Decoding the Gurus - A Sense-Making Odyssey, Part 2: Jordan Peterson, John Vervaeke & Jordan Hall

Episode Date: September 25, 2025

Matt and Chris once again take up their oars and plunge deeper into the recursive whirlpools of contemporary sensemaking. Picking up where Part 1 left off, having grappled with conscience, touchstones, hierarchies, and normativity, we return to the sensemaking labyrinth to see just how many more words and concepts the combined powers of Peterson, Vervaeke, and Hall can stretch to breaking point.This second leg of the voyage allows us to chart more of the universal sensemaking grammar, with its biblical scaffolding, liberal use of metaphors, and frequent exhortations to ascend Jacob’s ladder. But alongside Peterson's predictable biblical musings, you can also thrill at unexpected treats like John Vervaeke unveiling how finite transcendence connects to inexhaustible intelligibility and Jordan Hall explaining that even silence can be a form of sensemaking.Expect symbolic snakes, dangling ropes, and ecological psychology refashioned for mystical ascent, Augustine rediscovered through Plato, and culture reframed as an alcoholic parent. Or if you prefer, enjoy detours into atheists and their Luciferian egos, the sacred role of play, and the profound revelations that can be drawn from childhood disappointments at McDonald’s and grandfathers complaining about Nixonian duplicitySo join us for the final leg of the Sensemaking Odyssey. Sharpen your mind, get ready to traverse through 3D space, and prepare for an encounter with the Logos... in the context of listening to a podcast.SourcesA Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall | EP 532

Hello, welcome back to the codeinecker's podcast, we're an anthropologist and psychologist, This is the greatest minds of the world has Rolfo try to understand what they're talking about. Chris, Kavanaugh, you, you're my co-host, that's you. Yes. Matt, Brown, that's who I am. I'm here. It feels like it's hardly any time at all since I last spoke to you. I know.

It's a bit weird during an introduction when we're kind of a continuation episode. This is big brain stuff, Chris. We're not lying when we're saying we're listening to the greatest minds. We've got three of them. And we're still figuring, we're still handling it, we're still processing. We're still on topic one. Why are they having this conversation? We're still working on the definitions.

But we'll get there. We'll get there. So Chris, Chris, Chris, Chris, help me out here. Help everyone out. Where do we leave off? Yeah. Where are we? What did we establish?

Where have we gotten to from the first part of it? conversation. Yes. So where we left off was that they'd bring discussions of conscience. And when you're talking about conscience, you're talking about like adhering to verticality. If you're Jordan Peterson, you're talking about normativity in search of what is true and beautiful. If you're John Verveke and if you're Jordan Hall, it's hearing a sour note or a child trying to pick up a P. But all of that was, you know, we were going down the Russian nesting dolls for the various definitions. And where we got to was that John Verviki was talking about unifying meta narratives. I think that's what it was.

And they were talking about the difference between ideals. But he mentioned the word touchstone. Ah, yes. One thing you should never do when you're talking to Jordan Peterson is introduce a new word because he's going to get stuck on it. Yeah. So, and Jordan had gave his explanation for why he thought that he had used the word touchstone. So the touchstone is something that has a transformation of the axiomatic assumptions on which

the viewpoint are based. That was what Jordan Peterson said and that's where we left it. Now, Verviki was kind of agreeing, but he's got. some points to note, you know, some caveats to add to that. So yes, it's axiomatic assumptions, but it's the axiomatic assumptions, but I think it's woven with, I don't know, if you'll allow me to extend it, axiomatic skills, axiomatic states of mind. Yes, yes, yes. The axioms wouldn't have to be propositional. That's right. There's paradigmatic. Even perceptual, even perceptions can change, right? That's right. Right. Yeah. And so the touchstone is,

I want to be in contact, I want to do this comparative, reflective thing that makes me aware of the inexhaustible intelligibility, that which is most real. So compare a real object to a dream object. The dream object, like you could do some Jungian analysis, but you could. You could. But let's not, so I think he's probably going to say that real objects are more real than dream objects, which I think we can all get on board with that's probably true right that's where you think he's going well i mean you you did get there at some important clarifications that it's not just about axiomatic assumptions it's about axiomatic skills axiomatic steeds of mind and paradigmatic paradigms actions not necessarily propositional but that's key i thought i thought that point was key

that the that the that the axiomatic paradigms wouldn't necessarily need to be propositional I was thinking that just before he said it, actually. So was I, and, you know, a good point to note about the inexhaustible intelligibility, also good. Good to get these terms in. Good, did nobody stopped on one of those because any one of those, it's like, you know, it's like mine sweeper that could have been like, well, what do you mean when to say inexhaustible? But yeah.

Each one of those is a potential rabbit hole slash wormhole for them to delve into. So it's good that they gingerly stepped over them. Chris, I mean, jokes aside, I didn't actually understand any of that. Did you? Oh, I mean, well, to be honest, I didn't follow a huge amount there because it felt like it was just pointless babble, like techno babble. Because, yes, I understand that they're wanting to say it's actually broader than the specific category. but each of those words that they invoked

that they will have a specific semantic web that they attach to it. And who knows what that is? So, yeah, you know, they're just talking about why he used the word touchstone. Let's keep a grip on what's going on here. The touchdown thing wasn't even a key component. It's not connected to what they were talking about just before.

But anyway, if you're interested, that's why he mentioned used the word touchstone. Oh, they're not done, Ma. There's more. When he used the word touchstone, it made Jordan think about something else. And it is a bit Jungian. It is a bit Freudian.

So I'm sorry, you said, you know, let's not. But, well, let's. And I think that, that, well, I think you have a fount of inexhaustible intelligibility. And I think that is ultimately the touchstone. It's the sense of contact, and it gives us the comparative, reflective judgment of what is most real. So, you know, that reminds me of the representations of Moses' staff. I was thinking about Moses' staff when you were talking about that first stage. I think you described it not as orientation.

Origin. Origin, yeah. So Moses' staff is a symbol of center point, right? That's right. Right, right. And it's got a stable element, which is the tree, let's say. it's the tree of life, it's the staff of life, but it also transforms into a serpent, right?

So it's order with the lifeblood of chaos still within it. And wisdom, because the serpent's also wise. Right, yeah. Well, serpents wise partly because it sheds its skin and can transform entirely, right? Exactly. So Moses' staff, this is relevant to your concern about pathological super-egos. That's right.

You know, because you could say, and maybe this is partly why, the left, like the left suffers from that, I think, to a large degree, because when the left examines hierarchies, they see corrupt power. Yeah. So, you know, you, you were asking Matt about, you know, what, so the touchstone point, I just, I think it's worth noting that now we're on to Moses staff and serpents. And serpents are smart, Matt, because they could shed their skin. That's true. That's very true. I've forgotten. What were they talking about before they got distracted by the word touchstone? Normativity. That's right. So like you need a touchstone of something, right, in order to compare all the things. And then they got on the shadows and sticks. And then

when Verviki was talking about touchstones, it'd be a Jordan think about Moses' staff, because, of course, I guess. And I like that he, you know, of course, as I have pointed out in the previous segment, and we'll point out more so as we go on. Jordan Peterson mentions religious story or Bible figure, talks a little bit about psychology,

mentions something about verticality. He said hierarchies. And then he links it to like politics. This is what the left gets wrong, right? So the universal grammar of sense making or Jordan Peterson's particular brand of it continues to manifest itself in this conversation. So, yeah. Yeah.

But the way that the conversation proceeds is like a kind of a dream sequence of, you know, segues things just, you know, one to the other. It, I don't mean to be too mean here, but honestly, it does remind, me of a schizophrenic word salad. Like, this is what, like, I've read transcripts of schizophrenics babbling, and it's not that different from this.

Okay. Well, look, what about this comparison? The market, couldn't this be a French cafe late at night with a bunch of nihist poets? I mean, they're not nihilist, but I'm just saying, like, you know, I feel like, don't you have people that engage in

this kind of symbolic yes-ending in different spheres than schizophrenics. Like schizophrenics are proficient at it, but I feel like artists and dorm room students are also relatively proficient at this. I think

I think we can compromise. I think it's on the boundary. I think it's on the boundary or an incredibly yeah, pretentious atsy-fazzi, incredibly academic y'wank and schizophrenia. That's probably

where I'd place. Intellectual masturbation. That is the way I would put it as well. That's what it is. But, you know, so we're making progress and we're getting

somewhere. So we were on touchstones but we've raised the issue of hierarchies or I mean Jordan as we're hierarchies. No, we know, of course, from Jordan's other work. I just bet wordlessly.

That hierarchies are good. Hierarchies are good, yes. Hierarchies are absolutely good. But power is bad. It's not about power, right? That's right. You got it. So let's hear Jordan outline that point again. But then the question arises, if some hierarchies aren't degenerated, into power, then what's the principle of the hierarchy, right? And you can see echoes of that in the culture war that we're having right now about the definition of merit, right?

What's, well, what's the principle that rules if it's not power, right? Now, this is why I've been playing with this, too. So some of its voluntary self-sacrifice, but that's also where I think ideas of plays start to become important. Yeah, I think it's, I think what we've, I think it's not power. I think it's this, like love, beauty, reason, play are all what, what Frankfurt calls voluntary necessities. They're compelling, but they're not compulsive. Yeah.

We say, I would do no other, but I feel totally free in doing it. Okay. Well, that sounds good, a voluntary necessity. So that's good. So play, play is good. Hierarchy is good. Love beauty, reason. Yeah.

They're all good. and merit merit is also good right that's right that's the kind of thing that puts you puts you up there on the hierarchy and that's why it's not corrupt because you know you belong you belong in your place on the hierarchy

exactly like when you look at America today and you see the people at the top of the Trump administration you are seeing people operating purely on merit as far as I can see so much merit not they're not there because of like sycophancy and party politics and all that kind of thing it's Merrick. They've ascended competency hierarchies. RFK Jr., Dan Bongino, Pam Bondi,

all at the top of the game. That's, that's it. So, yes, Jordan's nailed that one. So, okay, they've invoked there, Matt, the concept of play. Okay. Yeah. Somebody said the word play. So, well, inevitably, this happens. I think it would be reasonable to make play central to that notion. because my suspicions are, this is informed partly from studying Pankseps, psychology of play, right? And play is a fragile motivational state. It can be disrupted by the dominion of virtually any other motivational state.

But you added beauty and love and like higher order values to that. But I guess my question would be, is what you're doing with those higher order values in that state of voluntary, what did you cry out, voluntary? Voluntary necessity. Voluntary necessity. Is that state of voluntary necessity? Is that the definition of play? I think it's the definition of the genus that play belongs to. Okay.

Yeah, I think they're all ways of tracking. I'm proposing the alternative to power. I like it. The reaction that was good. Okay, okay. Yeah, that's really good. Because is this a definition of play that is being invoked the voluntary necessity?

Ah, is that, well, it's the definition of the genus that play belongs to. And I like, I like, like, like, Jordan Hall hasn't got a chance to say much. But he like, nice, hmm. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, that's a, that's a good way to say that something is like kind of definitionally connected, but is it a definition. Well, you know what to say no, because that would. If I light all kinds of discourse. Rule omega.

That doesn't that doesn't apply there. But so again, I mean, you know, this is illustrating to the end of degree this point. But like, they're just leaping from word to what I mean, touchstone, forget about that. That's in the past, man. That's fine. We're way beyond that now. Yeah. Now we're on play.

Now we're on play. Now we're on play. What play has got to do with the half dozen other things that they've covered is unclear. But let's proceed. Well, let's proceed. Yes. And this next map will highlight, you know, like we talked about the different kind of references and the hobby horses that they have. Now, John Verbeki, he's a guy that likes nature and martial arts and this kind of thing. Jordan Peterson, he's a man that likes the pie ball. So listen to this exchange. I find this telling. Look, think about the moments when you feel called. You come around the corner as you're tracking through the wilderness and unexpectedly uncontrollably, there's the sunset that's beautiful. And you enter into a moment of resonance and you feel that you're in contact

with something more real. See, reality has to have an element that exceeds us, that is beyond us. And we have to have a responsivity to it. A faithful openness to it. That's also, that's something that's intensely desirable. I mean, I think, like, one of the insistences in both the Old and New Testament is that in the fundamental, in the final analysis, what's at the pinnacle is ineffable, right? So if you, there's no end to the traveling up Jacob's ladder. And that means that the ineffable transcendent is, by definition, outside our reach. And there's, there's, there's a, there's a cost for that. rare for Jordan to bring up the Bible and

verticality but he managed the managed to get it I mean you might think that looking at a oh you know you're going for a walk you're you're in nature it's all very lovely you see your sunset oh it's beautiful it brings you out of yourself it's very it's very poetic

and Jordan Peterson is that's like the Bible like going up Jacob's ladder ascending the dominance hierarchy etc etc there's a pinnacle That's a pitiful experience, right? It's at the top.

At the top makes me really come. It is like that. And, you know, so that's what, you know, Jordan Peterson, he drops in references to the Bible and the verticality. Like, once you realize that that's what he does, he just doesn't use his empathy. It's quite remarkable. But the other thing he does and that all the send speakers do is they drop in references to famous world literature or, intellectuals, you know, that are known for our history. Here's an example of this. Right. And you could also imagine that there isn't a limit to that, that the mysteries that might grab

your attention, even if you're operating at a relatively high level of apprehension, there's no limit upward to that. That's kind of what Tolstoy experienced when he had a dream that resolved his suicidality. And he had a vision of a, first of all, being hung over a, he was at a great height, right? He was hung over like an abyss, an infinite abyss, which is like an existential catastrophe. And when he finally looked up, he could see a rope that was holding him above the abyss, but it disappeared into the unknowable, right? Notice upwards, Matt, a rope. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So we got some dream analysis of Tolstoy's dream, which is helpful

so his point there is that even when you're operating at a high level you're in tune with the universe and you know you're maximizing your competence like Tolstoy like Tolstoy would be there's like a there's an infinite amount

of good things I don't know you can always go up the ladder or climb the rope it's infinite yeah that's right it always will take you up and up because, yeah, because, you know, God's up there, so he's internet, so it makes sense. You're following along, Matt. You're following along. Now, this is good. Now, next step

for thing for you, we've only been, we've only touched the Sands Waking Waters. They haven't even got started. But this next clip, I thought, was classic sense making. So let's see how many Sands speaking tropes you could get. I believe this is just Jordan Peterson roughing himself, but let's see how many of the tropes he manages to hit on. I think we talked a little bit, I was at a party with you recently, we talked a little bit about an extension of ecological, what's the ecological approach to visual perception? Who's that?

Gibson. Gibson, right. So Gibson talked about tools and obstacles, right? So you set a goal, you see a pathway. The objects that you perceive are tools and obstacles. Everything else is irrelevant. That's associated with your idea. of relevance realization.

But you can add layers to that, so you have tools and obstacles. You have friends and foes. That'd be the equivalent on the social level. And then there's another level too, which is like agents of magical transformation. And agents of magical transformation are beings or phenomena that emerge

into your field of apprehension from a higher order level of being. And the more distant up the Jacob's ladder that emissary the more the quality of magic would obtain in it. The magic would be that the

interloper is bringing with it a new set of axioms, a new set of rules. So that's the magic. It's right, like something magic plays by different rules. And so then there'd be a hierarchy of rules up Jacob's ladder, essentially. Something like that. That is something. That is something.

I'm vaguely familiar. with Gibson's ecological perception theory stuff. Per Gibson. That's right. I mean, probably Gibson wouldn't know that it also involved perceiving angels of magical transformation that are lifting you up to a higher...

Agents, well, but angels are an example of an agent, so yes, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Are they, though? Are they real? Well, you know, it was a big surprise for me, and they hear Jacob's Ladder coming in at the end there. I just, I wasn't expected that.

That was out of the left field. But, you know, again, reference to real thinker, big thinker, you know, researcher, talk about definitions and specific words, tools, obstacles, friends, goes, right? When Gibson was writing about affordances and things like that and specific stuff, the environment in terms of ways you can interact with it, what he was really getting at was, The latter, Jacob's ladder, and the angels. And Sand's speakers like this esoteric mysticism, religious stuff, right? So that always comes in.

So, yes, you've got agents, objects, tools, obstacles, but really also magical beings and supernatural things and stuff. And those are the really transformative stuff. And then link it to the Bible, just to finish off. So like Anakin said, now this is... sense making it sure is but you know like jordan is really directed like as you've been emphasizing he's very directed at his sense making like his one mission in life is to kind of connect everything but in particular the sort of philosophical psychology stuff that he likes to

the bible and his version of christianity like fusing those two things together is really his his mission. Yeah. Now, so that's a good illustration of Jordan's sense making. The response to this, John Verbeki, pipes up. Yeah, I think I agree. I think the if reality is, if the experience of realness is the experience of inexhaustible intelligibility, the inexhaustibility points to the fact that we cannot

make it determinatively. intelligible. We can't fully grasp it. I think that's the ineffable. And I think what that does is, and this is my proposal, what I think existential conscience is, as opposed to pathological, psychological conscience. Existential conscience is to realize our correct attitude, our correct comportment towards the fact that reality shines in intelligibly, but it also withdraws in mystery. And I think that, and this is Plato's central argument, which I just, sorry, I had a really sort of powerful realization that this is, I finally understood what Augustine meant when he said that Christianity was the continuity, the continuum, or even

the completion of Greek philosophy. The correct comportment Plato talked about was finite transcendence. You have to hold, like this tonus, this creative, like the tension of the bow. You have to hold that we are simultaneously finite and transcendent. We are finite in that we are capable of failure and sin and decadence. But if you just identify with that, you fall prey to despair and you become servile and manipulatable. You have to remember your transcendence. I imagine Jordan Peterson would like that a lot, both the mysticism and the connections

of how Greek philosophy, you know, basically was kind of fully realized in Christian philosophy. So the experience of realness is that. the experience of inexhaustible intelligibility and the inexhaustible points to the fact that we cannot make it determinative. Determinatively intelligible. Yes, because we cannot grasp the ineffable.

So, and that's, I mean, he makes a heroic effort there to connect whatever it is we're talking about back to conscience. His thing about, you know, Oh yeah, he did do that. He did do that. Yeah. And I thought you were going to say Plato, because, you know,

Jordan connects things to the Bible, but for Verviki, it should connect to Plato. I haven't heard much about Hermes. No, it was Hermes. Hermes, it's another thing that, you know, we're, it's fair to say, poking fun a little bit at this conversation, but according to Verveh, that is fair, thank you. According to Verviki, this conversation has just allowed him to have a breakthrough, a powerful revelation that he finally understood, you know, what St. Augustine meant when he said, so we are poking fun, but if you have the ears to listen, this is actually really a quite

powerful conversation. Yeah, because we've had the realization that it's all about finite transcendence, us, limited beings that we are, Chris, crawling around in the mud. we have within us, this divine spark, this ability to perceive the infinite, and that's the thing that can raise us out of sin and decadence and despair. I do agree with Hermes that Praviki is perhaps taking something off a road, you know, a winding road towards Christianity, because I do detect certain motifs and like it continues here. And I think existential conscience is the call to constantly re-inhabit and re-identify with holding both remembering, that reciprocal remembering of your finite and your transcendence.

And I think the incarnation and the crucifixion are the enactment of that. Of that's just what I was thinking, because I thought if Pajot was here, that'd be the first thing he'd point out. Yeah, so that's extremely interesting. Yeah, you'd have to point that out to me. Well, yeah, because you have this insistence. in Christian theology, that Christ as God puts on mortality comprehensively, right? It's not just death. It's kinosis.

It's the deep self-emptying, right? All the way down. All the way down. Not past death into hell. I think it's real bad making fun of this because, I mean, they're very passionate about it. Like, they are really, they're into it. They're getting a lot out of it. Yeah.

Well, I mean, I don't really take. issue over people getting excited about their interpretation of the symbology of the crucifixion or that kind of thing. But I do think it's worth keeping in mind about what is being said here because essentially a lot of this boils down to big words connected to some thinker loosely from philosophy or psychology or some discussion of words. And then ultimately, ultimately, Matt. Verviki does this lesson, Peterson, but as we're just seeing, he doesn't mind to do it.

Connected to the Bible, connected to Christianity, connected to Jesus. There's a lot of that going on. And like if this was a theological conference, I'd understand. but it's it's not sold as a yeah it's not sold as theology but yeah i know what you mean like it is like the whole discussion just circles around theological concepts um like you know it's speculative sense-makery version of it but but like even me atheists that i am i could recognize that stuff like i know that that's the whole deal with christ and the crucifixion and the whole thing that he was you know, totally, like, a limited human being with his sins and also God. And also God. And

that's the great mystery and the connection between, you know, like, like even I know that. So I guess they just are reprising relatively standard, you know, bits of Christian. Theological discussion. Yeah. Yeah. And that's, that's fine if that's what it is. But I feel like it's built as something slightly different. And Matt, this particularly triggered me. Let's see if you can work out what upset me here. This is a discussion about terror management theory. Then like the terror management theorists who aren't very pessimistic in my estimation, think that much of human motivation springs or even all springs from the denial of death, right?

That's a Freudian trope. But that's a problematic presumption in a variety of ways. It's been empirically undermined, too. Well, we'll have to talk about that because I don't know about the, I know of alternative models that fit. the data better, but I don't know any direct challenges to it. But in any case, what do you think triggered me there, Matt? I think what triggered you is that Jordan Peterson doesn't know, doesn't care whether or not

there is any empirical support for the, you know, sexy terror management theory stuff. Quite right, quite right. All he cares is he wants to talk about, like, what he thinks is a better interpretation, right? but his interest in like the validity of the data or the strength of the evidence, the bad kind of stuff, who would give a shit about that? To revoke his credit, he at least is aware. He's aware, that's right, to his credit. Actually, Chris, just is total upside.

When I first started working at my current university, I was helped out a colleague who had like a terror management theory, interpretation of some topic. He actually had kind of a fun little experiment where he would actually get people to hold a crocodile, like a small, like a small alligator or a crocodile, I can remember, but not a dangerous one, but still, so this was the medulation. Yeah, I think so. But yeah, I mean, so the whole thing that's meant to, the idea was, is this would cause a bit of terror and then see if people reacted to that by, you know, gambling more and stuff.

Did it work? No, no, not at all. I do like, that's a lovely environment, though. Hold this crocodile. He actually won the ignoble prize. You know the ignoble prize? Oh, he won that? He won that.

That is also, that just does speak to me what you psychologist, pure psychologists, like to do. You know, that's the kind of. What if we get someone to hold a crocodile out of their place of government? Yeah, I've got this really wild theory as to the mechanism. Now I was going to cause something completely unrelated. To be fair, though, to be fair to. I like that a lot better than I do, like, the word search games where, like, a lot of terror management theory or mortality, salient stuff.

Some of it is quite direct, like write about your death, like write a paragraph about your death. That's good. I think that's a relatively good manipulation. But there were ones like, we've done a word scrabble task, and if you unscrabble some of the words, they relate to coffin instead of coffee and so on. And I've been involved with research that did that. And that just struck me as wildly implausible at the time. and the data bears that was triggered

by Jordan Peterson being like, well, I don't know anything about that. And I'm like, of course you don't. Of course you know nothing. That's all right. I think, but it does give you your insight to how Jordan Peterson operates, right? But in his head canon is a bunch of random psychology factoid. Factoids. Yeah.

Like that. And something like mortality, salience and terror management stuff, he's obviously going to like that, right? It's sexy. I mean, he's, he's, He likes him up, but he's got a better explanation for it. He thinks they're, you know. That's the raw material, right, that feeds into his thing.

Yeah. Yeah, I wonder if his interpretation will connect the verticality of the Bible. I wonder. Let's find that. But, well, actually, this next little bit, I think it's beautiful because what we've mostly been hearing is John Verveke and Jordan Peterson, go back and forth, right? You've heard a couple of absolutelyes. Mm-hmm.

Well, yes, from Jordan Hall. heard him make a couple of analogical definitions but he hasn't contributed that much and John Verveke notes this. He makes this little aside here and he's referencing Jordan Hall. I agree. I agree.

I think and and first of all I'll say something and I want to be quiet because I want you to talk more because I value what you have to say. I'm good to say that every time I cut you off and I'll say this about

They'll be crap because, you know, I do care. Do you value what I have to say, Chris, do you? I do most of the time. I do, yeah, that's true. It's fair. But I, and there's nothing wrong with that. Right. He's a nice guy, right?

Yeah, yeah. Interpersonally, very much so. And, you know, he means well. But it's just, it is that kind of squishy, soft kind of padding each other kind of thing. You and I don't do that. Not so much. We're not cut from the same cloth. No, we're not as nice as for Ricky.

But so, you know, they go on to talk about stuff. But and then Jordan pivots to Jordan Hall and it's like, well, you know, tell us Jordan. Like, when did you get interested in this? Right. So he prompts him to explain things. And Jordan Holvers swad so that it's, this is just beautiful. How is it that you made your entry into the more philosophical domain from entrepreneurial, let's say? Hmm.

I'm going to answer that in a moment. But first, I want to just say something here. I think it's useful to notice, again, and I guess I'm putting in the role of self-referentiality, that while it may appear that I'm not talking, we don't actually really understand reality very well. And I feel like I'm quite present to what's happening. So it may very well be the case that I'm participating meaningfully, even though you can't hear the sounds come out of my mouth.

And you're gifted at that. I'm also aware of the fact that there's large to be said for listening. I'm also aware of the fact, though, there's an opportunity here for you. Sometimes I say things. Chris, do you remember that scene from Best In Show where the lady is there with a very old husband and she's saying, we have so much in common, you know, she's like married up. She's like a gold digger. She's married this big.

We have so much in common. We like to talk about, you know, we both like sprouts and we both like mutual. And we could talk or we always. finding things to talk about and not talk about it. We can sit and not find things to not talk about for hours. I've never seen Best in Show, which is why I didn't interrupt you there, Rob, to let you, for the listeners and for my benefit, you are like, but, but yes, we'll play the clip. We'll play the clip. I didn't remember. We'll play that clip. Yeah, we both have so much in common. We both love soup and we love the out.

doors. We love snow peas and talking and not talking. We could not talk or talk forever and still find things to not talk about. Because the thing about Jordan Hall is that he's an alpha, right? He usually dominates. He wouldn't want people to have the impression. impression that he's just passively, he's basically, he is actively, he is actively listening. Not taking part. Not taking part, yes. I mean, like, it's fine, right?

Like, it's fine. He's responding to this to say, okay, look, I haven't contributed much, but, you know, like, don't feel bad for me because I'm just happy to listen. You could just say it. You could just say, I don't mind. I'm just happy to be here and happy to listen. But it's the way that he says, first. of all, he says, look, it might

appear that I'm not talking, but we don't actually understand reality. Very well. You know, am I not participated? And then he's like, actually, is it not the chance that I'm participating meaningfully even though you can't hear

something's coming out of my mind? And I did think, like, in what sense do you participate in a conversation by, you know, not making science? I guess the fact that you're there, it inspires people to talk about different things and you can do head nods, you can say, mm-hmm, and all of these.

You're so concrete. You're such a materialist. At a cosmic level, there's stuff going on, but you don't even know about me. Well, that's actually true. It'll take months for me to realize, well, the contribution was from all of this. But yes. He did give the analogy about the baby. grasping the P. Let's not forget that. Yes, he did. He did do that. And he did say that conscience is

recognizing the discordant note. So he did do that. Look, I'm not here to litigate who's made the most contributions to this conversation. It's not for you to say. Not for us. Yeah. That's not our job here. But I will also say that I don't think the speaking the most necessarily means that you've contributed the most sense right here in conversation. And I will just say, too, that there is no shade at all if you find yourself in a room as Jordan Peterson and you find it's the case

that you cannot get a word in edgeways. You should not be embarrassed about that. That is natural and normal. Look, can I just reference an example that's a little close to home, a little bit, you know, let's stop poking the poor Jordan Hall and, you know, poking their sensitive spots,

okay? Let's turn the little. looking glass round on ourselves. Now, at one point, we had a conversation with a fellow called Sam Harris. During that conversation, you were present, Matt. You were there. But verbally, you were not that present throughout the conversation. And then at the end, you know, you emerged, you attempted conciliants, which failed. Failed, yeah. Yeah. And you said, you know, I've been here. I've been enjoying listening. thing and blah blah. But one thing that was quite funny is you did not say like, and I,

just to be clear, I have been contributing to you do. Right. But like there is an issue when that kind of thing happens, right? It's you need the, you feel there's an obligation to say, look, I haven't, sorry, I haven't contributed much, but I've been enjoying the discussion. That's what normally happens. It's, it's just that the way that he delivers that. And in that case, I think we made this clear in the following episodes, but your lack of contribution was your choice. Was your choice? And actually, in that occasion, unlike Jordan Hall, you were contributing via messages that

we were typing to each other about ways to freeze things and whatnot. Well, it's fair to say, my reaction to Sam Harris' monologues is kind of nonplussed, I think. That's true. I should have asked you to summarize, well, what did Sam just say there? I would have been checking my phone. I could stay on my phone for hours prior. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So anyway, look, all fine to for Georgia.

It's fine. But look, it's the fundamental thing. It is, sets making first and foremost is just incredibly pretentious. And self-indulgent. And self-indulgent. That is the, that's the key thing there. So he's saying a thing that an normal person would say, just in the most pretentious way possible.

Possible. Yeah, yeah. And like in this conversation, as you mentioned, like, you know, Jordan Hall is kind of the third fiddle or second fiddle to the pairing of Jordan Peterson and John Verveke. Right. They're pointing off each other. In the previous sense-making cubed,

sense-making about sense-making conversation that we covered, Jordan Hall and Daniel Schmachtenberger were the more engaged. engaged interlocutors, where Jimmy Wheel was playing a kind of third wheel, if you will. And that was called out there, and they discussed it. So this is something that they do because they're, you know, they're sense makers. So they talk about why are we having this conversation? They talk about the dynamics in the conversation. They discuss who's talking, you know, more than what that signals and so on.

So this is just the nature. I think this will happen if you have a sense-making conversation for long enough. you will eventually reference about that specific conversation and the contours of that conversation. Exactly. They happen to that original sense making cute thing as well. And, you know, it's all about self-referentiality. You know, it's like turning the looking glass inwards and digging in, you know, that idea

that they talk about. They love the concept of play and creative play and, you know, the dialogue goes and connecting together. So they are very much like the process of what they're doing, just fascinating. them like and that is kind of the main the main object of their curiosity yeah and that that is why I think you and I often draw analogies with like postmodernism because within that movement or you you could say like critical theory or the referential tone and anthropology or whatever there's a lot of that like the work should be self-referential you should be turning in looking gears round

and introspect on like you as the offer. Yes, that's the word I was looking for. So, you know, that's part and parcel. So that's why there is those parallels in some respect, because that is something that is recommended from people who come from the genre, which in all the ways is like very different from what they're doing. Yeah. And that's what I experienced is an undergraduate with those communication oriented units I was forced to take,

which was, I don't think you'd call it exactly post-mon, but it was definitely kind of critical theoretic, you know, know, and, and it was, it was just like this. It was this self-referential disappear up your own asshole stuff. I hated it then. Neville kidding. I've hated it my entire life. Yeah.

I don't want anything to do with it. And it's not that interesting, but yes, continue your present. There's nothing to be found up there. You know, just live it alone. But, um, uh, well, anyway, so, so let's continue on. That was, that was just a side show. The other thing about Jordan Hallmat, you've probably remember this, because we did cover it in a supplementary material.

But Jordan Hall has been sense-making for quite a long time. Somewhere around the probably late elementary school, I began to notice that the world that we live in, or at least the world that I had been thrown into, was suffering significantly from making any sense whatsoever. I was so haphazardly thrown together in a fashion that tended to produce more negative than positive. Think about just what happens when you go to school.

How old were you when that started to become a focus of attention, do you think? About fourth grade. Oh, yeah, okay. And then similarly the same noticing, for example, like, oh, wait, I'm sitting in front of a television in the context of my home, which is lying to me continuously with a highly effective capacity to manipulate. And yet that seems to be something that the people who are around me seem to be perfectly okay with. Hmm, that's interesting. So a sense of there's something way off. It's way off in

curiosity about, okay, well, what would right look like and how might we accomplish that? So you can see how those two things linked together. Yeah, we get some insight there into Jordan Hall's nascent Genesis as a sense maker. It happened early. It happened young. It happened in the context of his home while he was perceiving the television. Yeah. Yeah, so Jordan Hall, he's been sent to making from a young age. We've established that and the kind of things, which is now sensed making about like this. I would call it pseudo-metanoia right there. Like if you imagine you're going the wrong direction and metanoia is to turn you into the right direction.

Pseudo-metanoia at least turns you perpendicular to going in the wrong direction. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Kind of like dead reckoning. Yeah, and the trouble, of course, is if you get stuck in pseudo-metanoia, you don't get pointed in the right direction. You're now in a therapeutic loop where you're constantly drifting back here unless you happen to be in a very healthy context, which will begin to drift you in this direction. A healthy context. So out of the context of the high incident, do a healthy context. But that's what, you know, Sam speaking from your early teenage years does to you.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, it does. Yeah, I don't think we have time to listen to all of Jordan Hall's reminiscences here. But, you know, he paints a picture. You know, he was attuned to things from a very young age. He could see that he lived in a world where things didn't make any sense. People were lying. People were happy to be lied to.

And he was asking the big questions, the philosophical questions. Well, I mean, just to make a clear, Matt, they do kneel it down precisely. Like, those were the first inclines of sense making, but there's more precision that can be added. He would actually have to find a way to embed himself in a world that was in continuous contact with that sort of respite. Yes, yes, yes. to expand that territory to include the whole of his life and the whole of all that he loved. Yes, yes. Yeah, that's probably what the Protestants are like...

And that was my pivot in sixth grade. Okay, okay. So in sixth grade is when I had that thought of... You can't solve the problem by controlling a particular sphere in which you can find something like solace or joy because you have to create an entire world that has that continuity for everything that you love. And so that was the dual vector for me. Wow, that's a pretty video.

side to have at such a tender age. Impressive to remember individual thoughts. Yeah. As you're, I don't know, I don't remember much. What was I thinking in sixth grade? But then again, this is why I'm not a sense maker, I guess. I don't have the right stuff. No.

Just as an exercise, Chris, do you think, can you put what Jordan Hall was saying in your own words there? Just not criticizing it. just a mega principle, just reflect it back. What was Jordan saying then? What was Jordan saying then? Okay, so trying to recreate. I believe they were talking there about like depression and, you know, overcoming nihilism.

And then that's why Jordan Hall got on to the pseudo metanoia. point, right? That you're, you don't want to be perpendicularly going in the wrong direction. You don't want to be perpendicular where you want to be going. No. Yeah, so he managed to recognize that

to get out of these like dead ends, you have to, you know, you have to sense me. You got to go beyond these looking for solutions in the wrong place. That's what was happening. But he saw there was a, you know,

another way out of it. Right. That was the dual. What was the dual vector? For him, the dual vector. The dual vector. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He was talking about you can't create a particular sphere

where you could find joy, because that would mean you would have to create the entire world that has continuity for everything that you love. And that was the dual vector. And what's the dual vector? I don't know the specific thing the dual vector refers to. It's like related to agency and his business and stuff like this. But you're getting hung up on the details.

It's not like that specific word matters. What are your sense speaker? Why do you choose that word? No, I'm just trying to know what he's referring to. What on earth that any of it means? Well, anyway, I think the vibe. I think the vibe is clear, right? I, you know, he's, it's finding joy, happiness, not being perpendicular to the direction

you need to be going. Yeah. So he wanted that, because basically part of this conversation is that Jordan Peterson presented, you know, you were a successful business man. So you were like kind of pragmatically oriented and at some point you became philosophically engaged and like when was that pivot? But Jordan Hull once said, no, no, no, no. I've been

Always like this I was always Since Ricky's as a child And he meets this point That he had a meeting Because he was involved with DivX Right This like video codec

Kind of Yeah Right You know DivX But so listen to your story He wants to highlight the Jordan No you're getting him wrong If you think he was a businessman

He became a philosopher He was always a philosopher And then in the meantime Like here's a scene where in 2005, my third company has gotten to the point where it's quite successful and worth a lot of money. I'm in the office at the Google headquarters where I'm going to be meeting with Sergei Bryn.

They're talking to me about buying the company. Which company was this? It's called DivX, DIVX. And in the lobby, I'm reading Gilles de Lois' A Thousand Plateaus. So in the moment where I'm about to actually have a serious business meeting about my company being acquired by what at the time was by steps the ascendant giant of the space, my curiosity is still pointing to, okay, what's going on here in the world of post-structuralism? So these teams, they're very

tightly wound for me continuously. Yeah. So just to be clear, he was still reading, you know, he was still reading, you know, dense philosophy books whenever he was in a successful mom in the world of tech startups. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He was, he was, he was. they're, you know, waiting to go into the interview because to do a big business deal with Sergei Bryn, Google, just, just saying, and reading Gidei, is that, uh, uh, uh, was that Gidde, uh, I don't know how to pronounce it. I don't know how to pronounce it. No, Gilles deluse. Yeah. But anyway, reading French philosophy, but just before going to think, that's, that's a good story. That's a good story. He seems like quite the man to be, you know,

Philosopher King, yes. And then, well, after that, Jordan's right. Well, okay, that's, yes, that's very good, very important. Okay, so back to this point with John. You get an interlude there. But then later, when Jordan has been silent again for quite a while, Jordan, you know, suggests, okay, we've been talking about some things. Maybe this relates, Jordan, to that, you know, the stories that you shared earlier

about, you know, your proclivity for sense making. And so Jordan Hall gave some more examples. And I think Jordan Peterson's reaction to it is quite interesting. So this is later in the conversation, right? And he's giving more examples from his personal life, Jordan Hall, that says. Just make it very concrete. As an example, there were two that I remember quite clearly. One was a McDonald's happy meal, which was in fact not at all happy when you actually got it.

And then the other one was the president, Richard Nixon, explicitly saying something on the television and then having my grandfather over here letting everybody in the family know that that was a lot. So there's the two events that I remember going, huh, so I live in a culture where this kind of thing happens. I didn't think that way. I remember the feeling landing very heavily on me.

Huh, that means I can't actually... This is like the child who has an alcoholic parent who begins to have to take responsibility for parenting because they notice. So our culture is an alcoholic parent. It's actually a really good metaphor. Oh, that's brilliant. Yeah, it's a really good metaphor.

And so that feeling of, oh, I need to start taking responsibility for navigating this world. Why did you make that just, okay, but that's not the only, like, in the story of Kane and Abel, Kane fails, and he gets alienated from God and in consequence of that. So he experiences a landscape of trouble, let's say. But his response isn't to take responsibility. His response is to curse fate. I wasn't alienated from God. I was alienated from our culture. Those aren't the same.

Important. Why would, yeah, but they can easily become the same. Like people. Don't challenge Jordan Peterson like that. Don't challenge. When he's going on a Bible thing,

just let him go. What's he doing? So Jordan Hall was talking about a happy meal that wasn't happy. And they... Yeah, that would have been dramatic. And Richard Nixon, his grandfather said Richard Nixon is a liar in the context of his house

and then you realize hmm I live in a society where politicians are liars and happy middles are not always happy that yeah so big insights there then his metaphor is that he's like so that mean we think

our culture is like an alcoholic parent right the culture is supposed to be taking care of you. Yeah. But it's actually corrupted and abusive. Right. Right. So you've got a man up and put on your big boy pants and make the world a better place, right?

Yes. So then Jordan Peterson puts in and it's like, this reminds me of King. And Journal, this credit is like, no, it's not exactly. It's actually, yeah, because it's nothing to do with God. It's actually Nixon and Happy Meals, neither of which I think one good mistake for God. So that's fair, I think, fair for him to push back. But then Jordan's response there, there's no reply to that, which is they can become the same thing. Yeah, yeah.

And actually you get Jordan attempting to work out. How can Happy Meals and Richard Nixon be connected to God? How can this be? Or these things, you know, he was a therapist, right? So there's things that Jordan Hall has selected there, which might be telling. So, you know, the investigation continues. Okay, but that didn't happen to you when you were a kid. And you said you decided to take responsibility.

Okay. And you also made reference to your grandfather. Yeah. Okay. So did he play a role in this? Only in this particular episode. Only in that episode. Okay.

So why didn't you despair and why did you decide to take responsibility? And then what did that mean? Well, I think the answer to why I didn't despair was that so much of my life was still very much connected with just base reality as a kid, living in a physical environment, maneuvering around. And so something like 95% of my life was it's possible to navigate reality in a fashion which works. And were you doing that successfully? Yeah, yeah. Along what dimensions? You had friends? I had friends, yes. I was not hungry often.

The child to, you know, puzzle like the contours. And so it continues. Like how did Jordan Hall go on after having the unsatisfying happy meal and hearing his grandfather criticize Richard Nixon? How did he go on? And the answer is he was moving around the world. It was, it's blowing in creeks. He was talking to be.

It's like, yeah, it's, it's amazing how much they can drag on, you know, like these kind of, like, they shouldn't need to do this, right? They should just let him get to the end of his point. But so it continues, Miles. What about your relationships with your parents at that point? Pretty healthy, I'd say. I think so. Okay, so you were fairly firmly grounded. So you had a platform that enabled you to determine that constituted the truth.

Do it from the center out. The center out was pretty solid. Right. My own sort of physical body, my ability to maneuver in space, my ability to connect things, my relationships with my parents and my close family, my relationship with friends, my relationships with nature, we're all pretty solid. So when I come against this error at the level of culture, that's the anomaly. I don't have to worry about the center.

The center is pretty solid. Yeah. Why phrase it in terms of center and anomaly? Mm-hmm. Well, anomaly in the sense that, for the most part, again, everything is actually functioning reasonably well. Chris, I have this image in my mind of Jordan Hall maneuvering in space in the context of his home. You can't get out of it. I just can't cut that image out of my head.

Okay. So, I mean, yeah, like, what is this? This does illustrate, doesn't it? Just like their ability to take anything. and pick it apart and psychoanalyze it and fasten upon the particular words that are used. Like there is nothing that cannot furnish the tea leaves for a particular analysis. And clearly, Jordan Peterson's motivation here is to say, okay, we're going to take this story, Jordan Hall's sense-makery self-congratulatory.

Yeah, self-congratulatory anecdote about how pretty amazing he was as a kid, seeing the world for as it really is. But Jordan Peterson's mission, of course, is to turn this into a kind of a parable which amounts to his favorite themes, which is about taking responsibility, you know, connecting with God. I don't know. Can we mention something vertical? Where does the verticality come in? I feel it must somewhere. Yeah. But I do like that he's like kind of, it sounds a bit like he's digging for trauma or, you know, like a kind of doctor-caping, so how was relationships

with your parents, was your grandfather, you mentioned the alcoholic, right? You know, these kind of things, but Jordan was kind of like, no, no, like I was, I had friends, I was playing. It's all good. And then he mentioned the freest center anomaly, so obviously Jordan

then it's like, well, why did you select that one? Just like Yuma and dual vector. Why did he say dual vector? And so they talk for a little bit about anomalies and centers, because of, of course, they do. And this is basically where this segment ends. This is what it leads to. I have set now a new purpose.

My new purpose is to cajole my parents into taking me to McDonald's to get a happy meal. I have noticed that in the act of doing that, I'm creating dissonance with my own relationship with my parents who are not happy about this thing. I get the happy meal. The experience sucked. And I made my family mad anomaly. Purpose of value alignment. against the center. Oh, yeah. So that's interesting because you pointed to the fact that you had multiple dimensions of success, and I mean qualitatively distinct dimensions. So that's important,

such that when you were introduced to the abstracted digital world, so to speak, and you saw that it was faulty, that didn't shake your face. So now we're in a situation. There you go. He did it. They managed that, didn't they? Isn't that connected and coherent? yeah yeah yeah um i don't know what they got to there what you missed matt stop thinking by jordan hold rummaging around in his in the context of his house like to me that's pretty clear right so he had you know these experiences like he had an unhappy happy meal and he had yeah richard nixon zalier and that led him to realize that he is not just a consumer of society, he must contribute to society. Things aren't always what they seem.

They need to repair things. And so at the time he was in the world of tech, this was child's play for him, right? Literal child's play because he was operating on so many different paradigms from such an early age that it was no problem for him to read French philosophy and, you know, prepared to sell divx to Google. Right. Okay. Good. Yeah, that's helpful. Thanks. Yeah, you got it? Okay. So that's where we, that's where we got there. Now, that was Jordan Hall's contribution. That's basically it for the entire conversation. But before they got to that, there was a little bit more sense-making before it got to there. So, you know, in case you thought it was finished, what about this?

So it was the, that reminds me of a variety of things. The developmental psychologist, Pige, spent his whole life studying children. play. There were other things he studied, too, because he was a polymath. But the reason he did that was because he was trying to reconcile the gap between religion and science. None of the psychologists that I ever encountered ever told their students that, which is really quite sad because it was like, that's actually an important detail. You do. Yes, that doesn't surprise me, John. Let's go back to the super ego issue. Right. Yeah, well, I have to admit, I didn't know that either. Didn't know the Piaget's main goal was to reconcile.

science and religion. It wouldn't surprise me. It wouldn't surprise me. It wouldn't surprise me. This is something that many older academics started to talk about later in life. So, yeah, and especially if you're a famous theorist. But yes, that's sense making, right, Matt.

Reference famous theorist, talk about a word, and connected to religion. There we go. Yeah. Sense making, not complete, but started. And I think he did there introduce, you know, Let's talk about the ego. We've been talking, as we know, about conscience and about verticality and about all sorts of words we've defined. But what about ego?

I do really think, like one of the things I've seen about the atheist crowd, for example, is that to be an atheist, from what I've been able to understand, requires two things. One is a kind of alliance with a reductive materialist rationalism. And there's a kind of a luciferian pretension that goes along with that. But that's insufficient. It also really helps if you were viciously hurt by someone religious. Yeah, yeah. And so if we, let's delve into the nature of power a bit and not as ability.

But as when the postmodernists make the proclamation that everything's a power game, let's say. They're basically saying that power is the uniting metanarrative or procedure or world. Now, we're trying to distinguish between, or partly what we're trying to do is distinguish between the world that's governed by power and the world that's governed by this other orientation that we're trying to flesh out. So let's see if we can characterize the world that's governed by power. Now, you said that you're subject on a fairly regular basis to like a tyrannical, Freudian super eagle those are some words

it wouldn't be a Jordan Peterson interview if the post bombers didn't get the boot stuck in yeah and I thought the atheists we're going to get away with yeah yeah

it's our turn now so an alliance with a reductive materialist rationalism and there's a kind of luciferian pretensions I've noticed this in you actually Chris I've noticed that's true

well Jordan Peterson observed the same thing and he interacted with me and were you ever viciously hurt by someone religious? You probably were. You grew up in Northern Ireland. They were also nice to me as well.

So, you know, it's, but yeah, so it's part of the course, but Jordan Peterson's understanding of atheism is that you have to be a broken, a broken person. Yeah, you know, you're reeling against God for the crime of existence or you're dealing with your trauma

and all the wrong way. So it's luciferian shit that if he's materialist and postmodern, you know, whatever. They're all bad. But he does tie this into, as he often does Matt, that the postmodernist says it's all about power.

We've been fleshing out. There's something else. You know, and although unifying, let's say, for example, the Christian narrative as an alternative, maybe that's better. But for Vareki, you might have thrown this banner in the works by pointing out that sometimes conscience can be pathological. People can be self-critical and all that kind of thing. So maybe we need to deal with that issue first. How do we distinguish between, you know, the true impulse

and the false bad one? How do you distinguish between an impulse of your conscience that's a manifestation of the tyrannical super ego and one that's orienting you towards a higher good? How can you tell the difference? So my response to the situation that you were describing with the architect, what I do, what I've learned to do is I ask the source of the normativity of the judgment that's being rendered against me. The voice is saying, whoa, that's not real. Okay, tell me what real is then. Tell me what your standard of realness is. I get it to commit to a normativity. And then once it commits to a normativity, then I combined it to what I was talking about earlier. Okay, so let me ask you a clarifying question. Does that mean that

conscience without call is unreliable? Like if I'm stopping you and calling you out on your misbehavior, let's say, but I'm not providing an alternative pathway forward. Is that one of the markers of path a lot like tyrannical conscience? I think so. I don't know if that's the point I was making. Oh, okay. No, no, let's not lose that point. Yeah, okay. Okay. Let's put a pin in that point. The point I was trying to make is I can, the pathological conscience isn't consistent about normativity. What it does is constantly invokes normativity that it doesn't that it refuses to submit itself to. Right. Okay. So they're puzzling out here that the problem of distinguishing between good conscience and bad conscience and a bad, bad, bad conscience,

this tyrannical super ego. Of course they love Freud, right? They hate postmodernness. They hate this, but Freud, everything Freudian. Freud and Jung. Yeah, yeah. They're great. Anyway, but yeah, so, okay, so the bad one, the neurotic one is the one that just

kind of criticize, you're just feeling bad about yourself, but there isn't like a clear path forward. So the good kind is, he says it's a call. The good kind is where it's like, you shouldn't be doing that, that's bad. What you should be doing is, is this? Amat, but that's Jordan.

That's not what, Verbenki is, He says, hold on, you know, put the brief on. That's not exactly my point. And, you know, in good Omega Rule principle, he says, but that is a fantastic point, dear Vaking. And let's get back to that, right? But my point is slightly different. This did invoke in me about the feeling of listening to Vareki talk about this relationship with surveys.

Because he says, what he does when he hears that voice is he stops it and says, wait a second, where are your values of normativity coming from? Where do you get them in my head? And then the voice needs to commit to where its normativity comes from. And then

that helps to distinguish what kind of source of... Like, if it was Hermes, he would have a very good basis for the various things that he's making and he has your best interest in that. If it's Lucifer,

the voice in my head is Luciferian, then it's going to, you know, be invoking bad... Incoherent. So John McEcky's thing, is a bit more abstract than Jordan's because his thing is that you can tell the difference between good conscience is bad conscious because the bad conscience is like an entity that he can demand that it explain itself and when it does try to explain itself, it's going to get all confused. It's not going to be able to provide a coherent rationale. Entity is so reductive math. Whatever.

predictive materialist? Is it an entity? Is it a cosmic agrigora? Is it a cell aspect that is manifesting in a cognitive way of? We don't reduce things down to entities and whether they are internal or external. That's just materialist, Western science, nonsense. So what we do care about, Duma, is are they demons? So what is it you said?

What is something that actually has a point, voice? And then it will, if it's genuine conscience, if it's calling me to finite transcendence, it'll say, blah, and it'll call me to a virtue. If it's this pathological thing, it will start to thrash. It'll start to flounder because it will realize that... It doesn't have an up. It doesn't have something that it can actually bind me to.

It can inflict pain on it. That's definitely the voice of a demon, right? It's got no upward orientation. It's just trapped in hell. It's got no upward orientation. So that's my personal answer to your question. But that therapeutic intervention, if I can call it that, is coupled to the philosophical reflection that finite transcendence is what I am most called to identify with.

That is what I am. That is what my humanity is, is to hold together reciprocally remember and recognize my finitude and my transcendence. right finite transcendence so okay so how do you know if you're talking to a demon or an angel that's kind of one way to put this and what a reductive way that's that's that's Jordan Peterson's perspective well yeah the one point they were all clear on they all agreed was yeah that's a demon like demons demons demons demons don't have uh demons demons demons demons don't know which direction is up. Yeah.

Notice the up. Yeah. Okay. And the most important thing is reconciling your nature as a finite being that longs for transcendence. Yes. But very Vovacchi. So Vovacchi frames are like this.

Jordan Peterson is the one with the demons and the thrashing. Although. No, he. He, he, Viveki was on board. Viveki said that, actually. Yeah, he used frashing. That's the thing. Like, Vervecki does play around with the Christian terminology as he sees fit.

But, I mean, they're all in agreement, right, Matt, that the goal of life is to become the numidous one with the, like, the transcendent values. Be it in the instantiation of Christ or some other religious. numinance thing, that's what it's about. And that is what a lot of sense speakers believe, and a lot of theologians and spiritually inclined people also believe. So, yeah, yeah. So that's basically what is being invoked there. Yeah, yeah, it's all pretty familiar. Like, I don't think this discussion would be out of place in a 14th century monastery. Like, I can imagine Gnostic monks, you know, getting very enthusiastic about these questions. There might be some people getting strung up as heretics

depending how far they went, but it's the same kind of concerns, right? How do you distinguish denons from prophets and, you know, all this kind of thing? So Jordan Peterson contributes in response to that. How could it possibly be that we could bear the catastrophe of our

affinitude without remembering our ineffable relations? You'd think so, right? Well, you can fall into despair, and people might say, well, that's rational response. It depends on what you think the point of the rational is. It doesn't seem to be a rational response if it's, well, we could go into that. If it's self-defeating. Yes. Right. So then why don't we investigate for a minute what that means? Like one of the symbolic representations of

that, that's the blind leading the blind, right? They're going to fall into a pit. Okay. Well, why not? What's the difference? What the hell difference does it make anyways if you fall into a pit, right? And that's a discussion about the nature of reality. Well, there's endless suffering in the deepest of pits. And that, I don't know, that seems. So Jordan there just kind of starts, he sort of has, you know, those sort of, that style where he starts, he starts saying something, and then he, he cuts off and then he interjects with the other voice. Well, you might say. Yeah, someone might say. And that cuts off again. And he's like pretty quickly six layers deep. And he's kind of ranting to himself about being in a pit with endless suffering.

It's a very self-indulgent thing, though, Matt, because, like, he's there talking about, you know, so he's kind of, yes, and in the finite and the ineffable and the suffering that, you know, that we'll die, this generates and all this kind of thing. But then you hear people like trying, you know, Verbeki, trying to interject in the background. But then Jordan's like, well, wait a minute, what about the symbolic representation of the blind leading the blind? why don't we why don't I think about that for a minute and what that represents and you're like didn't you hear the person trying to speak like before you go into your your next metaphor that you want to discuss in detail like he's a very self-indulgent man mr peterson yeah yeah i think so towering to be in a conversation with him but yeah i mean yeah vivacchi and even jordan Hall of very, very tolerant.

Well, and I, you know, one thing there, Matt, though, we have to give him credit. He didn't invoke the Bible, and he didn't invoke verticality, right? You didn't hear any of that, did you? No, but he talked about infinite suffering in a pit. Okay, yeah, but that's not verticality. So that's good. The religious levittalions. Maybe this is also why that union, there.

we discussed of death and hell with the infinite, you probably can't find, yeah, that's probably right, you can't find an accurate way of orienting yourself to what's highest unless you traverse the lower realms. That's what happens to Jonah, right, in the wales. He's all the way down in the bottom of the abyss. Then he orients himself upward, and the voice of God makes itself manifest,

but only under those conditions. So don't worry about it. then he left the metaphor of the blind leading the blind and it's like this means we think of like Jonah in the wheel and the wheel is at the bottom of the ocean yeah and he didn't know how to get out of the whale and if you want to find your way out of a whale the first thing you're to do chris is orient yourself and know which way is up because that's yeah that's that's the way out that all makes sense so you know if you're the if you're the blind and you're leading the blind and you lead them down inside a whale

and you're trying to figure out which way is up. Don't worry too much because you have to go down there and traverse the depths because that's the only way in which you can actually transcend the finite and figure out what the highest good is. You have to get down there, thrash around for a bit. Yeah, that's right. So, you know, Jordan Peterson, verticality,

Christian, reference, self-indulgent, unlogged, that's Jordan. and we know what he does. Raviki, then? I mean, at a deep ownership and responsibility to one's capacity for self-deception. Okay, that, okay, now you've gone sideways with that. Now, I've been interested, as you know,

in self-deception for a very long time. Because the previous was the thing that you really focus on, and that's the thing he really focuses on. If we can find the place where there's me, we've got to have done something really interesting. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, okay, so why bring in the theme of self-deception? Because I think is, I think this is, I think that what drives self-destruction is self-deception.

So at the heart of evil is self-destruction. Why would any system destroy itself? I mean, this is a platonic argument. I think at the heart of it is self-deception. I mean, this is in the, to use a Christian source, this is the epistle of John. Like, we are prone to self-deception, and that's what keeps us from the love of God in a profound way. Wow. Wow.

Wow. Wow. So you know what? This is this is how the conversation shift. Somebody else references a word, self-deception. And then, you know, they're like, well, what's the relevance there? And he's like, well, I think this connects, right? And then Rebecca, surprise, surprise, brings in Plato, but also adds in some references to the Bible, which eases the transition. So they're not going to talk about self-deception. Yeah. And I think there is some sort of, isn't there some philosophical theme? Maybe it is Plato who, you know, it's a very philosophical point of view, which is like the root of all bad things comes around through not to misunderstanding things and not not thinking about them clearly. And so bad behavior comes from people misunderstanding, comes from errors, essentially philosophical errors. So, you know, they're referencing this grab bag of themes. are out there. Actually, suspect that in most cases, the people that they're referencing are relevant to the topics that they're talking about.

So yes, that makes no surprise me. It's not like the topic of self-deception is a rare topic in religious or philosophical traditions. You can literally pick any tradition and it will be a significant topic that philosophers and field origins have talked about, right? Like, for an example, Matt. So I spent a lot of time thinking about self-deception, like a lot. Yeah, it has crossed multiple times. Yeah, yeah. And so it seemed to me that it's akin to Freud's notion of repression, but there's an important difference because as far as I can tell, repression is like a sin of commission. It's something you do. Whereas most

self-deception looks to me like... Omission. Yeah, it's omission. That's what I was just saying. Yeah, exactly. bit. So I think... Yeah, I failed to explore. Okay, so lay out your theory of omission in relationship to self-deception. So it's an omission of insight. Yeah, you can relate it to Freud. Freud as well, yeah, if you're repressing things. Yeah, it's not exactly the same. And the difference is very important, ones about omission, the Elizabethic omission. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. So this is kind of part of the shape of it, too, isn't it? Like, they'll take a concept, a word. Then they'll think, okay, well, what's related to this? Where does this come up? And there could be some passages from the Bible, which relate to the concept. There could be some classical thinker whose

stuff is around this. There could be some Freudianism, which comes into there. And, you know, you can take all those different ideas and see if you can mesh them together somehow. Yeah, like this, for example. Maybe that's an example of a pattern of me mistaking. fear for anger that's permeated all my relationships. Okay, now I've got an entropy pit in front of me, right? So I'm going to have to, that's a journey down Dante's Inferno, I think. I'm going to have to go into that pit of uncertainty and do the hard work necessary to reconstitute the world

that that insight demolished. And the easiest thing for me to do is just not do that, right? I can just not do that. And you just made Iris Murdoch's argument in the sovereignty of the good. She talks about the example of the mother-in-law who has this attitude towards her daughter-in-law. She's coarse. And then she realizes, oh, she's not coarse. She's authentic.

She's not rude. She's spontaneous. And then she does the thing you just did. And then she thinks, oh, but maybe this isn't an isolated. Maybe there's a systematicity. Think Piaget. Maybe there's a systematicity to my error. and then she faces the choice.

There you go. Like you mentioned, Matt, you've got reference to entropy, right? Scientific concept. You've got Dante's Inferno. You have Iris Murdox argument about the sovereignty of the good. You got Paget thrown in there at the end. And you can hear people, you know, you can hear Verviki and Jordan getting energized by the conversation. Noticing the connections.

Yeah. And, like, I'll have to take it on. faith because I'm sure there is some connection there, some conceptual connection that is, you know, it might be tenurist in some cases. We've got Dantos in Funno. We've got entropy. We've got Aris Murdoch and what else? I don't know. Piagin. Right. So, you know, I'm sure there is some golden threads at some level that connect these things. But yeah, I mean, I don't know. I'm not going to, not judging it at this point. I'm just saying I don't know whether. It sounds like you say you're not judging matter. How much self-deception are you engaged? And it sounds like you're judging

up for your friend of voice. Well, there's a legit problem here, right? Because it's a bit like there's an emperor's new closely. You can say, well, look, they are onto something deep and meaningful here. It's just that you don't know, and I mean, me, I don't know, Iris Murdoch's arguments well enough in all of the subtleties. I haven't thought about Dante's Inferno deeply enough. In the context of Pagian development and ego and, you know, like someone that wanted to mount a defense could do a bunch of research and find something there. But yeah. Well, the way, the way I would point it out is they are building internally consistent semantic networks connecting these. For most of the

conversation I can follow the various quirt webs that they're reading. And I understand how their literary references and academic references are sprinkled in as illustrations that other people have talked about these concepts and you can connect this

bigger like literature and realm of thought out there. But the part which gets this for me is that this style of reason is very well suited to indulgent, theological, or, like, I don't know the way to put it. I've seen this a lot, but often what's been done.

It does feel like what you've described as decorative scholarship, where you're just dropping in names of influential thinkers, people who've written important books, they've said something about it, and you don't really go into a huge amount of depth. about it. So it's like, it is a judgment call, but there's a difference, right, between when somebody is making a reference, because they think it's important to connect this to a particular concept and that it helps explain things, right? Or they want to illustrate where they got the idea from. And when someone is doing it to illustrate that they are a very serious thinker who knows a broad range of literature. And it's a subjective call. And it's a subjective call and

some cases when someone is doing which one. I would say there's plenty of times in the sense making word where you can tell that it's it's decorative scholarship. But here in this kind of part, there is an argument that it is not more like loose associative like free thinking kind of thing. Yeah, yeah, it's more self-indulgent than anything. I don't think it's being done on purpose, if you like. But here's another way to describe why I I think there's a bit of a problem with it. I'm an audience here. I'm doing my best to understand what's going on.

I have not only studied Piage at school, at university. I'm familiar with that stuff. I've even read Dante's Infano. Maybe I didn't finish it. I read a fair bit of it. I'm very familiar with it. Admittedly, I don't know a great deal about Iris Murdoch's arguments there. But about a lot of the rest.

I think I'm probably more well-informed than most. Being a professor of psychology, I think I should be relatively well positioned to understand what Jordan Peterson and John the fact you're talking about. But it's not clear at all to me. And I think whether or not it means something to them, I'm sure at some level it does, because you can do these semantic associations. And this reminds me of that. And here's a story about this. And you can see how there's a connection where that can be symbolizes that. You can see how that's kind of the same thing. I mean, it's incredibly loose.

It's incredibly self-indulging. But in terms of how it functions to the audience, it amounts to the same thing as what you were saying, that decorative scholarship. I don't think it's essentially done on purpose. I might disagree a little bit here about because most of the time when I listen to these, I don't get lost on what they're arguing.

Like, my brain checks out because I get bored. But, yeah. Of the self-indulgent nature of it. But whenever I sit, I can follow all of the things that they're trying to connect together. Okay, wait, wait, you say that. You say that, but let's take this as an example. What happened is that Jordan Peterson gave a story about Dante's Inferno, going down to a pit of uncertainty and having to reconstitute the entire world

that your inside has demolished, whatever that means. And then, and how that's a thing, an important struggle. And John McAfee goes, right. See, now this is the same as Iris Murdoch's argument where she had this misdeception of her daughter-in-law thinking that she was coarse, but actually she was authentic and not rude and spontaneous. So she's noticed it was a systematic thing to that error, right? So you explained to me then, Chris, if you understand that, tell me how those two things

are connected. Yeah, it seems very obvious to me. This is not hard. Oh, my God, you're a sensemaker. No, no. Maybe I'm just very literal, like, am I just very literal-minded? Yeah, so let me explain. Jordan Peterson is talking about him and other people,

like falling into unhealthy relationship dynamics because of a lack of self-awareness. So they're mistaking what's causing arguments and whatnot in their relationship. And this is what he's likening to somebody, you know, going into Dante's. Inferno into the realms of hell of their own making because they're trapped in the self-defeating lack of awareness, interpersonal dramas and whatnot that are of their own creation, but they don't realize it, right? Lots of people in Dante's Inferno in various circles of hell who are like kind of being tormented for their own sins in life and lack of awareness about their pride or whatever their case might be, right? So there's the connection now. And the next bit that Aris Mordog's

argument about the muller-in-law is pointing to that same thing that people can misread others because there's this semantic gap between people and what they're doing and their ability to interpret what others are doing so we're all stuck in this never-ending pursuit to try and accurately represent the world and the other people in it but we're never going to do it perfectly right? So there's like, and you can get better at it. And, you know, this is like why you would focus on things like self-deception. Self-deception is a thing that is keeping you from better relationships, but also from recognizing your actual relationship with the ultimate values that are there. Okay. I kind of see that. I kind of see that. Yeah. Yeah. So, hey, just listen, okay, for all the people in the audience who are going to recast, this as me saying, I can never understand what for making what that are saying.

That's not, okay? And the reason I'm saying this, as you know, is because when this happens, people will then attribute that argument to me, right? They'll be like, Chris just doesn't appreciate it when people are making metaphorical arguments or whatever, but yes, so there we go. All right, so that's, all right, I see that. And also thinking about the conversation. To be fair to me, that required a fair bit of context to be, you reminded me of some of the previous context that were surrounding that immediate discussion, which if you bend your mind, you can see the connections there.

So they are ruminating about it's a problem, right? We misunderstand each other. You know, we have this egosetric point of view. We have uncharitable perceptions of other people. and maybe this is all contributing to us, thrashing around in our own private health. I get it. I'll throw your bone, no, Matt.

I'll throw your bone here. Because in the end, it often does evolve in the religious jibber-chapper. Right. Well, okay. Well, so then, so Dante, I think that that journey down into Dante's Inferno is a descent into that entropy pit. I agree. And then at the bottom, and I saw this in my therapeutic practice a lot too,

Dante put the betrayers right by Satan, right? And so imagine that you engage in one of those sins of a mission in this situation that you just described. Well, now that means that you've betrayed yourself, right? Because you've betrayed your capacity for transformation. I think that's that mysterious sin against the Holy Ghost is that you've now divorced. If you divorce yourself.

Yeah, well, because it's the sin that can't be forgiven, right? And so you think, what the hell is that? It's like, well, if you violate the... the spirit of transformation itself, then how in the world could you possibly recover from that? Because you foreclosed off any, and then like in your scenario there, there was a painful realization of inadequacy on part of the self. And it goes on. It doesn't. He goes he doesn't stop there. He does not stop there. I feel validated. I feel somewhat validated. But it's still all coherent, right? I mean, I mean, as coherence against the Holy Ghost

they can ever be. But it's, no, okay, well, not here. I, look, that's because Jordan Peterson is a religious jibber-jabber. We've established this. If you prefer it more in terms that you would like, you know, like your cognitive, your psychological term, for Vakey has got you covered. So it's been demonstrated the work of Stefan and Dixon. It's very complicated, but what you can do is you can use sort of state-space math to translate, like, where somebody's looking or pointing a finger into, like, a measure of the entropy of the cognitive processes that are producing the orientation. It's the math is well established.

So excess neural activation? Is that associated with that increase in entropy? It depends, because that's hard to measure, right? Because it could be, you know, it could be excitation or inhibition. And so you can't just track, right? And so, but what you get is you get a significant increase in entropy and then you get with the insight to decrease. I'm going to bet it'll look a lot like what we saw on Twitter around the H-1B thing for the past three days, if you were able to measure.

Yeah. That's interesting because I've been toying with that idea, Jordan, of being able to see the insight mechanics in decisions. distributed cognition, not just an individual cognition. Absolutely. Well, that would be that state of confusion? Again, Chris. Come on, you're the psychologist, all right?

You're the cognitive psychologist. There was lots of terms there from cognitive psychology. I just need to point out, right, that I did my PhD in psychophysiology and signal processing. I know what entropy is, right, in the sense that especially in relation to neural signals. Excess neural activation? Do you know what that is? I don't know what excess neural activation is. I know what neuroactive is.

Is it talking about a seizure? I don't know. Whatever. But, yeah, I mean, again, I'm sure he's alluding to a real thing, something he's read, right? And I'm sure if I... You don't know Stefan and Dixon? Look, Matt, let me try and break this down for you, okay? I'll do it, even though it's your subject.

So he said, did space math to translate where somebody's looking or pointing a finger and the measure of the entropy of the cognitive processes that are producing that orientation. So, like, doesn't that make sense? I'm tortured you here. But, like, I'm sure you can make a mathematical equation for the cognitive processes

about how people are orienting. impeding towards stimulus in the environment. Is that what he's referring to, though? Like, at state space, like, I don't know what he's talking about. I don't know what he's talking about. I'm sorry. Like, you could describe neural signals in any number of ways, measuring entropy or complexity of the signal in various ways is one way to do it.

Or you could talk about, I don't know what he's talking about. Like, I'm sure he's referring to something he's read, but. Well, Stefan and Dixon. That's what it's reference. But how can the audience have any idea what any of that means? Like, it's not... Oh, yeah. Yeah, well, that's a separate point.

But this is exactly the kind of thing that we're talking about, right? Because immediately after that, you switch to Jordan Hall making a reference to like a culture war thing around H-1B visas. And then the topic switches from there to pervake ye being like, Well, actually, I've been thinking about this to read it cognition, right? He's written some papers about people operating the Mars rover on Mars. But Jordan Hall's interjection kicks that very firmly out of that area. And then it's kind of into a lot more speculative,

even assuming that the first part isn't speculative. Like, I had no reason to doubt that you can make mathematical equations related to cognitive processes. Like, why would that be in any way controversial? Well, yeah, of course you can, right? Like, I mean... You can express anything in mathematical equations if you are. So you could describe the activation function of a neuron firing, right? And that's got a, you know, but you know, I've actually just Googled it because I'm not, I wasn't aware of Stefan Dixon. And now I look at the papers. I'm like, uh-huh, okay, I get it. I know now

why John McHanke likes it, and I know now where I had no awareness of it. Well, what is it? Look, here's the paper, or here's one of the papers. The self-organization of insight, entropy and power laws of problem solving. Explaining emergent structure remains a challenge in all areas of cognitive science. Bladdy, blah, de blah, we propose that the explanation of insight is beyond the scope of conventional approaches to cognitive science in terms of symbolic representation. Cognition may be better represented in terms of an open, nonlinear dynamic.

system. By this reasoning, insight would be the self-organization of novel structure. So it's this dynamic systems, you know, open systems kind of speculative stuff. I mean, you know, there's a, like the Santa Fe Institute and stuff like that right into this. Like, you know, what are the deep connections in systems theory and like ecological type psychology and, you know, people and societies and everything? Like it's fine, you know what I mean? But it's, it's, not, it's just abstract speculative stuff that actually has got only to do with cognitive science or, um, nothing to do with cognitive science. Well, not nothing, but it's nothing to do with conventional, like there's nothing to do with any empirical, you know, not really. Anyway,

it's just speculative stuff. I get it. I know what it is. It's just. I see, I see those guys on a couple of empirical people, though, but you know, that's all right. All right. But in, in this context, Chris, talking about state space math and significant increases in entropy and stuff. I once was on the panel reviewing a PhD proposal with our proposing using chaos theory and dynamic systems theory to model self-organizing social dynamics in like corporate boardroom settings. Right. Now, that stuff exists, right? You can do it. You can do it, right? And people do all kinds of things but yeah

that's all right that's all right so we're like the Express just because it's got math in it doesn't make it it's all I agree on that I agree in that but and I do think that in this conversation it's very unlikely that any of the people listening are going to follow up on you know reading the relevant material

or doing like the foundational stuff that you would need to investigate claims being made by cognitive process. I actually went through a short phase during or shortly up in my PhD where I was kind of into that stuff. You know, it's like self-organizing systems, dynamic systems theory, chaos theory,

fractals, like, you know, there's lots of cool stuff. You watched Jurassic Park and you thought like that was cool. Yeah, I thought he was cool. Yeah, Change Conway's Game of Life, all sorts of stuff. And it's fine. Like, it's okay. Like, it's not...

You keep saying it's fine. You keep saying it's fine. But it's... But it's... But it's also like a self-indulgent rabbit hole you can go down, which... Oh, that doesn't sign like the people that were covering here at all. That doesn't sign like something that we didn't trust them at all. No.

Anyway, I'll stop blustering about that. Move on. That's okay. That's okay. All right, a little bit more about... Don't worry. We're almost at the end of the Sand speaking excursion. You're getting cranky.

You've been out the Sand speaking river for two logs. Just a little bit more, you know, a mission. tyranny, humility, all our ideas. Notice how it's governed initially primarily by the sin of omission? Like nobody actually listening to anybody else? Like nobody actually stepping back, taking the stance of humility, which allows them to say, wait, maybe I'm making a mistake, maybe I'm reading you wrong.

So this is part of what builds up the entropy, is the hardening of the dialogic space around something which isn't able to actually step into an appropriate level of humility to allow the insight to land. Well, that's like a definition of tyranny. I want to pick up. I want to pick up on the humility thing. Yeah.

So there you heard about the pivot. Okay. Forget about what the hell were we talking about? I forget now. It's self-deception, right? Because somebody said humility. So we're off now. It's important to talk about humility.

And, you know, one example of this, we're going to hear Verviki talk a little bit of humility about them. Jordan is aware of humility, Matt. Because he's being, having experiences. Experiences with which I'm familiar. I just want to make one point. I think humility is the virtue of identifying with finite transcendence. Humility is not despair and it's not hubris.

Humility is a confidence in a recognition of a reality that transcends you, but a confidence that you can nevertheless address it. You can be in contact with it. Okay, so I was at church this morning with Tammy, and I'm kind of getting at. accustomed to going to Catholic services and one of the ways this service opens and many of them and maybe this is a constant across services is that the entire congregation professes a disjunction between itself and the transcendent. Jordan's been to Mars, Matt. Yeah, that's good. That's good. He's

gone to mass. Okay. Did you like for Vicki's definition of humility? Yeah, it's very abstract. Yeah. Well, it's not the spirit. It's not true. It's confidence and a recognition of a reality that transcends you. But a confidence that you can nevertheless address it. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. I'm getting impressed that they have those definitions.

Like on the tip of their tongue. That's right. Because he wasn't prepared for this. Like he didn't know they were going to get on to. I mean, he's talked about, let's be curious, talk to my humility before. It's not my chance that they got on the best topic. But yeah. So Jordan can transform, like, going to mass into a transcendental psycho drama.

Like, it's pretty impressive, you know. So how's that related? How is Jordan's little anecdote and little Christian riff there? How's it related to humility? My brain phased out there. Oh, because, like, in order to... Like, shut up and listen to someone else. Maybe he was exercising.

I can see, actually. No, Catholic Mass, you wouldn't know about this being a heathen. But there's various things that you have to steer. There are responses and there are chants by the, we believe in one God, the Father of the Almighty, the Maker of Heaven, of all of the sin and non-seen. We believe in one blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? The profession of faith and all these kind of things.

So I presume it's something in those various things. things from the catechism where you're stating what you believe and your state in belief in a higher power and yourself as a believer but somebody that's not worthy and it could be a number of things I get it I could imagine a bunch of Catholic things that involve humility yes okay so that's fine that makes sense humility is going to be related to Christian teachings yes and you know Matt there's all things like you, you know, you might have an argument with someone. That's about humility. But so you can step back and you can think, okay, well, what the hell are we trying to accomplish

here? Then you have to remember that while you're married and the person's going to be there tomorrow and that you love them. Then you have to remember what that means. And then you have to remember what it's like when you're not arguing, which is often very difficult when you are arguing. And then you have to call to that spirit, I think. And that's, what delivers the inside it's like okay what are we trying to do here yes we're trying to make productive peace okay the argument was power let's say a power manifestation at least in part but the proper goal is productive peace and then you'll get you'll get an answer from the spirit of productive peace so you do this you do this uh you know by asking you even do this with like

individually um uh the solomon paradox uh or eager grossman's work somebody get them to describe a problem they can't solve. They will inevitably describe it from the first person perspective. Yeah, Matt, you know, sometimes when I listen to these steps, I'm like, what are we trying to accomplish here? You have to try and remember at times, right? And he's talking about marriage and it's a long-term commitment marriage. So, you know, you might get caught up in the moment and arguments.

You might have dark periods of the soul and whatnot. But it's a by-productive piece and that requires humility. you know, and this relates the Eger Grossman's work. Yeah, yeah. It's all connected, isn't it? Humility, Christianity, engaging in dialogue us with other people. You have to sometimes shut up and listen to someone else.

That requires humility. Same as when you're married. Yeah. It's all connected. It's all connected. I see that. Well, I can also point, Matt, to, you know, the conversation goes on. And so it continues. But there's a couple of sans-speaking themes that they hit, which are very recurrent,

that I just want to flag up before we get to the end of this road that we're on today. And one is the kids today. The kids today, Matt, they got problems, okay? So this is Jordan talking about kids being shunted off to watch movies in the basement, where the adults enjoy themselves upstairs, and he doesn't like that. Or he doesn't like it if they're watching a movie. movie. So listen to this. And this always annoyed me because my attitude was throw the damn kids in the basement and let them amuse themselves, right? They have to do that. They have to learn to

play. They have to learn to get along with strangers and that's an excellent. And you just short-circuit that. But now imagine that we have all these kids that are dominated by the digital. And they come to that realization, you know, that they're being deceived in multiple ways. The question then is, like, what the hell's their center? They haven't one. Do you think that's true? Yeah. So there's data coming out.

I'm interested in your response to this, John. So I read recently that six, many times, by the way, and I think Jonathan Haidt details this. 60% of young women with a liberal political orientation have a diagnosed mental illness. Now, that's self-reported, you know, and so. there's problems with that but but i'm wondering to what degree and i'm not necessarily pointing the figure at the liberal ethos here i'm wondering about this immense rise in neurotic mental illness that seems to be characteristic of our culture let's just bring in to the image of the golden calf because the i think the key insight is to

recognize that any time a group of people move themselves into this way of being in relationship with each other and with the world, that is, the word I used was aggregate. I think we've used different words to describe it, meaning they're not in community as well-integrated whole, but are in fact parts endeavoring to pull themselves together by means of something like consensus. Oh, God. Jordan Hall has a way of being pretentious that is different and special. I know it's so good but it's a Christian reference right

he's playing the game oh he's playing the game you know he knows what Jordan Peterson likes he's got a like this the Golden Cup so right okay retrace our steps again so they started off with what's wrong with the kids today

it's annoying when when you know you have little kids around or whatever Jordan wants them to like be challenged to play in unstructured ways so he was like throw it down the basement, yes, but just with some other kids, they can play together. Yeah, don't give them

any games. Don't give them. Don't have them, you know, watch a movie. Okay, that's fine. Don't play computer games. Absolutely not, I'm sure the computer games day. Oh, that's, yeah, that would be. And there's data, he saw something 60% of liberal, no, he doesn't want to, doesn't want to make this a liberal conservative thing, but 60% of female liberals are mentally ill. just the liberal females the conservative females they're fine no they're all fine we've seen they're well adjusted in general and you know there are statistics that show that at least in the US but this could also be related for example yes it could be related to like social contagion and fads and all this it could also be related to a greater willingness to be

diagnosed with mental illnesses and in liberal communities and whatnot so like it's all it's all messy but in any case the 60% statistic seems roller high yeah um anyway so so that's what's going on you know there's something something bad going on here related to these facts um yes a jordan paul is helping out by saying that's all like the golden calf yes those kids couldn't do what he did like, you know, he integrated because of all those childhood experiences and whatnot, but this digital kids, they don't have the requisite sense-making skills to do that. Yeah.

Jordan Hall was out there interacting with objects in the context of his home, and that was... And the context of fields. Yes, various contexts. So that sent it to him. Whatever. The kids today, they're not in communion. They're not integrated whole because whatever. I don't know.

Too much time on device, perhaps. Yeah, yeah. And so they don't, the golden calf is. What is the golden calf? Like, I thought the golden calf was, like, what's the connection? They're worshipping a false god. The iPad is like a false, is like an idol. Yeah, yeah.

Right, okay. Yeah. So that's it. And he's used the word aggregate, but maybe that's not the exact right. Anyway, that's it. Thank God, nobody pulled them. What do you mean by aggregate? Because then we would have had a long conversation about aggregates.

So that's one thing, okay? Like the kids today, yada, yada, yada, yada. The postmodern people are bad. The aviose are bad. These are things that you typically hear. Another thing that we've heard in other sense making conversations is them taking us through the stages of humanity and detailing the different kinds of social systems that we've had.

So Jordan Hall does this here. It's sort of by definition. If it's an aggregate that isn't unified by the appropriate higher order principle, it's going to disintegrate. Yes, that's correct. That's why that principle isn't ideal because it disintegrates. And so, can we go here? I'm going to take it up like one level that may be more than we can handle right now in this, like where we are. But the basic idea is that the ability to actually form well-integrated holes that include a diversity,

people outside of a small group of people who are genetically related has not actually been a solved problem. So we've actually had three cuts of this. One is the indigenous mode, which is small groups of people who are genetically related live within a culture that has been the same culture for everybody for a very large number of generations. And by the way, if you investigate indigenous modes, they have incredibly powerful psychotechnologies for inhibiting things like self-deception or tyrannical norms. So it's a whole integrated complex that forms a relatively stable over long periods of time. Long periods of time.

There we go. So are we ready? Are we ready? Are we in a place? Can we handle this? Are we ready to go? Can we pick it up a level? Can we take it up a little?

That's right. I mean, maybe we're not ready for that. Maybe this is too much for you guys to handle it. So good Jordan Hall. When he gets a chance to talk, he's able to. I know. I wish he talked more. Yeah.

Okay, well, let's go there. And so there's incredible idea, my incredible, that you don't. Incredible idea. Now, you're an anthropologist. right so you can enlighten us what what are these incredibly powerful psychotechnologies that indigenous peoples had to prevent tyrannical norms like because i know i know that they didn't have like you know enforcement of of tyrannical norms or self-deception no that's things that he or inhibiting right yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah well so i was wondering there whether he was referencing i mean

often when these guys are talking about psychotechnologies, they're talking about psychoactive substances. Oh, of course. I wasca. Yeah, because we know from the other conversations, they've talked about drum circles and ayahuasca and various tools for introspection,

right? But being charitable Matt, I actually think here, because he's taking a more cultural evolution perspective around things, that what he wants to invoke is things like third part, party punishment and social observation and various structures that exist that allow people

to enforce group norms and values that do not rely on institutions. I understand that, but he's saying the opposite. He's saying these psychotech technologies we use to inhibit things like tyrannical norms. Yeah, but so they often present those as social technologies that inhibit. with tyrants from developing or whatever, like in, you know, enforced. Oh, oh, I see. Yeah, like, yeah, okay. Reputation management. If someone gets too big for their boots, then, then, I think that's what he's evoking. It could be either. He knows. Anyway, anyway, no, you're right. I've already spent too

long on this. Okay, so that's great. So that's, so very stable systems. They had it all figured out. Humanity knows how to live in a, in a small genetically related group. Yes. So, and then there are other layers, right? So one is the city-state getting together agricultural society, and one is the tyrant model dictatorships and empires and this kind of thing. So if you want to hear a little bit about it, it's a bit like this. This comes towards the end. So they have a sequential satisfaction of lower self-demands, which keeps them relatively stable for some amount of time, but not for a very long time, because it is structurally fundamentally and stable, as you said, to it will undergo collapse, which is where we are.

Yeah. Okay, so partly what we're trying to do here, and I would say in the broadest possible sense, I think this is what you're trying to do, John, and correct me if I'm wrong, is we've been investigating the propositionalization of an ethos that would unite iteratively and relatively permanently, and we're investigating the possibility that that must, by necessity, be predicated on something other than that immediate hedonic gratification

and it's also not predicated on power. Okay, so, you know, one of the things you see in the old test. Hold on one second. Yep. I think that was very powerful and very important. So in case, you know, other people besides us are participating in this conversation, put a bookmark on that.

Yeah. Okay. Yeah, yeah. That's, yeah, there's a lot of, there's a lot of exploration summarized very quickly in that statement. Yeah. there's an immense emphasis in the Old Testament on the value of hospitality. So they go through the other stages and then, as is often the sense we could call.

We are in the collapse of the empire stage. We've gone to like the kind of neoliberal technocratic attempt and now that's falling apart in front of our eyes. So we need some new kind of approach in order to stabilize society. We can't go back to the primitive map. We can't go back to tribal society because society's changed. We don't want empowers and tyrants again.

And the third wave of neoliberal, technocratic, internet society, that's not working either. What we need, of course, what we need is Game B, but game B doesn't get invoked here. But that's it. And so Jordan there, as Jordan Hall noticed, you know, we're participating in this conversation as well, Matt, albeit asynchronously. And he told us to put a bookmark in because I think it's very important here that they've

outlined that all the stuff we've been listening to, it's actually not tedious waffle about definitions and references to the Bible. It's very important because they are working here on establishing what would be an alternative universal value structure that we could orientate society towards and would allow society to continue. That's what they've been doing.

That's what this conversation is in service off. And that's important, Matt, because you know all these other alternative things like saying it's all about power or denying that there is any unifying structure. That's all leads to Lucifer

and hell. So there. There you go. Yeah. no, I get it. Okay, well, this is the goal of the sense makers, right? This is the political project to create a new, a new world based on sensibly. Waffle until, into a new civilization. Yeah. A civilization purely built on waffle. So, okay. Well, Matt, that would be a, that would have been a good point to end, but they didn't end there because Jordan mentioned the word hospitality.

Yes. So they got on to hospitality. And this is the last of the topics that I'll allow them to expand upon. They did talk about other words as well. But hospitality, Matt, let's have a little thought about that. And so I'm wondering, then I was thinking about hospitality. Like it's a local thing, right? Because that's what you do at a banquet or at a party.

Make people welcome. That's what you do if you run a small business. If you have even the least amount of sense, you make people well. welcome. Then you could think if that's scaled, well, then the whole world would be a hospitable place and the problem would be solved, right? So it's obviously a scalable virtue. And maybe it's also the foundation of that societal trust that constitutes, I think, the only real natural resource. Could you speculate, do you think, on the relationship between hospitality and play? Yeah, we talked about, yeah.

Throw an insight, too. Okay. Okay. I will. I'll throw an insight too. okay all right so yeah you're right that actually this the latter part of the conversation is sort of makes it clear they're thinking about how to craft the foundations the philosophical moral foundations of these are the finding followers yes of a brave of a brave new world and you know they talked about some things they've got a lot of ideas there but actually maybe hospitality just just popped up maybe that just came in at the end it just cropped up and maybe that's the foundation it just cropped up and maybe that's the foundation for this new society because hospitality is good right and it scales and clearly scales you just

you know if everyone's being hospitable to everyone then you've got the bedrock of new civilization yeah yeah and the banquet smart you know or small businesses both things you've got to be hospitable yeah and like why would not be a foundational bedrock so custom service is very important the thing is this is the kind of insights it's been out of these. You know, it seemed like we weren't going anywhere. We were spinning in circles. We were just defining whatever word that somebody happened to mention. We talked about shadows and sticks. We talked about touchstones. Yeah. We talked a lot about conscience and the ladder. The ladder and the directionality. The up. Verticality. Yeah, that's important. But actually,

it all boils down to hospitality. Well, you can connect hospitality to verticality, because there's relationships between customers and owners, right? And it's kind of, yeah, their hair, I go elements there, Matt. So think about that. But the last thing I'll end on, the last step. I have to do this, Matt. I'm sorry, because people will complain if I don't. They'll be like, what, you covered all of this and you didn't mention this.

So in this conversation about hospitality and civilization and how things have function, There is an aspect where Verviki discusses ritual, my particular speciality. And he actually has a course on the cognitive science of ritual, which I've heard various parts of. So let me just play him talking about ritual, and I'll offer some thoughts. Or maybe you can offer some thoughts first. But pay attention to this, Matt, okay? I'll just say if you have any issues here, this is all okay. All right, I'm focusing.

And the proposal is that we get the invention of, important sets of rituals that you get the invention of like something perhaps like even like the handshake, which is a ritual which is designed to try and speed up the process by which you and I who are strangers might be able to recognize each other as at least potentially trustworthy. And then and then you, but you have, so you have outward facing rituals like that and then you have inward-facing rituals of initiation, like, okay, we have to tighten our identity. So we, like, in order to be willing to interact with them, we have to know clearly better

who we are. And so you get the initiation rituals, you have, like, interaction rituals, and then in connection with that, you have rituals that have to do with enhancing the cognitive flexibility that makes that kind of ritual possible. Now, here's the connection. Ritual is play. It is a profound kind of play. Because what I'm doing in ritual is I'm engaging the imaginal.

So the Corban's distinction between the imaginary and the imaginary. So the imaginary is when I picture things in my mind and I'm taking myself away from reality. The imaginal is when I, like, when a child is playing at being. Superman. They're not picturing Superman. What's it like to look at the world like Superman? What does it like to try out this identity? That's what a ritual is. A ritual is a way of what's it like play, to serious play. What's it like to look at this person as, as, although they're a stranger, they're trustworthy. What's it like to be a person that can be, can enter into recognition with you? And so I think they're right. Okay. I kind of followed it. I think. Yep. I'm proud of

myself. I'm glad. Congratulations. But do you, do you have any issue there? Do you think that was any problems or is that okay? Was it mostly for hearing? Yeah. How is it related to hospitality though? So we started off with hospitality. That was Jordan Peterson saying this could be the foundation and Jonathan Vakey. I can't remember if this but comes before or after, but like the connection to play. Oh, the play. That's right. It's actually Jordan who asked for that connection between hospitality and play. And Jova Vaghi is very happy to oblige in a nutshell. I don't see the connection with hospitality.

I see how he talked about ritual. But I guess if you say that hospitality is a kind of ritual and ritual is a kind of play, then he's done the job, right? He's connected play to hospitality. Yes. But, okay, well, Matt, it might be a disservice to Verviki because there's obviously a lot context around

that particular clip that he has there. So let me play another clip that might make the connection clear. So if we think about the story of Sodom and Gamora, how critical the hospitality protocol was. Right. Oh, yeah. Right. Lot is willing to go to great lengths not to violate the protocol of hospitality.

That tells us to pay the ultimate length. Ultimate length. That's right. Ultimate length. And so the vertical dimension, the fact that we are now able to enter into a state of communion by means of properly exercising this ritual, this protocol of engagement to form a new identity that has completely new capacities and competencies that are an expansion in the vertical dimension as well as in the horizontal dimension. And that's like, that's the key unlock that enables everything together.

Yeah, yeah, well, it's so cool that that hospitality has that imaginal element. It's right, I'm going to treat this stranger as though they're welcome. Well, on there's a question, on what basis? So there's some connections. And you've got even vertical mentioned. Yeah, and not just verticality, but also horizontality.

Yes, well, that's important. Now, it's unfair to ask you about the ritual stuff. I know you're not an expert in that area. And actually, I think the majority of the stuff to the point side is stuff that's pretty standard. You know, people don't think about it,

but the way that you greet people is often heavily ritualized. Yeah. Yeah. No, I totally buy that, right? I'll totally buy that. If you want to get off on the right foot with someone or put yourself in a good position, then you go through the social niceties and they exist for a very good reason. Yes, and institutions, even scientific ones, have their various ritual initiations, pieces of paper that you have to display in order to demonstrate that you have certain competencies that you're trustworthy, so on so forth. ritual is a part of society map well you want that i'm a ball with that i'm a ball with that you're okay yeah so i get it so ritual hospitality but also play you've left out for playing yeah this is the bit where i forget taking a little bit of issue because so he then links it to like well

ritual is really like play it's a marginal play right because you're stepping into your world where you're doing things that's very symbolic and you're your playing characters or you're transforming into gods or, right? Ritchel is a very diverse thing about it. When you do a hand, she, I don't know that it's exactly imaginable play in that respect.

Yeah. I mean, to be fair to them, they're relying very much on their being a very particular common denominator, which is like, when you smile and show cans with someone, you are acting as though you are pleased to see them. And when you're acting, right,

you're imagining yourself. Imagining, yes. You see the connection there? Yeah, but you can equally emphasize, and this is one of the key components to ritual, that while there is this constructive, and in some stages like creative aspect through rituals, there is also rigid enforcement

of particular repetitive motions and stats. So like even taking the thing about shaking, hands, right? If you grow up in a society where people shake hands and you deeply buy to them, you'll confuse them. But both are greeting symbols, right? So actually, ritual has, yes, it does have creativity within it, but one of the features of rituals is that they are often quite dogmatic in the way that they should be performed. I know. I'm just messing with you. I don't really think ritual is really just a form of play or vice versa. No, I know. So this is the thing, he's not wrong that there are elements.

you know, people who point to like carnival style rituals or whatever, but like the Christian mass, except for when Jordan Peterson is, you know, in his psychodrama and it, it is not one where you're adopting all these imaginal, right? You're essentially just following the routine to get out of them at all right. And there are all these things like, but aren't you imagining that you're consuming the body and blood of Christ when you eat this? And isn't that play? Isn't that the same is when a child is imagining themselves to be Superman. Isn't it fundamentally the same thing? But you can see that

people could argue that, right? But I could equally argue that that is a good example where people are just eating bread because that's what they're supposed to do and they don't actually spend much cognitive effort in imagining that it is actually the body and blood. Even while they're saying the words, this is

the body of brother. Oh, Christ, right? So that's the thing. The other aspect of ritual research is that there is a tedium effect which repetitive rituals become, you know, things that people just do without any processing. They're just like going through the motions and it doesn't require. And then there are all the rituals where you're so involved in the specific procedure because it's so rare or it's so demanding that you actually don't have much space to do this reflective

stuff. And this is one of the arguments about why rituals are anxiety relieving because they allow you to focus on lower down processes, right? So, you know, people that have obsessive-compulsive disorder often engage in repetitive rituals, and that's anxiety alleviating for them. So anyway, I'm just saying that

like, there's a good example where the things that he's saying aren't, like, it's not all just nonsense cobbledy joke about ritual, right? There's valid stuff and I think Verbeki does know things about that literature, but it's kind of how it's there,

used in the conversation is much more like the extrapolation is very far and very specific there's a lot of it's very loose there's and there is a lot of reaching going on yes and a lot of reliance on a very tenuous connection like yes if you bend over backwards you can see some common elements between play and ritual because they both arguably sometimes have some amount of imagination or pretense involved in them. Yes. But, you know, that doesn't mean they're the same thing. And, you know, you shouldn't be leading on that tenuous connection.

And for me, that's the issue. I agree with you. And I was trying to make that sort of point throughout, which is like they're not referencing imaginary things. They're referencing real ideas from real stuff that they've read and they're connecting together. It's just that it's a very loose semantic. and sometimes just based on word similarity connections between wildly disparate things.

And this is why I think we originally sort of pinged all of these guys on the Gorometer because it's a particular style of expansive, all is one type reasoning, sort of mushing together ideas that, you know, it's very satisfying, I suppose, to sort of see a connection between a passage in the Bible, and some neuro-effective thing. A 1970s psychologist. A 1970s psychologist, a Greek philosopher, you know, connecting it all together.

But yeah, in order to do that, it is very loose and it is very tenuous. Yeah, and, you know, so rounding it up, Matt. If we went back and we traced where the conversation went, we could make a graph, we could make a diagram that showed, showed how this conversation went. And if we did, Chris, what would that diagram look like? I don't want to go through at all because it's so long. But it's, but it's essentially the same pattern always, right, which is like a topic or word is introduced. There's discussion about

definitions. There is occasionally people offering alternative definitions. There's a bit of negotiation, but inevitably during that, another word will be brought up and they will move to that concept. And all the while, they'll be reaching into their grab bag of references, which for Jordan is the Bible, for Vivek, he is Plato, and in this conversation, Christian stuff. And for Jordan Hall, it's metaphors and peck stuff. And maybe more, since he's become a Christian, a bit more Christian stuff as well. But that's it. Right. So you talk about conscience, you talk about worthwhile, you talk about quest, you talk about dimension, you talk about normative, you talk about deals, you talk about play, hospitality, blah, blah, blah. These are all big concepts. And the point

I do want the stress, though, is like, while it is a very, like, associative conversation that often turns on just one person's choice of a word, the themes that they return to and their thesis are relatively stable, right? And it's, and they're not complex, right? Like Jordan's thing is, there is a vertical dimension to relationships and society in the universe. verse and at the top is God and you should orientate yourself towards that or you should always be looking for that because otherwise you'll fall into these pathological traps which are you know posmodernists or atheist materialists or whatever which are also demonic and there's a constant blowing of the lines between like religious terms about whether it's metaphorical or

whether they're actually talking about like a force that exists and you know is influence in society and is it independent for people or is it just like a metaphorical language for an emotional state and they don't like to ever like address that kind of thing right because they regard it as as reductive and materialist or whatever to talk about that and so I think that one thing is once you know the themes of any given sense maker you're just going to hear them repeated at infinitum Right. And when they get together with all their sense speakers, that's what they do. They just like bat their particular concept back and forth and I'm referenced different words. That's it. And it's, I mean, we took a holiday in sense speaker land, but I don't want to go back for quite a while now. I have enough of it. And it's it's clear though to the audience that that kind of conversation for a lot of people comes across. process profound and moving and insightful. And yeah, I don't think it is.

I don't think it is, but that's a subjective assessment. But like for them, you know, they're very clear that they're making progress. They're all working towards things. This is all like an ongoing endeavor to build insight and resolve problems in society. And, you know, they titled this a dialogue so dangerous, it might just bring you wisdom. So, yeah. Yeah, I, yeah, no, you summed it up pretty well. I sign off on your interpretation. I saw it. I won't rehash the things he said because he said it well. One thing I'm curious about it is like what in their own minds, like what is their endeavor? Like towards the end there, it sort of sounded a little bit like they're trying to build a kind of a philosophical principles for a new society. But yeah, that is it. Is it? Is that it? Yeah, that's, I mean, I think you got it because like we know, says, because prepared a document that they were working on like a new constitution that they did release publicly, but various people sent to us. And that was, you know, when society collapses,

here is the way that society will be organized, that it was, I mean, people should, if that document ever becomes publicly. But that was like the kind of G&B people. But the G&B people are in the same pool, right? It's all the same thinkers. At Jordan Hall, is a game B person. Brett Weinstein is and they are about modern society is unfit for purpose. We need new values and like typically their new values are religious or if they invoke other non-religious stuff. It's kind of spiritual psychedelic insights or luminous kind of things.

And yeah, and like the other aspect of it is that they're very often tied up with reactions. conservative politics, kind of strangely, but that is where these people congregate. Yeah, no, it is an example of this weird kind of new age conservatism. You know, on one hand, it's very kind of playful and extravagant and intellectually diverse, you know, meshing to get synchronistic or whatever it's called. But actually, it's all aligned to, you know, quite, quite conservative social views. That's kind of the subject. Yeah, global warming, denialism, and, you know, like, these are all common talking points or, like, anti-immigration stuff, right?

All liberals and mentally ill. Yeah, the one thing I'll say, Chris, I think this is a good illustration of Galaxy Brainness, right? This, when we talk about it in the Gorometer, you know, we give the sort of pat definition of it's like, you know, having deep insights or whatever across a wide range of things. So it's kind of, it could be confused a little bit with being a polymath, like claiming that you have a great deal of expertise in a whole bunch of different areas. And that's part of it, sure. But this conversation made me remember what made us create that thing in the first place, which is conversations like this, right? What distinguishes them from, I think, a normal kind of more academic or technical discussion, even amongst some philosophers? who are more rigorous and a bit more disciplined, or even theologians, perhaps, is that

it is so expansive, right? So even a theologian or a speculative philosopher who's a bit more buttoned down, is a bit more specialized, would constrain the kinds of connections and the links that they're looking to make. What you see with these kinds of conversations is that they're so cosmic. It'll link together developmental psychology with mathematical concepts like entropy, with scripture from the Bible, from, you know, ancient philosophers. I won't list them all. You just heard all of the stuff that they're referencing, all of those ingredients which they're connecting together into their kind of new science of everything.

And that's kind of what sense making is. It's a science or a philosophy of everything. And, you know, Hitchhug has God to the Galaxy made fun of these kinds of questions, right? It's the meaning of life, the universe and everything. But, you know, that's kind of what they're about, trying to try to answer these questions like this. I think it's a fool's errand. Like you, I don't like it.

I don't think you'll ever get anywhere with this kind of process, with this approach, this epistemic approach to things. But, you know, each other. I mean, you'll get, you clearly will get somewhere in terms of social media developing the following and people thinking that you're a, I've made in terms of actually understanding things, but yes. No, no, yeah, in terms of actual contributions to science, so there were, no, no, but that goes without saying almost. But the one thing I will add, Matt, just last note for me on this is that both you and I recognize, just in case it's clear that, like, this takes place in the podcast world, right?

These guys are podcasty, sound speakers, content creators. Verviki is an academic as well. And there are actually, these are the kind of conversations. that you can find in various academic disciplines and conferences. Like, this is not restricted to the sense speaking realm. There are plenty of disciplines where this kind of conversation would be relatively normal. And Matt and I would be similarly critical of the reasoning there. All the people really like it.

So, like, there is that aspect where it is a value judgment in it. But I just want to point out that, like, it's not like you don't see this in corporate culture or academia. Like, this is a style of conversation and reasoning, which is very popular. And you can find it throughout history. This is just a particular manifestation of it, the sense-speaking realm. I think you could find it in certain Gnostic-type monasteries. You can find it in certain corners of academia. Ironically, often in very progressive corners of academia.

Yeah, which Jordan Peterson, he would hate them. He would hate to be compared to them. But it is very, very similar. And like you said, there are, there are some areas of late stage capitalism or whatever better phrase, like, you know, like the kind of management, consulting, corporate branding stuff, where they're operating on some abstract, bullshitty level that is so far up their own asses. And it's no coincidence that a lot of the sense makers, that is John Hall's friends, are actually management consultants.

Like, that's their job. They go into... Or they give retreats to high-powered individuals or help them to unlock their potential and that kind of thing. So, yes, you're right. There is an overlap there. So, yeah, but I just want to make clear

that, like, if you think that this doesn't happen in academia, it does. It does. There's entire conferences where this is the being an activity. And I will never, I will never go to them. Never, never. I've been there. well Matt now that's that's enough sense making where we've had our holiday we can all agree

whatever you think of our takes we can all agree that's enough sense making we've done enough we've done enough sense making for a while and i think you are right that perhaps the splitting into two parts might have been at necessity in this case and so yes there we go it was a dangerous conversation, but we, we navigated it, dare I say, and managed to survive, right, without crushing on any rocks. But you let us know. It was a danger close situation. Yeah, that's right. That's right. Now, Matt, just a quick thing, a little thing at the end, we got to shout out our Patreon people. We got to do it. They deserve it. Okay. I've got

them here in front of me. And I will not be stopped from doing it. Okay. I won't stop you I love our patrons more than you do probably I don't know if that's possible They're like children to me Chris They're like my own children Yeah

Except they financially benefit me Rather than costing me money And they listen to what you say And they listen to me That's right I'd like my children That's why they're better than my children In so many ways

Agreed Agreed So New members of the flock Include Cole Talley Lord Nicol Johnny Cripps

Michael A Matt O'Connor Flearn Joshua Anfemic Lovewabai Gavin Wilding Benjamin Van White

Crispin Lockwood RB 543321 Viren Sharma Josh James Hankin Thiel Suleman Nerpel Durple K

This again Oh no not KB Daniel Hockmoff Stephen Nwenn Ari Garb, Dill Dumfrey, Solomon Weiler, Dora, Anna, Patrick Darher,

the Kiara, mercenary lawyer, Andrew Preppens, Josh Stewart, and he's the rewrite. They are our conspiracy hypothesizers for this month. That's who they are.

Thank you very much, everyone. Thanks for being a conspiracy help authorizer. I feel like there was a conference that none of us were invited to that came to some very strong conclusions, and they've all circulated this list of correct answers. I wasn't at this conference. This kind of shit makes me think, man.

It's almost like someone is being paid. Like when you hear these George Soros stories, well, he's trying to destroy the country from within. We are not going to advance conspiracy theories. We will advance conspiracy hypotheses. Now I'm at our revolutionary thinkers, here we have Samuel Charles Innes, Kim, Hill Harvard, Phil Donard,

Claire, Super Octal Mau, Matzie, Claude, Work, Jenny Conard, Dunbitch, Moana Coffey, G, George Morrison, Tina Baker, Martin Tuvitt Leftel, Florian Schmidt, Pete Thompson, John Ray, Chris Callahan, Conrad Benjamin, Billy Morris, Adam Titbitts, Ryan Taylor, Dr Jennifer Burgess, Vigard Harks, Rob Ibs, Samuel Phillips, Samuel Phillips, Josh Herf Singh, Nicole, Dennis Stigman, Eric Ireland, Alexander Tasker, Richard Walter, Odin, Liam, Alexander Skull-Tammer, and Ash Corrig. Fantastic. Thanks, everyone. And I knew a couple of those names. I think I know them on social media. I knew more than you. Oh, you don't know that.

I didn't say how many I knew. Could have been. But I still know I know more. Could have been one more than you know. Could have been, but it wasn't. But thank you one and all. I'm usually running, I don't know, 70 or 90 distinct paradigms simultaneously all the time. And the idea is not to try to collapse them down to a single master paradigm.

I'm someone who's a true polymath. I'm all over the place. But my main claim to fame, if you'd like, in academia, is that I founded the field of evolutionary consumption. Now, that's just a guess. And it could easily be wrong. But it also could not be wrong. The fact that it's even plausible is stunning. Good old Jordan Hall.

We had some more good clips from Jordan Hall of this episode. Not as many as I would have liked, but a little bit too much as Jordan Peterson for my toast. I would have liked a bit more of a balanced. Yeah. Oh, also, just to mention my at this late stage, John Ververicki did apologize to Jordan Hall in the comment section on YouTube. He said, to my dear friend Jordan Hall, I apologize for talking too much and not making space for you. That was not considerate of me. It was not intentional, but it was negligent.

Ideas should not trump relationship. Ideas should not trump relationships. Yeah, I was kind of like, what? It's kind of a long way to put it, but, hmm, I know. Anyway, it felt compelled to apologize, so there you go. But he obviously didn't remember that Jordan said just because he wasn't, you know, you don't hear the word coming out of his mind he's not contributing. That's right. It was It played out exactly the way Jordan Hull planned it to. So he shouldn't really be implying otherwise. No, that's not necessary. But whatever.

And now, the Galaxy Brain Gurus map. We got a couple of them. We have Chris Sullivan, Kismet 13, Ivers Gerdans, Richard Wilt, Curtis Freeman, John Shoemaker, Seth Armstrong, John Marshall, resident Marxist, Iffi Donatello, black heart, Adam Session, good old Adam, and

Madhav. And iffy, he's a resident socialist. He is, we've got to convert him. I'm working on that. Chimping away, but he's, I think he's stuck in his ways. I think, you know, but he's not a tankie. Let it

not be said that he's a tank. That's right. That's right. He says, I'll make it clear. Okay. Nobody said that, Matt, but I'm just making it clear. Effie, I know you're not, thank you, all right? There we go. It's never quite clear what a socialist is.

I think I've got a lot of socialist opinions. Maybe I'm a socialist. I'd like to ban private schools and also private health insurance. Because if all the rich bastards were forced to go to the same schools and get the same quality of healthcare as the least fortunate among us, Chris, then they'd have to pay for it to be good for everyone. and I think those are two things that are just any decently prosperous civilization should give to everyone as a human right.

There you go. How about that? Vive a revolution. Yeah. Well, that's it. So contributing at this level helps you gain access to insights like that from that. That's right. That's right.

And if we get like 10 new top tier signups, then I will spout more revolutionary. Slogons. Oh, you heard them. So, we're trying to penetrate the socialist market now, Chris. This is a new, yeah. I heard we're trying to carve out the Sam Harris. It's unclear whether we hate Sam Harris or we love him. Their opinions dip up.

It is funny. Yeah. And what are motivations there are? Some people say, stop talking about Sam. somehow so much, leave him alone. Let them be. Other people say they clearly in the somehow

it's laundering game. I heard that you were just butt hurt because he owned you so bad in those debates. Who said that? What? People are saying lots of people who listen to those debates are saying that. Yeah.

Anyway. Now I'm not the clip. The clip for the people. Hello there. You awakening wonders. You may not be aware that you're in entire reality is being manipulated, become part of our community or free speakers. We are still allowed to say stuff like this. Science is failing.

It's failing right in front of our eyes and no one's doing anything about it. I'm a shill for no one. More than that, I just simply refuse to be caught in any one single echo chamber. In the end, like many of us must, I walk alone. There we go. That's an appropriate thanks to all the Galaxy Green Level. If you made it this far, God bless you. That's all I can say.

I hope you're thinking about the vertical and how to transcend Jacob's Ladder or all that kind of thing. And that you never listen to Jordan Peterson ever again without thinking about the sense-making grammar that we've unveiled here today. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Thank you, Jordan Peterson. It's reminded me why I'm not a Christian. But...

Well, you use the word reminded there. That made me think, Matt. When we re-mind, we mind, you know, there's a lot of things that connect. No, think about it. It's like the same as re-imagining, if you think what it is. Yeah, to imagine something, but then to re-conceptualize that. And, you know, you give you two vectors. Well, when you say vector, it means you think.

I'm like, don't have a little. You can show with the vector. Thank you. Thank you.