In this interview, Dr. Jordan Peterson reveals what he believes are the core differences between men and women, and why understanding these differences can bring people closer together. Dr. Peterson also shares his perspectives on how to fight for what you want at work, and navigate parenthood, plus the shocking diet that helped Jordan with his health issues, and astonished Dr. Oz. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
You think, well, that's all sociologically constructed.
The biggest personality differences in the world are between Scandinavian men and women.
Why?
Right, it's exactly the opposite of what virtually everyone predicted.
No one saw that coming, but that's what happened.
And it's not like a few little studies done by some right-wing professors of psychology in some little podunk institution.
First of all, there are no right-wing professors of psychology.
So no one's been happy about this.
Hey everyone, I'm Dr. Oz and this is the Dr. Oz Podcast.
He's been called an accidental icon of the modern-day philosophical movement.
Dr. Jordan Peterson's work as a clinical psychology professor at the University of Toronto has gained international recognition for his profound and often controversial insights.
Today, Dr. Peterson is back with me to break down his latest book, The 12 Rules for Life, An Antidote to Chaos, to help all of us gain a better understanding of our full potential.
So what is winning, losing, what is success?
How does that all fit into this hierarchy game?
It's musical.
Musical.
Multiple layers.
You bet.
It's like, you know, maybe it's a Strauss waltz.
It's beautiful.
And you're dancing with someone you love.
And the orchestra is being conducted.
And everyone's dancing around you.
And everything is stacked up harmoniously.
It's like you're winning at every level.
Simultaneously.
That's where the maximal meaning is.
It's like there isn't anything better than that.
Why would you pursue anything else?
You want to win at every level.
And that means that not only do you win, but the fact of your winning is related integrally to the fact of everyone else's winning.
That's a perfect game.
It's like, not only are you winning, so is everyone that's playing with you.
It's like, great.
And that is, and I do believe, I believe we're wired for that to be a meaningful experience.
God, look at us.
You go to a sports game.
And you see a remarkable display of athletic prowess and sportsmanship at the same time.
Everybody spontaneously gets up and applauds.
Before they think, it's like, yes, you got it.
I see that picture, but I also see pictures often on the set of men and women coming in, not getting each other.
And a lot of times it's...
It's hard to understand what the guy's up to.
I think we're all, as humans, like Maseratis.
As a surgeon, I see the inner workings of this.
When one little spark plugs off, everyone can hear it.
Sometimes you can't hear it over the noise, but it's there.
When a woman is not happy, for example, with what she needs out of life, most divorces these days in middle-aged couples are initiated by the women.
That's a consequence of higher trait neuroticism in all likelihood.
Explain.
Well, women are higher in trait neuroticism than men.
And I think it's because they have to take care of infants.
I don't think adult women's nervous systems are attuned to the needs of women.
I think they're attuned to the needs of women and infants.
That's different.
Mother and infant.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Mother and young infant, too.
And so there's more sensitivity to threat than might be good for a woman's mental health across the span of her individual life.
But it's the price she pays for being hypervigilant for her infants.
And it's driving the sorts of things that...
We know that one of the predictors of divorce, for example, is high-trade neuroticism in at least one of the partners.
Because they're more unhappy.
So how does an unhappy woman...
Express that in a successful way to get the guy to change.
Because he doesn't have trait neuroticism, right?
He's not all worried about being a father of a young child.
He's hardwired for aiming at the target.
Yeah.
Well, it might be worth having a discussion about what target to aim at.
You know, again, that's why we developed the Future Authoring Program.
It's like, okay, what are you both up to?
What are you aiming at?
We need to establish that.
And you say, well, I'm not aiming at anything.
It's like, yes, you are.
If you don't know what you're aiming for, that just means you don't know what you're aiming for.
You can't live without an aim.
It also might mean that you're aiming at 25 things at the same time, so you're polytheistic in some sense, and 10 of those aims are working at cross-purposes to the other 10. So you're a house divided amongst itself.
Exactly.
I think a lot of times women are big players in their family story.
And they figure it out.
And that's not fulfilling.
You want to be the main character, protagonist of your story.
Well, that's also perhaps associated with higher trade agreeableness.
It's another big five trait.
So if you're agreeable, you tend to defer to others and you're compassionate.
Now, deferring to others isn't necessarily a virtue.
We tend to think of compassion as a virtue, but we already discussed that.
It's like, well, one of the things that you do if you're a clinician, like clinicians basically do two things.
They help people deal with anxiety and negative emotion.
That's a big part of it.
And the other is they do assertiveness training.
And that's usually for people who are too high in agreeableness.
It's like, okay, what do you want?
I've had clients who are so agreeable, they couldn't say what they wanted.
It's like, what do you want?
I don't know.
They've been so other-centered that they don't know what it is that they're crying out for.
And that's often a very lengthy process of discovery.
But then you have to find out what you want.
Then you have to figure out how to fight for it.
Because you don't just get what you want.
It's like...
That isn't how things work.
Since you're talking about fighting for what you want, this came up in your Channel 4 interview in the UK about the fundamental difference between women and men.
And a hot topic That we've talked about on this show is the fact that women aren't paid in a way that seems equitable to the men in a similar job.
And you made arguments that there are fundamental differences between men and women where women need to play some of the role.
And assertiveness is part of this.
Yeah, well, agreeable people get paid less for the same job than disagreeable people.
Because they don't ask?
Sure.
Look, if you do your job very competently, you might expect that your boss should notice that, and probably he or she should.
But the problem with doing things well is that it's invisible.
What's visible is mistakes.
So then you just work really hard and you're invisible.
It's like, well, you're invisible.
That's not helpful.
And like, did you ask?
And maybe asking isn't good enough.
Like, I've counseled lots of people who've tripled their salaries in two or three years.
Like, it's work, man.
It's work.
It's a strategy.
It's a war to do that.
But you can do it.
I mean, the first thing you do is, well, the first thing we do is, well, are you actually doing a good job?
Let's say yes.
Okay, fine.
Are you documenting it?
Generally, no.
If you're documenting, are you communicating the documentation?
Well, no.
Is your CV up to date and prepared?
Are you ready to move laterally?
Are you looking for other positions?
Are you looking for other opportunities within the workplace?
How often do you talk to your boss about what you're doing?
What are your salary goals?
Well, I want a 15% raise.
Did you ask?
No.
Well, sorry man, you're not going to get it if you don't ask, unless you're assuming that your boss is omniscient and benevolent, which is highly improbable, especially if you're doing a good job and you can be ignored.
And then it's not only a matter of asking, it's a matter of negotiating.
Because if I want something from you, and it's somewhat of a zero-sum game, and often the distributable pile of money is somewhat of a zero-sum game, it's like...
Here's six reasons why you should pay me 15% more.
And here's two things that aren't good that will happen if you don't.
So, and then usually you're not even negotiating with your boss, you're negotiating with your boss's boss.
So what you're trying to do is to give your boss a story so that he can or she can go to the next person up and say, well, we have to give this person 15% more because if we don't, first they're doing a good job, but here's the documentation which they so helpfully supplied me for, and here's the negative costly thing that will happen if we don't.
It's like, oh yeah, give them their money.
Because it's cheaper than hiring someone else.
It's like, you have to think strategically and you have to be disagreeable.
And the disagreeable part is, you have to negotiate on your own behalf.
What's the fundamental difference between men and women?
Well, the temperamental traits are women are higher in trait neuroticism, so they feel more negative emotion, anxiety, and emotional pain, primarily.
And they're higher in agreeableness, which is compassion and politeness.
And that's about half a standard deviation, which isn't a lot.
So men and women are more the same than they are different by a substantial margin.
But at the extremes, those differences really make a difference.
So, for example, women's higher trait neuroticism, negative emotionality, is reflected in the fact that cross-culturally they're more likely to be diagnosed with depression and anxiety disorders, whereas men's disagreeableness is reflected in the fact that they're more likely to be arrested and imprisoned.
So it's 10 to 1 male convicts to female.
You think that's a matter of socialization?
You think this court system is stacked against men?
We're going to have an equity program for men and women in prison?
Are we going to accept the fact that men tend to be more violent than women?
Which is also, by the way, women commit, women attempt suicide more often than men.
That's a reflection of their higher levels of anxiety and depression.
But men commit suicide more often because they use lethal means.
Yes, and that's a reflection of their lower levels of agreeableness and their proclivity towards physical aggression.
And you think, well, that's all sociologically constructed.
No.
The data are in.
So, you rank order countries by how egalitarian their social policies are.
And you put the Scandinavian countries at the top because they have the most egalitarian social policies.
If we know what egalitarian means, if it's not the Scandinavians, then we don't know what egalitarian means because that's what they've been trying to do.
Then you look at personality differences across those countries.
If it's sociological, then the smallest personality differences are in Scandinavia, because they've been obliterated by the egalitarian policies.
That's exactly the opposite of what happened.
The biggest personality differences in the world are between Scandinavian men and women.
Why?
Because when you take out the sociological variability, you maximize the biological variability.
Right, it's exactly the opposite of what virtually everyone predicted.
No one saw that coming, but that's what happened.
And it's not like a few little studies done by some right-wing professors of psychology in some little podunk institution.
First of all, there are no right-wing professors of psychology.
So no one's been happy about this.
Second, these are studies with thousands of people.
They're among the most credible psychological studies that have ever been done.
And it's not only personality, it's interest.
This is the big one.
The biggest difference between men and women in the Scandinavian countries isn't trait neuroticism or agreeableness.
Those are personality dimensions.
The biggest difference is in interest.
And women tilt towards people and men tilt towards things.
It also turns out that if you're in a thing-oriented job, you tend to make more money because they're scalable.
You know, it's like how many people can you take care of?
So a thing is you're building machines, cars.
Gadgets.
Gadgets.
Yeah.
Tools.
People, you're helping people.
That's right.
Hospital, psychology.
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
And that tends to be more one-on-one.
It's hard to scale healthcare.
And you don't make a lot of money in most enterprises that aren't scalable.
I'll be right back with Dr. Jordan Peterson.
We've got lots more to talk about.
Taking a step back from this, should we be following our bliss That's the message that we've been putting out there a lot.
And I... There's a comment, and I've heard it from others as well, that we're better off following our blisters than our bliss.
Yeah, yeah.
Is that an important part of your message?
That the promise of bliss is a false promise?
Yeah, it's not the right term, and you've got to get your terms right.
Precision and speech, right?
Speech matters, because that's how you turn potential into reality.
Right?
Meaning.
If you pursue what's meaningful, then sometimes you'll encounter bliss.
Perhaps as often as it's possible to.
Which I would say isn't that often.
Those are sort of peak experiences.
Meaning.
And I do believe that meaning is a fundamental instinct.
In fact, I think it's the most fundamental instinct.
It's what you've got.
Meaning is real.
It might be the most real thing.
I pick on that theme because it's an example of how people aren't getting you, amongst the critics.
And another example, because people say, well, follow my bliss, I want to be happy, I want to be light, I want to be...
It's like the bubbly, sparkling water in my tongue.
How about you want to be good?
That'd be way better.
Pursue what makes you good as opposed to evil.
Bliss?
Sorry, no.
And what about the issue of political correctness, much of which I think came about because a lot of my generation grew up when reprehensible things could easily be stated about women in the workplace, about folks of different gender, color.
The Vietnam War.
The Vietnamese War.
Yes, which really tore the country apart.
I think a lot of my generation has PTSD just watching the news at age five and wondering why everyone thought everyone was lying.
And it still has impacted us.
But there are groups that have A sensitivity to how they are portrayed.
And political correctness allows you to be polite, if nothing else.
Good, at a higher level.
And yet, you've criticized political correctness.
I gather because you think it chases people...
It's a wrong narrative.
It's a group-oriented narrative.
It's like...
So people have social groups, obviously, and they're individuals.
And the question is...
Group first, individual second, or individual first, group second?
And the answer is individual first, group second, or else.
And the politically correct types who play identity politics say, no, your fundamental characteristic is your group.
Now, there's all sorts of problems with that.
It's like, well, the first problem, and this is the intersectional people within the politically correct campus have already realized this.
Well, which group?
Oh, it turns out that people belong to like five groups.
Okay, so do you make all of their groups the number one thing?
Well, that doesn't work because there's an infinite number of groups.
So that just can't work.
Actually, you see, what the West discovered was that You have to fractionate the groups to get justice.
Where do you stop fractionating them?
That's right.
That's exactly right.
I get that there are emotional hemophiliacs out there where there's a lot of sensitivity that you may not be able to control as a person's speaker.
You're not going to please everybody.
I get it.
But for me, a lot of the speech that we would call politically correct is polite speech.
I'm giving you a break because I don't want to be mean to you.
No problem with polite speech.
It depends on how it's enforced and who's enforcing it.
That's the thing.
It's like, you want to be polite?
No problem.
First of all, you should reserve the right to be impolite when necessary.
Because otherwise, you've been deprived of your defenses.
And that's not good.
So, it's not, for example, it's not like I don't believe there's hate speech.
There is.
The question is, how should it be regulated?
It's not like I don't believe that there's prejudice.
There is.
That's not the issue.
The issue is how do you conceptualize the world?
And the identity politics types, they have a fundamental tribal conception.
They try to make group identity the fundamental issue.
They assume that the best narrative is oppressor versus oppressed.
And they play up the victim issue.
And I don't think that's good for anyone.
I think all it does is divide society.
And return us to a fractionated tribal existence.
It's the wrong...
The whole story is wrong.
That's the problem with political correctness.
It's like you put the group first.
No.
No.
Wrong.
The thing that we got right in the West is that we put the individual first.
And I'm not willing to see that eroded.
It's a mistake.
And it's not because of rights.
It's because of responsibility.
So, the way out of the oppressive structure of history is through maximal adoption of individual responsibility.
It's the best way forward.
Let's talk about how we pass that along.
The best that we are along to the next generation.
There's a line that you've offered that really caught me off guard.
There are many.
But this one was particularly provocative.
You said, don't give your children a reason for you to hate them.
Right, right.
That's rule five, right?
Don't let your children do anything that makes you dislike them.
Yeah, well, that's another...
Most of the book, 12 Rules for Life, is about responsibility and meaning.
I would say those are the two.
Responsibility, meaning, and truth.
That's probably the interplay of the principles.
Well, the question is, what are you doing if you're a parent?
And the answer is, preparing your child to be maximally socially welcome.
That's your job.
And it's the job of the two of you.
Because the two of you together make one reasonable person.
Okay, so now you're a reasonable person because you've kind of ironed out your idiocies with each other, right?
Through that opponent process, that contentious relationship, that wrestling that's part of a real relationship.
You're both smarter and wiser than you would have been otherwise.
And that's part of the reason for the vow.
It's like, I'm not leaving you.
Oh my god, you mean we're stuck with each other?
Yes.
For how long?
Six decades.
Oh, so this stupid problem we have isn't going to go away for six decades?
Right.
No kidding.
We better do something about it.
So there's going to be contention there.
So let's say we fix each other up, so we're kind of 80% functional as a unit.
Okay, now we have a child.
A child has this 80% functional unit.
Okay.
And to the degree that the child can establish a relationship with that unit, that will generalize to other people.
So you want your child to be a good play partner for other children, because by the time he or she is four, their primary source of socialization will be other children.
So if they're not prepared to take their place in the world of children, they fall farther and farther behind.
That's very well documented.
And you want them to respect adults.
Why?
Why?
Well, firstly, because they're going to become an adult.
So they should obviously respect adults because they're going to spend two-thirds, three-quarters of their life as an adult.
So that better be worthwhile.
So it better be respectable.
Otherwise, you devalue their future, and that's pretty counterproductive and mean.
And then the second thing is, if they respect adults and can listen to them, then adults who kind of naturally like children are more likely to teach them things and give them opportunities.
And so that's a good deal.
And so, if your child is doing something that makes you dislike them, assuming you're in a relationship and you've ironed out most of your idiocy, then other people will also dislike that.
And so, if you allow or encourage your child to continue in such behavior, you turn them into someone who's miserable and socially isolated.
Now, if you don't want them to leave home ever...
That's probably a good strategy.
If you cripple them badly enough, they won't be able to drag themselves out of your door.
But if you love your child and you want them to thrive, then you do everything you can to have the world open up its arms to them.
And a huge part of that is discipline, careful, minimal force discipline.
- We'll be back with more from Dr. Jordan Peterson.
And we're back with Dr. Jordan Peterson.
Fewest number of rules and minimal enforcement.
That's right.
Just the least you have to do.
That's right.
That's exactly right.
Minimal rules, because it gets too complicated otherwise, enforced with minimal necessary force.
Those are excellent principles.
See, part of what got me on that statement is the possibility that if you are unsuccessful, you will hate your children.
And we see times when parents...
Are ruining their children.
And vice versa.
And vice versa.
Yeah.
Because they've fallen out of love with them.
Yes.
I see this at the end of life quite a bit when fathers dying and all the strange children are coming back into the picture and you see horrible fights at that level.
Oh, absolutely.
Absolutely.
Well, I can tell you a quick story.
So when my mother-in-law died, she had prefrontal dementia and it started quite young.
So she died when I believe she was just in her early 70s.
And so it was a kind of a brutal death.
And her husband really went above and beyond the call of duty with her.
I mean, he just made my jaw drop, man.
Because as she deteriorated, he stepped in and allowed her to preserve her autonomy, too.
Like, he wasn't over-carrying.
He was really attentive.
And when someone offered help, he would take it.
He wasn't so proud, you know, in the arrogant way.
He would take help.
And he kept her at home until...
He was getting old, too.
He couldn't get her off the chair anymore.
And so then she went into the old-age home where she eventually died.
And her whole family gathered around her deathbed.
We were there for about the last week.
And, you know, that's pretty rough.
She was dying of hunger and thirst, really, but the disease.
And one of her daughters...
Palliative care nurse was making sure that her mouth was wet and taking care of her.
And they all pulled together.
They all pulled together.
It was really something to watch.
And so, and then she died.
And so what happened?
Well, that was awful.
But it wasn't hell.
Hell would have been her dying and everyone around fighting and everyone walking away embittered and full of enmity as a consequence of her life and death.
But what happened instead was that all her kids had a newfound respect for their father which has prevailed over the intervening 10 years and all the siblings got tighter and so they lost their mother which was no trivial thing but because they handled it so well They gain something.
And I'm not going to say in some naive way that it was equivalent to the loss or that they came out better.
You don't have to make that case.
They certainly didn't come out worse.
And so these end-of-life scenes, the ones you're describing, it's like those things, bad can get so horrible if it's contaminated by...
Enmity and deceit and misbehavior.
That's the difference between tragedy and hell.
Since I'm a doctor, let me ask you one medical question.
I know that your diet has become an issue of interest.
You're obviously real thin.
People could take the Jordan Peterson diet, probably, and maybe they'll look like you.
But I know that the medical issues forced you to be careful about your diet.
Yes.
So what specifically do you eat, do you not eat, and how has it benefited you?
Well, it's mostly been of benefit to my daughter, who had a very complex autoimmune disease with about 30 extremely severe symptoms.
And she learned over about a three-year period of experimentation what she could eat, which was virtually nothing, and what she couldn't eat, which was virtually everything.
All she eats is beef and water.
Beef and water.
That's it.
And she's been eating that, only that for a year.
And she never cheats.
Because cheating has very severe consequences for her.
And so, her mother has some of the autoimmune symptoms, and I have some of them, and so it looks like she got all of them.
And so, when this worked for her, and we watched very carefully over a number of years while she was doing this, and, like, the improvement in her is, I just can't believe it every time I see it.
I literally can't believe it.
It doesn't compute.
And I can't believe that it was diet either, you know, because that went against many, many things that I believed.
But I decided to try her more restricted diet.
And first of all, it was just meat and greens.
And then I stopped eating greens too about five months ago.
And her mother has been doing the same thing for about eight months.
And the consequences have been...
They're hard to believe.
I don't even really like to talk about them because I'm not a dietary expert.
And it sounds so completely insane.
But...
But I lost 52 pounds in seven months.
52 pounds?
Yeah.
And I wasn't overweight.
Well, I was.
But not by modern standards.
No.
And, you know, a year before that, I had cut all the sugar out of my diet.
But I was still eating carbohydrates of all sorts.
And I lost like three pounds.
Nothing.
Then I tried this diet.
It was like the first...
Here's what happened.
This is what happened.
In the first week I tried this diet, this was just meat and greens essentially.
I quit snoring.
That was way before any weight loss.
It's just like it just off.
And I was snoring a lot.
It was disrupting my wife's sleep.
So I thought, oh, that's really interesting.
I quit snoring.
Isn't that weird?
Then I lost seven pounds the first month.
I thought, hmm, that's quite a lot.
Then I stopped having to have a nap in the afternoon because I was napping a lot.
Then my gastric reflux disorder went away.
Then I lost another seven pounds.
Then the psoriasis that I had on my foot and my scalp, that started to go away.
So, and then over the course of seven months, I stopped taking antidepressants because I didn't need them anymore.
My mood isn't perfectly regulated, but it's pretty damn good.
And I lost 50 pounds in total.
And I wake up in the morning, and I've never woken up well in the morning in my entire life.
So I don't know what to make of that.
And I wouldn't recommend it.
This is not something you do lightly.
Obviously there were issues that were going on in your gut, but it does make me curious as a physician.
As you point out, you learn from the extremes as well.
Well, here's a hypothesis.
You can make of it what you will.
This is a hypothesis I've formulated over the last year.
And like I said, this came as an absolute shock to me, and it still is a shock.
And I wouldn't recommend it because it's hell on your social life.
And it really makes traveling difficult.
So it's not to be done lightly.
And there are other consequences too.
But here's a hypothesis.
Let's say you have a patient who has multiple complex medical symptoms of unspecified etiology.
Okay, so what might you do?
How about if you reduce their complexity?
How about if you regard every single thing they eat as a variable?
Because maybe it is.
So then you take them down...
Well, people use elimination diets, but that's...
You got it down to one thing, basically.
One thing.
And what's weird is...
It appears that you can live on that one thing.
So the people say, well, you can't live on an all-meat diet.
It's like...
That's not so obvious.
It defies the conventional wisdom.
Yeah.
Well, here's the other thing that's worth thinking about.
Maybe.
Maybe.
There are a lot of people who are overweight.
There are way more people who are overweight than there should be.
And we don't know why.
I've read some literature that suggests that maybe it's a secondary consequence of emulsifiers disrupting our gut lining.
There's lots of theories.
To your point, if you simplify the variables, you only have one.
Well, the other issue is, what's the harm?
So you eat nothing but beef for two months.
Who cares?
If it doesn't work, quit doing it.
But maybe, like if you see symptom reduction, and I've heard stories, and these are, what do they say?
The plural of anecdote is not data.
It's like, yeah, but the plural of anecdote might be hypothesis.
I really appreciate all the information you shared.
It's wisdom that's worth thinking about.
I think a lot of folks will be stimulated to think further on things that matter.
Well, thanks very much for the invitation.
It was a pleasure to be here and to have the opportunity to talk with you.
