Lecture： 12 Rules for Life Tour - Sydney, Australia. (Q_zjdmkou0Q)

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Thank you, thank you very much. It’s much appreciated. The last time I was surrounded like this was, I think it was at a demonstration. Anyways, it’s lovely to be here in this amazing building and in this amazing city and well also in this amazing country. We’ve had a wonderful time in Australia so far. This is the second time I’ve been here and it’s gone extraordinarily well both times and I don’t know why that is exactly, but something’s I appreciate that very much. It’s very good of you to take the time out this afternoon and to take the trouble and to come and listen to an hour and a half of ideas. That’s a strange thing for you to choose to do, but personally I’m very happy about it. So I think we’ll get right to it. I want to cover a fair bit of psychological territory today. I’m going to try to integrate four of the rules from 12 rules for life. The first rule is stand up straight with your shoulders back and it’s really a description of the ancient nature of hierarchies, their almost universal existence among living creatures and the fact that you have extraordinarily ancient and profound neurological systems that really govern, they govern your psyche that process hierarchical information. It’s such an important psychological fact to know. I don’t know if there’s another psychological, biological fact that’s more crucial than that. The serotonin system is the system that tracks hierarchical information and it’s so crucial that it actually sets up your brain in utero. So it’s the master control system of the brain. If you thought about the brain as a symphony, which is actually a pretty good way of thinking about it from a metaphorical perspective, the serotonin system would definitely be the conductor. So there’s rule one and then there’s rule seven, which is do what is meaningful, not what is expedient. And it’s also at least in part a neurological chapter. One of the things I learned really a lot from reading Russian neuropsychology strangely enough, the Russians had great neuropsychologists, was that the sense of meaning, the sense of engagement that characterizes life when life is progressing in the manner that you would like it to progress is actually an instinct. It’s not a cognitive phenomenon. It’s not a second order consequence of thought. It’s way deeper than that. It’s an extraordinarily profound instinct. And so that’s really worth thinking about, assuming, you know, as you might, that we’re adapted creatures and that our instincts guide us in the world so that we can survive and so that we can reproduce and so that we can exist over long periods of time. The fact that an instinct of that depth exists and that it’s associated with the sense of vital engagement in being, let’s say, is a good indication, as good an indication as there is, that there’s something truly real about it. And I would say that might even be more important than the knowledge of the role that the serotonin system plays in adjudicating hierarchical position. Because, you know, we tend to think of meaning as something that people create as a secondary consequence through thinking or through philosophy or something like that. And when we think that, it’s easy to criticize it. It’s easy to become cynical about it. It’s easy to lose faith in it. But when you understand that it actually is a much deeper phenomenon than that and that the cognitive elements, the philosophical elements, are sort of like, well, they’re like the fronds on the top of the pond on a plant system that has unbelievably deep roots that go way down into the water. It’s much, it’s much, there’s something about that that’s much firmer and more solid. And I think that, I think the evidence that meaning is an instinct, a deep, deep instinct, is overwhelming. I don’t think that popular knowledge has caught up with that. I mean, the research is, it’s not new, but it’s been done, I would say, in the main in the last 30 years or so, and mostly by psychobiologists, like people who are really on the hard science end of psychology. And their work is difficult. It’s technically difficult. It involves a lot of neurobiology, neuroanatomy, psychopharmacology. It’s hard work. It’s hard going. But it’s unbelievably useful. I have two books in my reading list, by the way, at Jordanbpeterson.com. If you’re interested in this sort of thing, one is by a man named Jaak Panksepp, who is an absolute genius. He died a few years ago, unfortunately. I think he deserved a Nobel Prize, and you never know, maybe he’ll still get one, because he discovered whole circuits, mammalian circuits, that no one knew existed. So for example, Panksepp outlined a play circuit in mammals. There’s a separate biological play circuit in mammals. It’s a big deal to discover an entire new neurological continent, right? That’s a big discovery. And that wasn’t all he did. It was one of many things he did. So the book is called Affective Neuroscience, which is a rather intimidating title. It means emotional neuroscience. And you wouldn’t think you’d necessarily pick up a book on neuroscience, you know, for a light read. But it’s actually a very readable book. The people who work on emotions in neuroscience tend to be a little bit more romantic for scientists. And they’re a little more interested in story and narrative. So he tells a whole sequence of stories in affective neuroscience. And it’s a very readable book. And it’s a great book. If you’re interested in psychology, I would highly recommend it. And then there’s another book there called The Neuropsychology of Anxiety, which is written by a man named Jeffrey Gray. And that damn thing’s, that’s hard. That’s like a six month slog, that book. I mean, he was an absolutely, he had an absolutely encyclopedic knowledge of animal behavior and neurobiology and psychopharmacology. And like, I don’t know how many references are in that book, 2400, something like that. He read them. You know, he didn’t just cite them. And not only did he read them, he also understood them and integrated them. And so it’s a tough read. But man, I tell you, there’s really something to that. So a lot of what I’m going to talk to you about tonight, although not all of it, is derived from those books. And so I would recommend them if you’d like to go more deeply into these sorts of topics. And so that’s rule seven. Do what is meaningful, not what is expedient. Because meaning is an instinct. And meaning is the instinct that guides you in life across the totality of life, right? What’s expedient, that’s what you might want to do right now in an impulsive sense, right? Because you’re driven forward by, oh, anger or anxiety or frustration or disappointment or despair. Some sort of one-eyed motivational monster that’s got you in its grip that really isn’t considering everything at once, right? Like considering your life tomorrow or your life next week or your family’s life or maybe even your well-being half an hour from now, you know, because you lash out in anger. And it’s, you know, people do that. It’s understandable. Sometimes it’s even necessary, but it’s not wise generally. And the instinct for meaning seems to be a consequence of the integration of all of those underlying motivations and emotions with social being and then the manifestation of something like the proper pathway forward. And so, and you need that because you need to know how to move forward in life because you need to move forward in life. You need to act in life. And the other thing that’s, I suppose, part and parcel of, let’s say, 12 rules for life is the insistence upon action as of primary import. We’re not fundamentally creatures who passively perceive the objective world. That’s not the goal of our perceptual systems. It’s not the goal of our memory. The reason that you have memories isn’t to remember the past. The reason you have memories is so that if something bad happened to you in the past, you can figure out what it was that was bad and you can figure out why it happened and then you cannot do it again in the future. Right? It’s very practical. And it’s the same on the positive end of the spectrum. If good things happen to you in the past, then conceivably duplicating whatever you did to get those good things to happen could have them happen again in the future. So it’s practical memory and it’s oriented towards action and it’s oriented towards the quality of your life, not to the description of the objective world, even though that may be a useful thing to do, at least under some circumstances. So that’s rule seven. Rule eight is tell the truth or at least don’t lie. And originally that rule was just tell the truth. But then I thought about it, which you should do if the rule is tell the truth. And I thought, no, you better be careful about about putting forward a rule like that because to tell the truth implies that you know the truth and you don’t know the truth because you’re too ignorant to know the truth. Like you don’t know the truth about anything fully, right? If you push your knowledge out far enough, if I ask you why about something you’re doing enough times, it’s usually only three or four times, by the way, you’re out of answers. You don’t know. And if same generally, if I ask you how something works, like how does a helicopter work? Well, you know, the little whirly things spin and I don’t know, this thing like rock like entity rises into the air. It’s like really, that’s pretty sad explanation. And you know, that’s kind of the level of detail that you have about a lot of things. So, you know, you’re pretty ignorant like everyone else. It’s just so well, there’s just so many help. There’s just too many things to know, you know, and they’re detailed and difficult. And so you get by with pretty shallow understanding of most things. And so you can’t really tell the truth. But I think you can not lie, you know, and that’s not even the same as not being wrong, because of course, you’re also going to be wrong. And you’re gonna have stupid theories too. And they’re not even necessarily lies. A lie is when you know that what you’re saying is not true and you say it anyways. That’s a lie. And it’s a lie that you’ve decided yourself on the basis of your own knowledge. That’s a lie. You’ve decided that. That’s your own moral judgment. And so I rewrote the rule to suggest that it’s not a good idea to say things that you know not to be true. And I would say, by the way, as a practical issue, it’s also a worse idea to write things that you don’t think are true. Because, you know, your mind is organized at the highest level of abstraction in language. And it’s important that your mind is organized, because if you’re not organized, then you’re disorganized. And then things don’t go well for you in the world, just like they don’t go well for anything that’s disorganized. And so you have to be very careful with what you say and what you write. Writing especially, because it’s like it’s focused speaking. It’s focused speech. It takes more intense thinking. So in some sense, writing is even deeper than speaking. But you don’t want to speak things that you believe to be untrue. And you certainly don’t want to write them, because that changes you. And it changes you in the direction of the deception that you’re undertaking while you do the speaking or the writing. And you might think, nah, I can write whatever I want, and I can just leave it be. But that’s not true. And the reason for that, in part, is because your knowledge is shallow. And so if you take rather shallow knowledge, and then you write something detailed that’s false, you end up convincing yourself in all sorts of ways that you don’t even notice that what you wrote that was a lie was true. And then you’re stuck with that. And it’s not stuck with it psychologically exactly, although it’s also that. It’s stuck with it neurologically. Because when you learn things, and you make new connections, you change the structure of your brain. And then that’s that. I mean, you know, it’s plastic to some degree, but you’re messing around with your psychophysiology. And that’s a bad idea. And you know it’s a bad idea, because you kind of know, like everybody knows, that if you want to get through the world, if you want to get from point A to point B, if you want to get to wherever you’re going, it’d be good to have a map. And it’d probably be good to have a map that isn’t full of holes and errors. Because otherwise, you’re not going to get to where you’re going. You might not even know where you are to begin with. And that seems like a bad plan if you’re going to undertake a journey. And you are going to undertake a journey, because your life is a journey. So pathologize your speech, then you pathologize the systems that guide you, and then that relates back to rule seven, which is, well, you have an instinct for meaning, let’s say, and it can guide you, and you need it. And then if you pathologize it by introducing material that you know to be untrue, then you distort and warp and pathologize the very structure, the very feeling that you need to place yourself firmly in the world. And then you can’t rely on yourself. And this is a very bad idea, because you need to rely on yourself, especially in situations of crisis, you know, when you have difficult decisions to make. And it’s like, well, it’s not obvious whether I should go right or whether I should go left, right? Because there’s a lot riding on both decisions. And so you’re sweating it out. Or maybe you have three or four decisions to make at the same time. It’s like, you can talk to your friends and all that, but you, you’re the guy in the final analysis, man. It comes down to you. And if you can’t trust yourself because you filled yourself up with nonsense, then you’ll make the wrong decision. And then, hey, maybe you’ll pay for it for the rest of your life. And maybe you’ll deserve to as well. And so it’s very, you know, you hear now and then university students say, undergraduates, they say, well, it just, I just write what the professor wants to hear. And then I get a good grade. It’s like, first of all, most professors aren’t that corrupt. There are corrupt professors, but most of them are not that corrupt. You have to be pretty damn corrupt before you go that far, before a student will hand you something that’s well crafted and well thought through, and you’ll actually punish them for it. You’ve gone way off the malevolent end of the academic spectrum when you do that. Now, you know, maybe you’re a bit biased and you’ll give them a B plus instead of an A. And it’s not like that’s particularly forgivable, but it’s not a catastrophe. But, so I think it’s a bit cynical on the part of the undergraduates, usually. But more importantly, it’s like, what are you going to do? You’re going to do your whole four-year degree and all you’re going to do is write what you think your professors want to hear and you think you’re going to come out educated? You think you’re going to come out the person you were when you went in? It’s like, no, you’re not, because you’ve rewritten a different self and you’ve practiced deceit with regards to your highest moral faculty, right, your capacity for articulated speech. You’ve practiced that for four years. And so then definitely when you come out, you’re way worse than you were when you went in. And that’s not education. That’s the antithesis of education. Better not to be there. Better to lay bricks, right? And I have nothing, by the way, against bricklayers. Way to be bricklayers, as far as I’m concerned. But at least they can lay a straight brick wall and it will stand up and there’s something honest and solid about that. Much better that than to go and produce written material that you don’t, that your soul isn’t in. That’s what the damn education system is for, insofar as it’s not there to train you professionally. It’s to develop you psychologically and spiritually and to turn you into a citizen, you know, into a competent human being. You compromise that because of expediency and excuse, usually. It’s a very bad idea. I would highly recommend against never doing it. And I would say the same thing at work whenever. It’s very psychologically dangerous to say things you know not to be true. And in part it is because it warps that instinct for meaning. So you need that instinct for meaning too. And we should get this real straight. Why do you need it? Well, you need it because life is really, really difficult. I mean, people have a rough time of it. There’s plenty of suffering in life and everyone is going to encounter it. You learn this as a clinical psychologist and you know this generally, you know, unless you’re an extraordinarily fortunate person. You don’t have to talk to someone for very long and really talk to them and get beneath the surface until you find, you know, there’s a tragedy or two or three or ten lurking not very far beneath the surface. Someone in the family is very ill. There’s a childhood history of extreme pathology, alcoholism somewhere in the family, maybe a touch of insanity. Someone has cancer, you know, someone’s, some older relative is dying. There’s financial trouble. There’s economic trouble. There’s marital trouble. It’s like life is trouble. And you know, that doesn’t mean it’s all trouble, but man, it’s trouble. And sometimes it’s a lot of trouble. And sometimes it’s so much trouble that you can barely stand it. And you see that because people, you know, people get depressed and they commit suicide. And the reason they do that is because they think not being is better than being. And that’s quite the decision, you know. So, and it’s not that uncommon among people who are depressed. And so it’s a very, it’s a very important thing to consider. And it isn’t just a matter of depression and suicide. That’s bad enough. But you know, if you’re unhappy because your suffering has pushed you past the point of your ability to cope, then there’s all sorts of other things that can happen to you that aren’t directed towards you. You can become cynical and you can become bitter and you can become cruel and you can become narcissistic and deceitful and arrogant. And it’s like everything’s for you. And then you’re out for revenge. That’s a nice one. I don’t know against who, but maybe everyone. Maybe even including you because you’re not happy about the rule you’ve played in generating your own misery. I mean, there’s a lot of darkness underneath the suffering. And so, and that’s an ever present existential danger for human beings. You know, we’re aware of the future. We’re aware of our fragility. We’re aware of our mortality. It’s something that makes us truly unique, truly conscious in a way that no other creature is and capable of things that no other creature can do. But also bearing an unbelievably heavy existential load where the only creatures that have to always contend with the fact that we’re finite and that everyone we know is in the same position that allied with the suffering. And so that’s there all the time. And you know, even in the brightest moments in some sense, you know, in Renaissance paintings and still lifes, they used to put a memento mori often in the still life like a skull somewhere in the corner or sometimes in a very strange perspective so that you could only see the skull if you were standing like right beside the painting instead of dead on. But the idea was to always remember, you know, that everything that exists is tainted or touched with the taint of mortality. And you know, that’s rough, but there’s some useful things in it. It keeps you awake and it keeps you focused if you’re careful. But it also does indicate to you if you think about it, the necessity of having a meaning in your life because if it’s true intrinsically that life has this unbearable element of suffering which seems to be completely in what would you say indisputable as far as I’m concerned. And it’s worse than that too because it’s not just suffering, it’s suffering contaminated with malevolence, right? It’s bad enough to have something bad happen to you and it’s likely that that will happen. But it’s even worse for you to do it to yourself and to know that you did it. That’s rough. And it’s also extraordinarily rough to be betrayed by someone else or, you know, tyrannized by your own culture. And that’s not just suffering, that’s like unnecessary and pointless suffering that’s been directed at you by something that wants that to happen. And so both of those are very, very powerful, let’s say archetypal forces, suffering and malevolence and we have to deal with them at every level of reality. And you need something to, you need something to push back against that. It’s not optional if that’s the default position. And I think it’s the default position. Like a meaningless life isn’t meaningless. It’s suffering and malevolence. That’s not good. And if that’s acted out, you know, that’s the other thing. If that’s acted out, and I’ve read the accounts and the actions of people who’ve taken a very vicious turn into the darkest parts of the underworld, consequence of their resentment and their malevolence and then their desire to make everything in the world suffer for the outrage of its existence, man. I mean, that’s how we turn things into hell. If you want to know why totalitarian states take the brutal twists they take and why people are motivated to do the absolutely terrible things that they do, well that’s why. Is that the suffering and the malevolence that’s intrinsic to life overwhelms them and they turn and they turn in a very bad direction and then they make everything that’s already bad way worse and we’re very, very inventive at such things. And so that’s not good unless that’s the path you want. That’s a bad idea. You need an alternative and that’s meaning. And then rule ten, well that’s be precise in your speech. And so I’m going to weave those together and see what we can come up with as something like a general theory of meaning. That’s really what I’ve been working on, I would say, for 35 years. Something like a general theory of meaning. And so I’m going to see if I can deliver the whole damn thing in 35 minutes. So which I’ve never really been able to manage. But I’ve had a lot of practice, so maybe this is the night. So, okay, so the first thing I want to tell you about is a little bit about how you perceive things because it’s very important to know how you perceive things. And you don’t perceive very much, by the way, because well there’s a lot of the world, way more than you can possibly imagine. And there’s not that much of you. And so you’re, a lot of information is coming in through a very narrow channel. And it isn’t easy, given the fact that all that information exists, it isn’t easy to figure out how to narrow that channel so that the information you get is the information that you need. Information you need that also gives you grip on the world, right? It has to be practically useful. True and practically useful. Something like that. It’s a very, very, very, very difficult problem to solve. And a lot of it you don’t even, really solve because you can’t. It’s too complicated. You solve it by doing what you’re doing right now, for example. So here you are in this unbelievably beautiful building. And I read today a little bit about it. And today it would cost about a billion dollars to build this building. And so you’re sitting here and you’re all sitting here peacefully and you’re all pointing in the same direction, right? And we’re all basically doing the same thing and we’re doing it peacefully and we can all focus on the same thing. And we had to invest a billion dollars for that to be able to happen. And so part of, think about that is that part of the way your society solved the problem of the complexity of the world for you was by investing a billion dollars in what, 15, how long did it take to construct this place? 15 years, something like that. Maybe it was longer. So that you could sit here in relative comfort and peace and tranquility and concentrate on something that’s very focused, maybe something of beauty, something of artistic merit, something of intellectual merit, and that the rest of the world wasn’t there so you didn’t have to worry about it. And then, and that’s not all. It’s not just that you’re here in this building and the chairs aren’t falling apart and that the floor is reliable and the electrical lights work and the sound quality is good and like all the technology is working and there’s people beatling away in the background like mad constantly everywhere, making sure that those impossible things keep happening so that you don’t have to be distracted. But then you’re also sitting with people who are roughly like you, you know, roughly like you enough so that when they come into a venue like this, they know enough to sit down in the seats and face forward and not turn around and look at the person behind them, which would make them very nervous, right? Which would be an indication that that person isn’t playing the same game as everyone else and so God only knows what they’re up to because you just wouldn’t want that, right? You wouldn’t want the guy in front of you turning around and just looking at you for the next 90 minutes. And well, it’s worth thinking about why. Like what are you thinking about? You know, you’re going to be sitting there looking like this, your eyes are going to be darting around and maybe you’re going to be nudging someone and, you know, pointing at this person because maybe they have some idea of what this person is up to because you don’t. And the problem is if you don’t know what that person is up to, then they could be up to anything. And anything is a lot of things to be up to. And you don’t want people to be up to anything. You want them to be up to the one or two things they’re supposed to be up to while they’re with you in this narrow place that you occupy, right? And that’s, well, that’s sort of the hallmark of a civilized and socialized person is when we interact under 90% of conditions, 99% of conditions, you show me your persona. It’s just a very narrow slice of yourself. And I show you mine at the bank, say, or, you know, at the grocery store when we pass each other casually in the street, we nod and say hi and you nod and say hi or we just walk by peacefully and like we’re seething with complexity and we don’t let any of that out. And the reason for that is we don’t want anybody else to let any of that out either. Right? So we keep ourselves simplified and we build our architecture for that. And so, you know, you come into a building like this and the building tells you what to do. The chairs are all aligned. The chairs say sit on me. Right? The chairs are all facing the same way and kind of a semicircle and they say face the stage and there’s a stage. And so you come in here and all the perceptual problems are solved. And so there’s all this technology and there’s all this expense. And then there’s the shared culture that enables you to know that this is something like a theatrical experience. So what you do at a theatrical experience is come together as a group and remain silent but attentive, participating in that manner and watch and listen to the main performance. And you all know that. It’s part of the shared culture. And so that shared culture is also enabling you to perceive what you’re perceiving right now as a protective mechanism. And that’s part of a broader shared sense of civilization and it’s dependent on a shared government. And then there’s other forms of protection. You know, I mean, well, we’re not, the sun isn’t shining on us too brutally because we have a roof and we’re not in danger of warfare because you have borders and you have an armed forces and you have policemen and it’s like, Christ, there’s just things going on around you like mad to ensure that you can sit here so peacefully and so much as if the world isn’t a complex place for an hour and a half and do something this focused. And so that’s partly how you solve the perceptual problem. You don’t see the world that much. You screen a lot of it out. Now, there’s a good indication, good illustration of this. A psychologist named Dan Simon did this famous experiment which he called Gorillas in our midst. And some of you know about it but I’m going to go over it because it’s such a fun experiment to talk about because it’s so ridiculous and so illuminating and because it’s so relevant to what I want to continue talking to you about. So here’s the deal. You go into Dan Simon’s lab. He was at Harvard 20 years ago when he did this and he was interested in this phenomena called change blindness. You know, you see those kids books sometimes where there’s picture one and picture two and you’re supposed to look at picture one and then look at picture two and see what’s changed. It’s actually hard. You know, you look at picture one, you say, well, I saw that. And then you look at picture two and it’s different but you can’t see the differences and you have to really compare back and forth before you can check out the differences. That’s what perception is like. You’re very blind to change way more than you think and way more than anybody thought before Simon did his experiments. So he did this crazy experiment. So here’s the setup. Video camera set up in front of an elevator bank, right? And so the camera would be here. The elevator bank would be about here. So, you know, it’s pretty close up shot. There’s six people participating, three of them dressed in black, three of them dressed in white. The white team has a basketball. The black team has a basketball. They fill the whole screen. So it’s not like they’re way over in the corner this high and you can barely see them. They fill up the whole screen. You can detect their facial figures. It’s close shot. You see their whole body but it’s clear. There’s no tricks in it. And you sit there and you’re the experimental subject and the psychologist or his assistant says, okay, here’s your task. And you’re there to be focused on a task apparently because you’re in the university and you’re in a lab and you’d expect to be focused on a task. So you’re already primed for that and you’re willing to go along with it to be obedient but to be a good sport, let’s say, that’s better than obedient. And you want to do a good job because it’s intimidating to be in a lab like that. And so you want to do a good job of whatever you’re supposed to do unless you’re a troublemaker. And you’re probably not because you wouldn’t go into the lab to begin with if you were a troublemaker. So Simon says, count the number of times, like the white team is going to throw a basketball back and forth, variety of ways, three minutes. Just count how many times they manage it and they’re going to bounce it and throw it directly and all that. And so the black team and the white team start to mill around on the video and they’re tossing the basketball back and forth and you’re watching the basketball very intently with the central part of your vision. Now the central part of your vision is very high resolution. And you can tell this, it’s pretty easy. I’ll show you. I don’t know. Now this probably won’t work because I think the theater is too big to do it. But we could try it, I guess. So look at my finger, right? But pay attention to my face. Now that’s hard because usually when you pay attention to something you look right at it. But I don’t want you to do that. I want you to pay attention to my finger and look at my face. And what should happen, except perhaps for those of you who are quite a distance at the back, is that you’ll notice that you actually can’t see my facial features. So for example, if I look at even somebody in the third row, if I look directly at you, I can see your facial features fine. I can tell you have glasses. I can’t tell if you’re male or female. I can’t distinguish you from the chair and it has nothing to do with you. Right. But you don’t have to move very far away from central vision before it becomes extremely low resolution. And so that’s how your visual system is set up. High resolution in the middle, low resolution as you move towards the periphery, until like out here, I actually can’t tell how many, I mean I know how many fingers I have. Well, five if you include the thumb. But I can’t see them. If I move them I can see them better. Because that’s one of the ways your visual system overcomes its limitations, is that it’s better at seeing movement than things that are stable. And that’s because, well, if you’re watching something and something suddenly moves off to the right, it might be a good idea for you to shift your attention just to see what it is. And so that’s a trick your visual system uses. But mostly it’s foveal vision. And it’s a very, very small part of your visual field. And it’s extremely heavily neurologically innervated in the visual cortex. A lot of cells are devoted to that tiny area in the middle of your vision to make it as high resolution as possible. And it might be nice, eagles have two fovea by the way. They can see better than human beings. Their eyes, bald eagles, their eyes are as big as human beings and they can see better than we can. They’re the only animals that can do that. They have two fovea. But you can’t have that high resolution vision across the entire span of your eyes because then your head would have to be this big to carry that much brain around. And obviously that would be hideous and also counterproductive. So we do the best we can. And what it means is that we’re blind to a lot of things that we don’t think we’re blind to. So anyway, so you’re playing Dan Simon’s game and you’re counting the number of times that the basketball is tossed back and forth between the white team and he says how many times and you say being a good experimental participant, you say 16. And you’re right. And he says, you’re right. And you think, oh, good, I’m smart enough to participate in a psychological experiment. You feel good about yourself. You know, it’s a little self-respect boost, let’s say, because you passed the test. And then Simon says, did you see anything out of the ordinary? And you say, most of you, some people notice, most of you say, no, what do you mean? And Simon says, well, the gorilla. Did you see the gorilla? And you think, well, what do you mean did I see the gorilla? Like there was no damn gorilla. I’d see a gorilla, right? If you’re watching me on stage and the gorilla came out here, you’d see it. Maybe. Maybe, as it turns out. It might depend on what the gorilla was doing. But in any case, so Simon rewinds the tape as you watch it so that there’s no tricks. And he says, don’t count the balls this time. Just watch. So it’s a different command, right? So you have a different aim now. You’re pursuing a different value structure. He says, just watch. And he rewinds it. And sure enough, you see the gorilla coming out backwards and being in the middle and then going off to the side. And then he replays it for you. And minute and a half into the three minute video, in waltzes this damn gorilla. It’s a guy, because they didn’t have a gorilla for obvious reasons. Sex committees wouldn’t allow them to use a real gorilla. And he’s a big guy. He’s not a small chimpanzee type ape. He’s six foot four. And he saunters out there and beats his chest like for four seconds right in the middle of the screen, which you might think you’d see since it’s right in the middle of the screen. And then he saunters off to the side. And you don’t see it. And the question is, well, what the hell’s wrong with you? Like, why don’t you see it? And it’s worse than that. Like Simon has done other funny tricks. Like imagine you went to a grocery store and the cashier was behind the counter, right? And you’re talking to the cashier and the cashier says, excuse me for a minute. And then kneels down and then someone else stands up and keeps talking to you. And you think, oh, you’re going to catch that. And you don’t. About 50% of people miss that completely. So you can like change the person completely. And the reason is, well, how much processing do you have to do to have a casual interaction with a cashier at a grocery store? And the answer is not much, right? You don’t have to do the processing. Doesn’t have to be that deep. And you can kind of tell this because you can watch The Simpsons or you can watch South Park. And South Park has like the world’s worst animation, right? I mean, everything moves like this. It’s all circles and triangles. You don’t care. It’s like five minutes into the narrative. It doesn’t matter that it’s circles and triangles having a conversation. It’s fine. The icon will work. And that’s a good rule for perception is you use the simplest possible perceptual scheme that you can manage to get yourself from point A to point B, right? It’s a map. You don’t see the world. You see an iconic representation of the world. And then the question is, what makes the iconic representation sufficient? And I suppose sufficient means a couple of things. One thing it means is tolerable, right? It doesn’t cause an excess of suffering and degeneration. It has to be functional, right? And then maybe a more specific example of that would be, well, it has to work like a map works. A map is a low resolution representation, but it’s a good enough map if you use the map and you start at point A and you happen to be at point A, which is a good beginning for a map. And then you use the map and you get to point B and you think good enough map. And that’s really that’s us. That’s how we think. That’s how we construe the world. Our maps are really the stories that we use in the world are really the maps we use to guide us. And then they have perceptual implications, but that’s essentially what you do. So now the question is, all right, what happened in the gorilla video? Well, what happened was you were aiming at something, right? You’re aiming at counting the passes. And the question is, well, why were you doing that? And the answer is, well, someone told you to, asked you to, and then you might ask, well, why did you listen to them? There’s lots of other things you might have done in the lab, but that isn’t what you did. You did what you were asked to. And we might say, well, that’s because you’re reasonably cooperative and civilized. And then we might say, well, why is that a hallmark of cooperation and civilization? And we might say, well, reciprocity, like spontaneous reciprocity between strangers who have a bit of a contractual arrangement is part of civilized behavior. And so that’s the appropriate thing to do. And we might say, well, you wanted to do a good job in the lab because you wanted to make sure that your status wasn’t too low. You know, you could count to 16. And so you can give yourself a pat on the back of the head for that. And, you know, it’s part of being a civilized person. And so there’s a huge value structure behind that. Like you didn’t go into the lab and shoot it up, you know, or you didn’t bring a hand grenade, right? And you didn’t, you didn’t, you didn’t, you didn’t sexually assault the experimenter. There’s lots of things you could have done in there and you didn’t do those things. You just sat there and counted the balls and missed the gorilla. Okay, so and there’s complicated reasons for that. There are deep reasons for that. And so there are deep reasons for how you perceive things and why. And so that’s what we’re going to go into. So the first thing we’re going to do is talk about the basics of perception. And perception is very, very tightly related to action, to movement forward, and to emotion. And those things are very important to know. They’re very, they’re very tightly associated. So for example, you live in a map, let’s say, or a story. And the story is, wherever I am isn’t as good as it could be, and so I’m going to go somewhere that’s somewhat better. And, you know, that can be of different timeframes. Maybe you’ve got a plan for the next minute. You know, you’re hungry and so you want to go somewhere to eat. Or maybe it can be for the next hour or the next week or the next day or the next year or whatever. But basically what you’re trying to do is take where you are, point A, and make it better, point B. And so you’re always somewhere that isn’t quite as good as it should be, and you’re always going somewhere that’s somewhat better. At least that’s the hope. Unless things have gone wrong, you know, and you feel, God, it’s nothing but downhill from here on in. And that’s not good. You don’t want that. That’s a pathological condition. So, and it’s kind of unfortunate in some sense because it means you can’t be satisfied with what you’ve got. But how the hell can you be satisfied with what you’ve got? Because you’ve got problems coming your way. You know, I mean, even if everything’s okay right now, which it probably isn’t, but even if it was, that doesn’t mean everything’s going to be okay tomorrow or next week or next year or five years from now, right? You’ve got the future to take care of and your future self. And you’ve got your family to take care of. And maybe you’ve got your community to take care of. So you’ve got some problems. And so the way things are isn’t good enough. And so you’re going to fix them a bit. And so then you fix them across different levels of resolution. And you do this, you know, you do this technically in this manner. So you identify where you are. One thing you might think about is if you’re mixed up, one of the problems you might have is that you don’t know where you are. Lots of times people have to go to therapy or talk for a long time to someone to find out where they are because your experience might have scattered you everywhere. And you just, and you feel that things have, that you’ve come apart at the seams, right? That things have fallen apart around you, that you’re in chaos. You don’t know where you are. And so then you’re in trouble because how the hell are you going to plot a course forward into the future if you don’t know where you are? And so maybe you have to bring yourself up to date. I have an exercise online, by the way, at a place called Self Authoring, which is called the Past Authoring Exercise, fittingly enough. And what it asks you to do is to write an autobiography. It’s a guided autobiography and it can kind of bring you up to date. And you can know if you need to be brought up to date. It’s fairly straightforward. If you’re obsessed by memories of the past, more than 18 months old, and most of those are negative, so anxiety provoking most often, then there’s a lot of you that stuck in the past. And what that means is you didn’t map the territory well enough and the parts of your brain that are alarm systems, anxiety systems are saying, no, no, there’s holes in the way you’re looking at the world. There’s holes in the way that you’re looking in the world. And you fell in them once and you don’t know where they are and you don’t know how to fill them and you don’t know how to walk around them. And so you can’t forget them. You can’t forget them. You can’t forget them. You can’t forget them. So you have recurring nightmares, for example, or a good example of that sort of thing happening. But in any case, if you have memories like that, you remember them, they make you feel anxious and negative. You’re stuck back there. Your body is still reacting as if there’s an emergency that could happen again that you haven’t fixed. And it doesn’t matter if it was your fault. That’s irrelevant because the alarm system doesn’t care. Like when your smoke detector goes off, it isn’t relevant whether it was your fault. The smoke detector just says, house is on fire. And that’s a bad thing. And your anxiety systems are like that. If they’re tagging old memories with anxiety, then you have to do something about it or you will be tortured by those memories forever because that’s how the alarm system works. And so maybe you need to go back there and clean things up. You’ve got to figure out, okay, well, how did this happen? What sort of role did I play? Even if it’s a minor role, that doesn’t matter because the point is, is that you don’t want to be put in the same vulnerable position again. So anything you can do to strengthen yourself is good. You know, and often if it’s a really old memory, like maybe you were a child, you’re not a child now. So you probably have a variety of techniques at hand that you could use to deal with a situation like that if it came up now. And so you have to update that part of your brain that still thinks you’re four. And lots of people have parts of them that are still stuck in some traumatic childhood experience. And they don’t, I had a friend like that who had terrible childhood. And I mean really, I’ve had clients with terrible childhoods and his was like top of the lobster hierarchy in terms of terrible childhoods. And whenever he had a dream about it, which was very often, he was five in his dream. He’s 58. You know, he’s not five, but hadn’t been updated. And so he was still five in his dreams. It was a complete bloody nightmares for him, complete with all sorts of terrible physiological symptoms, really hurting his life. He couldn’t get himself updated. And he’s much older in his dreams now, by the way, he’s up to about 45. So that’s a, which is way better than five, you know, because you can’t fight back when you’re five, but you can fight back when you’re 45, especially if you have some, you know, some, some experience at your disposal. So anyways, you need to know where you are. So let’s say where you are is, well, you’re on this stage and you’re on this side of the stage. And you decide that you’re going to go over to that side of the stage, just to show that you can. And you’re, you’re making the decision, the same decision that, you know, the famous chicken who is going to cross the road, why does the chicken cross the road? Well, if it’s a sensible chicken, it’s because it assumes that there’s something better on the other side of the road. It’s like, or maybe it’s random curiosity, but then it just gets picked off by a dingo or a coyote. So that’s not so good. The other side of the road is better. So away the chicken goes. So that’s what you’re doing. You’re going somewhere slightly better. And so that’s good. Technically, it’s good because the way that your positive emotion systems work, they run on a neurochemical called dopamine, which by the way is the neurochemical system that drugs like cocaine and methamphetamine and alcohol for some people and opiates affect dramatically and make people feel far better than they should, which is part of their danger. It’s a very fundamental system. The dopamine system kicks in with a kick of positive emotion. If you’re going somewhere that’s worth going. And so that’s worth knowing. It’s really worth knowing. It’s like, okay, you want a little bit of positivity in your life. Well, how do you get it? Well, you’ve got to get the system. It’s almost like it’s the left hemisphere system for most people. Not that that’s particularly relevant, but it’s a it is a standalone neurochemical system rooted very, very deeply in the brain’s exploratory circuitry. So very ancient, ancient system. And it’s happy when you have somewhere to go. That’s the first thing. And then it’s also happy when you’re going there. And so if I’m on this side of the stage and I want to go over to that side of the stage and I see that there’s a nice clear pathway, I could just go straight down this line. Then I look at that and I’m actually a little happy. I mean, I’m not ecstatic. I mean, who the hell cares if I get to the other side of the stage, right? I mean, it’s a small piece of my life, but it’s not nothing. It’s something. Okay. And so I look at the pathway and I think that’s a good pathway and I feel a little positive. And then if I move here and then I see that little table right in the way between me and the other side of the stage, then I feel a little negative because I don’t want an obstacle in my pathway. And so that’s really how you’re looking at the world, by the way. You don’t see objects. It’s not the right way to think about it. We don’t see objects and then think about them and then evaluate them and then decide how to act on them. Or if we do, we do it rarely and slowly and with a lot of thought. What we see instead are pathways with tools that will move us forward or obstacles, right? And there’s no obstacles here and there’s a nice flat road. And so great positive emotion. This is a task I can undertake. The sailing is clear. It’s a good day. And then I’m here and it’s like, yeah, well, that’s a little annoying. I get a little pang of disappointment, let’s say, anxiety. Can I make it around that obstacle? I’m fairly confident. I’ve done this sort of thing before. So I can take the rough route and I can, you know, walk forward like this and then I can do this great trick, which is just this. And then, you know, I’ve circumvented the obstacle. Now, if I didn’t know how to do the little bit of circumvention, then that would be a real problem, right? Because I couldn’t get from point A to B and that would screw up my plan. But I do have that particular skill set. So it’s a minor disruption to the perceptual set that I’m using to organize the world. It’s a minor bit of chaos because that’s what happens when your perceptual set, the structure that you’re using to organize the world, the plan through which you’re viewing the complexity of the world reveals an inadequacy. Then that destabilizes your emotions. So that’s another thing to know. One thing you need to know is you need to be going somewhere and there needs to be a pathway in order for you to feel good. The other thing to know is that if that plan is untenable or becomes destabilized, then what happens is you become flooded with negative emotion. Frustration, disappointment, anger, primarily anxiety. But all of those things sort of intermingled. Anger maybe because you have to fight your way through the obstacle. Frustration because maybe you have to make a new plan. Disappointment because you put a bunch of work into the damn plan and it didn’t work out. Anxiety because now there’s too many choices in front of you. And so people don’t like to have their plans disrupted. They don’t like to have their plans disrupted. And the reason for that is that their plans are directly associated with their emotional perception of the world. And so, and that’s a good thing to know too. That’s why, you know what it is is you’ve decided that you’re going to go to like a Korean restaurant for dinner and that’s fine. And it turns out that you can’t and maybe you have to go to a Greek restaurant and it’s like who cares, right? Unless you hate Greek restaurants. Korean restaurant, that’s pretty good. Greek restaurant, that’s pretty good. You’re still going to be annoyed that your plans changed. Well, why? Well, because it’s annoying to have your plans changed. It disrupts the structure that you use to destabilize, to stabilize your perceptions of the world. And it throws you momentarily into a state of chaos. Not much. Now, how much chaos? Hmm. I don’t know. I don’t know. This is interesting. We don’t know. You know, like, let’s say you wake up one morning and you have an ache in your side. It’s like, well, you don’t have an ache in your side. What does it mean that you have an ache in your side? Well, you don’t know. Like, maybe it means you pulled a muscle and like who the hell cares? Maybe it means you have cancer and like you’re going to be dead in six months. The whole range of possibility is there, you know, and some people will assume one thing, it’s like that’s nothing. And some people will assume the other and all of them will be right sometime. And so the question is, how do you calibrate something like that? And the answer is, well, we tend to guess at it. We guess at it temperamentally. So one way we guess at it is we have our set points for negative emotion. So, so there’s neuroticism traits. Some people will be a lot more nervous about a small level anomaly than others. And maybe they’ll go to the hospital first and they won’t die. And then, or maybe they’ll be freaking out all the time and there’ll be a hypochondriac, right? So there’s pros and cons about being nervous like that. Other person’s very emotionally stable. They don’t worry about much. They think, ah, it’s nothing. And then, you know, by the time they get to the hospital, it’s too late. Hey, that’s how the dice roll. That’s one way that you guess. It’s determined in large part genetically. Not completely, but in large part. Another part is your position in the hierarchy. You know, so the issue is, how safe are you in life? And the answer is, who knows? But one of the way you guess is, well, are you good at things? You know, because if you’re good at things and a problem comes up, you can probably solve it. And then you might think, well, how do you know if you’re good at things? And one answer might be, well, other people think you’re good at things. Because you’re really kind of comparing yourself to other people when you’re thinking about whether or not you’re good at things. And so if it turns out that you’re in a hierarchy and you’re fairly high in the hierarchy, indicating a certain degree of competence, then your nervous system, under the control of the serotonin system, dampens down your negative emotion. It says, look, you know, all things considered, you’re probably pretty safe. And that’s nice. But it also means you don’t like having your position in the dominance hierarchy challenged at all. Because if you get tossed down the hierarchy, let’s say you get fired. What wreaks havoc with your serotonergic function, it makes you defeated, like the defeated lobsters that I wrote about. And then all of a sudden you’re way more susceptible to negative emotion. And who wants that? And so that’s why you don’t even like to lose arguments. You know, you lose a little argument. It’s like, whoop, down the dominance hierarchy a bit. Well, emotions are a bit destabilized. It’s no damn way. I’m right. And why? Because I want to keep my neurochemistry in check. And no wonder. Well, the thing is, sometimes it’s better to learn than to insist upon being right. Because learning works better for the future. But you get the point. Okay, so now I’m going to go from this side of the room to the other side. And that’s my little journey. And so but that isn’t exactly how journeys work. They’re nested. You know, you’ve seen bullseyes, classical arrow, you know, archery bullseyes. I think they’re red in the middle usually, right? And then there’s a variety of colored circles around them. Maybe the whole bullseye is this big. And you’re supposed to hit the bullseye. But the closer you get to the center, the better. But at least you could hit part of it. That would be good, you know. And you’re supposed to stand back and pull your arrow back and aim. And so and that’s that’s that’s that’s an acting out of something. It’s an acting out of the necessity of having an aim and taking your best shot. Right? That’s what makes it a sport. Now, and if you think about that, most of our sports are like that, right? Soccer’s like that, rugby’s like that, basketball’s like that, hockey’s like that, almost all team sports involve some sort of projectile going to some sort of target. And usually people organize themselves into hierarchies, two of them, because there’s two teams, and then they compete and cooperate to get the projectile in the target. And for some reason, we think that’s really cool. Right? Well, look, it’s worth thinking through deeply. It’s like you’ll spend a lot of money on that opportunity to go into in Toronto. You can’t buy NHL tickets for the Maple Leafs. They’re unbelievably expensive, and they’ve been sold out forever. Even though the damn team hasn’t won a championship since like 1968. Doesn’t matter. People will spend a fortune to go sit in an arena, like a long way away from the action. And there’s these guys out there, and they’re tough and they’re fast, and they’re fighting with this little black frozen disc, and they’re trying to get it in a net while someone is trying to stop. It’s completely bloody absurd. And yet people are thrilled about it. They’re thrilled, and they’ll pay for it. Right? They don’t have to be dragged there kicking and screaming, like they line up. It’s, oh, God, a hockey game. Thank God. And they’ll wear the jerseys. It’s like, and then, you know, some character who’s put in his $10,000 does his beautiful move and puts in a goal in some manner that’s like technically impossible. And everybody leaps to their feet, and they just have a fit of joy. And you think, what in the world is going on with that? It’s like you’re happier when that happens than you were when you got married. It’s like you don’t see, well, you don’t see people doing that when they’re, and it’s not everybody. When you get married, everybody stands up and has a little like a 10-minute fit and hugs strangers and then goes out and drinks a dozen beer and has a riot and tears down stores. It’s like, no, no, but a good goal, that’ll do it. I think Guatemala and Ecuador went to war over a soccer game, literally. So, and let’s not assume we’re so stupid, you know, even though we are. Let’s not assume it. There’s something behind this. It’s like we really like to see people take careful aim and hit the target. And we really like to see them cooperate and compete in an expert manner to do that. And we really like to see them do that in a way that stretches their ability beyond what we would normally be able to see, right? Because it’s nice to go to a competent display of athletics. But now and then you go, you see these like soccer goals on YouTube where these crazy characters, you know, they flip around in the air and they’re like eight feet off the ground, completely backwards, and they kick the ball four feet to the side of the goalie. It’s just impossible. Like they’re a hundred yards away and it’s perfect. And you think, right on, that’s what a human being is like. And you’re not really like that because you couldn’t do it, but you are human and conceivably you could do something like that. And so it’s a nice display of that potential for us to hit the damn target, right? So then the question is, well, what’s the target? And that’s the question because that’s the same question as what’s the meaning? And so, okay, so here’s my target. Let’s say do a personal unpacking of my value system, at least in part. So I’m a writer and I’m a writer and a researcher and a clinician and a professor. So those things, maybe roughly in that order. And so that’s my claim to my position in the social hierarchy. And, you know, the claim is something like I’m competent at that, it’s worthwhile, therefore I’m reasonably entitled by the rules of the game to the privileges and statuses that are associated with that position, right? As long as I’m competent. So there’s a match between social demand and my ability and as long as I’m playing the game properly, then I’m safe. That’s what’s keeping my emotions regulated. It’s not my internal regulation. It’s the fact that I can do what I say I can do. And everyone else agrees and people value that. And that keeps me secure. That’s also why I don’t want too much social upheaval, you know, because I might end up with the same skill set in a society that doesn’t value those skills and then, well then what? Then I’m done. So I want there to be an isomorphism between my internal hierarchy of perceptual value and the social structure itself. You know, and so this is also partly why radical claims of multiculturalism are wrong. Because at the base of things, we need to be playing a unified game so that everybody knows what everybody else is up to. Doesn’t mean that diversity of opinion isn’t useful because now and then the collective claim is going to be wrong and need to be updated. And so you need some strange people around, creative people generally speaking, who will, you know, take things in a direction that’s novel to update. But roughly speaking, we want everybody nested in the same game and then maybe above that playing some different games. And we need that because it’s the only way we can orient ourselves in the world. It’s the only way we can keep a match between our expectations and our skills and our desires and what’s actually expected of us in the world. There’s nothing that’s more harmful than for you to play the game straight, right? To do what you’re supposed to do, to be a good person and then to be punished for it instead of rewarded. Very disheartening. You want what you think to be good and right to also be rewarded by the world in that manner. And that means the structures have to be the social structure and the psychological structure have to match. And part of the reason that we protect our cultures is so that we can protect the match between our psychological structures and our social structures and keep ourselves oriented, moving forward in the world with some positive emotion and not terrified out of our skulls. It’s crucially important. It’s why we’ll fight to protect what we’ve built. It’s the game we understand. And it’s not something that can just be arbitrarily shifted or changed. And that’s partly because the aim isn’t arbitrary. The aim isn’t arbitrary. This is the problem with the postmodernists and the moral relativists. They don’t know what the hell they’re talking about. They’re a hundred years out of date. They’ve got it wrong. Okay, so I’m typing. And when I’m typing, I’m moving my fingers, right? And that’s not thinking. That’s moving my fingers. And I don’t really know how I move my fingers, but I can do it. And I can do it on a keyboard. And so I can type letters one at a time. And so you might say, well, what are you doing? If you were watching me and say, well, I’m typing letters. That’s my aim. So I’m pretty happy when I hit an A and an A appears. And I’m not that happy when I hit an A and an E appears and I have to backspace. A little annoyance there, right? Because I’ve shifted off the target. A little frustration. I fix it. That’s okay. Back on track. But I’m not typing letters because, like, who wants to read a bunch of letters? No one. You want to read words. So I’m trying to organize the letters into words. So goal one is the letters nested inside goal two, which is the words. But you don’t want just random words. That’s not helpful. How about some phrases? That’d be good. How about some sentences? Letters, words, phrases, sentences. Now we’re starting to get into units of meaning, right? And those are directions. They’re like a map. They have a point. Like a book has a point. Like a story has a point. And the point is to outline the map properly. And then not just sentences, paragraphs. And those are organizations of sentences that make the sentences make sense. And the phrases. And the words. And the letters. All nested together. And not just paragraphs. Chapters. Right? And then chapters nested in a whole book. And then not just the whole bloody book. Because that’s not enough. The book itself has to be nested in the shared literary experience of the audience. I have to assume, if I’m writing a book, that there’s a certain amount of culture that we share. Because otherwise I’d have to explain absolutely everything about absolutely everything. And I can’t. And so the book doesn’t work unless it’s in a culture that’s composed of maybe a thousand books in some sense that are widely known by all of us. Even if we haven’t read them. I can assume that the reader is a mechanism that can understand what I’ve written. And that’s part of where the meaning is too. And so that’s all nested together. All of that. To make it meaningful for me to sit down in the morning and concentrate so foolishly in some sense on moving my fingers up and down on a keyboard. What’s meaningful about that? Well, nothing. Who cares if I type a letter? A single letter. Yeah, well, how about a word? How about the right word? How about the right phrase? How about the right sentence? Well, every movement outward more broadly makes it more meaningful. And if that whole structure is coherent, then all of the small actions become associated with the meaning of all of the large scale actions. I’m not just typing letters. I’m writing a book. Why? Okay, then we get broader. This is the bullseye. This is the structure of the bullseye. The center might be the letter, you know? That’s one way of looking at it. That’s the highest resolution thing. I’ve got to get that exactly right. And then it’s nested inside all of these other structures. Well, I’m an educator. Okay, so I’m hoping the book will be educational. Well, why? Well, because maybe it would be better for people to be educated than not to be so that they don’t have to suffer so stupidly and so they could be less malevolent and that the world would be a less brutal place. That would be all right. So that’s part of my goal. I’m a clinician. I want to fulfill that part of my moral obligation to justify my privileged position in the social hierarchy, right? I’m a scientist. I want to test my hypothesis and see if they’re correct so I can advance the scientific domain and push human knowledge a little bit farther out into the unknown, right? And I’m doing that maybe because I want to be a good person, something like that. Okay, so now we’re a long ways out in the moral hierarchy. And so now we might think about, well, what does it mean to be a good person? Does that mean something? Well, you think it does. Because you know people who are good people and you know people who aren’t good people and you make a qualitative distinction between them. And you know when you’re being a good person and when you’re not and you make a qualitative distinction between that too. So I don’t think we have to have a discussion about whether or not good and bad people exist. We might have a discussion about how you distinguish between them, but that’s a different issue. So here’s some ideas and this is what we’ll end off with. What does a good person do? They take care of themselves. That’s a good thing. You know, you don’t want to be a burden to anyone else. Sometimes you’re going to have to be, but most of the time maybe it’d be better if you were a net positive. You know, and rely on people when you have to. And so that means don’t be so damn useless and constrain some of your malevolence. And that’s a good meaty bloody war to get involved in. It’s not trivial. It gives you something to do when you get up in the morning. And then it might be the same with your social organization, your family. It’s like your family could use some work, man. Just like everybody’s family and you might be able to help. And the company you work for, same thing. Blind, willfully blind, stupid, corrupt, going in the wrong direction. Not entirely. You know, I mean, things work pretty well for how haphazard the world is in some sense. I’m not trying to be overly pessimistic and I’m certainly not claiming that we live in an oppressive patriarchy. But like there’s work to do in most organizations. A little honesty and a little hard work on your part might straighten that thing out just a little bit. And God only knows what the consequences of that would be across time. And then, you know, there’s natural worries that you might want to take care of. There’s diseases to conquer and there’s children to take care of and there’s food to provide and all of the things that go along with that. So that you could involve yourself in taming and regulating the natural world. That would be a good thing. So there’s three sources of meaning. Right? Get yourself under control. See what you can do about the tyranny of culture and see what you can do about the civilization of nature. Right? That’s the construction of a walled garden. That’s what paradise means. To get the balance between civilization and nature right. That’s your goal. So people can live in there in peace and harmony. Including you. That’s a good goal. And then you think, well, that’s going out quite a ways. You know, you’re the culture hero who’s taking on your own malevolence and ignorance. The tyranny of your culture and the cruelty of nature. Great. We need more people like you. Go for it. And then maybe we can go one stage outside of that. And this is as far as I can go with it. So here’s how I think we are. You know, you hear scientists talk about us as deterministic creatures. We’re causal like an alarm clock. You wind the thing up. Of course you don’t anymore. But you wind the thing up and it just ticks away and one thing follows another. It’s like we’re actually not like that. You build systems of habit. So here’s an example. If I go like this, that’s a ballistic movement. And I have to plan that movement from here to here before I execute it. Because the movement is so fast that I can’t get a neural message from my hand to my brain and back to stop it once it’s started. So the whole thing is deterministic. I plan it, let it go. It’s deterministic. But I know how to do this. It’s habit. I have a structure built in me that’s deterministic. And lots of things you do are like that. Habit. Anything you practice enough is habit. So you’re deterministic at the habit level. But you’re not deterministic at the level of consciousness. Because consciousness comes into play when you’re doing something that you haven’t done before. And so that’s interesting because what it means is the conscious you is dealing with the world that isn’t determined yet. And I would say it’s actually dealing with the world of possibility. The world of potential. And it’s a world we believe in. You say to people, you’re not living up to your potential. And you say that to yourself too. You know, when you wake up at night and you’re guilty. I’m not living up to my potential. And you don’t feel good about that. And you think, well there’s potential around you that you’re not exploiting. You know, and you feel bad about that too. And you should. And so it’s a good source of guilt and shame. Not enough to crush you maybe, but enough to wake you up. And it’s certainly not something you hope for for the people that you love. It’s okay. You’re wasting your potential. It doesn’t matter. It’s like no one says that. And so what we’re contending with potential. And we know that because we wake up in the morning and poof we’re awake like the sun has risen again. We’re awake and we confront the world. And what do we confront? We confront the possibilities, the potential and the horror of the day. Here’s the things we could do. Here’s the things that could go bad. Here’s how we could make things go better. And you know what that is. You know what that is. It’s usually, there’s three or four things that I need to do today that I’d rather avoid. But I better do them because if I don’t do them, the world will be a worse place by six o’clock tonight. Right? And that’s a funny thing because the world isn’t like that yet. It isn’t made like that yet. It won’t be made like that until you make it. And you might think, well here’s some things I could do that would be good that would actually make the world a better place by six o’clock tonight. Take some effort, you know, and the willingness and some aim. But you could do that. You could make it slightly better than it was and certainly slightly less worse than it could be. And you know that. It weighs on you, I would say, as soon as you wake up. It might be a moral burden or it might be excitement or it might be some combination of both. But that’s certainly how you view yourself. A conscious agent confronting what has not yet been brought into being. Confronting potential and determining the course that the world’s going to take. Maybe just in your small area, but who knows how big your area is and how much what you do echoes around you. You know, we have an idea in our culture that each of us is the center of the world. That’s why you’re there. You’re part of the sovereign state. That’s why you vote. That’s why the future of the state itself is dependent on your decision. Because we’ve decided over like a 10,000 year period that you’re king. You for whatever for whatever reasons, it’s on you, your conscious ability to be awake and to be articulate and to and to be clued in and to keep nature at bay and culture straight and your own malevolence under check and to combat the unknown and to transform it into something that’s good. That’s what you are. And you see this reflected in the oldest stories. That’s the dragon myth. You know, you go out into the terrible unknown beyond what we understand into the unknown itself and you confront the terrible thing that rests there. The terrible predatory eternal predatory monster. And you can do that because that’s what you’re like. You’re not cowering at home. You’re not frozen into submission. You’re out there active and you can take it on. And as a consequence, you can attain something of substantive value. Right. And then that’s you. That’s the transformation of you because now you’re braver because you’ve done it. But it’s also something now that you’ve garnered from the potential and you can bring that back and you can distribute that into the community. That’s the story of humanity. It’s the oldest story we have. And it’s correct. There’s this idea in Genesis. And I’ll end with this. So there’s this idea in Genesis that at the beginning of time there was potential. Tohu vabohu. There was potential. It was nothing like like the nothing that’s there when you wake up in the morning. That’s just the potential of the day. It’s all sorts of things that could be but nothing that is. And then there’s a structure that confronts it. Well, that’s you. There you are. The structure that confronts potential. And then there’s the personality that you use to confront it. So in Genesis, the personality is logos and it’s something like truthful courage and communicative ability. All amalgamated. It’s something like that. So it’s a it’s a it’s a lesson. It’s like, OK, there’s the potential. What are you supposed to do with it? Well, there you are ready to confront it. How do you confront it with truth and courage? And then you transform it into what exists. You take the potential and you transform it into being itself. That’s your job in Genesis. When God does this repeatedly, he says something repeatedly. He says after each day of doing this, and it was good. And it’s repeated. So it’s like it means something. It’s repeated. And what does it mean if you confront potential with truth and courage, then what you produce is good. Well, so that’s a good thing to know. If you want to produce what’s good, it’s like confront the potential with truth and courage. And what you produce is good. Great. So that’s a that’s a nice thing to know. It’s a fundamental ethical axiom, and it’s sort of predicated on faith. It’s not easy to be courageous and it’s not easy to tell the truth. But the theory is if you manage both of those in the face of potential, then what you do is you produce out of potential what is good. So that’s a theory worth investigating, perhaps for the rest of your life. And then there’s a corollary to this story. And the story is at the end of God’s creation, describing how order emerges from chaos or being from potential. There’s this strange line, which is probably the most important line that’s ever been written in our culture at the basis of our culture. And that is that men and women are made in the image of God. And what does that mean? Well, if God is that which confronts potential with truth and courage and makes what’s good out of potential, that seems to indicate that we have the same faculty. Like on a smaller scale, we’re not omniscient, but we’re not bloody well nothing. You know, our conscious is integrally tied into the structure of being in some manner we don’t understand. And it certainly is the case that we take what isn’t and turn it is into what is. That’s something, man. That’s that’s quite the trick we’ve been able to manage. And so we’re made in that image. And so what are we supposed to do? Well, that’s what we’re supposed to do. We’re supposed to type our letters and make our phrases and construct our sentences and build our paragraphs and put our chapters together and make our books and communicate to people and straighten out the damn culture and constrain the malevolence and ignorance that besets each of us and push nature back and extend it to the future. And extend ourselves out into the unknown and confront the potential that’s there in the illimitable quantities and make the world better than it could be otherwise to move it away from hell, which and it can certainly become that and toward heaven to the degree that we can manage that. And that is a good enough goal. That’s the thing. You need something, you know, because your life is tough. It’s hard. You need something that, you know, you need something to get out of bed for and fight for. And that’s something right to fight, let’s say, against hell and for heaven. That’s something to fight for. Especially. Especially. And you know, if you if you don’t, if you want to be convinced about this, like read a little bit about hell, read the Gullah archipelago or read ordinary men or read the rape of Nanking or read about what happened in Nazi Germany during Auschwitz and all the catastrophes of the 20th century and see if you believe in hell and see if you think, well, maybe not have. That happen anymore would be a good idea. And then think about maybe that’s something you could contribute to. And then it wouldn’t have to happen anymore. And that would be a good thing. And God only knows what great things we could manage under such conditions. We’re becoming incredibly technologically powerful. And what would it be if we became? What would it be like if we became equally wise? Well, that would really be something God only knows what we could manage in the next 20 years or the next hundred years. You know, we’re running at 40 percent. Most of us, you know, because we’re half in and half out. And it’s not surprising because life is difficult. It’s like, well, what if you were 90 percent in or 95 percent in or or all in because you’re all in anyways. Right. It’s a it’s a life and death game. No one gets out of this. Everyone dies. You might as well commit yourself and you might as well commit yourself to the highest good that you can attain. Because why not? It’ll imbue your life with meaning. It’s hard. The responsibility is there. But all the meanings in the responsibility. And that’ll make your life better. It’ll make your family’s life better. And it should make your culture better. Maybe it make the world better. It’s like that’ll justify your damn miserable existence at three o’clock in the morning when you’re wondering what the hell you’re doing here. And that’s a good thing because there’s going to be days when you’re aching and tired and sore. And there’s people in your family that are sick and you’re cynical and bitter. And you need a reason to get up and you think, yeah, well, a little more heaven and a little less hell. Maybe I can pull that off today and tomorrow and next week. And that’s worth struggling forward for. And so that’s how it looks to me. So thank you very much. How much better does it get than this, my friend? Yeah, well, it’s pretty nice to be here, that’s for sure. I can see everybody around here, even these people who keep looking at me from behind. All right. I know we want to do as many as possible tonight. So here we go. I thought this was a good first one. Will you please, please, please run for prime minister of Australia? Well, that’s a very inviting offer and somewhat embarrassing, I would say. Not because there’s anything wrong with your country, by the way. I’m pretty happy doing what I’m doing at the moment. And so I’m talking to politicians in Canada and the U.S. and in other countries and doing what I can in some small way to moderate the excess degree of polarization that seems to be characterizing our discourse at the moment. And right now that seems to be a good position to be in. And this is good. Like, I can’t see at the moment doing anything with my life that is more useful and effective than this. And so I’m going to try to do the things that I think are most useful and effective. And this is it at the moment. So for now, I’m writing another book as well, and it’s coming along quite well. It should be out next January, with any luck. And so I’m trying to keep that going. But at the moment, this is… But I appreciate the sentiment, by the way. What are the most important things we should be teaching young children in schools? Well, to play fair, that’s the most important thing that you can teach children. Because the fundamental ethic, like the ground of ethics, is fair play. And children practice that while they’re playing. And so a lot of what should be happening in schools is play by children, a fair bit of it spontaneous, especially when they’re very young, but regulated by adults so that it remains fair, right, that it remains reciprocal. And you can tell that because children will continue to play a game if they believe the game is fair. When the game stops being fair, then it breaks down into squabbling and crying, which is what our games are breaking down into right now. And so then you need a mediator who comes in and adjudicates, says, well, you know, how about if you try it this way? Maybe we need to adjust the rule. Let’s see if we can get the game going again. It’s very important for kids to learn how to play fair. And I’m afraid that a fair bit of our electronic technology is taking them away from the kinds of social interactions that they need to learn one on one to know how to play fair. I might be wrong about that because I don’t know what effect video games have. And the evidence that they’re bad isn’t strong, you know, and they’re new. So we really don’t know. So that might be good enough. But that and well, it’d be good to teach kids to read. We seem to be continually confused about whether or not that’s a good idea. But we actually do know how to teach kids to read. You can use phonics programs. And I believe computers could speed that along substantially. Be good to teach them to read. It’s good to teach them to write. It’s good to encourage them. You know, that’s another thing. And it’s a good thing if you it’s a good thing to know this just generally. Here’s a real powerful technique that you might want to think about. And because this is this is worth knowing. You know, often when you have a family member or someone that you’re interacting with and they make a mistake, then you call them out on their mistake. And it’s pretty obvious when they make a mistake, because you’re going along on a pathway together and then there’s a divergence from the pathway. And you notice that that’s negative emotion. And you say, you know, what the hell? What’s going on? What you don’t notice is all the time you’re spending walking forward when it’s going real well. And the reason for that is what’s going real well. So you mostly ignore it. But that’s not so good. You got to wise up. The behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner is very smart person. He noticed when he was training animals that the best way to train an animal was to wait until the animal did something you wanted it to do and then reward it. Now, you had to watch. But and you had to know what you wanted the animal to do. That’s the other thing. So you had to be smarter than the animal. So like if you’re dealing with people in your own life or yourself, for that matter, and you notice that the person that you’re with or are has done something that you would like to see repeated many, perhaps many times, you might want to point it out. Say, look, you know, I just saw you do this thing and I’m really happy about that. You did it. You did a great job. I’m really happy about that. Little more. That would be wonderful. And just leave it be. And people are very thrilled about that because they’re and this is especially true of kids is there they are looking for positive attention. They’re looking for attention. Period. That’s their currency. They’ll take negative attention if they can’t get positive attention. They really want positive attention. And what they really want is for someone to watch them and notice when they do something that makes them a good person and then have that pointed out. It’s like good work, kid. Way to be. I saw what you did. Here’s what it was. Good job. I’m sure you could do a bunch more of that. Then they’re just like they’re just thrilled that that that their action, their small child action was important enough to draw your focused attention towards the animal. And makes them glow. And the probability that that will help them continue to act in those ways is extremely, extremely powerful. So, you know, if you’re trying to get along with some kid adolescent, maybe because they’re kind of hard to get along with often, you know, watch them. And if they do something that’s it doesn’t even have to be good. It just has to be better than what they’re usually doing. You know, which which is not a bad approximation of good. You know, it’s like, look, I noticed that you. You know, you were you were more pleasant tonight at the dinner table or that maybe that’s not quite the way of phrasing it. It can be because it’s sort of an insult to the way they are before. You might say, well, because you have to be careful, right? When you when you say these things and not put a barb in it because you’re kind of irritated. You might say. It was it was it was it was enjoyable having dinner with you tonight. You know, and they’ll kind of clue you in. You know, and they’ll kind of clue into why that might be. And they’ll think, oh, well, you know, hey, it turns out to matter if I do something that’s positive. And so that’s that’s that’s a that’s a piece of information about keeping your eyes open. So well, so what do we do with kids? Let them play, make them play fair. That’s really important. Teach them to read. That’d be good. Teach them to write. That’d be good. Teach them to stand up and speak for themselves. That would be good. You can teach a child to stand up. Pretty convincingly and say something intelligent in about 15 minutes if you do it carefully. And it almost never happens in school. It’s really it’s really quite appalling. So that’s another thing you can do for your kids is get them to stand up and say something. And, you know, not not like this. We’re talking to the floor and barely able to hear, you know, so that people have to strain and and strive to hear them. But to stand up and to say something. And you can tell them, well, stand up a little more, you know, put your shoulders back a little more, a little more volume so I can hear you. It can be a little game. God, they learn that so fast you can hardly believe it. And I don’t know why they’re not taught that. I think I think because people are afraid of competence. And so they’re afraid to teach kids to be competent. And so we don’t. And and and they kind of have to learn it on their own. And that’s unfortunate, let’s say. All right. Equally as important. Who would win in an MMA match? You or Sam Harris? Sam would win objectively, but I would win metaphysically. Well played. That sounded like a setup, but thank you. Thank you. Set that up. What tips would you give a highly emotional person to become more rational and level headed? Oh, well, it depends. There’s a variety of the first thing I would do if you’re highly emotional, like highly emotional, volatile, fly off the handle. A lot of mood variation, a lot of negative emotion. The first thing you might want to think about is whether or not there’s actually something wrong with you. Like physically, you might be ill because illness can do that to people. And so you should go get yourself checked out. You know, you might have an inflammatory condition or something like that. And the next thing I would check out is like, are you sure you’re not hungry? I’m dead serious about this. I mean, with many of my clients who have been anxious, like a lot of them, they come in and say, I’m so anxious. I’m so anxious. I had this one client. She’d come in and she’d say, God, you know, I’m just I’m so dead at the end of the day. I’m just wiped out. I’ve got no energy at all. All I can do is lay down. She was like 24. All I can do is lay down and watch like the same movie I watched the night before. Is that normal? I was like, well, no, it’s not. So and I knew this. I said, well, what do you eat? And she said, well, I usually don’t have any breakfast. And then I have like a little bowl of rice for lunch. And I usually have something like that for for dinner. And I thought. You live on two balls of rice a day. And you’re wondering why when you come home at night after full day’s work, you don’t have any energy. I said, well, have you considered the possibility that you’re starving to death? So, you know, we talked about this and you can’t you can’t live like that. That that’s not going to work. How about let’s try this for a week. You do this with therapy and you do experiments if you’re a behavioral therapist. It’s like you got to come to an agreement with the person. It’s like, look, is there some other things you’d eat other than rice? You know, like four other things. It’s like we agreed. Maybe she’d eat an egg or something. It’s like or I think it was eggs. And I think it was eggs. There was a few other things I said, OK, look, here’s what you do. Get up in the morning and like have two eggs. You don’t have to enjoy them. You know, because people say, well, I’m not hungry. It’s like, what? Why is that relevant? That’s not the issue here. It isn’t like gourmet time. It’s not starving to death time. So eat your two eggs and maybe in three months you’ll be able to eat two eggs. It’s like, oh, I have lots of energy now. It’s like, oh, good. You’re not dying of starvation. It’s like and I’m telling you, like if you’re a volatile person, if you’re a volatile person, try this. You know, you’re not dying of starvation. You’re not dying of starvation. You’re not dying of starvation. You’re not dying of starvation. You’re not dying of starvation. You’re not dying of starvation. You’re not dying of starvation. You’re not dying of starvation. So if you’re a volatile person, try this. Eat a high protein, high fat meal in the morning. No sugar. And a big one. Like have a steak. Have something solid. And it doesn’t matter if you like it. Who cares? Cook it the night before if you don’t want to cook it then. Just try it for a week and see what happens. My suspicions, I’ve had half my clients, I would say, have dropped their volatility levels 50% by eating a high fat, high protein meal. High fat, high protein breakfast. And then also notice that if you are crabby, you know, and volatile and touchy and you can’t get along with anyone, go eat something. Like have two teaspoons of peanut butter. And wait ten minutes. And see if you’re still a witch. So for some people, and if you are a volatile person, like your blood sugar levels tend to move up and down more. Because you stress yourself out more. For some people that really matters. And so, look, try it for a week. It’s nothing, right? And you might think, oh, God, what you’ll find if it works is, A, you don’t get nearly as upset about the things that used to upset you. So, and that’ll be a shock. You’ll think, my God, I would have flown off the handle because of that before. And now it’s hardly bothering me. So that’s a lovely thing. And then the second thing is, if something bothers you, you’ll recover way faster. And so that’s a good start. And so try that. That’s no harm. It’s not going to hurt you. Try getting up at the same time every day. That’s really important. If your sleep-wake cycle is not regular and you’re a volatile person, say biochemically, genetically, having a sleep-wake cycle that’s dysregulated is going to be very hard on you. So it doesn’t matter quite as much when you go to bed, although it would be good to regularize that too. But at least pick a time. Do it every time you want. Like, I would recommend like 8 o’clock or 7.30 because that’s what normal people do. And unless you have a really good reason not to be a normal person, you should start by trying to be a normal person if you’re being an abnormal person. So try to get up at the same time and try that. You can combine that with eating and see. Like, my suspicions are 50% improvement virtually immediately with that. And if that doesn’t work, well, then there are more serious things that you can consider being checked out by an MD and making sure you’re OK. You might want to go talk to a therapist. You might want to consider something like an SSRI, an antidepressant, because maybe you have a biological condition, a biochemical condition that’s wreaking havoc with your mood. And like SSRIs, serotonin reuptake inhibitors, don’t work for everyone. My experience has been that they don’t really work that well for people who have cataclysmically horrible lives. And that’s not the same as being depressed, right? Depressed is when actually your life’s not too bad by normative standards, but you’re still volatile as hell and your mood’s out of kilter. SSRIs sometimes can help amazingly with that. And usually you’d know within a month. So try them for a month. If they don’t work, stop. If they do work, well thank your lucky stars, because how bloody much misery do you want? And like having dysregulated negative emotion is no picnic, man, and it’s really hard on the people around you as well. So those are the that and, you know, I have this program online I mentioned. The other thing you could try is go online. I have this program called Future Authoring. You could do the past authoring program and bring yourself up to date, but Future Authoring is a program that helps you make a plan for your life. You know, and what do you want from your friends, your family, your career, your education? How are you going to take care of yourself mentally and physically? Where would you like to be in three to five years? How are you going to regulate temptation, drug and alcohol use, and that sort of thing, you know? Keep yourself out of trouble. And how are you going to stop yourself from deteriorating to where you could deteriorate if you weren’t careful? You can do a credible job of the program in an hour and a half. You know, it’s proved very useful for people. Maybe you’re kind of aimless and you need a plan. That’s another possibility. So but don’t live with it. You know, there’s lots of things you can try. Sleep. That might be number one. Food. That’s number two. Number three. Talk to someone, a professional, if it’s really out of hand because what do you want to do? You want to suffer terribly for the next 10 years? And plus, if you do have a lot of excess negative emotion, it’s really hard on you psychophysiologically because you produce a lot of stress hormones and that makes you old. So it’s dangerous physically as well. So and it’s hard on your brain. So if you can get it fixed, fix it. And if it has to be medication, then look, man, everybody’s you’re going to be taking medication at some point in your damn life, you know, because you’re going to get sick. And my observation of people has been that a everybody gets sick. And then what happens? Well, this is eliminating random luck. Some people get sick and then they do everything they can to not be sick, including taking medication, doing whatever they have to. And some of them get better and others just they don’t deal with it. And usually they don’t get better. So you swallow your pride and you think, oh, yeah, I should be able to handle my problems myself. It’s like, yeah, well, maybe you should. But maybe, you know, if you’re really depressed and you don’t take an SSRI, then one day you jump off a building and that’s pretty much the end of you helping yourself. And so, you know, you can take the drug. Hopefully it’ll help you out. You can get your life back in order if you’re fortunate. Then you can go off it. You can taper off it. They’re relatively harmless. Weight gain is a problem. Some suppression of sexual function. That’s a problem. You know, so they’re not without risk, but neither is anything else. So those are relatively straightforward things that you can do that have a high probability of working. This ain’t much of a segue, but when did you become a middle-aged male fashion icon? I love questions like this because it’s like they got the smartest guy around. Well, it’s fun. It’s one of the things that’s been fun about this tour is that a lot of people dress up for it. I’ve seen more people in three-piece suits than you can imagine in the last year. And that’s really fun. You see all these young guys. They’re coming to these and not just young guys coming to these shows and they’re all dressed up in three-piece suits. And they’re all dressed up in three-piece suits. And they’re all dressed up in three-piece suits. It’s like they look like adults. It’s kind of interesting because that’s gone out of fashion. So anyways, when I had been buying some reasonably high quality clothing, I suppose, when I was working as a professor lecturing because I like to dress professionally. You know, I thought it was a good idea, especially when I was much younger because it also helped put a bit of a discipline into it. I thought, well, I might as well up my game because hypothetically, I’m going to be talking to, you know, who God only knows how many people and I might as well. I’m in it all the way, man. And so I thought I might as well buy some of these high quality clothing and dress professionally. And I thought, well, I might as well do that. And I thought, well, I might as well do that. And I thought, well, I might as well do that. And I thought, well, I might as well do that. And I thought, well, I might as well do that. And I spent all the way, man. And so I thought I might as well buy some decent clothes and see what happened. And it was a really good idea, as it turned out. I spent more money than I thought any reasonable human being should ever spend on clothing. You know, it really made me cheap northern Albertan that I was, you know, used to rip jeans and like check shirts. I felt very guilty about doing it. But it was a really good idea. And so. So. All right, one more. I want it to be a good one here. Would you ever smoke a blunt with Ruben or Rogan? I might. But I’m not going to tell you people about it. All right, I guess we’re having a good time tonight. On that note, this is actually I’m actually going back to the States and you’re continuing the tour. So this is our last show out of one hundred and thirty shows until we start up again in September. And I’ve said it privately to you many times, but this has been the professional and in many ways personal journey of my life. I can’t thank you enough for being part of this. And it’s weird to do it in front of all these people. Yes. Well, thank you. It’s been you’ve been you’ve been a great help. It’s been lighthearted. I’ve enjoyed the introductions. It’s nice to face an audience that’s warmed up. I’ve enjoyed the Q&A’s. We’ve traveled all over. It’s gone extremely smoothly. It’s been a hell of a good thing altogether. So thank you as well. On that note, I’m getting out of here, guys. Make some noise for Dr. Jordan Peterson. Thank you guys very much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.