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Oct. 16, 2020 - Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

02:07:09

12 Rules for Life Tour - Brisbane, Australia.

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	.
	Well, thank you. .
	It's remarkable to see all of you here in this amazing room.
	So, well, I hope we have an interesting and engaging time tonight.
	That's the plan.
	I have a lecture planned, so...
	It's got a strange title.
	It's not that exciting really.
	The first part of it is the socialization of the value hierarchy and the second is and the estimation of the magnitude of error.
	It's like you wouldn't think you'd come And sit in here to listen to that talk, really, would you?
	I'm not sure I would.
	But it is interesting.
	It's a very, very interesting problem.
	And here's part of what the problem is, part of the problem I'm trying to solve.
	Part of it is, how is your emotional stability Tied up with your social identity?
	That's a really important question.
	And I think it might be the central question that I've been pursuing my entire...
	As long as I've been able to think intellectually, that might be the problem that I've been pursuing.
	Because one of the things I've been interested in is, why is it that people are so committed to their group identity, let's say, or their group beliefs, that they will, well, let's say, go to war to protect them?
	Or to spread them.
	Or that they will commit atrocities, hypothetically, in defense of them.
	So it's a very interesting problem.
	You know, because people, when people think about motivation for war, for example, they often attribute it to economic causes, and that just never struck me as plausible.
	Sometimes it's plausible, but it's not a deep solution, as far as I'm concerned.
	It's more psychological.
	Our beliefs are important to us.
	And what does it mean?
	Well, there's a lot of questions there.
	What do you mean by belief?
	Exactly.
	You know, physicists generally don't go to war over their belief in one physical theory over another, so it can't be just as simple as belief.
	It has to be more complicated than that.
	And people are committed to their beliefs too, and it isn't obvious what commitment means.
	And so, those are the things that I've been trying to unpack.
	What does it mean to have a belief?
	And what does it mean?
	How does it...
	Why is it important to you?
	Why is it crucial to you?
	There's something associated deeply.
	There's a deep association between belief and value.
	And so then that brings up another question.
	What exactly do you mean by value?
	So that's three hard questions.
	And so that's part of it.
	So that's the value hierarchy question part of it.
	And then the error magnitude problem is, Well, let's say you go to a party and you tell a joke and, you know, you think it's a pretty funny joke.
	And you tell your joke and no one laughs.
	And in fact, they look at you like you're rather odd.
	And then the question is, well, how should you respond to that?
	What exactly does that indicate about you?
	I mean, does it indicate a minor flaw in an otherwise stellar personality?
	Because that's a possibility.
	Or does it mean that, like, you're a creep?
	Right?
	And maybe right down to the core.
	And...
	You know, you could even think the less that you think that it means that you're a creep, the more likely it is that you are one.
	So, but you know, it's very hard to estimate the magnitude of an error.
	How upset should you get when something that you don't want to happen happens?
	And it's very, very hard to figure that out.
	If you wake up in the morning and, you know, you have a pain, say, in your side, Or you're not feeling particularly well.
	It's like, well, how upset should you get about that?
	And one answer is, well, like maybe you're going to die in three months, you know?
	Maybe that's the beginning of pancreatic cancer and that's the end of you.
	And so maybe you should just be terrified into paralysis when you have a pain that you can't explain.
	Or maybe you should just brush it off and think, well, you know, I'll get up and do what I usually do, and it's probably nothing.
	And sometimes you're right with the it's probably nothing approach, and sometimes if you don't go to the physician right away because you have some relatively trivial pain, then you're dead.
	And so this problem of estimating magnitude of error, importance of error, is unbelievably difficult problem.
	And so I want to address Both of those problems at the same time tonight.
	So that's the plan.
	So we'll see how that goes.
	So, and then I want to weave in there one more thing, which is this relationship between your own psychological structure, whatever that happens to be, your own value hierarchy, because there's a very tight relationship between your value hierarchy and your psychological structure, which is why hierarchies, by the way, which Are necessary.
	Which is part of the point I was trying to make, say, in Rule 1, in 12 Rules for Life, when I talked about hierarchies.
	There's no getting away from hierarchies.
	A hierarchy is a structure that tells you that one thing takes precedence over another.
	That one thing is more important than another.
	And if everything is of equal import, then nothing is more important than anything else, by definition.
	And then, well, what should you do?
	And the answer is, well, you can't tell, because...
	Nothing is any more important than anything else.
	And the definition of important, fundamentally, is something like, that which you should do first.
	You know, that constitutes importance.
	That's also something that's relevant, I would say, too, because a lot of the way that we look at the world is as a place to live.
	We look at the world as a place in which to act, and we make a lot of judgments about the nature of the world in terms of how we should structure our action.
	In fact, the theory that I am putting forth in general is a theory that's predicated on the notion that the essential way that we look at the world is as if it's a forum of action, like a dramatic forum, like a story.
	That's a good way of thinking about it.
	We really do view ourselves and our place in the world as a story that's set in a narrative landscape.
	And, you know, you might argue that that's not the case.
	You could say whether that viewpoint, for example, has been superseded by a scientific viewpoint.
	But it isn't obvious to me that that's the case.
	And it certainly isn't...
	It's certainly not the case that we act that way.
	And it's certainly not the case that we structure our political systems that way.
	And it's certainly not the case that we treat each other that way, or that we think that way, or that we react emotionally that way.
	And so that's a lot.
	And, you know, it's also the case that the other thing that's worth thinking about in this regard is, you know, we've only been thinking about the world...
	As an objective place for 500 years, something like that.
	I mean, maybe you could chase it back to the ancient Greeks and go back 2,000 years, but whatever.
	From a historical perspective, 500 years or 200 years is the same amount of time And it's a tiny fraction of the amount of time that living creatures that were approximately like us have been around.
	So, we got along fine without thinking about the world as an objective place for a very, very long time.
	We survived, and here we are.
	It doesn't mean it's a bad idea, but it does imply that there are other ways of looking at the world that are highly functional and that have been conserved for, well, let's say, for evolutionary reasons.
	And so, You know, if you make the case, which you might, that what you evolve to match is reality, at least you match it well enough so that reality doesn't kill you, which is more or less the definition of evolution,
	if you evolve to match reality in some sense, and the manner in which you evolve Predisposes you to view the world as if it's a narrative of sorts, then possibly the world is a narrative of sorts, at least insofar as it concerns you.
	Now, what that means metaphysically, I don't know, but that's okay, because who knows anything metaphysically, virtually by definition.
	What's metaphysical is beyond what you know.
	You can speculate, and so, you know, I would speculate that...
	There is something narrative about the structure of the world, but it doesn't matter.
	We don't have to go down that route.
	We can just think about this practically.
	So the first thing I want to tell you about that I think is really important to lay out the structure of this argument is something about the relationship between perception and emotion and motivation and this is actually pretty simple and but people don't know it and I guess it's simple in the way that complex things are simple when you think them through for a very long time and understand them and then can finally lay them out you know in
	some manner that's rather let's say clear because you understand them I derived a fair bit of this information from a book called The Neuropsychology of Anxiety by a man named Jeffrey Gray, who I think was one of the two greatest neuropsychologists of the 20th century.
	Two or three.
	And his Neuropsychology of Anxiety, which is on my list of recommended books, by the way, on my website.
	It's a really hard book.
	And I mean, it took me like six months to read that book.
	All of it was painful.
	And the reason for that was, well, you know, books are interesting.
	Some, some aren't.
	Often I dog-ear the pages of books that I'm reading if I find a line or something, you know, that I'd like to remember that I think is important.
	And, you know, I have some books on my shelves that, like, pages are dog-eared double because there was a really amazing thought on one page and there was a really amazing thought on another.
	On the other page, you know, the facing page.
	And so the whole damn thing is just nothing but dog ears.
	And then there's other books where there's zero.
	When I read Nietzsche, for example, there was lots of dog ears on Beyond Good and Evil, which is a great book.
	Nietzsche actually, he came up with the most arrogant statement anybody ever made about About himself as an author, which is really quite impressive.
	To come up with the most arrogant statement, you know, that's really something.
	He was great at coming up with one-liners, philosophical one-liners.
	He said, I can write in a sentence what other people, what it takes other people a book to write.
	And then he said, no, that they can't even write in a book.
	So that's pretty good, eh?
	It's like arrogant, and then he topped it.
	It's like, yes, this is a man who could really write.
	Anyways, the problem with reading a book like that, Beyond Good and Evil, say, is that every damn sentence is a thought.
	And a deep thought.
	And so reading Beyond Good and Evil, it's like just constantly being punched.
	I mean, partly you're punched because you read...
	Part of it you don't know what the hell he says and so then you know you're stupid and so that's a punch and then and then and then now and then you stumble across something you understand and it's like it's hard on you he said he philosophized with a hammer you know that he was breaking things apart and and and there's no doubt about that so now and then you run across something you understand and and then that breaks you apart because you understand it and so And it takes a long time to go through the book because you have to think about it.
	And God, that's not good, thinking about things.
	Well, it isn't because when you think about it, you already know everything in some sense.
	You've got a map that covers the whole world, which is sort of why you can function.
	And so as long as everything's going fine, you don't really have to adjust your map and you don't have to think.
	But then if you come across something that makes you think, then what that means is that part of the way you were thinking was wrong.
	And so when you think something, when you're forced to, then some little part of what you were, your map, the way you represent the world, it has to die.
	Because it was wrong.
	And then it has to be replaced by this new thing.
	And God only knows how much of what it was that was there has to die.
	That's part of the magnitude of error problem.
	And so people don't like to think.
	And so it's hard to read difficult books, like Beyond Good and Evil, because...
	You're just forced to think and think, and it's just exhausting.
	You wish that he would just go away, you know, which is why they're trying to not teach difficult books in universities anymore, so that people don't have to undergo the difficult process of actually having to think and transform themselves.
	Anyways, I read Jeffrey Gray's book, The Neuropsychology of Anxiety, and...
	It was like that.
	He was something, man.
	Student of a psychologist named Hans Isaac, who was the most cited psychologist in the 20th century.
	And really quite a good psychologist.
	He laid a lot of the groundwork for modern...
	Theories of temperament and personality.
	They've been modified since his work, but he got extroversion right.
	He was the first person to really identify extroversion in a manner that could be measured.
	Carl Jung actually invented the notion, but Isaac figured out how to measure it, which is a big deal.
	And he also noted that there was another important personality dimension Neuroticism which is the tendency towards negative emotion and he got that right too because that actually happened to be the case and he figured out how to measure it.
	So Isaac was the first person who really established conceptually the fact that our two fundamental we have two fundamental emotional systems one positive and one negative that they weren't They're not opposites exactly.
	They're actually separate biological systems.
	So some people can be extroverted, which means they're quite happy and assertive.
	They smile a lot.
	They laugh a lot.
	They tell a lot of jokes.
	They like to party.
	They always like to be around people.
	That's an extroverted person.
	And they can also be unhappy, worried, anxious, depressed, frustrated, disappointed.
	I mean, living with someone like that's quite a trip because they're just all over the place.
	But, you know, but there are people like that because you can be high in negative emotion and you can be high in positive emotion or low in both or whatever.
	And it's useful to know that.
	It's useful to know that about your partner and about the people around you.
	And if you are interested in this sort of thing, by the way, I have a personality test online at understandmyself.com and you can go there and it takes you about 15 minutes and it gives you five dimensions of personality.
	Extroversion, neuroticism, that's positive and negative emotion.
	Agreeableness, which is probably the maternal instinct dimension, but at least it's the variance between compassion and competitive aggression.
	It's something like that, and that looks like a continuum.
	And there's another dimension which is trait conscientiousness, which is integrity and undutifulness, orderliness, industriousness.
	And then finally, the fifth dimension which is openness, which is like a hybrid between intellect, intelligence roughly, and creativity.
	And so you can go there and find out how you compare to other people.
	And that's kind of interesting and useful.
	Because it's kind of useful to know who you are.
	To know that that's actually who you are.
	That you have a nature.
	And some of that stuff's movable.
	But it's not as movable as you think.
	And the farther you want to move it, the harder it is to move.
	Like you can take an introvert.
	You know you're an introvert if when you're around people, you get exhausted by it.
	And you have to go off by yourself and recover.
	Then you're an introvert.
	And if you're an introvert, you don't really like being in groups, and so sales, you know, maybe that's not for you, you know?
	And that's a good thing to know, because if you're an introvert, why go be a salesperson and be miserable?
	Do something where you can spend time alone and not be miserable.
	That's better.
	You might as well match your occupation to your temperament rather than the other way around.
	Now, you know, you can take an introvert.
	I've worked with lots of introverts who, say, had made pretty good progress in their careers and they were at a point where they had to do a lot of social networking, you know, and otherwise they were going to hit a plateau in their career.
	They could be taught the skills of extroversion sort of one at a time rather painfully.
	So they could learn them, they could accrue the skills and that would broaden their personality outward into the say extroverted end of the continuum.
	But it didn't make them extroverts.
	And so they were still temperamentally introverts.
	So, you know, if you're a neurotic person, high in negative emotion, you can learn to regulate your anxiety and so forth.
	But you hit a point of diminishing returns, and it's difficult.
	It's effortful.
	So, anyways, back to Isaac, and then back to Jeffrey Gray.
	So, Isaac identified extroversion and introversion, or extroversion and neuroticism, and that's going to be very important in a minute.
	And Gray, He elaborated Isaac's theories to a large degree, but he did that neurologically.
	He was a master of the animal experimental literature.
	And a lot of that's being phased out of universities because the regulations for animal...
	experimentation have become so onerous and difficult that it's much easier for beginning scientists just not to bother and that's a real catastrophe because we have learned a lot about the brain in the last 50 years a lot and we've learned very little about the brain from PET scans and MRI scans and Like that complicated technology that's used to study human beings and an unbelievable amount by studying animals.
	And you might think, rats in particular, and you might think, well, you know, rats, they're not much like human beings, you know, but that's wrong.
	You share, I don't know what it is, 98.5% of your genetic structure with rats.
	Some of you probably more than that.
	And, you know, we haven't devolved from the common ancestor with rats from an evolutionary perspective that long ago.
	I mean, like it's millions of years ago, you know, but it's short compared to how long ago we devolved, let's say, from, or we, yeah, devolved, I think that's good enough.
	From amphibians.
	And so, we're a lot like rats, man.
	And we have the same skeletal structure and our brains are quite similar and the neurochemistry is very, very, very similar.
	I mean, the neurochemistry is similar right down to the level of crustaceans, which is why I wrote about lobsters in Rule 1 because I thought it was so bloody amazing when I came across that literature to see that when lobsters are defeated in a social contest and they lose their hierarchical position that they undergo Neurochemical changes that are analogous to the neurochemical changes that human beings undergo,
	that's so amazing, and that the same damn drugs that help us, antidepressants essentially, also cheer up defeated lobsters.
	I mean, it's such a, it's a staggering demonstration of the continuity of biology across, you know, span, unbelievable spans of time.
	You know, critics have Complain that I cherry-picked the data, but they don't know what the hell they're talking about.
	So, they don't.
	They don't.
	I studied the serotonin system for a very, very long time, and I know perfectly well that one of the things that it does is monitor your position in a social hierarchy.
	And it's more important than that because the serotonin system is a master control neurochemical system.
	It's like the conductor of an orchestra.
	Everything in your brain depends on the serotonin system.
	Which is why, think about it, an antidepressant decreases the rate at which neurons will re-uptake serotonin.
	You need serotonin to modulate the way your neurons work.
	You take an antidepressant, and the serotonin works a little longer.
	Okay, so what's the consequence of that?
	Well, let's say you're depressed.
	Okay, we've got to think about being depressed for a minute.
	So, when you're depressed, this is what happens.
	All you remember about the past is what's negative.
	So everything about the past is negative.
	All you can see in the present is what's negative.
	Everything about the present is negative.
	And nothing about the future is positive at all.
	And so that's interesting, eh?
	Because it means that something has shifted inside you, let's say neurophysiologically, that changes the way you view everything.
	Everything!
	Your entire past, the present, and the entire future.
	And what it essentially does is exaggerate negative emotion to a tremendous degree, that's depression, and suppress positive emotion.
	Now, there can be variance in that.
	Sometimes you see depressed people, and they come...
	You can think about your own mood in this way, you know?
	You might say, well, I'm not that sad, but I've just sort of lost my interest in everything.
	Okay, so that means that what's happened is your positive emotion system has been suppressed.
	Because the positive emotion system is what gives you that interest in things, that pulls you forward to action.
	Okay?
	And the negative emotion system, that's anxiety, that's a huge part of it.
	Frustration, disappointment, grief, pain, that kind of covers it.
	Anger as well.
	Though anger is a bit complicated because it's half a positive emotion and half a negative emotion.
	Which is why it feels so good to get angry, by the way.
	And why it also impels you to action, whereas most negative emotions stop you.
	So, in any case, if your serotonin system, if your serotonin function declines, then all of a sudden everything is negative.
	You think, well, isn't that interesting?
	How the hell can it be that something can change within you that changes everything?
	And the answer has to be, well, it must be a fundamental system that's been changed, right?
	Because if it changes everything, It has to be a system on which all other systems depend.
	And that is the case with the serotonin system.
	And that's really worth knowing, especially when you also know that the serotonin system counts where you are in the social hierarchy.
	And so there's this weird kind of one-to-one correspondence.
	Imagine a social hierarchy has ten levels.
	I don't care what hierarchy you're in.
	Most people's hierarchies are actually quite small.
	They sort of consist of the people that they compare themselves to, you know?
	Which is a strange thing, too, because one of the things that you see happening with really successful people is they actually don't get a lot more...
	A lot happier and a lot less unhappy as they climb the broad social ladder because the people they compare themselves to change.
	And so I can tell you a funny story about this.
	So I know this guy.
	I worked with him for a long time.
	His name is Dale Resi.
	And he's a hell of a guy.
	He's like six foot seven and he's like really charismatic.
	And he's been pretty successful.
	He built this company in San Francisco called Founder Institute, and it's only one of many things he's done.
	And it's operating in 165 cities.
	It's a school to teach people how to be entrepreneurs.
	He's trying to export Silicon Valley, what would you call it, know-how, technological and financial, to the rest of the world.
	And in like five years, he built 165 schools.
	Not physical schools, but school-like organizations around the world.
	And like, go try that!
	Like, that's really hard, you know?
	Just to build one is hard, but to do that in multiple languages all over the world, it's bloody well impossible.
	And then, at the same time, He built his organization, started 2,500 successful companies as a consequence of building this school.
	It's pretty good, you know, and he was having a rough time and was talking to me on the phone about, you know, he wasn't so happy about what he'd done with his life, and he said, geez, I compare myself with my roommate, and, you know, I've hardly done anything, and...
	His roommate was Elon Musk.
	It's like, I just laughed at him.
	I thought, jeez, really?
	That's what you're going to...
	You haven't done anything compared to Elon Musk.
	And you're depressed about it.
	It's like, yeah, well, you and the rest of the planet.
	I mean, look, what did Musk, what did he do?
	He invented an electric car.
	That's impossible.
	Then he made it work.
	That's impossible.
	And then he built an entire infrastructure to charge it.
	And that worked, and that's impossible.
	And they're good cars!
	And then he made them faster than any cars have ever been, and cheap, and so that's impossible.
	And then that wasn't good enough, so then he decided that he would compete with NASA, which is impossible, and build rockets at one-tenth the price they were building them, except bigger.
	And then he would shoot his car on his rocket out into space.
	Right.
	And he did all that.
	And it's like Adeo was thinking, I've hardly done anything with my life.
	It's like, oh!
	So, but my point is, is that, you know, you...
	Primates of our type sort of have a group size that we think about as our group of about 200 people.
	So like on Facebook for example, the probability that you're in something approximating reasonable constant communication with more than 200 people is low.
	You just don't have the time and you can't keep track of it.
	So our natural group is something like 200.
	Our groups tend to fragment when they get bigger than that.
	And that's also associated, by the way, with cortical size.
	You see this in primates, is that as primates develop larger brains, the group size that they seem to be able to manage also increases.
	That might be part of the reason why they develop larger brains.
	Who knows?
	But, anyways, it's about 200 people.
	And the problem is that as you get more successful, say, in the global hierarchy of 100 million people, the 200 people that you compare yourself changes.
	And so that you end up with $100 million and you're not very happy because your $50 million yacht is like 20 feet shorter than your friends, you know...
	150 million dollar yacht and so and you're high in neuroticism so that makes you frustrated and disappointed you know so anyways anyways it's important it's important to understand it's the message here the point of this is that you have a system the serotonin system base of your neurophysiology it also sets your brain up during embryonic development So it really is the master control system in many, many ways.
	And it counts where you are in your hierarchy.
	And then it decides how much positive emotion and how much negative emotion you should feel, on average, because of your position.
	And so like if you're, let's say number one is at the top and number ten is at the bottom, so you're number ten, you're barely clinging to the bottom of reality, Your brain says, look, it's dangerous where you are at the bottom of the hierarchy.
	You don't have a lot of friends.
	It's precarious down there.
	And so that means any little thing that goes wrong, any little error you make, that might be the end of you.
	And so you better be on guard and alert.
	And if something small happens, it better hurt.
	Because...
	It might be the straw that breaks the camel's back.
	And there's nothing pleasant about that.
	Of course, why would there be?
	Why would there be anything pleasant about a process that magnifies everything negative you feel about anything that might be wrong?
	And not just on one small dimension of negative emotion, not just anxiety, which is bad enough, But, anxiety and the pain-related emotions.
	So, pain-related emotions are pain, obviously.
	It generally indicates damage to a psychophysiological system, but grief is a pain-like emotion, and frustration is a pain-like emotion, and so is disappointment.
	Loneliness as well.
	Those are all pain-like emotions, and have elaborated out of an underlying pain system.
	So the negative emotion system is like a tree that has branches, and each of the branches is the separate negative emotion, you know, but they're all tied together at the root.
	Positive emotions are like that as well, except they're not quite as differentiated.
	And so, if your serotonin levels fall, because you've suffered a hierarchical defeat, then the positive emotion system gets flattened, so that good things no longer feel good, because it's dangerous to take risks, perhaps, if you're at the bottom of the hierarchy, and you're not doing very well, which is why you're at the bottom.
	Why should you have any trust in yourself?
	And you don't have any friends, and you're not well situated in the social world.
	You're not going to be enthusiastically moving forward to do new things, and so your motivation for engaging in life declines, and it can decline pretty much to zero.
	You know, if you see people who are seriously depressed, they say, well, I can't even listen to music anymore.
	It just sounds flat and dead.
	You know, if you talk to someone who says that about music, they're pretty damn depressed, because...
	Music is one of those things that virtually everybody always enjoys, you know, at least one genre or another.
	And, you know, a depressed person will describe even that the sensory quality has changed.
	And so, and then they also say they're absolutely overwhelmed with negative emotion.
	And so, okay, so that's a good thing.
	So that's a good, very interesting thing to know, is that you're...
	The manner in which one of your fundamental neurochemical systems is tracking your position in a hierarchy is crucial to the maintenance of your emotional stability.
	Okay, so now you want to keep that in mind because that's the first important point.
	Okay, so now the next thing I'm going to do is explain to you how it is that the way you look at the world is related to the emotions that I just described.
	And then I'm going to talk about how that in itself is related to the idea of hierarchy.
	And we're going to explore from there.
	So...
	When you look at the world, you don't, you see, you think that the world is made of obvious objects, and that you look at them, and then you think about what they are, and then you think about how you evaluate them, and then you think about how you use them, and then you decide to act.
	And that's not the case, because the world doesn't come segregated neatly into objects.
	And it took people a long time to figure this out, because when you look at the world, there it is, segregated neatly into objects, right?
	It takes no effort at all, except it takes half your damn brain to do that, right?
	And we're very visual creatures, we have great visual systems.
	And so, a tremendous amount of metabolic energy and evolutionary expenditure of time has gone into providing us with a visual system that just breaks the world up into obvious objects for us.
	And that isn't even right, because we don't actually see objects.
	What we see are more like tools and obstacles.
	We just think they're objects.
	Like when you come in here, I can give you an example of that.
	Okay.
	Think about a beanbag.
	Okay?
	Think about a stump and think about a stool.
	You say, those are all chairs.
	Okay, it's like, well, what do you mean they're all chairs?
	What do they have in common?
	Objectively speaking, a beanbag doesn't have legs.
	You know, a stump is rock hard and solid.
	A stool is something almost completely unlike a beanbag.
	Well, they're all chairs.
	Well, why?
	Well, the answer is...
	You can sit on them.
	And so, most of the things that we group together as objects, we group together as a consequence of functional utility, and not because they share a set of features that are objectively similar.
	And the reason that we perceive in that manner is because we don't really care that much about the objective features of the world.
	Because we have to care about being alive.
	And so what we actually care about is what things do.
	And so we tend to see things that do things and group together perceptually things that do things.
	And so, you know, when you walk into a room like this, there are a trillion things you could look at.
	You could look at the color variation in the carpet forever.
	If you came in here on a psychedelic, you might even do that.
	Well, it's interesting because one of the things psychedelics do is they decrease the degree to which you view the world in an iconic manner.
	And then you see the incredible complexity that's underneath everything and it's absolutely fascinating.
	Now, it's not good because you shouldn't come in here and just look at the carpet for an hour.
	It's not that productive unless you're trying to re-equate yourself with the fundamental wonder of the world, and there is some utility in that.
	Artists do that, but practically speaking, it's not that useful.
	What happens when you come in here, you have a goal in mind, you're going to watch what happens on the stage, you're going to listen, And so you only see what's relevant to that and so what you see are chairs and chairs are things you sit on and so they pop up into your perceptual field just like that and then you you know what to do with the chair you sit on it and partly the reason you know what to do with the chair isn't because you look at the chair and you think oh look a chair because you didn't do that when you came in here right now there wasn't a single one of you that came in here and
	looked at at the rows here and said Oh look!
	Chairs!
	Right?
	It's self-evident that they're there.
	What happens is that you look at the chair and it maps, the chair maps itself onto your body.
	Like you prepare yourself, the perception prepares you for the action.
	So as soon as you see the chair, which has a certain shape, so imagine it's a pattern that sustains itself in time.
	Right?
	Because that's what a chair is.
	It's a pattern that sustains itself across time.
	That pattern is transformed into a pattern of light and then that's transformed into a pattern on your retina and that's transferred into a pattern on your optical nerve and then that's transferred into patterns all over your brain.
	And some of those patterns are the patterns that allow you to perceive the chair consciously and some of them are patterns that enable your body to prepare to take this position in the chair because part of what your eyes do is map right onto your motor system so that you look and you know what to do and it makes you a lot faster, right?
	You look at something, you know what you're supposed to do with it, your body's prepared to do it And that's kind of also what it means to understand something.
	You know, if you look at it, and you know what it is, you know how to use it, it means you can just map the thing right onto your body.
	And so, people are very, very good at that.
	And especially as you develop expertise at something, you just get better and better and better at that.
	There are people that have certain forms of brain damage.
	Lermite Syndrome, I think it was called, if I remember correctly.
	also known as utilization syndrome and these are people who have A degeneration of the prefrontal cortex, which is the part of your brain that organizes your behavior, I would say, at the highest level of abstraction.
	So when you're thinking voluntarily about what you might do, and then you go do it, it's your prefrontal cortex that's thought that up voluntarily, and then organized the rest of your brain to go do it.
	And so, it kind of...
	One of the things it does is inhibit all the other things you might do.
	So one of the things that happens to people who have prefrontal damage, Especially if it's on the right hand side is they get very socially inappropriate because they have all sorts of whims and motivations and emotions that would normally be inhibited by, you know, attention to context let's say and the desire for voluntary activity and they lose that part of the brain and so they get disinhibited.
	They can get disinhibited to the point where they have to be institutionalized or jailed because they start acting so inappropriately that they can't be controlled.
	And so, anyways, Lermitt's syndrome is utilization syndrome, and one of the things that happens to people who have utilization syndrome, let's say they're in an old folks home, maybe it's a consequence of a degenerative neurological disease, and they're walking down the hallway and there's an open door, and they walk through it, they can't help it, because what do you do with a door that's open?
	You walk through it.
	Now, you don't if you're doing something else, right?
	But if you're not doing something else, because you haven't got the part of you that is helping you do something else, then the object just tells you what to do.
	You know, and you see this with little kids, too, because whenever you present them with an object, you know, they grip, they grab it right away.
	They often grab it and put it in their mouths, and they do that because their mouths are already wired up completely.
	When they're born, right?
	Both from a sensory perspective and from a motor perspective.
	And so kids are always cramming things into their mouth so that they can investigate them with their tongue and map what they are.
	It's important for them to...
	Well, that's how they learn about the world.
	And so...
	Anyways, if you have utilization syndrome, you can't not utilize things.
	So you can hand someone a bottle or a cup of water who has utilization syndrome and they're not thirsty and they'll drink it because It's a cup of water.
	And what is that?
	It's not an object.
	It's a thing to grip and drink.
	You know, and it's...
	How else can you look at this?
	This isn't a cliff.
	It's a falling off place.
	Right?
	And if you're one of those strange creatures who just think it's a cliff and, you know, you're...
	I don't know, whether you're abstracted in thought and you walk off it, then you're dead.
	It's a lot better to perceive it as a falling off place, which is what you do, because you know what it's like.
	You go somewhere that's steep and you kind of play with the edge a little bit.
	You can feel the falling off place map itself on your whole body.
	It's kind of a Strange, I suppose, and interesting experiment to play with that.
	You know, you might be back here and you think, yeah, that's not too bad.
	I wonder if I can get a little closer, you know?
	And maybe you can, and maybe you can get, well, maybe you can get too close, and then you're an evolutionary mistake.
	So, but, but, you know, you get, you get close enough.
	Maybe you peer over and you think, yeah, that's enough.
	And you can feel the falling off place map itself onto your body, and You perceive with your emotions and your motivations and your action systems way more than you think.
	It isn't object, picture on your eye, picture in your brain, thought, emotion, and then action.
	That's not how it works.
	You're representing the world at multiple levels in your nervous system at the same time.
	And you need to.
	And one of those levels is emotional.
	So, okay, so here goes for the emotional part.
	Now, look.
	And this is just as important as the serotonin idea, I would say.
	Which means it's really important, because the serotonin idea is really important to know that your position in the social hierarchy determines the balance between your positive and negative emotion.
	That's like a crucial insight into human behavior.
	And that we have a positive emotion system, and that we have a negative emotion system, and that they're separate.
	Those are unbelievably important discoveries, all made by the way, virtually all made by animal experimentalists, just so you know, because they deserve some credit.
	So, now, the issue is, how is your perception related to your emotion?
	And so, it looks like it, and this is much of this I learned from Jeffrey Gray.
	Now, Gray was a student of iZink, but he's also a student of someone named Norbert Weiner, who was a cyberneticist at MIT. He established the field of cybernetics, and he was one of the first people who, he was one of the founders of computational science.
	He was a big deal, Norbert Weiner, and his His work had tremendous impact on all sorts of fields.
	And he was trying to figure out how to generate autonomous, self-correcting systems.
	So, let's say, intelligent systems.
	And us among them, because we're autonomous, self-correcting systems.
	And so, Gray knew about Norbert Weiner's work, and he integrated that with Ising's work, and then with all the psychobiology.
	And he came up with a lovely Set of ideas that are extraordinarily useful, and so here's one of them.
	We live inside, we perceive, this is part of perceiving the world as a story, we perceive the world as a place to go from one Location to another.
	So you can imagine that we're on a journey.
	That's our life, is a journey.
	And it might be a 10 minute journey.
	It might be a 15 minute journey.
	It might be the journey of a week.
	It might be the journey of a month or the journey of a lifetime.
	And, you know, maybe what you would want is that the journey of a minute and 10 minutes and a week and a month and a year Culminate into the journey of a lifetime.
	You know, you could imagine that you would want some continuity across all that, so that there was some integrity to your existence, so that each part of what you were doing was related in some intelligible way to the whole.
	That would be an ideal.
	When you think of someone as being integrated, right?
	As having character, something like that.
	That's really what you mean.
	You mean that all the parts of what they do fit somehow into an integrated whole.
	And so that's kind of interesting to know too, because if you have a value system that's well structured, then all the little things you do are part of the big thing that you're doing, whatever that big thing is, and you are doing that big thing.
	Okay, so that's another thing to keep in mind.
	Now, so...
	You're looking at the world.
	You're a creature of action.
	You have to be a creature of action because you have to act in order to live because if you don't act, well, then you fall apart and you're overwhelmed by despair and negative emotion and you starve to death and you die.
	And so, not acting, not an option.
	So, unless you're willing to take the consequences I just described.
	So, you better look at the world as a place to act.
	And so, how do you act?
	Well, you're somewhere.
	You should know where you are, by the way.
	That's very helpful psychologically.
	You know, imagine you have a map, you're in a car, and you don't know where you are.
	You're trying to get somewhere, the map's not helpful, because you don't know where you are.
	And so even if you know where you're going, but you don't know where you are, the map isn't useful.
	And the same applies, the same really does apply to your life.
	If you don't know where you are, it's very hard to map out where you're going.
	And Well, that has consequences for emotion as well, because going somewhere is actually what activates the positive emotion system.
	That's what it's for.
	The positive emotion system is to Facilitate movement forward to a better place.
	That's its function.
	So that's so interesting, because it means that if you're not moving forward to a better place, then you don't have any positive emotion.
	And there's another conclusion that you can derive from that too, which is that if you don't have a value system, you don't have any positive emotion.
	Because a value system is what posits that one thing is worth doing more than another.
	And if one thing isn't worth doing more than another, then you don't have any place valuable to go.
	And if you don't have any place valuable to go, then you don't have any positive emotion.
	And so that's...
	So when people are criticizing hierarchies, which they do a lot...
	Especially politically.
	There shouldn't be hierarchies.
	It's like, really?
	Really?
	There shouldn't be hierarchies, eh?
	How is it that you propose to look at the world?
	Because you look at the thing that you think is most important to look at at that point.
	And if you couldn't, you wouldn't even know what to look at.
	You know, maybe you've seen...
	I've seen videos, YouTube videos, of cameras that have been dropped from space accidentally.
	Maybe it wasn't accidentally.
	It might have been part of an advertising campaign for maybe one of those You Go things.
	What do they call those?
	What is it?
	Yeah, GoPro, that's it.
	So they dropped one, I think, from like 30 miles up and it spun around all the way down and videotaped.
	It's like pretty dull because...
	Why?
	Well, because it's not pointed at anything.
	It's not directed towards anything.
	Like it's a perfectly objective portrait of reality that's absolutely pointless.
	Because nothing is zeroing in on anything.
	Even to organize your damn vision, even to focus your eyes, you have to have a value hierarchy because you have to be focusing on something that you think is important.
	And if you think it's important, it has to be more important than other things.
	In fact, it has to be more important than everything else at that moment because otherwise you wouldn't be focusing on it.
	And so there's no getting rid of hierarchies.
	Not unless you want to...
	Disregulate your perceptual structures entirely and sacrifice your emotional stability no more positive emotion plenty of confusion though and be immobilized and then also sit there and do nothing and suffer and die and so let the idea that there's something intrinsically wrong with hierarchies that's It's wrong.
	It's wrong.
	It's really deeply wrong.
	It's deeply and stupidly wrong at multiple levels.
	And so then the question becomes more appropriately, well...
	What should the hierarchy be?
	Not whether or not there should be one.
	And you know, it's not like I'm not cognizant of the negative consequences of hierarchies.
	It's not like they're all positive.
	You know, I mean, no matter what hierarchy we set up to pursue what goal, it doesn't matter what the goal is, some people turn out to be better at doing that, and some people turn out to be worse.
	and the people who turn out to be worse pay a fairly heavy price for being worse and so you set up a hierarchy there are people and more people at the bottom that are worse pay a fairly heavy price and so it's not like hierarchies are without cost and I would say to the degree that the left end of the political spectrum has a valid point their valid point is Pay some attention to the people at the bottom of the hierarchies because it's a rough place to be.
	And keep the hierarchies fair so that people can move up.
	And keep them focused on their tasks so they're doing useful things and aren't corrupted by people who are only seeking power.
	All of that.
	Fine.
	No hierarchy?
	That's a bad idea.
	That's a non-starter.
	Okay, so...
	Now, you're deciding to go somewhere, and it doesn't matter where it is.
	Small-scale journey or large-scale journey, because a large-scale journey is composed of a multitude of small-scale journeys.
	So, I'll give you an example of this.
	I'm gonna build up a moral hierarchy for you from the bottom, okay?
	And here's one of the things that's kind of cool about doing this, because It actually solves, to some degree, the mind-body problem, if you do that.
	And so, if you're sitting there thinking, geez, I wish that I could solve the mind-body problem tonight, then, you know, maybe tonight's your lucky night, because maybe that's what's going to happen.
	So, imagine that you're going to do something like prepare dinner.
	You might think that's a good thing.
	So, that's interesting.
	So, it's an action, but we'd also put a moral dimension on it.
	It's good to feed hungry people, yourself included.
	Maybe you do a good job of making dinner.
	That'd even be better.
	Not only are you making dinner, but you're making a good dinner.
	And so, that makes making dinner an even more impressive moral feat, because you could make some wretched, cold, dismal, massive, glutinous...
	Catastrophe and serve it with contempt and hatred to the people that are around you, you know?
	You could do that.
	And it would still be dinner, but, you know, it'd be a low quality.
	It'd be a low quality and all too common occurrence.
	But let's say that you do it right, you know?
	It's like you're going to put some effort into it.
	It's going to be delicious.
	That'd be nice.
	It's going to be nutritious.
	It's going to be attractive.
	And it's going to be served with the proper attitude.
	You know, you're happy that you have some food.
	That's kind of nice.
	Hasn't been all that long that everybody had food.
	And certainly hasn't been all that long that everybody had a vast variety of high quality food.
	And so a little gratitude would be nice.
	So you got your...
	So even...
	Back to the task at hand.
	You're going to make dinner.
	So the question is, well, what exactly do you do to make dinner?
	And it's kind of an abstract idea to make dinner.
	Let's go make dinner.
	You can say that abstractly, but when you actually go to make dinner, it's not abstract anymore.
	You go into the kitchen, and you open the refrigerator, and that's not abstract, right?
	That's not mental.
	It's physical.
	You're interacting with the world.
	You grab the door handle on the refrigerator, and you open it.
	You don't really know how you do that.
	You know, I mean, I know you know how to close your hand and move your arm, but you don't know how you know how to close your hand and open the door.
	Your mind, that's where your mind runs out.
	It knows how to operate your voluntary musculature, but it doesn't know how.
	So your mind grounds out in your body.
	And I'm going to make the case that morality does that as well.
	It's part of this idea that the world is an action-oriented place.
	You open the fridge, you think, hey, carrots!
	We're going to need some carrots.
	So you take the bag of carrots out of the fridge, and you put them on the counter, and you peel the carrots, and again, same thing, bit of expert behavior there, you know, because you've peeled carrots before, and it's a bit deterministic, because you've learned how to do it habitually, and so you peel the carrots, and you take out the parts that aren't so edible, if you have any sense, and then you take out your knife, and maybe you have a nice knife with a nice wide blade at the end, so you can Chop up carrots.
	It's kind of fun to do that if you're good at it, because you can, you know, make 100 slices in 20 or 30 seconds if you've practiced it.
	And you take your carrot and you go...
	And then you have all these...
	You don't have to make that noise, by the way.
	But you can, if you want.
	And then, if you're good at it, then all the carrots are pretty much the same thickness, and that's kind of cool.
	You got a little expertise there and you got all the carrots lined up and maybe then you put them in some foil and you add a little butter and some, I don't know, cumin and a bit of pepper and make them into a foil packet.
	This is what we do in Canada.
	You might do that.
	You guys barbecue, I've heard.
	And then you throw the things on the barbecue and you wait until they're Steam puffs up the foil and you think, done.
	And if you have any sense at the same time, you know, you're cooking the steak and it's done at the same time and the potatoes, it's all done at the same time and it's caramelized nicely so it's got a bit of sweetness and, you know, you've got the right amount of butter for the potatoes and you serve it and that's good.
	That's good.
	And it took you a long time to learn that.
	And there's a hierarchy there, right?
	So the hierarchy is, the lowest part of the hierarchy is the muscular movements say that you, You employ when you're slicing up the carrots.
	There's nothing abstract about that.
	And then there's the sequencing of the carrots in the foil and the placing them on the grill and all of that.
	That's where the rubber hits the road.
	And you think, well, hey, I made a good dinner.
	And then you might think, well, what's making a good dinner a subset of?
	You might think, well, You know, if you're a good friend, good parent, maybe one of the things that you could do is make a good dinner.
	Like, it's not the only thing.
	I make a good dinner, and so I'm a good friend.
	It's like, no.
	But maybe that's one-fifth of it, or a tenth of it.
	It's some non-trivial proportion of it.
	Necessary, but not sufficient.
	Is that right?
	No.
	No, that's not right.
	It's not necessary.
	Anyways, it's one of the things you could do to be a good friend.
	And then, you know, if you have a friend, maybe he makes you a good dinner now and then, and there's some reciprocity there.
	And so you're capable of engaging in that reciprocity.
	And that's another thing that might make you a good friend, or a good parent, let's say.
	So let's say there's ten things like that at that level that make you a good parent.
	It's like, well, what?
	You can make a good meal.
	You can clean up the kitchen.
	That's a good thing to be able to do.
	You can clean up the bathroom and the rest of the house.
	So there's maybe five...
	You know how to clean.
	Well, that's part two of being a good parent.
	You get along with your partner.
	You know how to negotiate with them.
	And some of the things you negotiate about are those lower level tasks that you're going to engage in.
	It's like, well, I made dinner.
	Maybe you could clean up the kitchen.
	And, you know, there'd be some reciprocity there.
	And if you're a good person, which is getting a little higher up in the value hierarchy, then you can engage in that kind of negotiation.
	So, and that is exactly what you would be negotiating, is those tasks.
	And so, well, so maybe you're the sort of partner that can communicate with your partner, and maybe you're the sort of parent that can bring their children into the kitchen and teach them the mechanical elements of Food preparation.
	Starting at the bottom, right?
	I mean, maybe you're not going to give them the sharp knife to begin with, but you might get them to set the table.
	It's like they're two and a half.
	It's like table needs to be set.
	Here's a spoon.
	Kid, take the spoon.
	The kid can do that.
	He knows what a spoon is.
	You don't say, set the table for a dinner party of 20 to a two and a half year old, right?
	Because they haven't got that level of abstraction mastered.
	You say, You see this?
	Yes.
	Pat, pat.
	Here's a spoon.
	Yes.
	Can you say spoon?
	Spoon.
	Good.
	Good.
	Take the spoon.
	Take it.
	Good.
	You know where the table is?
	Yes.
	How about if you go put the spoon on the table?
	It's like, yeah, I can do that.
	So the kid wanders over and puts the spoon on the table and then maybe comes back and looks at you.
	And they look at you to think, well...
	Did I get the spoon on the table right?
	Did I do it right?
	That's one thing.
	Did I undertake the action correctly?
	That's one thing.
	And was it a good action, right?
	Did I do something that was morally appropriate?
	They're trying to check both of those out at the same time.
	And you pat them on the head and you say, hey, good job, man.
	You're growing up.
	And by that, you also signify to them that growing up is a good thing.
	And that's also important.
	And then you say, well...
	Here's another spoon.
	You're going to encounter lots of spoons in your life.
	Why don't you go put it on the table, too?
	And so, you know, they put the spoons on the table, and then maybe you show them how the spoons might be arranged, and then maybe you trust them with a fork, and then they can do the same thing, and then with the knife, and, you know, a dull butter knife sort of thing, at least to begin with, and with the dishes.
	And you teach them bottom-up, right?
	Reflex upward.
	You teach them the mechanics of preparing something complex.
	And so they have all those micro-skills embedded in them, so to speak.
	They're part of their psychophysiological ability.
	And at some point, with a certain amount of training, might take three months, four months, six months, you can say, Set the table.
	And then the kid knows exactly what to do.
	They don't know what to do until they have all those micro routines mastered.
	And so that's kind of cool, because what it indicates is that the command, the macro command, set the table, is only something that has a meaning when the micro processes that are motoric have already been mastered.
	And that's a really good way of thinking about how you're constituted.
	Like, you have a lot of skills, things you can do with your body.
	Action-oriented skills and perceptual skills.
	And once you have them As part of you, then other people can refer to them, and you understand each other.
	And that's partly how we understand each other, is that we share a hierarchy of skill and perception that's built from the bottom up to a very high level of abstraction, and also a very high level of isomorphism, meaning it's the same for everyone.
	So, okay, I'll explain that momentarily here.
	So, now, We already established that you have to do things.
	And I'm going to elaborate on that claim a little bit.
	So, you have to do things.
	And you have emotional systems that help you decide whether you're on the right path.
	Because if you have to do things, you're on a path.
	If you're going somewhere, you better be on the right path.
	And so then you need something to tell you whether or not you're on the right path.
	And that's what your emotions do.
	Your positive emotion and your negative emotion.
	They're orienting systems that tell you whether you're on the right path.
	And the path is defined by the goal.
	So you need a goal.
	So that's the first thing to think about.
	It's really, really, really, really important to think about this.
	If your life is not the way you want it to be, it's possible...
	That your goal is not what it should be.
	And that's a fundamental religious teaching, by the way.
	I would say that might be the fundamental religious teaching of Buddhism.
	Right?
	Because the Buddhists teach in some sense that everything is Maya or illusion.
	And it's a complicated idea, but partly what it means is The way the world manifests itself to you is in large part determined by your aim within the world.
	And so by switching aim, you can switch whether something is positive or negative.
	Like, let's say you come home and you find your wife's having an affair.
	It's like, man, you're not happy.
	You're one bitter, twisted, angry person.
	And, you know, you go down to the bar and you have a few drinks and you thought, God, you know, I really never liked her.
	And you think, hey, this is the best day of my life.
	My wife had an affair.
	It's like, I'm free.
	I know this is a ridiculous story, but you get my point, you know.
	It's like, you could make a switch like that.
	You think, well, isn't it so strange?
	It's like half an hour ago, I was like bitter and twisted and angry and resentful and anxious and...
	And frustrated and disappointed because there was something I wanted and I wasn't getting it.
	And now all of a sudden I've decided I didn't want that and everything is switched around.
	And so that's a miracle that that can happen.
	And so in Rule 6, you know, the rule is...
	Put your house in perfect order before you criticize the world.
	Well, so what's the idea?
	It's like, well, if the world isn't up to your standards, let's say, first of all, you might ask yourself about that to begin with.
	It's like, the world isn't up to your standards.
	Really?
	And that's the world's problem somehow.
	It's not more likely that it's, given that you're talking about the world here, it's not more likely that There's some chance that it's your problem.
	And that if you put yourself right, then the world wouldn't appear to be a problem.
	And I mean, it's a profound question, you know?
	And I'm not throwing that out cynically or sarcastically.
	I mean, I've been disenchanted with the world a fair number of times personally.
	I'm including myself in the list of people who make that error.
	But, you know, knowing that your emotional reactions are dependent on your aim, And that that's actually technically true does immediately open up the question, hey man, if things aren't laying themselves in front of you, out in front of you, the way that is necessary for you to live a full and engaged life and not be cynical and bitter and twisted and cruel and vengeful and disappointed and all of that,
	it's just possible that you're not aiming at the right thing.
	And man, that is a question, that is a question worth asking.
	Well, it's the question people do ask.
	It's like, well, what's the purpose of life?
	Well, it's the same question.
	What should I aim at?
	Those are the same questions.
	And, you know, if what you're aiming at is producing nothing but unrequited misery for you and everyone else, and it's a downhill bloody spiral into something approximating hell, then there is some possibility that you should think that perhaps your aim is off.
	And I don't want to overplay my hand on that either, too, because I know perfectly well that, you know, if you're suffering, if you're depressed, if you're miserable, it might be a consequence of really bad luck.
	You know, like, people get sick.
	And good people get sick, right?
	Everyone knows that.
	You know, good people, they get sick and they die.
	And so you can't say, well, if you're miserable and sick, it's because there's something, you know, bad about you.
	Because...
	Then that would be the case for everyone.
	Always, whenever they get ill, and you could just blame ill people.
	It's like, well, it serves the right that you're sick because you're a bad person.
	It happens a lot, actually, with ill people, you know, and it's an unfortunate thing.
	So I know there's an element of chance to all this.
	And I don't want to downplay that.
	You know, we are...
	Dust in the wind, to use a terrible cliché from a 70s rock song.
	We're blown hither and thither by events that are somewhat beyond our control, but that's still not the point.
	The point is that, to a large degree, you can determine the manner in which the world manifests itself to you by changing your aim.
	And so then that opens up, that opens up the entire domain of philosophy.
	Think, what good is philosophy?
	And people think that all the time.
	What good is philosophy?
	It's like, hey, philosophy is about value.
	Well, what use is value?
	Well, value determines your aim.
	Well, who cares what your aim is?
	Well, your aim determines the manner in which the world lays itself out to you emotionally.
	Well, who cares about that?
	No one says that.
	The argument stops there because no one, especially no one who's been seriously hurt or seriously depressed, like in pain, no one ever says, oh, well, who cares about that?
	Because if you can say that about your pain, all that means is you actually haven't been in pain.
	Because if you're in enough pain, you will not say that.
	That's for sure.
	So, you need to know what to aim at.
	So, Now you aim at something, you've got a goal, and then you see that you're making progress towards the goal.
	That's a good thing.
	That makes you happy.
	It actually, technically, there's a system, dopamine system, neurochemical system, same system, by the way, that cocaine and methamphetamine and opiates activate, which is why people like to take those drugs, and it tells you that your You're moving forward in the manner that you should be according to the dictates of your plan.
	Doesn't necessarily tell you whether you have a good plan.
	That's a more complicated problem.
	Because who knows if you have a good plan.
	But one thing that you could know is that a plan is better than no plan.
	That's a really useful thing to know, especially if you're kind of drifting.
	It's like, well, I'm going to find myself.
	It's like, no, just pick something and move towards it.
	And as you move towards it, you're going to succeed and fail, specifically.
	And then you're going to learn something about success, specifically.
	And you're going to learn something about failure, specifically.
	And then you can learn what you use to fix your plan.
	So a stupid plan is way better than no plan, and you're likely to have a stupid plan, or at least to be able to make one, so that's good news for everybody.
	You can make a stupid plan, and so I would say, make a stupid plan, and then implement it.
	Not any stupider that it has to be, you know, you could think about it a little bit, but then implement it, and have your successes and failures along the way, and learn from them, and then you can rejig the goal.
	You can move the target.
	That's fine.
	That's part of the game.
	It doesn't have to be fixed.
	It's a moveable target.
	And maybe what you're trying to do is to move the target to an ever better place.
	So you're moving towards a target, and at the same time you're moving the target.
	Right?
	And you're trying to move the target towards something like an ultimate ideal.
	You're trying to find out what that ultimate ideal is, and part of the way you figure that out is by moving towards a target, and by learning about success and failure along the way, because then you can inform yourself with regards to what might constitute a reasonable aim.
	And so that's the reason to go out in the world and, like, make some mistakes, you know?
	And then you're going to, and so it's okay.
	It's okay to make the mistakes.
	It's not so okay not to learn from them.
	Because then you make the mistakes again.
	That seems pointless.
	And so you're moving towards wherever you're going.
	And it's working.
	And so you get some positive emotion.
	You get some motivation from this dopaminergic system that adds zest to life.
	It adds interest and engagement and meaning to life.
	It pulls you into life.
	And that's worth thinking about, I would say, because if you think about it, you know, you might wonder about whether or not you should be engaged in life.
	And then if all of a sudden you're doing something, and because you're doing it, you get engaged in life, then...
	It seems like that might be the very definition of a good thing.
	It's evidence.
	The engagement is evidence that you're actually doing a good thing, a worthwhile thing in life with all its suffering and misery and brutality.
	It's like, you've got a pathway, you've got a name, You're moving forward.
	You're engaged.
	Excellent.
	Your nervous system, very deep down.
	This dopaminergic system.
	It's associated with a part of the brain called the hypothalamus.
	It's a really, really old part of the brain.
	It's not some new thing that popped up like 15,000 years ago.
	It's ancient.
	It's there to orient you in the world.
	It's part of the instinct for meaning that I talked about in chapter...
	I think it's chapter 7.
	Do what is meaningful and not what is expedient.
	It's a deep, deep instinct.
	And way down, way down in your psychophysiological structure.
	Not as far down as the serotonin system, but like next level up.
	And so if it's saying, hey man, you're on the right track, it's like, that's worth noticing.
	It's worth noticing.
	Now you can criticize it out of existence.
	You can question your aim continually.
	It's one of the...
	What would you call it?
	Dangers of our capacity to abstract.
	But, you know, if you're a smart person who doubts, you also might be smart enough now and then to doubt your doubt.
	And just to notice and to pay attention.
	And something I explain to my clinical clients and my students often.
	It's like, if you're trying to put your life together, watch yourself for a couple of weeks.
	Like you don't know who you are.
	Because if your life isn't together, you don't know who you are.
	So just watch yourself like you don't know who you are.
	And notice now and then if you're engaged in something.
	You know, and you kind of have to wake up because if you're engaged in it, you don't quite notice, right?
	Because you're engaged in it.
	But afterwards you might think, oh, I just spent an hour and I didn't notice that it was an hour.
	I was in it.
	That's good.
	You're in the right place at the right time, doing the right thing.
	There's something about that that's right.
	And maybe, like, you're not in good shape and that happened to you like 15 minutes once in two weeks.
	It's like, that's pretty dismal.
	And the rest of the time it was wretched.
	It's like, okay, fine.
	Well, maybe in the next two weeks you can see if you can do it for half an hour.
	And then maybe for 45 minutes.
	And then maybe for an hour, right?
	You can start practicing being in that place.
	That's a very useful thing to learn.
	It's like, oh look, I'm interested in what I'm doing.
	I'm engaged in it.
	Now, how did I get here?
	Where am I exactly?
	And how did I get here?
	And how could I stay here?
	How could I be here more often?
	Those are all questions you have to ask yourself.
	Well, that's the beginning of philosophy as well.
	And you think, well, why bother?
	And the answer is, well, you want to be engaged in your life?
	Well, why would you?
	Well, it's positive.
	It's analgesic.
	It fights off pain.
	It quells anxiety.
	It gives you purpose.
	It's good for you, practically speaking.
	Generally speaking, if you have an aim and you're moving forward, you're moving forward to something that's psychologically valuable, but also practically valuable.
	If it's really a good aim, also it's good for you now, tomorrow, the next day, the next month, because you're smart enough to, generally smart enough, to calibrate yourself so that Things that are really bad for you don't have that engaging quality.
	Now, it's not perfect, especially if you've messed yourself up psychologically by lying to yourself in all sorts of different ways.
	But it's still not a bad orienting system.
	And then the other thing you can also notice is, well, when are you doing things that make you feel really awful?
	By your own standards.
	It's like, oh, look, I just did something.
	I had some interaction with someone, and now I feel awful.
	It's like...
	Well, maybe you could not do that.
	Whatever it was.
	You might have to think it through.
	What were the routines that constituted that ill-advised set of actions?
	And maybe you're going to have to think really deeply about it, you know, because God only knows how much of your personality structure is involved in that error.
	But if it made you wretched, it made you feel like life wasn't worth living, then that might be a hint that that wasn't a good thing to do.
	And so then maybe you could start doing more of the things that make you engaged and less of the things that make you hate life.
	And that's worthy of practice, let's say.
	You might think about that as a fundamental ethical requirement, or I would say it's a fundamental form of religious meditation.
	That's a better way of thinking about it.
	And so then you're on the path.
	That's the straight and narrow path.
	It's like, I'm moving forward.
	I've got an aim.
	I'm moving forward.
	As I move forward, I'm engaged.
	It's bloody well worth walking down this pathway.
	And, you know, on the left of me is terror and horror and hell and pain, and I'm avoiding that.
	And to the right of me, perhaps, is ego and arrogance and the things that can get out of control with regards to positive emotion.
	But I've got that balance right.
	I'm on the right pathway.
	Okay, now we think about what might constitute the right pathway.
	Well, I can tell you a pathway that works for me to some degree, so this is a value structure that's characteristic of me, of things I do.
	I type, because I write, and so that's pure action, right?
	I type letters, I type words, I type phrases, I type sentences, I type paragraphs, I type chapters, I write books.
	And then people...
	And then I talk about the books and people read the books.
	And the reason that they can understand the books is because we're a lot the same.
	You know, like, there's a lot of things that have to be the same about you and me before I can write a book that you can read.
	And I have to be able to take them for granted.
	And so, the reason I'm telling you that is because there's an important...
	Relationship between my hierarchy of values and your hierarchy of values if we're going to be able to communicate and if we're going to be able to occupy the same place at the same time.
	You know, so if I'm writing a book like Twelve Rules for Life and it has a discussion about what constitutes the good in it, then I have to start with the presupposition that We share some fundamental intuition about what constitutes the good, or my words will fall on deaf ears.
	Okay, and it's partly because...
	And this is maybe the relationship between the social world and the psychological world that I wanted to talk about.
	As I build up my hierarchy of skill and ability, perception and emotional regulation, you know, from Slicing carrots upwards, you know?
	I'm a good cook.
	I'm a good parent.
	Maybe I'm a good man.
	Maybe I'm a good person, you know?
	And all of those cover a broader and broader range of abstractions and abilities.
	There has to be a relationship between that and what other people think.
	You know, because, look, if you're...
	Your kid, you teach your kid to set the table.
	And then he goes to someone else's house and sets the table and he gets a swat.
	It's like, well, what's the consequence of that?
	Well, the consequence of that is that the kid is going to be unhappy.
	Well, why?
	Well, it's because the kid did a lot of work...
	Building up all those separate skills to undertake that complex activity.
	And it really is a complex activity.
	You don't have a robot at home that sets the table.
	You know, you have a cell phone and it's smart, but it can't set the damn table.
	It's complicated to do that sort of thing.
	And so your kid had built this complicated neurological structure as a consequence of reward.
	Primarily, because reward helps build neurological structures.
	Built this whole structure, and now what he's hoping is that all the work that went into building that structure is something that other people will appreciate as well.
	So that's where you need the isomorphism between the intrapsychic structure, the psychological structure, and the social structure, which is why we have to have a shared social reality.
	This is partly why I think the postmodernists went off the rails so badly with their insistence that the world was only language.
	It's like it is in some sense very important that you construe the world the same way I do even though there's a very wide range of ways of construing the world.
	We come to some negotiated agreement about what's good and what isn't so that when I do things that I think are good you also think they're good so that I get rewarded for my good behavior and I get let's say punished for my bad behavior because that's often a relief as well by the way and so we have to have our own internal structure of values that we're pursuing because otherwise we don't have any meaning in our life and that's no damn good and then it has to be nested inside a shared structure of values that's
	similar so that when we act out what we have learned to be good we're treated by the world as if that's good and then we have peace That's the definition of a functioning political system.
	We've organized a moral game, a very complex one, and then we master it through reciprocal interaction with one another.
	We internalize it so that it regulates our emotions.
	Then we act it out in the world, and if there's a concordance between the way we act it out and the way the world responds, then we're okay.
	Because there's nothing more...
	disturbing to you than to act out a high-order moral good.
	Let's say you're working really hard at your job, for example, and you're hoping for a promotion, and let's say you deserve a promotion by all reasonable standards, and then you don't get one.
	You know, it's taken, it's given to, I don't know, it's given to the boss's mistress or some damn thing.
	You know, it's given to someone who doesn't deserve it by the canonical rules of the moral game.
	And all it does is devastate you.
	And the reason that it devastates you is because it disrupts the relationship between the internal moral hierarchy that you've built and the collective hierarchy And everything you have is staked on maintaining that isomorphism.
	You know, and it's the same even in intimate relationships.
	You know, if you do something good for your wife or your husband, you know, you go out of the way, maybe to make a nice meal, and they come home and they punish you arbitrarily for some tiny fault, maybe with the dinner, it's very disheartening.
	And the reason is it violates your faith, first of all, in your own Intrapsychic hierarchy.
	Second, in the structure of the social hierarchy.
	And third, in the match between them.
	And it's the match between them that's really important.
	We do not like mismatch between what we expect, especially in terms of reward, especially when we've really worked at it, and what we're delivered.
	Right?
	And so that's partly how we...
	It's partly a complicated explanation of how we regulate our emotions.
	You know, we regulate them by aiming, that's important.
	We regulate them by walking the straight and narrow path, but then we also regulate them by being fortunate enough to be in a situation where if we walk the straight and narrow path properly, then other people respond positively to us.
	And then you have this lovely harmony.
	And it's a right way of thinking about it.
	It's a musical way of thinking about it.
	There's you composed of this very unbelievably complex nested set of patterns.
	Beautiful patterns that you spent forever working on.
	And then they're nested inside a social structure that's also patterned in the same way.
	And those are working harmoniously together like a dance.
	And that's perfect.
	It's the meeting of the individual with society.
	And it's the secret to harmonious emotional regulation.
	And more.
	And to cooperation.
	And to proper competition.
	And to movement forward practically in the world.
	All of that.
	And so, okay, well, I'll close with just a description of what a hierarchy might look like, and a brief description of how it is that you calculate when you make a major mistake.
	So, my hierarchy would be something like this.
	I type letters, I type words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, I sequence the paragraphs, I make chapters, I write books.
	It's all Coherently laid out towards some higher order aim.
	All of that.
	And the aim is, as far as I'm concerned, to share my clinical knowledge and to educate people.
	And that makes sense because I'm a clinician and a researcher and a professor.
	And so if I was going to do that, I've decided I'm going to do that.
	So that's what I'm doing.
	And hopefully that's a good thing.
	Hopefully people respond to it as if it's a good thing because then that's a good thing for me and it's a good thing for them.
	And so that seems to be like the very definition of a good thing.
	And I'm trying to set things straight, right?
	I'm trying to set myself straight by writing carefully.
	I'm trying to set the culture straight by saying what I believe to be the case.
	I'm trying to set other individuals straighter by communicating with them.
	I'm trying to ensure that we can live more harmoniously in our culture and in the world.
	And you think, well, those are good things to have at the outermost reaches of your value hierarchy.
	You know, my friend of mine was talking to me about bricklayers the other day, and he's trying to restructure a major company at the moment, and we were talking about how to motivate people.
	He said, well, let's say you're a bricklayer.
	It's like, you know, one damn brick after another.
	How are you going to be excited about that?
	Well, let's say you're a medieval bricklayer.
	Right?
	And it's 1500.
	And you're working in one of the great early Renaissance cities in Europe.
	And it isn't a wall you're building, it's a cathedral.
	It's going to take 350 years.
	And why are you doing that?
	Well, it's for the ultimate glory of God, whatever that means.
	And so, you're not putting one brick down after another.
	It's like you're involved in this unbelievably complicated moral structure that stretches, really stretches all the way up to heaven itself, so to speak.
	And each of your minor actions, you know, your local actions, is imbued with the spirit of that entire moral structure.
	Well, that's a philosophy.
	It's like, well, do you have a meaning in life?
	What's the meaning of life?
	Well, hopefully it isn't just unrequited suffering and malevolence.
	We could dispense with that as much as possible.
	That might be a good start.
	But then to aim high, well, that seems to be reasonable to aim as high as you can.
	And we've laid out things that could be aimed at.
	You could constrain yourself, you know.
	There are things you're not doing and things that you shouldn't be doing.
	You stop doing the things that you shouldn't be doing and start doing the things you should be doing.
	That's a good start.
	Wake up enough so that you can set the structures around you right.
	It's your moral obligation as a citizen, your responsibility and your divine duty, I would say, from our cultural perspective because in the West everyone is regarded as a sovereign individual.
	The fate of the state A sovereign individual on whose shoulders rests the fate and the health of the state, right?
	That's the fundamental presupposition.
	Otherwise, well, why do you get to vote?
	Just to make a mistake?
	Well, no, that's not it.
	You're supposed to be awake so that the ship of state continues to move forward in the appropriate direction, and somehow we've decided that's up to you.
	Why?
	Well, because we've also decided, hey man, You can do it.
	And not only that, no one else can.
	And so that's something to know and might be something to take seriously.
	It's like, who knows what the hell you'd be if you got your act together.
	And I think you would be.
	Like, you'd be a force to contend with, you know?
	You'd have constrained the malevolence in your own soul.
	And you'd have started to take advantage of the potential that's around you.
	And to build yourself out of that potential into God only knows what, you know?
	And then maybe with that wisdom you can set the structures around you in order.
	At least more in order than they are.
	Or maybe to disintegrate them a bit when they need it and to restructure them so they're even better than they are.
	And you can push back nature in its horrible form and invite it forward in its positive form and make things better for you and for your family and for your community.
	And you can approach the unknown itself and you can explore that, the potential that's out there.
	And you can bring back the treasure that's part of the unknown potential.
	And you can distribute that.
	And that is what you can do.
	And not only that, it's what you need to do because you need to have a meaning in your life, a name, a value structure that's of sufficient value.
	Potency and magnitude to justify the limitations and the trouble that life constitutes, right?
	This is no trivial business that we're involved in, right?
	We're all in this up to our necks, literally.
	It's a mortal game.
	You're all in.
	And to play it wrong is to risk suffering and hell.
	And I'm not talking about afterlife.
	I'm not talking about something metaphysical.
	You can generate plenty of hell right here around you.
	Plenty.
	An unlimited amount.
	And so you can Move towards that direction, or you can move towards a positive direction.
	And you can orient yourself, and you know, you can know, you can learn.
	This is why the postmodernists are so incorrect.
	It's like, look, you need an aim.
	You need an aim.
	You cannot organize the way you look at the world without an aim.
	It's not optional.
	And then the question is, well, what should the aim be?
	Well, Probably not to radically increase the amount of misery and suffering that you experience in everyone else.
	I mean, maybe you want to go that route, but...
	And people do, but I think they only do when they become bitter and they give up, you know?
	And they make mistakes they know they're making, right?
	It's conscious decision to go down that route.
	It's not like they think that's okay to begin with.
	Their aim's wrong.
	It's like, straighten out your aim.
	So, there's an old idea, this idea of sin.
	Sin is a word that was derived from a Greek word, hamartia.
	And hamartia is an archery term, and it means to miss the target.
	And so you think, well, how can you miss the target?
	Well, you have no weapon.
	Well, then you miss the target.
	You have no target.
	You have no aim.
	Well, then you miss the target.
	You don't pick up your bow.
	Well, then you miss the target.
	You don't draw it back.
	Then you miss the target.
	You don't practice and miss many times, right?
	Because you have to do that to develop the skill to hit the target.
	So you're not willing to take the risk to miss.
	You do none of that.
	And so you miss the target.
	And that's the sin.
	And then you miss your life.
	And then what happens around you is that, well, there's far more hell than there has to be, and there's much less heaven than there could be.
	And it's on you.
	And that's part of your, what would you say, your divine value, let's say.
	That sets you aside, along with everyone else, as something, someone, some being that even the law itself has to respect intrinsically.
	And it's marked out in our culture by the sovereignty that you possess.
	And the notion that there's something in you that's made in the image of God.
	Something that can confront the unknown and to create habitable order out of chaos and potential.
	And to do that properly.
	And that's all true as far as I can tell.
	And it's all necessary to know.
	It's coded in the deepest stories that are at the base of our culture.
	And we're in danger of not understanding them and not believing them.
	And it's a big mistake because they're heavy and profound and weighty and fundamental and necessary.
	Because you have to stand on something that's solid or everything is sand and you fall in and you're done.
	And so is everything around you.
	Well, so that's...
	What was the name of the talk?
	What was the name of the talk?
	I don't even remember what the hell I titled it now.
	Um...
	Part of it is, yes, the relationship between your internal psychological structure and the social world.
	That's what's part of it.
	And then, the manner by which you estimate magnitude of error.
	I suppose that's the last thing I should say.
	You have a value hierarchy.
	We already described what that is, ranging from the trivial motor actions that you undertake to the highest order aims.
	What makes you upset?
	Your determination of how far up in the hierarchy the error you have made has disrupted things.
	You know, so, you tell your kid, you didn't put that spoon on the table quite right.
	And then they're a little upset, you know, but it's...
	whatever.
	You twist the spoon, it's fixed.
	Or you say, you know, you're a rotten kid, and you've always been a rotten kid, and I don't see that there's much hope for you in the future.
	It's like, well...
	Well, people do that when they argue with people they love, and they do that quite a bit.
	It's like they've taken them out at the highest level of their value hierarchy, right?
	And that makes people really upset, and the reason for that is, well, it wipes out their whole map.
	And so there's also a relationship, this is an interesting thing to know, between how upset you get emotionally, and how important it is, how important the thing that you're pursuing is that's being criticized.
	And with a practical note, you know, if you're arguing with someone, Here's something you can think about.
	You want them to change their behavior.
	The first thing you want to do is, you want to sort of pat them on the head and say, you weren't horrible all the time in the past, and you're not horrible all the time now, and you probably won't be horrible all the time in the future.
	So we'll just get that out of the way.
	But there's this small thing that you do, They could use a little improvement and here's how you can improve it and I would be satisfied and happy with that if you tried it Would you be willing to?
	And then, they improve incrementally, and over time, maybe, if you're very careful with such things, and you don't do them too often, and you also allow the other person to do that to you as well, then you get incremental improvements without taking, chopping people off at the knees, so to speak, when you're criticizing the way that they're behaving.
	All right.
	Well, how to conclude all that?
	You can't look at the world without a name.
	easy.
	Literally.
	You can't even perceive it.
	You cannot regulate your emotions without an aim.
	The better your aim, the more precise your aim, The more elevated your aim.
	Remember in Pinocchio, when Geppetto wants to turn Pinocchio into a real boy, he wishes on a star.
	It's a strange thing, eh?
	But everybody just accepts it.
	It's like, well, yeah, if you've got a puppet, you just made a puppet, and you want to turn it into a boy, the logical thing to do is open the window and wish on a star.
	Everyone knows that.
	It's like, none of that makes the least bit of sense, obviously.
	Except metaphorically, but we do understand it because we can watch that and it makes sense.
	There's something magical about it.
	And there is something magical about it.
	Because the truth of the matter is that if you want to transform something that's nothing but a wooden-headed puppet into something that's a fully functional, autonomous, moral, autonomous individual, then what you do is you elevate your eyes above the horizon to the highest point of light that you can perceive and you aim at that.
	And that works.
	And that works for you, and it works for your partner, and it works for your children, and it works for the world.
	Thank you very much.
	There was one here I thought was quite...
	Oh, who would wear when in a bare-knuckle brawl between you, Ben Shapiro, and Justin Trudeau?
	Well, Ben's a malevolent little creature, so...
	So he might have some dirty tricks up his sleeve, but he doesn't have much of a reach on him.
	Trudeau...
	Trudeau...
	He can box.
	So he'd probably get me on technical skills, and I'm quite a bit older, but...
	I think I'd get up a lot of times.
	So, well, hopefully it won't come to that.
	But I tell you, there is part of me that thinks it would be interesting.
	All right, all right.
	So, and there was 137 of you who thought that one was worth discussing.
	So, that's good.
	So, is the sole purpose of religious ideas to propagate the species?
	No.
	It's not the sole purpose.
	We discussed that a lot today.
	The sole purpose of religious ideas, the sole purpose, first of all, the questioner assumes that there is a sole purpose, and I don't think that that's accurate, so you want to be careful about reducing something complex to a single explanation.
	That's generally the purview of ideologues, right?
	They have one idea, and it just covers the world, and the world is It's a little bit too complicated to be covered by one idea, unfortunately.
	The purpose of religious ideas, as far as I can tell, is to remind us who we are.
	You know, we don't live that long, right?
	And we're really complicated.
	It's not easy to learn how to be a person.
	You know, I mean, it takes you like 40 years before you can learn to be a person enough so that you can get out of your mother's basement.
	So...
	It's hard.
	That's half your life before...
	Well, maybe not 40, but certainly sometimes.
	It takes a long time to learn how to be a human being.
	And we're very, very complicated.
	We're way more complicated than we can understand.
	You know, and we've been watching each other for a long time.
	Watching ourselves.
	Telling stories about ourselves.
	Trying to draw some wisdom from our self-observations.
	To teach to our children and to our grandchildren and so forth.
	And we've codified them in all sorts of strange ways in these memorable stories, fairy tales and myths and religious stories, all of those things.
	And what are they there for?
	They're there to remind us who we are.
	Because we need to know who we are.
	And you know, we talked about that a little bit tonight.
	I believe the notion that...
	I believe the most important idea that's ever been generated is the idea that men and women are made in the image of God.
	I think that a culture that isn't predicated on that belief, knowingly or unknowingly, and better, knowingly, is doomed to absolute catastrophe.
	Because there's no reason to assume that there isn't something about us that's of transcendent value.
	I mean, If for no other reason than the fact of our consciousness, you know, like here we are, we're aware of what there is.
	And it isn't even obvious that there could be what there is if there wasn't something that's aware of it.
	And so our very awareness plays an integral role in the fact of being itself.
	You know, metaphysics aside, it's hard to see that anything could be more Vital than that, more important than that.
	And then, it isn't only that we apprehend reality, you know, and therefore give it shape merely by our perceptions.
	It's also clearly the case that we partake in its shaping.
	And we call ourselves on that.
	You know.
	You know that you feel guilty and ashamed when you're not doing what you could be doing.
	When you're not living up to your potential.
	When you're not making the most of what's offered to you.
	You understand at a very deep level that you're...
	You're breaking...
	There's no other way of saying it.
	You're breaking a divine commandment.
	You're offered this unbelievably rich possibility.
	And it's there for you to grapple with.
	And...
	You say, well I don't believe in such things, in the divinity of humanity, or in divinity itself, or in the divine for that matter, but you can't fool yourself with that kind of argumentation.
	It doesn't stop you from feeling guilty and ashamed and worthless and disappointed and frustrated and angry and vengeful.
	At the fact that you're wasting your life and you're noticing it and that you're making yourself much less than you could be and that you're making things around you worse for everyone else and like perhaps There's a psychopath or two in the audience who just doesn't give a damn and who is focused only on instantaneous gratification for their most primordial impulses this moment,
	right?
	But it's not a sustainable mode of being and it's very rare.
	And so the purpose of religious ideas is to wake us up It's to remind us who we are.
	Right?
	It's to remind us that we're imbued with a spirit that can be best described in some sense as immortal.
	It's the spirit that allows all of us to be conscious, that we all participate in simultaneously, that gives rise to the world and shapes it.
	And then to alert us to the Vital importance of the responsibility that goes along with that.
	Because I do believe that we shape the world.
	We move it towards heaven.
	Or we move it towards hell.
	And we do that with every conscious decision we make.
	And it moves in the direction that we determine.
	And so that's what religious stories are there to remind us of.
	50% of Queensland police are now required to be women.
	As a bloke applying, how do I speak intelligently and effectively into this situation?
	What percentage of Queensland police are now currently women?
	Is it like 20% or 10% or does anybody know?
	Is it a low percentage?
	It's what?
	It's five.
	Okay, so this basically means that as a bloke applying, you don't have a hope in hell.
	Right?
	Which is why 200 people thought this was an important question.
	Well, as far as I'm concerned, it's like, what the hell are you sitting around for?
	It's time for some political action.
	There's no excuse for this whatsoever.
	There's no excuse whatsoever for equality... for equality of outcome measures.
	Thank you.
	They're ideological to the core.
	And they're very oddly applied.
	It's like, what percentage of women are bricklayers?
	I know I talked about bricklayers already tonight, but it's a good example.
	I went on the U.S. If you go on the statistical site that's operated by the U.S. government, you can look at occupations by gender.
	And it's an interesting thing to do.
	Here's an interesting thing.
	You know the most common occupation for women back in the 1950s was secretary.
	You know what the most common occupation for women is now?
	It's secretary.
	They don't call them secretaries now.
	It's usually executive assistant or something like that.
	And that may indicate some elevation, genuine elevation in status.
	But fundamentally, the most common occupation hasn't changed in, what's that, 70 years.
	So that's pretty interesting.
	Bricklayers.
	99.9% of bricklayers are men.
	Okay, so, and then it's the same for like heavy duty construction equipment operators and people who are working with heavy machinery tend to be men.
	People who are building things, especially outside, tend to be men.
	Overwhelmingly so.
	Far more even than engineers.
	There's a fair number of female engineers.
	It's like, what are we going to do here?
	It's like, we're going to enforce gender equality of outcome across the board.
	Sex equality of outcome across the board.
	Is that the theory?
	And how are we going to do that?
	Exactly.
	Or are we going to just do it hit and miss?
	It's like, oh well, it's policemen this year.
	Well, how about bricklayers?
	It's like, why don't we pass a law, like tomorrow, that now 50% of bricklayers have to be women.
	It doesn't bloody well matter if the women want to be bricklayers.
	That's irrelevant.
	Who says anything about want?
	It's like...
	The only reason that women don't want to be bricklayers is because they've internalized their misogyny.
	Right?
	Well, that's the standard answer for that sort of gender inequality.
	And where is it going to stop?
	So, I think, I've thought for a long time that the left can go too far.
	And I think that if you don't think that the left can go too far, then your head is so far stuck down in the sand that you're, that...
	I need an ending for that metaphor.
	I was thinking about something far ruder and just made it polite.
	Anyways, I guess that's the ending to it.
	Obviously, the left can go too far.
	The 20th century is a testament to that.
	Venezuela is a testament to that.
	Okay, so when does the left go too far?
	Because the left isn't particularly interested in answering that question.
	And I would say the left goes too far when they insist upon equality of outcome legislation.
	Now, equality of opportunity is a different thing, because I think that if you have any sense, imagine that you're just greedy, you know, and self-centered, and that you want the most for you.
	So, we won't be too optimistic about your motivations.
	And I don't think that most people are like that, by the way.
	I think that people are, by and large, pretty good at reciprocal interactions, and they do like to have, you know, nice things for themselves, but they're often hard on themselves.
	But they care about the people they love, and they care about their families, and they're pretty good at reciprocal interaction with other people too.
	So I don't think we are just innately selfish to the core.
	It doesn't work.
	But let's assume you are for a moment.
	Well, and then let's assume that, you know, there's a bunch of things you don't know how to do, and there's some people out there who have some talent that might be able to do them, and if they did them, then you'd get to benefit.
	You know, like, you don't know how to make an iPhone.
	Well, some of you might, but not the whole thing.
	But, you know, some people know how to make an iPhone, and you get to have one.
	And so, stopping someone who could make an iPhone from making one for some arbitrary reason because of their sex or their ethnicity or their race just seems...
	Completely counterproductive.
	And it's pretty obvious if you look around the world and you look at countries that are developing economically.
	Here's one good indicator.
	You know, the countries that have...
	There's a very high...
	There's a very powerful relationship between the rights granted to women and the economic viability of a given country.
	It's very tightly associated.
	So that's quite cool, because it seems to indicate, well, maybe openness to the participation of women in traditional societies is also an indicator of openness to the new, you know, to the novel.
	And so that's a good predictor of economic success.
	Or maybe it's that women have 50% of the talent and we could use the damn talent, so how about we invite them into play too?
	That seems perfectly reasonable.
	And the same goes for, as I said, for ethnicity and for race.
	And so I think you have to be a damn fool not to open up the hierarchies to those who are competent.
	Right?
	To the maximum possible degree.
	And that it's an error not to do that.
	But to insist that the outcome is the same?
	It's like...
	It's so...
	It's...
	It's vile.
	As far as I'm concerned.
	For a variety of reasons.
	The first reason is, there's no indication that any attempt to do that in the 20th century ended up in any other manner than catastrophe.
	So that's the first thing.
	The second thing is, think it through.
	Think it through.
	It's like, okay, 50% of every occupation has to be men and women.
	Okay, you're really willing to do that, are you?
	And we could start with bricklayers.
	It's like, how are you going to do that?
	You're going to start forcing girls when they're like 13 to learn to lay bricks?
	And how are you going to force them to do that?
	Because maybe they're not interested.
	I can tell you something that's quite interesting about the STEM fields in women.
	So, as society has become more egalitarian, so their equality of opportunity legislation is more widespread and arguably more effective, And so that would be in countries like Australia, but more particularly in countries like the Scandinavian countries, because they've taken it farther than anywhere else.
	Fewer women go into the STEM fields.
	Fewer.
	Not more.
	And so if you rank order countries by how free women are, there's a negative relationship with how probable it is that they'll go into science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields.
	Now, and the evidence for that is very, very strong, by the way.
	This isn't just a few casual studies.
	These are large-scale international studies with tens of thousands of participants replicated multiple times by researchers who did not expect to find that, nor want it.
	So it's reliable.
	Okay, so why?
	Well, there's a bunch of different theories.
	One is that the average IQ of men and women is the same.
	And that's quite clear.
	But the male curve is flatter than the female curve, and that's the, what do they call that, the enhanced male variability hypothesis, which has almost now become impossible to publish on because it's politically incorrect.
	And what it suggests is that there are more men at the very upper end of the intelligence distribution and more men at the very lower end.
	And that explains some things, like why there are far more boys, for example, who have learning disabilities than there are girls.
	And there's some evidence that men are more neurologically vulnerable than women because they're more specialized neurologically.
	And the advantage to that is this enhanced variability but the disadvantage is the specialization makes them less robust and resilient neurologically.
	Be that as it may.
	That's one possibility.
	And I think there's a fair bit of evidence for that.
	And it's often the case that differences at the extreme, even if there aren't differences in the middle, differences at the extreme actually make a big difference.
	You know, because like, let's say you're going to be an engineer.
	Maybe one person in a hundred is an engineer.
	And you have to be really interested in gadgets to be an engineer.
	You know, you have to be more interested than 99 out of 100 people to be an engineer.
	And there's not that many people that are like that, and most of them happen to be men.
	People have criticized the male variability hypothesis because they've looked at the performance of girls in mathematics in junior high school and it turns out that girls do pretty much as well as boys do in mathematics in high school in junior high at the upper end and so those would be the people you'd expect to go into the STEM fields right because they have the What would you call it?
	They have the intellectual ability for it.
	But what you see is that the women who have high mathematical ability also tend to have high verbal ability.
	Whereas the men that have high mathematical ability tend to have less high verbal ability.
	And so one of the things that implies is that the women who have high mathematical ability have more vocational choice.
	And so they're statistically less likely to go into the STEM fields.
	So that's kind of an interesting...
	No one expected that, so that's kind of an interesting observation.
	And then there's another observation, too, that's also extraordinarily germane.
	There's a variety of ways of looking at the psychological differences and similarities between men and women.
	And the first thing that you might want to know is that men and women are more similar than they are different on all the personality dimensions.
	So the overlap is quite strong.
	The biggest differences are there's five personality dimensions.
	I mentioned them.
	Extroversion, neuroticism, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness.
	The biggest differences are in Neuroticism.
	Women are higher in negative emotion, and that kicks in at puberty, because it's not the case for boys and girls.
	And they're higher in agreeableness, which is partly why there are far more men in prison, which is another thing we might think about.
	It's like, what is that?
	Is that gender discrimination, precisely?
	I'm bloody well dead serious about this.
	I went to a NATO conference 25 years ago, and there were a group of female scientists there who claimed that the Psychiatric diagnostic criteria for childhood conduct disorder should be revamped because there were far more boys diagnosed with childhood conduct disorder than there were girls.
	And that's the precursor, by the way, to adult antisocial personality disorder.
	Or to criminality.
	And the way that you equate it by sex, if you want to do that, is you get rid of the violence.
	So one of the criteria for childhood conduct disorder is kicking, hitting, biting, and stealing.
	Criminal behavior.
	If you take that out of the diagnostic criteria, then you get the same number of boys and girls.
	And that's what they were advocating for 25 years ago.
	And I thought, you people are completely out of your bloody minds.
	Because the only reason that we ever came up with the diagnosis for childhood conduct disorder was because we were worried that the violent kids would become violent adolescents and that they would become violent adults.
	Which is exactly what happens, by the way, because Aggressive behavior is unbelievably stable and difficult to alter.
	But they were perfectly willing to gerrymander the diagnostic criteria so that the sex difference disappeared, even though that would completely invalidate the utility of the diagnosis.
	And their fundamental claim was the reason that there were more men in prison than women was because it was a form of arbitrary prejudice.
	And this is absolutely insane!
	So, you know, it is the case, if you look at domestic violence statistics, by the way, women hit men more than men hit women, just so you know.
	It actually doesn't matter, mostly.
	Not that it's pleasant.
	That isn't what I'm saying.
	It's that men are a lot stronger than women.
	They have a lot more powerful upper bodies.
	And so when men hit women, the consequences tend to be very dire.
	And when women hit men, well, they're less dire.
	And I'm not saying that it's okay.
	But I am pointing out that, you know, this does happen.
	It's not the point.
	The point is that, you know, we're concerned about criminality because we don't want violent people attacking other people in the streets, disrupting the harmony of society, and generally corrupting the integrity of the state.
	And so we put them in prison.
	And most of them are men!
	It's like 10 to 15 to 1, and it's like that worldwide.
	Okay, what?
	50% are now going to be women?
	So, seriously, look, if the theory is the only goddamn difference between men and women is a consequence of the oppressive social structure, that cuts both ways.
	And what that means is that if 85% or 90% of the people who are in prison are male, then the prison system is unbelievably prejudiced against men.
	So we're going to act on that?
	And how?
	That's easy.
	We lower the standards of criminal behavior for women until we equate the number of men and women who are imprisoned.
	Look, that's what you're going to...
	Yeah, you know, you think that's funny.
	That's what happens in the military, especially at the higher ends, you know, in the operations like Navy SEALs or the places where there's tremendous emphasis on physical readiness.
	The only way you can equate by gender is to reduce the performance criteria that the women have to attain.
	So if you can do it there, then why the hell can't you do it for criminality?
	If the goal is equality of outcome, where are you going to stop?
	And that's easy.
	If the goal is equality of outcome, you stop when the outcomes are equal.
	And not just the desirable outcomes.
	You know, you hear about the fact that, well, if you look at the C-suites of major corporations, that a majority of the people are men.
	It's like, well, the first thing I think about that is, well, what the hell's your point?
	It's like, that's hardly anyone, right?
	99% of men, 99.9% of men are not on the C-suites of large corporations.
	So we're talking about a very tiny proportion of the population, and they're strange people.
	Right?
	They are.
	They're not normal people.
	And the reason I say that is because, first of all, they're very intelligent, most of them.
	So that takes the first slice.
	And the second slice is, all they do is work.
	Like 80 hours a week.
	And not everybody wants to do that, and why should they?
	It's like, whoever said that you should work 80 hours a week?
	But if you're going to rise to that level in any profession, I don't give a damn what the profession is.
	If you want to hit the top one-tenth of one percent in your profession, then all you do is work.
	And not only do you work, you work hard and efficiently, and you do it better than anyone else.
	Plus, you need the talent, and you need the intelligence, and you need the luck, and you need the health, and all the other things that might go along with that.
	And so the fact that a majority of them happen to be men, that says nothing about the structural, what would you call this?
	It says nothing about the fundamental structure of the state, as far as I'm concerned.
	And why are we concentrating only on the upper end?
	Like, why is it that it's the CEOs that count and not the bricklayers?
	You know, and there's all sorts of things we can talk about with regards to that.
	That's straightforward.
	Okay, so what's the difference between men and women with regards to occupation?
	Okay, men are way more likely to work outside.
	Okay, so now, Half the people who work outside have to be women.
	Men are way more likely to work in dangerous jobs.
	They're overwhelmingly more likely to be injured and killed on the job.
	It's like, okay, time to equate for that.
	I don't know exactly how we're going to do that.
	Maybe we just injure women randomly.
	Until it's equal.
	Or we force them to take the jobs.
	And I don't know how we do that.
	Okay.
	Men are way more likely to move.
	That's another thing.
	They're also much more likely to work longer hours.
	Women are way more likely to work part-time.
	That's particularly true, by the way, in Scandinavia.
	And the reason they do that is because, well, you know, they hit their 30s, early 30s usually, and they think, Especially often if they're successful.
	I've seen this happen with women all the time.
	As I worked with women in law firms, really unbelievably accomplished women.
	Because the firms would send us their best performers and our job was to see if we could make them a little bit more productive.
	Because if they were high performers and they were even 5% more productive, it was unbelievably valuable for the company.
	And so all the law firms, they just lose all their women in their 30s.
	And it happens everywhere.
	And the reason it happens is very straightforward, and all the female lawyers know this.
	They won't talk about it publicly, but they all know it.
	They did very well in high school.
	Then they did very well in university.
	Then they did very well in law school.
	Then they went and articled.
	And they did extremely well as articles, as articling students.
	Then they got hired as associates and did very well.
	And then they made partner.
	And it was just like linear progression.
	And there wasn't a lot of questioning that went along with it because most of the people who do that are very conscientious.
	So they're duty-bound.
	And so, you know, they hit it, they have an aim, and they just execute, man, they execute.
	And conscientiousness, by the way, is the best predictor of success In law, after intelligence.
	And so you have to be a conscientious person, detail-oriented.
	And so, if you happen to be a woman like that, extraordinarily hard-working, very, very bright, you just make a beeline to partnership.
	But then you're 30.
	And that's a problem.
	And it's a problem for a bunch of reasons.
	The first is, You've hit the target and now you're surrounded by these guys and women who are partners and you thought that was a hell of a fine place to be.
	But when you get there you find out that it's rough.
	It's aggressive, it's competitive, it can be nasty.
	And most of the people who are doing it are not happy.
	It's hard work.
	I've met lawyers who like what they're doing but they're rare.
	It's very competitive and it's very harsh.
	And you're going to work, man.
	If you get paid $750 an hour, you're working whenever there's work to do, no matter what else you have to do.
	And, you know, you might be making $350,000, $400,000 a year.
	That's good.
	But you're probably married to someone who's making approximately the same amount of money.
	So you actually don't need that much money.
	And you certainly don't need more.
	You might want it, but you don't need it.
	And then you start thinking...
	Why the hell would anyone in their right mind do this?
	Which is the right question, by the way, to ask about the people who sit in the C-suites in major corporations.
	It's like, they're working 70-80 hours a week for 30 or 40 years, you know, that often they sacrifice their families for it and everything else, and they're a particular kind of person who does that, usually hyper-conscientious, but like, the question why you would do that is a really good question.
	How about you have a life?
	How about you have a partner that you see sometime?
	How about you have some children that you actually get to see and take care of?
	And so then you think, well, maybe I don't need to work 80 hours a week to continue my rise through the, you know, upper stratosphere of the law profession.
	I'll pull back, I'll find an eight-hour-a-day job, or a part-time job, and I'll have a family.
	Well, that's what's happening in Scandinavia.
	It's like, is that okay?
	Or not?
	And if it's not okay, what are we going to do?
	We're going to enforce gender equality there too, are we?
	You know, they've enforced gender equality at the board level in the Scandinavian countries.
	It hasn't made a goddamn bit of difference to the number of women who are in management positions in Scandinavia.
	And the reason for that was, that wasn't the problem.
	It wasn't systemic oppression.
	There's a multitude of reasons that men and women take different pathways in their careers and they're becoming more evident.
	Another one is that women, so women are different, higher in negative emotion, higher in agreeableness, about the same in conscientiousness.
	Openness and extroversion.
	There's some differences, but they're relatively minor.
	Pretty much the same in terms of intelligence.
	Doesn't look like it's an ability issue for most professions, with the exception of the extended male variability hypothesis.
	That might have to do with, like, upper level mathematical genius.
	But we can leave that aside, because it's debatable.
	There is another difference between men and women, and this is the biggest difference that psychologists have discovered, and that's of interest.
	Men are more interested in things, on average, and women are more interested in people, on average.
	And the difference is actually quite big.
	It's one standard deviation, which means that, it's a little more than that, which means that if you were a man as interested in people as the typical woman is interested in people, you would have to be more interested in people than 85% of men.
	And if you are a woman who is interested in things as the average man is interested in things, you'd have to be more interested in things than 85% of women.
	So it's actually quite a big difference.
	And so thing interest is a big determination of interest in the STEM fields.
	And women just aren't that interested in things.
	Now some of them are, and they go into the STEM fields, but most of them aren't.
	So what are you going to do about that?
	So, you know, one of the things they're trying to do in the Scandinavian countries is they're going to really start to socialize boys and girls different in preschool.
	Okay, so that's good.
	So that's what you're going to allow.
	This is the idea.
	You're going to discount the notion entirely that there might actually be differences between men and women.
	Even though that wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing.
	But we're going to discount that.
	And we're going to assume that all the differences in outcome are a consequence of systemic oppression.
	And then we're going to give enough power to the state so that they're going to transform the way that our children are treated when they're three and four by teachers, by preschool teachers.
	And we're going to try to rejig the entire culture predicated on that theory.
	That's the solution.
	Well, if you don't think that that's a totalitarian solution, then you are not thinking.
	And this is the last one I'll answer.
	A little ornery about these questions tonight, apparently.
	What do you think of our state governments teaching gender fluidity concepts to primary school children?
	This is what I think.
	I think if your damn primary school teachers knew how to teach kids to read, they wouldn't have to bother teaching gender fluidity.
	Thank you, everyone. everyone.
	Thank you.
	It was a pleasure talking to all of you.
	You have a lovely city, by the way, and it's been a pleasure being here.

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