, Nietzsche, obviously, the classic example.
12:50 - Well, I include myself in the population of idiots
12:53 that I'm talking to.
12:54 So I think in some sense, I get away with giving advice.
12:59 Well, partly I'm not really trying to give advice.
13:01 I'm trying to straighten things out in my own life,
13:03 and I'm sharing the process of doing that with other people.
13:08 You know, when I lecture, for example,
13:10 I'm not lecturing, it's not the right word.
13:13 I usually have a question in mind that I don't understand.
13:17 So when I sit before a lecture,
13:19 I don't lecture with notes anymore.
13:20 I have a question that I don't really understand.
13:23 It's a hard question, like,
13:25 how do you make peace with people in your family?
13:27 It's like, oh my God, that's a hard question.
13:30 Do I have the answer to that?
13:31 Well, no definitive answer, that's for sure.
13:34 Well, could I walk through the exploration of that problem?
13:38 Yes, and then I verbalize what I'm thinking,
13:40 and that pulls people along through the process
13:43 of attempting to understand, explore,
13:46 and address the problem.
13:48 And I'm not talking down to people.
13:51 I don't do that because I don't believe
13:54 that I'm above other people.
13:56 And you know, in my clinical practice,
13:58 I dealt with an incredibly wide variety of people,
14:01 ranging from people who are so impaired
14:04 that they had trouble with the simplest of tasks,
14:06 folding in a paper to put inside an envelope, for example,
14:10 which is way more complicated than you think.
14:12 If you watch someone who can't do it,
14:14 it takes a remarkable degree of precision
14:17 to fold a paper in three precisely
14:20 to fit it inside an envelope,
14:21 to people who had world-class level intellects,
14:25 all that entire range,
14:27 and walked through a very large set of problems with them.
14:31 And I was trained too, partly as a clinician,
14:35 to break things down into simple steps.
14:39 The behaviorist psychologists were really good
14:41 at figuring out the necessity of that
14:43 and making things concrete.
14:44 And the more psychoanalytically-oriented people
14:48 that I studied repeated time and time again
14:52 that you have to lead people to draw their own conclusions.
14:56 And so I think the other reason, perhaps,
14:59 that I've managed to attract some public attention,
15:04 mostly positive, thank God,
15:06 is that I actually listen to people.
15:08 And I listen to people
15:09 because they actually know some things I don't know.
15:12 And the fact that there are things I don't know
15:14 makes my life worse than it might be.
15:17 And I don't want it to be any worse than it might be.
15:20 So if I can learn something from someone,
15:23 and if you really interact with someone,
15:27 I don't care who they are,
15:29 there is something you'll learn
15:30 if you handle it properly.
15:32 I learned plenty from dealing with,
15:34 well, say, my clients who are more intellectually impaired.
15:37 So I learned lots from dealing with them.
15:40 Like how the world treats people like that, for example,
15:43 and why, and what obstacles they encounter,
15:45 and how they overcome it,
15:47 and what the difference is in people
15:49 in terms of their intrinsic ability,
15:51 and how that plays out in each of our individual fates
15:55 and in society in general, and many, many things.
15:59 - I understand the power of what you're saying,
16:04 in part 'cause you say it so well.
16:07 I'd love to understand from you
16:08 why you think it bothers some people so much.
16:11 It just seems-- - Well, I get shunted
16:15 into the class of political enemy,
16:16 and then the people whose ideology inclines them to do that
16:21 really don't listen to what I'm saying.
16:24 They just have already made up their mind,
16:25 and so I'm just another person
16:28 who's in the basket of deplorables,
16:30 and maybe I'm a leader of that.
16:32 And so it's just casual, ideological, us and them.
16:37 - It just seems like your enemies fear you more
16:41 than they fear most people, or more angry at you
16:44 than they would be at most people
16:46 who would say what you're saying.
16:47 - Well, there's, okay, so apart from
16:49 just the conceptual confusion
16:51 that I'm lumped in with, say, radical right-wingers somehow,
16:55 because I've objected to radical left ideology
16:58 and its role in destroying the universities in large part,
17:05 there's something else going on there, too,
17:07 that isn't merely a matter of ideological distinction,
17:10 let's say, and the tendency to politicize everything.
17:14 This, if you go deep down into the culture wars,
17:18 especially as they've been raging in the humanities,
17:21 and this is especially true, I believe,
17:24 of the thought that came out of France,
17:26 Foucault, Derrida, and the postmodernist crew,
17:29 who were addressing a very real problem, by the way.
17:33 - Which is?
17:35 - The fact that everything is so complex
17:37 that there's an almost endless number
17:39 of valid interpretations of everything that goes on.
17:41 It's like, well, if that's true,
17:42 and it appears to be true even at the level of perception,
17:45 how do we know which interpretation
17:47 is reasonable, correct, or true?
17:50 It's a huge problem,
17:51 and it bedeviled many fields simultaneously.
17:54 So in AI, for example, when people were trying
17:56 to make intelligent machines and robots,
17:58 they came head-on into the problem of perception,
18:01 because it turns out that the world
18:03 isn't just simply made out of objects,
18:05 the objects that we see.
18:06 It's not like that at all.
18:09 And so how to categorize things
18:12 is an incredibly difficult problem.
18:14 No one really has any idea how we do it.
18:16 - So they're struggling to figure that out.
18:18 In the meantime, they're espousing a philosophy,
18:21 which most people didn't even appreciate was happening.
18:24 - Yes, well, there's another element to it,
18:25 is that when you make categories,
18:27 you distinguish between things,
18:29 and you do that on the basis of value,
18:31 at least to some degree,
18:32 because you want to see things that are useful and good,
18:36 and dispense with things that are useless and bad.
18:38 And so right in, built into the process of perception
18:43 and categorization is judgment,
18:45 and judgment involves exclusion.
18:48 And so, well, being excluded is obviously painful
18:52 in many situations, but there's no escaping it
18:55 if you're going to categorize.
18:56 Okay, so that's all still a straightforward
18:58 intellectual problem in some sense, and philosophical,
19:01 but underneath that, even, there's something else going on,
19:03 which is an assault on the idea of categorization itself.
19:08 And really, in some sense, that's what's being played out
19:11 way down deep below all the political trouble.
19:14 And it's part of, I hate to say this,
19:19 but it's part of the battle, in some sense,
19:21 the mythological battle between good and evil.
19:24 And so some people have an inkling of that,
19:26 and I'm on the side of discriminatory categorization,
19:29 which doesn't mean that I think people should be
19:31 arbitrarily judged and discarded.
19:33 It has nothing to do with that.
19:34 It has to do with making careful distinctions
19:37 between what is good and what is not.
19:39 And we are bound to do that.
19:42 It's part of the act of perception itself.
19:45 There is no escaping the necessity of value judgments,
19:50 and there's a higher and a lower,
19:51 because there's no value judgment without higher and lower,
19:55 and there's no action without value judgment.
19:57 So there is a hierarchy of value,
19:59 and I say that very clearly.
20:00 And there's something at the top.
20:02 And so, well, that's not a happy idea
20:08 for the people who oppose that.
20:12 And they see, to some degree,
20:14 that which side of that I'm on, let's say.
20:17 And well, that's a problem.