Name: #249 - Jordan Peterson | The Tim Dillon Show
Uploaded: 2021-04-25T04:00:01.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video '#249 - Jordan Peterson | The Tim Dillon Show' from The Tim Dillon Show on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-04-25. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video '#249 - Jordan Peterson | The Tim Dillon Show' from The Tim Dillon Show on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-04-25. Transcript available.

#249 - Jordan Peterson | The Tim Dillon Show

all right all right so what do you want to do today what do you want to
accomplish today
that's a great question it's a great question i think well you are you're a
clinical psychologist
so i do want to i think for my own life it's important that i selfishly use
this a little
bit to get advice from you personally um uh at which i think is which could can
help other people
as well i have the new book here which is called uh beyond order which i love
the title of that
12 more rules for life which was written i know a good chunk of this was
written before your ordeal
um which we can talk about too um and you know just the it's so funny on the on
the book it says
the new york times has called you the most influential public intellectual in
the western
world which is undoubtedly true it's a tremendous amount of pressure and do you
ever say to yourself
like do you ever look at the western world and go you know what i don't want to
be
the most influential public intellectual i don't want to be responsible in any
way for what's going on
um i i would say i vary in that opinion moment to moment every day um you know
i'm in an
extremely fortunate position but it's also a strange position and it isn't
exactly clear to me how to
conceptualize it or how to move forward in the position that i'm in so i'm
actively working that
through do you like fame like do you like the adulation of people because you've
helped a
tremendous amount of people um and you're very well known that also comes with
uh obviously a lot of
negatives um but there's a ton of positives to it and do you have you grown to
to like them to like
the idea of being famous well i find it very difficult to accustom myself to it
happened to me
quite late in life and so it's still very strange for me to walk down the
street and be recognized
continually it in some of it's extremely positive it's it's as if i'm always
among friends and well
wishers i mean you wouldn't get that impression if you looked at my reputation
online let's say
because there's a disproportionate number of journalists who have taken a
dislike to me but
when i'm out in public it's like being it's like living in a small town but
everywhere in some sense
because but in a small town like that was this subject of a 1950s you know
romantic romanticized
version of a small town where everyone loves each other and um people are
always telling me that they're
happy to see me walking around and looking healthy and or or they just say
hello or they you know do a
thumbs up or yell something out and so it's like being among friends and well-wishers
except it's
more intimate than that and it's extraordinarily positive but also very
difficult to conceptualize
i was walking with a friend of mine this morning who's a clinical psychologist
and i was talking about
this issue and about the impact that my communication has had culturally and
and um at the level of
individual lives and you know i i mentioned to her and we discussed the fact
that
so much of this isn't a consequence of my ideas you know i've read widely
and i i read people who's who were very profound thinkers nietzsche and dostoevsky
and jung people
who know me know that they were great influences on me but much more widely
than that many
neuroscientists and many literary figures and and of course people like jung
and nietzsche and dostoevsky
were overwhelmingly influenced by their own reading and their own knowledge
their knowledge of christianity the
knowledge of our religious traditions in jung's case his psychoanalytic
practice and his work with
schizophrenics and i've read much of the major works by all the major clinical
psychologists and
i've been able to communicate those ideas to synthesize them to some degree and
then to communicate
them to very large numbers of people it's not that surprising the ideas have a
profound effect because
they were written by geniuses who were interested in helping people sort out
their lives and and live
more meaningful lives and so um on the one hand it's not surprising that the
ideas have that influence
but on the other it's difficult it's complex to be the person who's identified
with that right to such
a great degree you're the conduit yes which is a cliched thing in some sense
you know artists say that
that they're just a conduit but there's truth in that and people say that i
articulate what they already
know and that that's helpful and i believe that to be the case because
otherwise it wouldn't
echo and reverberate right um and as powerfully as it does one of your rules
which i i looked at
here in the new book it said um and i want to ask you about this it says do not
allow yourself to
become resentful um deceitful or arrogant the first part of that you i've
witnessed um and i know that
you've lived and i i've never seen an attack on someone like i've seen on you
and i've been
i paid attention you know i'm a comedian i'm i i talk about cultural issues i i
um you know am
relatively well versed in what's going on in the public sphere i've never seen
uh attempt after
attempt after attempt to smear uh and like besmirch a human being as i saw with
you i've now i mean
there was um much less and i'm i'm serious about this there was maybe less
negative press about osama
bin laden than you i mean i mean i like i i think there was more of like people
trying to understand
osama bin laden um you know he grew up uh you know and he was disenfranchised
whatever it was
but how do you not especially because you went through this very powerful ordeal
and i don't know
how and i know that a lot of that was internal family dynamics and your own
health and your family's
health but how do you not become resentful against uh the people that have uh
tried to assassinate your
character also do you blame any of them for what you went through recently
which we'll we'll talk about
in a little bit but you know the ordeal that you went through do you blame any
of these people do you do
you say to yourself had they not been as aggressive and had they not been as
vicious uh you might not
have been in the situation you were in well you know i worked through a lot of
the answers to the
questions that you're asking while i was writing this second book the last
chapter the chapter you referred
to do not do not become resentful deceitful or arrogant those are the three
things that i noticed
that were particularly catastrophic to people in my clinical practice specific
those three things and
their interactions um and then in the in the final chapter chapter 12 is be
grateful in spite of your
suffering um look the first thing i'd say is that i've watched people since i've
become public a public
figure i've watched people my my peers let's say academics in other places in
the world or people
who are roughly my professional peers who've been the target of attacks on
twitter or in the newspapers
in some manner similar to what's happened to me and my observation has been
that it's very very hard on
people they generally fold up and apologize and are shocked and hurt quite to
quite deep degree and so
it's no joke to to have that happen to you it's it's given me more insight into
why people
are so likely to not say the things they need to say when it's the time to say
them because the trouble
that that can cause is very uh difficult to cope with and so i certainly wouldn't
say that it's been
without effect it's also a great mystery to me that it continually happens i
continually expect it to stop
but it doesn't stop and i don't it's hard to understand why that is exactly um
i'm i'm trying
to understand that all the time uh i think to some degree there's a public
attempt to understand that
even uh and i say that because i'm also the subject of an inordinate number of
memes right and they
represent who people think i am um in a very large number of ways strange ways
i've become very
associated with lobster imagery and with frog imagery and with king imagery and
with well the red skull
imagery and it's a very complex set of of images and so that all adds to the
difficulty of sorting it out
as as far as i'm concerned i certainly was tempted towards bitterness and
resentment as a consequence
of my illness which created a tremendous amount of pain and well at the same
time or approximately
the same time my daughter and my wife were also very ill and so it's difficult
not to succumb to the
temptation to shake your fist at god and curse the clouds and the thunder and
the structure of being
itself for all the all the suffering that people go through uh but it's not
helpful and i've really
strived with the help primarily of my wife but also of other people close to me
to identify resentful and
bitter thoughts and to eradicate them because they're not helpful they're not
justifiable like under any
condition as far as i can tell to and that's why i tried to illustrate in
chapter 12 that gratitude is
most properly conceptualized if it's not naive as a form of courage it's sort
of like the decision you
take when you decide to get married you know the trope is that you find the
right person and then
you just know but the truth of the matter is is that you you decide and then
you continually could
keep deciding day after day while you're living with the person and gratitude
in the face of life
suffering is the same thing it's a decision about an attitude that you are
going to strive to bring
forward it isn't so much uh it isn't so much a uh considered opinion about the
benevolence or lack
thereof of the world right so and i just couldn't see when i delved into my
thoughts i thought this
seems unfair i my family is struggling under a tremendous burden of ill health
uh not that that's not
true of many many families i'm very aware of that and and at the same time this
in some sense
rather unique uh exposure to continual public pilloring pillorying if that's a
word when
probably isn't but but i did when i delved into it identified all the thoughts
and thought them
through i couldn't see any positive utility they weren't helping me in any way
so and i've done a
reasonable job of dispensing with them in the last two months i would say at
the same time however i've
also been recovering to a fair degree since i've been properly diagnosed
finally now what was that
proper diagnosis for the people that aren't aware of what you went through
because i know that there's
there's was a lot of speculation because there was really no information out
there when you kind of
disappeared from public life yeah it's still not exactly clear what happened to
me i've had a long
history of depression and that definitely has played a role in predisposing me
to whatever happened over the
last few years but my new physician i i i was particularly suffering in the
mornings and by
the end of the day i was back to something approximating normal but it would
take me like
eight hours or so of real effort to even get to the point where i could stand
up and move forward to
without excruciating pain without believing that i was going to collapse and
then that would recur every
morning while he investigated the structure of my sleep and found that i was i
had severe central sleep
apnea and i was waking up 25 times an hour or so those are stressful occurrences
where you stop breathing
and so i've been using a breathing machine for the last month and it's improved
me from about five
percent of function to about 50 or 60 and and i'm still seem to be improving at
least to some degree
and so apparently i wasn't getting i was wearing this ring that monitors sleep
and i was getting zero
deep sleep maybe one minute or two minutes a night which is nowhere near enough
no and since i've been
using the machine it's up to more like 30 to 50 minutes that's where your body
restores itself
completely is during deep sleep and so at least one of the problems that i was
facing it's not the only
one but at least one of them was chronic lack of sleep and i know you had
anxiety and the