https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=EFWrLx8b2mQ
Hi everyone, welcome to the September version of my Q&A’s and thank you very much for tuning in again. Hopefully we’ll have an interesting discussion tonight. I want to start, that is, with a demonstration of some newly managed technical wizardry. I have a program that I developed with my colleagues that I want to talk to you guys about for just a few seconds. Some of you already know about this called Self Authoring. Self Authoring helps people write about their past. It’s a guided autobiography. That’s the past authoring program. And to write about their virtues and their faults, there’s two present authoring programs. And a future authoring program that helps people write out a vision and a destination, let’s say an ethical destination for their lives, as well as formulate a plan to put that vision into, to make that vision into reality. And our experimental investigations have indicated, for example, that university students who complete this program, even if they do it badly, and I would recommend at least doing it badly, increase their probability of staying at university by about 30 percent. And it has a positive effect on their grade point average as well. So there’s a fair bit of evidence that your personality is organized at the highest level through articulated speech. Some of that you can formulate internally by thinking, and some of it you can do by writing. You also do that in discussion with other people. These programs are designed to break down the problem of articulating your life in the past, present and future into a series of steps that are, at least in principle, manageable. And thousands of people have done them, and I think they’re very helpful programs. We spent a lot of time perfecting them, I suppose, to the degree that they are perfected. Anyways, I want to… here’s the high-tech part of this. You see, that’s the website, selfauthoring.com, and I put a coupon together. The coupon name is September, so that’s what you have to enter for the coupon, and that gives you a 20 percent discount at self-authoring. So and now, this is even more high-tech because this marker is in a different color, and this program is a personality test based on the Big Five Aspects Scale, which is a scale that Colin DeYoung, one of my students, developed when he worked in my lab, along with Lena Quilty. The Big Five Aspects Scale offers you a five-dimensional readout of your personality, extraversion, neuroticism, agreeableness, conscientiousness and openness, the classic Big Five, and then it breaks each of the factors, each of the traits, into two aspects, so you get a high-resolution map of your personality. The test takes about… It’s a hundred questions, it takes about 15 minutes to do, and you’ll learn about yourself. I think you’ll learn interesting things. I had my kids do repeated iterations of the Big Five Aspects Scale when they were teenagers, and I learned a lot about them, even though I thought I knew them quite well. I learned things that were very useful. So you can do that, and maybe you’ll understand yourself a little bit better. And so this is the site, and the coupon is September, just as it was for self-authoring, and that’s 20% as well. And you’ll see that, amazingly enough, this advertisement, I suppose, which is what it is, is in purple instead of blue. And so that’s another technological miracle brought to you by the internet and the intelligence of modern human beings. So, alright, so we’ve dispensed with that. So that’s self-authoring and understand myself, and you might find those useful, and I hope you do. So, on to more… Well, on to different things, I guess. I just got back to Toronto yesterday. I think it was yesterday. I was out in Western Canada. I went to a family reunion on Vancouver Island, and then a reunion of sorts as well in Saskatchewan with my side of the family, and finished a talk in Regina, and one in Saskatoon as well, which seemed to be relatively well received. So hooray for that. I’ve really enjoyed all these lectures that I’ve been giving. Tammy and I… Tammy’s my wife. We’ve visited 65 cities now on this tour, and we’re starting again on September 5th. We’re going to go down the Eastern seaboard. There’s 20 cities in the Northeastern US, and then we’re off to Europe for another 15 cities or so. And then in February, I think we’re going to go to Australia, and then in March and April back to Europe. And then in May, I’m going to spend four months diligently finishing up what I hope to be my next book, assuming that I can get that done in that period of time, and also that other opportunities, let’s say, or distractions don’t rear their head either positively or negatively. And who knows, right? Because life is a very uncertain business. I’ve really enjoyed the lecture tour a lot. You know, I’ve been speaking to audiences of about 2,500 to 3,000 people, and mostly about the… I would say mostly about the nexus, the relationship between meaning and responsibility, trying to make the case that because life is difficult, as everyone with any sense knows, and because we can make that worse with our own stupidity and malevolence, that it’s necessary to find a sustaining meaning in life. And my sense is, and I think people tend to agree to this, is that the most sustaining meaning can be found, A, in the adoption of voluntary responsibility, so in attempts to decrease the suffering in life, and to do things that are worthwhile and admirable, and to take care of yourself individually and your family, and to have a little bit left over for your community, and to have goodwill across all those dimensions if you can possibly manage it, despite the fact that there’s something in life to make people relatively bitter. And then, as well, the necessity of conducting yourself in a truthful manner. Making also the case to my listeners, I suppose, that one of the most ancient presuppositions that underlies the structure of Western civilization, which is a very functional civilization in my estimation, is the idea derived from Genesis that truthful speech, if you confront truthful speech, if you confront potential, the chaos and potential that is in front of you with truthful speech, that you engender the order that is good. And that’s a fundamental ethical dictum. It’s a presupposition in some sense that the order that you bring into existence in all the choices that you make will be the best possible order in proportion to the degree that you conduct yourself in a truthful manner. And so those ideas seem to be falling on very receptive ears. They are the most resilient ideas that I think I’ve ever come across. I mean, I always take an ice pick and a hammer to any idea that I encounter, and I really do that diligently because I don’t want to rely on ideas that can fall apart and break, especially when they’re stressed. I don’t see, I haven’t come across ideas that are more solid than that. I mean, the first proposition, you know, that life is suffering and that we make it worse with our malevolence. I think everyone understands that to be true. But the second is that the best way to confront that is to shoulder responsibility voluntarily and to live in truth. I think those are even more powerful ideas because you could say that the cure for a malaise or the treatment for a disease is more powerful than the malaise or the disease itself. If responsibility and truth are antidotes to suffering and malevolence, then that means that they have a power that’s transcendent over suffering and malevolence. And so it’s a very pessimistic viewpoint on the one hand because I’m stressing for everybody that is coming to listen to me talk the fact that life has an inalienable element of difficulty and travail and suffering and all of that. You certainly see that sort of thing when you go to a family reunion. You know, like a lot of my relatives, my parents’ generation, they’re getting old. My parents are in their 80s now and they’re friends. Some of them, they have friends that are older and everyone’s starting to suffer from the inevitable deterioration that’s associated with old age. And it’s very, very trying and very difficult for people. And it’s in those situations that you see more clearly the fragility of life and also the importance of having a family that’s functional and people around you that love you and all those things that in principle can help sustain you through difficult times. So anyways, I’m here in Toronto for about 10 days. Got a lot of media interviews again, partly to discuss the upcoming talks. My book, 12 Rules for Life, still appears to be selling extraordinarily well. It’s quite amazing, all things considered. It’s approaching 2 million sales in the English version and there are foreign versions coming out all the time. And I’m also in the process of putting together the final arrangements for my next book, which I talked about. So the plan is to… I’m writing that now. I’ve got it about half written, maybe a little bit more, expanding on the themes that I developed in 12 Rules for Life and also extending them as much as I possibly can. And I hope to continue writing during this period of touring as well so that I can stay on top of my deadlines and then from May to September to spend most of that time finalizing and editing and polishing and all of that. And then hopefully the book is due in September and the current plan is to spend September through December likely concentrating on a return to the biblical lectures, starting with Exodus, which is something I’m really looking forward to but haven’t really been able to turn my hand to. The other thing I’m really thinking hard about doing, I’d like to do a series of lectures and I don’t know if I could do them publicly or not, but I might be able to finagle that in some manner. I’d like to do a series of lectures on the sacred icons of the radical left. So I’d like to do a lecture series on Marx and Foucault and Derrida and then some of the famous feminists too like Betty Friedan, whose work I’m not a fan of for a variety of reasons, and Judith Butler as well. But I’d really like to concentrate on Marx. So one of the things I might do for you guys tonight, or to you, one of the things I might do to you tonight is I found a poem by Karl Marx that is extraordinarily interesting and that might be worth reading if I can. I just thought about doing that if I can scrape it up in time. So let me just check very quickly and see if I can find it and then I’ll get to some questions because after all this is a Q&A, right? That’s the theory. So give me 30 seconds if you can indulge me. There it is. Yeah, so let me read this to you and then we’ll get to the Q&A. I think this is the kind of thing that I’d like to shed light on in any possible lecture series on Marx. So this is called Invocation. Invocation of one in despair. So a God has snatched from me my all. In the curse and rack of destiny, all his worlds are gone beyond recall. Nothing but revenge is left to me. On myself, revenge all proudly wreak. On that being, that enthroned Lord, make my strength a patchwork of what’s weak. Leave my better self without reward. I shall build my throne high overhead, cold, tremendous shall its summit be. For its bulwark, superstitious dread, for its marshal, blackest agony. Who looks on it with a healthy eye, shall turn back, struck, deathly pale and dumb, clutched by blind and chill mortality. May his happiness prepare his tomb. And the Almighty’s lightning shall rebound from that massive iron giant. If he bring my walls and towers down, eternity shall raise them up defiant. Well, so on that happy note, that’s perhaps some insight into the spirit that motivated our friend Mr. Karl Marx. So I’ve really been thinking a lot about the Marxist critique of Western culture, especially The fundamental Marxist critique is something, a fundamental Marxist critique is a criticism of the fact that in capitalist societies, a disproportionate amount of the spoils, let’s say, the wealth, goes to a disproportionately small part of the community. And this is of course a truism, by the way, it is the case that that occurs, which is why the richest dozen people in the world have as much money as the bottom two billion, something like that. It’s also the case, it’s part of a more generalized law, sometimes called Price’s Law, and represented with the Pareto distribution, Pareto is P-A-R-E-T-O, showing that not only do the bulk of the spoils, let’s say the wealth, go to a disproportionately small number of people, but the bulk of the productive work is also done by a disproportionately small number of people. Not necessarily the same people that have the wealth, by the way, although in a functional society there’s some overlap. Now Marx was correct in observing that that happened in capitalist societies, but incorrect in assuming that there are any societies that have ever been formulated, or that could ever be formulated, that would escape from that destiny. Because you see that same tremendous Pareto distribution, that proclivity of wealth to crew in the hands of a small number of people, you see that in every human society that’s ever been studied, and if it’s not wealth, it’s sexual access or reproductive, well that’s the same thing, reproductive opportunity, let’s say, or material possessions, which is obviously a form of wealth, etc. So one of the things that characterizes the West is that although our societies produce inequality, like every other society, including animal societies, by the way, and even among plants, even among stars, a disproportionate number of the heavenly bodies have most of the mass, by the way, which is not something that you can lay at the feet of Western capitalism. The thing that the West has been able to do, that other societies haven’t been able to do, is to produce wealth along with inequality, and that wealth is definitely, a fair proportion of that wealth, is actually going to benefit the people who are in the direst straits, and that process has been accelerating over the last 20 years. So from the year 2000 to the year 2012, the level of absolute poverty in the world has halved, which is the fastest rate of economic development in the history of the world, and I think that rate is accelerating, at least in part because the Soviet Union, for example, anymore to agitate the economic masters and leaders of developing countries into the adoption of counterproductive, collectivist economic strategies. And so what appears to be happening is that as we spread the fundamental Western ethos of individuality and private property and free markets and freedom in general, for men and for women around the world, that the poorest people are becoming, well at least they’re not starving, they’re becoming richer, even though at the same time we do pay a price for that, in inequality. So there’s a rule, and I don’t know how to formulate it exactly, or there seems to be a rule which is a given unit of wealth is produced at the cost of certain production of inequality, a certain number of units of inequality, and that seems to be inalienable to some degree. So anyways, that’s part of a Marxist critique, the poem first, which is like, you want to listen to that poem a couple of times, I would say, but then more fundamentally, a critique of the Marxist critique of the West. Yes, the West produces inequality, but it’s not something that you can lay at the feet of capitalism, it’s a much, much deeper problem. And what that means too is that those people who purport to be on the side of the poor and dispossessed are not being friends to them by any stretch of the imagination at all by attempting to tear down the very hierarchies that seem to be leveraging the world’s poorest people out of poverty as rapidly as possible. There’s evidence as well that people start to become very concerned about the environment if you can get their family income, or GDP, I think, above about 4500 US a year, they start to have a little bit of spare time to be concerned with the environment around them. And so the right way to ecological balance in the world seems to be to make people rich as fast as we possibly can, to make the poor rich as fast as we possibly can. And wouldn’t that be lovely if that was really the way out? So anyways, enough of that. So let’s try some questions here. So any advice on effectively implementing what I learn into my life? I resonate with 12 rules so much when reading, but struggle to remember it in my day to day life. Well you’re not alone, that was Sam. You’re not alone in that Sam. I mean first of all you’ve got to figure out what your time frame is. One of the truisms of clinical psychology is that slow and incremental improvement is first of all normative in the best possible way, in the most optimistic situation, but also very powerful. And so of course you struggle to remember it in your day to day life, because life is difficult, and it’s harder to do things than not to do them, and it’s harder to do them well than to do them badly. You know, and it’s easy to sit around and be hopeless. I don’t mean it’s emotionally easy because it’s not, but it’s procedurally easy to be useless and to fall back into your old habits and to not discipline yourself. It’s a matter of continual practice, slow continual practice. And I think a good example of that is something like weightlifting. You know if you start a weightlifting program, which I would recommend by the way because it’s tremendously advantageous physically and cognitively, you’re not going to really see results for a number of weeks and then the results are rather slow, but you can get pretty decent results over a six month period, and absolutely stellar results over a couple of years. And so you have to make sure your time frame is right and not to be too hard on yourself. And I did mention the future authoring program earlier, and one of the things I would recommend too is if you’re having a hard time implementing your decisions, say your ethical decisions, that you spend a bit more time thinking them through and writing them down. And the future authoring program is really helpful for that. That’s why we designed it. And so get your goals straight and continue to practice every day. And if you’re not succeeding, then make your goals slightly smaller. You want to make your goals large enough so that they challenge you, but small enough so that you have a reasonable probability of succeeding at them on a day to day basis. And then you have to also understand that if you fail on a given day, like let’s say you’re trying to quit smoking and you quit for two weeks, and then you have a cigarette and you think, oh my god, now I’ve screwed it up, I’m not quitting anymore. You smoke a whole pack of cigarettes. It’s like, well, there’s a couple of mistakes there. And one is, well, just because you had a cigarette doesn’t mean you failed. It just means that you had a cigarette. You can start stopping again the next day. And the fact that you had one cigarette in the last two weeks is a hell of a lot better than the two weeks that you had before that. And so you’ve got to be realistically humble. You’ve got to be ambitious enough in your goals so that you’re pursuing something that you regard as truly meaningful and worthwhile. You know, and maybe you can judge that to some degree if you think about someone you love attempting the same thing and think about how you would feel if they managed it. And if you would feel good, then that’s probably a good, what would you say, that would be a good evaluation strategy to use on yourself. So you want your goals to be of sufficient nobility so that you can live with yourself properly if you’re pursuing them, but you want them to be small enough so that you have a reasonable probability of implementing them. And if your implementation… Okay, it’s good. It’s back. You can start again. Maybe. We’re back. Yeah. Okay, guys. Well, that was interesting. The software that I use on my camera crashed and then when I reopened it, it told me I hadn’t purchased it and wanted me to re-enter the serial number, which is quite the interesting experience. So I’m just getting my questions back up. This three-quarter person that you see here is Julian, who’s reasonably helpful about these sorts of things now and then. I’ve almost actually learned how to do this. I tell you, you do get slower technologically as you get older. It’s kind of annoying. Or maybe you get just fed up with it more. It’s hard to tell. I think you’re probably stupider and less patient. And so then you justify your stupidity by just assuming that you’re less patient. So okay, anyways, we’re back. Thanks Julian. You’re welcome. Okay. So, Paul Maloney says, you mentioned analyzing one of your wife’s dreams that left you feeling hopeful that will emerge from this chaos. Okay. Do you still feel this way? Any new signs? Well, who knows, right? Because the future’s complicated and no one’s a prophet. I don’t know what to think. I think this, I guess. I already mentioned earlier in this Q&A that on a global level, there is all sorts of reasons for real optimism as far as I’m concerned. There’s reasons for pessimism as well. But there’s reasons for real optimism. And it looks to me like what’s happening is that the spread of the Western free market individualist ethos around the world is producing a substantive increment in wealth, a substantive decrease in poverty. And the consequence of that decrease in poverty is also in places like China, which by the way, China is reforesting. So that’s pretty interesting. China is now rich enough so that it can afford to reforest. So there’s more forest in China than there was in 1990, which is quite a remarkable thing. Anyways, my point is that on the global scale, things appear to be very positive. But then in the West, we seem to be suffering from a crisis of confidence. And that’s destabilizing us and making us act foolishly. And I don’t know how much of a threat that is to the integrity of our political system. And I’m so much in the middle of this, let’s say, personally, that it’s hard for me to have a clear head about it. Now I’m very optimistic about a variety of things that I see. I’m very optimistic, for example, about the fact that so many people are coming out to these long-form lectures and paying attention to high complexity educational and political material on YouTube. There’s a real hunger for that. And as I said before, the lecture tour that I’m on has been extremely positive. It’s really something to see all these thousands of people come out to concentrate on getting their lives together. And I do believe that that’s why people are coming out. And then, you know, I think I don’t remember if I did a Q&A since I did the discussions with Sam Harris. I did four discussions with him, four debates, let’s say, each of which was about two hours long, two in Vancouver, one in Dublin, and one in London, UK. And there were about 3,000 people at each of the Vancouver events, 8,500 people in Dublin, and something approximating 6,500 in London. And the audience was very attentive for the two-hour stretch for all four discussions. And so I do see the… I see more intelligence in the general population, say, than I think we presumed was there. And more hunger for serious discussion. And I’m hoping that people who are clear-headed and sensible can push back the idiot collectivist radicals on the left and on the right. We’ll see. So yeah, I’m hopeful, because I think that people are remarkable creatures despite their limitations and the absurdity of our existence and our proclivity toward malevolence. I think that we can… Whatever constitutes our essence is capable of transcending that. And I think that people know that. And I think the more people that realize that consciously and start to implement it, the better off we’ll be. And so nested inside my extreme pessimism about the structure of life and the frailty of human character is an exceptional optimism about our potential. So we’ll see. But I would also say to all of you that are listening, you know, it is my firm belief that each of us have a responsibility to set the world right in the manner that we are able to. And that that is a fundamental… That’s a fundamental import. I really believe in some sense it’s of cosmic import. In the same way that consciousness itself is of cosmic import. Consciousness reflects being itself. And I do believe that we have the ability and the responsibility to bring new creation into being and that our ethical decisions help us… That our ethical decisions, that the value of that new being is dependent directly on the ethical decisions that each of us make. And I think we can realize that, even though it’s a frightening thing to realize. Marcus Perry asks, Well, God, another incredibly complicated question. You know, whenever I think about censorship… I actually talked to Mark Zuckerberg a while back and we had a good conversation. And Zuckerberg, who I think is a very straightforward person, as far as I could tell, is optimistic about Facebook and does see it as a platform whose primary goal is to connect people. And mostly at the personal level, although Facebook has made forays into news provision and that’s complicated their corporate vision. Now, I’m not a pro-censorship character. I do not like hate speech legislation and I am absolutely opposed to compelled speech legislation of the sort that’s been introduced into Canada. I think it’s a violation of the principle of free speech and free thought and I think it’s exceptionally dangerous. But having said that, you know, nothing is ever simple and that’s part of the reason that things are so annoying politically. So you know, one of the things that Apple and Facebook and so forth, those large social media platforms, had to contend with, say, was the attempts by organizations like ISIS to use their platforms for recruitment. Now let’s say that I’m a free speech absolutist, which isn’t exactly true because I realize that there are the constraints that have evolved in some sense naturally in the English common law system on free speech and that they’re necessary. You can’t libel someone, you can’t outright lie about someone, you can’t slander them, you can’t counsel them to criminal conduct, etc. There are restrictions on free speech. Well, but I think those restrictions should be minimal. Well let’s say that one of the restrictions you assume should be placed on free speech is that those that you are at war with are not allowed to use your platform to recruit, which doesn’t seem to be an unreasonable proposition and is perhaps even the sort of thing that a conservative or a libertarian, much less a liberal or a left-winger, might get behind. Well then that means that you’ve defined already a framework in which is that censorship, or maybe I’m not thinking this through clearly, but is that censorship? It’s certainly self-protection. Well then having established the principle that a certain amount of monitoring of the use of your platform is necessary, where do you stop? And the answer is it’s complicated. I think that what Facebook, etc. did with Alex Jones was a big mistake. I think that was because, well, it wasn’t just Alex Jones that was punished, let’s say, it was all the people that were watching him, and not everybody that was watching him was an avid follower of him. Some people were just watching him to see what the hell he was doing and what he was up to, and that’s necessary, but you don’t just censor the one person, you censor everybody that’s paying attention to him, and then you make him a martyr and you persecute someone who’s paranoid, which all that does is validate his conspiracy theories, his conspiratorial theories and the conspiratorial theories of his followers. I guess one of the things I’ve really been wondering is if the wild and wooly reality of Facebook and YouTube and Twitter are actually sustainable in a corporate environment, or if the radical freedom that was associated with those technologies was only something that was possible when in some sense all of that material provision, all the provision of that material was outside the standard legal framework because it was too new to regulate. You know, I can’t tell. I don’t know if corporations can manage something like YouTube or Twitter or Facebook for that matter because their internal conservatism, and I mean that in the temperamental sense, their unwillingness to take risk is what I mean in that particular case, is liable to make it impossible for them to be neutral purveyors of information, some of which is going to be extremely radical. So I have no conclusions to offer there. And I guess I’m glad in some sense that these particular complicated problems aren’t mine to solve. I certainly think that the production of automated sensors is a very, very bad idea, but I’m also someone who’s constitutionally opposed to such things as closed circuit TV monitoring of the general public as well and cameras that watch people at stoplights and any automated system that enforces the law or what’s hypothetically the law to me is to be regarded with deep, deep suspicion. So okay, that’s that. Much of my early work deals with alcoholism, yes, and at the biological level, that’s what I did my PhD thesis on in much of my early published papers where I learned about brain function because alcohol affects every part of the brain, so I had to learn a lot about the brain. What prompted my interest in that area and your apparent shift to issues clustered around personality? Well, I was always interested in motivation for drug and alcohol abuse, you know, what it was that drove people to use drugs of abuse, let’s say, and I got the opportunity to study at McGill under Dr. Robert Peel, who was an excellent supervisor, and he was deeply involved with drug and alcohol abuse research, looking at motivation for alcoholism, and he offered me a position in his lab, and that was what he was working on, and I thought, well, that was one of my cardinal interests, although perhaps not my fundamental interest, which even at that point had to do with motivation for totalitarianism and the commission of atrocity in the service of group belief, but I thought, well, it’s a broad topic, and I could learn a lot about biology and neurobiology as a consequence of working on something that was so biological, so my early work in psychology was extremely biologically oriented and it was unbelievably useful. I learned a lot from the animal experimentalists in particular, people like Jeffrey Gray and later Yaak Panksepp. I have a reading list at JordanBPeterson.com that outlines some of those books on emotional neuroscience. What was my, why did I shift? Well there was a variety of reasons. One was that the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, NIAAA, which funded grant research in the United States, essentially made the kind of research I was doing with Robert Peel impossible, and it’s part of the consequence, I think this is one of the things that the universities are doing so terribly wrong, is the ethics committees made our research impossible both to fund and to implement. So here’s why. So we were bringing people into the lab, so here’s who we picked for subjects. If you were going to be a subject in one of our experiments, you had to be a young man, and you had to have an alcoholic father and an alcoholic grandfather and at least one other first or second degree male alcoholic relative. Well, I hope I’m back again. You know my software updated and obviously the update has a bug, so that’s rather annoying. Apologies for that once again. So back to the alcoholism discussion. Where was I? Oh yes. So we would get these subjects, I mentioned who they were, they were young men who weren’t alcoholic but who drank socially, who had an alcoholic father, an alcoholic grandfather, and at least one other male alcoholic relative. Now why did we pick subjects like that? Well we knew alcoholism ran in families. We couldn’t really study its transmission in women because if you’re a female alcoholic and you drink when you have a child in utero, then the child can have fetal alcohol syndrome and whatever abnormalities in psychophysiological response or psychopathologies might be associated with their alcoholism can easily be masked by the presence of fetal alcohol syndrome. So we couldn’t use women and besides alcoholism is a problem that fundamentally characterizes men although there are female alcoholics. I think it’s four to one, if I remember correctly from those days, it’s four to one male to female. So it was, you know, when we thought if we concentrated on those who had the highest probability of developing alcoholism because of their loaded family history that we could shed some light on the mechanisms associated with alcoholism and that would be useful for men and for women. So we studied sons of male alcoholics, sons of multi-generational male alcoholics. Those were our target group. Very hard populations to find. We had people hired full time to do nothing but find us research subjects and so we did relatively small end studies because we were lucky if we could gather four or five subjects a month in the Montreal urban area. Anyways we did discover a lot about alcoholism. We discovered for example that if people with this multi-generational history, a substantial proportion of them, if they drank enough alcohol to move their blood level up above .08, which is legal intoxication level, and if they did that relatively short period of time, then their heart rate would increase above, I think the average was about 12 beats per minute compared to the standard control of zero. Zero or one or two. It was very low. And so, and then we did figure out over time, our whole team, that that seemed to be a consequence of susceptibility to alcohol’s effect on opioid production in the brain and secondary opioid effects on dopamine, which is both opiates and dopamine are primary reward chemicals. So it looked to us like people with multi-generational family histories of alcoholism got an opiate response from alcohol. But we had to get people drunk in order to find this response. And it turned out that .08, which was the legal limit at that time for driving, was approximately the place where we saw these psychophysiological effects and also saw fairly pronounced cognitive and motor effects of alcohol, because we also studied that. So now, we bring people into the lab and we’d give them three large shots of alcohol that they consumed in ten minutes. We used laboratory alcohol, which was, I think, 95% pure alcohol. Usually put it in orange juice. And so people would be reasonably intoxicated, and then we would let them sober up until they were at .04, which is half legal intoxication, which we thought was useful, and then we’d put them in a cab and they’d go home. And we had our odd mishap now and then someone would throw up and that was… Well, I’m at least getting better at fixing it when it screws up now. So anyways, now and then we would have somebody who would become ill in the lab and that was always unpleasant. But then we’d also let people sober up. And it actually takes quite a long time to go from .08 to .04, especially if you’re a big guy, because your dose of alcohol is proportionate to your body weight. And so we used to have people wait in the lab for a couple of hours, and they were not very happy necessarily about having to wait before we paid them and so forth. And if we didn’t treat them extraordinarily well, which we tried to do, then of course they were much less likely to come back and participate in another study. And since it was very difficult to get research subjects, then we wanted to treat them very well apart from the fact that we would have done that anyways. But then the NIAAA said, well you can’t let your research subjects go home until they have a blood alcohol level of .02. Was like we would have had to have people in our lab sobering up for… For six to eight hours. This keeps happening. Very sorry about this everyone. I don’t know what to say about it. Except that that’s a consequence of software updates, I suppose. Anyways, so that made it impossible, because we just couldn’t keep people in the lab for that long. All it did was annoy them to death, and then they hated us, and you know, people would get quite irritable and upset, and no bloody wonder. So then also NIAAA decided that half our subjects had to be women, or we couldn’t get funding. Well, our subjects couldn’t be women. It was impossible to do the kind of research that we were doing with women for the reasons that I just outlined. Well first of all, alcoholism doesn’t affect women as much as it affects men. Depression and anxiety tend to affect women more, and it’s perfectly reasonable to study those things, but that isn’t what we were doing. And then we couldn’t do multi-generational studies for genetic predisposition with women because of the fetal alcohol syndrome problem. And you know, this was something I think this came in under the Clintons, this requirement for absolute gender equality in subject selection, and they didn’t give a damn if that meant that there were certain kinds of research that just couldn’t be done anymore. And so I had to stop doing it. No one’s really doing that kind of research anymore because it’s just too difficult. It was always a pain because it was really hard to get the subjects, and then you had to get people quite intoxicated, and then you had to deal with them when they were drunk, and you had to do your psychophysiological recording and all that sort of thing, and then they had to sober up. It was complicated. Clinical research is unbelievably, unbelievably complicated and difficult. And then you add like two more restrictions to it, and people just go, oh, okay, well, I guess we won’t study the psychophysiological consequences of alcohol anymore. Or so people would use low doses, you know, and only get their subjects’ blood alcohol level up to like 0.02 or 0.03, but that’s completely irrelevant because alcohol doesn’t have much of a physiological effect at those low doses. And so, well, this is one of the things that made me absolutely despise ethics committees, and I believe that the proliferation of ethics committees is one of the reasons that university research is doing badly. Psychological research is doing badly. There’s a variety of reasons, but that’s certainly one of them. So I was interested, sorry, this is a very long answer, but I was interested in personality as well, you know, because I was a clinical psychologist, and I’d read Freud and Jung and Adler and all the great clinicians of the 20th century, and when I went to Harvard, I was offered, you know, when you’re a new faculty member, there’s usually a set course that they require you to teach, that’s one of the core courses, and then you have some freedom with your other courses. And so I said I’d teach personality, and then I got more and more, and we were looking at personality models with the alcoholism research too. At that point, the Big Five was starting to establish itself, and I wasn’t much of an admirer of the Big Five because I like, well, I like theories as well as empirical research, and I thought the Big Five, well, there was just no theory at all, it was just brute force empiricism. But, well, but, you know, the data eventually became convincing, and as I got more and more interested in personality, I got more and more interested in the use of personality and other psychometric technologies to predict things like academic and creative success. You see, at McGill, Bob and I, and a variety of other people, were using psychological tests of various sorts to predict things like alcoholism and antisocial personality. So we could use the Big Five and neuropsychological tests, tests of dorsolateral prefrontal function, at least in principle, to predict to some degree who might be susceptible to the development of antisocial personality. And then when I went to Harvard, I thought, well, hey, maybe we could use those tests to predict who was going to be good at things as well as who was going to be bad, you know, the people who were creative or the people who were academically outstanding or people who did well as managers and administrators and corporations might do well on personality tests and neuropsychological tests that assess dorsolateral prefrontal functions. That’s higher-order cognition. So we started to put together test batteries that assess that, and that was fascinating research. I did that with Daniel Higgins, who’s the partner, my partner in the development of the self-authoring program, and understand myself that things that he’s labored for 20 years on before they really became successful. And he wrote a bang-up thesis. I think it was the best thing ever written on the topic of intelligence and launched that. He started working on it in 1993, which is about the same time that the bell curve came out. And so his research actually became relatively politically contentious, even though all we were trying to do was trying to determine what attributes predicted success among creative people and among managers and administrators and in academia and so forth. Pure empirical research. But it became very rapidly politicized. Anyways, so I just got more and more interested in psychometrics, partly because I realized way back when in 1993 that almost nothing that psychologists measured was actually real. And so we were interested in what was real. And Daniel is an engineer trained at MIT. And so he was a very, very methodical person. And he didn’t like to move ahead with his research at all unless he had nailed absolutely everything down in a way that only an engineer and a software coder would. And so we started working on personality models. And I’ve been doing that and concentrating on that more specifically ever since, as well as writing the more theoretical material that was associated, say, with 12 Rules for Life and Maps of Meaning. Okay, so that’s that answer. Are you aware of any of your critics, are you aware of any critics of your work who are deep and credible? Well of course not. Someone who at a minimum had read Maps of Meaning. Well it’s a complicated question. You know, I’ve never read a critic of Jung who actually understood what Jung was talking about. And I actually knew a number of scientists, including Joach Panksepp, who wrote Affect of Neuroscience, which is a great book, who is a real admirer of Jung and the psychoanalysts. I mean, Panksepp was very interested in neuropsychoanalysis. And most of the people, many of the people who were interested in the neuroscience of emotion were also very interested in the psychoanalytic types. Most of the people who criticized Jung don’t have a clue what he was talking about. And it’s not surprising because he’s very difficult. No, I haven’t come across a credible critic of Maps of Meaning. And I think, and I don’t know, I mean that may also be because, you know, until I became notorious, let’s say over the last couple of years, it was an influential. It did pretty well, the book did pretty well for an academic work. It was no massive seller, although it’s hit the best seller list now in the audio version, which I think is pretty amusing. That’s the New York Times best seller list, given that they wouldn’t list 12 rules for life. So I don’t know if the lack of criticism is a consequence of its lack of influence or its difficulty. I’ve had social psychologists talk to me a little bit about the ideas of Maps of Meaning and I’ve tried to talk to them, especially the people who are interested in such things as terror management. But they usually don’t know the neuropsychology and they don’t know the mythology. There are very few people who are versed in the world of neuropsychology and in the world of mythology simultaneously. And I’m drawing these parallels, you know, like, and they’re very complicated parallels. So I made the assumption, see I studied these Russian neuropsychologists, Vinogradova and Sokolov who were students of Alexander Luria, brilliant students, and they discovered this phenomena called the orienting reflex, which I wrote a lot about in Maps of Meaning. And the orienting reflex is your automatic response to what is unknown. And you have a very deep automatic response to what is unknown. And that really means that the unknown is a conceptual category. And it was my proposition, developed in Maps of Meaning, that the unknown is a fundamental cognitive category, or maybe even a fundamental category of reality, depending on how you define reality. I’m defining reality phenomenologically, as experienced. But as experienced universally, and as experienced biologically by animals and by human beings. The unknown is something like unexplored territory, and it’s reasonable to assume that there’s a fundamental distinction, even neurologically, between the patterns of action that are obtained in territories that you’ve thoroughly explored, and the pattern of action that’s necessary when you step outside the domain that you’re familiar with, where your reaction as a prey animal or perhaps as a predator has to become paramount. And so the fundamental proposition in Maps of Meaning is something like the domain of the unknown that’s reflexively responded to with the orienting reflex, which is a very very fundamental reflex, and basic to the entire process of learning itself, is reflected in our mythological representations. And I think that that is a absolutely, if that’s true, then it’s a profound realization. I wouldn’t exactly say discovery, because I don’t know if you bring two literatures together that have never been conjoined if that constitutes a discovery, but I’ve certainly never found anyone who was able to suggest to me any reason why I should assume that hypothesis is incorrect. You know, and I’ve had pretty damn bright graduate students, and they’ve gone off to be credible professors, and most of them have maintained that viewpoint, and I think Colin DeYoung is probably foremost among them. So you know, it would be nice actually if I could encounter critics of Maps of Meaning who were credible, because I’m sure there’s some things in it that I wrote that were wrong. And I don’t know what they are. I mean, I’ve been thinking about the damn book since 1982, and I’ve been thinking about it a lot, and my work in 12 Rules for Life is an extension of what I did in Maps of Meaning, but I can’t see holes in it, and nothing I’ve learned since then, and that might be a consequence of my own stupidity, but in narrow-mindedness, I haven’t seen any reason to radically revise the propositions that I put forth in Maps of Meaning. I think they’re credible. I think the idea that, and I think there’s actually more evidence now that the propositions were correct than there were when I wrote the book originally. The idea, for example, that our hemispheres are specialized, one for action in the domain of the known and the other for action in the domain of the unknown, I think that’s well supported by the work of, what’s his name, another student of Luria, Greenberg, is it Greenberg? Elcon and Goldberg, and Ramachandran as well, a physician who’s well-versed in neuroscience, has a theory that’s quite similar. So no, I don’t think Maps of Meaning has been subject to proper critical evaluation. And then with regards to critics of 12 Rules for Life, well, most of the time they don’t criticize what I say, they criticize their, what would you call it, ideologically motivated pathological oversimplification of who they wish I was so they didn’t have to take anything I said seriously. And those people don’t constitute critics. They constitute the chattering puppets of a certain form of ideological possession. Wesley Yang reported that you met with tech titans Mark Andreessen and Peter Thiel, both of whom advocate decentralized education. Can you share anything about this? I don’t know if I can share anything interesting. I enjoyed meeting Mark and Peter. I’ve met Mark several times. I’ve only met Peter once, although I’ve spent some time with Eric Weinstein, who works with Peter. Peter is libertarian-oriented, and so he shares concerns about the potential totalitarian function of internet technology, manifesting itself, well, in the constant monitoring of our behavior and also in the emergent censorship, let’s say. Mark Andreessen, well, Mark’s a smart guy and he knows a lot of other smart guys and we spent a lot of time talking about the possibility of online education. But there isn’t anything really exciting I can report about that. I mean, they were all preliminary discussions of a sort to see if we could get along and if we could talk. And so far we’ve been able to. I am making a fair bit of headway with this university project, although we don’t really conceptualize it as a university project anymore. We’re conceptualizing it as an adaptive learning system. And we’re trying to use it to index people’s knowledge on the web, funnel money to creative producers of educational content, allow people to test their knowledge no matter how it’s generated and to accredit people properly. And we’ll release more information about that in the upcoming months as we move closer and closer to a functional prototype. The plan at the moment, I’ve talked to lots of people like Andreessen and Thiel who are very interested in technology and education and who also are very well capitalized and have had the opportunity multiple times to pull in investors into this educational project. I haven’t done that, partly because, weirdly enough, you think money is a solution to a problem, but it’s also often a problem in and of itself. And if I generated several million dollars, let’s say, to fund this educational endeavor, then I would not only have to worry about how to design the educational system, but then I’d have to worry about how to spend that money and shepherd that money intelligently. And that’s actually a huge administrative problem of sufficient magnitude to stop you from doing any creative thinking at all. So what we’re doing instead is I’m funding the university project at the moment, or the online education project, as a consequence of my Patreon funding. Ha! Fixed that in about five seconds this time. So I’m funding that from my Patreon donations and I like that model better. The only problem is that I would like to offer the people that I have as employees a certain amount of financial stability. And so, it isn’t obvious to me how stable the Patreon funding is, although it’s been very stable so far, but who knows how that will work out. So I think what we’re going to do is to crowdfund in October or November, once we have a minimal viable product. And I think I’d rather do that than raise money privately anyways, because I don’t want this project to be beholden to anyone. And I want to maintain control over its direction with a small group of programmers. You know, it’s often a small group of people who are working tightly together that solve very complicated problems. And that’s certainly been the case with working, say, with Daniel Higgins and Robert Peel on the self-authoring programs and so forth. The small team. We’ve thought about going the venture capital route and expanding and trying to make a big business out of it. But our sense was more that, and maybe we were wrong about this, but that it was better to go directly after customers and to build the business incrementally and to test it along each step and not to get enticed by the possibility of unicorn-level money. And so, anyways, that’s the situation there. And I’ve got three really bright people working on this open educational platform. It’s really quite exciting. And I would say we’re well ahead of schedule from where I thought we would be. So that’s pretty cool. Have you spoken to Nassim Taleb following your brief Twitter exchange? Would love to hear a conversation with the two of you. I’d like to talk to him too, because he’s very, very smart. He’s touchy, though, and so I have some apprehension about that. I’ve talked to lots of touchy people over the last couple of years, and I’m a bit apprehensive about it. But I would like to do that. There’s a lot of people I’d like to talk to. He’s one of them. And, you know, I’m having a hard time setting up those conversations at the moment because I’m doing so much touring. I am talking again to Jonathan Haidt, though, in the near future, and I think probably to Steven Pinker as well. And by the way, for those of you who are wondering, I am going to release the – and so is Sam – we’re going to release the videos from the Sam Harris Peterson debates. I’ll put them on my YouTube channel. Sam will put them on his. We’ll make them into podcasts as well. I’m going to release the first one on September 1st, and everyone will have access to it. It’s taken us a while to figure out exactly how to do this, partly because Travis Pangburn, who hosted the events, wanted to raise some money with the videos, at least in part to help offset the costs that he incurred for those events, which were very expensive, believe it or not, and difficult to generate a profit from on his end. And also, he wants to translate the material that he already has into multiple languages. So we agreed to let him – we had to make a three-way agreement for this, you know, because Sam was involved and I was involved and so was Pangburn. And we didn’t know how the events would go, you know, so we weren’t actually that concerned with the damn videos to begin with, because we’d taken a risk. I’m not complaining about this, by the way. Like, I’m not complaining about taking a risk, but we didn’t – Sam and I hadn’t even met, you know, we didn’t know if we were going to have conversations that were worthwhile. We didn’t know if anybody would show up for the events. And so we were way more concerned about whether or not we’d get a crowd of any sort, whether the events would be successful, and whether we could actually talk, than what we would videos if the – or even if there would be videos, if the events were successful. And so it turned out that we could talk, and we did have useful discussions, at least we thought so, and the audiences responded very well, and there was large crowds, and so it was successful. So then it turned out that the videos were worthwhile, but we hadn’t discussed who had control over the videos, or who was going to edit them, or any of those things, and we had to do that post-hoc, after the fact, which isn’t the best way of doing it. And then it took Travis a while to assemble a team to do the actual editing, and so that was our compromise, and you know, it would have been better if we could have released the videos and all of that immediately after the talks, but you know, when you’re doing something new, and you don’t know exactly what you’re doing, you’re not going to do it perfectly. And so we didn’t do that perfectly, but the events were good, and I enjoyed talking to Sam, and I learned a lot from the discussion. I really had to sharpen my thinking. I really figured out something. You know, I figured out that I think the fundamental issue here is how you take the infinite world of facts that presents itself to you, independent of the value of those facts, so value neutral facts, and they have to be filtered to a single point, like a single point of perception, because you have to point your eyes at one thing and your attention at one thing, and a single point of action. And so there’s a tremendous reducing of the world of fact to the extraordinarily simple and targeted world of value, and your brain is the instrument that does that reducing, and it’s sort of, it’s in keeping with Elders Huxley’s suppositions about, and they were motivated by Henri Bergson, the idea that the brain was a reducing valve and that what psychedelic experience did was open the doors of perception, something William Blake also talked about, the brain seems to be, in some sense, the part of the structure that reduces the infinite complexity of the world of facts to the finite and single point domain of world of values, and that’s partly neurologically instantiated and partly sociologically instantiated because we come to a negotiated agreement about what constitutes value, just like we do about what constitutes value economically. And so the structure that reduces facts to values is a reducing structure that simultaneously instantiated neurologically and sociologically. And I understand that a lot more clearly because I had these discussions with Sam, and I’m writing a lot about that in this next book, which is, it’s a follow-up, I suspect, that’s the plan at the moment, 12 Rules for Life, because I had written originally 40 rules, so I have more to go. I’ve written about half the new book, and I spent a lot of time writing about, at least in part, what I had to become clear about as a consequence of my discussions with Harris. And so I took a look at the videos, and I think the debates were productive, and the audiences seemed to find them so, and certainly Sam and I did. I really enjoyed meeting him, we got along quite well, he has a much better sense of humour than I presumed from the two podcasts we did, of course I wasn’t in great humour when I did those either. You know, I also think that I’m also, what would you say, a fan of Sam’s motivation, or at least as far as I can determine it, I mean he wants to ground the world of value in something that isn’t merely arbitrary revelation. And fair enough, man, that’s a good aim to ground ethics in something that’s solid, and not just arbitrary opinion. But I think that the devil’s in the details, and so that’s basically what we discussed. So how do you reconcile studies that show genetic supersteding environment and life outcomes with your own experience conducting successful psychotherapy? Yeah, well, I’ll tell you one thing, man, that I’ve really come to realise more and more in the last three or four years, partly I would say from dealing with my own health problems to some degree, but also watching the health problems that my daughter had, I think a lot of what we think of as mental illness is physical illness. It’s a lot more than we think even, and I think that that is reflected in the genetic studies. But I also think, I also still think that that doesn’t eliminate the role of learning, you know, people obviously learn and they can learn better or worse, and they learn better when they voluntarily approach things that are frightening and threatening and they challenge themselves. And so it’s made me more humble, I would say in some sense, both as a person and as a psychotherapist, because I’m more attuned to the fact that the apparently psychological difficulties that my clients might be experiencing may be a consequence of an underlying destabilisation of physical health. I’m really unwilling to discount that, even if what they’re experiencing is very idiosyncratic, but it still seems to me that there is credible evidence that exposure to what you would rather avoid is curative and so is the weaving together of a coherent map or narrative of your experience. I believe that those doctrines are solid. And that’s what psychotherapists do, essentially. They help you get your story straight about your past and your present and your future. They help you establish your point in life. They help you lay out a map so that you can negotiate through the territory of your life, past, present and future, and they help you develop strategies to help deal with emergent complexity and the fear that goes along with it. So… Michael Tombros asked a very hard question. Please comment on Jung Pauli’s, that’s Wolfgang Pauli’s, Unus Mundus hypothesis, One World Hypothesis, essentially. So that… So Michael Tombros asked, sorry, I got frozen there again momentarily, Please comment on Jung Pauli’s Unus Mundus hypothesis. Does this correlate with quantum theory solutions to the hard problem, e.g. Penrose-Hameroff-Orch-Orch-Or? I don’t know what Orch-Or is. I know Penrose and Hameroff. I’m not an admirer of the Penrose and Hameroff attempt to reduce consciousness to microtubule function, quantum mechanics and microtubule function. I did my best to understand it. I couldn’t. It seemed hollow to me. My experience has generally been, if I find something incomprehensible and hollow, it generally is. I’ve read better books on consciousness, like The User Illusion, which I really liked. That’s The User Illusion, by the way. And Jeffrey Gray wrote a good book on consciousness as well. Jung and Pauli, I’m not going to be able to answer this question very well because I’m starting to get a bit worn out here. Wolfgang and Pauli and Jung recognized that, man, this is really a complicated problem. I don’t know if I can answer this. Okay, let’s try this. God, it’s been years since I thought about this and wrote about it, so we’ll see how I can do. You can think about this from the perspective of Piagetian constructivism. So imagine that what you confront fundamentally in the world is what is unknowable. And what is unknowable has an intrinsic meaning. It’s both frightening and compelling. Simultaneously, it activates predator detection systems that protect you in the way that a prey animal is protected by freezing and withdrawal and that sort of thing, but it also makes you curious. So that which you do not understand, which is something that you can conceptualize as that which has not yet been made habitable world, has an intrinsic meaning. Now the question is whether the fundamental stuff of the world is that meaningful, unknown, or something material. You can make the case that what we recognize as material is actually a pragmatic reconceptualization of the meaning, of the ambivalent meaning of the unknowable. Now I know that’s a hard concept, but imagine, you see, it depends on whether or not you believe that our descriptions of material reality are the superordinate descriptions of reality, or whether our conceptualization of material is actually a form of pragmatic tool use that’s oriented towards our survival. And this is not an easy thing to sort out. It’s something that I did try to sort out to some degree with Sam. Do we have an objective description of reality and is reality something that can be objectively described or are we using a technology that produces so-called objective representations to facilitate our tool use? It’s a hard question, right? Because obviously our advanced technology, which we use in a tool-like fashion, is a consequence of our materialist science, which begs the question, is the science, is the fundamental purpose of the science descriptive or pragmatic? Now I think, I tend to think it’s pragmatic because I think our fundamental problem is a problem of survival. So there’s a way of looking at the world where the fundamental reality is the chaotic potential that gives rise to fear and curiosity. And that’s how your nervous system responds, by the way. And see, that’s interesting to me because I would say, well, it’s a truism of evolutionary biology that what your nervous system is adapted to, what you’re adapted to as a consequence of your three and a half billion years of evolution, is reality and that there’s no other real way of defining it. And so the way your brain construes reality is as if what you’re confronting is an indeterminate, chaotic potential that first generates something like apprehension, fear, and curiosity secondarily. The apprehension to freeze you so that you don’t get eaten or destroyed, and the curiosity to allow you to engage with what’s unknown and to transform it into habitable territory, which in large part consists of tools. Now the Unus Mundus that Polly and Jung talked about seems to me to be associated with this idea of that chaotic potential. And I think that’s related to the physicist Wheeler’s proposition that the fundamental reality of the world is information rather than material. That material is a secondary, what would you call it? It’s a secondary manifestation of information. And I think that what we confront in the world, see I don’t think we’re driven by the past or determined by the present. I think what we do is we apprehend the potential of the future, the chaotic potential of the future. And I think that that’s associated with the Tohu Vabohu, which is the chaotic potential that God confronted with the Logos at the beginning of time in Genesis. I think the Genesis story is a reflection of that fundamental truth. And I think that that capability characterizes us. And so the Unus Mundus is the informational substrate that constitutes the world before it’s divided into psyche, so that would be spirit, that would be human spirit and consciousness, and material. So there’s something underneath that, and this is what Jung and Polly were driving at in my understanding. There’s something underneath that, which is the pre-division unity of reality. And that’s something like the Tohu Vabohu or the Teom, which is etymologically cognate, by the way, with the word Tiamat. And Tiamat is the goddess that the Mesopotamian creator god Marduk confronted and cut into pieces and made the world from. So that’s all outlined in Maps of Meaning, although not so much the Unus Mundus hypothesis You know, and I haven’t thought about that for a while. I wrote about it, but these were in papers I never published because they were too damn complicated and I tried to publish them a couple of times, but people… But people didn’t understand what I was talking about, and I hadn’t even thought about… Oh man. Okay, well, here’s a weird thing. We’ll get back to that. Alright, well… The rate at which my camera equipment is crashing seems to be accelerating. So it appears that discussion of the Unus Mundus is irritating the structure of reality in some manner. Anyways, let’s get back to it for a minute. So this is a different way of conceptualizing the world. I think it’s a phenomenological perspective. And I don’t know what to make of it. So think about it this way. So it looks like your left hemisphere is specialized for operation in territory that you understand. So it’s specialized for operation in those places where behavioral patterns have been made habitual and explicit. Whereas the right hemisphere is specialized for response to chaos itself, to the unknown. And what that implies is that the division that’s expressed, for example, in the yin which is essentially chaos and order, actually represents something fundamental about the structure of reality. Now you might say, well, only the structure of reality insofar as biological organisms conceptualize it. But I don’t know if we can talk about the structure of reality outside the conceptions of biological organisms. Like if you’re a strict believer in objective material reality, in that transcendent existence of strict material reality, then you might say, well, of course you could talk about it because strict material reality exists in the absence of biology and consciousness. But it isn’t so obvious to me that material reality does exist in the absence of consciousness because I can’t conceptualize what existence would mean in the absence of consciousness. Like is there time? Is there duration? Is there size? All of these things are relative in some sense. All of these things presuppose a conscious observer, even in the materialist description. So it looks to me like what reality is, is this Unus Mundus that Jung and Pauli were pointing to. It’s chaotic potential. Now I also think that we treat each other that way. So if I’m treating you properly, then I treat you as if you’re a moral agent who’s actively engaged in the transformation of the chaotic potential that manifests itself as the dawning of the future and that attracts your attention. I treat you as if you’re an active moral agent engaged in making the moral decisions that determine how that potential is going to manifest itself. And if I don’t treat you that way, then I’m patronizing. I don’t grant you your full stature as a sovereign being. And I impinge upon your net, your intrinsic value, the same value that allows you to claim the existence of natural rights and also the presence, I would say, of natural responsibility. So I treat you as if you’re, well, I would say, made in the image of God, in the Genesis terminology, that you are part of the process that turns the Tohu-Abohu, which I never pronounced properly, into habitable order. And I think that that’s the Unus Mundus. And I think that that’s reflected in your neurological structure. And I think the fact that it’s reflected in your neurological structure and in the neurological structure of animals with this almost universal dual hemisphere neurological structure, which also, by the way, is something that’s necessary even in neural networks, which is where we got the idea for plasticity and stability, by the way, in the Big Five Aspect Scale models and the higher order personality factors. I think the fact that that bifurcation is reflected in neurology is a reflection of the fact that it exists in reality. Now, of course, defining reality is no simple thing, you know. You can think about it as an objective materialist, but you can also think of reality as the sum total of that which is experienced. And those aren’t the same things. They aren’t the same fundamental presuppositions. And I think that we’ve predicated our society insofar as our society is functional on the proposition that each individual is a sovereign entity, what would you say, characterized by a spark of divinity that uses the responsible, truthful word to confront the chaos of potential and generate the habitable order that is good. I think… I think we act that out. And look, guys, I’m going to call it a night, eh, because obviously this has got to be getting somewhat annoying for you to be constantly interrupted by these idiot software crashes. And it’s also approaching nine o’clock, so even with the delays, that’s a good hour and a half. And so I think maybe we’ll call it a day. And I didn’t get to many questions, although some of them were very, very complicated. And I would like to thank you for tuning in. And maybe I can remind you again about selfauthoring.com and understandmyself.com and the discount coupon code September. So if you guys want to try out those programs, I think they’re real helpful and I think that’s how people experience them. Then you can do that. And then I’ll have another Q&A probably, I would say probably in mid-October because I’m on the road now. You can see that in JordanBPeterson.com at events. I’m on the road now until mid-October. And so I’ll do another Q&A then and hopefully have an update on the educational, the progress of the educational material and all of that. And so thanks very much for tuning in and I hope you enjoyed the discussion. It got quite, well, far beyond what I thought it would get to. I haven’t talked about that. It’s a very, very radical idea. It’s sort of central. I would say, or at least central in an implicit sense to maps of meaning. And God, you fucking thing. All right, well, look, obviously the technological problems are mounting exponentially by all appearances. So I’m going to call it a night. Thank you very much and good luck to all of you. Get your lives together, man. It’d be a good thing for everyone, including you, but also everyone else. And maybe the structure of the world itself. I really believe that’s true, by the way. So for what that’s worth. Okay guys, bye.