Lecture： 12 Rules for Life Tour - Melbourne, Australia. (dPv1RYsi7sA)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=dPv1RYsi7sA

Man, that’s a lot of Australians. Well thank you very much for coming out. It’s really quite something to see all of you here. As Dave said, this is the largest venue that we’ve spoken at. I had a couple of debates with Sam Harris, one in Dublin and one in London, that were in larger venues, but as far as speaking specifically about 12 rules, this is damn near twice as big as the next biggest auditorium. I think we were at the Apollo in London and it held 3,000 people, and so that was good. But this is really something. There must be quite a dearth of things to do in Melbourne tonight. Seriously, though it’s remarkable to see all of you come out to engage in what I believe to be fundamentally a serious conversation about psychological and philosophical and perhaps certainly ethical, perhaps even religious issues. And who would have ever guessed that there was a mass market for that? And apparently there is, and maybe we’re smarter than we think we are. And I have a suspicion that that might be the case. One of the things that I’ve noticed about the intellectual dark web types, that’s a name that Eric Weinstein, you might be familiar with him, came up with, and it wasn’t like we all got together and built a little fort out in our backyard and called it the intellectual dark web. He just happened to coin the term and a number of people were included for one reason or another. And I’ve spent a fair bit of time trying to understand why that coinage stuck and what it might be that united this very strangely diverse range of people. And I think it’s really three things. One is that each of them, from Joe Rogan to Shapiro, the same with Sam Harris, are all people, and Dave, are all people who have their independent media platforms, right? They’re not part of a corporate structure. They’re not beholden to anyone. They’re financially independent, and they’ve built that themselves. And so they can say what they want. And so that’s kind of cool to see that happening, to see the technology that enables online video, which is really a complex form of broadcasting, and also online podcasts, which is a complex form of radio, enable that sort of independent journalism, and to see people able to not precisely exploit that but make use of it. That’s a very good thing. And I’m thinking that that might be a real positive outcome of the social media revolution. I mean, there’s lots of downsides. I think Twitter is a downside. It’s a pretty rough platform. And the commentary on social media platforms can be pretty brutal. We really haven’t figured out how to regulate it well yet so that it’s civilized. Not so that it’s censored, right? Because that’s a mistake. Censored and civilized aren’t the same thing. Properly regulated is civilized. And we don’t know how to do that. But YouTube and podcasts have opened up a huge market for intellectual material in a manner that’s never really happened before. And you’re also seeing this happen with audiobooks. You know, the audiobook market has absolutely exploded in the last five years. About a third of books sold now are audiobooks. And so, and that seems to be because people, having become accustomed to podcasts, are downloading audiobooks and listening to them in their cars or when they’re exercising or when they’re doing housework or, you know, and it’s one of the advantages of this new media type is that you have it on demand and you can play it at your leisure or when you’re working, for that matter. And so, you know, I have all sorts of working class guys come up and talk to me after the show, long haul truck drivers and those sorts of people who have a lot of time, you know, obviously they’re concentrating on what they’re doing, but they have spare time to listen and they’re listening to, you know, three-hour Joe Rogan podcasts on all sorts of abstract subjects and my lectures as well. And it’s really something to see that happening. And so, that’s one element of the intellectual dark web that’s interesting and tied in with the new media revolution. Because it really is a revolution to have video on demand like that and to have it so easy to produce and to have it permanent and to have it distributed everywhere in the world and to have it subtitled in all sorts of different languages and to have it essentially free of charge and able to be produced in a day or two. I mean, it’s, and then it’s permanent like a book. It’s really something new. And then the same with the audio version. And I do believe it may be the case that more people can, like a lot of people are intimidated by books for all sorts of reasons. I mean, highly literate reading is a relatively rare skill. Like it’s not overwhelmingly rare, but it’s relatively rare. But listening, man, people can listen, you know? And so, all of a sudden, this complicated information is available to people who can listen. And maybe that’s 10 times as many people who are likely to read or maybe it’s 50 times as many people who are likely to read. So, God only knows what the consequence of that is going to be. That could be a real education revolution. And hopefully we’ll be smart enough to take advantage of that carefully over the next 10 years and find out if that is the case. I’m optimistic about it because one of the things that really is cool about the internet is that, you know, if you want to learn something, you can pretty much type in your question, whatever it is, and somebody will have put up a YouTube video that tells you how to do it. And, you know, you might have to sort through two or three of them before you find someone who’s done a very high-level job of the explanation. But they’ve done it and often, you know, they’ve run an ad maybe and monetized a little bit, but mostly I would say it’s an altruistic gesture. And so, that’s really something. And the other thing the intellectual dark web people have in common is that, well, they’re opinionated. And fairly tough-minded. But, more importantly, they don’t think their audience is stupid. And that’s really something. And I think they’re right. I’m not going to assume instantaneously that that’s a consequence of something particularly moral about the people who make up that group. I think it is a testament to their faith in the essential nature and in the essential quality of human nature. But I also do think it’s a reflection of the medium itself, because it’s funny when I step into a television studio now, like a classic television studio, which happens from time to time and which is apparently going to happen with Australia’s Q&A on the 25th, which should be quite interesting. Yes, strangely enough, I’m actually looking forward to that, because I’ve been feeling a lot better recently. And so, it’d be actually nice to have a conversation with a journalist when I wasn’t feeling half dead and to see how that goes. So, it’d be nice to have a conversation at one point when I was at the top of my game. And so, I don’t know if I’m at the top of my game right now, but I am definitely feeling a lot better than I have for a long time. So, yeah, yeah. Thank God for that, man. Hopefully, that will be reflected in some reasonable quality of discourse tonight, and perhaps a tiny bit of wit, but we’ll see how that goes. So, when I step into an old school television studio, it feels like 1975 in some sense. You know, the person I’m talking to isn’t really there. They’re really a speaking device for the corporation. And they have to be, because the corporation, which is running high-bandwidth, you know, high expense, low bandwidth television, where every minute or every second is extraordinarily expensive, they can’t really take risks. They can’t have free-flowing conversations on the off chance that something goes dreadfully wrong. And it might, right? And so, everything is scripted, and then, you know, you have 30 seconds to make your point. Like, there’s just some things you can’t say in 30 seconds, you know? You have to compress them down to the point where they’re actually foolish. It’s actually foolish to try to do it, but, you know, what else do you have? Whereas with these long-form conversations, man, you can actually have a discussion about something. You can try to get to the bottom of it. And so, that’s pretty cool. And then it turns out that people will actually follow along. Like, I was actually absolutely stunned by it. I had four debates with Sam Harris earlier this year, two in Vancouver, and one in Dublin, and one in London. And each of them lasted about three hours. And we were going to do a Q&A for each of them. But as it turned out, while we were talking, we got into the conversation, and then we asked the audience to vote by clapping whether we should continue the conversation or move to the Q&A. And it was an overwhelming majority of people wanted the conversation to continue. And so, basically, what happened was something approximating a 12 to 15-hour continuous conversation about the relationship between facts and values or science and religion, you know? And that’s a fairly solid philosophical discussion. And that isn’t necessarily the case that Sam and I are the two people in the world who would be most qualified to undertake such a discussion. But, you know, we did our best, and it was a pretty high-level conversation. I mean, for me, it was approximately the level, I think, that would characterize a pretty decent PhD dissertation defense. And that’s fairly high-level intellectual conversation. And the audience was just with us the entire time. And so, that’s cool, man. You know, it could easily be that our relatively primitive initial mass communication technologies, like television, made us look a lot stupider, even to ourselves, than we actually were, because everything had to be compressed to a very short period of time. Everything had to be scripted so it couldn’t be spontaneous discussion. You couldn’t assume that your audience knew anything, because maybe it was the first time they watched the show. You couldn’t assume that they remembered anything, because you didn’t know, like, if it was a series, whether they had participated in the entire series. You had to aim at the lowest common denominator, and you couldn’t assume much of an attention span. But it turns out that people have an incredible attention span. You know, like I was just rewatching Breaking Bad, and I don’t know how many hours Breaking Bad is. It’s like, what, there’s six seasons? There must be 60 hours, I think, something like that. So really, it’s a continuous 60-hour movie. That’s a long movie, and it’s really engrossing. And there’s all sorts of other shows that are perhaps of equal complexity. And man, people have no problem with them at all, right? They just eat them up. So it turns out that, well, it turns out maybe we’re not so stupid. And so, that’d be nice if we weren’t so stupid. I’m kind of tired of everyone assuming that we are, just like I’m tired of everyone assuming that we’re some sort of cancer on the planet, you know? I don’t like that attitude about human beings. I think there’s something deeply, deeply wrong about it. You know, this is something that’s just kind of an interesting historical tidbit. Back in the late 1800s, there was a biologist named Thomas Huxley, and he was the famous novelist, Eldis Huxley’s, I think, great-grandfather, perhaps grandfather, and a very intelligent man, and a very, very gifted family. And Huxley was a great defender of Darwin, by the way, too. And he was commissioned by the English government to do a study of oceanic resources. This was back in the 1890s. And because the English, at that point, were concerned to some degree that, you know, maybe it would be possible that we would overfish and cause trouble because of that. And Huxley did an exhaustive study, and he concluded that there were so, there’s so much ocean, and there’s so much resource in the ocean, that there wasn’t a possibility that human beings with their rather puny technologies could ever do anything but put a small dent in the absolute overwhelming plenitude of the water that covers more than half the planet. And so that’s only 130 years ago, thereabouts. That’s not that long. You know, that’s two relatively old men ago. It’s not that long. And, you know, yeah, put them back to back, sort of. And so that’s yesterday in some sense, and it really wasn’t at all until the 1960s that we had some sense that we had developed technologically to the point where some of what we could do mechanically might start to have planetary repercussions. Say, you know, we saw that with air quality in cities, for example, and the denuding of the countryside. And then perhaps the overfishing in relationship to the oceans, which started to happen after World War II. But nobody had any sense, really, until 1960 that, well, maybe we had to take care of things a little bit better than we were, because there was more of us. We were starting to become a force that was, to some degree, a match for nature. You know, and bloody well, thank God for that, you know, because nature was more than a match for us for a very long period of time, right? Our species has come up through epochs, eons of absolute brutal privation and difficulty and starvation and freezing temperatures and burning in the desert sun and lack of water and lack of hygienic facilities. And like just hand-to-mouth suffering. And, you know, we’ve managed to organize ourselves to the point where that’s still the lot of a substantial number of people on the planet, but that’s decreasing very rapidly. You know, the UN now projects that by the year 2030, abject poverty, which is defined as living on less than a dollar a 90, dollar 90 a day in today’s US money, will be eradicated. There won’t be anybody in the world that poor. And the cynics say, well, that’s a pretty damn low barrier, let’s say. But if you double it, you also see that’s decreasing very rapidly. And if you triple it, you see that’s decreasing very rapidly. And you’ve got to draw the bloody line somewhere, you know, and abject poverty is abject poverty. And the fact that it’s decreased by 50% in the last 12 years from 2000 to the year 2012, we decreased the absolute level of abject poverty in the world by 50%. Right? It was the fastest economic, it was the most spectacular economic miracle in the history of humankind. And, you know, you hardly ever hear about it. Hardly anyone knows about it. It’s like, it’s a bloody miracle. There’s more middle class people in the world now than non-middle class people. And there are way more obese people than there are starving people. And so that’s something to celebrate, you know. I mean, it’s a funny thing to celebrate, but it’s quite the thing to celebrate. And the fastest growing economies in the world are in Sub-Saharan Africa. And they’re growing at 5% to 7% a year. So it looks like the economic miracle that’s, you know, that took place in India and in China, most of Southeast Asia, is really starting to kick in in Africa. And it seems, at least in part, it’s because of the collapse of the Soviet Union back in 1989. And the lack of overt pressure to have African countries pursue the most pathological, possible economic doctrines that anybody could ever imagine. They just stopped doing that. Has freed people up to start to become, well, if not rich, at least richer. And at least with the possibility of a continual rise upward, you know. The child mortality rate in Africa now is the same as it was in Europe in 1952. I mean, that’s really something, you know. And longevity rates have increased tremendously in Africa. And, you know, we’re kicking the slats out of some major diseases. Polio’s pretty much gone. It looks like we’re putting a pretty good dent in malaria. That’ll do great things for Africa. I think there’s a real possibility with some concerted effort that we could get rid of tuberculosis in the next 15 years or so if we made that a target. That would be something. You know, that’s an ancient scourge of mankind. We could certainly do without that. So there are intelligent people who are working hard on trying to eradicate these problems. And they’re doing it successfully. And so, you know, I’m not in favour of the whole, there’s something wrong with humanity, and we’re a scourge on the bloody planet. And it would be better off if there were fewer of us, and the whole planet would be thriving if there were none of us at all. I think that there’s something unbelievably dangerous about that attitude. And I think it’s ungrateful and unfair and unsympathetic and ungrateful and non-empathetic. Because I really do see that, like, I know, I don’t know a lot about human history, because, God, there’s a lot of history to know about, you know. And the more you know about human history, the more you know that there’s just endless details that you have no idea about. But if you do a reasonable overview, you do see that it’s a bloody mess, you know. That it’s privation and war and catastrophe and brutality and struggle and strife and difficulty all the entire way through, you know, people striving against odds that are just absolutely astronomical. And yet, succeeding, you know, that overall, the story overall is one of, I wouldn’t say unbroken progress, but it’s decent progress, and it’s better now than it’s ever been by a huge margin. And there’s every bit of evidence to suggest that it could continue to get better and better and better. You know, here’s another thing that’s really cool. Do you know that we’re adding four years of life expectancy every year now? So once we hit a year every year, then that’s it. We don’t die anymore. But those last eight months a year, they’re going to be tough to manage, you know. But four months a year is really something. And so, you know, we’re basically living longer and we’re living healthier and we’re smarter than we were because we’re much more, our nutritional levels are higher than they were because we’re not starving, especially the people at the bottom end. And, you know, we’re educating people all over the world. The Chinese graduate more engineers every year than the U.S. have engineers. Now that’s terrifying because, God, we’ve got all these engineers already and they’re making gadgets at such a rate that you can’t even keep track of the gadgets, right? You go online and, like, there’s all these technologies and all these subcultures using them, and you don’t even know what the technologies are. If you’re fully informed, you can’t keep up with the new stuff that you might buy. And it’s not like it’s trivial technology. It’s unbelievably powerful technology. Like, I’m in awe of many of the young people that I work with because they’re more, they’re savvier about the technological infrastructure that constitutes the web than I am because I’m old and it’s hard to keep up as you get old. And, you know, they come up with tools to make difficult things very simple, very rapidly. And there’s just subcultures everywhere that are doing this at an unbelievably rapid rate. You know, when you go to somewhere like Silicon Valley, and I’ve spent a lot of time in Silicon Valley, and it has its problems, but, Jesus, there’s an unbelievable collection of smart people there. And they’re working on things like, they’re working on things like MAD, and it’s working. You know, you see someone like Elon Musk. I mean, what the hell do you make of someone like that? You know, I mean, what did he do? He made an electric car, which is basically impossible, and it works, which is basically impossible. And then he built an infrastructure so that you could charge the damn thing wherever you drove, and that was basically impossible. And then he made it cheap because if you buy an electric car and you factor in the price of gas, the electric car is actually about as expensive as the gasoline car. And so that was unbelievable. And then he built a bloody rocket, which was one-tenth the price or less of a NASA rocket that you could reuse, which was impossible. And then he put one of his cars on top of the rocket, and he shot it up into space. And then this happened, right? This all happened, and he’s still alive. You know, and then he went and blew it all by smoking pot on Joe Rogan, you know, because, well, it’s so funny, you know. You know, we like our insane geniuses, like predictable and safe, and so we don’t want them doing strange things like having a tiny puff of marijuana on a show famous for marijuana. So anyways, you know, that’s all good news. It’s all good news, man, and I learned a lot about this. I worked for the UN for a while, like indirectly, and I wasn’t paid for it, by the way. It was volunteer work. I worked on this document, which was a report to the Secretary General on sustainable economic development. It’s quite funny because a lot of the right-wing conspiracy theorists are having a field day with that, man, that I’m some sort of like closet globalist shill because I work momentarily for the UN. It’s like, well, what the hell are you supposed to do when you’re asked to do something like that, you know? There was a document that was being prepared that was supposed to lay out some halfway intelligent vision of what things might be like if the international community cooperated for the next 30 years. It wasn’t like there weren’t brutal guidelines that were going to be enforced by jackbooted Nazis. It was just a proposal paper, and so we had a chance to work on it. There was only one Canadian team, and I got placed on that, and that was kind of cool. And so it gave me an opportunity to spend two years reading about economics and about ecology at the same time. And so what was so weird about that was the more I read, the more optimistic I got. And I thought, well, that isn’t what I expected. Like, I thought we were going to hell in a handbasket at quite the rapid rate. And, you know, I mean, there’s no doubt that we’re doing some stupid things. I would say the stupidest thing we’re probably doing is overfishing the oceans because there’s just no use. It’s just there’s just no use in that. It’s completely destructive. It doesn’t do anybody any good, and it could be stopped. But I know that your country, for example, is starting to put aside marine park reserves that are fishery free, essentially. And you don’t need a lot of that before the ocean can regenerate itself because it’s actually pretty good at that. One of the things that’s kind of funny, you know, remember when that when there was that big oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico? You know, there were more fish there two years later than there were before the spill. You know why? Because people stopped fishing. So it turned out that the pollution was really good for the fish. It’s like. Yeah, well, that’s why you have to do your research carefully, because you never know, you know, you never know what’s true and what isn’t. And so that was that was pretty interesting. The same thing happened in World War Two, by the way, in the North Sea, because the North Sea had been fished out pretty badly. And then during World War Two, it wasn’t all that safe to go out and fish in the North Sea because, you know, you would get sunk by a submarine and that was not very bright. So people stopped fishing and the fish came back very rapidly. And fish do that because they breed quite quickly. And so if you just leave the damn things alone for a while, most of them come back. But. But, you know, apart from the fisheries, which is really quite an appalling and pessimistic story, although not hopeless. And people are waking up to it and building these marine reserve parks, for example. A lot of the ecological news was surprisingly good, way better than I thought it would be. You know, so, for example, there are more forests in the northern hemisphere than there were 100 years ago. So who would have guessed that? I wouldn’t have guessed that. Partly it’s because marginal farmland has returned to forest. So and because we’ve got more effective at at at agriculture by a huge margin. And there are more forests in China than there were 30 years ago. And so that’s something. And it turns out when people burn coal, which is, you know, kind of polluting, they don’t burn wood. So, you know, they’re going to burn something because they don’t like eating raw, inedible things and freezing to death. So they’re going to burn something. And it turns out that coal is actually preferable to wood. And so well, and so these things are complicated. And the ecological story looked better than than I would have ever guessed. Even the overpopulation issue, you know, ever since the 1960s with Paul Ehrlich and the population bomb, there was this terrible pessimism that we were going to breed, you know, like like uncontrolled rats until every square inch of the world was like covered with with some starving skeleton and that that was all going to happen by the year 2000 when there would be mass starvation and the price of commodities would have blown through the roof and we would run out of oil and and all the all the commodities that we need to maintain a reasonably standard, reasonably high standard of living. And, you know, that didn’t happen. And not only did it happen is that rates of poverty went down and rates of hunger went down, even though the population went way up. And so there are more people who are hungry now than there were 50 years ago. But there are far fewer proportion of people who are hungry. And that’s really something. And so the overpopulation doom and gloomers were absolutely wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. And we’re going to peak at nine billion. That’s what it looks like. All the projections indicate something around nine billion. And that’s only two billion more than we have. Like it’s not nothing. It’s still two billion people. But we’re but at the rate at which we’re improving agricultural output and with regards to efficiency of agricultural output, there’s no evidence whatsoever that we’re going to run out of food. And, you know, a country like Uganda, this is quite interesting if Uganda, which is a very big country, by the way, if it was utilized properly, it has a water table underneath it and plenty of water. If Uganda was utilized properly, it could feed all of Africa. And so it’s not like we’re making full use even of the agricultural capacity that we have available to us. And so there’s no we’re not going to overpopulate the world and leave everybody like starving in on on like Easter Island with nothing but giant heads and no trees. That’s not going to happen. And in fact, I have a sneaking suspicion that within 100 years, one of the biggest problems that we’ll be facing is a declining population and that that’ll be worrisome. I mean, we won’t be concerned about that at the moment, but that whole doom and gloom scenario just seems to be to be wrong. And, you know, there are there are fewer wars than there were by a large margin. The overall rates of homicidal behavior in the world have plummeted. The rates of death by terrorism over the last 50 years have plummeted. There’s there’s a lot of good news. There’s way more good news than there is bad news. And that’s there’s no wars in the Western Hemisphere. There is a piece of good news. You know, that’s a remarkable thing. So and, you know, and it’s been it’s been 70 years since World War Two. And we’ve had thermonuclear weapons since then. And of course, everyone’s terrified of those bloody things. And and no wonder. And maybe that’s for the best because we maybe we needed something to really terrify us. You know, it’s certainly possible. But even though there’s always the possibility of a mistake and there’s still the possibility of a nuclear outbreak, we haven’t used them and we haven’t had a Third World War. And almost all of us here have lived in what you got to think, man, comparative peace and prosperity if you compare it to any other time and place anywhere else in the world at any point in history, which is not perfect because, you know, you’re still getting old and you’re still going to die. And and we haven’t we haven’t what we haven’t defeated all the diseases that that beset us. But, God, it could be a lot worse. And we seem to be making it a lot better. And so and so look, this is what happened to me, you know, when I wrote my first book, which was Maps of Meaning. I was looking at something that was really dark. It was really dark. I was interested in totalitarianism and I’m still interested in totalitarianism. I don’t care if it’s whether it’s on the left or the right. It doesn’t matter to me. It’s this it’s this totalizing view that’s predicated on the assumption that you can take a set of a few simple axioms about the way the world is and always was. And then you can decide how society would be structured and then you can force people into acting that way and the utopia will come. I’m not fond of that sort of thinking. I don’t think there’s any evidence that it’s viable, partly because the world’s too complicated to manage that and you just can’t get your axioms right. And besides, things shift around on you. And even if you’re right today, something’s going to turn on you tomorrow and you’re going to have to update your model a bit. And if you don’t, well then all hell’s going to break loose. So but then, you know, I was interested in totalitarianism partly because for psychological reasons I was interested in why people were so committed to belief systems that they were willing to put everything to the torch, essentially. So mostly I was concerned about the ideological struggle between the Western world and the communist world, particularly the Soviets, but not only the Soviets. And I was curious in a sort of postmodern way because, you know, you might say, well, you know, the Marxists, they have their viewpoint and, you know, inequality of income distribution is a problem and maybe things should be fairer and maybe the fact that there are relatively poor people in the West and relatively rich people in the West is a consequence of oppression and maybe something could be done about that. And the Western way of looking at the world is just an arbitrary set of rules and the communist way of looking at the world is another arbitrary set of rules. Maybe you could even say that about the fascist way of looking at the world, although somehow people are much less likely to agree to that, which is quite interesting because it means that by and large we have come to a collective decision that there are some forms of arbitrary games, let’s say, set up on axiomatic structure that are wrong, you know, and it’s a very rare person who thinks that what the Nazis did was justifiable, was right in any fundamental sense. And that’s interesting, you know, because it means that collectively we have come to a decision that there is a difference between good and evil if you assume that what the Nazis did was evil, which I think is a fairly reasonable assumption. I don’t know what you would do with the word evil if what happened in places like Auschwitz didn’t deserve that epithet. You’d need some other word that was just as dark to describe what happened, so you might as well just use evil because everybody knows what it means. So we have come to a conclusion that there are things that we shouldn’t get up to, you know, and that also implies that we’ve come to some conclusion about what constitutes good, some general sense that whatever the opposite of what, let’s say, the Nazis did, and I would say also the collectivist communists, whatever the opposite of that is, whatever that might be, that’s good and that we should be pursuing that. And so that’s a good thing because it kind of pulls us out of the moral relativistic problem. Not exactly because it’s not defined perfectly or anything, you know, to say, well, you shouldn’t be a Nazi. It’s like, well, it’s kind of vague, you know, okay, no armbands, no goose stepping, but then what? Well, that’s a complicated question to figure out how to conduct yourself so that you would be unlikely to participate in the horrors of a totalitarian ideological system if the advantages of doing so were offered to you in a realistic way. That’s really the moral issue because, you know, if you read about Nazi Germany and you read about communist Soviet Union and China, you understand that those systems were very attractive to people and there were reasons for that attractiveness and that had you been there, there’s a high probability that you would have been attracted by those ideas. And you can see that now because there’s a big resurgence, for example, both on the left, on the right, but I would say primarily on the left, especially in the academic world, there’s a big resurgence in the same kind of ideas that inspired generations of Soviet utopians, say, back in the early 1900s when they had not so much evidence that what they were doing was absolutely bloody pointless and murderous, you know, and so that does separate the modern people who suggest that such things from those who believed it a hundred years ago. But nonetheless, you know, the point is that those ideas are so attractive that they still resonate with people and you have to take that seriously because it means they probably resonate with you. And some of it is, I deal with this to some degree in chapter one, stand up straight with your shoulders back, because it really is a discussion of hierarchies and I actually try to make a case, like I like to make a case for hierarchy, you know, the radical leftist types, the postmodernists in particular, and I put this mostly at the feet of people like Foucault, he’d be villain number one, although he was influenced heavily by Marx and his own special sense of resentment, intellectual resentment and arrogance, so which made him into a sort of perverted and malevolent and underhanded Marx, which is really something to be, because just the ordinary Marx wasn’t so great. You know, and Foucault makes this fundamental case that human, that there’s no real truth and that what passes his truth is the dominant opinion of the dominant group, and by dominant he means those that hold the power. And so, that’s a hell of a pessimistic view of the world, and it’s wrong, it’s wrong, and like it’s seriously wrong, and I’m gonna lay out why it’s wrong. I mean, first of all, it doesn’t even work for kids. I know if you look at how kids organize themselves on the playground, there are bullies, and it’s interesting if you study bullies, you find out that they’re not necessarily the most unpopular kids. There are outcast kids who are more unpopular than the bullies, and the bullies are ambivalently popular. They have some friends and they have some enemies, so, you know, so it’s not entirely counterproductive to be a bully, but it starts working less and less well as you get older, and so it’s not doing so well by the time you hit junior high, and by the time you’re at high school, it’s not a very effective strategy at all. And a bully is someone who uses power. It’s like, bloody well, do what I want, or I’ll hit you, or I’ll do something else that you won’t like, that will be physical, or maybe it’ll be psychological. But if the psychology doesn’t work, calling you names, demeaning you, you know, talking behind your back, which is a very common form of female bullying, because females have their own forms of bullying, and they’re very effective. You know, if that doesn’t work, then I can just take you out of the schoolyard and pound you, and if I can’t pound you myself, well then I’ll pound you with one of my friends, and that’ll be just as effective, and you’ll bloody well do what I want you to do, and that’s power. And it’s like, really? That’s the basis of our society? That’s that sort of power? That’s how we organize ourselves? I mean, it’s patently ridiculous. First of all, most children who are popular, let’s say, universally popular, and who do well socially, aren’t bullies. They’re good at playing with others, and they learn that between the age of two and four, and they learn very straightforward rules, like reciprocity. That’s the big one. There’s a couple. Reciprocity is one. Trust is another, to abide by your word, but those are the same thing. Reciprocity and trust are very similar. It’s like, well, you know, we’ll take turns. You play my game now, and I’ll play your game tomorrow. You know, and you guys have had friends that were real friends, and you know perfectly well that if you have a good friend, you don’t have to keep track exactly of what you do for each other. You don’t write it down on a piece of paper, and you know, put a check mark beside it, unless you’re a little bit on the paranoid side, and that’s only the beginnings of your problems. And what you do is, you know, you kind of keep track of who does what for who, and you kind of keep the balance equal, and you do that because, well, that’s what you do if you’re awake and conscious and a decent person, and if you have a relationship, if you’re in a marriage, it’s the same thing. You know, it’s like you don’t obsessively keep track of who owes what, when, and why. That’s a sign of a degenerating relationship. What you do is, well, you do what you can for your partner, and they do what they can for you, and you’re both aware of that, and you assume goodwill, and with any luck, that iterates across time, and it’s a sustainable game. It’s not bloody power, and you know, you know, there’s nothing more miserable than being in a relationship where the rule is, do what the hell I want, or suffer the consequences, you know, and what kind of relationship are you going to get out of that? Even if the person is cowed enough to do what you want them to do when you’re there and enforcing it, they’re not going to put their whole heart into it. That’s bloody well for sure. They’re going to be, if they have any sense at all, and they do, and if they have any spirit at all, and they do, they’re going to be undermining what you’re forcing them to do all the time. There’s an old Soviet joke. They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work. Right, great. That’s a hell of a way to run a society, and that’s exactly how that society ran. So all you do with force is engender bitterness and resentment, and if the person that you’re exerting force on can’t exert the same level of physical force back, it’s not like they’re not going to take their revenge in other ways. They’re not going to cook you wonderful meals. They’re not going to be, what would you call it, enthusiastic sexual partners. You know, they’re going to get their revenge when they can, unless you’ve crushed their spirit completely, and then it serves you right, because then you’re dragging around behind you someone whose spirit you’ve crushed completely, and that’s a hell of a way to live. And so what is this idea that our society is fundamentally predicated on power? You know, and that’s the postmodern claim. We group ourselves into our groups, whatever the hell they happen to be, sex, gender, ethnicity, whatever the flavor of the month is, there’s an infinite number of ways we could group ourselves, and then we organize ourselves into power hierarchies, and we dominate each other, and then all of those groups go to war against one another, and the most dominant group that has the most power wins. It’s like, I don’t know what the hell planet Foucault grew up on. You know, that might be the definition of like the worst African dictatorship of the last 100 years, but it’s not a description of our society, and it’s not a description of the way that people organize themselves into hierarchies, which was the point I was trying to make in rule one. When I talked about hierarchies, now it’s very important where you are in your hierarchical position with regards to other people in relationship to your mental health, and this is a really important thing to understand, because you have an ancient counter in your brain, and that was the point of the biological comparisons, lobsters being one set of comparisons, but not only lobsters. We know perfectly well animal behaviorists, people who know their neuropsychopharmacology, know perfectly well that the serotonergic system operates quite similarly across most animals with complex nervous systems, and one of the things that it does is track relative status position, and in birds, wrens, which is another example I used, a lot of it is power. You know, wrens, a little bird, it’s quite a cute bird, it sings very nicely, and you think it’s harmless, but it’s not. It’s a vicious little character, and I used to sit in my backyard and record wren songs on my tape recorder, and the wren that lived in our backyard would dive-bomb it, you know, four inches away, and it was very brave of him, and he had a little nest that was up in a tree, and there were some nests that we had built, bird houses in the neighborhoods nearby, in the yards nearby, and he would go, like half his day spent stuffing those other bird houses with sticks, so full that no bird could get in them, you know. It was like, this is my damn yard, which is what he was saying when he was singing so beautifully, and you better look the hell out, because if you build, I’m going to stuff your damn house with sticks, and if I see you sitting on a branch, I’m going to dive-bomb you and knock you off, and that’s power, and that’s what wrens do, despite the fact that they’re cute, and chickens do the same thing. There are pecking orders among chickens, and virtually every animal, wolf packs organize themselves into hierarchies, and chimpanzees organize themselves into hierarchies, and like, there are rat hierarchies, and hierarchical organization is the rule among animals that live somewhat socially, and even those who don’t, that occupy the same geographical territory. There has to be some way of organizing access to relatively scarce resources that doesn’t result in chronic combat, because chronic combat, well look, you’re Wren A, and you’re Wren B, and you decide to have it out, so you peck yourselves half to death, and you’re Wren C, and so you got a little bit more patience, you just wait until those two wrens beat each other to death, and then you move in. It’s like it’s a stupid solution. It doesn’t even work for wrens, let alone people, and so, you know, the wrens announce their prowess, and they do that with the quality of their song, and their displays, and they indicate to one another who shouldn’t be messed with, and then there’s a minimum of combat, and you could make a pretty good case that that’s power, that that’s power. But like, it’s not like wrens get together and build like wren apartment houses, and then go out on collective worm hunt insects, I guess, collective insect hunting expeditions, and bring them all back and distribute them, or make insect farms so that there’s more insects for all the wrens. They haven’t got that far, you know. They’re competing in a zero-sum game, and that isn’t what human beings do. We figured out how to not have zero-sum games a very, very long time ago, and it turns out that if the game you’re playing isn’t zero-sum, right, which means that there’s only a finite number of resources, and everybody has to fight to the death for them, and some are going to get the lion’s share, and others are going to starve, if you’re not playing a zero-sum game, then you can learn to cooperate and compete in an intelligent, civilized manner, and all of a sudden, there’s more than enough for everyone. Now, still, some people are going to have more than others, you know, but there’s nothing. How are you going to stop that? And do you want to? Like, do you want to only know what, do you want to only be allowed to know what everyone else knows? You don’t get to know anything that anyone else knows, because it’s got to be equal. You want everyone to be exactly the same amount of attractive, you know, which, and if you averaged attractiveness overall, and you only allowed each person to be as attractive as the average person, there’d be not much attractiveness left in the world, and it seems to me that that would be quite the loss, you know, and strength, you’re not allowed to have any additional strength, or ambition, or talent, or, let’s say, athletic ability. It’s like, or artistic ability, I mean, aren’t we kind of happy that there’s massive inequality in the distribution of talent? I know it’s, I know it’s harsh and hard, but you can’t expect everybody to have every talent that there is, and it would be a hell of a sacrifice if no one got to have any talent, because it wouldn’t be fair, and so I don’t get the whole equality of outcome thing. It isn’t, it isn’t going to work. There aren’t that many geniuses, you know? We want to exploit the geniuses and get them to work for us, and if the price is, is that somebody has more than you do of something, well, suck it up for Christ’s sake. Well, Jesus, seriously, man, it’s like, look, look, how much more do you have than most people have? You know, you need, you need to make $30,000ayeartobeinthetop1$600, which isn’t a bad bargain. So it’s not that easy to do those economic calculations. But one of the things you can say about capitalism, and about private property, and about the idea that people have a right to what they earn, and a right to what they own, is that it’s pretty damn good at generating wealth. And the wealth isn’t equally distributed by any stretch of the imagination, but a fair bit of it goes to the bottom, and that’s why we’re seeing, well, a relative dearth of tremendous deprivation. And you might say, well, we want to squeeze out that last bit of inequality, and it’s like, well, maybe we do, and maybe we don’t. It’s not so obvious, first of all, because even if we did want to, we don’t know how. And we certainly do know that if there are some ways that if we go about it, then things really go to hell in a hand basket really fast, and everyone ends up equal, because they’re all starving and dead. You end up in a situation like Venezuela, not that they’re all starving and dead, but the average Venezuelan lost 17 pounds in the last year, and that wasn’t from voluntary diet, right? And that’s a very rich country. And so we do know that there are ways of ameliorating inequality that just don’t work, and so it’s a dangerous thing to mess with, because we don’t understand it. Now, you know, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to understand it, and that also doesn’t mean that the left doesn’t have a point, you know? If your society becomes too unequal, and too many people stack up at the bottom, and they don’t have an opportunity to move forward, that seems like it’s bad for everyone. And so we could agree on that, and we could try to set up our hierarchies so that they’re not too brutal for the people who end up at the bottom, right? That would be nice if we could be sensible and figure out how to do that, but I think we’re not doing that bad a job of figuring out how to do it. We build infrastructure that everybody can use, we have the universal education systems and so on, and they’re not perfect, but they’re far from catastrophic, and they’re a hell of a lot better than they were a hundred years ago. So we are making some progress on that. I think the problem with the radical leftists is that they don’t take the problem of inequality seriously enough. They blame it on capitalism. It’s like, sorry, that’s wrong. It’s a way deeper problem. It wasn’t capitalism that produced inequality of gravesite wealth distribution in Paleolithic Europe 10,000 years ago, and it’s not capitalism that makes some stars have all the mass, right? It’s a different order of problem, and so we have to be more sophisticated than economists were 150 years ago when we talk about inequality, and when we talk about hierarchy, we also have to be more sophisticated because we have to start to understand what it means for there to be a human hierarchy and the basis upon which hierarchies actually establish themselves if they’re going to be playable, iterable, civilized, productive, sustainable, what? Voluntary. That’s an important one. What are the characteristics of such things? And I think that if we use a little bit of sense, we can figure that out too, and I like to use the example of plumbers because I actually happen to like plumbers, partly because I don’t like it when my basement is full of sewage, and that’s happened once or twice, and you call a plumber and then that doesn’t happen, and I’m pleased about that, like I’m sure most of you are, you know, and plumbers have done an awful lot for the world, and there’s a big difference between a good plumber and a bad plumber. I’ve had two bad plumbers, and the first bad plumber was in Montreal, and my tap was leaking a little bit, and so he came in to fix it, and I don’t know what the hell he was doing, but he was using a torch, and he was burning something, maybe taking some solder off some pipes underneath the sink, but he lit the wall on fire, which wasn’t helpful because the wall wasn’t on fire before he showed up, and so, and then, and then he forgot to shut the water off at the main pipe when he took the tap apart, and so then apart from the fact that my wall was charred, my bathroom was completely covered with water, and then he sort of panicked, and he put the thing back together, the tap back together with the, with the, with the washer, which was now extraordinarily damaged, and he shut it off, and he turned, he had figured out to turn the water off at the main valve by then, and he turned it back on, and he left, and it was like, now the wall was on fire, and the floor was covered with water, and there was five times as much water running out of the tap. This was not an improvement. I joked with my wife that he was an anti-plumber, you know, like, like, like an anti-matter plumber, and if he ever met a real plumber on the road and shook his hand, they’d both disappear in a puff of light, so, so that was one plumber, and you know, and then another plumber, we were, we were redoing our house in Toronto, and it was the day before the drywallers were supposed to come in, and so we were working like mad, because drywallers, like, they’re fun to watch, man. They zip in, they lift up their piece of drywall, they zip it up with their screws, and they’re really fast at it, and it’s quite, quite a skilled operation, and, but they’re really fast, and they don’t muck about, and so you have to be ready for the drywallers, and so this guy had redone all our pipes, PVC plastic pipe, and you put this, that together with a kind of solvent, hey, so you just put solvent on one end of the pipe, the male end, and you put it into the female end with some solvent, and they stick together, and hopefully it seals, and he said, my joints never leak, and so we tested them, we went up on this roof, three floors up, and filled the pipes up with water, and his joints leaked. It’s like 32 joints leaked. We had four inches of water in the basement, and this was the day before the drywallers were supposed to show up, and then also we found that he had put a lot of the pipes outside of the wall where the drywall was going to be, which actually also constitutes a mistake, right, because I don’t know about your house, but, but my house isn’t a house where there’s plumbing sticking randomly out of the walls, so we had to spend the whole night redoing all the joints and cutting the pipes and, you know, putting them the way they were supposed to, and so, and so that’s a bad plumber, and so we’re going to make the case that there are bad plumbers, you know, and they don’t know what they’re doing, and so, so they don’t have any skill, or maybe they’re worse than not skilled, they make things worse, because that’s worse than just not skilled, and then you could say, well, maybe they lie to you when they deal with you, and maybe they overcharge you, and maybe they don’t treat their employees very well, you know, and maybe they’re not good to live with at home either, who the hell knows, but they’re not good plumbers, and so we’re going to say that just in the plumbing domain, which is an important domain, skill matters, right, that seems reasonable, and then we might say the same thing about, well, what, probably matters in law, like, if you ever need a lawyer, I would recommend that you get a good one, because if you get a bad one, it’s going to cost you a lot more than if you get a good one, like, like everything, and, you know, there are good teachers, and not so good teachers, and there are good massage therapists, and there are good nurses, and there are horrible nurses, and there are great surgeons, and then there are surgeons that will definitely kill you, you know, and you want to go to one that won’t kill you, that’s, that’s the, and you, you’d assume difference in skill, you know, and whatever your occupation is, you know bloody well, maybe you’re a short-order cook at a diner, and like some short-order cooks can whip up a pretty damn decent breakfast in three or four minutes, and you’re pretty bloody happy to sit there and eat it, and other short-order cooks can produce some god-awful mess of, of burnt eggs and wretched toast and rancid bacon and orange juice that’s, like, had a crayon dipped in it for the colour, and with, with a really ornery waitress and coffee that’s been cooking since, like, 1953, and there’s a, that’s a big difference in short-order cooks, there’s qualitative difference in skill, okay, and so one of the things we might point out is that part of the reason that we have hierarchies in the West is because people actually differ in skill, not power, skill, some people are better at whatever it is they’re supposed to be doing than other people, and we think that what they’re supposed to be doing is important so that it matters that they’re better at it, and what are we going to do? We’re going to deny that skill plays a role? All the evidence suggests that it does, like if you look at what predicts long-term success from a psychological perspective in a given occupation, conscientiousness is the best personality predictor, and conscientious people are dutiful and hard-working, and they have integrity, and they do what they say they’re going to do, and so that’s the best predictor, second best predictor, and the best predictor is intelligence, and so it looks like in a relatively complicated occupation, if you’re going to be successful in a Western culture, the best predictors of your success is whether you’re intelligent, skilled, and conscientious, and that’s pretty good, like how else would you want it to be if you’re going to set it up, and it isn’t power because agreeableness is another dimension, you can be disagreeable, men are more disagreeable than women by the way, and if our society was fundamentally based on power, then the most disagreeable people would be the most successful, and they’re not, they’re the ones that are most likely to be in prison, so that evidence just doesn’t support that, and then you know the other thing is you don’t have, you imagine well our society is fundamentally an oppressive patriarchy, and everything’s based on power, it’s like okay so you need a plumber, and so what you do is you go out in the street, or maybe you don’t, maybe you cower at home, and these like gangs of plumbers come to your house, and they’re armed to the damn teeth with their pipes, and they say look I don’t know whether you need like some plumbing work done or not, but maybe we’ll come in here and break a few things so that you do need it, but even if we’re not going to do that, it’s like we’re the plumbers that are going to take you out unless you call us, and so the next time the toilet overflows, man here’s the number and you better put it on your fridge, or there’s going to be hell to pay, or you know the same is the case of like gang affiliated massage therapists, exactly the same thing, tattooed to the hill right, armed to the teeth, and roaming the streets, making bloody sure that if you have a stiff neck, that the most powerful massage therapist is the one that you’re going to call first, you know, it’s complete bloody rubbish, it’s absolutely not the case. Now it is the case that even in a hierarchy that’s functional, the thing can go sideways, and it does, you know, you get companies that get too big, they start to get corrupt, people who play politics and who are good at manipulating start to rise up the hierarchy, the structure stops performing its function, its useful function in the way that it should, it starts to degenerate, but generally then it dies, you know, like the typical fortune 500 company only lasts 30 years, and the typical family fortune only three generations, it’s not that easy to keep a functional enterprise going, you have to be awake, and so no, it’s not an oppressive patriarchy, our culture, that’s wrong, it’s based on competence fundamentally, imperfect as that is, it’s not like we don’t make hiring mistakes, it’s not like there aren’t people who are foolish and blind and hire and fire based on attributes that have nothing to do with competence, but that’s a sign of the deterioration of the system and the corruption of the system, and not an indication of its fundamental function, and it’s also the case that, and this is partly what I tried to outline in rule one, which is pretty much the rule we’re going to discuss today, part of your goal if you want to take your place in the hierarchy properly is to be a good person, and that was the argument I was trying to make in the chapter, not that you’re supposed to be like the most brutal crustacean on the block, you know, it’s so foolish, it was Cathy Newman I think that asked me in the UK, so you’re saying that human society should be organized along the lines of lobsters, it’s like look lady, if you’re gonna insult someone, you might want to try accusing them of something, of believing something that someone somewhere believed at least once in the entire history of the human race, and not that, yes absolutely, lobsters for everyone, you know, that’s what I was trying to make the case was that we have this very old system in our nervous systems, which is very old, which keeps track of where we are in hierarchies, and that regulates our emotions because of it, because it’s really important to you, and you and you and you, if you’re not completely bloody psychopathic, that you have a place in a social hierarchy, and that you’re admired and respected and valued by other people, and it’s so important that the neurochemical system that keeps track of that regulates your other emotions, so that if you’re low on the totem pole, because well for whatever the reason happens to be, sometimes you deserve it, sometimes it’s accidental, sometimes you’ve been hurt, there’s lots of ways that this can happen, your serotonin levels plummet like a defeated lobster, and then you feel way more negative emotion about everything, and way less positive emotion about everything, and that’s absolutely dreadful, like it’s, that’s clinical depression, and it’s a terrible, terrible condition, and so it’s absolutely crucial that you maintain a tenable position in a hierarchy, and not one of power, but one of competence, and at least even if you’re not in a position that’s tenable, you’re moving upward towards one that’s tenable, because that at least gives you hope, you know, because maybe you’re young and useless, and you don’t know what the hell you’re doing, you’re just getting started, and so you’re a low man on the totem pole, but it’s not like you’re stuck there forever, you do some decent work, I had some kid tell me the other day, it was really nice, it was just last night, it was at a comedy show I went to here, and a lot of the comedians knew us, Dave Rubin and I went in there, and so a lot of them knew us, which was quite interesting, and one of them said, God, you know, I was in a rough shape two years ago, I was just getting married, I just got married, I was nihilistic as hell, and depressed, and bitter, and things weren’t going well for me at all, and I was unemployed, and one of my friends got me a job, and he said, I really liked the bloody job, I didn’t want to have the job, and I was kind of dragging my ass to the work, and not doing it well, and I listened to one of your lectures, and it said, look, if you haven’t got anything going for you, but you have a job, don’t quit your job, whether you hate it or not, it’s like, man, that’s what you’re hanging on to the edge of the world with your fingertips, you know, don’t let go, if you can find a better job, okay, fine, but you don’t just quit, because then what, you’re done, and he said, and another thing that I had mentioned was, why don’t you just try to work as hard as you can at your damn job for like six weeks, right, all flat out, you know, if you work 10% longer hours, you make 40% more money, that’s something worth thinking about, you know, you’ve got a job, maybe you show up 15 minutes early, and you leave 15 minutes late, you know, and you actually work, and your boss notices, because he would probably notice, and then maybe someone’s going to get promoted, and maybe it’ll be you, because something’s going to tilt the scales, and that little extra bit of work done without cynicism and resentment might be enough, well, he said he started at 21 bucks an hour, and in six weeks he was making 37 dollars an hour, and it’s not a king’s ransom, man, but it’s a hell of a lot more than zero, and it’s quite a lot more than 21, he said his life had turned around substantially, because he learned if he put some damn effort into it, and I’m not trying to be Joe optimist here, like, I know that people hit runs of bad luck, and that things can take you out of life, right, unfortunate illnesses, and betrayal, and like, there’s no shortage of randomness and horror that can wipe you out, even if you’re doing your best, but you don’t have a better bloody plan than to do your best, and it tends to work a lot better than you think, and what’s so interesting about the hierarchies that people set up is that that’s how they’re set up, they’re not set up on power, they’re set up on reciprocity, and skill, and trust, not always, you know, and if you’re in a job where you work hard, and you’re a good guy, and you’re doing your best, and your boss is a bloody tyrant, and you never get a break, it’s like, okay, fine, you’re in a Foucault world, get the hell out of it, you know, get your resume set up, write your CV, fill in the educational gaps that you have, send out your 25 resumes a day, and prepare to make a lateral move, because you’re in a bad place, but almost everywhere, and this certainly means the case virtually everywhere I’ve worked, and I’ve had like 50 jobs, you know, if you go above and beyond the call of duty, you know, and wake in an intelligent way, interpersonally, socially, with regards to the diligence of your work, with regards to the truth of your attitude, and your courage, and all of that, that will work, and you know, if you try it for a year, and it doesn’t work, then go somewhere else, because you can, right, you’re free, I mean, it’s not easy, you can’t just walk out the door and instantly find another job, but you’re not enslaved, you could make a move, you could even decide that you’re going to make a move and double your salary, you know, it’s not a bad goal, and it’s certainly a possibility, it’s like, it isn’t hierarchy, it’s ethics that determines success in a functional society, it’s ethics that determines success, not power, the rest of it’s a bloody lie, and that doesn’t mean that all our systems are perfectly ethical, you know, you’ve got to be awake if you’re in a system, there’s going to be some corruption in it, part of what you’re supposed to do is keep your damn eyes open for the corruption, and your mouth speaking truth, so when the corruption starts to take root, you object to it, so the whole damn system doesn’t turn into a pathological power play, and that’s part of your ethical responsibility as a conscious being, an ethical being, a religious being, for that matter, and a citizen, you know, and you’re charged with that, that’s why you vote, that’s why you’re the cornerstone of your state, man, you’re the, what would you call, you’re the wellspring of the ethical actions that replenish the dying world, that’s what you are, and if you act, that’s really, that’s what you are, and if you act that out properly, then things work, and that’s why that’s always been described as ethical behaviour, it’s not because you’re supposed to be good, you know, and being good isn’t that easy anyways, and it certainly doesn’t mean being nice and harmless, it’s not an easy thing to be good, you have to be tough as a damn boot to be good, because you have to stand your ground when you need to stand your ground, and you have to be able to say no when it’s time to say no, and you have to mean it, and so then you have to think and plan strategically, so that when you’re going to say no, you can mean it and it will stick, you know, and that takes a certain amount of integrated malevolence, I would say, and once it’s integrated, it’s not malevolence, it’s strength, it’s strength of character, it’s the ability to stand your ground, and you have to cultivate that, and you cultivate that at least in part by telling the truth, and so you take your place in the world as a decent person, and as a decent citizen, and then, and you play the hierarchical game properly, and that is to stand up straight with your shoulders back, it’s like the world’s an onslaught, you’ve got the tyranny of culture to deal with, you’ve got the catastrophe of nature, you’ve got your own damn malevolence and ignorance, right, all coming at you, plus the incredible complicated indeterminate potential of the future, that’s all coming at you, and it’s all your responsibility, and you can cringe away from it, and be afraid of it, and be victimized by it, and be bitter and cynical about it, and no wonder, because it can be painful, or you can turn around and you can say, man, bring it on, because there’s more to me than there is to the catastrophe, and this is what I discovered from looking at what I looked at, I looked at the darkest things I could look at, really for 30 years, I was really a lot of fun to be around, I can tell you, I looked at the darkest things that I could think of, right, not only what happened in Auschwitz, and what happened in the Gulag, but personal issues, you know, it’s like, I wasn’t so much interested in the totalitarians as a group, I was interested in the people who undertook the terrible acts that the totalitarians required, you know, the people who, I was just rereading Ordinary Men, and it was a story about a police battalion in Poland that trained ordinary policemen to take naked pregnant women out into the fields and shoot them in the back of the head, it takes a lot of training, by the way, before you can bring yourself to do that, and you aren’t the same person by the end of it, it’s pretty goddamn horrific, you know, and I was trying to figure out what would it be like to be that person, because we are that person, and then what would it be like to not be that person, right, to refuse to do that, to not participate in that, you know, and what I discovered by making that totalitarian proclivity personal was that there was, there’s more to us than there is to the horror, as nature is, bent on our destruction, bad as culture is, tyrannical and bloody, back as far as you can look, as malevolent as you are, in the darkest part of your heart, and that’s plenty malevolent, the possibility that’s within you that can well up, the courage and the truth and the ability and the skill and the willingness to set things right, if you are willing to set them right, is more powerful than all of that, and so it’s so interesting, it was proof for me of an old saying I read from Carl Jung, it’s an alchemical motif, inster qualinus inventur, which is what you most want to be found will be found where you least want to look, essentially, and it’s so interesting, because it means that if you’re willing to turn around and to stand up, say, and stand up straight and face the darkness like fully, what you discover at the darkest part is the brightest light, and that’s something that’s so much worth discovering, because there’s going to be terrible darkness in your life, and it’s going to make you cynical and bitter, and it could easily be that you’re just not looking at it enough, because if you looked at it enough and you didn’t shy away and you brought everything you had to bear on it, you’d find that there was more to you than there was to the horror, you know, I watched my father-in-law, I’ll end with this, and you know, you don’t know, eh, because you’re not bringing your A game to the table with all that cynicism and bitterness and resentment and willful blindness and avoidance, maybe you’re playing at 60%, it’s not good enough, because there’s too much of what’s bad for 60% to be good enough, it’s like you need 90% or 95% or 100%. About 15, 20 years ago, my mother-in-law developed prefrontal temporal dementia, which I wouldn’t recommend, you know, it’s one of those degenerative neurological diseases like Alzheimer’s, and those bloody things are, like they’re in the top echelon of awful, you know, you watch a person deteriorate before your eyes, it’s a lengthy, lengthy death, and it was slow, and her husband, he was, he lived in this little town that I grew up in, about 3,000 people, and he was quite a character, everybody knew him, I bought him a foghorn, leghorn t-shirt once, because that’s kind of what he was like, he was loud and sort of bombastic, but he stood up straight, I can tell you, and he played the fool a little bit, mostly for the amusement of people, but he was no damn fool, and I always admired him and liked him, and the feeling was mutual, thank God, since I married his daughter, and you know, he drank a lot with his crazy friends up in northern Alberta, and he wasn’t at home a lot because he was working a lot, and you know, he was kind of a party animal about town, but a good businessman, and a good man, and then his wife got sick, and they moved to another town, and you know, he took care of her for like 15 years, it was unbelievable, as she deteriorated, you know, and she got more desperate to have him around, and her love for him never, never went away, even as she lost herself almost completely, she would always light up when he came into the room, you know, and he took care of her right till within weeks of her death, he had to finally put her in an old folks home, because he was no longer strong enough to lift her up from the chair, and we interacted with him a lot, you know, because we were trying to help him figure out how to cope, and we had signs put up in the house, electronic signs that would tell her when he was leaving, so that she would know where he went, and we had recordings in the bathroom, so that she knew what to do when she went into the bathroom, and we tried to do everything we could to not make this absolutely bloody, atrocious experience complete hell, and he participated the whole way, you know, and it was really something to see, it was really, it left me with a tremendous sense of admiration for him, but not just for him, but for people who can do that, you know, and if there was a new decline, he took it on, and he didn’t complain about it, and he tried to do what he could, you know, and like it was no picnic, don’t get me wrong, but it wasn’t hell, and then we were all gathered around the deathbed, her mother’s, my wife’s mother’s deathbed, and the family was there, and they got along pretty well, you know, and her sister’s a palliative care nurse, and the other one’s a pharmacist, and none of them are particularly afraid of illness and death, you know, they’re a pretty tough group, and so, you know, they made sure their mother’s lips were wet while she was no longer eating or drinking, and tried to make her comfortable, and they’re around the deathbed, and they were kind of getting along, you know, it wasn’t family feud at mother’s death time, and that was kind of nice, and she died, and that was that, but it wasn’t just that, because the fact that the family had coped with it well, and nobly, and honorably, I would say, brought them together, they were closer afterwards than they were before, and they all had more respect for their father, and then in the old folks home, he met another woman who had a husband there who had Alzheimer’s, and they got to know each other, you know, and he died after a while, and she died after a while, and then a few months later they started going out, and then eventually they had a relationship, and now they live together, and so he gained something, like it wasn’t that he replaced what he lost, you know what I mean, because he still has pictures of his wife up in his house, and she was the love of his life, and that’s not going away, but you know, his family respected him more, and everybody pulled together more, and it wasn’t hell at the deathbed, it was just tragedy, and the family pulled together more, and that was a good example of how you can extract at least a certain amount of light out of what’s dark, even at a personal level, and it’s worth asking yourself, it’s like drop what you’re doing that’s foolish, that you know is foolish, and pick a name that’s worthwhile, you know, to make things better for yourself, like you’re worth taking care of, like you’re worth something, you know, and to surround yourself with people who believe the same, and who are what, rejoicing in your accomplishments, and unhappy when you fail, right, and you’re comparing yourself to your accomplishments of yesterday, and not to someone else’s today, so that you’re not jealous and bitter, and you put your own house in order, so that you’re not cursing the world when some of its disarray might be your fault, and you’re trying to pursue something meaningful, and you’re doing your best to tell the truth, and all of that, and then you see what happens, who the hell are you, you know, you think you’re a miracle of some bloody bizarre sort, we’ve been around for three and a half billion years, you know, every single one of your relatives propagated successfully, and here you are, against all possible odds, in this world of hell in some sense, and bitterness, and tyranny, and malevolence, and yet, God only knows what’s inside you, this capacity for consciousness, the capacity to confront potential, and to turn it into something good, that’s us, man, that’s the western story, that’s the individual as the cornerstone of the state, that’s our responsibility, and it really is who we are, and so we need to know that, and we need to remember it, and we need to act it out, and then maybe we can see what we can do about it, you know, and see how good we could make things, and maybe that would be the purpose of your damn life, right, not to be happy, it’s like, there’s problems to be solved, be happy after you solve the goddamn things, right? So I learned, because I looked at dark things, that I learned that the light was more powerful than the darkness as far as I was concerned, and that people were capable, each of us, of remarkable things, and that we need to know that that’s what we are, we’re this consciousness that confronts potential with all its catastrophe, that’s what we are, that’s what makes us in the image of God, that’s what gives us our intrinsic value, and that idea that we have intrinsic value, that’s the bedrock presupposition of our state, we’re going to question that, or we’re going to live it out, better to live it out, find out who you are, thank you very much. Thank you. All right, so now we’re going to try to plow through as many questions as we can, all right? Okay, okay, I’ll try to be brief. All right, here we go, I thought this was the most important one that I saw, it got 73 upvotes, which was the most tonight. Do you think Joe Rogan is as deep and sophisticated as he seems, or is he just a stoner? I’ve been in a room with lots of smart people where Joe was in the same room, and it wasn’t obvious that he wasn’t the smartest person in the room. So, you know, he’s one of those characters who’s not a formal intellectual, but often really smart people who have taught themselves, you know, and sort of come up in the world through their own devices, have an original intelligence that’s not so obvious among, say, the more classically university educated, more cookie cutter, and Joe is a, he’s a remarkable guy. I mean, you think he’s tough as a boot. That’s the first thing. He’s a fighter. That takes a lot of bravery. He’s damn funny, like pro-level funny, and often viciously funny. The thing he did on the Kardashians, that was just, man, I just couldn’t believe that he would go that far. It was just, it was just, my jaw just kept opening more and more as he became more and more of, like he was just like what gargoyle on a bedpost, right, whispering in Jenner’s ear. Yeah, God, very politically incorrect, very funny, and he’s very brave, and he knows that there’s a lot of things he doesn’t know, so he’s got a really intelligent humility. So, he’ll ask intelligent questions, and you know, so he’s been successful at like five things. So, he’s no, he’s certainly not just a stoner, that’s for sure. I got lots of respect for him. The quick follow-up on that, obviously, is will the two of us smoke a blunt on stage? Do you have one? Sure, it could be arranged. No, no, probably that wouldn’t be. I think it’s still illegal here, isn’t it? Yes, it is. Yes, it is. One guy said no. It’s not illegal in Canada, I’ll tell you. We just made it legal, and now everyone is stoned all the time, especially in the winter, when you should be stoned. Do your best Aussie accent saying, good day, mate. No way, I’m not doing that. No way. No, I can’t do jokes on command. It makes me turn red, and then I sweat, and I have this rule that I don’t say things that make me turn red and sweat. So, which I’m doing now. They went funny, this group. Who would win in a cage fight between a serotonin-filled lobster and a petted house cat? And a what house cat? A petted. A petted house cat. Because you’re petting cats all the time. Well, it would depend on the size of the lobster. Right, I mean, equal weight? I’d bet on the lobster. Equal weight, I’d bet on the lobster. If it was a 60-pound lobster, there’d be no competition. One snip, that’d be that. But equal weight, the lobster would win. I like how he can give a scientific answer to even that. Especially underwater. This is a good one. What does the B in Jordan B. Peterson stand for? It stands for barrent, and it’s a Norwegian name, and it means bear, and not the naked kind, the other kind. And it was my great-grandfather’s name, and he built a boat and sailed it from Norway to New York with like 14 other people. Yeah, so, and he was quite the cool character. He was a blacksmith and a bit of a mechanical engineer. He built farm equipment for his farm in Saskatchewan. He homesteaded there. They built a log cabin. They cleared the land. It was tough work, tough life, and he raised my father mostly. My father admired him greatly. He died when I was fairly young, but I remember him, and so that’s where the barren comes from. You’re stuck on an island, and you can only bring three things. What are they? Well, a powerboat with a lot of gas. Three things. Well, an axe. Like, obviously. You definitely need an axe. A knife. That would be good. Knife, axe, flint. That’d be good. Hey, isn’t it the Australian guy? I might be wrong about this, but there’s this YouTube show I watch about this guy who goes out in the, I think, an outback, like with nothing. He just wears shorts, and he goes out there and like builds little cities. You know, what’s it called? Yeah, yeah, that’s right. That’s right. I mean, I think that guy’s absolutely unbelievable, you know? It’s so fun to watch him. It’s like, well, I’ve got some shorts. Then he goes out and he gets a stick and a rock, and he makes an axe, and then he cuts down a bunch of trees, small trees, and he makes a house, and then he builds a floor, and then he builds like a heated floor, which is really quite cool, and then he builds a water wheel, and it’s it’s amazing. It’s amazing to watch him, but I’d still go for the axe. I’d like the axe and the knife and the flint, and I think I could maybe not die instantly if I had those three things. Well, I’m going to read this one just because it’s like, man, they’ve got like, you know, the most influential public intellectual we’ve got, and this was the question they came up with, so I just have to read it. I guess I’d bring my wife too, but I don’t think that would make her very happy. Imagine I was having my wishes, you know? I’m on the island, a genie shows up, you get three wishes. Axe, poof, knife, poof, wife, poof. It’s like, what the hell did you bring me to this island for? I don’t think that’d be good. All right, well, wait till this one. Who is your pick to win the WWE Universal Championship at WrestleMania this year? Seth Rollins or will Brock Lesnar retain? It’s Brock. It’s Brock for sure. It’s Brock. I have no idea who Brock is, by the way. The name, the name sounds right. All right, let’s shift gears a little bit. How many up votes did that question get? That one got 12. 12. It’s like 12. That’s really what 12 of you wanted to know. You don’t want to know how many you’re asking what kind of underwear you wear. I’ll tell you what kind of underwear I’m wearing. All right. I’ve never done this before. All right. You’re going to do it now. But it’s funny. My wife bought me underwear with moose on them. And so I have to tell you that because that’s a Canadian thing, like underwear. Not underwear. Like underwear with moose. And so I just couldn’t believe she bought me these. And they’re actually quite nice, which I also can’t believe because I don’t understand how red underwear covered with moose can also be nice. But as far as underwear go, they beat the hell out of tighty-whities. Says the guy wearing a blue tie with lobsters on it. Hey, well, I keep getting these as gifts, man. You can’t believe how much lobster themed clothing there is. All right. Let’s shift gears a little bit. Has the sudden rise to fame over inflated your ego? Has the sudden rise to fame over inflated your ego? And if so, how do you regulate it? Oh, I’m married. Well, you know, more importantly, I’m married to someone who’s very sensible, you know, and she doesn’t let things go to her head, really. She doesn’t get overly upset and desperate when things are overly upsetting and desperate. And she doesn’t get overly enthusiastic and narcissistic when things are going well. She’s very level-headed. And, you know, and we’ve been through a lot. We’re not kids, my wife and I. We’re both damn near 60, you know, and we’ve had our kids and we have grandkids and we’ve traveled all over the world and met all sorts of people and done all sorts of things. And so, you know, we’re reasonably sensible and to the degree that we’re not, we sort of butt up against each other and try to make ourselves slightly more sensible than we are. And so that’s helpful. And also over the last couple of years, you know, I’ve had people, I’ve been watching very carefully because, well, especially for the first year and a half, because I was always one utterance away from complete bloody disaster. And so I was watching what I was saying and doing very carefully, but I had people around me who were doing the same, you know, my wife being foremost, my two kids who are both awake, you know, and careful and they were keeping a close eye on things. And my parents are still alive and they were watching as well. And I have a group of friends, some of whom, I lost some friends, but I kept a number of them. And they were watching very carefully and letting me know when I was not, you know, a little too angry maybe or a little too acerbic or arrogant, all those things. They’d let me know right away. And so, and I’ve been a psychologist for a long time. And I know, especially from reading Carl Jung about the danger of ego inflation. It’s not something that you want to mess with. It’s very dangerous. And, you know, I tell these archetypal stories a lot. And I learned from Jung 30 years ago that knowing the stories doesn’t make you the archetype. And that’s very, very, very important to understand, you know. And so I try to be cognizant of my shortcomings, which are manifold, and to be grateful. That’s a good thing. You know, like tonight, here you all are and I’m really happy about that, pleased about that. And I would say grateful is a rough word to use because it’s kind of, it’s been overused, you know. It’s been used by people who, it’s been used to signal a virtue that is non-existent often. But I am grateful for this because it’s so unlikely, you know, that there’s 5,500 of us here sitting together in peace and tranquility and harmony, trying to think hard about what we should be doing in our lives and how we can make ourselves in a non-naive and non-what would you call it? It’s that, there’s a kind of striving for goodness that isn’t virtuous. And I think it’s the praying in public kind. It’s the I’m against poverty sign kind. I’m hoping what this is, is that it’s the old original sin kind. You know, it’s like, yeah, Christ, there’s plenty wrong with me. And I include myself in this all the time, you know. I know there’s plenty wrong with me. It’s like, it’d be good if something could be done about it, even a little bit. And maybe that would make things a bit better for everybody. And maybe that’s a noble goal. And maybe we can come and have a serious conversation about that for two hours and think hard about it. And maybe we can turn around our lives a little bit. And because I think we can do that. And that it’s possible for each person to make things around them way better than they are. You know, not always because sometimes you’re in such a dire goddamn situation that basically all you’ve got is a hope for slightly less hell, you know. But man, you can make a huge difference in your life to take care of yourself properly. And a huge difference in your family’s life. And a huge difference in your community’s life. And it would be so good if we could… People wonder, well, what’s the meaning of life? Like, what’s it all about? What justifies the suffering and the misery and all of that? It’s like, well, that’s what justifies it. It’s like, you put yourself up against that. You think, okay, with all of this pushing against me, how much can I push back? Could I move the horror an inch back with all the strength that I have at my disposal? Man, and the answer to that is, yeah, you can. It makes you better with regards to yourself, but it also makes the world a better place. And so, well, so, you know, more of that. And you don’t want to be narcissistic or egotistic about that because it just gets in the way, you know. And one of the things I learned from Solzhenitsyn, this was unbelievably useful, man. This is a pronoun thing. This is a pronoun thing. About 30 years ago, I came across this website that was… that had been produced by this guy who was a paranoid schizophrenic. And he was an aerospace engineer in England, and he was no fool. He’s a real genius. He put together a really interesting site. And he had this delusion, he had developed this delusion that he was the center of the world. And he had this really complicated explanation because he lived in the geographic center of England, and he thought of England as the center of the word that had spread around the world. And he lived right in the middle of the town that was in the geographic center. And so, his schizophrenic fantasy had put him at the center of the world. The center. And he’d made a very elaborate web page about all of this. And then, and so I was thinking about that, this center of the world. I was also reading Solzhenitsyn at the same time, and Solzhenitsyn said, you know, that the world is constituted, and this is one of the fundamental axioms of Western civilization, is the world is constituted so that each person is a center of the world. Like, literally. We can’t understand this because we can’t understand how something could be constructed so that that could be the case, because we’re used to things having one center. But the universe isn’t like that. It has multiple centers. Every conscious being is a center. And a center of infinite scope, in some sense. You know, like bounded, but infinite, which is also very difficult to understand. And there’s a big difference between being the center of the world and a center of the world. So, if you remember that you’re a center of the world, then you stay sane. But as soon as you start thinking that you’re the center of the world, well then, you know, you’re just done. And it’s not going to be helpful. And like, even if you are doing the best you can, you know, you invite everyone else along. It’s like, I’m doing the best I can, and I’m doing the best I can. But there’s way more work to do, man. And everybody needs to participate. And everybody’s participation, that’s the other thing that’s so weird about it. Everybody’s participation is vital. There isn’t anybody that, it isn’t okay for anyone not to be in the game. You know, and I don’t understand that exactly as well. But that also has something to do with our, like our being made in the image of God, and the central value and divinity of our consciousness. The consciousness that gives rise to being itself. These are truths, you know. These are truths. It’s consciousness that gives rise to being from possibility. And that’s us. That’s what we do. And we decide, is it going to be better or is it going to be worse? And if it’s better, well that’s on you, man. Because you made it a little better. And if it’s worse, that’s on you too. And that’s your destiny every day. And that’s what gives you your intrinsic value. And the meaning of your life, the significance of your life, and the effect of you on the structure of reality itself. That’s all you. And it’s a miracle, you know. And that is why, I believe fully, that’s why it says in Genesis that human beings are made in the image of God. God is what extracts order from chaos, from potential. It’s like, I don’t, I think that that’s, I don’t think that can be said in any way that’s more true than that. And it’s a hell of a thing to contemplate. And especially when you think that you actually believe it. You know, because you do believe that you have intrinsic value. Our whole legal system is predicated on the idea that you have intrinsic value. Even if you’re a murderer, even if you’re accused of something absolutely heinous, there’s still something about you that has value outside of the dictates of the state. And you treat other people like that. You know, if you’re going to have a friendship with someone, or an intimate relationship, or love for a child or a parent, you treat them as if they have intrinsic and transcendent value. It’s like, well, is it true or not? And if it’s true, well, maybe it’s an inexhaustible source from which you can draw. It’s possible. It seems to be the case. And it’s worth the experiment, because like, what the hell else do you have to do that’s better than to try that? So, yeah, so that’s that answer. Well, here’s a segue. Will you run for Prime Minister of Australia? People ask me that in different places. I’ve talked to lots of politicians, and I’m talking to more of them all the time. And I’m interested in… I’m not interested in politics so much. I don’t think I have the temperament for it, to tell you the truth, because I don’t think I could take the… I don’t really think I could take the… What is it? It’s sort of the vicious boxing. You know, like, I have a reputation, I guess, of enjoying conflict, but I don’t enjoy conflict at all. It really bothers me, actually. But I don’t shy away from it either, and that’s because I know that sometimes… And this is what I’ve learned from being a clinical psychologist in part. A serious clinical psychologist is like, if I walk into a room and there’s trouble, I’m not going to pretend that the trouble isn’t there. I won’t do that. I’ll point it out. And so that kind of makes me annoying, often. But I can’t stand it if I can see it, and everyone’s pretending. You know, there’s an elephant under the carpet, and everyone is shifting in their chairs as the elephant moves, and they’re all smiling away, stupidly, as if everything’s okay. It’s like, I’m not doing that. I’m going to point it out. And I don’t like that, because it’s usually not an elephant, either. It’s usually some god-awful monster, and it’s been there for a long time, and no one wants to admit to its existence. And so that makes for difficult conversations. But I don’t enjoy them. But I know perfectly well that things that you hide grow, and I enjoy that a hell of a lot less. So anyways, I’m not interested in politics. I don’t believe, because I don’t think I have the temperament for it. But I am interested in aims, and I am interested in trying to figure out what we should be aiming at, because we need a new story. You know, like, we’re all bloody petrified in one way or another, and cynical about the possibility of multiple apocalypses, because one isn’t enough. And we don’t have a counter-story. It’s like, okay, well, here’s a bunch of ways that things could go to hell in a hand basket. It’s like, well, what could we build instead? You know, who knows what we could do? We could irrigate all the world’s deserts. You know, that might be a good thing to do. I mean, maybe we want some desert. That’d be, we could keep some desert. But we could irrigate the damn deserts if we could get our, if we could become sophisticated enough with regards to our technological use of energy. It’s not like we’re going to run out of energy. It’s like the world’s, the universe is made out of energy and matter. We’re not going to run out of it. You know, I mean, and we could make sure everybody had a high quality education, and that child mortality was cut to almost nothing, and that we were taking full advantage of everyone’s talents to the best of our ability. And like, I’m interested in establishing these aims. And so, and I’m working on that with all sorts of people in Canada and the United States, and to some degree in Australia and in other countries, trying to understand, well, we need a noble aim for Christ’s sake. What the hell? We’ve got all this technological power, and it’s multiplying like mad, and all this wealth. It’s like, what could we make the world into? Let’s find out. What the hell? You know, we’ve got to stake our lives on something, and that’s better than politics, that. It’s better than, it’s a better role for me. All right, so we’ve got time for one more. What does a great day for Jordan Peterson look like? Well, there’s a couple of kinds of great days, I would say. It’s a great day if I have a chance to spend it with my wife and my kids. That’s generally a great day. I get along very well with my kids, and I get along as well as anybody would want to with my wife. And so, well, and I say that specifically because, you know, if you’re fortunate in your partner, you have someone to contend with, not someone that you just always get along with. You have someone that you’re, you know, you’re contending with. There’s a story in the Abrahamic stories where it’s Joseph, Jacob, Jacob becomes Israel, I believe. I’m hoping that’s right. He’s kind of a trickster, and he causes all sorts of trouble. And at one point, when he’s going back to reconcile himself with his estranged brother, he sends his family across the river and is laying on the banks alone, and an angel comes to wrestle with him. It’s actually God, and they wrestle all night. And weirdly enough, Jacob wins, and God dislocates his hip because he’s God, you know. He’s not going to let you just walk away. So he dislocates his hip, and then he renames him Israel. And Israel means he who struggles with God. And that’s something really worth knowing, man, you know, because what that means is that at the basis of our most profound stories is the notion that the founder of the holy state is the person who wrestles with God. And that doesn’t mean believe in God, you know. That isn’t what it means. It means contends. It’s like this is, this is, this reality that confronts us is a rough and harsh place, right? It’s not for, it’s not for the weak of heart. It’s not for the faint of heart. It’s for, it’s for the person who wants to step forward and contend. And it turns out that if you’re that person, you wrestle with God, which means that you try to defeat it. Defeat? There’s a, there’s a, an attempt to be, to attain victory even over God of all the strange things. And that’s what makes you part of the holy state. It’s like, it’s an unbelievable idea. And I think it’s so realistic that you want something to contend with, you know. And if you have a good marriage, and maybe if you have good friendships for that matter, you have someone to contend with. And in my wife, I have someone to contend with. And it’s the case with my children as well, not to the same degree, because they’re my children. But it’s a good day when I have a chance to spend it with them. And then this is a good day, you know, which is why we keep doing this. You know, like, I think all the days we’ve done this have been good, don’t you think? It’s been unbelievable, man. I mean, and it’s, and I do mean literally unbelievable. Every night you think, wow, wow, really, this is going to happen again? We’re going to, we’re going to, like, bring 3,000 people together, and this is what we’re going to talk about? And, and it’s going to be serious, and we’re going to, like, aim high and, and, and think critically and have a genuine discussion, and, and everyone’s going to be, like, locked onto that? That’s amazing. And so, yeah, these are good days, which is why we keep doing them. And so those are two kinds of good days, and, and, and I’m fortunate to have them with a fair degree of regularity. So. Well, that right there is how you circle up a show. So I’m going to get out of the way and make some noise for Dr. Jordan Peterson, everybody. Thank you guys for coming out tonight. Thanks, Steve.